The Rehearsal: A Novel

by Eleanor Catton

  The secrets of the auditorium were revealed to the first-years in the second week of the school year. They filed silently through the passages, inspected and tested the trap, hoisted themselves up into the flies, and dropped, awkward and untrusting, both hands clutching at the flying harness and craning nervously to check the winch. They walked across the stippled bridge that connected the fly-floors, looking down at the stage far below and reaching out to touch the thick braided cables that ran back and forth. The flies were at least twice the height of the proscenium arch, and the Head of Acting showed them how an entire panel of scenery could be flown up into the space above the stage to hang there, ready and waiting for the cue to drop. He activated the lift in the orchestra pit and they watched the floor of the pit rise up to meet the level of the stage. He showed them the heavy motorized chain underneath the false stage floor that activated the revolve, and then he switched the revolve on and they let themselves be carried around in silent powerful orbit, standing braced like stiff-legged pawns as the red mouth of the auditorium flashed by again and again.

  The Head of Lighting came forward and showed them the templates that could turn light into dappled water and wind, the gauzes that gave the illusion of distance, the lights that could make you beautiful or villainous or old, and the followspot with its thick steel handle that could track an actor around the stage. He showed them how to make sunlight and moonlight and counterfeit flames. He showed them how to turn indoors into outdoors and back again.

  They stood underneath the steel lighting rig and looked up at the heavy black instruments hanging like a cloud of bats from the pipes, the black barn-doors that shuttered and blinkered the bulbs all folded and unfolded like countless bat-wing membranes settling in sleep. The instruments were each clamped to the rig with a steel yoke which allowed the shuttered beam to be directed anywhere over the stage: the Head of Lighting demonstrated, slipping colored gels expertly in and out of the gel frame holder and pulling the yokes to and fro. He straddled the top of his dented ladder with his ankles hooked around the topmost steps to hold him steady, squinting down at them and plucking at his brown beard with his free hand as he spoke.

  The first-years were then shown the lesser secrets: the door-slam, a little wooden box with a heavy sliding bolt that could simulate door-slamming sounds from backstage, and the rain box, a little box filled with dried peas for simulating rain-sounds—“Before everything was digitalized,” the Head of Acting said with a nostalgic gravity, as he shook the box and filled the air with the sound of gentle drumming rain. He showed them up close how the false perspective of the painted flats contrived to make the stage area bigger than it actually was. He showed them the grooves and runnels into which the flats could slip, the ancient pulley that hauled at the red curtain, and the curved cyclorama at the back of the stage that gave the space a never-ending vastness, as if it went back and back forever.

  “The auditorium is a sacred space,” the Head of Acting said at last, looking gravely at them as they stood in the middle of the flooded stage and breathed in the sweet dusty smell of hot lights and generated fog. “We do not hold classes in here. It is only when we come to dress rehearsal that you are allowed to use this space. You may not come in here alone.”

  The first-years all nodded. Stanley was standing at the back of the group, still craning upward into the vast blackness of the flies and trying to remember everything they had been shown. He was a little in awe of the Head of Acting, but underneath it all he wasn’t sure he liked the man very much. There was something cold and pulsing about his manner that reminded Stanley of a lizard or a frog. He had never touched the Head of Acting’s ropy liver-spotted hands, but in his mind he imagined them to be cold and moist and snatching.

  They all waited for the Head of Acting to say more, but he just drew his heels together and spread his arm to gesture them off the stage, signaling that the tour had come to a close.

  The first-years filed quietly past him and he watched them go, down the wheeled aluminum steps into the stalls, up the aisle past the rows and rows, and finally out into the marble light of the foyer. When they were gone he moved to the stage manager’s cubicle to kill the lights. He stood with his hand on the cool gray lever, and out of habit cleared his throat and called out a warning up into the flies: “Going dark.”

  November

  Stanley walked out of his final audition feeling light-headed. He paused at the fountain in the foyer to steady himself and gripped the basin with both hands. He breathed quietly for a moment, looking past the porcelain masks into the foggy middle-distance of a recent memory, and after a moment he realized he was being observed. He straightened and gave the spectator a rueful sort of smile. She was an older woman, maybe the secretary, framed like a news-anchor behind the high administration desk in the foyer and watching him with her cheek propped upon her palm.

  “You’ll be wishing you brought a hip flask,” she said. “Just had your audition, I guess.”

  “Does everybody look like this?” Stanley said, emphasizing his already crippled posture with a little jerk of his spine and holding his hands limp. The woman laughed.

  “More or less,” she said. “You have to watch the ones who look too happy. In my experience the ones who look too confident afterwards are the ones who don’t usually get in.”

  “Oh,” Stanley said, drawing himself up slightly.

  “I suppose it’s your first time auditioning,” the woman said. “Some kids try out three, four, five times. It makes you think what they’re doing with their lives in the meantime, just waiting all those years to finally get in.”

