The tenor sax moves up a semitone and repeats the exercise. Isolde checks her watch: she is almost fifteen minutes early.
She swings her sax case idly and looks around the courtyard for something to do. The concrete is blackened and dulled with
the recent rain, glum puddles pooling underneath the drainpipes, the birds shrugging off the drips as they hop between the
wires.
Isolde steers herself vaguely away from the tree and the high observatory tower, and wanders into an alley with the
dim purpose of finding a bakery and buying a hot bun.
As she passes through the cloisters she begins to hear the low thump of a far-off drumbeat. Sometimes there is free theater
or performance art by the hot-bread wagons that park on the far side of the cloisters, and she absentmindedly pursues the
sound through a narrow arch and down a wet bricked alley until she comes to an open door.
The door is halved horizontally by a steel bar, and at chest-height there is a shiny patch where the oil from thousands of
hands has worn the paint away. At present the door is wedged open with a brick, and from within Isolde can hear shouting and
the clear thump of a drum.
She slips in quietly, padding down the corridor and up a small set of white-nosed stairs. She passes several dressing rooms
with doors ajar and realizes that she must have entered the old auditorium by the players’ door. She hesitates and almost
turns back, but the drum-thump is louder now and she can hear voices, and she resolves to go on and at least take a look before
slipping back the way she has come. She emerges in the thick velvet blackness of the wings, and inches forward in the dark
until she finds a gap in the cloth that will give her a view of the stage.
From the wings the stage looks chaotic, the chalk and pencil lines all visible, the painted flats slantwise and cramped together
and unbeautiful, and on the far side the jumbled mess of props and costumes in the wings opposite. Isolde can see a small
number of backstage watchers, separated from each other by the quivering upright cloth of the wings, some in costume and standing
tense on the balls of their feet as they wait for a cue. She can see past the footlights into the foggy dark underbelly of
the two-tiered auditorium, and in the foreground the silhouetted players lit around their edges like the bright thread around
the rim of a solar eclipse.
In center stage there is a boy in a scarlet turban, wearing shabby coat-tails, a torn dirty ruff, and white gloves that are
loose at the wrist and soiled. Vertical black diamonds are painted over each eye, spearing down his cheeks and cutting a sticky
greasy track through the white powder on his face. They give him an odd haunted look, merry and melancholy at once. From where
she stands Isolde can barely see his profile, just the curve of his cheek and the swell of his turban above his temple and
a flash of black diamond every time he turns his head.
“This is a complete deck of cards,” the boy is saying into the dark, shuffling a deck of cards so they cascade neatly from
his right hand to his left. “No joker. Aces low. The card you draw from this deck will be yours to keep. You will carry it
around with you always like a dirty secret.”
With a flourish the boy fans the cards in an arc on the felt table in front of him. Her eyes are focusing now, and Isolde
becomes aware of others on the stage, clothed in red and black and foaming around this central boy like lepers. The boy is
tall and proud and glittering, harshly lit as if he is a figure in an overexposed photograph, bright and misted and glassy-eyed
against the glare.
“If you pick a card of a black suit you will be attracted to men. If you pick a card of a red suit you will be attracted to
women. The number value on any spot card indicates your sexual prowess. Ten means you’re good; ace means you only think you’re
good.”
The boy is whipping the cards out of the pack as he speaks, holding them up between his fingers and his thumb, then puckering
his hand swiftly so the card pops out and flutters into the air above him. He catches the fluttering card with his free hand,
his other hand already reaching to pick up the next. The effect is rather like he is juggling, the cards tossed up in an explosive
little arc and snatched away before they fall.
“If you pick a court card, your sexual life might get a little
more complicated. In general, a queen of any suit forces you
to cross-dress, a king will give you a sadistic tendency and a jack will give you a masochistic tendency. But there are exceptions.”
The kettle-drum roll is building and building. As the drum roll gets slowly louder, the boy becomes gradually more urgent.
