Trust Exercise

by Susan Choi

  For all the time and money she’d spent anticipating this event, she’d less formed a plan than fostered a hope, that if she brought herself here, something would happen. Someone—not Claire—would say something, or do something, or be something, and then Claire would know what to say, do, and be. This hope of Claire’s, if it could even be called that, was characteristically passive and uncertain. As usual, her Listener had undermined her efforts to not be this way by praising her as “courageous and determined” in “creating conditions for change.” The few feeble ways she’d imagined creating conditions for change she gave up on arrival. The office, which she’d known was a long shot but at least gave her someplace to start, wasn’t open. The crowd, which she had expected to resemble an audience at the movies—a couple hundred people sitting still, unsuspectingly allowing themselves to be closely examined—turned out to be a shape-shifting monster with no head or tail, a surging tide of thousands. Worst of all, her goal was still unclear. Even if she homed in somehow, using instinct or magic, what then would she do? Claire remembered the single time she’d broached the idea to her mother, years ago when she’d just started college. Her mother had neither scolded nor cried, as Claire had no reason to think that she would. But their closeness ensured that Claire would feel the vibration of sadness her mother failed to hide. “I always knew you’d want to know, and you should,” her mother had said in a false, strident voice. “Dad and I can’t be everything to you.” “But you are,” Claire had argued, as if the whole discredited idea had been her mother’s to start with. Claire’s hold on the idea had been so tenuous already that she’d been glad, at that moment, for the chance to abjure it. Her parents being everything to her at least was an idea that was robustly, reassuringly true. Claire’s parents had prized her so much, tried so hard, organized their lives so completely around her, that the one thing they’d failed to give her was the reason she craved something more—something so potent, singular, and undefined that Claire was embarrassed to even share with a Listener she paid by the hour her private name for it. The Look: a grail that for all the time Claire spent imagining it, she could still neither see nor describe. Who delivered the Look, what exactly they saw Looking at her, were the urgent details Claire would learn only when the Look happened. She was, however, sure of how it would feel: the electric shock of being recognized, of being herself the object of a quest, the one thing someone else had been missing.

  Instead Claire was plunged in this agoraphobe’s nightmare where she lingered not courageously, as her Listener might claim, but because it was impossible to leave. The crowd groaned along like a glacier carrying with it all the squealing and hugging and crying people and her, until the force of it squeezed her into a seat. There the man next to her—he was maybe forty or thirty-five or fifty, she was terrible at guessing people’s ages who were older or younger than her—talked to her with the assumption that she belonged there, saying Wasn’t it so terrible, but Wasn’t this incredible, and Had she heard who was going to be there, until at last he was interrupted by the lights going down and a screen gliding out of the ceiling and the audience roaring like the thing was a fucking rock concert. Projected on the screen, white on black, ROBERT LORD, 1938–2013.

  A very highly produced tribute played, managing to take low-quality video and photos and make an asset of how low their quality was. The emotion in the room grew more audible the queasier the colors and the worse the resolution. By the time it was the early 1980s you could barely tell the gender or race or age of anyone in the murky black-and-white photos while the occasional image in color was almost unbearably elegiac, as if not only Robert Lord had expired but also whatever kind of special sunshine had once shone on his students, whatever better air they had once had to breathe. Everyone looked so young and beautiful and glad, although perhaps this was just Claire’s anxiety racing to extract the possibility from each image before it dissolved to the next. At first certain images had elicited particular explosions of applause or cries of recognition but soon enough every single image elicited explosions of applause and cries of recognition until continuous full-throated yelling and continuous flesh-numbing slapping of palms seemed required. Claire must have looked as stricken and enraptured as everyone else. She hadn’t anticipated this additional realm of possibility, photo after photo of Robert Lord midstride amid a changing crowd of raptly attentive kids in dance togs or ridiculous costumes or holding play scripts in front of their faces. But Robert Lord thoughtfully stroking his beard, or retrieving his glasses from the top of his head, or sitting backward on a chair, or demonstrating a dance step, or forming his mouth in an elongated O as a youngish, then less young, then older, then oldish, then decidedly old man with hard creases cut from his nostrils to the ends of his mouth was not what Claire stared at devouringly. What Claire was staring at, her eyeballs burning with the effort, was the ever-changing constellation of kids clustered around Robert Lord. Claire meant to see to the heart of every long-ago young ancient face. She’d had the irrational conviction that she’d never see the video again, that this opportunity was passing so swiftly that if she so much as let herself blink she would miss it. Of course, she’s rewatched the whole thing several times on her laptop, not seeing anything more than she did the first time. The lights came back up and the endless testimonials and live performances began. None of the speakers set off her alarms but even before she’d arrived she had already felt in her gut that it wouldn’t be one of the speakers but a spectator, if one of these thousands at all. She toggled back and forth between absolute doubt and absolute certainty that it had to be one of these thousands. This event was a net that had dredged up possibilities from far and wide and deep into the past—if not here and now, where and when? Claire swiveled her gaze around, trying to scan every face in the crowd. But the crowd was so enormous it seemed not even made out of faces. It was a carpet of life that did not even have individual threads. Not even counting the excluded throng who’d had to settle for the simulcast, crammed in the lobby.

