You can’t tell any of this from Isolde’s face: she is just sitting in the gray half-light, her hands in her lap, looking at
the wall.
“I am never quite sure,” the saxophone teacher says, “what is truly meant when the mothers say, I want my daughter to experience
what was denied to me.
“In my experience the most forceful and aggressive mothers are always the least inspired, the most unmusical of souls, all
of them profoundly unsuccessful women who wear their daughter’s image on their breast like a medal, like a bright deflection
from their own unshining selves. When these mothers say, I want her to fully experience everything that was denied to me,
what they rightly mean is, I want her to fully
appreciate
everything that was denied to me. What they rightly mean is, The paucity of my life will only be thrown into relief if my
daughter has everything. On its own, my life is ordinary and worthless and nothing. But if my daughter is rich in experience
and rich in opportunity, then people will come to pity me: the smallness of my life and my options will not be
incapacity
; it will be
sacrifice.
I will be pitied more, and respected more, if I raise a daughter who is everything that I am not.”
The saxophone teacher runs her tongue over her teeth. She says, “The successful mothers—musical women, sporting women, literate
women, content and brimful women, women who were denied nothing, women whose parents paid for lessons when they were girls—the
successful mothers are the least forceful, always. They do not need to oversee, or wield, or pick a fight on
their daughter’s
behalf. They are complete in themselves. They are complete, and so they demand completeness in everyone else. They can stand
back and see their daughters as something set apart, as something whole and therefore untouchable.”
The saxophone teacher goes to the window to let down the blinds. It is almost dusk.
Mrs. Tyke waits in the corridor for ten minutes before the saxophone teacher opens the door.
“I just wanted to touch base, really,” she says once they are inside, “in light of this dreadful scandal up at the school.
I’m thinking of the girls.”
“I understand,” the saxophone teacher says, pouring out two mugs of tea. One of the mugs has a picture of a saxophonist on
a desert island and the words “Sax on the Beach.” The other mug is white and says “Let’s Talk About Sax.” The saxophone teacher
returns the jug to its cradle and carefully selects a teaspoon.
“Mrs. Tyke,” she says, “you would very much like, I think, to sew your children’s hands to your waistband, just to keep them
with you always, their little legs swaying when you hurry and trailing on the asphalt when you stroll. If you turned on your
heel very fast your children would fan out around you like a sunburst pleated skirt. You would be a goddess in a corset and
a bustle, your children radiating out from you like so many graceful little spokes.”
“I’m thinking of the girls, that’s all,” says Mrs. Tyke. She holds out both hands to receive her mug of black-leaf tea. The
saxophone teacher lets the silence creep until Mrs. Tyke bursts out, “I’m just worried about some of the
ideas
she’s bringing home. They’re ideas she didn’t have before. They stick in the side of her mouth like a walnut, and when she
talks I can see glimpses
of these ideas—just a flash every so often when she opens her mouth wide—but it’s enough to make
me very nervous. It’s like she’s tasting them, or poking them around her mouth with her tongue. They’re ideas she didn’t have
before.”
She blinks dolefully at the saxophone teacher, then shrugs in a helpless fashion and ducks her head to sip her tea.
“Can I tell you what I think the problem is?” says the saxophone teacher in a special quiet honey voice. “I think you feel
a little bit as if that horrible man up at the school, that vile and disgusting man, has left a big fat fingerprint on your
glasses, and it doesn’t matter what you’re looking at, all you see is his fingers.”
She stands up to pace.
“I know you wanted your daughter to find out about it all the ordinary way. You wanted her to find out behind the bike sheds,
or underneath the bleachers on the rugby field, or in Social Studies, the facts written on the whiteboard with a felt-tipped
pen. You wanted her to sneak glances at magazines and at movies she wasn’t allowed to see. You wanted her to start off with
some sort of blind sticky grope in her mate’s front room on a Saturday night while her friends are outside being sick into
flowerpots. That might happen more than once. It might become a phase. But you’d be prepared for it.”