His movements get faster and his throat gets tighter and his voice gets more insistent. The black-clothed figures on the stage
have begun to writhe.
“The King of Diamonds is the only king to carry an axe instead of a sword. For this reason he is known as the Man with the
Axe. If you draw the Man with the Axe, your sexual appetite may well develop into a perversion.
“All the court cards are shown in full face except for three: two of the jacks and one of the kings are always in profile.
If you draw one of these one-eyed cards, you will be prone to self-deception and dishonesty.
“But the most important of all the court cards is the Queen of Spades.”
Someone collides heavily with Isolde from behind. She staggers painfully and whips around. A boy has fallen back against the
wing-cloth, swearing and clutching a handful of fabric to steady himself, his feet slipping on the worn chalky floorboards
and his free arm sawing back and forth as he tries to regain his balance. He fumbles to keep hold of the scepter he is holding,
but it falls with a clatter and rolls away under a fold of cloth.
He peers at her sharply and frowns. “What are you doing here?” he hisses, already ducking down to retrieve his scepter.
“I was just watching,” Isolde says, taking a hasty step back as the boy scrabbles around in the half-dark. “Sorry.”
“Stanley!” hisses one of the lepers on stage. “Stanley, that’s you!”
There is no time for Isolde to say more. The boy grabs his scepter, jumps to his feet and hurries onstage, righting his crown
and flipping his scepter up in the brief half-second before he
is illuminated. Isolde’s last glimpse of him before he dissolves
into the harsh stage light is of a face in transformation, caught between a natural expression and a caricature, changing
from the inside in the way the bathwater skin begins to pucker and depress when the plug is pulled from underneath.
Isolde’s heart is still thumping from the collision and she suddenly feels ashamed that she is watching without invitation.
She turns and slips away, retreating down the white-nosed steps she entered by, padding softly down the narrow corridor and
finally bursting out into the ginkgo-smelling bright of the day.
“Masks or faces? That’s what I keep asking myself. Masks or faces.”
The Head of Movement was leaning against the radiator in the staffroom, his thin hands wrapped around his mug, frowning in
a glassy sort of way at a faint stain on the linoleum floor. “The tall girl,” he said. “Today. Doing that… that piece from…
The piece she did today—oh, start me off?”
The Head of Acting dipped his newspaper and looked at him over the top of his glasses. “Come, you spirits…”
“
Come,
you spirits, that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full of direst cruelty.
Yes.” The Head of Movement stood quivering for a moment. “She will never convincingly play that part. She is trapped inside
her little round eyes and inside the smooth perfect symmetry of her face. All I could think while I was watching was that
she
would never think those lines. Not her. Not
that face. That face would never dare. If I went and saw her in performance I
would walk out and say, Lady Macbeth was all wrong.” The Head of Movement tossed his head in frustration. “I look at them
all,” he said, “and I see so much hope and vigor and determination, all trapped inside faces that will never sell, that will
never be remarkable—modern, pampered, silken faces that have never known tragedy or hardship or extremity, or even… God, most
of them have spent nearly their whole lives
inside
. That girl—Lady Macbeth, today. It is like she’s made of plastic. She is too smooth and round to be real. She will never
escape that smoothness and that roundness. She will never escape her face.”
“You’re in a very bleak mood, Martin,” the Head of Acting said, unwrapping an aspirin and dropping it neatly into his coffee.
“I didn’t think she was that bad. I rather liked her freshness. ‘Come to my woman’s breasts, and take my milk for gall’—I
thought that was marvelously seductive. She wasn’t trying to be
evil
.”
“She wasn’t trying to be evil because she didn’t understand a damn word of what she was saying,” the Head of Movement snapped.
There was a silence. The Head of Movement bent his head and gulped from his mug in an indelicate snatching way, gasping between
each hot mouthful, his throat contracting like a reptile’s when he swallowed. The Head of Acting thought, That’s a bachelor’s
habit, bred of always eating alone. He felt sorry for the Head of Movement suddenly, and put his paper down.
