Trust Exercise

by Susan Choi

  Or is it possible, Sarah says to Mr. Kingsley, that their whole breakup is a misunderstanding? Isn’t it possible, Sarah begs Mr. Kingsley, that David still loves her? How could he say that he did, and then not?

  “Do you love him?”

  “Yes.” Then, unnerved by her certainty, “I mean, maybe. I think.”

  “Have you told him how you feel?”

  “How could I?”

  Acting is: fidelity to authentic emotion, under imagined circumstances. Fidelity to authentic emotion is: standing up for your feelings. Is this not the one thing, the one thing, he has tried to teach them? At first she thinks he’s barked out of anger, then grasps that he’s laughing. Perhaps he is laughing at her, but at least he’s not angry. “God,” he says, and even in the sanctum of his office his laugh is a stage laugh, artillery fire. “Thank you. I forget sometimes: it’s a process. And, you know, it never ends. That’s the beauty of it.”

  She doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but once she’s cleaned herself up yet again with the box of Kleenex, she puts on her wise, weary face. “So it is,” she agrees.

  “What about your mother?”

  “What about her?”

  “How are you getting along?”

  “I don’t know. Not that bad. Not that well. Even when we’re not fighting we don’t really talk.”

  “She drives you to work on the weekend. You must talk in the car.”

  “Not really. It’s so early in the morning. We just get in the car and drive there.”

  “I think the bakery job is too much. You should be sleeping on the weekend. Having fun.”

  “I need the job,” she says tersely, because Mr. Kingsley is as unlikely as her mother to sympathize with her implacable pursuit of a car. She’s unaware that her tone might suggest the brusque pride of the abjectly poor, particularly when paired with her tatty punk wardrobe. She does resent the absence in her life of a pale blue Karmann Ghia convertible, but she knows she’s not poor. Not rich, certainly, in the little two-bedroom apartment behind the chalk X with her mother’s long-serving Toyota. But not poor.

  He is silent a moment, thoughtful. “You and David come from very different worlds.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “David comes from a world of privilege.”

  She doesn’t wonder how he knows this, or whether he’s guessed. “I suppose more than me.”

  “He’s not working.”

  “No. He doesn’t have to. When he turns sixteen, his mother and Philip will buy him a car.”

  “Who’s Philip?”

  “His stepfather.”

  “Ah. Is that a recent thing?”

  “It can’t be that recent. His mom and Philip have a two-year-old baby.”

  “So David’s the big brother,” Mr. Kingsley says, smiling.

  She smiles also, to designate David this way. “He already was. He’s the oldest from his mother’s first marriage. Then his mother left his father for Philip, David thinks because Philip had money. David’s real dad never had any money. David says his parents, his mom and real dad, burned his childhood house down to collect the insurance. So in that sense, originally, he’s not from such a privileged background,” she concludes, overwhelmed by her flood of disclosures.

  But Mr. Kingsley does not judge her craving to talk about David. He does not judge her breathless uncertainty, now that she’s stopped. He reaches out, across the corner of his desk, and takes her hand. “You got to know each other,” he observes. She nods mutely, all fluency diverted again from her tongue to her eyes.

  That night when Joelle drops her off, after ten, her mother’s at the kitchen table in her robe. Usually by this hour she’s behind the closed door of her bedroom. Her mother’s brown hair, streaked with kinky white strands, hangs down loose to her shoulders. She’s wearing men’s athletic socks on her feet. “Your teacher called,” she says.

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Kingsley.”

  “Mr. Kingsley called here? Why?” Some terrified animal group—a quad of quail? a mess of mice?—explodes into flight inside Sarah’s rib cage.

  “I have no idea why. I know his stated reason. He called to ask about your bakery job. He asked if I could possibly let you stop doing it, for your health and well-being. He seemed to think that I force you to do it and keep all your earnings.”

  “I never said that to him!”

  “I told him I don’t have the slightest control over how you spend your time, at the bakery or anywhere else. I’d like to know what made him feel entitled to call me about it.”

  “I don’t know, Mom.”

