The Rehearsal

by Eleanor Catton

  “He said she looked good in her summer uniform, way back in the first term,” says first trombone as she empties her spit valve on to the carpet. “I was standing right there, as well.”

  It is a mark of the depth of their wounding that they are pretending they suspected it all along. Everything that they have seen and been told about love so far has been an inside perspective, and they are not prepared for the crashing weight of this exclusion. It dawns on them now how much they never saw and how little they were wanted, and with this dawning comes a painful reimagining of the self as peripheral, uninvited, and utterly minor.

  “He had this thing he did,” the percussionist is saying, “if they were lying in the dark together, if he was talking into the dark and he wasn’t sure whether she was smiling. He would make his forefingers into little calipers and he would keep reaching over to check the corners of her mouth. Sometimes he would lie on his side and he would keep his fingers there, just lightly, as they talked on and on into the dark. They used to laugh about it. It was a thing he did.”

  Bridget is in the corner, lifting her sax out of its gray furred cavity and fitting the mouthpiece together absently. Last week she bought a number of different reeds from different manufacturers to test, numbering each one with a tiny red numeral to remind her which is which. She removes one from its plastic sheath and checks the tiny inked number before screwing it tight. The reed is harder than she has been used to, and probably her tongue will bleed.

  “My gypsy girl,” says second trumpet. “That’s what he called her. My gypsy girl.”

  The bell rings. There is a vague flurry of chair-scraping and shuffling and they all aim their half-eaten sandwiches at the wastepaper bin and then settle into their concentric half-circle, ready for the conductor to arrive.

  “They got her to admit that it had been going on since last year,” says tenor sax. “She had to give a statement to the police and everything.”

  And then they are silent for a while, dwelling separately on the unhappy realization that they, above all others, are the ones who have been deceived.

  Wednesday

  “If you imagined yourself in French plaits and a pressed school kilt, playing ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ on tenor sax at the seventh-form prize-giving and standing coyly in a pool of yellow light, then I’m afraid you made the wrong choice.” The saxophone teacher’s fingernails are blood-red today, and gently tapping. “The saxophone does not speak that language. The saxophone speaks the language of the underground, the jaded melancholy language of the half-light—grimy and sexy and sweaty and hard. It is the language of orphans and bastards and whores.”

  Bridget stands with her sax limp in her hands like a wilted flower.

  “The saxophone is the cocaine of the woodwind family,” the sax teacher continues. “Saxophonists are admired because they are dangerous, because they have explored a darker, more sinister side of themselves. In your performance, Bridget, I see nothing grimy or sexy or sweaty or hard. Everything I see is scrubbed shiny pink and white, sedated and sanitized like a poodle at a fair.”

  “Okay,” Bridget says unhappily.

  Tap-tap goes the bloody fingernail on the side of the mug.

  “What do you think makes a good teacher, Bridget?”

  Bridget draws her lips in between her teeth as she thinks. “I guess talent,” she says lamely. “Being good at what you’re teaching.”

  “What else?”

  “I guess being patient.”

  “Shall I tell you what makes a good teacher?”

  “Okay.”

  “A good teacher,” the saxophone teacher says, “is somebody who awakes in you something that did not exist before. A good teacher changes you in a way that means you cannot go back even if you might want to. Now you can practice and learn the pattern of the notes and have good control over your instrument and you will be able to play that piece very competently, but until you and I can work together to challenge and awaken and change some part of you, competent is all that piece will ever be.”

  “I was just trying it out how Mrs. Critchley said,” Bridget blurts out. “She’s Mr. Saladin’s replacement. We had jazz band today.”

  The sax teacher narrows her eyes briefly, but all she says is, “Is that Jean Critchley?”

  “She’s Mr. Saladin’s replacement,” Bridget says again.

  “I’ve seen her play live. She plays trumpet.” The saxophone teacher is suddenly withdrawn, her voice cold and calm and careful, looking Bridget up and down as if she is seeking visible signs of treachery.

  “Why didn’t you apply?” says Bridget, her eyes widening with the thought.

  “I don’t like high schools,” says the saxophone teacher.

  “She doesn’t look like a Mrs. Jean Critchley. She has red glasses and she wears baggy tee-shirts with leggings and sneakers. First thing she said,” Bridget says, brightening now, “first thing she said was, All right, shut up so I can talk about myself. I’m the teacher who comes after the teacher who had the affair. Let’s blow it all out of the water now so we can get on and make some music and have some fun. And you can all relax right away. They made me promise not to have an affair with any of you.”

  Bridget blinks innocently at the saxophone teacher. She is good at voices.

  “Did anyone laugh?” the saxophone teacher says.

  “Oh, yeah,” says Bridget. “Yeah, everyone likes her a lot.”

  “So they laughed. They laughed at the sheer ridiculousness of it. The prospect that Mrs. Jean Critchley might seduce one of you, might draw any one of you toward her by subtle and insidious means, might push one of you against the music-cupboard door and press her cold cheek against yours so her lips are almost touching the feathered lobe of your ear. The prospect that one of you might want her, even, and pick her out as an object and a prize. That one of you might blush every time she looks at you, might stammer and stumble and take every opportunity to divert through the music block in the hope of brushing past her in the hall.”

