“Do you love him?”
“Yes.” Then, unnerved by her certainty, “I mean, maybe. I think.”
“Have you told him how you feel?”
“How could I?”
Acting is: fidelity to authentic emotion, under imagined circumstances. Fidelity to authentic emotion is: standing up for your feelings. Is this not the one thing, the one thing, he has tried to teach them? At first she thinks he’s barked out of anger, then grasps that he’s laughing. Perhaps he is laughing at her, but at least he’s not angry. “God,” he says, and even in the sanctum of his office his laugh is a stage laugh, artillery fire. “Thank you. I forget sometimes: it’s a process. And, you know, it never ends. That’s the beauty of it.”
She doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but once she’s cleaned herself up yet again with the box of Kleenex, she puts on her wise, weary face. “So it is,” she agrees.
“What about your mother?”
“What about her?”
“How are you getting along?”
“I don’t know. Not that bad. Not that well. Even when we’re not fighting we don’t really talk.”
“She drives you to work on the weekend. You must talk in the car.”
“Not really. It’s so early in the morning. We just get in the car and drive there.”
“I think the bakery job is too much. You should be sleeping on the weekend. Having fun.”
“I need the job,” she says tersely, because Mr. Kingsley is as unlikely as her mother to sympathize with her implacable pursuit of a car. She’s unaware that her tone might suggest the brusque pride of the abjectly poor, particularly when paired with her tatty punk wardrobe. She does resent the absence in her life of a pale blue Karmann Ghia convertible, but she knows she’s not poor. Not rich, certainly, in the little two-bedroom apartment behind the chalk X with her mother’s long-serving Toyota. But not poor.
He is silent a moment, thoughtful. “You and David come from very different worlds.”
“How do you mean?”
“David comes from a world of privilege.”
She doesn’t wonder how he knows this, or whether he’s guessed. “I suppose more than me.”
“He’s not working.”
“No. He doesn’t have to. When he turns sixteen, his mother and Philip will buy him a car.”
“Who’s Philip?”
“His stepfather.”
“Ah. Is that a recent thing?”
“It can’t be that recent. His mom and Philip have a two-year-old baby.”
“So David’s the big brother,” Mr. Kingsley says, smiling.
She smiles also, to designate David this way. “He already was. He’s the oldest from his mother’s first marriage. Then his mother left his father for Philip, David thinks because Philip had money. David’s real dad never had any money. David says his parents, his mom and real dad, burned his childhood house down to collect the insurance. So in that sense, originally, he’s not from such a privileged background,” she concludes, overwhelmed by her flood of disclosures.
But Mr. Kingsley does not judge her craving to talk about David. He does not judge her breathless uncertainty, now that she’s stopped. He reaches out, across the corner of his desk, and takes her hand. “You got to know each other,” he observes. She nods mutely, all fluency diverted again from her tongue to her eyes.
That night when Joelle drops her off, after ten, her mother’s at the kitchen table in her robe. Usually by this hour she’s behind the closed door of her bedroom. Her mother’s brown hair, streaked with kinky white strands, hangs down loose to her shoulders. She’s wearing men’s athletic socks on her feet. “Your teacher called,” she says.
“Who?”
“Mr. Kingsley.”
“Mr. Kingsley called here? Why?” Some terrified animal group—a quad of quail? a mess of mice?—explodes into flight inside Sarah’s rib cage.
“I have no idea why. I know his stated reason. He called to ask about your bakery job. He asked if I could possibly let you stop doing it, for your health and well-being. He seemed to think that I force you to do it and keep all your earnings.”
“I never said that to him!”
“I told him I don’t have the slightest control over how you spend your time, at the bakery or anywhere else. I’d like to know what made him feel entitled to call me about it.”
“I don’t know, Mom.”
“I’d be very happy if you quit that job, and I could quit driving you there at five thirty both weekend mornings, but you’re so determined to buy your own car, you’re so convinced that not owning a car at the age of fifteen is some sort of awful deprivation, you’ve somehow convinced me I’d be mistreating you by not giving you rides to your job. And now your teacher, who keeps you at your school for twelve hours a day painting pieces of canvas and gluing flowers on hats, this man calls to suggest I’m mistreating you by forcing you to work, as if I’m making you sing for your supper? How dare he! Who the sam hell does he think he is?”
“I don’t know, Mom. I never said that to him.”
“I happen to agree with him that you should quit that job, but that doesn’t mean that I want his opinion. Your life outside school isn’t any of his goddamn business. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she says, edging toward her bedroom. Already, his phone call’s impact has changed shape. In the instant, she’d felt his betrayal, the violation of their special alliance. Now she grasps that he’s mounted a challenge to her mother’s authority. He has intruded for the sake of intruding. How proud she feels, to command his attention.
THE REHEARSAL ROOM, with its long mirrored wall and its frigid linoleum floors. So much has happened here, in this fluorescent-lit refrigerated box, where their twins stare at them from the room in the mirror. The room in the mirror is just as bright and cold as this room, just as provisional-seeming, with its plastic/chrome chairs, its foam/Naugahyde mats, its piano and bench, shoved aside, cleared away for their bodies. In this room they’ve crawled through the unrelieved darkness, encountering and groping each other. They’ve lain on their backs and been corpses. They’ve cradled each other, fallen into each other’s linked arms, formed a wheel and by turn had the hub stare at them and deliver a verdict (Norbert to Pammie: “I think you’re the nicest girl in our class, and if you were thinner, you’d be kind of pretty”; Chantal to David: “I don’t fuck white guys, but if I had to fuck a white guy, I’d fuck you”). Now, coming into the room, they’re told to set it up as a theatre. Three or so rows of chairs facing this way. At their front, a pair of chairs facing each other. As always, Mr. Kingsley will stand. “Side aisles, please,” he says, and they hurry to compact the rows so there’s clearance between the row ends and the walls. They take their seats, clustering in their usual ways: the black girls, the white boys, the rest filling in in accordance with vague, shifting rules of attraction/repulsion. The two chairs “onstage” remain empty. Sarah, coming in late from the bathroom, takes the empty chair at the back by Manuel, for no reason apart from its emptiness. Manuel is wearing a nice shirt; it seems lately he has better clothes, though this impression of hers isn’t consciously made, it’s landscape. Memory will reveal it.
“Sarah, please take one of the two chairs up front. Either one.”
She’s so startled to be singled out that for a moment she doesn’t stand up, though her gaze whips to Mr. Kingsley, questioning. Nothing in his gaze answers. He is loftily perched on the battlement tower, conducting the movements of miniature troops. As she stands she’s aware of Manuel quickly moving his backpack as if it might be in her way.
Last year, she’d had her wisdom teeth out. They’d come in unusually early, the dentist had said, and been unusually large in a way that would certainly cause crookedness that was harder to fix afterward; there was some sort of joke to be made here about oversize premature wisdom and irreparable crookedness, but she’d never worked it out to her satisfaction before the teeth were swapped for blood-soaked wads of gauze. They’d drugged her to do the procedure, her mother sitting in the waiting room, reading the paper, while Sarah lay prone and unconscious beneath the hot lights; and no sooner had the teeth been yanked out and the gauze wads stuffed in than Sarah had apparently swung her legs down from the chair, while the dentist and nurse washed their hands with backs turned, and before either of them, or the receptionist, or Sarah’s mother, or other patients in the waiting room could quite process that Sarah was walking, she’d walked out of the office, and out the door of the building, and across much of the parking lot until, giving chase, the receptionist and nurse had at last detained her as she attacked the locked doors of her mother’s Toyota. She retained not a shred of a dream’s memory of this dental escape. In fact she’d thought her mother was joking, until she’d gone back for her follow-up visit and the dentist had said, “Should I tie you down first?”
This transit to the chair at the front of the room is equally unremembered. She finds herself facing herself in the full-length and full-width mirror. The other chair faces away from the mirror. An advantage she’s failed to seize.
“David,” Mr. Kingsley says. “Please take the other chair. Please move the chairs together so that your knees touch.”
Their classmates do not make a sound, but almost as one they lean forward. The sitting knee-to-knee is unfamiliar, but that’s not the piquant novelty. They who have stroked, rubbed, groped, and gripped in every possible configuration, at the behest of their teacher, in the name of their Art, can hardly be impressed with kneecap contact. What is impressive is the blunt singling out by Mr. Kingsley himself of what they’ve all, themselves, grown sick of tiptoeing around: David and Sarah and their all-important drama, of which they’re so proud that they won’t even share it. In Ego Reconstruction they skate over each other with ridiculous comments like “I appreciate the effort you made cleaning woodshop.” They’re haughty emotional hoarders; it’s about time they were brought down a peg. At the edge of her vision, Sarah feels the hungry encroachment, made only worse by the pockets of sympathy—Joelle and perhaps Pammie wide-eyed with anxiety for her, while Norbert’s lip curls at one corner. He’s hardly the only one eager for blood.
David’s knees, touching hers through their two pairs of jeans, do not feel like parts of a person. All four of their knees bump and flinch, blind bewildered convexities. It’s necessary to sit strangely primly, squeezing her thighs together, to maintain the commanded contact. Unbidden, unbearable, she recalls David’s face as he’d first entered her, in her twilit bedroom, on that hot afternoon. I feel like, he’d kept trying to tell her. I feel like … He’d felt like their bodies were made for each other, the tired cliché stripped of all but its startling truth.
She squeezes her eyes tightly closed, balls the memory up.
“Sarah, open your eyes,” Mr. Kingsley commands. “Sarah and David, make eye contact, please.”
She raises her eyes to his face. The blue agates grudgingly stare. The horizon dividing his lips. The button of his mole. His collarbone, partly disclosed by the V of his polo shirt, rising and falling a little too quickly. She seizes on this as a clue, and hope, which she’d thought she’d forsworn, explodes invisible and noiseless from her chest; but its force must be felt, because David recoils, the blue agates receding to points. “This is not a staring contest,” Mr. Kingsley is saying. “I want you to find a soft gaze. I don’t mean soft like weepy.” (Does he say this because either of them appears weepy? Sarah will not weep. She will, she tells herself with absolute bloodless conviction, sooner stop breathing than let herself cry.) “I don’t mean soft like tender.” (Does he say this because either of them appears tender? She’s already forgotten her vow of an instant before, her eyes well, they desperately rummage in David’s for some tenderness, then catch sight of themselves in the mirror and boil themselves dry with the heat of their shame.) “I mean neutral. Receptive. A neutral gaze, without anxiety or accusation or expectation. Neutrality is the self that we offer the other, alert and open, unencumbered. No baggage. This is how we come to the stage.”
Now that he’s got them up there in the chairs, maintaining eye contact, disallowed from staring, accusing, expecting, or experiencing anxiety, allegedly neutral, alert, unencumbered—for some minutes he seems to forget about them. He wanders the edge of the room, unhurriedly talking. What it means to be present. Integrity of the moment. Acknowledgment of … Freedom from … Of course one feels and one knows what one feels and at the same time is master of feeling, not slave; feeling is the archive upon which we draw, but the archive has doors or perhaps it has drawers, it’s got storage, an index, the metaphor for the archive of feelings has been lost on Sarah but she gets the idea. You’re fucked if it isn’t in order.
“David,” Mr. Kingsley says abruptly, returning to stand over them. “Please take Sarah’s hands. Sarah, please take David’s hands.”
David has advanced, receded, tilted, and swum in her paralyzed vision, his red polo shirt has grown blobby and almost subsumed him, but at the command David’s back in the chair with a merciless thud, all sharp, unkind edges and nails for eyes.
They join hands.
David’s hands are horribly inanimate, like meat, these hands of his that have been so alive to her.
Her own hands’ surfaces crawl in protest, these hands of hers that have wrung the pillow clutched against her gut, and pleasurelessly slimed themselves between her legs, in failed service of her longing for him. Her hands have regained him, and he feels like a corpse.
“I want you to communicate through your hands,” Mr. Kingsley instructs. “No words. Only touch.”
David’s hands remain inert. They do not squeeze, stroke, slap—but how are hands meant to communicate with hands? In fact, his have done so already. They don’t even hold her hands. Sarah’s hands are frozen to maintain the appearance that his hands hold hers. Her elbows are locked at her sides, her wrists and forearms tremble from the strain; if she gave up, her hands would clatter to her sides, David wouldn’t catch them.
Mr. Kingsley is orbiting slowly. “Is that the best you can do?” he demands. “Those hands know each other, don’t they. What do they remember? What could they tell us, if they knew how to talk? Or maybe they’d lie to us. Maybe they already are.”
He can see, Sarah thinks. He can see the hands aren’t really joined. They are linked but they somehow don’t touch. How stupid they must seem to him, that they can’t even follow his simplest direction. She is powerless to clasp David’s hands, to seize them, to communicate with touch. Sweat drenches her scalp; she can feel it worming under her hair. The floor beneath her seems to rise and tilt, again and again, describing the same arc without ever completing it. She is slowly falling out of her chair, a black sunstroke stain marring her vision. Far away David’s face hangs in the air, his cheeks tumescent with blood and his sightless eyes gleaming with rage. Sarah splits from herself; David might crush her fingers in his, snap the slender bones like so much dry spaghetti. If only he would. At length she grows dimly aware she is shaking with sobs. She hears the ugly noise long before she is able to pinpoint the source, and like the victim who is forced to inflict her own torture, unwilled she remembers the first time she came, and the wails she hadn’t realized were hers until she felt David weeping with joy on her neck.
The tone of Mr. Kingsley’s accusation has shifted and sharpened, for Sarah has brought the authentic emotion. She might not have done so with her hands, but poor thing: she is doing her best.
“Is that the best you can do?” Mr. Kingsley is shouting, red-faced. He’s shoved his glasses on top of his head, snagging a chunk of his hair which now sticks up in unprecedented disorder. “This is the girl you walked miles for. In the heat. With a stupid tennis racquet so your mom would think you’d gone to the club. Because you loved her, David. Don’t lie to her now and don’t lie to yourself!”
Their classmates are slack-jawed. Is there any possibility this is a play? Among them, emotional exhibitionism is commonplace. Confession is commonplace. Shrill recrimination, and reconciliation, are commonplace. This is different, in what way they cannot in the moment define. Some feel the urge to call out, as if at a sporting event, with encouragement or admonishment or outright insult. “Don’t give in to that cunt!” Colin wants to call out to David. Pammie wants to rush over to Sarah and conceal Sarah’s bowed head with her arms. Pammie once sat behind David while he sat behind Sarah, and thought to herself, If a boy ever looks at me for half a second the way he’s looking at the back of her head, I’ll die and go to God a virgin, I will not even need to be kissed. Chantal wants to say, “C’mon, be a man, David, the fuck are you getting so red-faced about?” Norbert, who would gladly lick Sarah’s ballet flats, wants to slap her across the face and say, “This is what you get for loving that dick when you could have had me.” Some who find their view blocked are tentatively kneeling on their chairs or fully standing. Sarah finally snatches her hands away, covers her face with the sieve of her fingers through which mucus and tears leak in clear, gooey threads that become sticky stripes on her arms.
“Foul!” Colin shouts, and relieved, nasty laughter erupts.
“Take five!” snaps Mr. Kingsley, displeased by the class’s irreverence. But he has one hand on Sarah’s right shoulder, the other on David’s left shoulder, and he leans in: they are not yet excused. Sarah cannot, will not, uncover her face, but she feels his lips brush the crown of her head.
“Well done,” he says into her hair.
Then she hears him speak softly to David. “I won’t rest until you cry.”
Sarah peeks between her fingers. Mr. Kingsley is smiling, in cold enjoyment of his prophecy. It is only a matter of time. David’s face is almost purple with effort. David lurches from his chair, knocks over several more as he less walks than falls out of the room.
“Take five, sweetie,” Mr. Kingsley says so that everyone foot-dragging, shoe-tying, purse-digging, faking some reason to stay in the room—everyone except David, who’s left—clearly hears. “You know where to find the Kleenex.”
Take five, sweetie.
“WHAT ELSE DID you tell him?” shouts David, who hasn’t spoken to her, even deigned to acknowledge her lowly existence, in months and who now strikes like a holy avenger as she and Joelle cross the parking lot toward Joelle’s car.
JOELLE: (interposing herself) Shut up, David! Leave her alone.
DAVID: (actually shoving JOELLE to one side with the palms of both hands, so JOELLE reels on her stiletto-heel boots, almost loses her balance) Did you tell him you won’t even talk to me, but you’ll fuck me in the music room hallway?
SARAH: I won’t talk to you?
DAVID: (over her) Or was he watching us fuck, did you set that up too?
JOELLE: (regaining her balance, roaring with terrific volume) You’re an asshole—
SARAH: (too stunned to speak—but DAVID has already turned his back on her, ERIN O’LEARY’S little car has pulled up; he gets in, slams the door, and his blond chauffeuse, expressionless behind sunglasses, drives him away)
SARAH’S MOTHER: Your life outside school isn’t any of his goddamn business. You know that, don’t you?
MR. KINGSLEY: Please begin, Sarah.
Sarah and David sit at the front of the room in the two chairs again. Their knees no longer touch, they are permitted to sit very slightly apart. David looks at Sarah without looking at her. He sees her without seeing her. He sits in the chair without being there. She doesn’t comprehend, not why he does this, but how; if she could do it, she would; she understands for the first time that David is the real thing, that David is going to make it in theatre, he may even make it so far, matter so much, that he can spell it “theater” if he goddamn feels like it, and she also understands that here at CAPA, with Mr. Kingsley, David is already finished. He will never play a lead. He will never be a star. He will leave the school with his weight of charisma untapped, unacknowledged, unpraised, obscured beneath a miasma of stale smoke and alcohol fumes, the “silly walks,” the polo shirt, the tennis racquet not merely discarded but utterly invalidated and forgotten by all but a few stubborn memory-keepers.
