Isolde smiled and made a funny gesture, turning out her hands and lifting herself up onto her tiptoes to show that her whole
body didn’t know. Stanley felt a rush of happiness surge over him like a tide.
“I guess that’s a risk we’re going to have to take, then,” he said.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the Head of Improvisation approaching.
“I have to go and finish my walk now,” he said. “But I’ll wait for you under the ginkgo tree.”
“I finish at five,” Isolde said.
“I know,” Stanley said. “I’ve been watching.”
“You have to follow through with the action to the very end,” the Head of Movement called out crossly. His tired hand was
smoothing the hair on his crown, over and over. “Right now it’s obvious that you both know the scene is about to end, and
you relax before the lights go down. It’s only a split-second thing, but it matters. You have to give the illusion that the
scene is going to keep going on, behind the curtain. You have to follow through with the action to the very end. Again.”
Stanley and the girl again assumed their position, Stanley standing with his palm cupped against the girl’s cheek and his
index finger slipped inside the tight little bud of her ear. They said their lines again, and tried not to loosen or slacken
their bodies as the scene came to its invisible end.
“It is what I want. This is what I want,” was Stanley’s last line, and he gave her jaw a tight little shake with the clutch
of
his hand, for emphasis. The girl looked up at him. The scene ended.
Stanley’s face was close to hers and her cheek was in his hand. He followed the action through: he leaned down and kissed
her like he meant it.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” the Head of Movement exploded, and the two of them jumped hastily apart. “When did I say kiss her? I
said, Follow through with the action to the very end.”
“I thought that was what you meant,” Stanley said, with hot embarrassment, looking out past the lights. The girl wiped her
mouth and looked at the floor.
“We are not going to have the curtain come down on the two of you pashing like a couple of kids!” the Head of Movement shouted.
“Think about the scene, man!”
The Head of Movement did not usually yell. He was generally less vicious than the Head of Acting, less inclined to shame or
fracture his students, less given to little bursts of irritation or cold contempt. But today he was scratchy, surly and tight
chested as if short of breath, and as he glared up at the pair of them from his seat in the stalls he was smothered by a vast
glove of anger and blame.
“What is it?” he said. “Just leaped at the opportunity, I suppose? What?”
The boy had a wounded look. He had been expecting congratulations, probably, praise for his physical commitment to the scene,
his willingness to put personal considerations aside in the name of his art; he had been shamed, moreover, and shamed in front
of a girl. The Head of Movement might well have destroyed all possibility of a relationship between the pair by this public
shaming that caused them to flush and leap apart. The tutor knew it, and didn’t care. He was suddenly immensely irritated
at them both, the boy with his fair lashes and vulnerable pout, the girl with her practiced look of nervous naïveté, worn
thin.
“I just thought that’s what you meant,” Stanley said again. “Sorry.”
The Head of Movement did not speak for a moment. They were looking at him with faint pity now, he thought, as any teenager
looks at an adult they believe to be utterly incapable of lust. They were looking at him as if they believed their awkward
dry fumble against the fold of the curtain had somehow made him jealous; as if their collision had made him yearn for some
lost youthful spontaneity of touch, and his outburst had only marked his dissatisfaction, his recognition of his own immeasurable
loss. The Head of Movement felt disgusted. He wanted to turn his head and spit on the floor. He wanted to mount the seven
steps to the stage and tear them from their cocoon of self-absorption and conceit. He wanted to shout and make them see that
he was not jealous, that he could not be jealous of any pathetic hot-light kiss between two ill-made brats, and if anything
what he felt was a profound nausea at what he had been forced to watch.
“Again,” said the Head of Movement sourly, and threw himself back into his chair.
Stanley was waiting for Isolde under the ginkgo tree when she emerged from her lesson, trotting down the sunken stone steps
and across the courtyard to embrace him and kiss him briefly on the mouth.
“Look at you, you little gypsy,” Stanley said as he stepped back. “All your bags and everything.”
