Trust Exercise

by Susan Choi

  “Do you not believe he slept with his students?” Karen finally asked. Karen had realized there was nothing she could say, at this moment, that wouldn’t shred the jaded unshockable costume she was still somehow wearing, that wouldn’t shred it into rubbery strips. At moments like these, a most useful technique is to ask the other person a question. It shouldn’t be a leading question, but Karen’s question, we admit, had some slant. All we can say is, the room had some slant. I was trying to stay on my barstool. I was trying to remain an old, dear friend of David’s.

  “I’m sure he slept with his students. I’m sure they slept with him. They knew what they were doing! We knew what we were doing. Remember what we were like?”

  “We were children,” Karen said carefully, as if it were David who ought to be handled with care, David who might be injured by the conversation. But apparently, despite taking precautions, Karen still caused offense. David gave a scornful laugh.

  “We were never children,” he said.

  * * *

  THE ATTENTIVE READER might wonder, What ever happened to Manuel? Will Karen reveal his fate to us? I wondered this myself. After reading what I read of Sarah’s book, before seeing her at the Skylight bookstore, I went to my bookshelf and pulled down my high school yearbooks. Yes, reader, I kept them. They were quality items, those yearbooks. Their title was Spotlight! With the exclamation. It is not without care that I turned the stiff, glossy pages. Few inscriptions marred the endpapers. What effusions the few did contain didn’t reveal anything unexpected. No writer had claimed space with a colored Flair pen who did not find the yearbook’s owner “a sweet girl,” “so nice!” destined to other than an “awesome future.” Turn the page, then; pass the frontispiece of none other than David glancing over his shoulder, wearing the last of his hair and a Mao jacket. Pass through Administration with a pang; those office ladies took more care of you than your own mother did. Pass through Dance and Music (Instrumental and Vocal), through the Winter Ballet and The Jazz Ensemble Takes Manhattan! Theatre is the headliner here. It not only comes last but has the most pages. Study them all: four classes of Theatre students each year for four years, and there’s still the strong chance that “Manuel’s” DNA includes chromosomes from another department. We’re seeking the fate of Manuel in his various origins, for though I won’t claim there was no Manuel, I guarantee there was no one Manuel. Of clear sources I count at least three.

  The first Manuel was a Theatre student, “Hispanic” as the forms say, who lacked all discernible talent. No more could C. act than dance, no more sing than drive nails into wood. He could not even glue feathers onto a hat. What was he doing there? It isn’t my puzzle to solve, but whatever the reason, it didn’t expire. C. was our classmate all four years. He departed as he came, unremarkably. He neither achieved prominence nor prematurely disappeared. Although he never had a girlfriend or boyfriend while we were in school, last I heard he’d gotten married, gone into business, had a couple of kids, and was doing just fine.

  The second Manuel was a Vocal Music student, also “Hispanic” as the forms say, whose name you may know if you listen to opera. He is one of the school’s biggest success stories, and his voice, like Manuel’s in the surprising audition, truly conjures the ranks of the angels. He never came out as gay while at our school but he certainly is. However, P.’s talent wasn’t discovered at our school but years earlier in his childhood. Nor was he a protégé—or more—of Mr. Kingsley’s. P. was the pride of the Vocal department, so consistently booked in professional opera from the age of thirteen that he never even deigned to audition for the school mainstage. He continued from our school to Eastman, and a stellar career. I saw him perform once, as Sharpless in Madama Butterfly, when I lived in New York. Afterward I briefly considered waiting for him at the stage door with the handful of starry-eyed others all cradling bouquets. But I had no claim on him. I’d known of him but he’d never known me. I decided against and went home.

  The third Manuel is not a person but an observation. Is not a salient aspect of this character his special relationship with Mr. Kingsley? Does not this relationship so anger Sarah that she inflicts an unspeakable wound, a strange sort of revenge?

