Julia comes abruptly to an end and looks at the saxophone teacher for the first time. Her mouth is twisted and her expression
is sour, as if the performance has made her remember an unpleasant feeling that she would rather have forgotten.
“Was that really what happened?” the saxophone teacher says, as the lights return to normal and Julia reaches for her sax.
“Was it Mr. Saladin in the car, Julia? Could you be sure?”
“I was just telling you what I imagined,” Julia says, all of a sudden grouchy and withdrawn and peering suspiciously at the
saxophone teacher like she is an enemy. And then she adds, “It was dark.” She picks at one of the keys on her sax, just to
hear it clack.
“This could be very important,” the saxophone teacher says.
“It’s what I imagined,” Julia says again, retreating further. She turns away and plays an arpeggio to warm up.
“Julia,” says the saxophone teacher. Her eyes are gleaming. “Tell me what you saw.”
“Nothing,” Julia says, and although she is sullen and inward the saxophone teacher senses in her something like triumph, as
if Julia has led her somewhere remote and treacherous only to abandon her. “I dropped her home. She said goodbye. She got
out. She shut the door. Nothing happened.”
“Can you remember losing your innocence, Patsy?” the saxophone teacher says.
They are in the afterward bar, Patsy sitting sideways in the booth with her legs up and her brown boots crossed at the ankle.
There is a bottle between them, and two glasses, each stained with the pale gray kiss of a woman’s lower lip, like a fingerprint
just below the rim.
“Do you mean a specific event?” Patsy says. “The actual loss of it, do you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Losing my virginity?”
“Not necessarily. Just if there was a moment when you ceased to be innocent. The moment you fell. Can you remember your fall?”
Patsy thinks about this quietly for a second. The saxophone teacher raises her wineglass to her mouth and drinks. Patsy is
beautiful tonight. Her hair is swept back into a tumbling handful at the nape of her neck, and her eyes are clear and bright.
She wears a heavy brass locket, a gift from Brian, an antique and accidental-seeming piece that suits her perfectly, suits
the stout capable breadth of her chest and the soft notched hollow of
her collarbone. Patsy always suits her clothes, her
costume. The image of her is always complete, the saxophone teacher thinks: it is impossible to halve her, undress her, subtract
from her. The sax teacher cannot imagine removing the necklace, even in her mind—she can’t imagine Patsy unclothed, Patsy
without the trimmings and trappings that she inhabits so completely.
Patsy rolls the stem of her wineglass in her fingers.
“I was never veiled or misted as a kid,” she says slowly. “You know, Santa Claused, Easter Bunnied, cabbage-patched, euphemized.
I can’t remember any illusions. I can’t remember ever
not
knowing. Sex was never really a mystery. And there was no God in our house, so no mystery there. Of course I had first experiences
like everybody else, made mistakes like everybody else, repaired and reinvented myself like everybody does. But I can’t remember
ever really
falling
. I can’t remember if I
was
ever really innocent. I have no nostalgia for a time before.”
She looks up at the saxophone teacher. “Is that terribly sad?” she says, and laughs.
The sax teacher smiles and says nothing, and they both sit quietly for a while, touching their wineglasses with their fingertips,
looking away.
“Everything had a precedent,” Patsy says after a time. “Everything I have ever done had a template, a formula, a model, something
public and visible and
known
. I knew the shape of everything I would ever meet, before I met it. The template always preceded the reality, the experience,
the personal truth of a thing. I learned about love from the cinema, and from television, and from the stage. I learned the
formula and then I applied it. That’s how it happened for me. My whole life.”
She gives another little tinkle of a laugh. “Is that terribly sad?” she says a second time. “Is that very sad?”
Up on the little dais next to the piano the double-bassist leans forward and says into his microphone, “One last song, folks.
Here’s one last song.”
The day after the Theater of Cruelty lesson Stanley ran into the victim of the exercise on the main staircase. The boy was
walking quickly with his head down, taking the stairs two at a time. His hair was cropped close to his skull now, to even
up the patch on the crown that the masked boy had snipped. The shorter cut didn’t quite suit him. He looked a little frightened,
his ears and forehead protruding too obviously from under the shrunken cap of hair. He was wearing a new shirt.
