Stanley nodded again. He looked down for a moment, drew a breath, and then looked up again with his father’s wry twitching
smile. He spread out his hands and said, “Hit me,” and all at once he was guiltless and unapologetic and mischievous.
“How well do you know your son Stanley?” the Head of Acting asked first.
Stanley raised his eyebrows and smiled. “He’s a good kid. We swap dirty jokes, that’s our thing. We get along fine.”
“What kind of dirty jokes?”
“Oh, we try and shock each other, back and forth. It’s just a game we play.” Stanley smiled again and looked at the Head of
Acting coolly, as if he could see right through him, as if all of the Head of Acting’s wants and fears and hopes and faults
were laid bare to him. The Head of Acting looked impassively back.
“Tell me one of the jokes that you’ve told your son,” he said.
“What’s the best thing about sleeping with a minor?”
“I don’t know,” said the Head of Acting politely.
“Getting paid eight dollars an hour for babysitting.”
There is a smothered giggle from one of the students on the floor. Stanley turned to flash him a smile. “Good, eh?” he said,
twisting both wrists around to shake out his cuffs the way his father often did. “But it’s getting harder and harder to come
up with anything original. I have my secretary look them up for me. Best job she’s ever had, she reckons.”
There was another ripple of laughter from the floor. Stanley
grinned and drew himself up a little higher, placing both hands
on his stomach and stroking the fabric of his shirt downward again and again. He contrived to make the movement look almost
absentminded.
“Tell me one of the jokes that Stanley has told you,” the Head of Acting said.
Stanley paused and thought for a moment. “Can’t recall, sorry,” he said at last.
“Would you say you have a good relationship with Stanley?”
“We don’t see each other that often,” Stanley said, “but he’s a good kid. Good sense of humor. A bit sensitive maybe, but
that isn’t going to hold him back. We get along fine.”
“What’s your son good at?”
“Stanley?” Stanley said, buying time the way his father would buy time. “He’s pretty well liked everywhere he goes, I think.
He did well to get into drama school. Is he a good actor? I don’t know. You could probably tell me that.”
“So what would you say he was good at?”
“The arts,” Stanley said doubtfully, thinking hard. “He’s a romantic. He got that from me. He sure as hell didn’t get it from
Roger.”
“Is Roger his stepfather?”
“Yes.”
“What’s he like?”
“Mild,” said Stanley. “Laughs even if he doesn’t think it’s funny. Runs out of things to say and then looks frightened, tries
to escape. Sure he’s a nice man though. I wouldn’t marry him. But he’s a nice man.”
“Is he a good father to your son?”
“He’s a good stepfather to my son.”
“All right,” the Head of Acting said, turning to include the rest of the group huddled at Stanley’s feet. “Let’s open up the
floor. Any of you can start asking Stanley’s father questions. Anything you like.”
“Do you see yourself in Stanley?” called out a girl in the front row.
“He’s a little more careful than I was at his age perhaps. He’s an innocent kid. I wasn’t as innocent as he is.”
“Do you think he’s still a virgin?” This was from one of the tousled boys in the back. The Head of Acting looked around sharply,
but Stanley didn’t flinch. He shrugged and smiled.
“There’s a certain manner about him,” he said. “Something unspoiled. I couldn’t say. Wouldn’t want to say.”
“What’s the worst thing about him? His worst fault?”
Stanley looked down at the floor and drew his lips between his teeth to think. “Trusting people too much,” he said at last.
“Trusting people who aren’t worthy of being trusted.”
“Have you told him that’s what you think?”
“No,” Stanley said. He flapped his arm irritably. “What would be the point of that? He needs to make mistakes or he’ll never
get anywhere. And that’s not the sort of father I am.” He tossed his head impatiently and twitched out his cuffs again.
“What do you think Stanley thinks of you?”
“I think that underneath it all I disappoint him,” Stanley said. “He’s disappointed and he’s angry because on one level he
really wants to rebel against me. He wants to tear down everything I stand for, make me see myself for what I am, but he can’t.
I’m not that person in his life. He doesn’t need to rebel against me, because I’m not the one who makes the rules. I’m just
the outsider, the man who turns up every now and again. If he tried to really rebel against me I’d just laugh at him. I think
he resents me for that. It’s a disappointment to him.”