  The attentive reader might also wonder, What did Karen know about Sarah’s strange act of revenge? Again, I wondered this myself. Had I seen things I’d not understood? Had I known things I’d somehow forgotten? To the first question, Doubtful. To the second, No way. I never forget anything. But Sarah’s reconstruction in her book of the lighting and set and backdrop were so true to my memories, I kept blaming myself that the action seemed unfamiliar. How completely Sarah transported me back to that costume shop, with its overtaxed garment racks poorly divided by signs made of wilting shirt cardboards. The iron, the ironing board, the hats left on the floor. Yes, exactly. All that, just like that. Enough to make me think the unfamiliar action must be equally true and I just hadn’t noticed. But no: no one inexplicably disappeared from our theatre class—except me. And no one had a very special, perhaps too special, perhaps so special as to unleash in Sarah a thirst for revenge, relationship with the man we’ve agreed to call Mr. Kingsley—except Sarah.

  But you’ve heard all about that very special relationship already. Or have you?

  Two terms my therapist used that I liked, among many, were “projection” and “restraining force.” I liked those terms because they were so concrete in the therapy context and so broad in the context of life. Projection: even if you don’t do therapy yourself, you’ll agree that for all its bad rap, projection is creative. It puts something, or rather someone, out there, that person supposedly having those feelings that are actually yours. While restraining force is creation’s true opposite, not destruction but creation’s cancellation. Not-thinking, not-feeling, not-doing. Projection or Restraining Force: Something or Nothing. The bald lie, or the stark truth that never gets told. There is no Manuel, or there are several. Sarah did nothing like that, or she did everything, even things she attributes to others. Karen knew nothing, or she knew everything but the form that the story now takes. Sarah tells this story to reveal a hidden truth—or to hide the truth under a plausible falsehood, scrambling history unrecognizable with the logic of dream.

  Does Sarah think the story makes her out as a good or bad person? Looked at one way, she’s a selfish, hurtful bitch. Looked at another, she might imagine she’s rescuing someone.

  But the truth or falsehood of Sarah’s story, the purity or taint of her motives for being truthful or false—these aren’t ours to determine or speculate on. We apologize for the digression.

  * * *

  NOT LONG AFTER that night at The Bar with David, Karen went to the main branch of the public library and obtained her own copy of the article in the Bourne Courier-Telegraph. After reading it she found her belief in Martin’s guilt completely vindicated. Strangely, she could also grasp how David’s belief in Martin’s innocence might be completely vindicated. The article was one of those that used a local controversy to investigate the broader “culture wars.” At the well-regarded high school in Bourne, Martin had won teaching awards year after year for his theatre program while also fending off rumors that he engaged in “behavior unbefitting an instructor.” None of the rumors had ever been proved. Receptivity to them seemed to vary according to one’s view of the utility of arts education. Conservative parents who viewed the theatre program as so much time-wasting twaddle called for investigation and accused the school’s principal, an arts champion, of shielding a sex criminal. Progressive parents who viewed arts funding as being under siege called for the defense of Martin and the denunciation of a witch hunt in which, most regrettably, he was the witch. The difficulty of knowing which side had it right was made worse by the students, who almost always declined to speak out and the rare times they did, disagreed with each other. Finally, the previous year, a sixteen-year-old Theatre student at the school had told her parents that she and Martin shared a loving and consensual sexual relation
ship and that she was expecting his child. Martin denied being other than the girl’s instructor. The girl’s parents hired lawyers and demanded that Martin submit to paternity tests. Martin refused and was fired—but not charged with a crime, as the student retracted her claim. While the age of consent in the UK has been sixteen since the late nineteenth century, the article said, it is an offense for any person aged eighteen or older and who holds a position of trust (for example, a teacher) to engage in sexual activity with a person aged eighteen or under, as such activity abuses the position of trust. The school, perhaps in penance for its prior inaction, put out the word through alumni networks that it was seeking other victims of Martin’s alleged abuse. Lest this sound too judgmental, the article concluded with a quote from a theatre colleague of Martin’s: “Here’s a person of incredible talent who’s devoted his life to the teaching profession, and this is what he gets: fired from his job, his reputation destroyed, all on the basis of hearsay. And you wonder why talented people won’t teach.”

