Trust Exercise

by Susan Choi

  In the deserted hallway, Mr. Kingsley’s door is closed. There was no reason to think he would be here, as he is other days when they just have the half-hour break and he spends it at his desk typing in gunfire bursts, his rimless spectacles precariously balanced at the end of his nose, his door half open but his severe absorption a deterrent to all but the most desperate, or confident, students.

  She slides down the wall to the floor, hugs her knees to her chest. Perhaps Joelle will bring her a pineapple empanada, though she isn’t hungry and can hardly recall the last time she was hungry. The cold ache, like a fist pressing onto her diaphragm, has long since replaced hunger. She’s almost used to it, this pressure of sadness like a stone on her diaphragm’s bellows. Or maybe she’s not used to it, but it’s actually lessened? She thinks of Ms. Rozot’s promise to her as a prophecy. If she can just stick it out long enough, she will earn the bewitchment and stop feeling pain. Every morning she X’s a calendar in her mind’s eye: one day closer to feeling less pain. She tries a deep breath, even stretching her legs out along the cold floor so her diaphragm has ample space. She can’t do it. She can’t fill her lungs. She can’t shift the stone and inhale all the way. And this was the first thing he’d taught them: how to breathe. The location of the diaphragm and its unequalled importance, perhaps even exceeding the brain’s. As they mastered three-part breathing, he explained to them, two things would happen: they would come to understand the diaphragm’s true dimensions, and they would come to understand the true scope of its powers. Until now, they had probably only used half (or a third!) of their diaphragm’s total capacity. Even worse, they had probably thought that their brains were in charge of their bodies. Wrong. It is the diaphragm—opened to its full capacity, regulating influx and outflow, tuning us in to ourselves and the world, tuning out all the static, enabling clear thought—that’s in charge of the body and mind, which of course are all one. And Sarah hasn’t just lost control of her own diaphragm, she’s perhaps lost possession of it. It’s usurped by a stone.

  She stretches out full length on the spine-chilling floor of the empty hallway. What if these floors had been carpet or wood? Could soft texture or warm temperature have changed memory’s substance? The unrelieved hardness and coldness of the linoleum floors will always be to Sarah an inseparable part of the lessons learned here. For the first time all year she sincerely attempts it, flat on her back on the floor with the bulletin board above her. She has to scoot a little closer to the center of the hall, so her arms and legs lie properly without touching themselves or her sides. Palms up, eyes closed. The air-conditioning turns her torso to gooseflesh beneath her thin blouse, her nipples hardening with discomfort, but she forbids herself from crossing her arms over her breasts. Relaxation requires discipline. Strangely, she seems to hear better lying here on the floor. The air conditioner’s resonant hum, which she’s not sure she’s ever heard before, seems to have different parts: a dull, buried knocking, a rising note over a rumbling low note, a scrape as of a chair across the floor. The foot of Mr. Kingsley’s door is inches from her head. From behind the door, perhaps from the bowels of the building buried deep beneath the floor, Sarah hears a tuneless vocal noise and an abrupt creak.

  Hard as she can, she pulls air through her mouth, as if hauling a rope. It’s no use. There might as well be someone sitting on her chest. David sitting on her chest, as he did once. In the summer. When she’d reached around, grabbing his buttocks, forcing him to lean over her face.

  She scrambles up to a seated position, back hitting the wall as with almost no warning Mr. Kingsley’s door opens. Manuel steps out, sees her seeing him. He pulls the door shut behind him. She’s against the wall next to the doorframe and so cannot see into the room and has no way of knowing for sure if Mr. Kingsley is in there.

  Without a word to her Manuel turns and walks quickly away, disappears around the corner of the hall.

  She rises also, before the door can open again, and goes the opposite way from Manuel.