  “I’d be very happy if you quit that job, and I could quit driving you there at five thirty both weekend mornings, but you’re so determined to buy your own car, you’re so convinced that not owning a car at the age of fifteen is some sort of awful deprivation, you’ve somehow convinced me I’d be mistreating you by not giving you rides to your job. And now your teacher, who keeps you at your school for twelve hours a day painting pieces of canvas and gluing flowers on hats, this man calls to suggest I’m mistreating you by forcing you to work, as if I’m making you sing for your supper? How dare he! Who the sam hell does he think he is?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. I never said that to him.”

  “I happen to agree with him that you should quit that job, but that doesn’t mean that I want his opinion. Your life outside school isn’t any of his goddamn business. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” she says, edging toward her bedroom. Already, his phone call’s impact has changed shape. In the instant, she’d felt his betrayal, the violation of their special alliance. Now she grasps that he’s mounted a challenge to her mother’s authority. He has intruded for the sake of intruding. How proud she feels, to command his attention.

  * * *

  THE REHEARSAL ROOM, with its long mirrored wall and its frigid linoleum floors. So much has happened here, in this fluorescent-lit refrigerated box, where their twins stare at them from the room in the mirror. The room in the mirror is just as bright and cold as this room, just as provisional-seeming, with its plastic/chrome chairs, its foam/Naugahyde mats, its piano and bench, shoved aside, cleared away for their bodies. In this room they’ve crawled through the unrelieved darkness, encountering and groping each other. They’ve lain on their backs and been corpses. They’ve cradled each other, fallen into each other’s linked arms, formed a wheel and by turn had the hub stare at them and deliver a verdict (Norbert to Pammie: “I think you’re the nicest girl in our class, and if you were thinner, you’d be kind of pretty”; Chantal to David: “I don’t fuck white guys, but if I had to fuck a white guy, I’d fuck you”). Now, coming into the room, they’re told to set it up as a theatre. Three or so rows of chairs facing this way. At their front, a pair of chairs facing each other. As always, Mr. Kingsley will stand. “Side aisles, please,” he says, and they hurry to compact the rows so there’s clearance between the row ends and the walls. They take their seats, clustering in their usual ways: the black girls, the white boys, the rest filling in in accordance with vague, shifting rules of attraction/repulsion. The two chairs “onstage” remain empty. Sarah, coming in late from the bathroom, takes the empty chair at the back by Manuel, for no reason apart from its emptiness. Manuel is wearing a nice shirt; it seems lately he has better clothes, though this impression of hers isn’t consciously made, it’s landscape. Memory will reveal it.

  “Sarah, please take one of the two chairs up front. Either one.”

  She’s so startled to be singled out that for a moment she doesn’t stand up, though her gaze whips to Mr. Kingsley, questioning. Nothing in his gaze answers. He is loftily perched on the battlement tower, conducting the movements of miniature troops. As she stands she’s aware of Manuel quickly moving his backpack as if it might be in her way.

  Last year, she’d had her wisdom teeth out. They’d come in unusually early, the dentist had said, and been unusually large in a way that would certainly
cause crookedness that was harder to fix afterward; there was some sort of joke to be made here about oversize premature wisdom and irreparable crookedness, but she’d never worked it out to her satisfaction before the teeth were swapped for blood-soaked wads of gauze. They’d drugged her to do the procedure, her mother sitting in the waiting room, reading the paper, while Sarah lay prone and unconscious beneath the hot lights; and no sooner had the teeth been yanked out and the gauze wads stuffed in than Sarah had apparently swung her legs down from the chair, while the dentist and nurse washed their hands with backs turned, and before either of them, or the receptionist, or Sarah’s mother, or other patients in the waiting room could quite process that Sarah was walking, she’d walked out of the office, and out the door of the building, and across much of the parking lot until, giving chase, the receptionist and nurse had at last detained her as she attacked the locked doors of her mother’s Toyota. She retained not a shred of a dream’s memory of this dental escape. In fact she’d thought her mother was joking, until she’d gone back for her follow-up visit and the dentist had said, “Should I tie you down first?”