“You can see all that?” asked one of the boys from the floor with a pointed skepticism, as if to imply that Stanley wasn’t
quite remembering the rules of the exercise. The Head of Acting was sitting back with his arms folded, watching Stanley intently
with narrowed eyes.
“Yes,” Stanley said simply. He spread his hands again. “I’m a psychologist. It’s my job to see things.”
“We’ve got information!” the boy Marcus was crying out when Stanley slipped into the rehearsal room and took his seat on the
floor. “Polly had a friend of a friend who was the abused girl’s best friend, and she knew basically everything. We interviewed
her and wrote everything down!” He waved a little notebook in the air, flushed with his own success.
“What’s some of the stuff?” somebody called out.
“Like, he was her music teacher,” Marcus said, flipping open his notebook in excitement, “and she took private woodwind tutorials
with him, for alto sax. And when they drove anywhere she used to lie on the floor in the backseat with a rug over her. And
in his spare time he painted in oils, just as a hobby, only he never painted her because it would be evidence and he wasn’t
that stupid. But he wanted to, he said, God he wanted to, because when she came all the blue-map veins on her sternum and
her throat would all come up, rise to the surface of her skin just for an instant, and he always said that if he could capture
her at just that moment, it would be the best thing in the world he had ever done. He knew it instinctively. They had a joke
that he could do a series of paintings, an exhibition. He said he had never seen anything like it, someone who changed so
much in that split-second instant, as they came. It was his favorite thing about her.”
Marcus flipped through his notebook, turning over the pages.
“Oh, there’s so
much
,” he said, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “We can use all of it. It’s so good, and there’s so much. We
should buy this
girl a present to say thank you. Polly knows her through orchestra.”
“We’ll make sure to get her complimentary tickets for opening night,” Felix said, already making a note on the side of his
jotter. “And a voucher for nibbles.”
“Read out the rest,” someone called out. “Read out everything.”
Near the end of the first-year calendar was an underlined event described simply as “the Outing” and carefully timetabled
so that the first-, second- and third-year actors were all required to participate together. The actors all assembled in the
gymnasium, the second- and third-years smug and aloof in the security of having performed the exercise before.
The sixty-odd students were each assigned by the Head of Acting a part from a play. He had appointed the parts carefully,
choosing students who bore a temperamental or physiological likeness to the characters he knew so well, and he smiled as he
read each name off the long list he had penned into his notebook. “Henry, I’d like you to play Torvald,” he said. “I’m looking
forward to seeing your Torvald. I’m guessing it’s going to be a very interesting mix”—as if Henry and Torvald were transparent
overlays that could be placed upon each other to form an amalgam, a newer, brighter image that would be better and more vibrant
than either the boy or the man on his own.
“Claire,” he was saying now, and turning to one of the third-years perched on the edge of the crowd. “I’ve chosen Susan from
A Bed Among the Lentils
for you. You’re playing out of your age range a bit, but I think you’ll manage beautifully.”
The rules of the exercise were relatively simple. The students
were asked to leave the grounds of the Institute and disperse
into the four city blocks that surrounded the Institute buildings. They had to remain in character for two hours. They were
to be let out in small staggered batches, one batch leaving as another returned, over a period of three days. The tutors and
the off-duty actors would be patrolling the city blocks, appearing to perform ordinary activities, like shopping and ordering
coffee and jogging and meeting each other on the street to talk, but all the while observing the actors as they performed.
Dora. Septimus. Martha. Bo. The list went on. Stanley looked out the window and allowed his mind to wander, and soon found
that he couldn’t distinguish the names of the characters from the names of the students assigned to become them.
“Stanley,” the Head of Acting called, jolting him out of his reverie. He looked up, but the Head of Acting wasn’t addressing
him. “Stanley from
A Streetcar Named Desire
,” he was saying, and a student on the floor was nodding vigorously and scribbling down the name of the role in the margin
of his exercise book. Stanley sighed and looked down at his hands.
“I know that some of these roles are easier than others,” the Head of Acting said, “and with some of these characters it’s
hard to imagine them out of the context of the play. But remember that every performance is an interpretation. You can be
as imaginative as you like. It’s up to you what you want to wear, whether you want to try an accent, whether you want to change
your appearance to better suit your role.”
