Trust Exercise

by Susan Choi

  Though now David angled away when he saw her approaching. When unavoidably they met in classrooms David stared coldly and Sarah stared even more bitterly coldly and it was a contest, to pile up coldness, to shovel it furiously from their hearts.

  “Let’s form a circle,” Mr. Kingsley said.

  As so often before, they grew uneasily aware of their crotches as they sat down cross-legged, and felt the icy touch of the linoleum numbing their asses. Most of them had privately concluded that Ego Deconstruction/Reconstruction was some sort of fleshless orgy, and they were helplessly blushing, their skin crawling with arousal and dread. The wall of mirrors doubled their circle, around which Mr. Kingsley paced in orbit. His gaze was cast somewhere beyond them. His very way of gazing told them plainly how far they fell short—of last year’s Sophomores? Of their own potential? Of the actors he’d known in New York? They felt their deficit all the more sharply because the unit of measure was wholly unknown. Sarah tried to see David, but he’d placed himself near enough to her left or her right that she couldn’t see him, while far enough that she couldn’t sense him. Would David be chosen? Would Sarah be chosen?

  “Joelle,” Mr. Kingsley murmured, in a tone of regretful admonishment. Sadness, almost, at her failure, but what had Joelle done? She was pink year-round, and a summer’s worth of sunburn had her mottled and peeling all over her face and down into the cleavage broadly exposed by her tight V-neck top. The new raw pink skin turned bright red at the sound of her name; all the curls of dead, half-peeled skin seemed to rustle with fear. Her surface was disgusting, Sarah thought. “Joelle, please stand at the circle’s exact center. You’re the hub. Invisible lines radiate out from you to each one of your classmates. These lines are the spokes. Your classmates, and you, and these spokes, make the wheel. You’re the hub of the wheel, Joelle.”

  “Okay,” Joelle said, blushing fiercely, a fountain of blood pounding under her skin.

  “I’d like you to choose one spoke now. Look down the length of that spoke. Someone’s at the other end. Someone you’re bound to, by that spoke passing through you, and passing through them. Who’s the person you’re looking at?”

  The linoleum doesn’t feel cold anymore. Please, no, Sarah realizes, staring straight ahead at Joelle’s middle, at her soft belly concealed beneath the tight top.

  “I’m looking at Sarah,” Joelle says huskily, her voice almost a whisper.

  “Tell her what you observe.”

  “You didn’t call me all summer,” Joelle barely chokes out.

  “Go on,” Mr. Kingsley says, gazing somewhere miles away; he’s not even looking in Joelle’s direction. Perhaps he’s using the room’s giant mirror to watch Joelle’s burning skin, her glittering eyes, her too-tight top, out of the corner of one eye.

  “And I would call you, and you wouldn’t call back, and I mean, maybe it’s me, but it’s like, I feel like—”

  “Stand up for your feelings, Joelle!” Mr. Kingsley barks out.

  “We were best friends and you act like you don’t even know me!” The strangled grief in her voice is far harder to bear than the words. Sarah is frozen, a statue, she’s staring blindly at the opposite wall with its door to the hallway as if she could will herself out of this room, and then suddenly it’s Joelle who bolts: Joelle stumbles headlong through the circle, practically stepping on Colin and Manuel, she wrenches open the door and, unleashing a wail, disappears down the hall. In her wake no one breathes, no one looks anywhere but the floor, no one even looks at Sarah. Life is suspended. Abruptly, Mr. Kingsley wheels on Sarah.

  “What are you doing?” he demands, and Sarah flinches in alarm. “Go after her!”

  Sarah lurches to her feet and out the door, unable to imagine the faces she’s leaving behind, even David’s. She isn’t even able to find where he was in the circle.

