Trust Exercise

by Susan Choi

  * * *

  THE WAY MARTIN had written his play, the Girl doesn’t have a quick-change. If you’ll remember, in the penultimate scene the Girl and Doc go offstage, into the back room which we’ve previously seen through the propped-open door, and know to be Doc’s squalid home. Doc and the Girl close the door behind them, there’s a pause, the shot rings out, the lights go out; then the lights come up again on all Doc’s regulars sitting in the bar memorializing him, and only after they’ve said a few lines does the Girl appear, in her funeral clothes. It’s a quick-change for the set: in the blackout the actors playing the regulars get to their marks, the stagehands put the portrait of Doc and some wilted flowers and black bunting on the bar, etc. The Girl has more than enough time, between going through the backroom door with Doc, and reappearing, to do her own costume change. So Karen’s invitation to Sarah to be her dresser, in addition to being an inspiration of the moment, was also an idiotic gaffe. Karen did not need a dresser and Sarah would not need help realizing this. But in the weeks after Karen saw Sarah at Skylight Books, and before Sarah arrived to take up the sentimental task/have the funny old-times’-sake experience which Karen had offered despite it not existing to give, the staging of the play went through a series of evolutions that would almost make you think Karen had supernatural powers. First, David’s set designer created a window in the bar’s backroom door with a roller blind pulled over it, so that when Doc and the Girl went in the back room and closed the door, a spotlight threw their shadows on the blind, and the shooting could be seen in silhouette. Second, David decided that when the lights came back up he wanted the Girl already onstage, dimly visible to the audience if not to the regulars, so that when she stepped forward into the light, the regulars would realize she’d overheard them. This meant Karen couldn’t start her costume change until the lights went out, and had to complete it before they came up again. It would be a quick-change. “You’ll need someone to dress you,” said David. Karen waited for the nightly post-rehearsal at The Bar to tell David that Sarah would do it. “Sarah’s coming?” cried David.

  “I saw her last month in LA. We thought it would be fun if she helped with the show,” Karen lied, clumsily. David was sitting up slightly too straight, staring down the length of his nose and holding his cigarette out to one side. When David was affronted, you were reminded of how dangerously handsome he’d been at the age of eighteen. His eyes flashed out as if to remind you that you shouldn’t have forgotten about it.

  “Sarah’s never seen a single show I’ve done.”

  “That’s why. She felt like she had to see this one and even help in some way,” Karen continued to deceitfully improvise, really disliking this situation of her own creation in which she had to prop up a pretense of Sarah, to mollify David. Once again Karen was reminded of the suffocating self-regard of Sarah and David, who never failed to see themselves as performing some extraordinary drama even when they’d been completely out of touch for almost thirteen years.

  “Why this one? Because you’re in it?”

  “No, just because she realized it was about time she saw one of your shows. It’s just an extra point of interest that I’m in it.”

  “When did you get back in touch with her? The way I remember, toward the end of high school you weren’t even speaking.”

  “We were in high school,” Karen said dismissively.

  Maybe it was unfair of Karen to see Sarah and David as twin narcissists, each fixated on the other’s ancient image and seeing in that hapless teenage lover some lost part of themselves that they still wanted back. Maybe it was unkind of Karen to see Sarah and David this way because the feeling-state attendant was one of impatience, resentment, and scorn. Karen had no room for other people’s unresolved emotions because she had no room for her own lack of generousness. Karen suffers, herself, because she wants to be empathic and she can’t. The best she can do is maintain healthy separation, and oftentimes she can’t even do that. Karen’s failures in the empathy department are so acute she finds that she can’t look at David and Sarah, when David, getting out of his piece-of-shit car, and Sarah, getting out of Karen’s car, confront each other on the broken stretch of sidewalk outside the bar/performance space where the first dress rehearsal will finally happen tonight. Picking Sarah up from the airport, Karen had let Sarah do all the work—grin strenuously with excitement, unhesitatingly hug, chatter and marvel nonstop—while in the privacy of nonparticipation Karen coldly dissected every pop and pulse of Sarah’s tireless efforts. But as Sarah faced David across the expanse of smashed pavement, Karen found herself looking away. What passed between them in an instant smote Karen. She felt ashamed, witnessing it.

