The Rehearsal

there is. Everything from this point onward is only going to be a facsimile, darling. You will try and re-create that one kiss with all your lovers, try and replay it over and over; it will sit like an old video loop on a television screen in front of you, and you will lean forward to touch the cool bulge of the glass with your forehead and you will feel the ripple-fur of static with your fingers and your cheek and you will be illumined, lit up by the blue-black glow of it, the bursts of light, but in the end you will never really be able to touch it, this perfect memory, this one solitary moment of unknowing where you were simply innocent of who you were, of what you might become. You will never touch that feeling again, Julia. Not ever again.”
    “Is that how it is for you?” Julia says. “With Patsy?”
    The saxophone teacher expels a breath and says nothing.
    “Where’s Patsy now?” Julia says.
    “Oh, she still lives in the city,” the sax teacher says, waving a hand vaguely, north by northwest. “We’re just very old friends, Julia. Patsy’s married. We’re just old friends.”
    “Married to a man?”
    “Yes, to a man.”
    “But you were lovers once,” Julia says.
    “No.”
    “Even once?”
    “No.”
    “You’re lying.”
    “What does it matter anyway, how it was?” the saxophone teacher snaps. “I could only ever tell you how I remember it, never how it was. My wrinkled cheesecloth of a memory, all balled up and mothy with the sunlight glinting through. And you lied about your favorite thing. You stole it from someone else and used it as your own.”
    Julia scowls and says nothing. After a moment she tosses her head and says, “You probably know it all anyway, from somebody else.”
    Friday
    Stanley is waiting for Isolde after her lesson. From inside he can hear snatches of a tune played by two saxophones together, one confidently leading, the other duller and shyer and more ordinary. He is nervous. He wishes he’d scripted something to say.
    At last the saxophones cease and he thinks he hears, through the open window, the faint rumble of Isolde’s teacher’s voice, and Isolde laughing. He shuffles his feet.
    After a few minutes Isolde emerges from the building and trots down the short flight of steps to the courtyard, her saxophone case in her hand. She looks strange: she is smiling too readily and too brightly, and her eyes are sad. Stanley doesn’t notice. He keeps pulling at his collar and his hair, and when he looks at her he doesn’t hold her gaze for long.
    “Hey you,” she says. “Did you hear me that time?”
    “Yeah,” Stanley says. “You’re pretty good.”
    “Want to come to my recital? You don’t have to. It might be boring.”
    “Sure,” Stanley says awkwardly. He falls into step beside her, and as they walk out of the courtyard he looks over his shoulder at the saxophone teacher’s window. Is there somebody there, standing by the curtain, looking down at them? Is the next student waiting patiently in the hall for the saxophone teacher to finish watching, smarten her hair, open the door and invite her in? He can’t tell from this distance and soon the window disappears behind the branches of the ginkgo tree.
    “My parents will be there,” Isolde says. “They’re really stoked to meet you. Especially Dad. My sister had, like, this weird thing this year where she slept with a teacher and Dad’s really keen to get back to normal or whatever. He’s just stoked you’re not in your thirties and balding and my teacher at school.”
    Stanley exhales sharply and almost pulls away from her. There it is: all the information he needed, the clinching information, tumbling out of her mouth in one careless little burst. Too late.
    “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” he says.
    “Oh,” Isolde says airily. “I don’t know. I’m just sick of it, I guess. It’s all anyone talks about any more—just Victoria and the rape or whatever and how hard it’s been. I just didn’t want to talk about it with you.”
    She reaches for his hand and pulls him closer to her as they walk, showing more affection than she has before.
    “It’s not a big deal,” she says.
    “What do you mean, slept with her teacher?” Stanley says.
    “Well, apparently the story is now that she didn’t even sleep with him,” Isolde says. “I don’t know. It keeps changing. She gets all cagey.”
    “You must know,” Stanley says. “She’s your sister.”
    Isolde gives him an odd