SARAH to DAVID: You’re angry.
MR. KINGSLEY to SARAH: No mind-reading. Again.
SARAH to DAVID: You’re bored.
MR. KINGSLEY: (Exasperated) Live honestly, Sarah!
SARAH to DAVID: You’re wearing a blue polo shirt.
DAVID to SARAH: I’m wearing a blue polo shirt.
MR. KINGSLEY: I don’t hear listening.
SARAH to DAVID: You’re wearing a blue polo shirt.
DAVID to SARAH: I’m wearing a blue polo shirt.
SARAH to DAVID: You’re wearing a blue polo shirt.
MR. KINGSLEY: Who’s in the moment here? Anyone?
DAVID to SARAH: I’m wearing a blue polo shirt.
What is the moment? thinks Sarah. Where is the Now she’s supposed to respond to? How does repetition not void all the moments, like a great spreading darkness behind which David hides, safe from all observation, and nursing his hatred of her? But such thinking, such hapless confusion, is exactly the reason they’re failing at this, it’s exactly the reason Mr. Kingsley, again, makes the gesture of rapid erasure: get-the-hell-off-the-stage.
COLIN to JULIETTA: Your hair is curly.
Indisputable. Julietta’s emblem is her corkscrew-curl hair. Her hair stands up and sideways from her head and bounces when she walks and is an extension of her radiant smile. Julietta’s cheeks are downy and pink at all times. Her eyes sparkle. Her mother is French, and has bequeathed to Julietta adorably unique pronunciations, like, for the common white spread, “MY-OH-NEHZZZZ.” Julietta’s mother has also bequeathed to Julietta an ecstatic Christian faith. Unlike Pammie, Julietta never seems to feel obliged to defend her religion. When her classmates inform her God doesn’t exist, she beams at them without condescension. She loves them for sharing their thoughts! Just as Jesus loves them, and they don’t even need to believe it.
Julietta dazzles Colin with her smile: what a perfectly right thing he’s said! “My hair is curly.” She chuckles.
“Your hair is curly.” Damn, girl, when you look “curly” up, there’s your hair!
“My hair is curly.” Oh, is it ever, Colin. You cannot talk my hair out of curling. Isn’t it funny?
“Your hair is curly,” tries Colin. Come to think of it, Colin also has thick, wavy hair. Anywhere else Colin’s hair would be “curly,” but here it’s competing with Julietta’s storybook hair, her bouncy fairy-princess hair, her hair from an idealized painting of some nature-maiden with springtime’s own blossomy vines for her hair! Does Colin’s hair, his coarse tufty hair, even count?
“My hair is curly.” Julietta shrugs. Big deal. Plenty of curly hair here.
“Your hair is curly,” Colin says suddenly, his voice rough with impulse, as if the words got ahead of their sound. He stares a narrow bead at her, and just like that, Julietta flushes crimson as if he’d unbuttoned her jeans. A disbelieving titter streaks the room. Damn, how did he do that? He’s good. Colin is usually so busy playing the rude Irish thug of his ancestral imagination they forget that he’s actually good.
Silence! Mr. Kingsley snaps his fingers, then nods sharply to Colin. Next level. Colin still leads.
The next level is subjective observation. Subjective: an opinion, a feeling. A judgment. Very often a confession. As opposed to ostensibly simpler objective: a statement of fact. By and large they tend to think of the objective as describing the follower (here Julietta, who speaks second, responds) and the subjective as describing the leader (here Colin, who speaks first, makes the leading statement). But that’s only because their dichotomous thinking is undeveloped.
Without a pause Colin says, “You’re a virgin.”
Whoa!
“Oh shit!” cries Angie, unable to “button it,” as Mr. Kingsley will sometimes snap out, though he usually says it with no more than a look or a snap of his fingers. He does so now, angry SNAP! and they all wiggle, agonized, in their chairs, some straining forward with avidity and some cringing backward with dread. The composure of the audience member is a lesson they strangely have never been taught at this school of performance. They’re only shushed and snapped at as if they were dogs.
Julietta had already been maximum crimson. As they watch her, her usual roses-and-snow very slowly fades back as the heat of her blushing fades out. She is taking her time, perhaps wondering, as many of them are, if Mr. Kingsley is going to call foul because “You’re a virgin” is really objective—but is it? Isn’t that up to her? Isn’t it subjective—Colin’s mockery of her—until she confirms it as fact? Yet she can’t not confirm it as fact, the rules state that she has to repeat, only changing the pronoun and verb conjugation, which makes her assent meaningless—so does that, after all, make the statement subjective? Their dichotomous thinking is undeveloped, this conundrum is pulping their brains. Pammie clutches her temples, then covers her eyes.
But Julietta, in her protracted silence—for she’s entitled to silence as one of the actor’s most versatile tools—has tilted the balance of power. Her complexion is fully restored. She is not smiling. Nor is she scowling or exhibiting uncertainty, embarrassment, or fear. Julietta regards Colin with unbroken composure which Colin tries to return, but they see him shifting his hams on the hard plastic chair, tilting his face slightly at her. He’s mirroring her, but poorly.
“I’m a virgin,” Julietta says, as if making this notification by her choice alone.
“You’re a virgin,” says Colin, strangely trapped by her into neutrality. Any scorn, any glee he exhibits will confirm his juvenility.
“I’m a virgin,” Julietta repeats patiently. There’s no kindness mixed into her patience. No unkindness either. Only acknowledgment that Colin might need to be told more than once.
“You’re a virgin,” says Colin increasingly sadly.
“I’m a virgin,” Julietta says, pitying Colin’s sadness. His thinking is still undeveloped.
The class loses count of the number of times Julietta and Colin exchange this statement. Sometimes Mr. Kingsley will stop repetitions for obvious reasons. Eruption and resolution. Power-trade. Clear successions of tone, giddiness to sadness to indifference, as random as changes of weather. Other times he allows repetitions to drone on and on. Then, even to those who aren’t speaking, the words will become nonsense sounds that no fresh inflection will ever renew.
At last, interposing between Julietta and Colin, Mr. Kingsley says, “Thank you. Excellent.” The class is sitting very still, all hilarity, amazement, discomfort forgotten. Their shared mental condition is akin to hypnosis.
Julietta and Colin remain in their chairs for a moment, regarding each other. Then Colin stands and with goofy sincerity holds out his hand. Julietta shakes it.
“YOUR EYES ARE blue,” Sarah says, perhaps the least observant observation she could make. Almost hostile in its insipidity.
“My eyes are blue,” says David, with such perfect neutrality he cannot be charged with indifference. He might have said, “One two three four,” or hummed notes. No: humming, by the nature of song, would be far more expressive.
“Your eyes are blue.” She’s learned if she stares straight at him he goes foreign to her and she no longer sees him, yet Mr. Kingsley cannot accuse her of avoiding eye contact.
“My eyes are blue.” Perhaps David’s doing the same, staring at her so that, like the sun, she blinds him.
“Your eyes are blue.”
“My eyes are blue.”
“Your eyes are blue.”
It’s been weeks of the same. A punishment everyone shares, for neither of them will give up an inch, not a flush nor a flinch nor above all a tear. It exalts Sarah almost, this death of her heart, this drought of her tears. Perhaps she is actually getting somewhere: at least, she’s learned something from David. An utterly passive, compliant resistance. In the beginning, their rigid impasse fascinated their classmates. Now, it’s a purgatory. Their classmates hate watching them even more than they hate sitting there. They never fulfill the objective. They never win praise. They are never allowed to advance. Unlike everyone else, they’re exclusively paired with each other.
“My eyes are blue.”
“Your eyes are blue.”
“My eyes are blue.”
“Stop,” Mr. Kingsley barks, flicking a hand in disgust. They are both now persona non grata. In unconscious tandem they stand up, turn away from each other.
“HABLAS ESPAÑOL,” JOELLE says to Manuel with a twinkle of mischief. The room rustles with reinvigorated interest. They’ve never heard Joelle speak in Spanish, they’ve hardly heard Manuel speak at all, and repetitions in Spanish are unprecedented, they’re not even sure they’re allowed. How cool of Joelle! Their estimation of her rises sharply.
Manuel smiles, surprised. “Sí, hablo español.”
“No additional words,” Mr. Kingsley says. Manuel colors slightly.
“Hablo español,” he amends.
“Hablaaaaaaas españOLLLLLL,” Joelle mugs, in the voice, perhaps, of a chain-smoking Chihuahua. They’re all sitting up, wide awake now, delighted.
Manuel colors a little bit more, but he feels her warmth: it’s conspiracy, not condescension. “Ahh-BLOW,” he bleats with crazy nasality, and they all burst out laughing, “ehhhhhhhsPAÑOWELLE,” so it rhymes with “Joelle”!
Joelle shimmies her shoulders and pushes her breasts toward him, raising one arm in the air. “AAAAAAAHHH, BLAAAAAAAAS!” she sings with power if not beauty, tinting pink from the effort, middle C, up to G, they-sing-with-her-in-their-minds, “EHHHS-PAHN-NYOLL!” she concludes, A, B, ending up on that high C …
“Woo, girl!” Angie calls out, and she isn’t admonished, they’re all breathlessly watching Manuel, will he, will he, will he?
Manuel is smiling back at Joelle with his lips slightly pursed, as if to say, “You naughty thing, someone ought to spank you, but not me, I’m too likely to laugh.” They’ve never seen such animation, such knowledge, in Manuel’s face before, and then, as if timing is another of his secrets he’s kept hidden from them, without windup or warning he does it, unleashes his voice in the room, “Ah, ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-AHHH-BLOHHH,” he unfurls bafflingly—how can such sound issue forth from a kid in a chair—“eh, eh-eh, ehhhhh, eh-eh EHHSSS … PAHNNNN … NYOLLLLL,” his concluding bass note rolling through like a velveteen landslide. Their howls of approval are equally meant for Joelle, she and Manuel are heaving with laughter, sliding out of their chairs, they are total subversives, and yet Mr. Kingsley is laughing and clapping the hardest of all.
IN THE FUTURE, Joelle will run away. She will simply disappear, halfway through senior year. Rumors will abound of her reasons, her means, her location. Her father beat her with a belt and a stick and tied her to a tree; she’d been sent to live with him by her mother, for being too wild. Her father has the FBI looking for her, he has doors broken down, Joelle’s spotted all sorts of places: Tampa; Waikiki; New York; the background of the Aerosmith video for “Love in an Elevator,” in which she is said to be one of the dancers. Confirmation of any of this awaits a farther future than the one in which she runs away.
In the future, Pammie will decide to be an astronaut. It’s no frivolous decision, though she’s remained, to her grief, overweight. She must go back to school and learn physics. After physics, a diet.
In the future, Taniqua will become one of the most recognizable television actresses on earth. She’ll play a cop on a long-running show about rookie cops growing and changing in the course of becoming experienced cops. Taniqua will play the absolutely humorless female cop, whose awful past (of course), full of poverty and abuse and incarcerated fathers and drug-addicted mothers and shot-to-death brothers, accounts for her absolute humorlessness. Her old classmates, from her youth, will hardly believe it’s bright, sassy Taniqua who’s playing that humorless cop. They’ll keep thinking that her hidden sense of humor, its belated revelation, will have to provide a plot point, but year after year it does not. Nor do her good singing voice or her dancing. None of these seemingly central aspects of Taniqua will ever appear in her signature role. She’ll play that role for years, and be rich.
In the future, Norbert will be a manager at Whataburger. This will be so consistent with their cruelest expectations of him that they’ll dislike him even more, for not proving them wrong. Norbert, so incurably himself. So stubbornly immune to all those means of metamorphosis.
In the future, Ms. Rozot’s prediction in fact will come true. Things, at least the sorts of things implied in that discussion, like heartbreak, will hurt less, although the range of hurtful things will expand. Heartbreak will come to seem like a rather luxurious reason for pain. There will also be the failings of the body and the wallet. The extinctions of friendships. The crimes against children committed by grown-ups. And the inexplicable, small kindnesses, which somehow pierce Sarah most deeply of all, as when she left the house one summer day so distracted she forgot to zip her sleeveless summer dress, so a wide slit was open from armpit to hip, through which her bra and her panties could clearly be seen, and she walked this way, obliviously, all the way to the park, where a strange woman cried, “Sweetie! How have you been?” and embraced her.
And while Sarah stood bewildered in her arms, the woman said in her ear, “Your dress is open. I’ll keep hugging until you’ve zipped it.”
And Sarah zipped, and then they stepped apart and said goodbye as if actual friends, keeping up the charade until turning and walking their opposite ways. And Sarah recalled, for the first time in years, that acting was truthful emotions in false circumstances. She already missed that strange woman, her make-believe friend.
IN THE FUTURE, David will be so changed it will be hard to give credence to the David she first knew in these mid-teenage years. It will be hard not to see that young David as sort of a sham, a lightweight cocoon through which the future David, knobbly and heavy and hard, is already beginning to obtrude. Or perhaps this younger David really is an insubstantial shell. Perhaps they all are.
Mr. Kingsley no longer asks her to his office. There is no more of their confidential chatting, about her and David, or her and Joelle, or what a help he expects her to be when the people from England arrive. There is no talk between them at all. Sometimes, he winks at her in passing. Most times he looks straight through her. She’s aware of having missed some opportunity, squandered some advantage, in the course of having tried to do exactly the opposite. One Friday afternoon instead of driving to the Empanada Outpost with Joelle and whoever else Joelle has in her car, Sarah returns to the deserted department hallway. On Fridays rehearsal doesn’t start until five thirty, because of lesser pressure to finish by nine, it not being a school night. Instead of dining at U Totem on Fridays, they all walk in raucous packs or drive in dangerously overladen cars to one of the real restaurants they’ve adopted, where they are well known and in some cases greatly disliked. They are grimly tolerated at La Tapatia Taqueria, where they consume the free chips by the bushel. They are just short of banned at Empanada Outpost, where they will only be served if they all sit outside on the rickety deck. They are adored and spoiled at Mama’s Big Boy, the once unremarkable Big Boy somehow entirely taken over by gay male waiters, who will give them free pie if they sing. Fridays can feel like a festival, the five thirty rehearsal start time often drifting toward six if Mr. Kingsley himself isn’t back from wherever he’s gone for his dinner—never any of the cheap nearby places that they go for theirs.
In the deserted hallway, Mr. Kingsley’s door is closed. There was no reason to think he would be here, as he is other days when they just have the half-hour break and he spends it at his desk typing in gunfire bursts, his rimless spectacles precariously balanced at the end of his nose, his door half open but his severe absorption a deterrent to all but the most desperate, or confident, students.
She slides down the wall to the floor, hugs her knees to her chest. Perhaps Joelle will bring her a pineapple empanada, though she isn’t hungry and can hardly recall the last time she was hungry. The cold ache, like a fist pressing onto her diaphragm, has long since replaced hunger. She’s almost used to it, this pressure of sadness like a stone on her diaphragm’s bellows. Or maybe she’s not used to it, but it’s actually lessened? She thinks of Ms. Rozot’s promise to her as a prophecy. If she can just stick it out long enough, she will earn the bewitchment and stop feeling pain. Every morning she X’s a calendar in her mind’s eye: one day closer to feeling less pain. She tries a deep breath, even stretching her legs out along the cold floor so her diaphragm has ample space. She can’t do it. She can’t fill her lungs. She can’t shift the stone and inhale all the way. And this was the first thing he’d taught them: how to breathe. The location of the diaphragm and its unequalled importance, perhaps even exceeding the brain’s. As they mastered three-part breathing, he explained to them, two things would happen: they would come to understand the diaphragm’s true dimensions, and they would come to understand the true scope of its powers. Until now, they had probably only used half (or a third!) of their diaphragm’s total capacity. Even worse, they had probably thought that their brains were in charge of their bodies. Wrong. It is the diaphragm—opened to its full capacity, regulating influx and outflow, tuning us in to ourselves and the world, tuning out all the static, enabling clear thought—that’s in charge of the body and mind, which of course are all one. And Sarah hasn’t just lost control of her own diaphragm, she’s perhaps lost possession of it. It’s usurped by a stone.
She stretches out full length on the spine-chilling floor of the empty hallway. What if these floors had been carpet or wood? Could soft texture or warm temperature have changed memory’s substance? The unrelieved hardness and coldness of the linoleum floors will always be to Sarah an inseparable part of the lessons learned here. For the first time all year she sincerely attempts it, flat on her back on the floor with the bulletin board above her. She has to scoot a little closer to the center of the hall, so her arms and legs lie properly without touching themselves or her sides. Palms up, eyes closed. The air-conditioning turns her torso to gooseflesh beneath her thin blouse, her nipples hardening with discomfort, but she forbids herself from crossing her arms over her breasts. Relaxation requires discipline. Strangely, she seems to hear better lying here on the floor. The air conditioner’s resonant hum, which she’s not sure she’s ever heard before, seems to have different parts: a dull, buried knocking, a rising note over a rumbling low note, a scrape as of a chair across the floor. The foot of Mr. Kingsley’s door is inches from her head. From behind the door, perhaps from the bowels of the building buried deep beneath the floor, Sarah hears a tuneless vocal noise and an abrupt creak.
Hard as she can, she pulls air through her mouth, as if hauling a rope. It’s no use. There might as well be someone sitting on her chest. David sitting on her chest, as he did once. In the summer. When she’d reached around, grabbing his buttocks, forcing him to lean over her face.
She scrambles up to a seated position, back hitting the wall as with almost no warning Mr. Kingsley’s door opens. Manuel steps out, sees her seeing him. He pulls the door shut behind him. She’s against the wall next to the doorframe and so cannot see into the room and has no way of knowing for sure if Mr. Kingsley is in there.
