The Rehearsal

lover.”
    The saxophone teacher taps her fingers on the desk. “Tell me about Isolde,” she says.
    Julia runs the tip of her tongue over her bottom lip, and then she says, “We meet in the drama cupboard at school. Nobody’s ever in there, and we wedge the door shut anyway. We make a nest out of nuns’ habits and Nazi uniforms and hoop skirts, and when the bell rings we leave one after the other, with a decent break in between, so nobody notices.”
    “And?”
    “And what?” Julia says.
    “That’s not enough,” the saxophone teacher says. “It’s not enough, just to know that you’re in there. How did you get there? How did it start?”
    “Why do you want to know?” Julia says. “You’ll still be on the outside looking in. Even if you know everything, even if you know all the things you shouldn’t, even then you’ll still be on the outside. Why did she leave you this studio?”
    They are tense, like two dogs chained apart.
    “As a vote of confidence in my music,” the saxophone teacher says. “She taught me saxophone, once upon a time, but she got arthritis early. It started in her thumbs and then spread outward, like a slow and painful inkblot, outward from her thumbs across her hands. She had to stop teaching. She went back to university, and I just took over her studio. I replaced her, I guess. I pay rent to her now.”
    “She was your teacher?”
    “Once, yes.” The sax teacher hesitates, her hands clutching at her elbows, but then she draws a breath and says quickly, “What do you do in the drama cupboard?”
    “Mostly we talk,” Julia says. “There’s only gib board between the drama cupboard and the practice rooms so we have to be quiet. That’s how Mr. Saladin and Victoria got found out, Isolde said. Somebody was in the drama cupboard and they heard them through the wall. It’s always pitch dark in there—we don’t dare to turn on the light because it’ll shine under the door. My favorite thing she does in the dark is she makes her two forefingers into little calipers and she keeps checking to see if I’m smiling, feeling my face in the dark and lying there with her fingers resting, just lightly, at the corners of my mouth. That’s my favorite thing.”
    “What do you say? When you talk. What do you say to each other?”
    “We talk about the preciousness of it all,” Julia says. “How fortunate we are. How lucky we are that the accident of my attraction coincided with the accident of hers. We just lie there and marvel, and feel each other’s skin, and inside I feel years and years older than I actually am—not like I’m weary or wise or anything, but more like what I’m feeling is so huge it connects me to something still huger, something infinite, some massive arc of beautiful unknowing that is bigger than any kind of tiny trap of time, or space, that might otherwise contain me. It feels like that one moment, that one tiny shard of now , that brief and perfect moment of touching her skin and tasting her tongue and feeling so utterly captured, so caught in her, that moment is all I’m going to need to nourish me for the rest of my life.”
    The saxophone teacher has fumbled with her hand to find the edge of the desk, and she sinks back against it weakly.
    “But at the same time, the feeling is shot through with a kind of sadness,” Julia says, “a bittersweet and throaty sadness that sits heavy in my gullet and I can’t swallow it down. It’s like I know that I am losing something; that something is seeping away, like water into dust. And it’s a weird idea, the idea that loss—the massive snatching tearing hunger of loss—is something that doesn’t start when a relationship ends, when she melts away and disappears and I know that I can never get her back. It’s a feeling that starts at the very beginning, from the moment we collide in the dark and we touch for the very first time. The innocence of it—the sweetness and purity of it, the shy and halting tenderness of it—that is something that I am only ever going to lose .”
    Julia takes a step toward the saxophone teacher. “Is that how you felt?” she says. “With Patsy?”
    “Julia,” the saxophone teacher says, and then she doesn’t say anything for a moment. She draws a hand over her eyes. “Patsy,” she says, but then she falters and changes her mind.
    “Let me tell you something, Julia,” she says at last. “That moment you’re talking about. That one perfect kiss. It’s all