  Then the instant passed and David, his old lope still visible beneath his new weight, crossed the space between them and grabbed Sarah into his arms in an overly hearty, hail-fellow-well-met way and Sarah gave a strangulated laugh, exaggerating the strangulation for humor, and said, “Careful! Don’t squeeze too hard. I’m pregnant,” and David stepped away as if he’d been burned.

  “I found out right after I saw you in LA,” Sarah said to Karen. “My hangover the next day was—well, it lasted a lot longer than usual.”

  “I guess that answers the question of what I can get you,” said David. “I mean, there’s a bar in the space.”

  “Oh! Water or juice would be great.”

  “Great! Okay,” David said, and turning on his heel he strode across the street and into the building as if Sarah had ordered the drink to be brought to her there on the sidewalk.

  “Congratulations,” Karen said as they walked in.

  “I’m only eight weeks. I didn’t mean to say anything but I just sort of blurted it out. I was afraid I might blurt something worse.”

  “I’m sure David would have forgiven you. He’s been thrown up on a lot in his life,” Karen said.

  Inside David was nowhere to be seen. Karen left radiant Sarah to be fawned on by Martin and made her way through the maze of black curtains, across big dark hidden reaches of the warehouse, and out the back door onto the old loading dock. David was there, sitting on the dock with his back to the wall, smoking and staring at the toes of his boots.

  “Are you okay?” Karen said.

  “I’m not,” David said. “In fact I’m not okay.”

  Karen sat down on the dock next to David, which she hadn’t intended to do. She’d intended to go inside and leave David alone. Telling herself to not think about it too much she put her arms around David and at her touch he slumped heavily and then jerked back to life with a terrible sound like an animal caught in a trap. His whole body heaving and jerking made him hard to hang on to. Karen guiltily wanted to stop, but only had to admonish herself a few times before he shrugged her off of his own accord, without anger, to get at his cigarette pack in his pocket. Before lighting up he scrubbed the loose-stretched hem of his ancient T-shirt roughly over his face.

  “We’d better do this fucking rehearsal,” he said, standing up.

  Sarah watched Act One sitting alone in the fourth row while David went about the business of running rehearsal. But it was still there, Karen observed: that tension, like a wire strung between them that if you weren’t careful you’d trip over it. Karen wondered how it could still bother her. Because it excluded her? Because it made such a claim for itself, to be a more important human condition than anyone else’s? David was constantly on the move, stamping up the risers to the lightboard or climbing onstage or sitting in the outermost seats to check sight lines, the whole time trailing cigarette smoke and slopping suds from his beer on the floor, but no matter where he moved he kept his eyes away from Sarah so that you knew he’d grown eyes in the back of his head, or on the outsides of his shoulders, wherever they needed to be to keep that wire running the most direct path. It cut the room to pieces and the rehearsal was a disaster of missed cues and misspoken lines and tech glitches and no one, except possibly Karen and Sarah and David, knew why. Once the second act started and Sarah
was out of sight backstage with Karen’s costume the last shreds of David’s focus disintegrated and he shambled around with his fourth or sixth beer like a sleepwalker. “David, David?” the lighting designer was saying. “Is that the cue you wanted?” “David, David?” the sound designer was saying. “Which song did you mean?” “David, David?” the set designer was saying. “Should Doc yank down the blind?” Karen had brought the loaded blank gun in for the first time and she realized the blocking of the silhouetted shooting was going to have to change again; holding the Beretta nose down with her fingers well away from the trigger she went out onstage and squinted into the lights. “David!” she said and felt the whole chaotic room of milling-around people who’d lost their leadership suddenly snap to attention. “Whoa, don’t shoot,” someone said, and a shiver of laughter broke out.

  “There needs to be more space between Martin’s head and the gun. Once I’m standing on my mark, take a look from far left and far right to make sure the shadows line up the right way.”

  “I thought it was a blank gun.”

  “It is, but it still has a cartridge with gunpowder in it. That’s what makes the shot noise, and it makes a shock wave. So no one fool around and put this against your head or even point it at someone. I’ll point away from Martin’s head at an angle for safety, but the shadows should look like I’m aiming at him. Tell us if they line up.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” Martin said, “am I in any danger?” Martin had come out onstage to play this question for humor.