Without a word to her Manuel turns and walks quickly away, disappears around the corner of the hall.
She rises also, before the door can open again, and goes the opposite way from Manuel.
Last year, she’d had Mr. Banks for geometry. Mr. Banks was rumored not just to have sex with some girls at the school but to have had a baby with one, who had dropped out a few years ago. No one knew the name of this girl or had ever seen her, or her baby. No one disliked Mr. Banks. He was tall, with muscle packed on his torso that shifted and bulged when he raised up one arm to write proofs on the board. He wore snug, short-sleeved polos that clearly displayed a dark upside-down U on his right upper arm with bent-back ends that it sat on like feet. All year Mr. Banks had made Sarah and William his pets, ostentatiously excusing them from proofs because, he told the rest of the class, they knew what they were doing while nobody else had a clue. Mr. Banks would say, “William, man, he’s going to be sitting here doing the books for my outside business, and I’m going to be paying him, right under this table, while the rest of you fools still don’t know how to measure circumference.” Sarah, Mr. Banks would announce, was going to brush her hair like a shampoo commercial for his special enjoyment. Sarah would do so, bending forward so her hair hung like seaweed in front of her face, and then whipping her head so her hair fell back onto her neck. “You’re supposed to do that in slow motion,” Mr. Banks would complain. “C’mon, L’Oreal.” At the end of the year, when Mr. Banks informed Sarah he was taking her off-campus for lunch, she hadn’t been surprised or dismayed. She’d known he wouldn’t touch her, whether through superior instinct or naïveté rewarded by luck, she couldn’t have said. She’d followed him to the front parking lot and climbed into the cab of his huge pickup truck with the two bumper stickers. One said, “Easy Does It.” The other said, “My Other Car Is Up My Nose.”
“What does that mean, anyway?” she had asked.
“It means my life was ruled by an addiction to cocaine.”
“So, what—you turned your other car into cocaine?”
“I had to turn it into money first. Here I thought you were so smart.”
“What about that thing on your arm?”
“My brand?”
“It’s a brand?”
“Like they do onto cattle. It’s the letter omega, from Greek. You don’t know that either? You’ve had me fooled, girl. I thought you were some kind of genius.” He’d shown her his coin laundromats—his outside businesses—on their way to a hamburger stand in a part of town she’d never seen and could never have found her way back to, everyone black except her, standing outside their cars, their burgers in hand, in wax paper, the older woman at the open-air counter wagging her finger at Mr. Banks, meaning “How old is this girl?” and Mr. Banks telling her off with a gesture, and the two of them laughing.
In the truck, driving back, Sarah had said, “That’s the best burger I’ve ever had. Thanks.” This was back when she ate, and enjoyed it.
“You’re welcome,” Mr. Banks had said. “And thank you for your charming company.”
That was all that had happened. It hadn’t seemed unusual or wrong to have gone to lunch with him. Even her hunch that he wouldn’t kiss her, implying the less likely odds that he might, hadn’t made the lunch feel secretive. They hadn’t skulked, walking out to his truck. They hadn’t skulked, coming back, amid everyone else coming back from wherever they’d eaten.
Despite all the rules—the repetitions without extra words, the relaxation with arms never touching their sides, the breaths drawn in three parts—no rules exist to define their relations with teachers. They can have lunch with teachers, or not. They can shed tears and tell secrets, or not. Vague norms emerge and dissolve, are specific to people, don’t apply generally or across time or across the whole group. They’re arrived at by instinct, by naïveté rewarded with luck, or by naïveté not rewarded with luck. When Sarah’s mother had said, “Your life outside school isn’t any of his goddamn business,” and asked Sarah whether she understood, although Sarah said yes, she didn’t agree. Her disagreement perhaps was the same thing as not understanding.
MANUEL’S PARENTS APPEAR on opening night and seat themselves as best they can, near the back, until Colin, who is working as an usher, at Mr. Kingsley’s direction persuades them to move to the second row center, the first and second rows having been taped off and marked “VIP.” Colin’s first attempt to move the parents doesn’t work, they are politely bewildered. He has to fetch Joelle from backstage, where she is covered with loops of duct tape and safety pins, in readiness for wardrobe emergencies. Joelle comes out and with much compensatory smiling and laughing explains to the parents that seats have been saved just for them. They move with great reluctance, as if expecting to find they’re the butt of a practical joke. They’re both short compared with Manuel, solemn as carvings, exceptionally ill at ease. When the performance is over Sarah, having slipped upstairs into the light booth where Greg Veltin is running the board, sees Mr. Kingsley, his arms piled with flowers right up to his chin, press one of the bouquets on Manuel’s startled mother. Mr. Kingsley’s husband, Tim, is helping him distribute the flowers, and the two men, very alike with their clipped, glossy hair, their expensive wool V-necks over brightly hued shirts, and their knife-pleated trousers and glittering shoes, seem to diminish Manuel’s parents even more just by talking to them, despite how clear it is they’re raining down compliments. Mr. Kingsley is wearing his glasses, and Tim wears a mustache, and this is probably how Manuel’s parents can tell them apart, Manuel’s parents who are a paired species also in their dowdy church clothes.
Sarah feels relieved when Mr. Kingsley and Tim have moved on to the cast, who receive their flowers with regal entitlement.
The show is a thorough success. Erin O’Leary is adorable as Adelaide; dorky Tom Dieckmann, who cannot really sing, is nevertheless the perfect wiseacre as Nathan; and Manuel’s wooden acting is wiped from the spectators’ minds when he raises his voice in a song. Watching him act almost seems like a requisite penance, the price of the voice. Slantwise Sarah looks at Greg Veltin, so adorably handsome with his freckles and thick auburn hair and his tall, slender body. Last year, in Anything Goes, he had danced like Astaire. That too was vicarious grace, of the sort that exalted them all. No less can Greg sing, perhaps not like Manuel, but with his own irresistible brightness, as clean as a sailor’s white suit. Pammie and Julietta have made a cult of him, Pammie in particular barely able to breathe in his presence. She goes pink as a ham if he says hi to her. Not long ago Sarah used to see him ride off in Mr. Kingsley’s Mercedes at lunchtime. Now he sits in the light booth. “Why didn’t you audition this year?” Sarah wonders, she hopes not rudely. Everyone has wondered and been too shy to ask, assuming the reason is his personal crisis, about which he is so placidly unforthcoming.
“You know,” Greg says, as if it’s a question he hadn’t considered, and finds genuinely interesting, “I think I just realized I had stuff to learn in the wings. I mean, there’s such opportunities here that we shouldn’t pass up. Like this light board? Mr. Browne says it cost twenty-four thousand dollars.”
“But you’re one of the best singers and dancers at school. Anybody can run the light board.”
“Thank you,” Greg says. “That’s so sweet.”
“I mean it,” Sarah insists. “You would have been perfect as Sky Masterson.”
“Manuel was amazing.”
“You would have been better.”
“You’re the sweetest,” Greg says kindly, shutting her down.
The party is at Mr. Kingsley’s huge, beautiful house that he lives in with Tim. Only the current Seniors have been here before, in their sophomore year, the last time Mr. Kingsley was willing to host. “Does anyone want to tell me,” he says before doing the toast, “why Tapatia Taqueria won’t let us rent their backyard anymore?” Everyone laughs. There’s Martinelli’s Sparkling Cider and soda and all sorts of cookies and snacks laid out on fancy platters on a big buffet table inside, but outside, alcohol trickles into the yard from their cars. Here a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, there a six-pack of Bartles & Jaymes. The yard is vast, landscaped, labyrinthine, with brick walks and large shrubs and places to sit out of view of the house. They know Mr. Kingsley will ignore pot and alcohol out in the yard so long as they’re discreet. Out in the yard, their conversation mostly concerns where to go next, understanding as they do that for the hosts and for themselves, the party is a pleasant obligation. Mr. Kingsley and Tim are no more interested in hosting a wild party than the backyard denizens are interested in being wild in this genteel locale. They’ll stay an hour, go in and say thank you, get back in their cars, and be wild someplace else.
Inside, a very different party is proceeding on completely different lines. Here, no one wants to be anywhere else. They’re taking turns at the piano and singing, they’re hoping Mr. Kingsley will talk about Broadway, they would never imagine Mr. Kingsley might want them to leave. Yet they’ll all leave, exalted and tired, long before overstaying their welcome.
The two parties share some guests, trade some guests, enjoy the presence of most guests exclusively. Julietta and Pammie, Taniqua and Angie, Erin O’Leary and Tom Dieckmann, among many others, are inside eating chips, drinking soda, and singing their throats sore. Tim has a few solemn Juniors and Seniors around him on the screened-in porch, talking music and art. Joelle rolls easily from indoors to outdoors and back. A tight crowd in the kitchen, earnest chitchatters clogging the stairs. David’s so allied with shadow that Sarah’s not even sure whether he’s here, and, like Joelle, but for different reasons, she restlessly goes back and forth, in and out, from the sting of Colin’s bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the supple darkness to the caustic orange grit of Doritos in the house’s harsh light. She’s unable to feel at ease anywhere. She gets past the earnest chitchatters who are clogging the stairs and goes up, looking for a bathroom that doesn’t have people sprawled outside its door. Down the second-floor hallway are posters for shows, real professional shows in New York. Godspell. Follies. The hallway is lined in beige carpet that swallows all sound, and Sarah ventures its length, as if her noiselessness means she is also unseen. Here at the end of the hall is a spreading mosaic of photos in colorful frames, Mr. Kingsley and Tim standing shoulder to shoulder and grinning in various rooms, or at various scenic vistas. Sometimes Tim has his arm around Mr. Kingsley’s shoulders, and sometimes Mr. Kingsley has his arm around Tim’s. They always look hale and collegial. Sarah wonders if it is a prejudice in her, deep-rooted, unconscious and unintended, that makes her unable to see that they’re lovers in any one of these pictures. She wonders if, on the other hand, there’s some persistent reticence on their part, posing for a third party, that makes every picture this way, independent of her. She wonders what a photo of her and David would look like, if it could capture some aura they both sought to hide.
There’s a narrow little staircase at the end of the hall, uncarpeted and steep, as if it’s recently grown up from being a ladder. She climbs it, directly into a room with sloped walls she realizes was made from an attic, now beautifully finished and furnished with a round braided rug and a bed and a sort of tall cabinet with a full-length mirror on the inside of one of its doors, before which Manuel stands, tucking in a blue shirt. “Do you live here?” she exclaims.
“No,” he says, badly startled, one palm flat in his waistband, and then with surprising aggression, “Why are you here, always hanging around?”
“Hanging around? It’s a party.”
“There’s no party up here.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I’m changing my shirt, if you’d leave me alone,” he says, closing the door to the cabinet, but not before she’s seen several more expensive-looking bright-colored shirts, the same ones she’s noticed him wearing at school.
“Did he give you those?” she asks.
“They’re mine.”
“Why are you keeping them here at his house?”
“Why don’t you go somewhere else? Maybe the music room hallway? I hear you put on good shows there.”
She almost falls back down the steep narrow stairs.
In the kitchen, trying to get out the back door, she runs into Pammie. She has to leave, her determination to leave is so total it leaves room for no other thought. She’ll walk, never mind that her apartment is more than a half hour’s drive. She’ll walk all night, straight to the bakery for her six a.m. shift, seven hours has to be enough time to walk there. “Come with us!” Pammie cries eagerly. Julietta is with her; Sarah cannot even open her mouth to object before they’ve borne her off like happy thugs, each of them holding an elbow. The yard has emptied out substantially, the drinkers and smokers have said their goodbyes to their host before getting too drunk or too high. David is nowhere to be seen, perhaps never was here. Greg Veltin is waiting in the backyard gazebo, he’s especially asked to speak with them. “We brought Sarah,” Pammie says breathlessly. “Is that okay?”
“Of course,” Greg effuses. It’s perfect they’ve also brought Sarah. It’s perfect she’s here. He wants them to hold hands with him, is that too strange? Sarah looks across the murk of the gazebo, its ocean-floor light, at Pammie’s rapt face. In Greg Veltin’s presence, it shines like the moon. They are sitting in a circle on the gazebo’s slightly splintery floor. Greg reaches out and takes Pammie’s hand, and with his other hand takes Julietta’s, and Julietta reaches her spare hand to Sarah, and Sarah reaches hers to Pammie, in a trance of surrender, not having the slightest idea what they’re doing. Greg Veltin resembles Jesus—a clean-cut and freckled and auburn-haired Jesus—sitting cross-legged, holding the hands of these sophomore virgins who love him so much they would happily share him in marriage (they’ve discussed this at length, although with each other, not him). “I cherish your friendship,” Greg tells them. “I feel so lucky to have friends like you, and I want you to know that I love you, and that, if things were different—God, I’d be so in love with you girls I wouldn’t know how to choose! But luckily”—and he squeezes Pammie’s hand and Julietta’s hand with such a surfeit of feeling the two pairs of hands jump—“luckily,” he repeats, “I’m gay, and so I don’t have to choose, and I can cherish all of you forever.”
“Oh my God!” Pammie cries, both her hands flying up to her mouth.
“You’re the first friends from school I’ve told,” Greg continues, incredibly—this adored, handsome Senior who can dance like Astaire and who is so clearly, inevitably, no-other-possibility gay that Sarah cannot believe she never realized—but that was fifteen in a nutshell, she’ll think when she’s twice, and then three times, that age. The obvious and the oblivious sharing the same mental space.
Julietta has burst into tears. “I’m so honored,” she sobs. “I’m so honored you told us.”
“I am too,” Pammie says ardently, for in the instant, she also knows she has already known, and is also amazed by the gift of Greg’s trust, a far greater intimacy than she’d dreamed of before.
The three of them have fallen into a joyous group hug. “Sarah, Sarah!” they laugh and cry helplessly, trying to extend their arms to her, too clumsy in their happiness to keep her from slipping away.
THEY KNOW SO much about each other, yet so little.
They know that William’s mother makes William and his two younger sisters keep their toothbrushes and toothpaste and combs and whatever other personal items they use in zippered travel cases, which they must carry to the bathroom and back to their bedrooms every morning and night, and that if William’s mother finds toiletry items left behind in the bathroom—the bathroom that only William and his sisters ever use, because his mother has her own bathroom off her bedroom—she will throw them away. She will throw away, as punishment for their failure to abide by her rule, a forgotten toothbrush or stray comb. They, William’s classmates, know this, but they don’t know William’s mother’s first name, or where William’s father might be, or whether he’s even alive.
They know that Julietta’s parents store flour and rice in sealed plastic tubs against a coming apocalypse, but they don’t know if Julietta herself believes in this apocalypse, or is worried about it. She certainly doesn’t seem worried.
They know that Colin’s father hits Colin, “punches his lights out,” “knocks his block off,” “smacks him clear to next week,” but they don’t know what Colin has done to deserve this, or whether he’s angry or sad to be beaten. They don’t even know if the words Colin uses to mean getting hit are his own words, or words he’s been taught.
They know, at least some of them do, at least one of them does, that Sarah has let David have sex with her in the music room hallway, right out in the open, where anyone could have seen them.
They don’t know that Sarah works weekend mornings at a French bakery, on the opening shift. Alone, Sarah carries the wide baking sheets of croissants, chaussons aux pommes, pains au chocolat, and brioches. She pulls the greasy pastries off the trays, to which they are lightly adhered, trying not to poke holes in them with her fingers. She fills up the display case. The baker, whoever it is, has finished the baking and left at some point before Sarah got here. She wonders who it is, why they never cross paths. The pastries are still warm. The curled, browned, brittle croissants make her think of the discarded shells of locusts she sometimes found hooked to the trees, when she was a little girl, and they lived on a street that had trees, before her father moved out. Sometimes in the very early mornings she would put on her sneakers and slip out of the house while her parents were asleep, and a blanket of white fog lay over the lawns, reaching just to her knees. Strange exhalation of the lawns at daybreak, magic child’s-height fog she could pierce with her legs like a giant. In a certain season, she can’t recall which, she could pull fragile locust husks off the trees and, if she wanted to, crush them in her fist, though she never did so. It would have seemed like such a waste of so much hollow intricacy, so many chambers and hinges and spikes, like an alien spaceship in miniature. She couldn’t have been more than eight then. Half a lifetime ago. She had never been tired in the morning, couldn’t imagine what being tired felt like. Running back through the fog as it melted away like a dream, to see her dad leaning out the front door of the house for the paper.
Now, she is always so tired she doesn’t even realize she’s tired. Words stall on her tongue. Tears gather prematurely in her eyes. Waking dreams drift and coil through her mind, similar to ideas, but perhaps not the same.
THEY KNOW SO much about each other, yet so little. Manuel knows, or thinks he knows, about her. A whore would have more dignity.
She knows, or thinks she knows, about Manuel. Furtive and smug. The closed doors, and new shirts.
And yet she doesn’t know where Manuel lives, doesn’t know his home number. Can’t conceive where such information might be found. She’s already forgotten the morning, freshman year, that a four-alarm fire broke out on the far side of the massive apartment complex she lives in with her mother, a complex so massive they couldn’t even see smoke from their carport and only found out what the sirens were about from TV, where they’d seen the complex filmed from the air, and the flames six or eight blocks away. Distant though the fire had been, it had made for bad traffic, and her mother had dropped her off late, but when she went in the office to get her late pass the office ladies had cried, “Oh my gosh, honey, are you okay?” because in the office they knew her address—they’d actually looked through their records, when they’d seen the big fire on the news, to check if they had any students in danger.
