“That’s a very interesting way of looking at it,” the saxophone teacher says.
“
I
want a reason,” Julia says. “If it turned out that I was damaged, then it wouldn’t be my fault anymore. It wouldn’t be something
gross, it would be something tragic. It would be an
effect
—an effect of something out of my control. I’d just be a victim.”
“You all want to be damaged,” the saxophone teacher says suddenly. “All of you. That is the one quality all my students have
in common. That is your theme and variation: you crave your own victimhood absolutely. You see it as the only viable way to
get an edge upon your classmates, and you are right. If I were to interfere with you, Julia, I’d be doing you an incredible
favor. I’d be giving you a ticket to authorize the most shameless self-pity and self-adoration and self-loathing, and none
of your classmates could even hope to compare.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying,” Julia says.
The two of them look at each other in silence for a moment.
“What details would you choose to include?” the saxophone teacher says. “Those sharp mosaic-sliver details that would line
your alibi like the tight angled coins on a chain-link vest.”
“Nothing physical, at first,” Julia says. “That would be too obvious. The lie would shine too brightly, and they’d find me
out. Something psychological. Something insidious and dripping. Some slow erosion that in the end would be far worse, far
more subtle and damaging, than any quick backstage fumble or teasing slap.”
“It’s still going to be a lie, Julia,” the saxophone teacher says. “At the heart of it. You won’t be satisfied. At bottom,
all it will be is a lie.”
“How do you know?” Julia says. “How do you know how you have influenced me? How do you know I’m not damaged? How do you know
I don’t nurse some small criticism, some throwaway comment that you made and have now forgotten but I remember every time
I stumble or I fail? A tiny something that will dig deeper and deeper, like a glass splinter working its way from my finger
to my heart? Some tiny something that will change the shape of me forever—how can you know?”
For once the saxophone teacher has nothing to say. She looks out the window at the birds.
The saxophone section of the Abbey Grange jazz band is gap-toothed now: first Victoria, who has chosen not to return, and
then Bridget, who never will. The cavities have been filled with lesser players, and the chairs shuffled a fraction closer
to tighten the curve.
“Bridget would have really liked this,” says first trombone every now and again, knowing that dead people are always very
sentimental and always full of joy and appreciation for the simple things. Some of them still weep, not for Bridget, who was
unmemorable, but for themselves, imagining that they themselves had died, and how irreplaceable they would be.
The school’s Christian group was tight lipped and private about the sacking of Mr. Saladin and its aftermath; on the subject
of Bridget’s death it blossoms. A man’s powerful and senseless attraction to a girl he had been instructed to protect is a
human mystery. More marketable is the divine mystery of this one lampless girl mown to extinction in the dewy dark: it is
right
up their alley, and the Christian group thrives. Advertisements for prayer groups spring up around the school. Enrollments
for youth camps run a record high. A Christian pancake stand appears in the quad at lunchtime, managed by a zealous few who
roll the pancakes in lemon and sugar and shine brightly with an inner light. They don’t hand out tracts or wise words or a
summons to a better life. They hand out pancakes. It’s enough. Soon many of the girls are exchanging their plastic Fuck-me
bracelets for nylon bands that invite them, in mnemonic, to consider what a grown man might do if he were one of them, if
he were faced with the same choices and confounded by the same desires. Bridget herself had been a sometime member, a wearer
of a nylon commitment band—this is a comfort, the girls agree, as they mutely beg their own salvation and reach sideways for
each other’s hands.
The lunchtime youth group shifts from a classroom to the school hall to cater for the swell in numbers, and with the counselor
long since returned to his frosted cubby between the bursar and the nurse, the youth leaders rise to take his place. They
conclude that, in all likelihood, He would do just as they are doing now, and as they regard their bracelets they feel a throb
of satisfaction that they possess the single correct answer to the rhetorical question stitched around the band.
In a sense, Bridget comes to eclipse Victoria after all. Victoria’s questionable victimhood, the all-too-visible streak of
her own reciprocation cannot, in the end, compete with the indubitable victim of a roadside smash. But the posthumous Bridget
is not a singular and universal notoriety, celebrated as Victoria had been celebrated, herself the symbol and the locus of
her fame; Bridget is an instrument, subtler and more pliable and vastly more diffused. It’s the best she could have hoped
for.