  This transit to the chair at the front of the room is equally unremembered. She finds herself facing herself in the full-length and full-width mirror. The other chair faces away from the mirror. An advantage she’s failed to seize.

  “David,” Mr. Kingsley says. “Please take the other chair. Please move the chairs together so that your knees touch.”

  Their classmates do not make a sound, but almost as one they lean forward. The sitting knee-to-knee is unfamiliar, but that’s not the piquant novelty. They who have stroked, rubbed, groped, and gripped in every possible configuration, at the behest of their teacher, in the name of their Art, can hardly be impressed with kneecap contact. What is impressive is the blunt singling out by Mr. Kingsley himself of what they’ve all, themselves, grown sick of tiptoeing around: David and Sarah and their all-important drama, of which they’re so proud that they won’t even share it. In Ego Reconstruction they skate over each other with ridiculous comments like “I appreciate the effort you made cleaning woodshop.” They’re haughty emotional hoarders; it’s about time they were brought down a peg. At the edge of her vision, Sarah feels the hungry encroachment, made only worse by the pockets of sympathy—Joelle and perhaps Pammie wide-eyed with anxiety for her, while Norbert’s lip curls at one corner. He’s hardly the only one eager for blood.

  David’s knees, touching hers through their two pairs of jeans, do not feel like parts of a person. All four of their knees bump and flinch, blind bewildered convexities. It’s necessary to sit strangely primly, squeezing her thighs together, to maintain the commanded contact. Unbidden, unbearable, she recalls David’s face as he’d first entered her, in her twilit bedroom, on that hot afternoon. I feel like, he’d kept trying to tell her. I feel like … He’d felt like their bodies were made for each other, the tired cliché stripped of all but its startling truth.

  She squeezes her eyes tightly closed, balls the memory up.

  “Sarah, open your eyes,” Mr. Kingsley commands. “Sarah and David, make eye contact, please.”

  She raises her eyes to his face. The blue agates grudgingly stare. The horizon dividing his lips. The button of his mole. His collarbone, partly disclosed by the V of his polo shirt, rising and falling a little too quickly. She seizes on this as a clue, and hope, which she’d thought she’d forsworn, explodes invisible and noiseless from her chest; but its force must be felt, because David recoils, the blue agates receding to points. “This is not a staring contest,” Mr. Kingsley is saying. “I want you to find a soft gaze. I don’t mean soft like weepy.” (Does he say this because either of them appears weepy? Sarah will not weep. She will, she tells herself with absolute bloodless conviction, sooner stop breathing than let herself cry.) “I don’t mean soft like tender.” (Does he say this because either of them appears tender? She’s already forgotten her vow of an instant before, her eyes well, they desperately rummage in David’s for some tenderness, then catch sight of themselves in the mirror and boil themselves dry with the heat of their shame.) “I mean neutral. Receptive. A neutral gaze, without anxiety or accusation or expectation. Neutrality is the self that we offer the other, alert and open, unencumbered. No baggage. This is how we come to the stage.”

  Now that he’s got them up there in the chairs, maintaining eye contact, disallowed from staring, accusing, expecting, or experiencing anxiety, allegedly neutral, alert, unencumbered—for some minutes he seems to forget about them. He wanders the edge of the room, unhurriedly talking. What it means to be present. Integrity of the moment. Acknowledgment of … Freedom from … Of course one feels and one knows what one feels and at the same time is master of feeling, not slave; feeling is the archive upon which we draw, but the archive has doors or perhaps it has drawers, it’s got storage, an index, the metaphor for the archive of feelings has been lost on Sarah but she gets the idea. You’re fucked if it isn’t in order.

  “David,” Mr. Kingsley says abruptly, returning to stand over them. “Please take Sarah’s hands. Sarah, please take David’s hands.”

  David has advanced, receded, tilted, and swum in her paralyzed vision, his red polo shirt has grown blobby and almost subsumed him, but at the command David’s back in the chair with a merciless thud, all sharp, unkind edges and nails for eyes.