  Not long after reading the article, Karen obtained a copy of Martin’s play, which he had been hoping to produce, star in, and direct, until his witch hunt interfered, and she read it with the same interest she’d brought to the newspaper story. She got the copy of the play from David. David, after being shaken and shocked by the news about Martin, and then affronted and outraged, had turned finally sardonic and crusading. The sardonic crusading took the opposite form of the shocked shakenness, which played out at The Bar, an ideal location for sitting, drinking, and scolding the world for being “fucking insane.” The sardonic crusading played out on the stage of David’s theatre. This progression, from being shocked on a barstool to crusading onstage, was in fact David’s cycle, the way his wheel always turned. First, David would passively suffer his shock. Then after a certain point, as if the suffering charged him with power, David would unleash a crusade to shock others, and make them suffer in turn. Then, exhausted or remorseful or both—because he always, in his crusading phase, attacked people and made them upset—David would feel shocked again and passively suffer. Rinse, wring, repeat. If I ever actually become a therapist, and David ever has money, I’d like to treat him. He interests me. He interests everyone, which is more than you can say about most people. I once heard an intoxicated commentator at The Bar opine that David did well with women because he was so unpredictable, but this was a drunk person’s observation. David is completely predictable. Half the time he’s in a funk and half the time he’s ferociously active. Half the time he suffers and half the time he causes suffering. I’ll leave it to a mental health professional as to whether this is textbook bipolar disorder or something more nuanced but for our purposes you only need to know that David’s sardonicism—a real word, look it up—about the treatment of Martin led to his crusade to put on Martin’s play. David recovered the letter Martin had sent him, mashed onto the floor mats of his car or in his bedsheets or underneath his coffee maker. He wrote to Martin fulminating against the idiocy and insanity of the world and asking for a copy of the play. You can easily believe that when Martin got this letter, he was gratified. So began a transatlantic correspondence between these long-separated members of the Elite Brotherhood of the Arts.

  Karen was in David’s office on the day the play arrived in the mail. You could say that she’d been staking out that play, stalking it, the same way she’d been keeping herself abreast of all the David/Martin developments: David’s shock evolving into his crusade, David’s recovery of the letter, etc. Karen had kept herself abreast by making herself indispensable to David, which was always very easy to do. David always needed some administrative favor and was always quick to accept someone’s help, without asking why that person would offer. David, I believe, suffered from low self-esteem yet never had any difficulty believing in the singular importance of his work. This is a distinguishing trait of members of the Elite Brotherhood of the Arts. David also had no difficulty believing that this belief—in the singular importance of his work—was shared by others. When proposing to dedicate hours of your life to some project of David’s, you were never in danger of David asking why you wanted to do that. David had recently relocated his office due to an unfortunate misunderstanding of the fire code, and Karen offered to unpack and overhaul his filing system, which she herself had created several years earlier, but which no one had ever maintained. In this way Karen was able to keep herself abreast of the David/Martin correspondence, and to read Martin’s play, at her leisure. There were no surprises in the correspondence but there were some surprises, at least to Karen, in the play.

  The first surprise was that the play was good. At least, to Karen the play seemed to be good. She’s never claimed to be an expert on plays. But she read through it quickly. That seemed like a sign of a good play. Also, how much she thought about it afterward seemed like a sign of a good play. The play had startled her, yet seemed strangely familiar. That was the second surprise, that the events of the play seemed so familiar, as if they had happened to Karen—but in a different life, a life she hadn’t known she’d lived, so that the play was a sort of dream-version, all jumbled but retaining some reminder, like a smell or a stain.

