Eleanor Catton - The Rehearsal

“If the memory is one of sin,” the Head of Acting was saying, his voice ringing out now as if he were quoting from a beloved text, “afterward you will be free of this sin. It is a kind of redemption.”

Stanley wondered whether he had done anything in his life that required redemption. He felt ashamed that nothing came to mind. He wished he had a secret, a dark blooming ink-stain of a secret that he could brood over and shrug away.

Finally, with the minute hand on twelve o’clock, the Head of Acting said, “I have one final question before we close. What is the last taboo? The taboo that is graver and more sacred than all others?”

“Sex,” somebody said. The answer sounded cheap, and some of the students frowned and shifted and looked at the floor and thought hard. Stanley felt a stirring in his groin again, and he stiffened, wanting very much to leave the room and disappear. Then the girl sitting on the Head of Acting’s right-hand side looked up and said, “Incest is the last taboo.”

The bell rang. The Head of Acting said, “You may go.”

It took the best part of a morning for twenty students to reenact the most intimate scene of their lives. Most of them chose a key moment from their parents’ divorce. Some attempted a sexual encounter or a scene of public shame. One of the girls brought a pile of pizza boxes on to the stage. She chewed through each slice until it was mush and then spat it out into a white bowl she held under her arm. She wept and wept, and had chewed her way through three cold pizzas before the Head of Acting finally clapped his hands and said, “Good. Thank you. We can work with that.”

A bleakness descended on the class as the morning wore on. Stanley was one of the last to perform, and he clutched his little paper bag of props against him as he watched the performers replace each other, one after another, all of them weeping and shouting and caressing invisible lovers with the backs of their trembling hands.

“When I was sixteen,” a girl was saying now, “I was going through the drawers in my dad’s desk to find a compass for a math project. I came across this photo of my dad in the bath with a little kid. I didn’t recognize the kid, or the bath. I flipped it over but there was nothing on the back. I showed my mum.”

She yanked down the handle of an old retractable map affixed to the top of a spattered freestanding whiteboard. The map unrolled. The girl had stuck an enormous painted rendering of the photograph to the map-roll. Her father was bearded and laughing, throwing his head back and showing the secret scarlet of his throat. The girl affixed the handle of the map to a hook at the bottom of the whiteboard to hold it open, and stepped back.

“He had two families,” she said. “That’s how we found out. He’d had this affair with this woman years ago and she got pregnant, and then she got pregnant again, and again, and all of a sudden he had two families, two batches of kids. He divided his time between the two, I guess. When we found out, he didn’t try and explain or anything. He just up and left. I haven’t seen him since. I wouldn’t want to. Mum destroyed the photo so I had to make a copy. So this is him with the third kid of the new batch.”

Stanley stared up at the fleshy father in the bath, grossly out of proportion, with his fingers wrapped thick and pink around the small figure of a baby, laughing in the pale soapy lagoon between his legs. The Head of Acting was nodding and writing furiously on his jotter pad. Stanley watched the girl roll up the giant painting and descend quietly from the stage.

A boy began to describe the worst fight his parents had ever had. He was one of the comedians of the group, cheerfully self-deprecating and witty and successful with the girls, and as he spoke the class visibly relaxed and brightened, and sat up with a new generosity and willingness to laugh. The Head of Acting turned to a fresh sheet and looked up at the boy over his glasses, his head tilted and his finger-pads splayed on the desk in front of him.

“And that was the point,” the boy was saying, “where Dad goes, You are a neurotic, compulsive woman and one of these days you are going to need to accept that. He really screamed it, and it was a bit frightening just for a moment because my dad’s a really quiet, patient sort of a person. After that something just broke. Mum ran off, she really ran away from him, right down the corridor into her study, and slammed the door. We thought the fight must be over, but ten minutes later or so she opened the door again with her head so high and proud, like this—” he demonstrated, holding his arms out like a ballerina “—with her arms full of paper, and she’d typed it out, the whole phrase, in thirty-six point, and she’d got fifty copies printed. She put it up everywhere. She hid copies in his briefcase and in all his pockets. She pinned it to the noticeboard in the kitchen. Everywhere in our house there were these signs that said, You are a neurotic, compulsive woman and one of these days you are going to need to accept that.”

Everybody laughed. The boy gave them a quick thumbs-up and then made as if to return to his seat on the floor.

“Stay there a second, Oliver,” the Head of Acting said. He wasn’t smiling. “Why did you choose this as your most intimate memory?”

The boy shrugged and shoved his hands into his pockets. “I guess because it was the day I learned about revenge,” he said, and everyone laughed again.

“Really?” the Head of Acting said. “Or was it because the easiest thing in the world for you is to make everybody laugh? And you chose the easy option, took the easy way out, instead of choosing to actually share yourself in a sincere and honest way?”

The room had gone quiet. Everyone picked at the floorboards with their fingernails and avoided looking at the comedian Oliver, who was still standing with his hands in his pockets and scuffing the soles of his shoes upon the stage. Stanley watched the defensive smile flicker like a flame at the corners of the boy’s mouth.

“Everyone else here has really shared something,” the Head of Acting said. “They have willingly shown themselves at their most vulnerable. They have relived the most painful and most sacred moments of their lives, and laid them out for us to see. That’s a brave thing to do. There’s been a lot of trust in this room this morning. I don’t see a lot of trust in you, Oliver. Playing to your strengths isn’t brave. You knew everyone was going to laugh, big deal.”

Oliver was nodding now, chagrined and visibly straining to get down off the stage and melt back into the seated crowd so he could ponder his disgrace in private. He had known this was coming. All the first-years endured a breaking-in of this sort, a forcible public fracture of their ego-mold in the interest of rebuilding a more versatile self. About half the first-years had been targeted so far, and the rest sat glumly and waited for their own turn.

“Do you have a girlfriend, Oliver?” the Head of Acting asked.

“Yes.” She was part of the first-year batch and his eyes sought her out briefly in the crowd.

“Is there any aspect of your relationship with your girlfriend which you would not want the rest of the group to see?”

The boy turned back to the Head of Acting. He paused and looked at the tutor suspiciously for a brief moment. “Yes,” he said again, but Stanley thought to himself that he could not very well say no. The girl looked faintly stricken, as if anticipating some forced revelation that would cheapen or destroy her, but all the same the boy’s admission gave her a rush of pleasure and she almost smiled, looking quickly around at her classmates to see if they were jealous.