  Last year, she’d had Mr. Banks for geometry. Mr. Banks was rumored not just to have sex with some girls at the school but to have had a baby with one, who had dropped out a few years ago. No one knew the name of this girl or had ever seen her, or her baby. No one disliked Mr. Banks. He was tall, with muscle packed on his torso that shifted and bulged when he raised up one arm to write proofs on the board. He wore snug, short-sleeved polos that clearly displayed a dark upside-down U on his right upper arm with bent-back ends that it sat on like feet. All year Mr. Banks had made Sarah and William his pets, ostentatiously excusing them from proofs because, he told the rest of the class, they knew what they were doing while nobody else had a clue. Mr. Banks would say, “William, man, he’s going to be sitting here doing the books for my outside business, and I’m going to be paying him, right under this table, while the rest of you fools still don’t know how to measure circumference.” Sarah, Mr. Banks would announce, was going to brush her hair like a shampoo commercial for his special enjoyment. Sarah would do so, bending forward so her hair hung like seaweed in front of her face, and then whipping her head so her hair fell back onto her neck. “You’re supposed to do that in slow motion,” Mr. Banks would complain. “C’mon, L’Oreal.” At the end of the year, when Mr. Banks informed Sarah he was taking her off-campus for lunch, she hadn’t been surprised or dismayed. She’d known he wouldn’t touch her, whether through superior instinct or naïveté rewarded by luck, she couldn’t have said. She’d followed him to the front parking lot and climbed into the cab of his huge pickup truck with the two bumper stickers. One said, “Easy Does It.” The other said, “My Other Car Is Up My Nose.”

  “What does that mean, anyway?” she had asked.

  “It means my life was ruled by an addiction to cocaine.”

  “So, what—you turned your other car into cocaine?”

  “I had to turn it into money first. Here I thought you were so smart.”

  “What about that thing on your arm?”

  “My brand?”

  “It’s a brand?”

  “Like they do onto cattle. It’s the letter omega, from Greek. You don’t know that either? You’ve had me fooled, girl. I thought you were some kind of genius.” He’d shown her his coin laundromats—his outside businesses—on their way to a hamburger stand in a part of town she’d never seen and could never have found her way back to, everyone black except her, standing outside their cars, their burgers in hand, in wax paper, the older woman at the open-air counter wagging her finger at Mr. Banks, meaning “How old is this girl?” and Mr. Banks telling her off with a gesture, and the two of them laughing.

  In the truck, driving back, Sarah had said, “That’s the best burger I’ve ever had. Thanks.” This was back when she ate, and enjoyed it.

  “You’re welcome,” Mr. Banks had said. “And thank you for your charming company.”

  That was all that had happened. It hadn’t seemed unusual or wrong to have gone to lunch with him. Even her hunch that he wouldn’t kiss her, implying the less likely odds that he might, hadn’t made the lunch feel secretive. They hadn’t skulked, walking out to his truck. They hadn’t skulked, coming back, amid everyone else coming back from wherever they’d eaten.

  Despite all the rules—the repetitions without extra words, the relaxation with arms never touching their sides, the breaths drawn in three parts—no rules exist to define their relations with teachers. They can have lunch with teachers, or not. They can shed tears and tell secrets, or not. Vague norms emerge and dissolve, are specific to people, don’t apply generally or across time or across the whole group. They’re arrived at by instinct, by naïveté rewarded with luck, or by naïveté not rewarded with luck. When Sarah’s mother had said, “Your life outside school isn’t any of his goddamn business,” and asked Sarah whether she understood, although Sarah said yes, she didn’t agree. Her disagreement perhaps was the same thing as not understanding.

  * * *

  MANUEL’S PARENTS APPEAR on ope
ning night and seat themselves as best they can, near the back, until Colin, who is working as an usher, at Mr. Kingsley’s direction persuades them to move to the second row center, the first and second rows having been taped off and marked “VIP.” Colin’s first attempt to move the parents doesn’t work, they are politely bewildered. He has to fetch Joelle from backstage, where she is covered with loops of duct tape and safety pins, in readiness for wardrobe emergencies. Joelle comes out and with much compensatory smiling and laughing explains to the parents that seats have been saved just for them. They move with great reluctance, as if expecting to find they’re the butt of a practical joke. They’re both short compared with Manuel, solemn as carvings, exceptionally ill at ease. When the performance is over Sarah, having slipped upstairs into the light booth where Greg Veltin is running the board, sees Mr. Kingsley, his arms piled with flowers right up to his chin, press one of the bouquets on Manuel’s startled mother. Mr. Kingsley’s husband, Tim, is helping him distribute the flowers, and the two men, very alike with their clipped, glossy hair, their expensive wool V-necks over brightly hued shirts, and their knife-pleated trousers and glittering shoes, seem to diminish Manuel’s parents even more just by talking to them, despite how clear it is they’re raining down compliments. Mr. Kingsley is wearing his glasses, and Tim wears a mustache, and this is probably how Manuel’s parents can tell them apart, Manuel’s parents who are a paired species also in their dowdy church clothes.