His dissatisfaction with the world always has such a terribly personal quality, the Head of Acting thought; he is freshly
disappointed each time anything falls short of an ideal, and he wears his disappointment like a child. It showed a curious
kind of innocence for a man of his age—a foolish self-sabotaging kind of innocence, for he knew that he was going to be disappointed,
and still he believed.
The Head of Movement’s instinct inclined toward simplicity
and scruple, and yet he was not a scrupulous man: instead he was
anxious and undecided and complaining, suspended between points of view. He was forever in the shadow of a principle, forever
in the shadow of some floodlit cathedral swarming with bats in the dark, and while he might admire it and worship it and fear
its massive contour, he could never bring himself to truly touch it; he would never knock and enter.
The Head of Acting watched him wince and scowl into his coffee and draw his shoulder blades together and toss his head as
if his skin had shrunk. The Head of Acting thought, It is as if, in some deep recess of him, he is still a teenager who has
not yet lost that selfish blind capacity to fall in love, and fall badly. He wondered if he was jealous of the man’s anxiety,
jealous of the agony of his choices, jealous of his tortured sense of failure and the failed justice in the world.
“Is it a bad batch this year?” the Head of Acting said. “Is that what’s getting you down?”
The younger man flopped into a chair like a punctured balloon. “No,” he said, drawing out the word in a doubtful way.
“You were asking yourself, masks or faces.”
“Yes,” the Head of Movement said, and sighed. “I used to believe in faces. All my life I believed in faces. I think I might
have finally changed my mind.”
Whenever a door was closed at the Institute another always opened, popping gently forth, invisibly nudged by a draught that
could never be contained. The shifty current gave the buildings a muttering, ghostly feel. If Stanley closed a door behind
him, he always listened to hear another click open, like a faithful echo, out of the shadows further up the hall. All the
doorknobs rattled. Hairline cracks webbed the enamel like dirty lace.
The academic year began with a lavish production of
King Lear
, directed by the graduating students and starring all the tutors, proud and flashing in burgundy and gray. The title role
was played by the Institute’s previous Head of Acting, long since retired, a sinewy man with long teeth and thin white hair
scraped neatly forward over his forehead like a monk. About a month after closing night a costume, freshly flattened, was
mounted on the peeling corridor wall. The collar was still stained black from the blood that ran down from empty eye-sockets
and dripped sticky and scarlet off the Head of Movement’s gray unshaven chin.
The year began in earnest. The production of
King Lear
had been in part a challenge, presented to frighten the first-years and to show them an inheritance they would have to fight
to earn. For a time it worked. In the beginning the first-years looked up at the tutors and older students with a kind of
meek reverence, but as the weeks wore on they slowly began to inflate, growing ever larger with purpose and self-belief.
“I’m an actor,” Stanley was surprised to hear himself say, and after an initial pause he found that the definition pleased
and even empowered him. “At the Drama Institute,” he then added, and waited confidently for his interlocutor to say, “Oh,
the
Institute
. That’s supposed to be very hard to get into, isn’t it? You must be rather good.”
The first few weeks of the year seemed to pass in a flurry. Initially the first-year batch appeared tentative and apologetic
and bashful with each other, but in fact each student was carefully carving out a place within the context of the group: those
who variously wanted to be thought of as comic or tragic or eccentric or profound began to mark out their territory, fashioning
little shorthand epithets for themselves and staking claim to a particular personality type so that none of the others would
have a chance. One of the girls might drape herself over her classmates as they walked from Movement down the hall to Voice
and say, “God, I love you guys! I love you all!,” just to secure her place as
someone who was indubitably
sweet
. With that place occupied, the others scurried to make known their social or musical or intellectual talents, each defining
a little space for themselves that no one else would be able to touch. The other students all said, “Esther is so
funny
!” and “Michael is so
bad
!,” and just like that each won the double security of becoming both a person and a type.