Eleanor Catton - The Rehearsal

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

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

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

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

“Not in it for fame and fortune?”

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know.”

“Sexy kids.”

“That’s funny.”

“It’s good, eh?”

“Yeah.”

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

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

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

“Thanks,” Stanley said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was trying to look at them all equally.

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

“Good,” said the Head of Acting abruptly. “Tell us why you want to be an actor.”

“I want to be seen,” said Stanley. “I don’t really have a bigger answer than that. I just want to be seen.”

“Why?” said the Head of Acting, his fountain pen hovering above the page.

Stanley said, “Because if somebody’s watching, you know you’re worth something.”

“Thanks all for coming in, people,” the counselor is saying as Isolde walks in. He raises his palms like he is a politician or a priest. “I’d really like to build on some of the issues that we raised in our last session. I thought that today we could talk about taking control.”

The room is almost full. Isolde looks around for a seat, nodding tersely at a few of her sister’s friends who look at her with sad round eyes as if they are imagining themselves in her shoes and feeling very sorry for themselves indeed. Isolde scowls. She slips into a chair and tries to scrunch down as low as possible. The counselor smiles at her, a horrible rubbery proud smile that makes Isolde’s skin creep, and she quickly looks away, down at her fingernails and the worn tatty cuffs of her school jersey. She suffers being questioned and patted and caressed by the girl sitting behind her, a stout motherly figure who was Victoria’s tennis partner in intermediate school and once shared a paper bag of sweets with Isolde under the trees at the end of the lawn.

The girl settles back into her chair like a fat tufted hen, and Isolde can hear her say to the girl sitting next to her, “They’re keeping her in the dark I reckon. Makes sense.”

“Who can tell me what the issue is here?” the counselor is saying, spreading his arms to include them all. “It starts with B,” he adds, silencing the girls who are about to volunteer possible answers that do not start with B. The girls lean back and think of all the B words they have heard the counselor use.

“ Boundaries ,” the counselor croons at last, and there is a collective exhalation. “Boundaries, people.”

Isolde sits very still and gives nothing away, folding into herself and glassing over as if she is pushing her face into a mask. Vultures, she thinks to herself, using her mother’s word. Her mother had said it when she saw the contented headlines in the morning paper. Vultures, she said, and then swooped down and ripped off the front page, but ineffectually so the column headline was vertically halved and the piece that remained read Teacher Sex . Vultures, Isolde thinks now, as the whispers eddy around her and the counselor smiles his plump greasy smile.