So of course home addresses are known in the office, but she doesn’t think of this. She isn’t scheming. She lacks not just the skills for, but the very resolve for, premeditation.
Nevertheless, even in her tiredness, she’s alert. Having noticed some things, she keeps noticing more things. Her work on costume crew is basically finished, she has not been assigned as a dresser, but she’s still responsible for the general state of the costumes; the costume shop and dressing rooms are her wheelhouse, she patrols them, tidying and repairing. Particularly the hats were her thing for this show; she monitors their clusters of feathers or fruit or their bands of grosgrain, she gets out the glue gun if need be. In hushed hours before run-through starts, when nobody’s around, she’ll check the boys’ dressing room, where they neglect their fedoras, leave them tossed on the floor. She’ll re-form the crowns, dust them off, put them pointedly up on the shelves with the masking-tape labels where the boys should have put them themselves. The male cast members share two extremely overtaxed garment racks, cardboard dividers sticking up at dense intervals bearing their character names. “Gambler 1,” “Gambler 2,” “Sal Army guy,” “Sky Masterson.” They do a lousy job of hanging up their costumes. This Friday after school, before the show’s second and last weekend begins, Sarah’s going to be slaving away at the ironing board. She wiggles her fingers into, pries apart the crushed mass of male clothes between “Sal Army guy” and “Sky Masterson.” Here’s a pale green shirt, perhaps it’s a color the store would call sea foam. The label: Armani. Duh, this isn’t part of Sky Masterson’s costume. She almost laughs at Manuel’s lame deception. But of course, no one else is alert to his shirts. No one else has realized, as she has, that he wears these shirts only at school, changes back into cheap, crappy shirts, poor boy’s shirts, before going home. Despite its crushed condition, the fabric of the shirt feels newly stiff and fresh. No gray ring in the collar, no yellow stains at the pits.
Sarah extracts it. She turns on the iron, waits patiently for it to heat, and then irons the shirt with great care, even using the sleeve form. When she’s finished she folds it with buttons centered and sleeves underneath, the way she’s seen men’s shirts come from the dry cleaner’s, and then she takes it into the costume shop and hides it on a high shelf, above the boxes of notions and buttons, stuff that currently isn’t in use.
In the course of the week and weekend, two more shirts appear, of the same sort and in the same place, and she does the same thing with them both. She watches Manuel for signs of unease. He always looks slightly uneasy. He never makes eye contact if they happen to pass near each other. Their enmity is an agreed-upon fact and requires no further acknowledgment. Joelle is his dresser and he and Joelle are now buddies, they’re constantly laughing and joking in Spanish. Joelle might even know Manuel’s address but Sarah doesn’t think of asking her, no longer cares where Manuel lives and doesn’t recall why she did. She isn’t aware of a plan for the shirts. She’s just stealing them, because they make her angry, though whether at Manuel, or Mr. Kingsley, or both, she isn’t sure. Her anger is intense but obscure.
The last performance, as always, is a two p.m. Sunday matinee, which, as always, feels anticlimactic, but there has to be time for the strike. After the show they’ll all remain to strike the set for however many hours it takes.
Manuel’s mother reappears for this final performance, without the father this time. Instead she’s accompanied by a young woman, slender, serious, conservative slacks and blouse from, perhaps, T.J.Maxx or some other large store that sells cheap office wear. She has a black purse with a very thin strap. She resembles Manuel, like Manuel is a full head taller than the mother; she walks close to the mother, sometimes taking her arm. This time, the mother appears more at ease, the young woman unsmiling and watchful. It’s the mother who leads the young woman, with visible pride, to the taped-off row of VIP seats. They settle themselves, tip their heads together, converse only with each other in the midst of the house’s exceptional noise, all the greetings and huggings and jokings and families trying to find six or thirteen seats together, it’s the final performance. Sarah leaves the light booth where she’s been sitting with gay Greg Veltin, goes back to the costume shop, but it’s too chaotic in there, all the cast members in costume and makeup fawning over Mr. Freedman, the costume designer, and giving him gifts. She waits until the first act is well under way, Mr. Freedman watching tonight from the house; then rooting through the costume shop’s wealth of potentially useful garbage finds a plastic shopping bag with handles and slides the three ironed shirts in, in a stack. Settles them flat on the bottom to keep them unwrinkled. Tonight everybody is toting a sack of something, mostly gifts for Mr. Kingsley, teddy bears that say “Thank You!” or boxes of chocolate, despite Mr. Kingsley having recently said, “I’m on very strict orders from Tim: NO MORE CHOCOLATE. Let’s say thank you without calories!”
Once, she would have filled a box with pain au chocolat at the bakery, because despite orders from Tim, Mr. Kingsley’s great passion for chocolate is known. She would have tied the box closed with a ribbon, paid for it out of her wages, bought Mr. Kingsley a card at Confetti!: The Celebrate Store and toiled over just what to say.
This show, she’s not giving a gift. She does not think he’ll notice.
The show ends, the ovations end, cast members with their makeup very imperfectly removed bound out of the dressing rooms to be gushed over by their family members and to line up for pictures. Impromptu and fragmentary encores. “Sue me, sue me, go ahead, sue me, I LOVE YOOOO!” Then family members are reluctantly drifting away, cast is due back onstage in ten minutes for strike, they should get off the rest of that makeup. Manuel has a word with his mother and the woman who must be his sister, goes back in the boys’ dressing room where his brand-new secret shirts constantly disappear. Sarah, standing in the piazza outside the main theatre doors with the bag, not sure which lot they’ve parked in, almost misses the mother and sister, catches sight of them just as they’re stepping outside. She has to run to catch up. “Excuse me,” she calls. If she had planned this, she might have worked out how to say it in Spanish. Joelle could have helped. But clearly, she hasn’t planned this. “Excuse me. These are Manuel’s, to take home.”
The women turn toward her, surprised. She thrusts the bag at the mother, so she has to accept it. “Manuel’s?” the mother says skeptically, glancing inside.
“They’re a gift, from Mr. Kingsley, for Manuel,” Sarah says, very clearly, although in English. But the sister can surely speak English. “Because Manuel is his boyfriend,” Sarah adds, quickly turning away.
“What did you say?” says the young woman sharply. But Sarah has dashed down the hall, disappeared.
“… AND YOU’LL KEEP these director’s notebooks for the whole of spring term. Any questions?” asks Mr. Kingsley.
“Where’s Manuel?” Colin asks. They have not seen Manuel since the Guys and Dolls strike. That was back before Christmas. A whole month ago.
Sarah watches Mr. Kingsley’s face closely. Culpability is what she would like to discern. Disquiet is all she expects. She finds neither, nor anything else. “Manuel’s having family issues,” Mr. Kingsley says smoothly. “Hopefully he’ll be back with us soon.”
But he never is.
“BITCH,” JOELLE SAYS in her ear. “Get your own fucking ride.”
“AND IT STRIKES me as inappropriate, extremely inappropriate, for the children to be working at school for twelve, sometimes fourteen hours a day—”
“We’re not children,” Sarah breaks in.
“Certainly the rigors of our program don’t suit everyone,” says Mrs. Laytner, their remote principal, an irrelevant person in pearls. Mrs. Laytner attends opening nights with a fresh corsage pinned to her jacket, she cuts ribbons on new lighting boards, she is quoted in the local newspaper when their school is named a Top Ten. She’s never in Sarah’s recollection even walked down the Theatre hall. “Pre-professional training for children this age is a major commitment. But we believe that our students—”
“And his methods, this teacher’s methods, also strike me as inappropriate.”
“Unconventional, maybe. Mr. Kingsley is a brilliant man, an unconventional but brilliant teacher; we’re incredibly lucky to have him. His methods are directly adapted from groundbreaking—”
“It’s my understanding they’re methods designed for adults.”
“I think if you’re concerned about his methods, it would make much more sense to sit down with Jim and have a discussion—”
“No!” Sarah exclaims.
“It’s time we heard from Sarah,” agrees Mrs. Laytner. “Sarah, do you feel, as your mother’s concerned that you might, uncomfortable in our program? In any way overwhelmed?”
“No,” Sarah says.
“Do you think Mr. Kingsley’s way of teaching is inappropriate for students your age?”
“No,” Sarah says.
“Of course she’s going to say no,” Sarah’s mother objects.
“Isn’t this why we’re here? To ensure her well-being? Sarah, do you feel overworked here? Under too much pressure?”
“No,” she says.
“Is anything concerning you at all about school right now?”
“No,” says Sarah, who still cannot draw three-part breath, still can’t eat, still can’t sleep through the night. “Not at all.”
“YOU’RE TALL,” DAVID declares, startling her. Their repetitions, Sarah’s and David’s, have taken on the pointless, leaden feel of international diplomacy, of the greatest number of people, the highest level of tension, the longest list of conditions, the profoundest concealed boredom, brought to bear on the tersest and least meaningful utterances. It is the falsest emotion under the realest circumstances, except for now, when unexpectedly David’s tone changes. Game over, it says. Ignore everyone else. Look at me. I am talking to you.
“You’re tall,” David repeats. This is supposed to be objective repetition. The two of them, unique among their classmates, have never been allowed to advance to the subjective repetition. Even Norbert can ace the subjective. But Sarah and David are too immature, too determined to pursue their private drama at the expense of the group. They won’t process emotion, they hoard it. They are stuck in a rut. They are narcissists. Mr. Kingsley delivers these indictments as they sit knee-to-knee in the chairs, as if Sarah and David aren’t present, as if their immaturity and narcissism and stuckness also mean they are deaf. In a way, Sarah is. Having fought for the right to remain in this school, in this class, in this hard plastic chair, she stares, unflinching, deaf, blind, into David’s unavailable agates and he stares back, no one home, curtains drawn. Until today, when he sits forward slightly. “You’re tall,” he tells Sarah. Her heart lurches. Sarah’s height is average. She is shorter than David. If he took her in his arms, her cheek would find rest on his sternum.
“I’m tall,” she says carefully, as if afraid to misconstrue him.
“You’re tall,” he confirms.
No one else in the room with them now. The rest of them mere furniture. Mr. Kingsley has moved right in front of them, blocking the spectators’ view, his arms crossed and his thin lips compressed with displeasure. Even he’s furniture.
“I’m tall.” Gentle skepticism: Don’t you think that’s a little bit silly? When we made love, my face smushed in your chest. Turning my head, I could feel your heart denting my cheek.
Telepathy received. Private smile: No argument here. But despite that, “You’re tall,” David says.
“I’m tall,” Sarah says, trying it out.
“Take five,” Mr. Kingsley says peevishly. Secret codes aren’t authentic emotion. Sarah and David aren’t behaving with integrity here. They just can’t seem to stop being cryptic; this is not a game, people, it’s life. The familiar condemnation rains down on their heads as without argument they return to their seats. They know everyone sees their disgrace but to them it is weightless, familiar, like the blossomy tree-trash that falls in their hair and sticks there as they’re walking outside. Outside it is March, in their hot southern city late spring. Wildfires of azalea ringing the houses. All the sticky-fingered trees. David is sixteen at last, and his mother and stepfather, as promised, have bought him a car. David drives Sarah home, and though their companionship is stiff and wordless Sarah sits in his new-smelling passenger seat as if perched on the wing of some fabulous beast. It is David but carries him, too. They feel hopeless delight that they’ll never admit. So this is what they might have had. Flying through their city unwatched, their arms warming the narrow abyss where the gearshift stands guard between them.
At the chalk-X-marked gate Sarah smiles her thanks, David smiles goodbye. Sarah turns so she won’t see him driving away. David keeps his gaze out of his mirrors so as not to see her recede, growing small. Their sadness is a shared secret now and perhaps that’s enough. To dare further they need scrutiny, hectoring, the built-in limitations they first obtained from Mr. Kingsley but that are broadly available elsewhere, the countless ways of being cryptic, of behaving with doubtful integrity, though never, they both know, without authentic emotion. Whatever they have, it’s authentic. There Mr. Kingsley was wrong.
BY THE TIME the English People were finally due to arrive, even their hosts had forgotten about them. The English People had been announced by Mr. Kingsley the previous September, what now seemed a lifetime ago. The previous September, Manuel had still been a nonentity. The previous September, Greg Veltin had still been the untouchable idol of all virgin girls. The previous September, they had just been embarking on repetitions with the accumulated fervor of long anticipation, and had not yet so failed as to have heard Mr. Kingsley declare, as he’d declared this week, that they were the most disappointing Sophomores he had ever worked with. The previous September, they had not yet been disgraced—yet now, these ancient arrangements, in reminding them who they had been, also offered the prospect of starting anew. They would be their best selves, in the eyes of esteemed visitors who had never known them otherwise.
The English People were a performing troupe from a high school in Bournemouth, a city in England. They were only fifteen and sixteen themselves, which was why the Sophomores had been granted the particular honor of hosting them. The previous September, when Mr. Kingsley had gathered them in the rehearsal room, he’d reversed his chair and leaned at them confidingly. “They’re touring with what’s supposed to be an absolutely terrific adaptation of Voltaire’s Candide,” Mr. Kingsley had explained, “and as you’ll learn in European Theatre History, Voltaire was France’s most famous playwright. Now, who’s been to England?” Involuntarily Sarah looked at David, and as quickly looked away. For her, until now, England only existed in David’s postcards. Now those Big Bens and Piccadilly Circuses and Carnaby Streets with their punks seemed like jokes played upon her alone.
David’s hand, and only David’s, raised up. The elbow remained bent, denoting his reluctance to answer this question. Sarah remembered the first time she caught sight of his house, freshman year, from the kid-crammed back seat of Senior Jeff Tillson’s car. Jeff driving some five or six nondrivers home after one of the mainstage rehearsals, the lengthy and confused overlapping directions, debating who lived nearest to school and each other, David repeatedly telling Jeff Tillson to take the other kids home until it came out that David’s house was the closest to school, in its historic neighborhood of enormous old live oaks hiding tall stately homes behind veils of discreet Spanish moss. David wound up being dropped off first, and the car had erupted with cries of “That’s your house?” while David, his face crimson, uprooted himself from the overpacked car.
The chief feature of David’s house was that it was two houses: the gracious two-story in front and a luxurious garage apartment, just built, in back. Apart from the bathroom, the garage apartment was a single enormous rec room, with David’s bed at one end and his younger brother Chris’s at the other, and a pinball machine and sofa and stereo and TV in between. David’s mother, in preparation for the English People, added a set of bunk beds, a dorm-size mini-fridge, and a microwave oven, whether to encourage total exile from the house or apologize for it, no one bothered to wonder. Eight hosts had been originally asked for, but only six had been needed, because David’s family would house two of the boys, and Joelle’s family two of the girls. The other two boys would stay with William and Colin, and the other two girls with Karen Wurtzel and Pammie. Julietta had ardently wanted to host but for reasons that went unexplained Mr. Kingsley chose Karen Wurtzel instead and Julietta fervently smiled her approval. There were also two adults, both men, both of whom would be hosted by Mr. Kingsley and Tim in their beautiful home.
Long ago in September, Sarah was still enough part of her class to laugh with everyone else when Mr. Kingsley said the English People were arriving over spring break to get accustomed to their hosts and temporary homes “before tackling CAPA, which—how shall I say?—can be intimidating to the uninitiated.” Sarah was still enough part of her class to relish the smugly held knowledge that for all its feuds and sectarian fissures, their school as a whole was a clique, unwelcoming to the outsider. Sarah was still enough part of her class to anticipate the pleasure of pitying these eager, inferior English, of surprising them with kindness, and receiving their gratitude. But now Sarah was so far outside of her class that she might have been English herself. She was so far outside of her class that when spring break ended, and school resumed, she was at first unaware that there had been a revolution, for she had missed all the contributing events: William’s guest, Simon, deserting the unpredictable austerity of William’s home for the dependable luxury of David’s garage apartment; Colin’s guest, Miles, in protest of the other three leaving him out following Simon, and being followed by Colin; David’s original guests, Julian and Rafe, mocking Colin’s Irish heritage in a manner that Colin mistook for a special distinction; David’s brother, Chris, deserting the apartment for points undisclosed, leaving Simon and Miles to nightly fight over who got Chris’s bed versus who got the sofa, while Colin uncomplainingly slept on the floor.
Meanwhile, among the girls, surprisingly it had not been Joelle’s house but Karen Wurtzel’s that became the headquarters. Karen’s English guest, Lara, had in no time at all learned and broadcast what facts about Karen nearly two years of Trust Exercising had not excavated: that Karen’s mother, Elli, unlike Karen, was pretty and fun and would stay up till all hours drinking Bartles & Jaymes and watching telly and talking and laughing while Karen stayed locked in her room and only came out to ask her own mother to please make less noise. Joelle and her two guests, Theodosia and Lilly, having hit it off like the proverbial house afire and spending the late hours after rehearsal driving Joelle’s Mazda everywhere but the forty-five minutes to Joelle’s inconveniently located home, started sleeping at Karen’s; after which, as had happened with the boys, the fourth English girl, Pammie’s guest, Cora, protested at being left out and migrated to Karen’s, Pammie trying to follow, but finding herself not invited.
After these domestic rearrangements, which took less than a week, the clique hardened its form.
Their first day at CAPA, the English People debuted as a leadership class. Though in many ways they looked physically younger than their American peers, the boys—Simon, Miles, Julian, and Rafe—being slender and smooth, their faces and chests still entirely hairless, and the girls—Lara and Cora, Theodosia and Lilly—being girlishly skinny, with no hips or breasts, the English People nevertheless separately, and even more so en masse, seemed older, their wits sharper, their knowledge more extensive and at the back of it somehow impenetrable. Perhaps cultural difference explained this. Perhaps it was all a mirage they induced with their accents, poor imitations of which became a widespread affliction of the sophomore class. The impression of power they gave seemed not wrought, but inevitable. That David or William or Joelle or Sarah or any of them had imagined impressing the English was now so unimaginable as to best be forgotten.