“Fridays are horrible,” Isolde said. “Sax and PE and art all in the same afternoon.”
“Gypsy girl.”
Isolde exhaled and flapped her arms and then grinned at Stanley, a broad, honest grin that lit her up completely. It was the
same unashamed openness that had lured Mr. Saladin to
Victoria, only it was transplanted here on to her sister, the same smile
on a different face. Stanley leaned forward and kissed her on the nose.
“So when am I going to hear you play?” he said.
“I thought you could hear from down here in the quad.”
“But I’m never sure which sax is you and which is your teacher,” Stanley said with a grin. “I might be thinking you’re much
better than you actually are.”
“Our saxes actually have really different voices,” Isolde said. “If you know to listen for that sort of thing. My mouthpiece
is vulcanized rubber and hers is metal. The metal piece makes a really different sound.”
“Like how speaking voices are different from each other.”
“Yeah,” Isolde said. “Right. Like the difference between a woman and a girl.”
The stone building behind them was now unlit, all the curtains pulled and the lights doused. Inside, the offices were locked
for the night and cooling now in the gathering dusk. On the attic level the saxophone teacher’s window was dark, as if she
had locked the studio after Isolde’s departure and departed herself for the night, but if you looked up through the ginkgo
branches you would see an inky figure standing by the curtain and looking down into the courtyard at the pair standing together
under the ginkgo tree. Stanley and Isolde did not look up. Stanley crushed Isolde in a one-arm hug and together they walked
away, talking quietly with their heads together, until they were swallowed by the cloisters and the branches, and they disappeared.
“Do you know why you are here?” the Head of Movement said as Stanley sat down.
“Probably my Outing,” Stanley said, hazarding a guess.
The Head of Movement raised his eyebrows and twitched up his chin sharply. “Your Outing?” he said.
“I must have failed the exercise,” Stanley said, suddenly realizing that he should be cautious, and trying to look a little
more innocent and perplexed.
“I don’t think so,” the Head of Movement said. “I have your report from the Head of Improvisation and she said she was very
much impressed. You were Joe Pitt.”
“Yeah,” Stanley said.
“I believe her report was very admiring.”
“Oh.”
Stanley tried to shrug and smile, but all he managed was a shiver and a grimace.
“Were you expecting to fail?” the Head of Movement asked, peering at him closely.
“No,” Stanley said quickly. “So I guess I don’t know why I’m here.”
The Head of Movement sat back and placed the palms of his hands on the desk before him. He was wearing a long-practiced look
of grave disappointment, and Stanley’s heart began to hammer. The Head of Movement said, “Somebody has complained about you.
Somebody has laid a very serious complaint about you. Do you know what that might be?”
Stanley looked bewildered. “No,” he said. “Who? What was it?”
The Head of Movement did not speak immediately. He looked at Stanley with something between pity and disgust, and Stanley
felt himself shrivel.
“A music teacher who teaches in a studio in the north quad,” he said, “laid a complaint with us that you had been harassing
her students.”
“What?” Against his will Stanley felt himself begin to flush.
“Harassing her students,” the Head of Movement went on. “In particular a young girl in the fifth form. Does this mean anything
to you?”
Stanley sat for a moment without speaking.
“Nothing?” the Head of Movement said.
He drew the silence out between them carefully, like a measured breath. There was a dreadful sinking feeling in the pit of
Stanley’s stomach. He sat and stared at the glossy sheen of the table under the Head of Movement’s hands, and said nothing.
“Normally,” the Head of Movement said, “we wouldn’t intervene in a case like this, of course. Normally we’d treat you like
an adult and expect you to sort it out of your own accord. But the fact that this music teacher has taken up the issue directly
with us—you see that we are compelled to talk with you about it. You see that.”
“Yes,” Stanley said automatically, and he nodded his head.
“The music teacher was very concerned about her students’ safety, given the proximity of her studio to this Institute,” the
Head of Movement said.
Stanley nodded again.
“What happened, Stanley?” the Head of Movement said. “What’s all this about?”
