Trust Exercise

by Susan Choi

  “Well done,” he says into her hair.

  Then she hears him speak softly to David. “I won’t rest until you cry.”

  Sarah peeks between her fingers. Mr. Kingsley is smiling, in cold enjoyment of his prophecy. It is only a matter of time. David’s face is almost purple with effort. David lurches from his chair, knocks over several more as he less walks than falls out of the room.

  “Take five, sweetie,” Mr. Kingsley says so that everyone foot-dragging, shoe-tying, purse-digging, faking some reason to stay in the room—everyone except David, who’s left—clearly hears. “You know where to find the Kleenex.”

  Take five, sweetie.

  * * *

  “WHAT ELSE DID you tell him?” shouts David, who hasn’t spoken to her, even deigned to acknowledge her lowly existence, in months and who now strikes like a holy avenger as she and Joelle cross the parking lot toward Joelle’s car.

  JOELLE: (interposing herself) Shut up, David! Leave her alone.

  DAVID: (actually shoving JOELLE to one side with the palms of both hands, so JOELLE reels on her stiletto-heel boots, almost loses her balance) Did you tell him you won’t even talk to me, but you’ll fuck me in the music room hallway?

  SARAH: I won’t talk to you?

  DAVID: (over her) Or was he watching us fuck, did you set that up too?

  JOELLE: (regaining her balance, roaring with terrific volume) You’re an asshole—

  SARAH: (too stunned to speak—but DAVID has already turned his back on her, ERIN O’LEARY’S little car has pulled up; he gets in, slams the door, and his blond chauffeuse, expressionless behind sunglasses, drives him away)

  SARAH’S MOTHER: Your life outside school isn’t any of his goddamn business. You know that, don’t you?

  MR. KINGSLEY: Please begin, Sarah.

  Sarah and David sit at the front of the room in the two chairs again. Their knees no longer touch, they are permitted to sit very slightly apart. David looks at Sarah without looking at her. He sees her without seeing her. He sits in the chair without being there. She doesn’t comprehend, not why he does this, but how; if she could do it, she would; she understands for the first time that David is the real thing, that David is going to make it in theatre, he may even make it so far, matter so much, that he can spell it “theater” if he goddamn feels like it, and she also understands that here at CAPA, with Mr. Kingsley, David is already finished. He will never play a lead. He will never be a star. He will leave the school with his weight of charisma untapped, unacknowledged, unpraised, obscured beneath a miasma of stale smoke and alcohol fumes, the “silly walks,” the polo shirt, the tennis racquet not merely discarded but utterly invalidated and forgotten by all but a few stubborn memory-keepers.

  SARAH to DAVID: You’re angry.

  MR. KINGSLEY to SARAH: No mind-reading. Again.

  SARAH to DAVID: You’re bored.

  MR. KINGSLEY: (Exasperated) Live honestly, Sarah!

  SARAH to DAVID: You’re wearing a blue polo shirt.

  DAVID to SARAH: I’m wearing a blue polo shirt.

  MR. KINGSLEY: I don’t hear listening.

  SARAH to DAVID: You’re wearing a blue polo shirt.

  DAVID to SARAH: I’m wearing a blue polo shirt.

  SARAH to DAVID: You’re wearing a blue polo shirt.

  MR. KINGSLEY: Who’s in the moment here? Anyone?

  DAVID to SARAH: I’m wearing a blue polo shirt.

  What is the moment? thinks Sarah. Where is the Now she’s supposed to respond to? How does repetition not void all the moments, like a great spreading darkness behind which David hides, safe from all observation, and nursing his hatred of her? But such thinking, such hapless confusion, is exactly the reason they’re failing at this, it’s exactly the reason Mr. Kingsley, again, makes the gesture of rapid erasure: get-the-hell-off-the-stage.

  * * *

  COLIN to JULIETTA: Your hair is curly.

  Indisputable. Julietta’s emblem is her corkscrew-curl hair. Her hair stands up and sideways from her head and bounces when she walks and is an extension of her radiant smile. Julietta’s cheeks are downy and pink at all times. Her eyes sparkle. Her mother is French, and has bequeathed to Julietta adorably unique pronunciations, like, for the common white spread, “MY-OH-NEHZZZZ.” Julietta’s mother has also bequeathed to Julietta an ecstatic Christian faith. Unlike Pammie, Julietta never seems to feel obliged to defend her religion. When her classmates inform her God doesn’t exist, she beams at them without condescension. She loves them for sharing their thoughts! Just as Jesus loves them, and they don’t even need to believe it.