“There was a girl at my high school who died,” the girls will say, years later. “She was hit on her bike coming home from
work. God, it was sad. It really affected us, you know? All of us. I hardly knew her, but even so. It was so sad.”
“That’s it, then,” Patsy said, when the saxophone teacher received her teaching diploma. They looked at it, stamped with a
blue watermark, silvered and inked and glossy under its pane of glass. “That’s it,” Patsy said, “you’re damned. A lifetime
of the world assuming that you are a spinster, a closed thin-lipped efficient spinster who lies spangled and lock-jawed in
her bed at nights and has no love or pleasure to light the room. It’s the one truth about music teachers, and everybody knows
it: they are alone, always alone, limp and graying in their cold offices and waiting in the dark for their next student like
a beggar waiting for a meal. Congratulations!”
They touched glasses lightly and drank.
“But you’re not a spinster,” the saxophone teacher said. She was still looking at the shining diploma, tracing the words with
her eyes.
“But everyone still assumes. Or a lesbian. If they are generous, then they assume I am a lesbian.”
“That’s why she asked for that ring,” Brian said, pointing to the penultimate finger on Patsy’s left hand. “She said, Make
it the biggest fattest old diamond you can get your hands on. This isn’t just a symbol, it’s a whole bloody advertising campaign.”
“And
this
is what you came up with,” Patsy said, waving her hand and making a disgusted face, as if the ring was worth nothing. They
laughed.
“Anyway, well done, old thing,” Brian said, reaching across and covering the saxophone teacher’s hands with his own. “It all
starts here.”
As Isolde unpacks her case the saxophone teacher talks enthusiastically about the upcoming recital, the venue and the other
performers, and the chance for everybody to listen to everybody else. Isolde is not listening. She is going to mention the
saxophone teacher’s complaint about Stanley. The thought of bringing it up makes her heart thump, and the advance phrasing
of the question paralyzes her, consumes her utterly. She senses that the topic is dangerous, that she is somehow backfooted
at the outset: she has done something wrong without her knowing, and she will lose.
There is a knock at the door.
“Hang on a minute, Isolde,” the saxophone teacher says serenely. “I think that’s probably Julia.”
“What?” Isolde says.
“I thought we could try the Raschèr duet with both of you together,” the saxophone teacher says. “You’ve each been learning
one part and I thought it would be fun to bring them together properly.”
Isolde goes red. She looks at the saxophone teacher without speaking for a moment, and then says, “I didn’t know I was going
to play it in a duet.”
“Well,” the saxophone teacher says, “I wasn’t sure if Julia would be able to make this Friday slot. It was kind of a last-minute
idea. It really is worth playing against someone else, you know. There’s a whole new enjoyment to be got out of playing with
another person.” She doesn’t advance to get the door: she hovers near Isolde, hands on her hips, and surveys her student.
“I would have practiced,” Isolde says. “If I’d known.” Her mouth is suddenly dry.
“You remember Julia, don’t you?” the saxophone teacher says.
“Yes,” says Isolde.
“Wonderful.” The saxophone teacher walks swiftly to the door to release the latch. “Welcome,” she says to the older girl.
“Hello, darling,” Julia says as she sweeps in, and all in an instant Isolde knows that Julia has stepped out of herself and
become somebody else entirely: she is performing, and Isolde must too.
“Honey,” she says, and they kiss on the cheek like old friends, like thirty-something friends who were once teacher and pupil,
once upon a time. The saxophone teacher has melted into the shadows by the wall.
“I know this is meant to be a rehearsal, Patsy, and there’s work to be done,” Julia says, “but I do need to talk to you. After
what happened between us. I’m sorry to spring it on you like this. I’ve been going through what I want to say in my head,
over and over, out there in the hall, and I think I just need to spit it all out before I’m too afraid to speak of it. That’s
all. Is it weird?”