As Mrs. Tyke watches the saxophone teacher she lets something steal across her face, not something as crude and bold as realization
or awakening, but something which registers only as a slackening of her features, a tiny release. It’s such a good performance
the saxophone teacher almost forgets she’s acting.
“You wanted her to finally get a boyfriend in sixth form maybe, some prancing, empty sort of boy you didn’t really like, and
you wanted to catch her with him eventually, coming home early because you had a funny feeling, and seeing them on the couch,
or on the floor, or in her bedroom among her teddy bears and her frilly pink cushions that she doesn’t really like but she’ll
never throw away.
“I respect these things that you wanted for your daughter,” the saxophone teacher says. “I imagine they must be the things
that every good mother wants. It’s a terrible thing that this venomous little man should have stolen your daughter’s innocence
so slyly, without ever having laid a finger on her, shoving his dirty little secrets down her throat like candy from a brown
paper bag.
“But what you need to understand, my darling,” she whispers, “is that this little taste your daughter has had is a taste of
what could be. She’s swallowed it. It’s inside her now.”
“The first term,” they said, “is essentially a physical and emotional undoing. You will unlearn everything you have ever learned,
peeling it off skin by skin, stripping down and down until your impulse shines through.”
“This Institute,” they said, “cannot teach you how to be an actor. We cannot give you a map or a recipe or an alphabet that
will teach you how to act or how to feel. What we do at this Institute is not teaching by accumulation, collecting skills
as one might collect a marble or a token or a charm. Here at this Institute we teach by elimination. We help you learn to
eliminate yourself.”
“You may break or be broken,” they said. “This happens.”
The fat one on the end leaned forward and said, with emphasis, “A good actor makes a gift of himself.”
“An actor is someone who offers up his body publicly,” they said. “This can happen in one of two ways. The actor can
exploit
himself, treat his body as a ready and obedient instrument, a product to be sold. At this Institute we do not favor this approach.
We do not breed confectioners or clowns. You are not here to sell your body: you are here to sacrifice it.”
And then they said, “You’re not at high school anymore.”
“I graduated from the Institute in December,” said the golden boy, his gaze passing from face to face with calm disinterest.
“They asked me to come and talk to you guys today about my experience of the program and where I’m headed now and maybe you
can ask some questions if you have any.”
He sat cross-legged on the gymnasium floor like a prophet.
“God, I envy you guys,” he said, and then he smiled and smiled. “Not too virginal, not too defiled. Sitting there all shiny
and pregnant with the best still yet to come.”
The golden boy looked at them, the tight pale ring of nervous faces and black tee-shirts still creased down the middle with
newness.
“The three years I spent at this Institute didn’t just shape me as an artist. They shaped me as a person,” he said. “This
place woke me up.”
He flushed brightly as if he were describing a lover he had lost.
“Everything you’ve ever slammed shut gets reopened here,” he said. “If none of you had auditioned and been accepted you would
all have become cemented, cast in plaster and molded for the rest of your adult life. That’s what’s happening to everybody
else, out there. In here you never congeal. You never set or crust over. Every possibility is kept open—it
must
be kept open. You learn to hold all these possibilities in your fist and never let any of them go.”
There was a silence. The golden boy smoothed the knees of his corduroy pants and said, as if he had just thought of it, “Remember
that anybody who is clever enough to set you free is always clever enough to enslave you.”
Stanley was disappointed with his life so far. Here, on the eve of his eighteenth birthday, he stood in the rich dusty quiet
of the shuttered foyer in a paralysis of bitterness and dissatisfaction. He was thinking about everything he was not.
Stanley had expected to be savage and dissenting and righteous as a teenager—he had yearned for it, even—and grew more and
more dissatisfied as his high-school years passed politely by. He had expected to drink whisky from a paper-bagged bottle
by the river, and slip his cold hands up a girl’s skirt in the patch of scrub beyond the tennis courts, and take shots at
passing cars with a potato-gun from a neighbor’s garage roof. He had expected to drink himself blind and vandalize the bus
shelters in the suburbs, to drive without a license, to retreat from his family, to turn sour, and to frighten his mother,
maybe, by refusing to eat or leave his room. This was his entitlement, his rightful lot, and instead he had spent his high-school
years playing gentlemanly sport and watching family television, admiring from a distance the boys brave enough to fight each
other, and longing for every girl he passed to lift her head and look him in the eye.