The two English grown-ups—Martin the teacher/director and Liam the star—first appeared after lunch, given that they were grown-ups, not visiting students, and so didn’t take classes. When everyone had assembled in the Black Box, Martin and Liam sat onstage with Mr. Kingsley, like Mr. Kingsley backward on their chairs, while Theodosia and Lilly and Lara and Cora, Rafe and Julian and Simon and Miles, sat anonymously in the risers with the rest of the students. Bantering back and forth with Mr. Kingsley about the Touring Life, One Hotel Seeming Just Like Another, and the Pleasures of Home, Martin and Liam seemed cut of that same kingly cloth as the aptly named teacher. Martin and Liam were capable of the same ostentatious air of relaxation: that manner of behaving as if unobserved, to broadcast the serene consciousness of being closely observed. Martin and Liam and Mr. Kingsley, entirely ignoring their students, trading theatrical badinage between their improperly utilized chairs, formed not a clique, grown-ups being understood not to form cliques, but another sort of unit, perhaps best called a club. To Sarah, the existence of the club registered just below thought, as a sensation of hopeless exclusion. To David the existence of the club registered as an angering challenge he wished to reject—but in such a way that Mr. Kingsley and Martin and Liam would be abashed, and desirous of winning his favor. To Joelle it was merely three men, two of whom she’d not before assessed. Joelle quickly found Martin too old and dismissed him to the same inert heap where lay gay Mr. Kingsley. Liam, by contrast, was in range. As if her eyes were a stethoscope, Joelle measured his blood: high temperature, swift tempo. Energy zigzagged unpredictably through him like the charge through a poorly wired lamp. He had arrestingly unique, ice-blue eyes such as you read about in fairy tales, but they transmitted to Joelle some sort of muffled desperation. This was a good-looking guy who would never be sexy, due to what sort of deficit or obstacle it didn’t interest Joelle to discover. Dismissing Liam as well, Joelle returned to passing notes with Theodosia and Lilly about the packet of cocaine in Joelle’s makeup bag, and with whom they should share it at lunch.
Liam had been Martin’s star student some handful of years before this, and Martin had staged Candide specifically for him, which Martin’s current students seemed to accept with no trace of resentment. Liam was twenty-four, six years out of high school. Of Martin’s age no one was sure. Sarah would not learn Liam’s story, including his age, until Liam told her himself, later on in this Month of the English. Mrs. Laytner had been unusually visible since the English arrival, intersecting as it did with ambitions she had for the school. Their multimillion-dollar theatre, with its two hundred feet of flyspace, its four hundred red velvet seats, its twenty-four-thousand-dollar lightboard, would host touring dance companies, orchestras, and whatever else one found in such beacons as Los Angeles and New York. While the Bournemouth Candide marked the American debut of its director and precocious young actors, its greater importance was as CAPA’s debut as a venue on the stage of its city. A first performance of Candide during the regular school day was reserved for CAPA students and teachers, but this was only to keep them from taking up space at the two weekends of public performances, all of which had sold out in advance, after a photo-filled feature in the city newspaper, more evidence of Mrs. Laytner’s exertions.
By the day of the first performance, the CAPA “sneak preview,” the English People are almost halfway through their stay. They seem both familiar and foreign, as if they have always been here and as if they have just now arrived. Familiar are their faces and voices, their postures, their gaits—any one of the CAPA students can pick out any one of the English from the ocean of heads in the hall, across the width of the lot ducking into Joelle’s Mazda or vaulting into David’s convertible Mustang. Foreign is almost everything else. Well as the Sophomores know one another’s private lives, which Mr. Kingsley has made them yield up like paying dues into a fund, they’ve learned so little about their English peers they do not even notice how little they know. They don’t know if Rafe lives in a large house or in squalid government housing, if Cora is a knowing virgin or a discreet libertine. They can’t crack the code of their clothes, if there is such a code, or of their accents, which to them all sound the same. They don’t know what roles any of the English people, apart from Liam, are playing in Candide, nor what roles there are, nor even what the title role is, if “Candide” is a name or a thing. Busy as they are with this quarter’s Costume History and Shakespearean Monologue and American Songbook, not one of them has read Candide. They may imagine that its title has an exclamation point. They have never seen a rehearsal because it goes without saying that the English People have no need to rehearse. They have never seen sets, props, or costumes because these don’t exist. The English People travel light.
Sarah sits alone in the full house, hidden amid instrumental musicians. She is doubly exiled from Theatre now, persona non grata among the Juniors also. Somehow the year-old secret of her one night with Brett has become current news. They hadn’t even had sex; in her memory Sarah sees Brett’s narrow, hairless body and his abashed and drooping penis, pallid and cold to the touch. But these details do nothing to lessen her crime, just as her self-isolation, her cold-shouldering of loyal Julietta and Pammie, her funereal clothes, sullen curtain of hair, and dragon’s tail of cigarette smoke have done nothing to prepare her for being an actual outcast. She’s ablaze with fresh humiliation and can no more see beyond its nimbus of heat than could anyone being burnt at a stake.
The house lights go down. Greg Veltin has a list of lighting cues he’s been given by Martin. A lightboard operator being the only technician Candide requires, Greg Veltin is the only person at CAPA, indeed in the entire United States, who’s seen a rehearsal, as rehearsals in fact there have been. Greg Veltin is looking forward to the performance. Greg’s own paradoxes, of personality and persona, of social status and historical experience, perhaps uniquely equip him to look forward to it.
Greg Veltin brings up the first cue and out saunters Liam, in generically olden-times baggy white blouse and knee breeches. The stage is otherwise perfectly bare. At CAPA, elaborate sets, props, and costumes are always required to keep busy the students who will never be cast—or who once were but are not any longer. For example, Greg Veltin, once the next Fred Astaire, now anonymous lighting cues guy. Greg Veltin appreciates the blunt lack of bullshit in this English production. Apart from the lighting cues list that Greg holds, the production consists entirely of the actor who plays the hero, and eight other actors who play, variously, the other human roles, a couple of animals, and some items of furniture, roles that aren’t really performed but denoted, with a startling carelessness Greg Veltin knows is not actually careless. He has seen it repeated with flawless precision, the tossed-off gesture again tossed, with just the same strength to just the same distance, again and again, the definite vagueness maintained so you’re never quite sure if the gesture denotes an object or an action or even the set, as for example when actors get onto all fours, as they do frequently, to play at being tables, or sheep, or South American mountains, or something else altogether.
Once Liam sauntered onstage Greg’s concentration on his cues became complete; regretfully he couldn’t spare attention to the audience reaction for fear he’d mess up. Pools of light bloomed and faded to indicate scene changes that otherwise might go unnoticed—despite, or perhaps because of, the incessant and bellowed narration. “ONCE UPON A TIME THERE LIVED A BARON IN A GREAT FANCY HOUSE,” bellowed Cora, as the rest of them, the girls dressed like Cora in knee-length ruffled skirts and snug blouses, the boys dressed like Liam in loose blouses and snug breeches, charged onstage like attacking commandos, enacting a house, a baron, fine furnishings, servants, and many abuses of servants, while Liam, as Candide, wandered this frenetic landscape of events in such a haze of charismatic idiocy Greg couldn’t decide whether Liam was doing absolutely nothing onstage or whether he was a genius. Sarah, alone in her row of musicians, saw expressionless Miles standing arms akimbo, to indicate being a wall, over which Theodosia, on tiptoes, mimed peeking. Behind the “wall” were Lilly and Rafe, Lilly flat on her back with her legs scissored open, Rafe on all fours energetically thrusting. “OH!” shrieked Lilly with gusto. “OH! OH! OH!”
“ONE DAY,” competingly bellowed Simon, taking over for Cora as narrator, “WHILST SHE WALKED IN THE GARDEN, SHE SPIED MASTER PANGLOSS INSTRUCTING THE MAID IN SCIENCE. SHE THOUGHT SHE AND CANDIDE SHOULD LEARN SCIENCE TOO!” Theodosia determinedly yanked her skirts up to her waist and leaped onto Liam, whose expression of idiocy grew so much more idiotic that Greg Veltin concluded he must actually be performing, although with unique subtlety as compared with the rest of the cast. Sarah saw, without seeing, the thrusting of groins, heard without hearing the squeals and moans. No part of this pantomime struck her as sexual; she stared as if at animals or children, organisms beneath her interest. An indeterminate sound that was equally titter and murmur had spread through the house, like an erratic wind on water. Mrs. Laytner, who had been sitting in the front row with Mr. Kingsley, rose abruptly and stalked up the aisle. The doors at the rear of the theatre swung in her wake.
Was the performance cut short, or was it simply short at its full length? Even with such headlong swiftness—the English People raced through Candide as if in reasonable expectation that large hooks would yank them offstage—it was possible for audience members to grow more discerning. This was their first real experience of double entendre, and they were starting to get it, the joke of the mismatch between words and acts; they could catch it before it flashed past. There was another mismatch, between the actors’ acts and their blithe, even dopey expressions. Stupidly grinning, the English People—Rafe and Julian and Simon and Miles, Lara and Cora and Theodosia and Lilly, and, of course, Liam—energetically pantomimed killing each other and being killed by each other, by means of guillotine, gun, bonfire, dagger, and noose; they pantomimed natural deaths via drowning and sexually transmitted disease; they pantomimed raping and being raped and consensual fucking; and above all, it seemed, instances of both forced and consensual ass-fucking. In the audience the uncertain titters and murmurs and utter confusion gave way to real, emboldened laughter flaring up here and there threatening to ignite the whole house, then turning inside out and resurfacing weirdly as shame. Things were very funny and without warning weren’t funny at all, they were deeply embarrassing, and just as quickly that was funny, that ridiculous seriousness—or was it? Were you an asshole for thinking it was? And why had you thought the word “asshole”? How incredibly funny!—or not.
Greg Veltin performed his last cue and turned his attention to Mr. Kingsley, still in the front row showing the rest of the house the expressionless back of his head. To his disappointment, Greg couldn’t derive any clues about the state of Jim’s, or rather, Mr. Kingsley’s, face, from the back of his head. Greg was no longer sure what he’d expected, or what he had hoped for. The show was over—had they taken their bows? Not having started with raising a curtain, they couldn’t end with lowering one, so just walked off the stage. As throughout, the audience, once released from the spectacle, could not reach consensus on how to react. Some stampeded for the doors. Some remained as if roped to their seats. Even these motionless ones, like Pammie, appeared torn between opposing impulses, in Pammie’s case the passive immobility of shock, and the active immobility of rage. Pammie’s seatmate, Julietta, didn’t stay to find out. For Julietta, the only thing worse than watching the show would be talking about it.
“HI-HO!” CALLED AN English voice in a manner both sarcastic and sincere. Assume friendly intent? Assume mockery?
Sarah looked up from her boots. She was sitting on the hood of her mother’s ancient Toyota Corolla, at the corner of the front parking lot. Sarah was parked here to avoid everyone, and so far she’d succeeded. She would have succeeded even in the back lot which was unusually empty, her classmates having left for the day. The Sophomores had no rehearsals, indeed almost nothing to do, until the end of the month. Instead of being performers this month they were supposed to have been learning the role of presenters—drumming up publicity and printing up programs, ushering patrons to seats, counting the box-office take. But Candide had been canceled.
Neither Martin, who had called out “Hi-ho!,” nor Liam, who sat in the passenger seat of the car Martin drove, seemed regretful. Martin was the author of the stage adaptation of Candide as well as its director. Liam was not merely the star, but the star for whom Martin had chosen Candide. They were far from home, in a city the April climate of which was already hotter than their native one ever approached on its worst days of August, and they had brought, as their ceaseless plaint went, too many “jumpers” and “trainers” and not enough of whatever nursery words they employed to mean T-shirts and sandals, and they were living as houseguests, in some cases decreasingly welcome. Were Martin and Liam angered, or embarrassed, or even pleased, to find themselves idle where they had expected to be presenting six performances in the space of ten days? It was impossible to say, as Sarah knew, because we cannot read minds but can only react honestly in the moment.
“Hi,” Sarah says carefully. There is much to confuse her here. She has never spoken to or been spoken to by either Martin or Liam, for all the hours she’s spent in their presence at school. She has never seen either of them in a car without Mr. Kingsley, their host, at the wheel. Having just, at long last, received her own license, a milestone the enormity of which is equaled only by its sense of anticlimax and its failure to grant her relief from her pain, Sarah is hyperaware of those occasions when a body and a steering wheel conjoin. She wonders whether Martin is licensed to drive in this country. Somehow she doubts that he is. The car Martin is driving isn’t Mr. Kingsley’s Mercedes. It’s a teenager’s car, a stylish beater of the exact make Sarah desperately covets, a convertible Bug, midway through extensive dermatological renovation. Its shell is heavily plastered with what Sarah assumes is a rust medication. In this year of their sixteenth birthdays, cars, or the absence of cars, are the only significant emblems. Sarah knows she knows this car but she can’t place it, the car having only recently appeared in the lot, around the same time as Sarah’s mother’s impoverished Toyota, which Sarah hopes is not connected to herself in the minds of her peers despite how hard she has fought for the right to drive it. The crucial thing is not to be dropped off at school by her mother. Sarah is allowed to drive from her mother’s workplace to school, and from school to her mother’s workplace. This is why she’s still in the CAPA lot, although there’s no rehearsal. Her mother’s workday doesn’t end until six.
“Fancy taking a spin in our chariot?” Martin goes on, Liam grinning encouragingly. It’s Karen Wurtzel’s car, Sarah realizes. Karen’s father has been helping her restore it. Somehow in her taciturn remoteness Karen has made the car’s deficits into an asset, proof that she actually knows about cars.
“I have to pick up my mother from work,” Sarah says, so surprised by the invitation she does not think to lie.
“Where’s her job? Is it near?”
“She’s a secretary at the university.”
“Might have been there, we’ve seen every bloody attraction, is it the one down past those fountains? Why don’t we follow you there, you can drop off the car with your mum and then come on with us and have dinner.”
It’s so simple the way he describes it—like driving itself, when one thing shape-shifts into another, for example her solitary vigil in the front parking lot smoothly eclipsed by Martin and Liam making ridiculous faces they know she can see in her narrow rearview, secondarily framed by the bug-spattered glass of Karen Wurtzel’s windshield. Down Fountain Boulevard she leads them, underneath the linked arms of the live oaks, the afternoon sun her attentive spotlight, the Toyota Corolla suffused with an alien splendor.
Sarah knows her hopeful excitement is the result of reprieve from exile, from her status which isn’t quite that of a slut but a soiled castoff even Norbert ignores. She’ll no more show herself this hope, which is the same as abject gratitude to Martin and Liam for noticing her, than she would show it to Martin and Liam, let alone to her mother, from whom she conceals everything with such thoroughness that her mother doesn’t know there are visiting English at school, available to magically pluck Sarah from her disgrace. Prior to the English People’s own disgrace, which seems to so little concern them, the CAPA Sophomores were under constant pressure from Mr. Kingsley and Mrs. Laytner to sell Candide tickets to family members and friends. Sarah had not sold her mother a ticket. Sarah’s continuation as a student at CAPA is largely a condition of her mother’s being able to forget that the school exists.
“You’re early,” her mother says, not without pleasure. “Would you like to use Petra’s typewriter? She’s gone for the day.”
In the barely recalled past of junior high school, Sarah spent most afternoons with her mother, in her mother’s little office, also not without pleasure. Her mother would take her lunch hour late, at two thirty, using it to pick Sarah up from her school and bring her back to the campus. There Sarah had been allowed a freedom she had not yet possessed anywhere else. She had wandered the full breadth of the university with its enormous crabgrass lawns, its famous old live oaks, its broad pebbled walks, its oft-photographed Spanish-style buildings, its backpack-wearing students hurrying along among whom Sarah would pretend to belong. The campus bookstore was where she had bought the paperback copy of Tropic of Cancer she still hadn’t managed to read; the campus commissary was where she had sat alone, with a Dr. Pepper, pretending to read it, cultivating an air that aloneness was the state she had chosen, and sometimes actually feeling a fierce pride in being alone. But most of the time, she would return through the towering heat of the late afternoon to loiter purposelessly with her mother, slouching in her mother’s extra chair, receiving unembarrassed the attentions of her mother’s co-workers, rearranging her mother’s collection of witty coffee mugs, all of which had been gifts from Sarah on Mother’s Days past. She’d spent those afternoons with her mother so effortlessly that she’s never given them a thought until now that they’re as intimately strange as the object landscape of her mother’s desktop.
“That’s okay,” Sarah says, picking up the photo of herself she most likes, the one from seventh grade. She looks far older than her years, is wearing just enough makeup, is smiling with unrecognizable confidence. There’s neither the slutty excess of eyeliner nor the desperate excess of eye contact that marred her last three school pictures despite deliberate precautions to the contrary. She does not recognize the very pretty, very happy thirteen-year-old in the picture, perhaps because the picture has become for her an icon. She wishes she had some pretext for showing it to Martin and Liam. “I ran into Karen Wurtzel after school and she invited me to sleep over”: the lie as always successful in direct proportion to her lack of preparation. Duplicity, or she’d rather call it storytelling, is her sole realm of inspiration, the entire basis for her mistaken belief she can act.
“Who’s Karen Wurtzel?”
“You know, she lives in Southwoods.”
“I don’t know.”