“It’s not weird,” Isolde says softly, but she takes several steps backward, away from the other woman. Her saxophone is in
her hand. Julia’s sax is not yet out of its case, so they appear unevenly matched, Isolde with the bright arm of her instrument
held close against her chest and Julia weaponless with her hands upturned to show the white of her palms.
“It just seems so desperately unfair,” Julia says. “That I am marked so indelibly, so ineffaceably, tattooed and blue with
the ink of your name across my heart, and that your ink is washable, Patsy. It was always washable, and you knew that all
along.”
“Come on, darling,” Isolde says. “You’re talking about just one kiss. You’re talking about a single red-wine-flavor of a kiss,
in the dusky dark of one late evening, riding on the giddy thrill of a concert that sent your pulse to racing.”
“Yes,” Julia says, vehemently.
“A one-off.”
“Yes,” Julia says again.
“Come on,” Isolde says again, but weakly now. “We’re overreacting, surely. We’re behaving like teenagers.”
There is a pause and they look at each other.
“I think that this is worse than any other shame,” Julia says. “To be rejected not because of circumstantial reasons, or provisional
reasons, or reasons of prior claim, but simply for the unitary and all-quenching reason that I am, and will always be,
unwanted
. I feel spotlit, pinned against the bright wasteland of a bare stage, with nothing to hide behind, nothing to blame.” She
gives a cruel hard little laugh, not her own. After a moment she says, “Can’t you just tell me why? Can’t you just tell me
why
it’s Brian, and it isn’t me?”
Julia advances several steps. The other girl does not retreat. They are closer now, and Isolde looks her in the eye for a
long moment before she speaks.
Isolde says, “I had always imagined that any woman’s choice to be with another woman would be a reactionary choice, defined
mostly in the negative by the patterns she is seeking to avoid. It would, I always thought, only be after deciding she does
not want men that a woman might conclude that she wants other women. It is a public stance, itself a kind of activism. It
is a complaint. It marks a dissatisfaction. It is the kind of attitude only held by a particular type: emphatic, campaigning,
radical, the kind of woman who would boycott certain companies on moral grounds, who would picket outside a factory gate.
“I recognize a shade of this quality in you—the hardness of your opinion, your skepticism, the implicit challenge every time
you speak. But there is another quality of yours that dawns strangely on me—a childlike helpless quality of vulnerability,
a need. It is this quality that has awakened a new possibility in my understanding of the world: that a woman’s choice of
another woman might be a free choice in and of itself, not a handicapped pick of second-bests, not a halved choice of remainders
once the men have all been censored and removed. This positive definition—that a woman might love another woman simply in
and for herself—is what makes me feel nervous.”
“Nervous, why?” Julia says, and takes another step toward her. Instinctively she reaches out with her thin red hand and catches
Isolde’s fingertips in hers. Isolde doesn’t pull away. She looks down, watches their hands for a moment, Julia’s bony ink-stained
thumb moving in a light caress over her knuckles. Her hands are cold.
“You want me to explain this burgeoning
something
with Brian,” Isolde says, looking up again, “which may or may not ripen to a fruit. But I don’t think I did actively choose
between you, representative of women, and Brian, representative of men. Instead I placed myself in a position where I didn’t
have to choose. I let myself be his temptation; I behaved as passively as possible and did nothing as he advanced. It was
the marshy fogbound unmapped depths of you that made me nervous, darling. What I wanted was something protected, something
proved. I wanted a default feeling, not a nervous uncertain forbidden-place of a feeling where everything was overlaid with
fear and even guilt. I don’t want to be seduced. I just don’t want it. I want to be comfortable.”
“How can that be what you want?” Julia says. “How can it be?”
“It is,” Isolde says. “In the end. It just is.”
Julia steps forward and kisses her on the mouth, and all in an instant they’re back in the smoky fug of the bar, and the last
number is playing, the last song. They’re in the corner and they’ve just got up to leave, to wrap themselves back into their
scarves and their coats and turn their smiling faces to the band as a final show of appreciation, a kind of farewell. Patsy
turns to the saxophone teacher to say something but whatever she was going to say dies on her lips. Her eyes flicker down
to the saxophone teacher’s mouth, and then the saxophone teacher
leans over and kisses her, her gloved fingertips against
the other woman’s cheek.