  The halls are deserted, the slippery black-and-white checkerboard rapping harshly against the hard soles of her boots. Her punk boots, cruel-toed with metal stilettos and three large silver square buckles each. Behind closed classroom doors on the west hall the Freshmen and Juniors doze through the requirements, English and algebra, social studies and Spanish. Down the south and east halls, the real life of the school can be heard: the jazz band splashing through Ellington; the lone pianist’s hands prancing over the keys in the dance studio and the thumping of bound, bloody feet. The smokers’ courtyard is empty, its sun-bleached benches bearing only acorns from the massive live oak. The outdoor classroom, a walled-in rectangle of grass with a stage at one end, is also empty, its street-side gate padlocked. Sarah wills David, not Joelle, to appear in these secretive places, David to be sitting on the empty smokers’ bench, David to be sitting underneath the oak tree. The rear entrance leads to the rear parking lot, where the students park and also eat lunch, on the hoods of their cars, when the weather is good. Joelle is outside the doors, doubled up, honking with sobs. Joelle clearly meant to escape in her car but was slowed by her grief; the keys to her Mazda poke out of one fist. This is the brand-new, rocketlike little Mazda Joelle bought with cash—more than ten thousand dollars in cash—she once showed Sarah, stuffed in a coffee can under her bed. Sarah didn’t know where this money came from. Drug sales, she assumed; possibly something else. Each day Joelle drives the car to a friend’s house a few blocks from home and then walks the rest of the way, so her parents won’t see it. Joelle is not convoluted but simple, not sullen but sunny, yet she has the extensive clandestine life of a career criminal, and this used to enthrall Sarah. Now Joelle appears stripped bare, her essence exposed. She’s just a party girl, overeager to be liked. The insight startles Sarah not because of its unkindness but because this, she suddenly knows, is the sort of insight Mr. Kingsley is constantly trying to extract. He paced with impatience last year when they told each other, during Observation, such things as, “You’re a really nice girl,” or, “I think you’re handsome.” Yet at this moment, Sarah equally knows, there’s a story unfolding into which her true feelings don’t fit. She is supposed to hug Joelle, make it up to her. She knows this as surely as if Mr. Kingsley stood there, supervising it all. She has the strong feeling he is there.

  Joelle, precociously fleshy and pungent, so obliviously manifests the carnal that Sarah’s own self-conscious carnality becomes disgusting to her, along with her own flesh, her own scent. Joelle’s enormous breasts are heavily freckled, their trapped clefts and creases are constantly sweaty; Joelle’s crotch, encased in her jeans, trails an olfactory banner like some sort of sticky night flower to inflame jungle bats. Joelle sleeps with much older men; at school, she disregards boys as if they’re not even incipient men. She only has eyes for Sarah.

  Half closing her eyes, almost grinding her teeth, Sarah takes Joelle into her arms. Joelle clings to her gratefully, soaks her shoulder with tears and slick snot. This is also self-control, Sarah thinks. This brute willing of the self to take action. Until now, Sarah thought self-control was only restraint: not putting the chair through the glass.

  “I’m really sorry,” she hears herself mumbling. “I’m so messed up right now, I didn’t mean to seem distant. Things have just been so crazy.…”

  “What’s been going on? I could tell you had shit going on! I just knew—”

  Soon the counterfeit is complete. Sarah intended to confide in no one, and if someone, Joelle least of all. Now, as if reading a script, she tells Joelle about the decoy tennis racquet, the empty snack bar. Confession made, she’s in receipt of Joelle’s whole devotion again. Joelle’s sobs turn to mirth, her abject supplication to glee. She clings to Sarah no longer from the weakness of grief but to prevent herself rolling merrily on the sidewalk. Having bought back a friendship she no longer wanted by defiling the one thing she cared about most, Sarah knows it doesn’t matter that she enjoins Joelle to a “secrecy” that puts Joelle into raptures. Joelle is practically wrapped like a vine around Sarah as they stumble back into the classroom and almost literally into David, because they’ve been gone for so
long class has ended, and David’s the first on his feet, to escape. At the sight of David, Joelle bursts out laughing and covers her face. David shoulders roughly past Sarah and Sarah feels bonfires ignite on her skin. Mr. Kingsley, also on his way out, says as if as an afterthought, “Sarah, come by and see me tomorrow at lunch.”

  Not even David in the course of escaping fails to hear the summons, or fails to understand what it means. Even Joelle, who has so misunderstood her entire transaction with Sarah, understands what Mr. Kingsley’s summons means. Joelle tightens her hot grip on Sarah with sisterly envy. Sarah has become the kind of Problem they would all like to be.