  Sarah feels relieved when Mr. Kingsley and Tim have moved on to the cast, who receive their flowers with regal entitlement.

  The show is a thorough success. Erin O’Leary is adorable as Adelaide; dorky Tom Dieckmann, who cannot really sing, is nevertheless the perfect wiseacre as Nathan; and Manuel’s wooden acting is wiped from the spectators’ minds when he raises his voice in a song. Watching him act almost seems like a requisite penance, the price of the voice. Slantwise Sarah looks at Greg Veltin, so adorably handsome with his freckles and thick auburn hair and his tall, slender body. Last year, in Anything Goes, he had danced like Astaire. That too was vicarious grace, of the sort that exalted them all. No less can Greg sing, perhaps not like Manuel, but with his own irresistible brightness, as clean as a sailor’s white suit. Pammie and Julietta have made a cult of him, Pammie in particular barely able to breathe in his presence. She goes pink as a ham if he says hi to her. Not long ago Sarah used to see him ride off in Mr. Kingsley’s Mercedes at lunchtime. Now he sits in the light booth. “Why didn’t you audition this year?” Sarah wonders, she hopes not rudely. Everyone has wondered and been too shy to ask, assuming the reason is his personal crisis, about which he is so placidly unforthcoming.

  “You know,” Greg says, as if it’s a question he hadn’t considered, and finds genuinely interesting, “I think I just realized I had stuff to learn in the wings. I mean, there’s such opportunities here that we shouldn’t pass up. Like this light board? Mr. Browne says it cost twenty-four thousand dollars.”

  “But you’re one of the best singers and dancers at school. Anybody can run the light board.”

  “Thank you,” Greg says. “That’s so sweet.”

  “I mean it,” Sarah insists. “You would have been perfect as Sky Masterson.”

  “Manuel was amazing.”

  “You would have been better.”

  “You’re the sweetest,” Greg says kindly, shutting her down.

  The party is at Mr. Kingsley’s huge, beautiful house that he lives in with Tim. Only the current Seniors have been here before, in their sophomore year, the last time Mr. Kingsley was willing to host. “Does anyone want to tell me,” he says before doing the toast, “why Tapatia Taqueria won’t let us rent their backyard anymore?” Everyone laughs. There’s Martinelli’s Sparkling Cider and soda and all sorts of cookies and snacks laid out on fancy platters on a big buffet table inside, but outside, alcohol trickles into the yard from their cars. Here a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, there a six-pack of Bartles & Jaymes. The yard is vast, landscaped, labyrinthine, with brick walks and large shrubs and places to sit out of view of the house. They know Mr. Kingsley will ignore pot and alcohol out in the yard so long as they’re discreet. Out in the yard, their conversation mostly concerns where to go next, understanding as they do that for the hosts and for themselves, the party is a pleasant obligation. Mr. Kingsley and Tim are no more interested in hosting a wild party than the backyard denizens are interested in being wild in this genteel locale. They’ll stay an hour, go in and say thank you, get back in their cars, and be wild someplace else.

  Inside, a very different party is proceeding on completely different lines. Here, no one wants to be anywhere else. They’re taking turns at the piano and singing, they’re hoping Mr. Kingsley will talk about Broadway, they would never imagine Mr. Kingsley might want them to leave. Yet they’ll all leave, exalted and tired, long before overstaying their welcome.