  “Yeah,” said Stanley. “Yeah, wow. It is my first time.”

  “They didn’t shake you up too much?” the woman said. “They can be quite mean, in the beginning. To break you in.”

  She seemed bored, sitting there with her head on her hand in the echoing cavern of the foyer. All the surfaces were bare and clean, and the car park was empty through the high wall of glass.

  “Nothing too painful,” Stanley said. “Nothing I didn’t deserve, probably.”

  The woman laughed. Stanley watched her laugh. It struck him for the very first time that there were qualities of beauty that were unique to women, qualities that teenage girls could not possess: kindness lines around the eyes and mouth, a certain settling of the body, a weariness of poise and pose that was indefinably sexual, like the old glamour of a dusty taffeta dress or a piece of costume jewelery with a rusted clasp. The thought had not occurred to him before. He had supposed (though never truly consciously) that a woman was only attractive insofar as she resembled a girl; that her attractiveness fell away, by degrees, through her twenties and thirties until it was buried by middle age; that the qualities that women sought were always the qualities they once had, a backward striving that was ultimately doomed to fail. He had supposed that men slept with women their own age only because they could not snare anybody younger, or because they were still married to the sweetheart of their youth; he had not supposed that weary, veined and pear-shaped women were attractive in and for themselves—they were a second-best, he had imagined, a consolation prize. Now, with a weak stirring in the nerve-wracked cavity of his chest, he saw this woman through a different lens.

  She was wearing makeup, a thin line of black behind the lashes of her upper eyelid that must have been straight and uniform when she stretched her eyelid out flat to apply the liner, but when she released the skin to blink and appraise herself the line had puckered, giving her a blurred, slightly clownish look that made Stanley think of an old and kindly whore. As she smiled he saw that her incisor was rimmed with the gunmetal gray of an ancient filling. The skin on the back of her hands was loose enough to frame the tendons and the veins, and her knuckles were pouchy whorls of white. A manufactured tan on her collarbone and on the V-shaped glimpse between her breasts gave the skin a fibrous look: the wrinkle-weave traveled both horizontally and vertically so the skin was soft and infinitely lined, like wo
rn suede.

  For the first time in his life Stanley saw that a woman was not simply a failed and hopelessly outmoded girl. She was a different creature entirely from the glossed and honeyed girls in the audition room: those girls, Stanley thought, could never play this woman until the day they became her, and from that day onward they could never play a girl.

  “You’re right about the hip flask,” he said. “I reckon I’ll walk out of here and straight into the pub.”

  “Have one for me,” the woman said. “And good luck. If luck counts for anything.”

  Stanley passed through the double doors and out into the drowsy warmth of the late afternoon. As he turned the corner and left the gabled heights of the Institute behind, he thought to himself that he was probably the twentieth student that day to have exited the audition room, passed through the foyer, walked by the administration desk and exchanged words with the secretary before leaving the building. He wondered what she had said to the others, and how she had said it, and what they had thought when they looked her in the eye.

  October

  “Let’s see some chemistry,” the Head of Acting said, and nodded for them both to begin.

  “I met him last week on the damp satin dance floor at the inter-school ball,” she said. The words tumbled out of her too quick, too early, before she had swallowed her nervousness and found her rhythm. “Everyone was balled up in a tight knot near the stage, forming a human noose around the girl and the boy in the middle. It’s so the teachers can’t see in. From the outside it looks horrible, all tight and pushing and pushing, like they’re trying to watch a cock fight or a captured bear. They all take turns in the noose. I was down the other end, just watching, and he walked up to me and asked me very quietly if I wanted a drink.”

  She was sitting on the edge of the podium, her ankles hooked over each other, kicking out her legs in an idle, gentle way so her heels bounced and bounced. Stanley was standing a little way off with his hands in his pockets, watching her calmly.

  “Soon I will walk you home in the bluish dark and ask if your hands are cold just for a reason to touch you,” Stanley said.

  “He asked me if I wanted a drink,” the girl said again. She wasn’t looking at him. She had found her rhythm now, and her eyes were flashing. “I thought that meant he had some alcohol so I said, Yes. We’re breath-tested now, at the door before we walk in, we have to say our name and our address, and always there’s that little spasm of fear that you feel, coming out of nowhere, in case it comes up positive. Some of the boys take cameras in, just so they can fill empty film canisters with rum and drink it once they’re inside. Or they strap hip flasks to the inside of their legs. Most of them just bring pills. I thought he meant he had some alcohol so I said, Yes. He disappeared.”

  “Even as I saw you I was disappointed,” Stanley said. “Can anything come of such an ordinary beginning? I asked myself. I looked at you and I thought of all the things you aren’t. Even before I spoke to you I was angry at you for not being more than you are.”