“Hey,” Stanley said, reaching out a hand to stall him.
The boy turned guilty eyes up at him and nodded a shy hello.
“I just wanted to say that I went and complained,” Stanley said. His voice sounded huge in the stairwell, spiraling up and
up to the floors above and ringing clear and hollow in the vertical shaft like the pealing of a bell. “About what happened.
I went to the Head of Movement and complained.”
“Thanks,” the boy said quietly. “But it’s all right now. It was just a dumb thing.” He made as if to continue downstairs,
but Stanley stopped him, moving closer and cornering him so he was trapped flat, pinioned against the banister with nowhere
to go.
“I’m going to talk to the Head of Acting as well,” Stanley said. “I can’t believe that nobody else is doing anything about
this. It’s disgusting. What they did to you was disgusting. And nobody cared.”
The boy looked at Stanley inscrutably for a moment. He reached back with both hands for the banister, and stood there with
his arms behind him, tugging gently on the handrail. Then he said, “I was a plant.”
“What?” Stanley said.
“I was a plant. The main guy—Nick, the guy in the mask—he asked me and arranged it all beforehand. I knew they were going
to pick me, and I knew what was going to happen, mostly. I knew about the water, and he said they might slap me around a bit.
I thought it would be funny. Just for a laugh.”
Stanley was frowning. “But you bolted.”
“I didn’t know they were going to go that far,” the boy said. “My shirt and everything. Cutting my hair. He only told me about
the water-trough. I thought it would be okay. I thought I’d help them out or whatever. I said yes.”
“Is there always a plant?” Stanley said. “Every year?”
“I guess,” the boy said. He jerked his gaze away, past Stanley’s shoulder and down the stairs. “They’d never get away with
it otherwise.”
“They shouldn’t get away with it.”
“Yeah,” the boy said, and shrugged. “It was just an exercise. It was only to make a point.”
“But
why
?” Stanley said. He spoke with more aggression than he intended. He felt the same dawning feeling of helplessness that he
had felt in the Head of Movement’s office. In his
confusion he was scowling at the boy, and now the boy scowled back.
“I was just helping them out. They needed someone for their project. It’s no big deal.”
“What about your shirt?” Stanley said. “Your shirt was a big deal.”
The boy gripped the banister tighter. He was flushing. He clenched his jaw, and his shorn golden cap of hair moved angrily
backward on his scalp.
“Hey look, I appreciate your concern, all right,” he said, “but I’m not like a little bandwagon, you know, or some sort of
a just cause that you can fight for. It was my fault, I should have asked them what they were planning on doing. It’s no big
deal. You didn’t have to complain.”
“They
hurt
you!” Stanley shouted.
“Yeah, and came and found me afterward,” the boy said loudly. “After they’d taken off their masks and it was all over, and
we talked and everything, and we sorted everything out. It’s not your problem. You weren’t there.”
Stanley looked at the boy for a second and then stepped aside to let him through. The boy ducked his head and muttered, “Thanks
anyway.” He slipped past Stanley, bounded down the stairs and disappeared.
Stanley looked up through the high mullioned window that lit the stairwell, and breathed heavily. He found his hands were
balled into fists and he vaguely felt like hitting something, but he wasn’t sure what he wanted to hit, or even why. He stepped
back as a flood of second-year actors thundered down the stairs, and as the crowd dwindled he looked up to see the Head of
Acting descending calmly in their wake, holding under his arm a bundled mainsail, patched and rat-tailed and studded around
its edge with reef-point eyelets filmed with rust. He looked preoccupied.
“Stanley,” he said as he approached. “You’re the man who wanted to see me, is that right?”
“It’s all right. I sorted it out with the Head of Movement,” Stanley said, stepping respectfully aside. “It’s all sorted out
now.”
“This is an exercise in control and communication,” the Head of Movement said. “I want you all to divide into pairs and face
each other. Starting with your palms together and your feet square, you will begin to move in exact tandem, each the mirror
image of the other. You can move however and wherever you like, but I want to be able to walk among you and not be able to
tell who is leading and who is following.”