  “Just don’t piss Karen off!” someone said.

  As the humorlessly responsible firearms person, Karen ignored this. “Even though there’s no projectile in this weapon, the safest way to handle a blank gun is to pretend that it’s real. I’m firing toward stage left, so I want no one stage left during the scene. There’s no need for anybody to be there. Costumes are stage right, props are stage right, all the actors make their final entrances from stage right. Okay? Nobody hangs around stage left.”

  “Listen up!” David said.

  Because so much of the bar’s back room would be visible through the open door, and also because David insisted, the set designer had furnished the room with a little shelf of yellowed paperbacks, a full ashtray, a filthy manila folder with the neglected paperwork of an ailing small business sticking out the sides, a hot plate with a tattered cord, a few cans of soup, a pair of gray socks with large holes in the toes hanging over the end of the cot. Inside the drawer of the rickety table, which not even the front row could see, half-empty matchbooks, chewed pencils, hoarded change, a tattered old Playboy, and a pocket sewing kit. It was the sewing kit that pierced Karen when she opened the drawer to look in. It seemed like her own lonely, unloved competence hidden in that scratched plastic box.

  Martin sat in Doc’s chair at Doc’s table; Karen stood to his side; the lighting instrument clamped to a pipe poured its hot light on them and threw their shadows on the closed window blind. Holding the Beretta with her trigger finger lightly balanced on the trigger guard, Karen pointed the gun. She stood to Martin’s right. Martin sat facing front; at the sound of the shot he would tumble sideways, to the left. David shouted to Karen to step inches this way or that way, angle her arm up or down. Karen’s arm was quivering and burning from being extended so long. She shouted to David that her arm would fall off and at last David said that it worked. One of the stagehands came out from the wings and taped around the chair’s legs, Martin’s feet, and Karen’s feet, and taped an X on the inside hidden wall of the set while Karen sighted down the barrel. If she and Martin and the chair all stayed inside their marks and she sighted at the X, the shadows ought to line up from every seat in the house. “Let’s do it!” called David, and Karen, setting the Beretta back on the table and rubbing her shoulder, went back out onstage, passing Sarah, who grabbed onto her hand.

  “You’re so good,” Sarah whispered when Karen looked at her questioningly.

  “Shoot it this time for real,” David said.

  “Somebody should tell them up front in the bar that we’re shooting a blank gun,” said Karen.

  A good idea, all agreed. Someone went.

  In the brief pause someone said, “It’s a good thing we’re out in the sticks where nobody can hear.”

  Someone else said, “In the sticks … no one can hear your blank gun.”

  Someone else said, “In space … no one can hear your bad jokes.”

  Then they were ready and began. For the first time, doing the scene, Karen felt a panic-pressure building inside, as if her rib cage was about to blow apart. Far away in the depths of a pit her mouth was speaking her lines but she couldn’t hear what she was saying, she didn’t know which line was next. She’d had bad dreams like this. She must have said them all; Martin/Doc “seized her in a violent embrace” and for the first time although they’d done this countless times she felt his body, scrawny and aged and hot with effort and forceful, and her own body bristled and rippled all over.

  Then they’d gone through the door, Karen pausing as the Girl inside the doorframe so that the audience, when they had one, would be able to see the resolve coming into her face like a bank of stormclouds. David had said that about the stormclouds, weeks ago. He’d said he wanted the audience to know that the Girl had decided, even though the audience didn’t know what the decision was. His comment had reminded Karen that David thought in metaphors. David had originally wanted to write his own plays and direct them, not direct plays that other people had written. Again Karen felt panic-pressure from the inside out, straining her ribs, and she didn’t have any idea whether she’d conveyed the stormcloud-of-decision while standing in the doorframe. She didn’t know whether she’d shut the door so that the window blind/screen was in place. She didn’t know whether she was standing inside her taped box with her arm at the correct height and angle while she sighted at the X sightlessly and, from somewhere outside her body, pulled the trigger, jerking back from the force and the noise which was so much louder and more startling than the noise of an actual gun. Martin fell sideways out of the chair like a sack of potatoes, and the lights blacked out. The gun fell out of Karen’s hand onto the floor.