  They join hands.

  David’s hands are horribly inanimate, like meat, these hands of his that have been so alive to her.

  Her own hands’ surfaces crawl in protest, these hands of hers that have wrung the pillow clutched against her gut, and pleasurelessly slimed themselves between her legs, in failed service of her longing for him. Her hands have regained him, and he feels like a corpse.

  “I want you to communicate through your hands,” Mr. Kingsley instructs. “No words. Only touch.”

  David’s hands remain inert. They do not squeeze, stroke, slap—but how are hands meant to communicate with hands? In fact, his have done so already. They don’t even hold her hands. Sarah’s hands are frozen to maintain the appearance that his hands hold hers. Her elbows are locked at her sides, her wrists and forearms tremble from the strain; if she gave up, her hands would clatter to her sides, David wouldn’t catch them.

  Mr. Kingsley is orbiting slowly. “Is that the best you can do?” he demands. “Those hands know each other, don’t they. What do they remember? What could they tell us, if they knew how to talk? Or maybe they’d lie to us. Maybe they already are.”

  He can see, Sarah thinks. He can see the hands aren’t really joined. They are linked but they somehow don’t touch. How stupid they must seem to him, that they can’t even follow his simplest direction. She is powerless to clasp David’s hands, to seize them, to communicate with touch. Sweat drenches her scalp; she can feel it worming under her hair. The floor beneath her seems to rise and tilt, again and again, describing the same arc without ever completing it. She is slowly falling out of her chair, a black sunstroke stain marring her vision. Far away David’s face hangs in the air, his cheeks tumescent with blood and his sightless eyes gleaming with rage. Sarah splits from herself; David might crush her fingers in his, snap the slender bones like so much dry spaghetti. If only he would. At length she grows dimly aware she is shaking with sobs. She hears the ugly noise long before she is able to pinpoint the source, and like the victim who is forced to inflict her own torture, unwilled she remembers the first time she came, and the wails she hadn’t realized were hers until she felt David weeping with joy on her neck.

  The tone of Mr. Kingsley’s accusation has shifted and sharpened, for Sarah has brought the authentic emotion. She might not have done so with her hands, but poor thing: she is doing her best.

  “Is that the best you can do?” Mr. Kingsley is shouting, red-faced. He’s shoved his glasses on top of his head, snagging a chunk of his hair which now sticks up in unprecedented disorder. “This is the girl you walked miles for. In the heat. With a stupid tennis racquet so
your mom would think you’d gone to the club. Because you loved her, David. Don’t lie to her now and don’t lie to yourself!”

  Their classmates are slack-jawed. Is there any possibility this is a play? Among them, emotional exhibitionism is commonplace. Confession is commonplace. Shrill recrimination, and reconciliation, are commonplace. This is different, in what way they cannot in the moment define. Some feel the urge to call out, as if at a sporting event, with encouragement or admonishment or outright insult. “Don’t give in to that cunt!” Colin wants to call out to David. Pammie wants to rush over to Sarah and conceal Sarah’s bowed head with her arms. Pammie once sat behind David while he sat behind Sarah, and thought to herself, If a boy ever looks at me for half a second the way he’s looking at the back of her head, I’ll die and go to God a virgin, I will not even need to be kissed. Chantal wants to say, “C’mon, be a man, David, the fuck are you getting so red-faced about?” Norbert, who would gladly lick Sarah’s ballet flats, wants to slap her across the face and say, “This is what you get for loving that dick when you could have had me.” Some who find their view blocked are tentatively kneeling on their chairs or fully standing. Sarah finally snatches her hands away, covers her face with the sieve of her fingers through which mucus and tears leak in clear, gooey threads that become sticky stripes on her arms.

  “Foul!” Colin shouts, and relieved, nasty laughter erupts.

  “Take five!” snaps Mr. Kingsley, displeased by the class’s irreverence. But he has one hand on Sarah’s right shoulder, the other on David’s left shoulder, and he leans in: they are not yet excused. Sarah cannot, will not, uncover her face, but she feels his lips brush the crown of her head.