  The play was set in a pub, and though it was full of English people drinking English drinks and saying English-sounding things, the setting might have been The Bar. It was the same sort of every-night place. The owner and bartender, “Doc”—the character Martin intended to play—is a taciturn figure. In the opening scene, the patrons argue about an acquaintance who’s drunk himself to death, and whether this should count as suicide. The patrons try to get Doc to weigh in but he won’t. Then a girl enters, seeming to want a handout. She’s dirty and sexless—the audience should even think that she might be a boy—and also small and frail-looking. In spite of that, her arrival gets Doc riled up. For the first time, he says more than a couple of words. He yells at the girl, and kicks her out. Everybody else is uncomfortable but gradually things get back to normal, and the argument resumes. The scene ends.

  Then come a lot of scenes about Doc and his patrons illustrating social ills and moral conundrums. They are well done if in no way original. Karen read these with absorption but felt no need to reach for the Post-its. Hence I’ll skip to the almost-last scene.

  The bar is dark and deserted, closed for the night. A clock shows that it’s four in the morning. But then we hear a key turn, and Doc enters. And, surprise, with him is the Girl. Before, it seemed as though they were no more than enemy acquaintances, business owner and street hustler. Now it’s clear they’re something more. In the dramatis personae, neither character is given an age. Doc is described as “past his prime; a different life might have left him less stooped, less scowling.” The Girl is described as someone who, “however long she lives, will never cease to look the waif.” She is supposed to be indistinguishable from a boy in her dirty jeans and T-shirt, which means she’s breastless and hipless, but does that make her ten, twelve, or twenty? The Girl sits at the bar while Doc moves around behind the bar and in and out a door through which we now see a pathetic back room, all peeling linoleum, bare lightbulb, and cot. This is apparently where Doc lives. Doc puts a plate of food in front of the Girl, and she eats. They seem to pick up a conversation from where they left off. Doc is angry at the Girl for how she lives. The audience should realize that concern, not accusation, was the subtext of his yelling at her earlier. The Girl says Doc might as well be angry with himself. Doc says, “We all make our own choices.” The Girl says, “Do we?” Doc says, “We do when we can but you know that I can’t.” The Girl says she can’t make Doc’s choices either; no one can make another person’s choices. Here Doc “collapses; whether physically, morally, or both” (to quote stage directions). It’s a moment of reckoning—but for what? “Don’t you see?” Doc says to the Girl. “Don’t you see that I’m trying to repay you?” “Selfishly, as always,” says the Girl. “Please, baby,” Doc says. “Please do this for me.” No blocking is provided, but the Girl
apparently finishes her food and stands up. Doc apparently comes around from the back of the bar, or the Girl goes around from the front, because Doc “seizes the Girl in a violent embrace” (to quote stage directions). Is Doc the Girl’s father, or lover, or both? The play doesn’t answer these questions of Karen’s.

  Doc and the Girl exit to the back room, the door shutting behind them.

  A shot rings out, offstage.

  The Girl comes out from the back room and exits.

  But the play isn’t over. The lights come up one last time. It’s a memorial. The bar is draped in black bunting, and there’s a framed picture of Doc, and a vase of wilting flowers. All the same patrons, all wearing cheap-looking jackets and ties, are sitting around drinking and talking, just as in scene one, but now the suicide they’re debating is Doc’s. They all have different theories about why he did it, and make different pompous statements about the meaning of life. Suddenly, silence. The Girl has entered. She’s better dressed, in clothes appropriate for church, although they look secondhand and don’t fit. Despite her changed appearance, her evident intention of paying respects, all the patrons attack her. “Get outta here, you little whore!” and “Fuck off, you sticky-fingered bitch,” they variously say. The Girl has no lines in response, but nor does she seem to exit. The play seems to end with her standing there. She enters; she’s assailed by insults; and the word

  end

  is all that remains.

  But Karen, reading that word, could see the end clearly, as Martin, writing that word, must have seen it clearly. Martin was a director as well as a playwright. What might seem missing, from a reading point of view, was actually something bestowed, on director and actors. Karen was once an aspiring actor. She remembers how to fill in those blanks.