  Finally, the current principal, a slim, sleek woman in a sleeveless black sheath, took the stage a second time. “As our cherished alumni community, most of you already know that this beautiful building expresses so much of Bob’s vision. Working with our architects and designers, as well as with the Lewis Family Foundation, Bob was hands-on every step of the way, and it is difficult for all of us to lose him just on the brink of this amazing new phase of our school’s history.” Something in her comment had reversed the current and Claire realized that noises in the din she’d thought were hooting or cheering were actually booing. Seeming unsurprised the woman brought her face flush to the mic and her voice boomed out, drowning the others. “The conversation around the Lewis Family Foundation’s bequest, and around naming rights, has engaged our community in a lastingly valuable way. Debate and dissent are the hallmarks of any inclusive community.”

  “Bob would have spared us the bullshit!” a male voice called out, and not just Claire’s head but every other swiveled to take in the densely packed tiers of the grandiose space, trying to pick out the heckler.

  “And though we can never say that Bob’s death has a silver lining,” the principal shouted determinedly in her mic, “I think I speak not merely for our school administration, and the Lewis Family Foundation, but for all our community when I say how delighted I am that our school’s new name, at the suggestion of the Lewis family themselves, will not be the Lewis School for the Arts, as originally planned, but the Robert Lord School for the Arts.” In the pandemonium of approbation that followed, Claire could barely hear what her seatmate bent close to tell her although his hot breath crawled over her ear.

  “Bob would have fucking despised that. Being used as political cover. Y’know?” Claire nodded energetically, and kept nodding energetically as the crowd-glacier slowly reversed direction, first squeezing her away from her seatmate, who seemed to be working up to ask for her number although he had to be, she was now sure, at least twenty years
older than she was; then squeezing her through the lobby past enormous images of Robert Lord hung from filaments high in the vault of the cathedral-like space that would bear his name; and finally squeezing her back through the doors, where she might have stopped and reflected but the crowd’s force did not stop, it kept pushing her, down the sidewalk and across the parking lot until she was decisively at its far margins and then no part of it at all.

  * * *

  SHE’D VISITED THE old building almost three years before, on a day in June. She’d chosen the date carefully. She knew as well as anyone who’s ever gone to school that June is the victory lap, with everybody killing time. She’d called ahead for an appointment. She’d said she had questions about the program and repeated herself when the admin in the office asked Was she a prospective student or parent? A member of the press? Acquainted with Mr. Lord? Mr. Lord was very busy.

  “I have questions about the program,” she’d repeated. She kept repeating the same six words not out of any courage but because she was so nervous she got stuck in the rut of the phrase. The admin put her on hold for so long that the line defaulted back to ringing again. The different voice that answered seemed completely unaware that Claire had not called that moment, but had been on hold for perhaps fifteen minutes. “Oh, of course, dear,” the second voice said, and gave Claire an appointment, twelve twenty-five on a Friday, presumably lunch hour.

  Before the appointment she hadn’t known what kind of man he was. She hadn’t known he was a local celebrity; she hadn’t even known his name. She’d simply needed the head of the program for her own surely uncommon reasons. When the first admin had put up resistance, Claire had not been surprised because she always felt, when she called anyone, that she had to be bothering them. But arriving at the building she understood she’d accidentally been bold enough to ask for its king.

  The women in the office traded skeptical looks when Claire said, “I’m here to see Mr. Lord. I have an appointment.”

  “You have an appointment?”

  “At twelve twenty-five.”

  “Did you make it with one of us?”

  “I’m not sure. I called—”

  “What’s the name of the person you spoke to?”

  “I didn’t ask—”

  “Did she sound like an older woman?” Claire would have guessed both of these women were fifty or sixty or more. “It must have been Velva,” one said to the other with a roll of her eyes. “I’ll need to call Mr. Lord to make sure he’s here in the building,” she said reproachfully to Claire. “It’s his lunch hour and he’s very busy.”

  To hide her flushed face Claire turned to a mosaic of photos encrusting the wall. Young people played trumpet, declaimed, did the splits in midair. Most wore haircuts and clothes of the past. Behind her Claire heard the woman murmuring into the phone and then calling, “Julie!” A bare-midriffed girl appeared and received from the woman a molded plastic comedy-tragedy mask with the word “Visitor” plastered on it in sequins. “Julie will walk you to Mr. Lord’s office,” the woman said, turning back to her screen.