  Julietta dazzles Colin with her smile: what a perfectly right thing he’s said! “My hair is curly.” She chuckles.

  “Your hair is curly.” Damn, girl, when you look “curly” up, there’s your hair!

  “My hair is curly.” Oh, is it ever, Colin. You cannot talk my hair out of curling. Isn’t it funny?

  “Your hair is curly,” tries Colin. Come to think of it, Colin also has thick, wavy hair. Anywhere else Colin’s hair would be “curly,” but here it’s competing with Julietta’s storybook hair, her bouncy fairy-princess hair, her hair from an idealized painting of some nature-maiden with springtime’s own blossomy vines for her hair! Does Colin’s hair, his coarse tufty hair, even count?

  “My hair is curly.” Julietta shrugs. Big deal. Plenty of curly hair here.

  “Your hair is curly,” Colin says suddenly, his voice rough with impulse, as if the words got ahead of their sound. He stares a narrow bead at her, and just like that, Julietta flushes crimson as if he’d unbuttoned her jeans. A disbelieving titter streaks the room. Damn, how did he do that? He’s good. Colin is usually so busy playing the rude Irish thug of his ancestral imagination they forget that he’s actually good.

  Silence! Mr. Kingsley snaps his fingers, then nods sharply to Colin. Next level. Colin still leads.

  The next level is subjective observation. Subjective: an opinion, a feeling. A judgment. Very often a confession. As opposed to ostensibly simpler objective: a statement of fact. By and large they tend to think of the objective as describing the follower (here Julietta, who speaks second, responds) and the subjective as describing the leader (here Colin, who speaks first, makes the leading statement). But that’s only because their dichotomous thinking is undeveloped.

  Without a pause Colin says, “You’re a virgin.”

  Whoa!

  “Oh shit!” cries Angie, unable to “button it,” as Mr. Kingsley will sometimes snap out, though he usually says it with no more than a look or a snap of his fingers. He does so now, angry SNAP! and they all wiggle, agonized, in their chairs, some straining forward with avidity and some cringing backward with dread. The composure of the audience member is a lesson they strangely have never been taught at this school of performance. They’re only shushed and snapped at as if they were dogs.

  Julietta had already been maximum crimson. As they watch her, her usual roses-and-snow very slowly fades back as the heat of her blushing fades out. She is taking her time, perhaps wondering, as many of them are, if Mr. Kingsley is going to call foul because “You’re a virgin” is really objective—but is it? Isn’t that up to her? Isn’t it subjective—Colin’s mockery of her—until she confirms it as fact? Yet she can’t not confirm it as fact, the rules state that she has to repeat, only changing the pronoun and verb conjugation, which makes her assent meaningless—so does that, after all, make the statement subjective? Their dichotomous thinking is undeveloped, this conundrum is pulping their brains. Pammie clutches her temples, then covers her eyes.

  But Julietta, in her protracted silence—for she’s entitled to silence as one of the actor’s most versatile tools—has tilted the balance of power. Her complexion is fully restored. She is not smiling. Nor is she scowling or exhibiting uncertainty, embarrassment, or fear. Julietta regards Colin with unbroken composure which Colin tries to return, but they see him shifting his hams on the hard plastic chair, tilting his face slightly at
her. He’s mirroring her, but poorly.

  “I’m a virgin,” Julietta says, as if making this notification by her choice alone.

  “You’re a virgin,” says Colin, strangely trapped by her into neutrality. Any scorn, any glee he exhibits will confirm his juvenility.

  “I’m a virgin,” Julietta repeats patiently. There’s no kindness mixed into her patience. No unkindness either. Only acknowledgment that Colin might need to be told more than once.

  “You’re a virgin,” says Colin increasingly sadly.

  “I’m a virgin,” Julietta says, pitying Colin’s sadness. His thinking is still undeveloped.

  The class loses count of the number of times Julietta and Colin exchange this statement. Sometimes Mr. Kingsley will stop repetitions for obvious reasons. Eruption and resolution. Power-trade. Clear successions of tone, giddiness to sadness to indifference, as random as changes of weather. Other times he allows repetitions to drone on and on. Then, even to those who aren’t speaking, the words will become nonsense sounds that no fresh inflection will ever renew.