  * * *

  “THAT WAS KIND of you yesterday,” Mr. Kingsley began, after closing the door behind her with a resonant click. He’d indicated the chair she should sit in, and perhaps it was the novel sensation of sitting in a chair in his office that induced her to say, right away, “I didn’t want to be kind.” She was aware of a dangerous urge to spar with him.

  “Why not?” asked Mr. Kingsley.

  “I don’t feel close to Joelle anymore. I thought, with everything you’ve taught us, that honoring my feelings about that was what I should do. But yesterday it seemed like the way that I felt didn’t matter.”

  “How so?”

  “You wanted me to go after her and make her feel better, and tell her we still were best friends. And I did, even though I was lying. And now I have to keep lying because she thinks that we’re best friends again.”

  “What makes you think that’s what I wanted?”

  “Because you told me to go after her!”

  “Yes, but that’s all I told you to do. I didn’t tell you to make her feel better. I didn’t tell you to lie, and say the two of you were still friends.”

  “Then what was I supposed to do? She was crying. I felt guilty.” Now Sarah was crying, which she had sworn she wouldn’t do. All the anger she’d brought into the room was transformed into sobs. There was Kleenex on the end of Mr. Kingsley’s desk nearest her chair, as if people often sat where she was sitting and cried, whether out of anger or some other emotion. She took a handful and blew her nose in it.

  “You were supposed to stay with her in that moment, with tenacity and honesty. And that’s what you did.”

  “I wasn’t honest. I lied!”

  “And you’re aware of the lie, and aware of the reason you told it. You were there in that circumstance, Sarah. More there than Joelle.”

  That this disparagement, to her, of her classmate might be considered a dishonest behavior of Mr. Kingsley’s wasn’t among Sarah’s thoughts at that moment. His comment seemed true in some way, and for a moment her crying subsided. “I still don’t understand how telling a lie makes me true to my feelings, unless you’re saying that making someone feel better is more important than telling the truth.”

  “I’m not saying any such thing. Honesty is a process. Standing up for your emotions is a process. It doesn’t mean running roughshod over everyone else. If you weren’t a person of integrity, I don’t think you’d be sitting here challenging me about what happened yesterday.” Sarah prickled with alertness to hear him describe her as “challenging” him. It was clearly the right thing to do. “I’ll be counting on that integrity of yours when the English students are here in the spring,” he went on. “They’ll need the guidance of someone like you.”

  This futuristic leadership role seemed far less real to Sarah than her current crises. “I feel like, in telling her we’re still friends, I’ve put myself in a trap.”

  “You’ll find your way out.”

  “How?”

  “I said you’ll find your way out.”

  Sarah cried with renewed force, for such a long time that she eventually grew aware of an unfamiliar luxuriousness. Mostly she cried alone, on rare occasions in front of her mother, but either way the emotion alongside of grief was impatience. Her own impatience, her mother’s impatience, with her tears. Mr. Kingsley seemed to grow more contented and patient the more that she cried. He sat smiling benignly. Under the narcotic of his patience she felt tempted to share the real reason she was crying, but thinking of it she cried too hard to speak, and then she’d been crying and thinking so long, she felt she’d actually talked about David, perhaps even been told what to do, and a strange peace overtook her that might have just been exhaustion. Mr. Kingsley still smiled benignly. He seemed more and more satisfied.

  “Tell me about life outside school,” he said when her guttering breaths had grown calm.

  “Like what? Um. My mom and I live in the Windsor Apartments.”

  “Where are those?”

  “You don’t know? Oh my God, they’re like the biggest apartment complex in the world. Every building and carport and tree looks the same. The first year we lived there, every time we went out we got lost coming back. We had to put a chalk X on our gate.” This made him laugh, and she swelled with pleasure.