  “Jesus!” said Martin from down on the floor. “Is that the gun you just dropped?” Karen felt she’d crashed back in her body the same way the gun had crashed onto the floor.

  “Yeah, sorry,” she said, snatching the gun off the floor as the lights came back up.

  “Let’s do it again with the quick-change!” called David, which meant, That was perfect, let’s keep the fuck going and finish.

  “I need to reload it to do it again,” Karen said. “I’m only loading one blank at a time. For safety.”

  Everyone stood around the props table watching as she opened the cylinder to confirm that the chamber was empty, loaded the new cartridge, pressed the cylinder back in the frame. Doing these things she’d done many times before and had total confidence doing Karen’s hands felt shaky and unruly and she wished they wouldn’t watch her so closely. She wasn’t performing fucking brain surgery. To distract attention, theirs and her own, Karen talked through the steps the way Richie had done. “You always have to confirm the cylinder is clear after each time you use it. Basic safety. Your finger should be nowhere near the trigger and nowhere near the trigger guard until you’re ready to shoot. Never point the gun at anyone, even if it’s unloaded. Never squeeze the trigger, even if it’s unloaded. The safest thing in our situation is if no one touches this blank gun but me. I’ll bring it to and from the show, I’ll move it to and from the props table, I’ll load it and clean it. No one else should touch it at all, even if they’re just trying to help. That’s how accidents happen.”

  Then Martin and Karen and the gun all returned to their marks. Karen as the Girl again stood with Martin as Doc on the stage with the lights blazing on them. They spoke their lines again. They did their seizing embrace again. Through the door, stormclouds, door closed, find the marks, pick u
p the gun. Martin clapped his hands over his ears.

  “What’s that?” David called from the house. “Why are you doing that? We can see it, man. Doc’s supposed to be waiting for death!”

  “It’s bloody loud, are you hoping that I should go deaf?”

  “I think he’s right,” Karen heard herself saying. “We’ve done it once and I know how it feels, let’s go back to ‘bang’ for the rest of rehearsal or we’ll all end up deaf.”

  David was unhappy with this. He came up onstage, opened the set door, and stood scowling at them. “You’re the safety expert. Seems to me like you should get used to shooting it for real in rehearsal. It’s gotta go perfectly in performance.”

  “I am used to it. It will go perfectly. We’ve got the angle, I’ve felt the recoil. It’s less safe to shoot the thing off every time we rehearse.”

  “You didn’t think so before.”

  “I hadn’t thought it all through.”

  “Well. You’re the one holding a gun.”

  “Then let’s take five so I can unload it again.”

  “For fuck’s sake!” David said.

  After that it mattered even more that the quick-change go smoothly. Karen remembered the quick changes she’d done years ago when they all were in school, the cold intimacy of pulling open Melanie’s zipper, yanking down her dress to a pool at her feet, pulling the doughnut of the new dress swiftly over her head and her arms while she stepped out of the old dress, dropping onto all fours to grab her feet one at a time, push them into her shoes while she did up her buttons, all breathlessly fast in the dark. It was all business, it was not sexy, you were not meant to feel excited or strange as you roughly handled someone else’s body and clothes as if they were a doll you didn’t love. Yet it was sexy, exciting, and strange, or maybe only Karen felt that way, back when their feelings were so sternly policed that you got in trouble if you didn’t feel one way on command and also in trouble if you felt another way that had not been commanded. And now it was Sarah grabbing hold of Karen’s body in the dark, tugging her jeans down and holding them flat to the floor so that Karen could quickly step out, Sarah casing Karen’s body in the tight dress, swiftly zipping it up with the flat of one palm running up Karen’s back so the zipper does not bite her skin. Shoes, bag, a tiny light-up compact that Sarah snaps open so Karen can put on lipstick. The lipstick transforms the waif-Girl into something sharper and harder when she reappears onstage minutes later. Sixty seconds and Karen has sprung to her bit of glow tape. They’ve done it, first try. Karen even has time for her heart rate to settle back down.