“My arm’s dead, sorry,” the girl whispered apologetically, and wiggled it free.
“
Shit
,” Stanley said.
“What’s wrong?” the girl said in surprise, drawing the duvet up around her and tucking it carefully under her arms as she
withdrew.
“I don’t—”
“You don’t know what to do?”
“
No
,” Stanley said, a little too savagely. “No, I know what to do.”
“It doesn’t matter,” the girl said, pushing his hair off his face with the rough heel of her hand. The action was coarse and
tender at the same time, and Stanley was humbled, feeling her easily achieve the truth of the action when he had found it
so difficult. “Just give me a cuddle. Come here.”
He crept across the bed and she opened up the duvet to let him in. They lay there for a while, Stanley’s heart thumping, the
girl’s hands moving up and down the curve of his shoulder blade and into the thin hair at the nape of his neck.
“I didn’t think it would be like this,” Stanley said, without thinking.
The girl raised herself up on an elbow and said, “What?”
Stanley realized he had sounded rude, and said hastily, “I mean me. I didn’t think I would be like this.”
That sounded even worse, and he seethed for a moment in frustration and self-contempt. What he had meant to say was that all
the films and television programs he had ever seen that might have schooled him for this moment had placed him in the position
of the outsider, the snug and confident voyeur who is able to
imagine
himself in place of the hero but is never physically required to act. Now he felt utterly unscripted, marooned, desperate
for the girl to act first so that he would only have to follow and the burden of decision would not fall to him.
“It’s your first time,” the girl said, and a note in her voice changed, becoming softer, even maternal. She gathered him up
closer to her and he burrowed in. “Silly old duffer,” she said, and rubbed the top of his head with her knuckles. “You’ll
be all right.”
They lay there for a while, listening as the ice-cream truck pulled into the street and sounded its theme tune for the children
to hear. The truck whined away down the road, and it was quiet again.
“That was it,” Stanley said, looking up for the first time, into the lights.
“That was what, Stanley?” the girl said, rolling over and touching him lightly on the lower curve of his back with her fingertips.
“That was what?”
“That was the most intimate scene of my life,” Stanley said. “Right then. That was it.”
“Cue Mr. Saladin!” one of the students shouted. “King of Spades! Where the hell are you, Connor?”
There was a commotion in the wings, unseen, and then the
King of Spades appeared, red faced and trotting, ejected so swiftly
from the parted cloth it was as if he had been physically launched.
“Sorry,” he called out wildly in the direction of the pit. He cast about to find his mark on the floor, two pieces of tape
crossed in a pale X like a cartoon Band-Aid.
“Get your bloody game on,” someone shouted.
They watched with contempt and satisfaction as the King of Spades found his mark, drew himself up and took a breath. The stiff
waxy breastplate of his costume had come untied on one shoulder and so hung at an odd angle across his chest. He had forgotten
his gloves and his sword, but it was too late now.
The onstage students sighed and retraced their steps to give the boy his cue again. They said, “But look at it from another
point of view. She lost her virginity, and in good time, before it began to cling unfashionably like a visible night-rag.
She snared an older man. She achieved celebrity. And now she has a secret which everyone craves to know: a sexual secret,
the best kind of secret, a vortex of a secret that tugs and tugs away at her edges so she’s never quite
there
. Oh, don’t pity Victoria. Pity poor lonely Mr. Saladin, who has tasted the bright ripe fruit of youth and purity, and now
nothing else will do.”
There was a kettle-drum clash from the orchestra pit, on the beat. Its effect on the King of Spades was dramatic. He crumpled,
as if he had been clubbed between the shoulder blades, and all in an instant he became crippled and fragile and old. As he
began to speak and the lesser characters reformed like children around his knees, one of the boys in the stalls leaned over
to whisper, “He’s still playing it for laughs. It won’t work if he plays it for laughs.”
The King of Spades said, “There was something so very endearing about it, right back in the beginning. The way she played
it, out of a textbook, big moon eyes and an open collar, and her skirt hitched up to show her knee. It was so touchingly
amateur.