Stanley heard the voice of the Institute tutors in his mind. “The real thrill of the stage,” they said, “is the thrill of
knowing that at any moment something might go wrong. At any moment something on the stage might break or fall over; someone
might miss their cue, someone might botch the lighting, someone might forget their accent or their lines. You are never
fearful
watching a film, because what you are watching is always complete, always the same and always perfect; but you are often fearful
watching a play, in case something goes foul and you must then suffer the private embarrassment of watching the actors flounder
and repair themselves. But at the same time, in the silky dark of the auditorium, you ache for something to go wrong. You
desire it utterly. You feel tender toward any actor whose hat falls off, whose button breaks. You gasp and applaud when an
actor trips and rights himself. And if you see a mistake that others in the audience miss, then you feel a special privilege,
as if you are glimpsing a seam of a secret undergarment, something infinitely private, like a scarlet bite-mark on the inside
of a woman’s thigh.”
Stanley stood in the foyer of the Institute and looked about him. Here was another possible life that was in his power to
claim, another life he wanted, just as he had wanted, as a shy and useless teenager, to be unfeeling and disrespectful and
casual and vile. Now, as then, he felt the weight of a terrible inertia pin him to the foyer floor. He suffered all over again
the disappointing and quotable truth that the world would not come to him, or wait for him, or even pause: if he waited, this
life would simply pass him by. Stanley thought about this and felt deflated and terribly short-changed.
In his sixth-form school production he had been cast as Horatio, a part which pleased him—Horatio was a memorable name, at
least, the only one he had heard of before he encountered the play. Everyone remembered Horatio. It was a name that stuck.
Horatio it was who endured, critical and strident in the cultural memory, as the less resonant, less pronounceable characters
peeled off and dropped away. Stanley’s part was pared almost to nothing by the sharp-nosed drama teacher who said, “People
don’t want to sit here for three and a half hours,” and in rehearsals remarked, “You
are
a bit of a Horatio, aren’t you, Stanley?
You’re a Horatio through and through.” Stanley nodded and smiled and mouthed “Thank
you” and felt a private happy-thrill, and didn’t truly apprehend her meaning until several months later when he realized that
the comment had been less than kind. Even on stage as he trotted about in Hamlet’s brooding shadow, flaring his doublet and
flexing his hose, he had not really understood that his part existed merely to throw other, more interesting characters into
greater profundity and sharper relief. His mother called him “Wonderful,” and in the exhilarated lineup of the curtain call
he had been close as he could be to the center: by Hamlet’s side, holding Hamlet’s sweaty hand.
At the end of seventh form Stanley had seen the ragged call for auditions stapled to the pin-board in Careers Advice and simply
fished for a pen and written his name. He supposed that he had wanted to be an actor since he was a child. Acting was part
of a child’s primary lexicon of adult jobs: teacher, doctor, actor, lawyer, fireman, vet. Choosing to become an actor did
not require originality or forethought. It was not like choosing to be a jockey, or a greengrocer, or an events manager for
a local trust, where part of the choosing meant seeking and creating the choice; it did not depend on opportunity or introspection.
Choosing to become an actor was simply a matter of reaching for one of these discrete and packaged categories with both hands.
Stanley did not think about this as he wrote his name. The auditions sheet was watermarked and heavy, and the emblem of the
Institute was stamped in bronze.
Later, wishing to amplify the memory of this unremarkable decision, he imagined that it was this moment, when he lifted his
pen up to the paper and pressed hard to unstick the ink in the roller-ball tip so that for an instant his fingertips were
white and bloodless and hard—this moment, he imagined, was the moment when he seized an opportunity to transform from a Horatio
into something utterly new.