Stanley’s gaze slid sideways to the Head of Movement, standing like a patient shadow behind the Head of Acting, his ankles
together and his heels against the wall. He was smiling faintly and nodding his head, but the movement looked automatic, like
a weighted pendulum keeping indulgent time behind a pane of glass. He saw the Head of Movement wink at one of the students
on the floor, and turned his head quickly to follow
his gaze and seek out the recipient of the wink. He was too late to tell.
He looked back at the Head of Movement and saw him smile and look carefully down at the floor.
The Head of Acting had reached the first-year group, and all around him his classmates were being branded one by one. Harry
Bagley. George. Moss. Irene.
Stanley was assigned the part of Joe Pitt. “Read the play first,” the Head of Acting advised, and smiled a tiny smile before
returning to his list. Somebody in the crowd giggled faintly and Stanley blushed, wondering what sort of person Joe Pitt was.
He wrote the name on a fresh page of his organizer and then tucked the book into his bag.
“How long are you in town for?” Stanley asked after they had ordered. His father was busy scratching something into his electronic
notebook and he didn’t answer immediately. He stabbed at the screen, folded the notebook away, and shook out his cuffs.
“Sorry, champ,” he said. “You said?”
“How long are you down for?”
“Just the weekend. I’m speaking at the conference tomorrow and then we fly out. I’ve got a joke for you. What’s the difference
between acne and a Catholic priest?”
“I don’t know,” said Stanley.
“Acne only comes on your face
after
puberty.”
“Dad, that’s revolting,” Stanley said. He thought, A taboo is something that’s forbidden because it’s sacred.
His father held up his hands in surrender. “Too far?”
“Yes,” Stanley said. Or because it’s disgusting. He scowled despite himself and took a drink of water.
“Tell me about you, then,” his father said. “Tell me about drama school. Oh! I forgot—I’ve got something for you. I cut it
out of the newspaper this morning.” He thumbed through his briefcase until he found a wad of newspaper, folded in eighths.
He passed it across the table to Stanley and hummed merrily as he waited for Stanley to read it.
The headline read
Girl’s Death “Terrible Waste
.” The article was brief.
“You know the girl?” his father said when he’d finished. He was expectant, his eyes the gleeful half-moons of the laughing
Comedy mask in the foyer of the Institute.
Stanley looked at the article again, and swallowed. “You’re going to tell me that this was the million-dollar girl.”
His father laughed. “Stanley,” he said, “this was the million-dollar girl. Did you know her?”
“What if I did?” Stanley said. “What if I did, and this was how I found out, and you’ve just been horribly insensitive to
both of us?”
Stanley’s father reached across to twitch the page out of Stanley’s hands. “It’s just a bit of fun,” he said, tucking the
wad back into his briefcase. “I thought you’d laugh. Don’t look at me like that.”
He shook his finger playfully at Stanley, and reached for his tumbler. “Anyway, if you
did
know her,” he said, “then I’d be congratulating you, because you’d have picked her from the start and you’d have taken out
a policy.”
“That girl is a real person somewhere,” Stanley said.
“That girl is a corpse somewhere,” his father corrected. He gave Stanley a stern critical look, as if gravely disappointed
and seeing him truly for the first time. He said, “I really thought you’d laugh.”
The catchment area for Abbey Grange is wide and economically diverse. It is close enough to the city center to touch some
of the wealthier areas, but covers several suburbs of middling value and a few streets at its nether edge that properly belong
in the backwater suburbs, wide crawling streets with vast gutters and unkempt grass.
The poorer girls who work part-time in fast-food and clothing chain stores are able to effect something of a moral victory
over the girls who receive an allowance from their parents and don’t have to work for cash. When the less wealthy girls visit
the white and shining houses of the rich they always come armed with a strong sense of entitlement, opening the fridge and
changing the channel and taking long delicious showers in the morning, always with a guiltless and even pious sense of righting
some dreadful inequality in the world. It is almost a noble thing to cajole and thieve half a bag of crisps from a girl whose
pantry is lit by angled halogen bulbs anchored to a chrome bar: it is not a burglary but a form of just redistribution, a
restoration of a kind of balance. So the poorer girls tell themselves, as they close their salty fists around their next mouthful
and remark out loud that they are rostered on to work the late shift at the candy bar tonight.