  * * *

  SO MUCH OF what they do, with Mr. Kingsley, is restraint in the name of release. It seems they have to throttle their emotions to have complete access to them. Access to one’s own emotions = presence in the moment. Acting = responding with authentic emotion under made-up circumstances. They fill their notebooks with such singular declarations, each of which, as they’re writing it down, seems to offer the key, or perhaps the keystone, that will make the whole structure cohere, but later, when Sarah reads her notes over, she hears a repetitive melody that never climaxes or ends, like the maddening song that the ice cream truck plays in the summer. Sarah doesn’t blame the information, or Mr. Kingsley, its source, any more than she would blame the book she is struggling to read, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, for its impenetrability. Clearly she’s too young to read Tropic of Cancer, but she can’t accept this; if she knows what the words mean, the book’s meaning ought to unfold. Stubbornly she keeps trying. Similarly, with acting, stubbornly she keeps trying. Similarly, with David, stubbornly she keeps up her half of the duet each blames the other for starting, this new flavor of longing embittered by outrage but no less exclusive to them. It’s still a promise, Sarah stubbornly believes. Still a performance that each reserves just for the other. Sarah hides her fear that she’s wrong—that she doesn’t have talent, or David—beneath a youthful indifferent swagger, an insistence that she’s willing to do anything.

  By late September, the mainstage rehearsals have started. Their school day already ends late, at four p.m., unlike the day at normal schools, which ends at two thirty. But during times when there’s rehearsal, which is more than half the year, rehearsal starts at four thirty and can go on for three or four hours. At dismissal the whole mass of Theatre students pours across the parking lot to U Totem for junk food: Funyuns and hot-pepper-spiced pork skins, individual servings of ice cream, rolls of SweeTarts and stacks of Kit Kats. Joelle shoplifts most of her items and never gets caught. Back in the parking lot they gorge on their feast, throw their wrappers in the outdoor trash cans, wash their hands before hitting the mainstage. For all their shoving, shouting immaturity, their indifference to nutritional standards, their unhygienic disorder as expressed in their lockers, their backpacks, and, for those who have licenses, cars, there are certain fastidious habits all the Theatre students observe as a group, by reflex. They would never dream of eating on the mainstage, in the wings, in the house with its red velvet seats. They may be teenagers, but there is nothing teenage about their dedication to this space, their cathedral. They’d as soon defecate in the aisle as eat candy bars here. They’ll retain some of these habits the rest of their lives. Long after they’ve left the theatre, and their theatre dreaming, behind, they’ll still spell it “theatre.” The alternate spelling will always seem ignorant to them. The master’s pride in a difficult tradecraft: they’ll have Mr. Kingsley to thank for bestowing this on them, whatever else they conclude about him.

  These long days, this life conducted almost wholly away from their parents, in a nearly unsupervised world of their p
eers, is the source of the ardor they feel for their school. Freedom, selfhood—those intangibles they might have once thought were reserved for adults—turn out to be already theirs. Even Sarah, still months from her license and perhaps an eternity away from a car after having to spend all her earnings on fixing the sliding glass door, tastes freedom now that Joelle will drive her anywhere, anytime, in the Mazda, despite the fact that they live an hour’s drive from each other, on opposite sides of the city. It’s a swift balm to Sarah’s resentment at having been forced to renew their friendship. Sarah and Joelle are both on costume crew, and have nothing to do until Mr. Freedman, the costume designer, has finished the measurements, but they stay for rehearsal because they would not dream of leaving; they sit in the house with their tedious history homework. David is on props crew, which also has nothing to do because props crew is waiting for certain artistic conflicts to be resolved between Mr. Browne, the props master, and Mr. Kingsley, the director, but the props crew stays also; everyone stays, regardless of whether they have to, except for certain Freshmen who don’t yet understand the ethos or whose parents object to a twelve-hour day.

  From her seat in the house Sarah sees David, at a break in the blocking, cross from stage right to stage left very near the rear wall. He disappears in the direction of the shop. All the curtains are up in the fly space; the stage is a thrillingly vast, utilitarian maw in which the actors mill, waiting. Sarah rises quickly from her seat, tells Joelle she’s going to the bathroom. Outside the theatre doors, she hooks left to follow the hallway that leads to the shop’s outside door. As if on cue, the door opens and David steps out. It’s past six; the hallway is empty. They’re alone, for the first time since that late summer day on the college campus. The hall is empty but this emptiness is momentary; the shop door is just here, farther down is the loading-dock door that leads into stage left, the sets crew is not building yet, awaiting, as is the props crew, resolution of conflicts about the design, but any moment they’ll wander through here, through their realm.