The class lumbered to its feet and Stanley found himself paired with the girl who had been sitting nearest to him. They smiled
at each other quickly as they turned to face each other, and Stanley felt his heart leap. He felt a little stab of self-contempt
and frowned to quash the feeling. He turned back to look at the Head of Movement, narrowing his eyes to show the girl that
he was listening hard, and that he intended to take the lesson very seriously, and that despite what she may expect or believe
he was utterly indifferent to the fact of her sex. In his vague peripheral vision he saw the girl watch him for a moment longer,
and then turn back to the Head of Movement herself.
“Between you,” the Head of Movement continued, “choose one person who will begin as the leader. You must also choose some
sort of physical signal to indicate to each other that the leader will change. You can swap between yourselves as many times
as you wish, back and forth. Eye contact is essential. We will conduct this exercise in silence.”
The paired students leaned in to confer with each other in whispers. The Head of Movement turned away and pressed a button
on the stereo surround system, wiping the dust off the protruding edge with his finger while he waited for the disc
to load.
The dust was thick and silver-gray, accumulating on his fingertip in a soft feathered wafer. He rolled it into a ball and
flicked it away. The disc began to spin, and he twisted the volume knob slowly up and up so the music faded in, swelling larger
and larger until it filled the gymnasium completely. He had chosen a cinematic score, instrumental and surging and overblown.
“Please take your places and begin,” he called over the opening bars. “The music is your pulse. Take inspiration from it.
Detach yourself and divide your mind between watching your partner and listening to the pulse. You should feel alert but at
peace. You may begin.”
Stanley turned to face his partner and held up his palms for her to touch with her own. They looked clearly at each other,
and at first he squirmed and frowned, unsure as to what she might be seeing, looking at him in such a clear, frank way. She
was a little shorter than him, and her chin was tilted slightly upward to meet his gaze. She had determined gray eyes and
a straight thin-lipped mouth. Stanley was close enough to see the down on her cheeks, glowing soft pink in the slanting light,
and the fawny scatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose.
The heavier instruments dwindled to let the strings build their own quiet plucking crescendo. Stanley peeled his right palm
away from the girl’s and felt her make the same movement, slowly and carefully, lagging perhaps a quarter of a second behind.
She was frowning slightly, but even as he registered the expression he realized that she was attempting to mirror his own.
He relaxed into a more neutral face and saw her do the same, his movements reflected back at him in a delicate feminine echo,
like a cave that threw back a finer, female version of his own call. He balled his hand into a fist and brought it up under
his chin, trying to move slowly and carefully so she would see the whole trajectory of his movement and be able to replicate
it simultaneously. She watched his eyes, not the movement of his hand. They
were both wide eyed with the strain of trying
to communicate without words. Around them the other paired couples were moving similarly, waving their hands about in a slow
and measured way. As he spread his fingers out and laced them through the thin cold fingers of his echo-girl, Stanley thought
to himself that from above the class must look like some sort of windswept crop, swelling up and back like tiny quivering
blades thrusting up out of the soil and into a stiff and ever-changing breeze.
From the stage the Head of Movement watched them all in silence, his fingertips still resting on the stereo and filmed gray
with dust. His gaze drifted over them and came to rest upon one of the boys, standing on the edge of the group and reaching
out his hand to touch his partner’s neck with his index finger. The Head of Movement watched the mirrored pair trace an invisible
line down each other’s windpipe and into the hollow at the center of the collarbone, and thought, The boy is leading. He could
always tell.
The boy was standing with his chin high and his legs apart and wearing a solemn burning expression on his face that almost
made the Head of Movement smile. It was the first time he’d had class with the boy since the teary outburst in his office
following the Theater of Cruelty exercise, and when he had walked into the gymnasium that morning and called for the attention
of the class he’d at once spotted Stanley bobbing on the periphery, anxious and desperate to be seen. The Head of Movement
had looked away. He did not want the boy to cling to him in such a fearfully filial way, craving attention and recognition
and time, unaware that all the trembled first-experiences and thought-dawnings that affected him so wholly were, for the Head
of Movement, only the vicarious latest in a long line of the same.