It was like a child’s painting, imperfect and discordant and poorly executed and crying out to be celebrated, to be pinned
to the wall or the fridge, to be complimented and fawned over and adored.”
He trailed his foot and looked down at the floor and smiled secretly to himself, as if he was remembering something infinitely
private. The band in the orchestra pit had struck up a jazzy pulse, drums and double-bass and the throaty murmur of a tenor
saxophone.
He said, “In ten years’ time she will be able to look at a man in cold blood and think, We are compatible. She will think,
given your generosity of spirit, given your ability to provide me with the emotional shelter I need, given your particular
wry and self-deprecating sense of humor, your interest in silent film, given the things you like to cook, and your tendency
toward pedantry, and the things you do to pass the time—given all of this, I can conclude that we’re compatible. Over the
course of her life she will gradually compile this dreary list of requisites. Year by year she will reduce the yawning gulf
of her desire to the smallness of a job vacancy: a janitor, or a sentry, or a drone. The ad will say, Wanted. That’s all.”
The King of Spades shrugged.
“But with me she didn’t have a formula,” he said. “She didn’t know her appetites, didn’t recognize the jumping pulse that
leaped and leaped in the scarlet recess of her throat. Every time we touched she was finding out something new—not about me,
but about herself, her tides and tolls, her responses, the upturned vase of emptiness she carried around inside her always,
like something unfinished or unmade.”
Behind him there were shadow-figures arched and clawing behind mullioned screens. They were silhouettes, crisply lit and dark
against the white cloth, and they were all the shapeliest of the first-year students, chosen for their linear form, their
profile. They were hand-picked by the others, who squinted until they
saw only the positive outline and could judge the massy
contour on its own.
The jazz band eased into the main theme now, the recurring motif of the production, and the seething crowd on stage reformed
into another shape, another scene. The lights changed and the music changed, and the King of Spades was swallowed by the crowd.
“You missed out a bit,” one of the stage managers said, when the King of Spades at last heard his cue to exit and bowed out,
stage right. He was holding a sheaf of papers fixed together with a bulldog clip, and he shook the papers in the King of Spades’
shadowed face. He said, “You missed out that whole section where he says, How can I protect these girls and excite them at
the same time?”
“Has anything ever gone wrong?” Stanley said. “In the devised production? Like, the pistol was loaded and nobody even knew
it was real. Or the flying harness was unclipped, or somebody fell from the fly-floors and slammed into the action in the
middle of the stage. Some tragic story that happened almost too long ago to remember.”
“You’re nervous,” Oliver said, as he slid into the seat opposite. He pulled an apple out of his backpack and began tossing
it back and forth between his hands.
“There’s just something scary about being let loose,” Stanley said. “Without the tutors watching or anything, just us on our
own for months and months. And I just wondered if anything’s ever gone terribly wrong. Like in a
Lord of the Flies
kind of a way.”
“You’re worried you’re going to be impaled on the spikes of your wimple,” Oliver said, taking a cheerful bite and grinning
across at Stanley as he chewed. “Suffocated by that big black dress. Death by habit.”
“So nothing’s ever gone wrong?”
“Well, if not, maybe this year’s the year.” Oliver enjoyed Stanley’s frowning distress for a moment longer, then reached across
and slapped him on the arm. “Hey man, you’re awesome in that role. Everyone always says so as soon as you leave the room.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Stanley said. He drummed his hands on the tabletop and sighed.
Stanley left the Institute buildings at a brisk trot, hugging a long woollen trench coat around his body. He was wearing a
suit and tie, and his shoes were shined brightly black. He took the stairs two by two, broke apart from the rest of the group
and set off across the quadrangle with his head inclined and his shoulders slightly bowed, his hands clenched in fists inside
the pockets of his coat. He walked swiftly, and soon he had left the rest of the group and was walking down the boulevard
alone.