Stanley looked up quickly to meet the Head of Movement’s gaze, and then drew his eyes away, turning his head to look at the
framed posters and theater programs above the filing cabinet. They were ordered chronologically, lined up like a simple recipe
for the Head of Movement’s life, the plotted path to where he sat right now at his empty desk with his bare feet together
and a frown upon his face.
“I don’t know,” Stanley said at last. “I don’t know anything about a saxophone teacher.”
“I said music teacher.”
Stanley drew in his breath sharply and again glanced at the Head of Movement, even quicker this time, as if the tutor’s
haggard
face was either very hot or very bright, and his eyes could not stand to rest for long.
“I knew she played sax,” he said quietly, and the words were like a horrible admission, a statement of guilt. A little cough
in the back of his throat broke the last word in two.
“I assume you are keeping quiet so as not to incriminate yourself,” the Head of Movement said coldly, after another wretched
pause.
“I just—”
In truth Stanley simply had nothing to say. He shrugged, more to communicate helplessness than insolence, but the Head of
Movement’s eyes flashed and Stanley saw that the gesture had angered him. The Head of Movement’s coldness somehow amplified
now, and he pressed his palms flatter upon the tabletop.
“Because the young girl in question is in the fifth form,” the Head of Movement said, “you understand that she is not yet
sixteen.”
Stanley was still nodding.
“Because she is not yet sixteen,” the Head of Movement said, “you understand that any form of sexual relations an adult might
have, or have had, with this girl would be a crime. I’m speaking in my capacity as your tutor here.”
Stanley nodded again. He was vaguely aware that he had gone white and that his mouth had started to fill with saliva in an
awful tongue-shrinking preface to vomiting. He felt nauseous and all of a sudden found his sense of smell sharpened acutely:
he could smell the damp wool of his tutor’s jacket hanging on the back of the door, the paper twist of nuts on the dresser,
cold coffee pooling in the bottom of a cold mug. He felt his head reel.
The Head of Movement surveyed him for a moment. He had a wide-eyed straining look about him, as if the worst was still to
come. He leaned forward, puckering his lips slightly in a dry kiss as he made a careful choice of words.
“Stanley,” he said, “I want you to think about something very carefully. You don’t have to answer, I just want you to think
about it. If the parents of this young girl ended up being
in the audience
when you produce your first-year production at the end of this week, would it change anything? If they were there?”
It was a strange question and Stanley didn’t understand it. He stared at the Head of Movement blankly and said, “I don’t know
what you mean.”
“This girl that you have been—”
“Isolde.”
“Yes. She has a sister, am I right?”
“I don’t know,” Stanley said. “Why?”
The Head of Movement was now looking at him with open disgust. “Oh, come on, Stanley, let’s not dance around like this. This
is ridiculous.”
Stanley swallowed and reached up to wipe a film of sweat from his upper lip. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I must be missing something.”
“Isolde’s sister’s name is Victoria,” the Head of Movement snapped. “Does that ring any bells?”
Stanley stared at him for only a brief half-second before he realized—and the realization descended upon him like the awful
downward shudder of a guillotine.
Victoria
, he was screaming.
Victoria
, the celebrity focus of their production, snipped from a column in the newspaper, snatched up and stolen and grafted on to
all the posters, black and red,
The Bedpost Queen
. Would it change anything if
Victoria’s
parents were there—that was the Head of Movement’s question.
And then the second blade of realization fell, if possible more horrible than the first. They think Isolde is a pawn, Stanley
thought, a pawn that I wielded to get information for the play. My pawn.
“Of course, I am not supposed to know anything about the content of the first-year devised theater production,” the Head
of
Movement was saying, “and really I do know very little about what you are rehearsing and working on. But I can’t avoid walking
past an open door every so often, or hearing a scrap of conversation in the hall. You understand.”
Stanley sat shrinking in his clammy seat, trying with difficulty to swallow the nausea that was rising like a hard stone in
the back of his throat.