  “Yeah,” Bridget says. “She blew it all out of the water, so we could get on and make some music and have some fun.”

  “So you got on and made some music and had some fun.”

  “Yeah,” Bridget says again.

  “And Mrs. Jean Critchley suggested that you play this piece like an ice-cream jingle.”

  “She didn’t say that.” Bridget senses she’s winning, in some obscure way, and draws herself up a little higher. “She just said, Sometimes it’s not about originality. Sometimes it’s just about having fun.”

  The saxophone teacher is frowning. Inside she asks: does she feel jealous? She reminds herself that Bridget is her least favorite student, the student she mocks most often, the student she would least like to be. She reminds herself that Bridget is lank and mousy, with a greasy bony face and a thin hookish nose and pale lashes that cause her to resemble a ferret or a stoat.

  She is jealous. She doesn’t like the idea of Mrs. Jean Critchley, who is jovial and flat footed and forever appealing to her students to just have fun. She doesn’t like the idea of Bridget having a basis for comparison, an occasion to see her, the saxophone teacher, in a new and different light. She doesn’t like it.

  “Let’s move on,” she says. “I think it’s time to try something new. Something a little harder, that will make you struggle a little more and re-establish which one of us is truly in control out of you and me. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Bridget says.

  “Let me find a Grade Eight piece,” the saxophone teacher says. “One that Mrs. Critchley won’t have any cause to comment on.”

  Friday

  Isolde falters after the first six bars.

  “I haven’t practiced,” she says. “I don’t have an excuse.”

  She stands there for a moment, her right hand splayed over the keys and damply clacking. The shifting tendons in her hand make her skin stretch white and purple.

  The sax teacher looks at her and decides not to fight
her. She moves over to the bookshelf and lifts the plastic hood off the record player. “Let me play you that recording, then,” she says. She selects a record from the pile and says, “Tell me what happened at school today.”

  “They wanted to cancel Sex Ed,” Isolde says gloomily. “In light of recent events. They took Miss Clark out into the hallway, and the principal was there and we could hear the whole thing. We’re not supposed to call it Sex Ed. We’re supposed to call it Health.”

  The saxophone teacher lowers the needle with a crackle and a low hiss. It’s Sonny Rollins playing “You Don’t Know What Love Is” on tenor sax. The record trembles like a leaf.

  “What is it that you learn in Health?” asks the saxophone teacher as they sit back to listen.

  “We learn about boys,” says Isolde in the same flat voice. “We put condoms on wooden poles. We learn how to unroll them so they won’t break. Miss Clark showed us how much they can stretch by putting a condom over her shoe.”

  Isolde lapses into silence for a moment, remembering Miss Clark struggling to stretch a condom over the toe of her sensible flat-soled shoe, hopping and red-faced and puffing with the effort. “There it goes!” she said triumphantly in the end, and wiggled her foot so they could all see. She said, “Never believe a boy who says it won’t fit. You say to him, I saw Miss Clark put a condom over her whole shoe.”

  The music is still playing. Isolde is only half-listening, looking out over the rooftops and the chimneys and the wires.

  “We don’t really learn much about girls,” she says. “Everything we learn about boys is all hands-on 3-D models and cartoons. When we learn about girls it’s always in cross-section, and they use diagrams rather than pictures. The stuff about boys is all ejaculations, mostly. The stuff about girls is just reproduction. Just eggs.”

  In truth the classes are patched and holey, hours of vague unhelpful glosses and line drawings and careful omissions which serve to cripple rather than assist. Most of the girls now lack a key definition in this new and halting lexicon of forbidden words, some slender dearth of understanding that will later humiliate them, confound them, expose them, because it is expected now that their knowledge is complete. They envisage rigid perpendicular erections and a perfect hairless trinity for the male genitals, groomed and gathered in a careful bouquet. They have not heard of the glossy sap that portends the rush of female drive. They know ovulate but not orgasm. They know bisexual but not blow. Their knowledge is like a newspaper article ripped down the middle so only half of it remains.

  “Is it useful?” asks the saxophone teacher. “Do you learn things you didn’t know before?”

  “We learned that you can only feel one thing at one time,” says Isolde. “You can feel excitement or you can feel fear but you can never feel both. We learned why beauty is so important: beauty is important because you can’t really defile something that is already ugly, and to defile is the ultimate goal of the sexual impulse. We learned that you can always say no.”

  The two of them sit in that self-conscious half-profile demanded by music-lesson etiquette. Facing each other squarely feels too familiar and standing side by side feels too formal, as if they are amateur actors onstage for the first time, fearful of turning their faces away from the auditorium lest their performance be lost. So they position themselves always at forty-five degrees, the angle of the professional actor who includes both the stage and the audience and holds in delicate balance that which is expressed and that which is concealed.

  The Sonny Rollins track has the thin gritty sound of an old recording.

  “You can take the record home if you think you’d find it inspiring,” the saxophone teacher says kindly. “I really think you’d suit playing tenor.”

  “We don’t have a record player,” Isolde says.