Behind him, a motley clutch of characters from Tennessee Williams, Steven Berkoff, Ionesco and David Hare milled about briefly
before settling upon an objective and dispersing likewise. One of the girls had costumed herself in a taffeta dress that was
cut above the knee, and she looked uncomfortable and underdressed in the chill of the afternoon. Her bare legs were blood
mottled and the fine fur on her arms was standing on end.
Stanley had resolved to circumnavigate the park, detouring to avoid the children’s playground, then looping carefully around
the lake and returning to the Institute buildings from the opposite side. He withdrew further into the collar of his shirt
and lengthened his stride. He supposed he was probably being followed: the Heads of Acting, Movement, Improvisation
and Voice
had all left the premises earlier that morning to station themselves around the city quarter.
“You mustn’t leave the bounded area,” the Head of Acting had said again and again, tapping the illuminated area with his forefinger
and looking down past the steel arm of the projector at the shifting mass of students straining in their seats. He was dressed
in canvas trousers and an open-necked shirt, looking only slightly jauntier than usual but nevertheless infected by the same
giddy thrill of disguise as the students, some of whom were almost unrecognizable in their pinned costumes and period hair.
Stanley turned off the boulevard and passed through the blunt-tipped iron gates into the botanical gardens. A suited man passed
him on the gravel path and gave him a long look. Stanley almost looked away, but quickly remembered he was Joe Pitt, and looked
hard at the man for the longest possible instant, not breaking his gaze until he had passed. He felt an unpleasant flicker
of guilt at the deception that did not dissolve when the man rounded the corner of the hothouse and disappeared. Stanley thought
he saw out of the corner of his eye the Head of Improvisation sitting on a park bench in a pool of sunlight and holding a
newspaper on her lap. He drew his coat tighter around himself and walked on.
Pretending to be somebody else gave Stanley a curious feeling of privacy in himself. The inner thoughts and processings of
his character, visible only as he chose to make them visible, across his face and in the lie of his hands and through the
curve of his posture, enclosed his own thoughts like an atmosphere, parceling the real Stanley up beneath a double-layered
film, the inner and the outer Joe Pitt. He felt snug, as if tightly curled within a nut, safe in the knowledge that nobody
could truly see him beneath the double fog of his disguise.
“Hello,” said a small voice, and suddenly there was the girl from the wings, the music-lesson girl, coming toward him with
her saxophone case slung over her shoulder like a quiver. She grinned, the first properly uncensored grin he had seen on her
face, and said, “Are you following me?”
“If I was following you, wouldn’t I be walking behind you?” Stanley said.
“I meant stalking.” The girl was still grinning, now flicking her gaze up and down Stanley’s overcoat, which was a little
too large for him, the sleeves hanging over his fingertips as if he was a child dressing up in the clothes of his father.
“Oh. I’m doing an acting exercise for drama school,” Stanley said without thinking. As soon as he’d said it, he awaited a
sinking feeling in his stomach: he’d failed the exercise; someone would surely have seen and noted it. “If you tell
anyone
that you are doing an exercise, or describe the Institute or your profession in any way,” the Head of Acting had said, “it
goes without saying that you will automatically fail.”
“I have to stay in character all morning,” Stanley said, rushing on. “Those are the rules.” The sinking feeling didn’t come.
He felt curiously lighter, standing here in the park with this pretty upturned girl, and he flapped his oversized coat around
him and laughed.
“Do you want to get a coffee later?” he asked. “When I’m done being Joe Pitt.”
“Okay,” Isolde said shyly. “Who’s Joe Pitt?”
“Well, he dresses like this,” Stanley said. “And beyond that, I couldn’t really say.”
“You’re not doing a very good job of being him then,” Isolde said.
“I guess not.”
Stanley located the feeling of lightness: he felt
real
, more real than he had felt in months.
“How do I know you’re not acting now?” Isolde said, which was almost a cliché but he forgave her because of his feeling of
lightness and because of how pretty she looked, with her pink
ears and her woollen coat and her mittens clapped together against
the cold.
“How do I know that
you’re
not?” Stanley said.