  “He came back,” the girl said, “and I almost laughed. He had gone and bought us both a Coke, still all dewy and frosted from the fridge behind the bar, and he opened mine up for me with this quiet little flush of pride, like he was some black-and-white hero lighting my cigarette and fixing my drink just the way I like it. We talked for a while about leaving school and going to university and he told me he wanted to be an actor, and we watched the noose for a while.”

  “I didn’t like you,” Stanley said. “I didn’t like you for detaining me at this never-ending stage of nervous silence and nothing-talk and worry. I didn’t want what you were offering. I stayed because I was angry and I wanted to show you that I thought that you were boring. I wanted to make you feel boring.”

  The Head of Acting was watching them impassively. Stanley could see him out of the corner of his eye, holding his head very still.

  “I’d already decided,” the girl said. “He wouldn’t have known that. As soon as I saw him I decided the way it was going to be. He never had a chance.”

  November

  “Why do you want to be an actor, my boy?” Stanley’s father asked. The capillaries were standing out in his cheeks in bold little threads. Stanley could tell he was drunk only by the way he ducked his head slightly every time he blinked.

  “They asked me that in my audition,” he said. He watched his father refill his wineglass, and suddenly didn’t feel like being honest. “I just want to have fun with it, I guess.”

  “Not in it for fame and fortune?”

  “Oh,” Stanley said, watching as his father reached across the table and emptied the bottle into his own glass. “No. It’s more of a… no. I just want to have fun.”

  “Good man,” said Stanley’s father. “I’ve got a joke you might like.”

  “Yeah?” Stanley said. This was his least favorite part of the evening. He tried to read his father’s wristwatch from across the table. They had already ordered dessert, tiny splashes of cream and color on vast white plates, and soon his father would be hailing a pair of taxis and slipping fifty dollars into his breast pocket and clapping him on the shoulder and walking away. Outside the street was slick and oily with rain.

  “What’s the most common cause of pedophilia in this country?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sexy kids.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “It’s good, eh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I got it off a client. Have I told you about him? The one with the angel voices. You’ll love this, Stanley. This guy is honestly something else.”

  Stanley sometimes tried to imagine what it would be like to live in the same house as his father, to see him every day, to walk past him dozing on the couch or brushing his teeth or squinting into the fridge. Their yearly outing was always at a different restaurant, and Stanley could catalog his relationship with his father in a string of names: The Empire Room, The Setting Sun, Federico’s, La Vista. Sometimes his father rang him on the telephone, but the two-second delay of the international line made him sound distant and distracted and Stanley always worried he was talking too little or too much.

  “You were an accident,” was how his father explained it many restaurants ago. “Our relationship was casual, respectful, and very brief. She found out she was pregnant and decided to keep you, even though my practice was moving to England and it was likely I’d never come back. I said I would keep in touch and help out wherever I could. And I saved your life—she was going to call you Gerald. I stepped in.”

  “Thanks,” Stanley said.

  “No problem,” said his father, waving a piece of squid. “But believe me, sperm is a serious business.”

  Stanley looked at him now, drunk and flamboyant and mischievous and laughing at his own story. He was a little afraid of his father. He was afraid of the way the man delivered his opinion, afraid of the crafty watchful antagonism that left Stanley uncertain whether he was meant to argue or agree. His million-dollar insurance policy idea was a typical trap, a raw slice of bloody bait laid out with a flourish and a double-crossing smile. Did his father expect him to second-guess the idea? Was he supposed to follow through with it, or admonish his father for being macabre and coarse? Stanley didn’t know. He reached into his pocket and touched the edge of the glossy brochure from the Institute.

  “Well, I think that’s us,” his father said, returning his glass to the table and reaching up to smooth his lapel with his hand. “This time next year, my boy, you will have become a sensitive and feeling soul.”

  November

  “Tell us about yourself, Stanley,” said the Head of Acting. He made an abrupt gesture with his hand. “Anything. Doesn’t have to be relevant.”

  Stanley shifted his weight to the other leg. His heart was thumping in his rib cage. The panel was sitting against a wall of high windows so their faces were all in shadow and Stanley had to squint against the glare.

  “I don’t
know whether I’m any good at feeling things,” he said. His voice was tiny in the vast space. “Nothing big has happened to me yet. Nobody has died, nothing terrible has happened, I’ve never really been in love or anything. In a funny way I’m kind of looking forward to something terrible happening, just so I can see what it’s like.”

  “Go on,” said the Head of Acting when Stanley faltered.

  “I was always a bit jealous of people who had real tragedy in their lives,” he said. “It gave them something to feed on. I felt like I had nothing. It’s not like I want anyone in my family to die, I just want something to overcome. I want a challenge. I think I’m ready for it.”

  He was trying to look at them all equally.

  “In high school I kind of tried things on,” he said, “just to see what it was like. Even when I got mad or upset or had a fight with someone, it was like I was just trying it on, just to see how far I could push it. There’s always this little part of me that’s not mad, that stays sort of calm and interested and amused.”