  At last, interposing between Julietta and Colin, Mr. Kingsley says, “Thank you. Excellent.” The class is sitting very still, all hilarity, amazement, discomfort forgotten. Their shared mental condition is akin to hypnosis.

  Julietta and Colin remain in their chairs for a moment, regarding each other. Then Colin stands and with goofy sincerity holds out his hand. Julietta shakes it.

  * * *

  “YOUR EYES ARE blue,” Sarah says, perhaps the least observant observation she could make. Almost hostile in its insipidity.

  “My eyes are blue,” says David, with such perfect neutrality he cannot be charged with indifference. He might have said, “One two three four,” or hummed notes. No: humming, by the nature of song, would be far more expressive.

  “Your eyes are blue.” She’s learned if she stares straight at him he goes foreign to her and she no longer sees him, yet Mr. Kingsley cannot accuse her of avoiding eye contact.

  “My eyes are blue.” Perhaps David’s doing the same, staring at her so that, like the sun, she blinds him.

  “Your eyes are blue.”

  “My eyes are blue.”

  “Your eyes are blue.”

  It’s been weeks of the same. A punishment everyone shares, for neither of them will give up an inch, not a flush nor a flinch nor above all a tear. It exalts Sarah almost, this death of her heart, this drought of her tears. Perhaps she is actually getting somewhere: at least, she’s learned something from David. An utterly passive, compliant resistance. In the beginning, their rigid impasse fascinated their classmates. Now, it’s a purgatory. Their classmates hate watching them even more than they hate sitting there. They never fulfill the objective. They never win praise. They are never allowed to advance. Unlike everyone else, they’re exclusively paired with each other.

  “My eyes are blue.”

  “Your eyes are blue.”

  “My eyes are blue.”

  “Stop,” Mr. Kingsley barks, flicking a hand in disgust. They are both now persona non grata. In unconscious tandem they stand up, turn away from each other.

  * * *

  “HABLAS ESPAÑOL,” JOELLE says to Manuel with a twinkle of mischief. The room rustles with reinvigorated interest. They’ve never heard Joelle speak in Spanish, they’ve hardly heard Manuel speak at all, and repetitions in Spanish are unprecedented, they’re not even sure they’re allowed. How cool of Joelle! Their estimation of her rises sharply.

  Manuel smiles, surprised. “Sí, hablo español.”

  “No additional words,” Mr. Kingsley says. Manuel colors slightly.

  “Hablo español,” he amends.

  “Hablaaaaaaas españOLLLLLL,” Joelle mugs, in the voice, perhaps, of a chain-smoking Chihuahua. They’re all sitting up, wide awake now, delighted.

  Manuel colors a little bit more, but he feels her warmth: it’s conspiracy, not condescension. “Ahh-BLOW,” he bleats with crazy nasality, and they all burst out laughing, “ehhhhhhhsPAÑOWELLE,” so it rhymes with “Joelle”!

  Joelle shimmies her shoulders and pushes her breasts toward him, raising one arm in the air. “AAAAAAAHHH, BLAAAAAAAAS!” she sings with power if not beauty, tinting pink from the effort, middle C, up to G, they-sing-with-her-in-their-minds, “EHHHS-PAHN-NYOLL!” she concludes, A, B, ending up on that high C …

  “Woo, girl!” Angie calls out, and she isn’t admonished, they’re all breathlessly watching Manuel, will he, will he, will he?

  Manuel is smiling back at Joelle with his lips slightly pursed, as if to say, “You naughty thing, someone ought to spank you, but not me, I’m too likely to laugh.” They’ve never seen such animation, such knowledge, in Manuel’s face before, and then, as if timing is another of his secrets he’s kept hidden from them, without windup or warning he does it, unleashes his voice in the room, “Ah, ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-AHHH-BLOHHH,” he unfurls bafflingly—how can such sound issue forth from a kid in a chair—“eh, eh-eh, ehhhhh, eh-eh EHHSSS … PAHNNNN … NYOLLLLL,” his concluding bass note rolling through like a velveteen landslide. Their howls of approval are equally meant for Joelle, she and Manuel are heaving with laughter, sliding out of their chairs, they are total subversives, and yet Mr. Kingsley is laughing and clapping the hardest of all.

