Trust Exercise

by Susan Choi

  Karen, still smiling, let Martin peck both her cheeks, which he did while keeping up a nervous scolding of David. “You didn’t bloody tell me we’d be seeing Karen!”

  “Did he tell you I’m playing the part?”

  Hearing this, Martin had to act so much more Enthusiastic he practically shot through the ceiling—but that was his nervous confidence convincing him that actually, Karen was flirting with him, that actually, it was All Right. This was how Karen was able to see that in fact, despite all her worry and doubt, Martin’s story, and hers, were the same.

  Equally pretending this wasn’t the case they sat down and told each other piles of pointless lies about the past dozen years of their lives while the young actors deferentially supplemented the pitcher of water with several pitchers of beer.

  Then, everybody sat down and they did the read-through.

  “Doc hardly talks in Act One,” David observed afterward, “yet the audience has to form an opinion about him—that gets exploded.”

  “Given it’s my own bloody part I could gladly give myself more bloody lines,” Martin said, provoking laughter from the young actors.

  David talked more about the subversiveness of Doc, and Martin interrupted him with comments like, “Isn’t he just a pathetic sod?” shrewdly disguising from the admiring young actors and David his neurotic need for limitless compliments on the complexity of his character as false modesty dressed up as jokey self-deprecation. It was a virtuoso feeling-state lasagna and everybody ate it up and gave Martin back just what he wanted: more laughter, along with protests that his character wasn’t a “sod” at all but an Everyman and maybe even a Jesus.

  In addition to dissecting Martin’s high-level bullshit, which had the welcome effect of making her feel less ashamed of her youthful past self that had found him so brilliant, Karen entertained herself by trying to guess how long it would take any of the men to notice her sitting there, not contributing a word to the conversation. But they were all drinking beer, and she wasn’t, so they weren’t even on the same clock. “I think we ought to see the gun in Act One,” she interrupted. “Like Chekhov says. If we’re going to hear a gun in Act Two we’ve got to see it in Act One.”

  “Actually, he says that if we see it in Act One, it’s gotta go off by Act Two. But, same difference. That’s a cool point, Karen.”

  “I can imagine Doc, like, digging around for something under the bar at some point and just slapping the gun on the bar to get it out of the way,” one of the actors remarked.

  “All bar owners keep a handgun,” said another.

  “Is that true?” Martin said. “So bloody American. It’s not true in England.”

  “Welcome to Bloody America.”

  “Maybe he takes it out when the Girl first appears, sorta slaps it on the bar like, Scram, or else?”

  “I like that,” said David. “We’ll need a prop gun, but we needed one anyway. Recorded gun noises are lame.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” said Karen.

  The four young actors planned to linger to see a band that was coming on later so David and Martin and Karen walked out as a trio onto the ruined street of cracked concrete slabs sprouting weeds and other former warehouses that hadn’t yet turned into bar/performance spaces. A few blocks away were railroad tracks on the literal wrong side of which the whole area sat; on the right side, a few miles away across total wasteland, you could see the tidy shape of downtown sticking up, where the traffic lights worked. David might have parked anywhere, there was nothing but parking, but he’d parked directly behind Karen on the desolate street so that, going back to their cars, they were walking together. David’s sports car, with the phone, was long gone. The driver’s-side window of his current vehicle was a black plastic trash bag. Karen’s much envied convertible was also long gone. She drove a practical unblemished car that David recognized only because he’d seen it so often. The shattered sidewalk and desolate street stretched away to an unseen horizon. Black infinity stretched overhead. Out here, on the literal wrong side of the tracks, there wasn’t enough light pollution to lower the salmon-orange haze that was their city’s night sky over them like a comforting blanket. David parking behind Karen was a companionable gesture, in the way of herd animals sidling up to each other at dusk, to less feel the darkness and cold. It made Karen wonder, as they unlocked their cars, whether he was less confident of his judgment than he’d pretended. “Even if he was fooling around with his students,” David had said just a few nights ago, “it’s not a fucking crime. Our standards have gotten so overreaching. We can’t drive without wearing a seat belt and can’t fuck unless the government says it’s okay? We know they all consented.”

  “How do we know?” Karen asked in her I’m-not-arguing-just-curious tone.

  “He says they did—and sue me, but so far no one’s shown me one good reason not to believe him. Now they say that they didn’t consent, years or a whole decade later. Why’s that?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t prove that they’re lying.”

  “Well what about you? Whatever your thing was with him, you weren’t some helpless victim. You gave him the keys to your car. He moved into your house.”

  “All true,” Karen said.

  “You weren’t some helpless victim,” David persisted. There was a strange fervor in his voice when they talked about Martin. “You could have walked away—you could have kicked him out! Mr. Kingsley kicked him out—and you took him in. If anyone was helpless, it was Martin.”