  The two parties share some guests, trade some guests, enjoy the presence of most guests exclusively. Julietta and Pammie, Taniqua and Angie, Erin O’Leary and Tom Dieckmann, among many others, are inside eating chips, drinking soda, and singing their throats sore. Tim has a few solemn Juniors and Seniors around him on the screened-in porch, talking music and art. Joelle rolls easily from indoors to outdoors and back. A tight crowd in the kitchen, earnest chitchatters clogging the stairs. David’s so allied with shadow that Sarah’s not even sure whether he’s here, and, like Joelle, but for different reasons, she restlessly goes back and forth, in and out, from the sting of Colin’s bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the supple darkness to the caustic orange grit of Doritos in the house’s harsh light. She’s unable to feel at ease anywhere. She gets past the earnest chitchatters who are clogging the stairs and goes up, looking for a bathroom that doesn’t have people sprawled outside its door. Down the second-floor hallway are posters for shows, real professional shows in New York. Godspell. Follies. The hallway is lined in beige carpet that swallows all sound, and Sarah ventures its length, as if her noiselessness means she is also unseen. Here at the end of the hall is a spreading mosaic of photos in colorful frames, Mr. Kingsley and Tim standing shoulder to shoulder and grinning in various rooms, or at various scenic vistas. Sometimes Tim has his arm around Mr. Kingsley’s shoulders, and sometimes Mr. Kingsley has his arm around Tim’s. They always look hale and collegial. Sarah wonders if it is a prejudice in her, deep-rooted, unconscious and unintended, that makes her unable to see that they’re lovers in any one of these pictures. She wonders if, on the other hand, there’s some persistent reticence on their part, posing for a third party, that makes every picture this way, independent of her. She wonders what a photo of her and David would look like, if it could capture some aura they both sought to hide.

  There’s a narrow little staircase at the end of the hall, uncarpeted and steep, as if it’s recently grown up from being a ladder. She climbs it, directly into a room with sloped walls she realizes was made from an attic, now beautifully finished and furnished with a round braided rug and a bed and a sort of tall cabinet with a full-length mirror on the inside of one of its doors, before which Manuel stands, tucking in a blue shirt. “Do you live here?” she exclaims.

  “No,” he says, badly startled, one palm flat in his waistband, and then with surprising aggression, “Why are you here, always hanging around?”

  “Hanging around? It’s a party.”

  “There’s no party up here.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I’m changing my shirt, if you’d leave me alone,” he says, closing the door to the cabinet, but not before she’s seen several more expensive-looking bright-colored shirts, the same ones she’s noticed him wearing at school.

  “Did he give you those?” she asks.

  “They’re mine.”

  “Why are you keeping them here at his house?”

  “Why don’t you go somewhere else? Maybe the music room hallway? I hear you put on good shows there.”

  She almost falls back down the steep
narrow stairs.

  In the kitchen, trying to get out the back door, she runs into Pammie. She has to leave, her determination to leave is so total it leaves room for no other thought. She’ll walk, never mind that her apartment is more than a half hour’s drive. She’ll walk all night, straight to the bakery for her six a.m. shift, seven hours has to be enough time to walk there. “Come with us!” Pammie cries eagerly. Julietta is with her; Sarah cannot even open her mouth to object before they’ve borne her off like happy thugs, each of them holding an elbow. The yard has emptied out substantially, the drinkers and smokers have said their goodbyes to their host before getting too drunk or too high. David is nowhere to be seen, perhaps never was here. Greg Veltin is waiting in the backyard gazebo, he’s especially asked to speak with them. “We brought Sarah,” Pammie says breathlessly. “Is that okay?”

  “Of course,” Greg effuses. It’s perfect they’ve also brought Sarah. It’s perfect she’s here. He wants them to hold hands with him, is that too strange? Sarah looks across the murk of the gazebo, its ocean-floor light, at Pammie’s rapt face. In Greg Veltin’s presence, it shines like the moon. They are sitting in a circle on the gazebo’s slightly splintery floor. Greg reaches out and takes Pammie’s hand, and with his other hand takes Julietta’s, and Julietta reaches her spare hand to Sarah, and Sarah reaches hers to Pammie, in a trance of surrender, not having the slightest idea what they’re doing. Greg Veltin resembles Jesus—a clean-cut and freckled and auburn-haired Jesus—sitting cross-legged, holding the hands of these sophomore virgins who love him so much they would happily share him in marriage (they’ve discussed this at length, although with each other, not him). “I cherish your friendship,” Greg tells them. “I feel so lucky to have friends like you, and I want you to know that I love you, and that, if things were different—God, I’d be so in love with you girls I wouldn’t know how to choose! But luckily”—and he squeezes Pammie’s hand and Julietta’s hand with such a surfeit of feeling the two pairs of hands jump—“luckily,” he repeats, “I’m gay, and so I don’t have to choose, and I can cherish all of you forever.”