The Rehearsal

him. He wished that he was a man at home with his body, a man who could say, You are beautiful, and know that the words would have meaning because he spoke as a man and not a boy.
    Stanley slithered his hand down her belly, down past the little scooped slit of the girl’s navel, hatted by a fold of skin that shrank to a tight little nib as she raised her arms up above her head. She reached to pull his head down to hers and craned up to kiss his mouth. His hand was scrabbling at the button of her fly. He was ashamed at himself for moving so quickly but impelled all the same by a helpless wish for self-annihilation, a desire for the scene to somehow go on without him so he could withdraw. The denim was stretched tight and flat over the bones of her pelvis, and he had to bend the buttonhole cruelly sideways to wrench the button through. It gave. He drew down the zipper and with his fingers felt the thin cotton of her briefs, buoyed up by the tufted whorl of her pubic hair. He felt surprise. Had he imagined her hairless, like a doll?
    The girl was breathing faster. He slipped his hand inside her briefs and cupped the wiry mound of her pubis with the heel of his hand, arching his wrist to loosen the waistband of her jeans. Carefully he moved to part the seam of her, hot against the cool of his fingers. He wanted to speak. He wanted to whisper something that would break the awful fumbling quick-breathed silence that was filling the room, the mousy rustle of his hand.
    Stanley found himself watching the scene from the position of a camera, and he began caring too deeply about what he might look like from above, or from the side—he tried to be sleeker, to thrash less, to push the hair gently off the girl’s face and let his fingers trail around her jawbone and touch the soft furry pouch of her earlobe, like he had seen done in the cinema so many times. It didn’t seem to be working.
    “My arm’s dead, sorry,” the girl whispered apologetically, and wiggled it free.
    “ Shit ,” Stanley said.
    “What’s wrong?” the girl said in surprise, drawing the duvet up around her and tucking it carefully under her arms as she withdrew.
    “I don’t—”
    “You don’t know what to do?”
    “ No ,” Stanley said, a little too savagely. “No, I know what to do.”
    “It doesn’t matter,” the girl said, pushing his hair off his face with the rough heel of her hand. The action was coarse and tender at the same time, and Stanley was humbled, feeling her easily achieve the truth of the action when he had found it so difficult. “Just give me a cuddle. Come here.”
    He crept across the bed and she opened up the duvet to let him in. They lay there for a while, Stanley’s heart thumping, the girl’s hands moving up and down the curve of his shoulder blade and into the thin hair at the nape of his neck.
    “I didn’t think it would be like this,” Stanley said, without thinking.
    The girl raised herself up on an elbow and said, “What?”
    Stanley realized he had sounded rude, and said hastily, “I mean me. I didn’t think I would be like this.”
    That sounded even worse, and he seethed for a moment in frustration and self-contempt. What he had meant to say was that all the films and television programs he had ever seen that might have schooled him for this moment had placed him in the position of the outsider, the snug and confident voyeur who is able to imagine himself in place of the hero but is never physically required to act. Now he felt utterly unscripted, marooned, desperate for the girl to act first so that he would only have to follow and the burden of decision would not fall to him.
    “It’s your first time,” the girl said, and a note in her voice changed, becoming softer, even maternal. She gathered him up closer to her and he burrowed in. “Silly old duffer,” she said, and rubbed the top of his head with her knuckles. “You’ll be all right.”
    They lay there for a while, listening as the ice-cream truck pulled into the street and sounded its theme tune for the children to hear. The truck whined away down the road, and it was quiet again.
    “That was it,” Stanley said, looking up for the first time, into the lights.
    “That was what, Stanley?” the girl said, rolling over and touching him lightly on the lower curve of his back with her fingertips. “That was what?”
    “That was the most intimate scene of my life,” Stanley said. “Right then. That was it.”
    August
    “Cue Mr.