  * * *

  IN THE FUTURE, Joelle will run away. She will simply disappear, halfway through senior year. Rumors will abound of her reasons, her means, her location. Her father beat her with a belt and a stick and tied her to a tree; she’d been sent to live with him by her mother, for being too wild. Her father has the FBI looking for her, he has doors broken down, Joelle’s spotted all sorts of places: Tampa; Waikiki; New York; the background of the Aerosmith video for “Love in an Elevator,” in which she is said to be one of the dancers. Confirmation of any of this awaits a farther future than the one in which she runs away.

  In the future, Pammie will decide to be an astronaut. It’s no frivolous decision, though she’s remained, to her grief, overweight. She must go back to school and learn physics. After physics, a diet.

  In the future, Taniqua will become one of the most recognizable television actresses on earth. She’ll play a cop on a long-running show about rookie cops growing and changing in the course of becoming experienced cops. Taniqua will play the absolutely humorless female cop, whose awful past (of course), full of poverty and abuse and incarcerated fathers and drug-addicted mothers and shot-to-death brothers, accounts for her absolute humorlessness. Her old classmates, from her youth, will hardly believe it’s bright, sassy Taniqua who’s playing that humorless cop. They’ll keep thinking that her hidden sense of humor, its belated revelation, will have to provide a plot point, but year after year it does not. Nor do her good singing voice or her dancing. None of these seemingly central aspects of Taniqua will ever appear in her signature role. She’ll play that role for years, and be rich.

  In the future, Norbert will be a manager at Whataburger. This will be so consistent with their cruelest expectations of him that they’ll dislike him even more, for not proving them wrong. Norbert, so incurably himself. So stubbornly immune to all those means of metamorphosis.

  In the future, Ms. Rozot’s prediction in fact will come true. Things, at least the sorts of things implied in that discussion, like heartbreak, will hurt less, although the range of hurtful things will expand. Heartbreak will come to seem like a rather luxurious reason for pain. There will also be the failings of the body and the wallet. The extinctions of friendships. The crimes against children committed by grown-ups. And the inexplicable, small kindnesses, which somehow pierce Sarah most deeply of all, as when she left the house one summer day so distracted she forgot to zip her sleeveless summer dress, so a wide slit was open from armpit to hip, through which her bra and her panties could clearly be seen, and she walked this way, obliviously, all the way to the park, where a strange woman cried, “Sweetie! How have you been?” and embraced her.

  And while Sarah stood bewildered
in her arms, the woman said in her ear, “Your dress is open. I’ll keep hugging until you’ve zipped it.”

  And Sarah zipped, and then they stepped apart and said goodbye as if actual friends, keeping up the charade until turning and walking their opposite ways. And Sarah recalled, for the first time in years, that acting was truthful emotions in false circumstances. She already missed that strange woman, her make-believe friend.

  * * *

  IN THE FUTURE, David will be so changed it will be hard to give credence to the David she first knew in these mid-teenage years. It will be hard not to see that young David as sort of a sham, a lightweight cocoon through which the future David, knobbly and heavy and hard, is already beginning to obtrude. Or perhaps this younger David really is an insubstantial shell. Perhaps they all are.

  Mr. Kingsley no longer asks her to his office. There is no more of their confidential chatting, about her and David, or her and Joelle, or what a help he expects her to be when the people from England arrive. There is no talk between them at all. Sometimes, he winks at her in passing. Most times he looks straight through her. She’s aware of having missed some opportunity, squandered some advantage, in the course of having tried to do exactly the opposite. One Friday afternoon instead of driving to the Empanada Outpost with Joelle and whoever else Joelle has in her car, Sarah returns to the deserted department hallway. On Fridays rehearsal doesn’t start until five thirty, because of lesser pressure to finish by nine, it not being a school night. Instead of dining at U Totem on Fridays, they all walk in raucous packs or drive in dangerously overladen cars to one of the real restaurants they’ve adopted, where they are well known and in some cases greatly disliked. They are grimly tolerated at La Tapatia Taqueria, where they consume the free chips by the bushel. They are just short of banned at Empanada Outpost, where they will only be served if they all sit outside on the rickety deck. They are adored and spoiled at Mama’s Big Boy, the once unremarkable Big Boy somehow entirely taken over by gay male waiters, who will give them free pie if they sing. Fridays can feel like a festival, the five thirty rehearsal start time often drifting toward six if Mr. Kingsley himself isn’t back from wherever he’s gone for his dinner—never any of the cheap nearby places that they go for theirs.