  The girl’s sneakers beneath her snug jeans landed flawlessly heel-to-toe as if on a tightrope. After many turns they stopped in front of a just-ajar door and the girl gave Claire the comedy-tragedy mask. “You’re supposed to return this to the office when your visit is over. Do you want me to knock for you?” Now that she’d stopped, Claire could see the girl was very beautiful. Her natural makeup and lovely winged brows appeared professional, the look of an off-duty starlet.

  “That’s all right,” Claire said. “I’ll do the knocking.”

  “Have you met him before?”

  “No.”

  “Are you interviewing him or something?”

  “Yes,” Claire decided to say.

  “That’s awesome,” the girl said, craning her neck very slightly to peer through the crack of the door.

  “Thanks for showing me the way,” Claire said and waited until finally the girl went catwalking back down the hall.

  “You’re the Claire Campbell who wanted to see me? I’d started to think they had lost you,” he said as he pulled the door open. He shoved it fully closed as soon as she stepped in, turning back toward his desk without shaking hands or otherwise introducing himself. There was a visitor’s chair and she perched on its edge while he bent himself into his own chair, removed a frail pair of glasses from the top of his anvil-like head, folded the glasses, and laid them on his desk. He was not what she’d expected. She would never have admitted it aloud but she’d expected a fey man in a bow tie with a Hello, Dolly! poster framed on his wall. Not this granite-hewn, glowering man with dramatic black streaks in his white, lupine beard. Claire stared at his large, shapely knuckles. She was always surprised to encounter such actually masculine men, with their sword-tip eyes and their brooding brows and, when old, their somehow all the more menacing physical diminishments, as if their power hadn’t been lost but just put in reserve.

  “So.” He picked up a pink While You Were Out slip from a pile on his desk, looked at it, and put it back down, without putting his glasses back on. A tic? A performance? “You had questions about our program.” This was the moment Claire had mentally rehearsed so many times: not the stuttering phone call to make the appointment, nor the unintended rivalry at the threshold with bare-midriffed Julie, but this moment of belated disclosure, to this man she’d expected to be so unlike he was. Even more than information she’d expected sympathy. Kindly interest or as much as delight at the prospect of helping her. Why had she thought that would happen? Because she’d thought he’d be gay, and therefore sensitive?

  “They’re not exactly questions about your program. I have questions about someone I think was enrolled in it.”

  “And who might that have been?”

  Claire had worked long and hard on a response to this anticipated question but now the words disappeared from her mind. Instead she fumblingly took out the folder and held out the sheet. He let her keep proffering it while he slowly unfolded the glasses again, put them on, and unfolded a Look at her over their tops. “You’d like me to read this?” he asked, still not taking it.

  “That would be great, if you could. I think it’ll be a lot more clear than me.”

  “Are you saying your parents misnamed you?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Claire. They named you Claire,” he repeated as she stared dumbstruck at him. She couldn’t fathom how he already knew. That she’d had first one name, then another—but then she saw he didn’t know this. She’d misconstrued him, but it was too late to stop the sensation of having been seen, which instead of being the recognition she always desired took the unpleasant form of a wave of heat under her clothes.

  “‘Claire’ means ‘clear,’” he was suffering to explain to her.

  “Right! No, I know that. I misunderstood you.”

  He let fall one last very protracted Look at her over the tops of his glasses before he took the sheet and read the words she knew by heart.

  Baby Evangeline, as she was known in this loving Christian environment where she spent her first months, was born January 1985 to a healthy Christian mother, Caucasian, age sixteen years. Birth mother’s heritage on the maternal side Scotch-Irish, many generations in this region, on the paternal side German, also many generations in this region. Mother’s mother attended secretarial school, mother’s father vocational school, no college attendance in the family to date. Growing up, mother was a healthy active girl showing normal development. Church attendance on and off due to divorce but Christian principles prevailing in both homes. Showed an early aptitude for acting and dancing and was accepted in the region’s leading school for these arts; described herself, at the time of her residence with us, as an aspiring actress. Pregnancy normal, carried baby to full term and normal delivery. Nothing known of the father apart from Caucasian and Christian, good health.

  He took much longer to look up from the sheet than it would take even a ver
y slow reader to read it. At last he asked, “And what am I supposed to glean from this story?”

  “‘The region’s leading school for the arts’: that’s this school.”

  “Is it? It’s not even clear from this scant paragraph what the region is that it refers to.”

  “It’s this region.”

  “Is it?” He made to pore over the sheet again, even running his finger down each of the lines.

  “That’s just an excerpt from my file.” Claire caught herself twisting her hair. “What region it is—the rest of the file makes that perfectly clear.”

  “Makes it perfectly Claire.”

  “Yes.” She tried to smile. Perhaps that was what he was after, less solemnity on her part, more banter. Already the appointment had become about what he was after. Remotely Claire remembered it was she who was after something. “The question isn’t what region it is or even what school it is, because I know it’s this school—there’s no other school that it could be,” she tried. “The question is, which student was it—of yours. Which student of yours was my birth mother.”