  “I’m not arguing with you,” said Karen. No, she was not some helpless victim. It wasn’t David’s business to decide this, but it happened to be true. Still, that evening he had wanted to prove something, and this evening, as they unlocked their cars, Martin standing there dragging on his cigarette for dear life and pretending to admire the hideous view, Karen sensed David feeling unsure that he’d succeeded in proving it. And when David was feeling unsure, he wouldn’t rest until extracting reassurance.

  “Coming to The Bar?” David said with poorly hidden insistence.

  “The cost of soda’s too high. Heading home,” Karen said.

  “Do come, Karen, we haven’t had a proper chat,” Martin said with poorly faked insistence, so obviously wanting her to leave that she almost stayed just to spite him. But no.

  * * *

  MY FATHER WAS a carpenter. “Like Jesus,” to quote him. Also like Jesus, my father had a lot of other skills. Electricity, plumbing. Anything you need to know to build a house, my father knew how to do. After he split from my mother he’d still come back to our house on the weekends, to do big things and small, reshingle the roof, clear the gutters, rewire the ceiling fan, unclog the toilet. Even that, my mother couldn’t do herself. Once my mother had Ron, the first in a series of boyfriends, my father stopped coming, not that Ron knew how to fix anything. But my mother didn’t want Ron to feel shown up by my father’s grim competence. The things that got fixed were the things that I’d learned how to fix, by watching, but I couldn’t keep up with the house’s deterioration. By the time I was in high school, the house was returning to a state of nature. The grass was waist deep in the yard and there were oak trees taking root in the gutters. At the same time as our yard was taking over our house, my father’s house was taking over his yard. He’d added a deck and a kitchen extension, turned his two-car garage into a television room, and built a giant carport to shade his driveway. On our weekends, I’d drive my beater over there and work on it with him. There was nothing he didn’t know how to do: engine work, body work, he’d even salvaged leather seats for the interior. We didn’t talk much, share feelings or thoughts. My father and I—this is the story I tell myself; who knows how his story would go—are too much alike to be close. We’re both extremely competent, we both like to be left alone, we both had a weak spot for my mother and hate ourselves for it. Again, it’s possible that if you asked my father about him and me he’d say something completely different, though it’s more possible he’d sa
y nothing.

  When I was little my father supported us by doing carpentry and handy work, but at some point early on he started building sets and doing lighting for the opera, and got himself into the stagehands’ union. That’s what kept Kevin and me fed and clothed, my father’s union job and his decency toward us even though my mother, then as now, barely worked and spent her alimony on her boyfriends. My father worked rock concerts and film shoots, pretty much anything that used lighting, but his most steady paycheck remained the opera, the downtown theatre, and summer stage in the park—all the middle-of-the-road, status quo stages that David despised. David, who’d grown up with more money than anyone else in our school, burned with contempt for those places, which he would say offered cultural diversion for the self-regarding rich. On the other hand my father, who grew up poor and never went to college, would have scorned David’s rabble-rousing plays if he could have been bothered to know about them, which he couldn’t. When I told my father, who knows every union prop master in town, that I needed a gun that shot blanks for a show of David’s, my father made the huffing sound that lets you know he’s laughing. “What’s the show, The Marxist Revolution? Every time I see that kid interviewed in the Arts section he’s insulting rich people, but I notice he’s fine about taking their money. He’s got his angels like everyone else.” Although my father is Christian, by “angel” he didn’t mean a messenger of God. He meant a rich person who donated money to keep David’s theatre going.

  “Yeah, it’s a conundrum. Anyway, I was thinking that Richie could help me.” Richie was a prop master friend of my father’s.

  “A prop gun or a blank gun?”

  “A blank gun. It gets fired.”

  “So use the prop gun and a good sound effect.”

  “Dad, I’m not the director.”

  “I wouldn’t trust this person with a blank gun. Who’s his prop master? How do you know that they know what they’re doing?”

  “I’m his prop master. And I know what I’m doing.”

  “Just because there’s no bullet, it’s still dangerous. There’s still the cartridge and gun powder. No screwing around. That’s how Bruce Lee’s kid died.”

  “That gun had a squib load in it.”

  “Because the prop crew were morons. You’ve got to know what you’re doing.”

  “I do, Dad.”

  “Sure you do. It’s the morons I’m worried about.”

  “Well, I won’t let them touch it,” I said.

  I decided to take both a prop and a blank gun from Richie—for safety, we agreed. I even got two different models, so you couldn’t mistake them. The prop gun was a Colt replica with a wooden hand grip. Like any prop gun, it was a real-looking toy that did nothing. The blank-firing gun was an all-black Beretta. I didn’t even bring it to the warehouse until the full dress. It was the prop gun we used in rehearsal, the prop gun I held when, offstage, Martin and I acted out what the audience would hear but not see. Martin sat in a chair and I stood beside him, the prop gun in my hand, pointed down and angled away. I’d suggested blocking our movements backstage for safety and it was just the kind of detail David loved and believed in for the authenticity it would somehow convey. Doc sinking into his chair, the Girl taking position beside him, stepping her feet apart, bracing herself.