  FOUR

  October

  The gymnasium was not a gymnasium but a fluid space, a space that seemed to inhale and exhale and settle around the shapes and figures on the floor. There was a giant accordion made of steel that compressed the plastic bleachers against the wall, and dusty heavy drapes that could divide the space into thirds and quarters and fifths. The stage was formed of many chalky footprinted podiums that could be rearranged or stacked or upended or tiered, depending. Today the drapes were all pushed to the sides and the podiums stacked against the wall in a hasty barricade. The space was clean and full of light.

  “Mime is literal embodiment,” said the Head of Movement once the doors had closed. “To mime an object is to discover its weight and volume and thus its meaning.” He was weighing something in his hand as he spoke, something invisible and heavy. “If we occupy each other, we begin to truly understand each other,” he said. “The same is true for all things. Mime is a path to understanding.”

  He turned over whatever he was holding in his hand.

  Everyone was taut and straining and watchful, waiting for an opportunity to say something clever or profound or interesting that would set them apart from the other hopefuls and secure the approval of the tutor. Some of them were nodding slowly with their eyes narrowed to communicate insight and deep reflection. Some were waiting for the tutor to reference something they had a particular knowledge of, so they could snare him afterward and force a conversation. Stanley was sitting on the outer rim, alert and upright but sneaking careful sideways glances at the other hopefuls whenever he could.

  “The first and most important point,” the Head of Movement said, “is that you must start with a thing itself, not with an idea of a thing. I can see what I am holding in my hand. I can see its weight, its shape and its texture. It doesn’t matter if you can see it yet or not: the important thing is that I can.”

  They all strained to see the invisible thing he was holding in his hand. Every pair of eyes followed the Head of Movement as he moved slowly back and forth. He was barefoot, like all the tutors at the Institute, and when he took a step his foot rolled from the heel to the ball in a slow feline movement, lazy and deliberate at once. His feet were milky and lean.

  The Head of Movement said, “Many of us fear women. We are afraid of woman as woman, longing for her as virgin or as madonna or as whore. It is not by becoming a woman that we will address this fear. It is by becoming the things she touches, the spaces she moves through, the fractured gestures that are not signs in themselves but are nonetheless hers and thus a part of her. If we discover the weight of these small things, then she will appear not as an idea but as a life and a totality.”

  He paused at this, and ran his tongue over his bottom lip. The hopefuls shifted uncertainly, wondering whether they were supposed to argue, and for a moment nobody spoke.

  Stanley had gone to an all-boys high school and he felt the presence of the girls in the group acutely. They studded his peripheral vision like scattered diamonds, but when he looked around the room his gaze passed casually over them, in the same way that he might self-consciously pass over a cripple or a drunk and pretend not to notice, pretend not to flinch. He waited uncomfortably for one of the girls to say something, maybe even to object. He looked at the floor.

  “I don’t fear women,” one of the boys called out at last, and there was a ripple of relieved laughter.

  The Head of Movement nodded. “Stand up,” he said. “I am going to tell you a little about yourself.” He folded his arms across his chest suddenly, forgetting about the invisible thing that he had been holding in his hand, and the invisible thing disappeared.

  The boy got to his feet. He was thin and freckled, his rib cage peaking a little at his sternum and his hip bones thrusting out above the tight gathered waistband of his tracksuit pants. His shoulders and ankles and knees all looked a little too large, like he was a paper figure held together at the joints with brass pivot pins.

  “Go for a walk,” the Head of Movement said. “Go on. Walk around for a while.”

  The boy started walking. The Head of Movement watched him in silence for an entire circuit of the gymnasium, following him with
his eyes, his arms folded and his face still. When the boy had lapped the gymnasium completely, the Head of Movement fell into step behind him and began to imitate him. He withdrew like a tortoise into himself, shoving his chest out and his shoulder blades together, keeping his upper body rigid while he walked so his arms fell awkwardly from his shoulders, and paddling with each step as if he were walking underwater. They walked in tandem in this way for a while, the boy looking unhappily over his shoulder and unhappily sideways at the other hopefuls watching from the floor, newly conscious of his big feet and his peaked chest and his stiff paddling arms.

  “You may stop now,” the Head of Movement said finally. “Thank you.” He turned to the group. “Can someone please tell me something about my performance of this young man’s walk,” he said.

  The hopefuls shifted awkwardly but nobody spoke.

  “My performance was a parody,” the Head of Movement said after a long pause. “It could only ever be a parody because I do not know this young man. I am old and comfortable and I don’t really understand his nervousness, or his uncertainty, or his hope. I cannot possibly understand these things just by watching him walk for fifteen seconds. In parodying this young man I disperse all possible complexity. I reduce him and I insult him. Your performances will be insulting too if you do not truly understand what you are pretending to be.”

  The gymnasium was very quiet. The Head of Movement said, “You cannot mime what you don’t understand. You cannot penetrate death, or God, or a woman. To attempt any of these things is to aim for sincerity rather than truth. Sincerity is not enough for students of this Institute. Sincerity is a word for hawkers and salesmen and hacks. Sincerity is a device, and we do not deal in devices here.

  “Mime,” he said. “We will begin very simply. Everybody up.”