“She’s in my class. She followed me here so I could drop off the car.” No need to talk about the building’s lack of visitor parking, the reason Karen isn’t standing here also; Sarah had thought of saying this on the way up, which means it’s too much detail and so she does not. Sarah’s mother has long since chosen her battles, and theirs is now an almost marital understanding of tacit permission in exchange for unblemished appearance. Sarah’s grades will never slip, she will never be addicted or arrested or pregnant.
“She’s taking you to school in the morning?” confirms her mother by way of farewell, turning back to her work. Sarah feels a pang; her mother had been happy to see her. If they were a different mother and daughter she would go around the desk and kiss her mother’s drooping cheek, but even in the past, when theirs was a shared world, they rarely touched each other.
Sarah goes back down in the elevator and finds Martin and Liam horsing around in the lobby despite the building’s lack of visitor parking; through the glass doors Karen Wurtzel’s car is visible parked in the fire lane. “We were just about to send out the search parties,” says Martin, and when Sarah says it’s good that they didn’t she must show alarm, because both men laugh.
“Did we give you a scare?” Liam hopes.
The rear seat of Karen Wurtzel’s car is almost not a seat at all and Sarah has to twist sideways to fit. “Now off to fetch Karen,” says Martin. “Those Calamitous Bournemouth Yokels.”
“The Captain Boffed You.”
“Three Corpulent Britons Yodel.”
“Troubled Cooks Bludgeon Yams.”
“You have a future on Fleet Street, Liam. This Can’t Beat Yours but There Comes Bonny Yanni.”
“Who’s Yonny?”
“Y-a-n-n-i. Greek fellow with long flowing hair, plays the keyboards and sings.”
“Do you fancy him, then?”
“Oh yessss, he reminds me of you, you pretty thing, needs a shave like you do. Hasn’t old Lillian taught you to shave, you inveterate son of a smothering mother?”
“I’ll thank you not to mention my sainted mother.”
“I’m humoring you as the way to her heart.”
“Will you be my daddy then?” Liam grotesquely curls in the narrow front seat and paws Martin’s sleeve in the manner of an uncoordinated kitten. “Will you change my nappies? Waaahh! Waaahh!”
“Don’t I already?”
“Now, Martin,” admonishes Liam, leaving off his kitten act and sitting up. “I’m trying to impress this girl, aren’t I?”
All this witty repartee is shouted back and forth across the stick shift as if for the peanut gallery, as Martin drills the little car down the street like a man fully licensed, or perhaps never licensed. Sarah need not acknowledge what Liam has said. Had he not made the comment she would have felt sure they’d forgotten her. As it is she can’t be sure she’s the girl that he wants to impress; perhaps “this girl” is Karen. The force of the wind as Karen’s car speeds along isolates Sarah in the back seat, her tornado of hair intermittently blinding and gagging her. Concealed within these onslaughts she is able to contemplate Liam. He has the chiseled features of an idol, eyes so unlikely in their blueness and brightness as to suggest something doubtful, an improvised or artificial arrangement, hidden under his skin. Rejected as Sarah has been by Joelle—by Joelle, whom Sarah tried to reject—Sarah is unaware of Joelle’s verdict on Liam, and had she known it she would have surely contradicted it. Yet Sarah comes to much the same conclusion. Liam is within range, although she doesn’t frame it to herself the same way. But the impression of inexplicable deficit, of a queer gap between outward gifts—tall, handsome, lanky, flashing eyes, dazzling smile, the fringes of his hair tangling just the right amount with his eyelashes, one could go on and on—and inward integrity, this Sarah notices also. She envisions a cringing creature, some naked frightened nonhuman thing, having put on Liam’s body like a suit. Now it has to be vigilant, it has to keep watch on the humans around it, to see how to act, so it isn’t found out. And who was Liam keeping watch on? Martin.
The vision of the creature in the Liam bodysuit had to be forcibly struck from her mind. Liam was exceptionally handsome. Sarah repeated this idea to herself as if it were a lesson.
Martin wrenched the steering wheel and Karen Wurtzel’s car dove roughly over a curb cut and into a small parking lot. Brief strip mall, a handful of storefronts, the retail totem pole at the parking lot entrance indicating Chinese takeout, shipping center, and TCBY, which stood either for The Country’s Best Yogurt or This Can’t Be Yogurt, Sarah wasn’t sure which. Karen Wurtzel was standing in front of TCBY wearing jeans and a kelly-green polo with TCBY stitched above the left breast. She held a white plastic tub about the size of a medium popcorn. Martin braked just short of running her over and flourished grandly with one arm. “Thine Chariot Beckons You.”
“Too Clever By Yards,” complained Liam.
“Testy Can Be Youth,” replied Martin.
Sarah watched a series of storms break across Karen’s face and disappear before the men had looked up from their wordplay. “Hi,” Karen said brusquely to Sarah without looking at her, as Martin and Liam got out of the car, Martin handing Karen her keys with a bow. Karen handed Martin the white plastic tub and Martin peeled off the lid and peered in. “This Can’t Be Yogurt,” he said.
With Karen driving, Martin took Liam’s place in the passenger seat, and Liam climbed in with Sarah. “How’s the water?” he asked. Their knees clashed in the inadequate space and Liam bent to study their conjunction. “They’re talking about us,” he reported to Sarah, who bent her head near his to hear him.
“What are they saying?”
“I don’t know. I don’t speak any Knee.”
“How do you know they’re not just making noises to fool you?”
“The way dogs do? ‘Woof woof woof,’ as if they’re saying something? Dogs must think we’re quite daft.”
“I don’t actually hear our knees talking.”
“It’s on a higher frequency, like a dog whistle. Perhaps dogs talk to knees. But they don’t have knees, do they? Do they? Look, Martin! Who am I?” Liam sprang onto his knees in the tiny back seat and let his tongue idiotically loll from his mouth as the wind beat his hair from his face. “Arf arf!” he shouted into the wind. The toes of his upturned shoes were digging into Sarah’s thigh; they were battered black lace-ups made of cheap or fake leather, sad-sack shoes yet he wore them as obliviously as would a little boy whose mother still bought all his clothes. He had fully committed to playing the pleasure-maddened dog and was barking and slobbering and nosing Martin’s shoulder as best he could around the impediment of Martin’s seat behind which Martin, twisting so as to face back, sheltered whilst whacking Liam’s “dog” nose with a rolled magazine he’d produced from his satchel.
“Bad dog! Bad dog!” Martin cried as Karen wordlessly drove and Sarah, seated behind Karen, rode while trying to catch a glimpse of Karen in the rearview, spotting only herself. Her grim expression repelled her and she forced herself to laugh with crazy energy at Martin’s and Liam’s antics.
Karen parked in the lot at Mama’s Big Boy and they filed inside, first Karen, looking at no one and speaking to no one, then Martin and Liam shoving and goosing each other, then Sarah, at whom Martin and Liam grimaced and clowned and for whom she felt herself performing as a mirror, laughing a laughter not her own, although it would become hers, she told herself. She would not mimic Karen’s wounded hauteur, the flattened line of her mouth.
“Table for four,” Karen told the host as the host pirouetted in welcome.
“Right this way!” the host cried. “Are you going to need high chairs, honey? Not even boosters?”
“I dooo want a boothstah, I dooo!” Liam said.
At the booth Karen slid in first. As if scoring a run Martin slid in beside her, slamming her against the booth’s inside wall. “So terribly sorry!” he cried. “Are you injured? We must take a pulse—I’ll be gentle. Cold as ice. Is there a doctor in the house? Perhaps a licensed dietician? Liam, crumple up these napkins for a fire, I believe Karen’s heart has stopped beating—”
“Let go,” Karen said, laughing, for even she could not withstand Martin’s earnest assault—but it was different with Karen than it had been when Sarah mirrored Martin’s and Liam’s hilarity. Sarah knew she had been copying, while Karen had somehow reclaimed her own place. It no longer mattered to Karen that Sarah was here.
Sarah wound up seated opposite Karen. Liam, beside Sarah, sat opposite Martin, consumed by his role as Martin’s foil, co-conspirator, and jester. “D’you know Liam used to have fatal stage fright?” Martin was telling Karen. “D’you know I used to have to tell him to bring extra pants on the nights he performed?”
“He liked to see me play dress-up,” said Liam.
“In case of accidents.”
“D’you mean like that time you zipped your willy, Martin? Don’t worry, Karen, it caused only minor deformity.”
“I’ll cause you a minor deformity!”
Neither Sarah nor Karen could compete with this, nor were they invited. But Karen needed only to train her attention on Martin. He’d cast her in the role of watching him, as he’d cast Liam in his multiple roles, and Sarah in her part as a sort of wordless prop by which Martin could give Liam occasional scoldings. “Poor Sarah’s bored stiff!” Martin said. “She’s going to be wondering why she came out with us instead of having all the great wicked fun she had planned.”
“I was just going to pick up my mom,” Sarah began.
“Devoted to her mum, just like you, Liam, and yet it’s me discovering these points in common. Why aren’t you getting to know each other? Do I have to do everything?”
Wit, or what passed for it; a nimbleness of insults and baffling allusions; the quick pivot, the cavalier non sequitur, the comically extreme reaction. Sarah had always imagined herself possessed of such talents. Hadn’t she been a lunch-hour intimate of Mr. Kingsley’s? But Martin’s conversational virtuosity—or perhaps his unremitting energy for dominating social situations—overmatched her completely. She became quiet and even stupid in its presence. She tried to lay hold of Karen’s passive spectatorship, which seemed, at least in the moment, to possess more dignity than her own tentativeness, but Karen’s refusal to meet her eyes, to acknowledge her presence, to in any way admit her into comradeship, seemed to deny her Karen’s manner toward Martin and Liam as well. Since becoming a student at CAPA, Sarah often had the classic nightmare of finding herself about to go onstage without knowing her lines, or even her role, or even the play, and though this situation lacked the abject terror of those dreams it was similarly paralyzing.
Although Sarah also spoke, laughed, ate half a club sandwich, even flirted with Liam—at least, had she been watching herself from a neighboring table it would have appeared that she did all these things. They had arrived at the Big Boy around five and now it was almost seven. “Crikey, we have shopping to do,” Martin said. “Come along, come along. What did you tell people, Liam? Seven thirty or eight?”
“I don’t know,” Liam said. “I think I just said after seven.”
“You’re such a complete imbecile, or perhaps you’re a dreamer, a beautiful dreamer, and we’re all your beautiful dream.”
“Why d’you look so much like my worst nightmare, then?”
“D’you ever have that nightmare,” Sarah tried, “where you’re in a play, but you never rehearsed, and you don’t even know what play it is?” She’d done the thing she most despised, of attempting to parrot their accent. Mustering the strength to speak words, she couldn’t even use her own voice.
“Yes!” Liam was shouting, as if she’d guessed the answer to a lucrative riddle. “All the bloody time! That’s my worst nightmare!”
“Another remarkable point in common. There you go, Sarah, you’re drawing him out. I think you two ought to do the drinks shopping and Karen and I will do snacks, but don’t take all night. We’re already late and we don’t even know if we’re late for seven thirty or eight due to Liam’s remarkable idiocy.”
“Where are we going?” Sarah asked Liam once they were alone, cleaving the arctic glare of the supermarket with the rattling cart preceding them as if they were a young couple pushing a “pram.” Separated from Martin, Liam had grown quiet, and intently attentive to her, and correspondingly handsome; he watched her push the cart as if enthralled. For a moment, after she spoke, he seemed to study her words on the plate of his mind, as if unsure how to consume them.
“To our place,” he said.
“You mean—Mr. Kingsley’s?”
“Yes. Jim’s place. And Tim’s. Mustn’t forget Tim. Tim and Jim, Jim and Tim. D’you think they fancied each other because their names rhyme? And they wear the same size trousers.” Liam giggled, exposing his compromised teeth—if only he would keep his mouth shut.
“I didn’t know they were having a party.”
“Is this a lager you like? We should get one of these big—boxes—Martin loves big American things—”
She understood for the first time that they were buying alcohol. “Do you have an ID? That proves that you’re over eighteen?”
“You think they’ll ask me to prove that I’m over eighteen?” Liam giggled again, perhaps at the thought of being mistaken for a minor—yet he had come here, with Martin’s troupe, as a sort of honorary high school student. Didn’t he think he resembled one? But he didn’t, Sarah realized. Beneath the unforgiving grocery store lights, his skin was slightly worn, the corners of his eyes slightly creased. Or perhaps it was not the store’s fluorescence, but the absence of Martin as a point of comparison, that made Liam’s age abruptly visible. Either way, Liam said, as if he knew her thoughts, “It doesn’t matter. Martin will pay, and there’s no mistaking him for a kid.”
“How old is he?” Of course she knew he was older—the teacher’s imprecisely superior age—but how much older she’d never been able to guess. She could not match him, agewise, to the other adults in her life.
“How old is Martin? He’s bloody forty, isn’t he? Old wanker.” This was said with fondness. To cover her surprise Sarah wheeled the cart into a reckless U-turn now that it was heavy with Miller High Life and Bartles & Jaymes. Forty was much older than she’d thought, though she wasn’t sure what she had thought, nor how this contradiction of what she had thought made her feel.
At the register Martin paid for the beer, wine, potato chips, and pretzels while Sarah, Karen, and Liam slunk out of the store as if they didn’t know him. Barks of laughter—Martin’s—and an unintelligible volubility—the cashier’s—followed them through the automatic doors, which slid shut and then jerked open again for Martin, pushing the juddering cart. “Is everyone in this country a ponce?” he asked as he plowed the cart across the lot toward Karen’s car. “I’ve never met so many poofters in my life. Teaching at your school, waiting tables at that burger restaurant, ringing me up at the grocer’s—”
“It’s the neighborhood.” Sarah cut him off. Something in Martin’s comment provoked a warning sharpness in her own reply, but as soon as she heard it, she faltered. “This is the gay neighborhood,” she clarified, and now she sounded apologetic. “I mean, not just gay—it’s the arts neighborhood, but it’s where lots of gay people live. It’s the fourth-largest gay neighborhood in the country,” she unaccountably added, “after New York, San Francisco, and—I’m not sure of the third.”
“Buggering Batman, Liam. Sarah here seems to specialize in Sodomitica. How did you know, Sarah, that sort of thing’s right up his alley?”
“My cousin’s gay. He used to live in this neighborhood,” Sarah said, uncomprehending and unheard, as Liam, having leaped on Martin’s back and snatched off his glasses, howled and waved the glasses in the air while Martin spun himself and Liam like a top, hugely waving his arms to emphasize his vision impairment. Unassisted, Karen unloaded the grocery cart into the VW’s under-hood trunk.
“Did your mummies know your school’s in America’s fourth-largest gayborhood? Mind my specs, Liam, you’re going to break them.”
“Did you know, Martin? I’ll bet you did. And you told me I wouldn’t need my arse helmet.”
All the way to Mr. Kingsley’s they kept it up, though neither could entirely out-shout the VW’s plosively stuttering engine. It brought a din as of German invasion to the crepuscular, secretive streets of Mr. Kingsley’s neighborhood, the strangely underwater world into which one passed instantly upon turning off the garishly lit boulevard. It was a noiseless foreign world of boundless lawns upholstered in shadow on which globes of live oak and azalea floated like ships. Karen’s unmufflered vehicle tore through it contemptuously, and Sarah could already see Mr. Kingsley standing at the hem of his own velvet lawn, eyeing their approach with his fists on his hips and that expression Sarah most feared, of unsurprised distaste, on his face. But as they came around the bend that revealed his house there was no Mr. Kingsley, only several familiar cars at the curb. One was Joelle’s. One was David’s. Karen parked her car in front of David’s.
As she stood out of the driver’s seat, Karen looked directly at Sarah for the first time all night. Not in friendship, but in cold inquiry. Sarah knew Karen wanted to see David’s car inflicting on Sarah whatever soft violence an unmoving car can inflict. “Aren’t you coming in?” Karen said. Martin and Liam hastily routed the booze and snacks from the under-hood trunk and disappeared around the side of the house toward the enchanted forest of Mr. Kingsley’s backyard, with its deck and pergola and fairy lights. Sarah gazed forward yet she could see David’s car through the back of her head, could see the ghosts of David and herself entwined like snakes in its dusky interior.
“Are you dating him or something?” Sarah asked about Martin, as much to banish her own thoughts as to deflect Karen’s question.
Karen stepped away from the car and slammed the door, which left Sarah having to lever the driver’s seat forward and reopen the door for herself, or climb out the open top. Either option would make her look like a clumsy fool and so she stayed in the car and returned Karen’s unfriendly gaze.
“‘Dating’?” Karen smirked. “We’re just hanging out.”
“Your mom must love you hanging out with some forty-year-old guy from England,” Sarah said, hoping to shock Karen with Martin’s shocking age, as Liam had shocked her.
But Karen only said, “She does. That’s why we’re not hanging out at my house anymore.” With that Karen turned her back and crossed the lawn.
As soon as Karen had passed out of sight Sarah clambered out of the car on the curb side, averting her gaze from David’s car as if it would blind her to actually see it. She stood so near the hood of David’s car she could have laid her palm on it. She was seized with the wild conviction that David was sitting in his car, just an arm’s length away, watching her, and that this had been the reason for Karen’s cold gaze. Then Sarah understood that it wasn’t just David sitting in David’s car, watching her, but David and the new girl who rode in the passenger seat. English Lilly, ambient gossip reported. David and Lilly sat quietly watching Sarah smote by the thought of David’s car, unable to even look at it—Sarah wheeled on them, her lips compressed in scorn. The car was empty. As if she’d meant to all along, Sarah pulled the door to David’s car open and slipped inside. He never locked it; locking it would suggest that he might care about it. The car, once so clean and new-smelling, was now a squalid vessel for abuse. The passenger seat and footwell were heaped with books and refuse, empty bottles, empty cigarette packs, the twisted wraiths of soiled cotton T-shirts. The pull-out ashtray overflowed and propagated smears of gray, foul ash in every direction. The car phone lay strangled in its cord, its light-up buttons extinguished. Until recently, Sarah knew, that phone had worked. David had boasted so much about it, handing out the number to so many people, even Sarah had learned what it was. It had been a schoolwide pastime to call David’s car. The phone appeared to have been beaten to death perhaps against the cracked dashboard. The one time Sarah rode in the car, its interior hadn’t even been marked by a boy’s carelessness. Now it overflowed with a grown man’s despair. Sarah reached for the seat lever and lowered the seat all the way, and herself. The hushed night disappeared from view and she saw only the interior skin of this filthy armor of the boy she had loved.