  From that vantage, standing beside seated Martin, her gaze always fell on the same thing, Martin’s skull where it sprouted his ear. The connection between skull and ear seemed a little too loose. She’d lost the original Martin, who’d previously been preserved by her total recall down to the yellowish grooves of his nails. The night of the read-through, when he’d come slouching in next to David, for an instant the two Martins shimmered on top of each other, more alike than different but still marking the time from the past until now. It was the slightness of the difference between Martin Now and Past Martin that made it so strange. It was the thorough difference of Karen Now from Past Karen, the shocking difference of David Now from Past David, and the only slight difference, a connoisseur’s difference, between the two Martins, that made it so strange. Strange enough to make you think that you hadn’t known Martin at all in the past. The original Martin, already so hard to attest to, was absorbed by the Martin of Now, and even Karen with her total recall couldn’t get him back out.

  And everything, and everyone, cooperated to help Martin supersede Martin. Everyone smiled and agreed, without being so crass as to put it in words, that the scandal reported in the Bourne Courier-Telegraph must not have occurred. Mr. Kingsley, who’d once thrown Martin out of his house, came to rehearsal all smiles and pumped Martin’s hand. Martin was normal, delightful, as most people are if you give them a chance, and it felt good, I’ll fully admit, to take part in his normalization, to drift with prevailing currents, to not be the sore loser or lone crazy history buff. It felt good and I let it feel good. I enjoyed rehearsal—I enjoyed the permission it gave me to not think about Martin. Running lines with Martin, being “seized” by Martin “in a violent embrace,” joining Martin and the others at The Bar afterward, I finally stopped thinking about Martin for the first time in years. He finally got out of my head and went to sit across the room with his ferrety smirk and his yellow fingertips and his knobbly knees and his shaggy hair, and although I saw him sitting there, his reality didn’t disturb me.

  * * *

  WHEN SARAH’S BOOK had first been published, the previous year, David got manic-crusader about it, as if he’d written it himself or perhaps more accurately as if he’d had a child, who had turned out to be incredibly precocious and possessed of all the qualities of David’s own that David loved and none of the ones that he hated, and this child, this sort of genius-distillation of David, had written the book. David’s first campaign was to get CAPA to feature the book on their marquee, where the mainstage productions were usually announced; in the big glass display case just inside the front doors; and on the brand-new still-under-construction website. You’d think this was a fool’s errand, given Sarah’s depiction of CAPA, which some would have called negative and yet others a whitewash, a difference we will not pursue, but as it turned out the administration at CAPA was apparently too dazzled by its association with a Published Author to even read the author’s book and make up their own minds and so David succeeded. Next David went on a campaign to get the Trib and the Examiner to not just review Sarah’s book but do big splashy front-of-the-section feature articles about it. David might have been a guy who drove a car with a black plastic trash bag for its driver’s-side window but he was also a shrewd self-promoter who’d developed, over the years, very useful relationships with the arts editors at both papers and in this campaign he also succeeded. You might have thought Sarah had hired David to do freelance publicity but in fact David and Sarah had not seen each other since high school, any more than Sarah and Karen had seen each other since high school, or Karen and David had seen each other since high school, until Karen moved back to their hometown and found David there. It was from David that Karen first learned about Sarah’s book. He’d yanked it out of his backpack and thrust it at her with that smirk on his face—lips tightly compressed, face twisted in an unsuccessful effort to conceal wicked glee—he always wore when vindicated. About what did Sarah’s book vindicate David? Her writing “talent,” which perhaps he thought he’d discovered, or encouraged? His importance to her, as measured by the number of pages devoted to his fictional self, and the far fewer number of pages devoted to fictional others whose real analogues might have been thought to rate more coverage? Karen assumed that it must be the latter, but later to her great surprise David told her, one night after rehearsal, that he’d never even read Sarah’s book. This was a full year after the book had been published, and just a few days before Karen surprised Sarah on Sarah’s paperback tour. David seemed surprised that Karen was surprised. “I’m not a reader,” he reminded her, as if she should know better. “I read plays and I read the newspaper.”

  “But you were so proud and exci
ted about it. You, like, harassed people to give it publicity.”

  “Of course I did. It’s Sarah’s book. I’ll do the same for you, whenever you fulfill whatever your huge ambition is.”

  “I have no huge ambition.”

  “Bullshit. I got you out to auditions!” As usual David steered the conversation back to his accomplishments, his self-satisfaction coexisting with his insecurity and self-hatred. It had to be the insecurity and self-hatred, Karen felt at first, that accounted for his not reading the book. Only the dread of a humiliating discovery could be powerful enough to counteract the burning narcissistic curiosity David must feel knowing Sarah had written about their CAPA years and so presumably about him. Yet it turned out he did not even know that the humiliating disclosure he might have feared, had he had any real self-awareness, had been spared him by Sarah for reasons which Karen will not try to guess. Even had the disclosure been there, Karen still could more easily see David devouring his portrayal than just taking a pass.