Her face pressed into one of the leather seat’s stitched crevices, she crushed her fist in the vise of her thighs, the car so vibrating with her lust, or her grief, its movement should have been visible from the outside. But, “Sarah?” called Liam’s slightly too high-pitched voice, trailing off forlornly. He would be somewhere near the front of the house, seeing Karen’s gaping convertible, top down and obviously empty, and David’s car, also apparently empty. Surely he would not cross the lawn to make sure Sarah wasn’t crushing her clitoris over a white-knuckled fist in the passenger seat of her ex-boyfriend’s car, in the hope of the sort of orgasm that feels like one’s pleasure torn out by the root: a punishment for the pleasure as well as a final end of it.
Still Sarah froze, heart racing in her chest, skull, and crotch. The scent of her lonely exertion wound into the car like an unwilled and shameful secretion, fear’s trickle of urine or mystery’s trickle of blood from the nose.
He didn’t call her name again. A muffled sound, perhaps the door closing again, and then silence. David’s car’s clock said 7:42. When it said 7:48 Sarah raised the seat back to its previous position and left the car as if leaving the scene of a crime.
Mr. Kingsley’s front door was unlocked. No Liam or anyone else stood in Mr. Kingsley’s foyer, with its terra-cotta tiles and its bizarre human-size doll that was supposed to be called a “soft sculpture” and its rusty Mobil sign, with a winged horse, ostentatiously hung underneath its own spotlight. Quickly Sarah took the front stairs to the second-floor hall, the plushly carpeted one lined with posters and photos; she locked herself into the bathroom, washed her hands and her face, and redid her eyeliner and lipstick. When she came out again, there was Liam at the end of the hall, standing in an attitude of indecision. He seemed to be slightly tipped forward, hands dangling at his sides, wrists too long for the sleeves. This impression of infirmity passed when he saw her, and once again he looked handsome and young and his striking eyes flashed with charisma.
“You’re mysterious, aren’t you!”
“I went to buy smokes,” she lied.
The smile remained on Liam’s face but now it had been there too long. He was acting, she realized, and wanting direction but not getting it. This was the strange quality that hung around his handsomeness, a blur or a warp where he seemed to be lagging behind his own actions and wondering how they had gone.
“Isn’t this house crazy?” she offered.
His gratitude seemed to cohere him. “It’s a bloody fucking castle, isn’t it! Let’s hide—I hear the others.” Grabbing her hand he hauled her up the steep attic stairs—half serious, as if their lives depended on it, half ridiculous, as if “let’s hide” were an improv they’d just been assigned. The gleamingly beautiful attic room Sarah remembered from the night she’d discovered Manuel was now as squalid as—what? It took her a moment to understand the familiarity of the squalor. The room was as squalid as David’s car which she had just left. The stately expanse of the varnished floor, the expensive charm of the low-angled ceiling and dormers, were made unrecognizable by trailing heaps of pungent laundry, scudding piles of takeout garbage, countless fallen soldiers of the armies of Miller and Coors. Retaining her hand Liam pulled her through the cluttered filth with no more compunction than a goat would show crossing its native terrain. Then they were standing at the window on the far side of the room next to one of the beds. Letting go her hand, Liam opened the window with exaggerated care, making almost no sound, and cupped a hand by his ear to indicate that they were eavesdropping. A murmur of voices entered with the damp evening air: composite talk and laughter, muffled by distance and leaves. A party concealed in the manicured jungle of Mr. Kingsley’s backyard. From the height of the attic the party’s constituent parts, its outlines, its individual words were as impossible to parse as were the individual leaves of all the shrubs and trees that loosely filled the air outside the window like a mound of black feathers. Peering out Sarah could see, here and there, bright glints from the small outdoor lights. They disappeared, then flashed again, whether from the movement of the breeze through the leaves, or from the movements of people, she didn’t know. And then David’s voice reached her, as clearly as if he and not Liam were standing beside her. David’s low, sardonic voice made some sort of wisecrack, was answered by jagged laughter. In the instant of hearing his voice Sarah’s chest seemed to fill with the same feathered darkness into which she was gazing: a mass crushing and weightless of pain and desire. Across that distance she hadn’t deciphered the words he had spoken, yet it took her an instant to realize she hadn’t; his voice by itself seemed so sharp she had almost flinched from it.
“Everybody’s outside,” Liam said. “All our lot, and David.” After a moment he added, “He used to be your boyfriend—or was he just having us on?”
Her mouth was too dry to speak comfortably. “He wasn’t ever my boyfriend.”
“But he fancied you?”
“I don’t know.”
“’Course he did.”
Stupidly she blurted, before thinking, “Why.” Now he would think she wanted compliments from him, when what she’d literally meant was why did David love me—which was the cowardly way to ask David, Why do you no longer love me? Of course Liam, in speaking to her, assumed she was speaking to him.
“Because you’re lovely, that’s why.” He delivered the line beautifully, and a thrill rippled over her surface, in the depths of which David continued to lurk, the unanswered question.
“Stop,” she said, wincing.
“You are. So. Lovely. D’you know who you remind me of?” he exclaimed, as if finally solving a conundrum. “Sade. D’you know who that is?”
“I don’t look like her.”
“You do,” Liam said, feasting his eyes on her face until he seemed to embarrass himself. He broke off, and reaching outside the open window, brought in a saucer of cigarette butts. After patting himself all over, he produced a packet of Drum and papers, and sat down on the bed. “Fancy a ciggie?”
“Don’t you want to go down in the yard?”
“With the rest of them? No. No.” He dropped the packet of Drum and pulled her by the wrist to sit beside him. “No,” he whispered hotly. “I want to stay here with you.” When he jammed his tongue into her ear she gasped with repulsion as much as surprise, and twisted her head to take his tongue in her mouth, a less embarrassing arrangement that was even less pleasurable. She tasted the bitterness of her own earwax and bore down harder against him, in the hopes of erasing the flavor. It was a baffling struggle to accommodate his wildly poking, flicking tongue; no matter what they did, her tongue and his seemed to be at violent cross-purposes, each trying to poke the other out of the way. With an agonized groan Liam twisted their intertwined torsos until he’d crushed her to the mattress’s uneven surface, and then her air went out of her all at once as Liam, wildly struggling to take off his jacket, let his full weight drop onto her chest. He finally wrenched the jacket off with the vehemence of a madman escaping his straitjacket, and at the same time she gasped in such a desperate effort to refill her lungs she made a noise like a squeak or a shriek—hearing her, Liam raised himself above her on the balls of his hands and grinned frankly into her face, for he’d taken her gasp as a sign of excitement.
And she was, in a strange way, excited. All the physical signs of Liam’s ardor abashed and shocked her. He flailed; his dead white hairy limbs appeared impaled on the stem of his unaccountably wrinkly erection which he took in his fist and seemed to squirt redly at her, for he’d yanked back the covering skin. Sarah had never seen or even imagined an uncircumcised penis; she must have gaped at it, delighting him further. But along with these dismaying physical extrusions came verbal ones which made her shudder with astonishment. He talked constantly, mostly incomprehensibly, but what of his babble she grasped was unstintingly filthy. His voice rose and fell as he jabbered at her, like the voice of a gleefully mischievous boy who’s found a pornographic novel and is reading it aloud. And the words he used! So much filthier for being nursery words a mincing mother might use as she wiped a fat baby. He called it his willy—“Oh my willy’s going in!—it’s going in!—so squashy wet my willy’s in your squashy wet tight squashy hot—” Nothing could have been less suave—he didn’t touch her so much as he yanked, poked, jabbed, squeezed as if her body were some sort of toy—and yet she heard herself, a rising note of protest or a siren of warning, “Noooo, noooo, noooo.” And the horrible pleasure, pushing outward from her like a flower of flesh with great muscular petals like tongues, in its enormous agonizing opening so overpowered her she could not even feel his “willy” or any other part of him anywhere in or near her, as if he’d shrunk to a speck and been swept out to sea on the flood of her unwanted pleasure.
Returning from this she found herself suffocated beneath a weight of damp flesh. Her bra, T-shirt, and jean jacket were shoved to her armpits, exposing her breasts; her jeans and panties were shoved to her ankles; her knees were splayed open; she was still wearing her black pointy boots. Her bottom, coldly soaking wet, felt glued to a puddle of slime. Over Liam’s shoulder she saw the door of the room which was not even closed, and shoved him away with such force he fell off the end of the bed into foothills of trash.
“Didn’t you like it?” he exclaimed.
“The door’s open!”
Ah, she wasn’t displeased, only charmingly shy! Agreeably he sprang across the room to close the door despite it hardly mattering now—and so was the window still open, through which, only minutes before, she had heard David’s voice. What had the night heard of her, she wondered as she frantically tugged her clothes back into place, dodging his spidery efforts to re-entwine her, his slobbering kisses and praise. “God you’re so lovely,” he marveled again and again, like an actual idiot. She wished he would put on his clothes, cover his pale washboard chest and its brightly pink nipples. But he seemed perfectly at ease, sitting cross-legged on the heap of fouled sheets, his spent penis flopped between his legs like a stricken worm.
“Don’t you think we should go downstairs?” she begged him.
“If you’d fancy a drinkie I can pop down and get us some beers.”
“It’s just—what if someone comes up?” That the door had been open—the unthinkable humiliation of exposure grew more narrowly evaded in retrospect, as if, with enough dawdling, the past might be rewritten and the awful thing take place after all. How often was she going to do this, fuck someone in public? If he’d only get dressed!
“But Jim isn’t here. Did you think he was here? He’s at the opera, he and Tim. They’ll be gone hours.”
“He and Tim aren’t home?”
“No!” Liam laughed.
“But do they know we’re here?”
“We’re their guests! We’re allowed to be here.” At last he was pulling his clothes on, growing handsome again as his flesh disappeared. Halfway into his shirt, he pulled her against him and again pushed his pointy avid tongue down her throat. “D’you know I’ve been mad for you?” he asked huskily. “Wanking day and night, thinking about you. Almost drove poor Martin out of his mind.”
“Oh my God.” She laughed hollowly, twisting away. He tried to pull her hand into his just-buttoned pants but playing the coquette she escaped him, and rushed out the door and down the flight of stairs into the second-floor hall. A murmur of voices and music reached her from the opposite end of the house. As she pursued it Liam caught up, wearing the gaze of devoted assurance she longed for from David.
“I adore you,” Liam whispered as they emerged, pungent and nest-haired and obvious, into the kitchen.
There stood Joelle and Theodosia and Lilly and Rafe and a handful of the popular Juniors, whom Sarah had never known Joelle to spend time with, sharing a joint. Joelle gazed at Sarah as if from the deck of a ship that was moving away from the dock toward a glorious distant horizon; and Sarah saw herself, in Joelle’s steady gaze, marooned on the dock, shrinking down to a pinprick, vanishing.
“My my my,” Rafe said to Liam, “where’ve you been, Master Candide? Learning your lessons?”
“I’ve been alphabetizing the porno. There’s ever so much of it.”
“Oh my God,” Rafe said, blurting out smoke. “D’you all know about the porno? No end of it. Martin told us he’d thought he was putting on 8½ by Fellini and what came on was gents shoving their fists in each other’s a-holes.”
“Noooooo!” shrieked the popular Juniors, covering their faces, their mouths, or their ears.
“Martin’s such a bloody liar, he knew exactly what tape he was playing,” Lilly said to laughter.
“Do I hear my own revered name?” Martin said, appearing in the doorway that led from the yard with his dingy hair even more scrumbled than Liam’s. “Did you miss me, my darlings?”
“We’re just talking about what a pervert you are.”
“Be good now, be good. For fuck’s sake take the joint back outside.”
Karen wasn’t with Martin, or anywhere Sarah could see. Unobtrusively Sarah tried to peer through the darkness seeking Karen or David as she passed outside into the yard. Her palm was wet and cold from the bottle of beer she was clutching. The small of her back squirmed beneath Liam’s palm where he kept it attached as if with adhesive. She craved escape from his touch at the same time as feeling wild gratitude for the obstacle he made, like a shield, between her and Joelle, between her and the prospect of David. No sooner did this occur to her than she became afraid he’d change his mind and in her fear grabbed his hand, and felt him gratefully squeeze in return. Then they were smoking in the gazebo with Simon and Erin O’Leary, who clung to each other with the stunned despair of lovers so overcome by their lust they cannot take the first step toward solving it; they could have walked indoors and fucked in any of several unoccupied rooms as Sarah had just done without meaning to, but the simplicity of this solution escaped them. Their mutual grip was white-knuckled. Also in the gazebo were Colin and Cora, Cora who had been housed with Pammie and had thrown her over and moved in with Karen. Sarah wanted to ask Cora where Karen was, but Colin and Cora, unlike Simon and Erin, were noisily necking, grinding and groping, indifferent to their audience. And Rafe was there, bantering filthily with Liam, his arm slung around Katrina from Dance. Every one of the visiting English had paired off soon after arriving, none of these couplings was news, there had even been time for breakups and betrayals—only the grown-ups, Liam and Martin, had remained outside the dance, bemused by it, exempt; “horny little fuckers,” Martin had said. But now Liam had chosen Sarah—she could feel this information emanating through the darkness, altering her status, though in what way she couldn’t yet gauge. And Martin? “We’re just hanging out,” Karen had sneered. Sarah remembered sitting in this gazebo with Julietta and Pammie and Greg Veltin, those three linked in a circle of joy to which Sarah could not stay attached though they’d reached out their hands to keep her. Theirs was a love she had rejected by reflex because of its very simplicity, its undiverted, untranslated eruption from the heart or the guts or wherever such feelings came from. Sarah didn’t have such feelings anymore. Here she sat in the octopus arms of a man whose attractiveness she had to keep scolding herself to perceive and for whom she felt nothing but, now, an uneasy responsibility, as he slobbered and groaned his undiminished longing into her ear.
Rafe and Katrina and Simon and Erin and Cora and Colin no longer bothered to banter or smoke but only strove with mouths and tongues to swallow each other, and ground their crotches together, and collided their limbs with the gazebo’s unyielding walls. When Sarah flinched from Liam’s kiss he fell agreeably onto her neck and fed there like a starved, toothless dog. Apart from feeling wet, and as a consequence cold, Sarah’s body was devoid of sensation. Staring into the darkness beyond the gazebo as Liam whimpered and gummed the tendons of her neck she saw David’s profile float past, moving away, as if though mere feet of air stood between them they were no longer of the same world. Ever since arriving she’d been straining her powers of intuition to make some kind of contact with David and now he was passing so near she might have reached out and seized him. Her jaws opened but no sound came out. Yet David turned, and his gaze fell on her where she sat on the floor of the gazebo with Liam’s mouth latched onto her neck and Liam’s hand twiddling her unfeeling breast. David’s gaze swept her mercilessly and then he’d passed out of sight, toward the house. Sarah wrenched herself upright. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said, and escaped.
Inside the house the kitchen counters were covered in bottles and bags, the sound system had been left spattering between radio stations, shelves of smoke hung in the air performing slow disintegrations where they had been deposited by unknown persons passing through. Every room Sarah saw was empty. Yet she was certain the house wasn’t empty. Her body had come back to life, emotion pumping from her like a tide that touched all surfaces and lifted even the slightest piece of evidence, floating it into the light. Passing down the first-floor hallway to its very end Sarah flattened her hand on a door that was slightly ajar, pushed it open, and there were Martin and David, hunched in noiseless contortions of mirth. Their puckered faces were red. At her entrance they unbent, with effort and gasping.
“Oh my God,” said David, “get that thing away from me.”
The room in which she’d found them was a bedroom, vast and dim, holding a great bed lavishly made up in purple satin so dark as to look almost black. The bed stuck out from its wall like a tongue, was tumbled with pillows of all different sizes but all made of the same black-purple satin, like a crop of eggplants. The glow from two enormous lamps under zebra-striped shades would have barely outshone a candle. The far side of the room disappeared into drapery.
“Look who’s here! Catch,” Martin said and as she reached toward him in dumb obedience an object landed in her hands. David smacked it away.
“Jesus! Don’t make her touch it.”
“I’m sure it’s perfectly clean. I’m sure they boil them after each use.” Shaking with laughter, Martin dropped onto the bed and started rifling through a drawer in the near bedside table. “Maybe Sarah would prefer a different color? A tad longer or fatter? More pointy?”
“What is it?” she asked David as Martin pelted David with another of the objects.
“You’re fucking sick!” David was trying to talk down to Martin, but his very desire to talk down to Martin guaranteed he could not. David wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t touch the thing, whatever it was, but dodged it like a squeamish little boy, so that Sarah, inflamed, snatched it up from the carpet.
“You really want to put that down!” cried David.
“Oh, shame,” Liam said, peering around the doorframe. “Martin’s got in the toy chest again.”
“Do you want to know what it is?” Martin asked her, with sudden seriousness. “My, David, you needn’t man the battle stations, you’re quite safe with me. Did you really fancy him?” This was to Sarah, for David had sprung from the room, he’d escaped her again. “I’d like to know his secret. He must emit some chemical. Lilly’s mad for him, she says she’s not going to come back to England, she’s staying here to shag David the rest of her life. But you, sweetest Sarah, you’re far too mature for Liam, let alone a wet-eared wanker like David. Come sit beside me. You too, Liam. Gather round, children,” and in a trance Sarah sat down beside him on the eggplant-colored bed, seeing nothing but David and Lilly, David’s blunt-fingered hands and Lilly’s sallow, pointy face and her grim, willing mouth. Liam bounced onto the bed and pulled her onto his lap so that her legs dangled just short of the floor. “I feel like Prospero blessing Miranda and Ferdinand,” Martin said, digging into the drawer. “Trade me the one you’ve got, Sarah. Give it here.”
“Tell me what it is first,” Sarah said, twisting out of Martin’s reach.
“Naughty minx!” Martin said.
How well she could suddenly do it—act a complete part, while concealing, completely, a true self that did her no good. Saucy and sharp, she baited Martin, tossed and caught the rubber thing just beyond Martin’s reach, felt Liam’s insistent erection questing into her ass as he gripped her ever tighter to his lap. And all the while she was really with David, with his fumbled efforts over Lilly which he made to evade her, Sarah, and which wouldn’t succeed. Indifferent to the stupid men for whom she played the role, indifferent to the prick pressing into her ass, indifferent to the thing dropping into her hand, indifferent to the room, she homed in on David. It won’t work, she told him calmly.
“Sarah,” came Mr. Kingsley’s voice into the newly quiet room. “Please give that to me and go home.” Beneath her Liam stood up and she slid off his lap onto her feet. Mr. Kingsley was standing before her, his hand extended, and she put the thing into it, staring into his face and at the same time past his shoulder into his husband Tim’s face, which hung in the doorframe like Mr. Kingsley’s pale shadow.
“Lucky you! That must be the shortest Das Rheingold in history,” Martin brayed, as if by sheer volume he could transport them all out of the room.
“Tim was feeling unwell,” said Mr. Kingsley, while pointing at Sarah a look that spoke words as if straight to her mind. You of all people should have known better.
“We had a bit of a misunderstanding,” Martin blared on. This wasn’t obliviousness, Sarah saw, but a hostile rejection of circumstance. Apart from Martin’s voice the house was perfectly silent. Even the faint static from the untuned radio in the living room at some recent moment had ceased. “My lot came around looking for me,” Martin shouted, “then their pals turned up looking for them. Inseparable they’ve all become.”
“Sarah,” Mr. Kingsley repeated, “please go home.” As she rushed from the room Tim seized hold of her hand.
“Do you have a ride, sweetie?” he whispered.
“Yes,” she said, or perhaps she nodded, or perhaps she said nothing; she wrenched her hand from his and ran down the hall out the door. Every car was gone from the curb. Every trace of the party was gone like a zipper drawn closed, leaving only her sharp breaths and the clicking of her boots as she ran down the street. She feared nothing more than Mr. Kingsley’s Mercedes pulling up to display his disgusted but unsurprised gaze, but she must have longed for it, also, so vividly did the vision pursue her. No one, not Mr. Kingsley nor Martin and Liam nor Karen nor David nor anyone else whose body was, as it seemed bodies always should be, encased in a car appeared out of the darkness to enfold Sarah’s seemingly naked, certainly lost, unprecedentedly vulnerable body into the proper housing and accustomed rate of progress of a car. Sarah ran, as she had never previously run, down streets unaccommodating of pedestrian activity, streets without sidewalks and where the signs were far apart or entirely absent. Mr. Kingsley’s neighborhood was a sinuous maze and she was lost almost as soon as she’d gotten his house out of view. Soon she was too winded, and too self-conscious of the noise her boots made, to keep running but her walk was swift and frightened. In this city only the very poor and criminals who had made some sort of mistake while committing a crime ever walked. Sarah thought of her mother’s shabby little car, so intimately familiar, with longing and rage. She would do anything to obtain her own car. She would prostitute herself or rob or kill if it meant she could have her own car. Since starting all over with saving her bakery wages she hadn’t bought a single thing and if she could just get to twelve hundred dollars she was sure she’d have her pick of good cars; she read the Auto Trader every week with obsessive attention. She had long since ranked her dreams in order: Bug, MG, Alfa Romeo, in every case convertible. There were always beautiful little foreign convertibles for sale for around twelve hundred dollars in the Auto Trader “because those little cars are a big pain to keep running, they’re worthless,” said Sarah’s broken and cynical mother, who for all her superior experience of life knew nothing about how to live.
And then suddenly Sarah had returned to the wide, loud, brightly lit boulevard and could see the sign for Mama’s Big Boy glowing in the distance. It was a distance a car would travel in the blink of an eye but it took Sarah, walking quickly, what felt like ten minutes. She walked at the edges of the parking lots, not on the curbside bands of crabgrass, so as to look like someone walking to her car, not someone walking down the street, but even so, a few cars sounded their horns as they passed as if striping her with a paintbrush of noise. Were they warning or mocking? She didn’t know, but she tried to walk even more quickly, as fast as she could without seeming to run. In the entrance vestibule of Mama’s Big Boy she spilled her coin purse all over the floor trying to get her fingers around change for the phone. Her useless fingers, like so many hot dogs stuck onto her hands. Once she had finally managed to call David’s car phone she was afraid that the ringing would stop. David was certainly parked somewhere with English Lilly grinding away on his lap, the curtain of Lilly’s blond hair slapping them both in the face, Lilly’s left knee like an ungreased piston squeaking against the edge of David’s seat and with each squeak nearly knocking the phone from its cradle. At any moment David and Lilly’s labored fucking in the front of his car would inadvertently answer the phone and then Sarah would hear what she already saw and heard all too clearly—but instead she heard a default outgoing message that David had apparently never bothered to personalize. She hung up. It wasn’t even eleven. Mama’s Big Boy was approaching its busiest hours, when people who had already been somewhere and people who were still going somewhere converged. There wasn’t a single booth open so she sat at the counter, staring down at the enormous laminated sheets of the menu. “You again?” said her waiter of three hours before as he sailed past with pots of coffee aloft in both hands. Thankfully he wasn’t working the counter, he wouldn’t speak to her again, wouldn’t say, “Where are those boys with the accents?” She had only enough for an order of fries and a coffee and when they came their two contrasting tastes, dull-grease-potato and acrid, equally filled her mouth with the warning saliva that comes just before vomiting. She couldn’t sit on the stool at the counter for more than an hour, they had a rule against loitering, but she might not even make it that long. Some time later she went to the bathroom to rinse and stare at her unrecognizable face and when she returned the untouched fries and coffee were gone and someone new was on the stool, poring over the menu, and when she caught the counterman’s eye he waved a hand dismissively and turned away.
Close to midnight, she definitively wanted David to answer, she didn’t care if he had Lilly on his lap, but again he did not. Perhaps now he was asleep. Perhaps now everyone was asleep. Her mother in her lonely bed; her mother’s car, which Sarah still felt might appear—willed to join her like a loyal animal—in its carport. Mr. Kingsley’s Tim, who had not been feeling well at the opera, was asleep, and Liam whose incursion she still felt as a damp dull soreness between her legs was asleep. Mr. Kingsley and Martin—where were they? Had they placed silence and contempt between themselves, retreated to opposite ends of the house? And where was Karen? Never until this moment had Sarah considered that she might after all have to spend the night with Karen. She had expected Martin and Liam, whose idea it had been to spirit her away, to bear responsibility for the impulse as if it weren’t an impulse at all but a rational plan—as if, like CAPA hosting the troupe, Martin and Liam would host her, safeguard her welfare and put her up—in a hotel?—and buy her breakfast and drop her off on time at school in the morning. She had expected this because they were adults. Yet she’d gone off with them because they didn’t behave like adults, so that she couldn’t understand, now, whether they’d deserted her or whether she’d been stupid to expect otherwise.
There were five Wurtzels in the phone book but only one in a familiar zip code. Sarah dialed the number and despite the late hour a smoky drawling voice answered, sounding not unpleasantly surprised.
“Karen?”
“This is Elli. I think Karen’s already asleep. Can I give her a message?”
This Sarah had not been prepared for. She demurred, apologized, managed not to cry, and yet failed to hang up on the unsurprised voice. “Sarah,” Elli Wurtzel’s voice said after Sarah had choked out her location and situation, “I want you to stay standing there at the phone until a taxi pulls up. It’s going to be an orange-and-blue taxi that says Metro Cab. It might take a while but it’ll definitely come. It’ll bring you to my house and I’ll be waiting up for you. Don’t disappear on me or I’ll have to call your mom, and the cops. Okay? Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Sarah said.
“Are you drunk, honey?”
“No.”
“High?”
“No.”
“It’s okay if you are; I just want to be sure you don’t leave there before the cab comes.”
“I won’t.”
“I want you to wait inside, honey. Don’t stand outside in the lot by yourself.”
On this one point she disobeyed. She waited outside in the lot, out of sight of the waiters she felt must be watching and talking about her. Close to one in the morning an orange-and-blue car that said Metro Cab entered the lot, driven by a man with a brown beard and longish brown hair who asked, “Sarah?” then gestured her in. He found her gaze in the rearview mirror. “Hi, I’m Richard. I’m not running the meter ’cause Elli’ll settle up with me direct. She’s a friend.”
“Okay,” Sarah said. She’d never ridden in a taxi in her life. She hadn’t even realized her city had taxis. In her childhood she’d watched a television show about New York cab drivers. The meter had something to do with the way that you paid.
They drove back down the boulevard, all the dead grass, crushed glass, strewn litter, cracked pavement, inexhaustibly vivid granular variety on which Sarah had trod exhausted in an instant. The cab climbed onto the freeway and whistled through the night, dismounting two exits west of Sarah’s neighborhood among slightly dilapidated single-story brick ranch-style houses like those the city over except in neighborhoods of the wealthy, like David’s and Mr. Kingsley’s, or in poor neighborhoods, like Sarah and her mother’s, or in the neighborhoods of people even poorer than Sarah and her mother; everyone else, in Sarah’s experience, lived in houses like these. Even Sarah and her mother had once lived in a house just like these, when Sarah’s parents were still together. Richard pulled into the driveway of a darkened house on the front step of which a petite woman with long brown hair was sitting in a frilly bathrobe, smoking a cigarette. As the car turned in, the woman stood quickly and came to meet it. “Thanks,” she said to Richard, leaning one elbow on the sill of the open driver’s-side window, as if it were the middle of the day. “I owe you one.”
“You’ll get my bill,” Sarah heard Richard say, and Elli and Richard both laughed. Sarah got out of the car on the opposite side from where Elli was standing, and the car drove away.
Inside the house the air seemed made of sleep. All was warm, stale, damp. Sarah could hear the heavy inhalations and exhalations of sleepers; following Elli through a shag-carpeted living room dimly lit by the glow of a VCR’s digital clock Sarah saw that a sleeper facedown on a couch, one long leg and one arm dangling onto the floor, was Liam.
“In here,” Elli whispered, coming back to where Sarah stood rooted to the floor and taking her hand as if Sarah had perhaps lost her way in the dark. They left the twilight of the living room, passed through the near-complete darkness of a hallway with many closed doors, and entered the last door, from under which glowed a thread of gold light. “It’s a full house tonight,” Elli said when the door had been closed behind them. Her drawl was husky and bemused, as if no circumstance could distress it. They stood together in her densely cluttered bedroom, clothes and teddy bears and pillows heaped in such quantity that the underlying furniture could barely be seen. A lamp with a tasseled shawl pinned to the shade cast dim light on framed pictures of a much younger, rounder-cheeked Karen and a chubby little boy with the same face as Karen. Dolls and knickknacks and books were crammed into the overtaxed shelves: Star Signs; The Complete Tarot; Recipes for Nutritional Health. “This should fit you,” Elli said, with effort tugging a pajama set loose from a drawer that was too full to be properly opened. When the set was uprooted Sarah could see that it was ruffled and trimmed with little marble-size pom-poms. “I got it for Karen but she won’t be caught dead wearing it, and it’s too big for me. I’m a two. Oh, honey. What is it? Is it a guy? You are so pretty. Karen never talks about you; I can guess why. You’re gonna get in the shower—use the body wash.”
Clutching the pom-pom pajamas, Sarah locked herself into the tiny bathroom, like a forest of candles and powders and creams in which toilet, sink, and tub had accidentally grown, funguslike, through the floral perfumed understory. Sitting on the toilet she turned on the shower and sobbed into its noise. Love was some kind of chemical error. In the shower she turned the water by increments from very warm to very hot until she thought her skin would burn, and felt the microscopic Liam—where he had floundered his chest against hers leaving streaks of hot sweat, where he had tongued his spittle through the grooves of her ear and down the cords of her neck, where he had greased her with his fingers and stuffed her with what she’d hoped to forget he referred to as “spunk,” another nursery word connoting sickly stench, unlaundered linen, hidden stains, and shame—scoured and rinsed away like so many hairy little organisms from a cleanser commercial, protestingly sucked down the drain. No part of her body did not crave the annihilation of hot water and soap. She found the body wash, but didn’t want to use the crinkly pouf that went with it and was obviously often used by Elli and seemed too personal, so in the end she poured the body wash into the cup of her hand and tried to get it over as much of herself as she could. She washed her hair twice, clawing hard at her scalp. Then it seemed she might have been in the shower too long. When she crept out of the bathroom Elli sat curled on the bed with a tray resting beside her on which was clustered an array of little jars. Elli smiled a bright and pretty smile Sarah found herself returning. Elli had a small mole on her cheek. She seemed to be fully made-up despite how late it was. “There,” Elli said happily. “You look so much better.” Elli patted the mattress and shifted the tray to make room. That Elli was a mother, Sarah couldn’t keep lodged in her mind, let alone that Elli was the mother of Karen. Carefully Sarah climbed onto the bed, wishing the pajamas were longer. At home she slept in a 97Rock T-shirt that came down to her knees.
“I can tell you have a broken heart,” Elli said.
Sarah started to laugh and found herself crying instead. She covered her eyes with one hand and felt a tissue box being pressed on the other.
“Don’t be embarrassed, honey. You’re lucky, having your heart broken. That means you were really in love. I’m dying to do your Tarot but I think you should sleep, just as soon as you swallow your supplements. Do you take supplements?”
“Um, no. I don’t think so.”
“You should. Our bodies need this stuff. And your body needs even more, because of the stress and the pain. You have to help the body renew. A lot of the sadness you feel is physical. That’s really important to know. We’re gonna make up your supplement mix and tomorrow once they’ve had a chance to work we’ll talk about how you feel and if I need to I’ll make some adjustments. Then I’ll do up a week’s worth and write you a list and you can get them yourself.” As she spoke Elli uncapped one jar after another, shaking out capsules and tablets of all sizes and colors from which rose an unsettling odor of dead and dried things. The odor made Sarah think of those dirt caves beneath a dome of tree roots in which things often seemed to happen, whether magical or sinister, in the stories she read as a child. Elli had created a kaleidoscope of dingy color on the tray which looked as easy to ingest as a pile of gravel. “Sit up straight,” she instructed, handing Sarah a tumbler of water. “Relax the back of your throat completely. It’ll help them go down.”
It was a long, queasy process, swallowing everything down. Some of the capsules contained gold, beige, or olive-green powder, some of the tablets tasted moldy or salty and sucked the moisture from her mouth like eating chalk. Herbs, minerals, essential spores, and elements of earth. Mechanically, Sarah wet her mouth, placed a pill from the tray at the back of her tongue, relaxed the muscles of her throat, washed it down, Elli talking all the while in her tireless, musical voice. “What I always tell Karen is how boys and girls, and women and men, mature at such a different rate—it’s a medical fact that if you take a girl of sixteen like you, and a boy of sixteen, physically you might look the same age but chemically—and remember chemicals make our emotions and thoughts—that girl of sixteen and that boy of sixteen are at totally different levels. Emotionally, intellectually, the girl’s years ahead of the boy. That jelly-looking one is fish oil, I know it’s smelly but it lubricates your brain. So important. Even if you just took that alone, right away you’d feel calmer. And the truth is, the boys never catch up. Not entirely. Take my father, Karen’s grandpa. That man is fifty-eight years old and he’s barely more mature than Karen’s little brother, Kevin. Kevin actually has much more of the feminine in him, because we’re all a mix. When I talk about men and women or girls and boys I’m simplifying, because we’re all a masculine/feminine mix though most women are more feminine and most men are more masculine, but it’s not black and white, not at all. My father is a very masculine man and he’s like an animal crossed with a child. Kevin’s gonna be ahead of him by the time he’s fifteen, I really believe that. But your guy, the boy who hurt you—I’m guessing that the masculine is dominant in him. Do I know who he is? Is he one of your classmates? Oh, honey—no, don’t talk about it. Sometimes it helps to talk it out and sometimes it’s just worse. Go to sleep.” For Sarah woke up at six every morning, seven days in a row in a row in a row. Her head juddered downward, perhaps her chin actually struck her chest, the drained tumbler of water dropped out of her hand, she felt Elli’s small, soft hands rolling her over, tugging the bedspread and sheets from beneath her, the bed continued restless a few moments more, the lamp continued to glow, but Sarah barely felt, barely saw, not even when the lamp’s click brought absolute dark nor when the bed’s jouncy movement subsided and was replaced by encircling pressure. “Can I cuddle you, honey?” came Elli’s imperturbable whisper. “You poor thing, so tired.…” Sarah indeed was too tired to answer or move or to flinch from her bedmate’s enveloping touch.