The Rehearsal

look. “I don’t,” she says. “I don’t know anything.”
    They walk on in silence for a while.
    “Do you talk about me to your sax teacher?” Stanley says. His voice is high and strained.
    “I guess,” she says. “I mean, I’ve mentioned you. Music teachers are like therapists, kind of. You meet up once a week and tell them everything you need to tell them and then you disappear again. It’s like therapy.” Her voice is high too, as if she doesn’t believe her own lines.
    “What do you say about me?” Stanley says.
    “Oh, you know,” Isolde says. Now she looks embarrassed.
    Stanley makes a swift decision to tell Isolde half the truth. He stops walking and turns toward her.
    “She laid a complaint about me,” he says. “Your teacher. She must have been watching through the window. She complained that I’ve been harassing you—because you’re so young, I guess, and I’m not. Young. I guess that was why.” He breathes heavily and watches her.
    Isolde opens her mouth a little but says nothing. She drags her eyes from Stanley’s face and looks at a pasted advertisement on the wall over his shoulder.
    “So what do you say about me?” Stanley says, impatient now. “In your lesson.”
    “Nothing,” Isolde says quickly.
    “You said you mentioned me.”
    “Only briefly.”
    “So why would she complain? What does she have against me?”
    Isolde shoots him a calculating look. “Are you in trouble?” she says.
    “I just want to know what you say about me,” Stanley says loudly. In his frustration he is forgetting that he is only telling Isolde half the truth after all. He begins to blame her. He becomes irritated by her open-mouthed stare, the plump curve of her pouting lip, how childlike she seems.
    “It’s this thing with my sister,” Isolde says at last. “I suppose she knows how much it affected me. She knows how vulnerable I am, how impressionable I am, how likely it is that I might act out or do something dumb or end up slutting around, just to make myself heard. It happens, when there’s trauma in a family. She’s protecting me, I guess.”
    “From me?”
    “Well. Yeah. I mean, probably.”
    “And you knew.” He is thoroughly angry with her now.
    “No,” Isolde says. “I didn’t know. She acted behind my back, like a clinging mother orchestrating the life of her child.”
    “This is bullshit,” Stanley says. “You talking to your teacher about me, the two of you together. It’s bullshit.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “You must have made me sound like a rapist.”
    “I did not make you sound like a rapist !”
    “It’s my reputation,” Stanley says. “My reputation at the school which is at stake. Whatever you said, you made her act like that. You made her complain.”
    “I did not make her complain!”
    “You must have,” Stanley shouts. “You did. With whatever you said.”
    Cars are passing. The passengers press their faces to the windows to watch the two of them fight. Stanley has his arms flung wide and Isolde’s hands are crossed over her belly. Finally Stanley makes a scissor motion with the flat of his hand that means enough . He is the first to turn and walk away.
    Monday
    “What would you do,” Julia says, “if I said that you did things to me here, when we were alone? Indecent things. If I confessed to somebody. If I broke down.”
    The southerly is gathering above the gables, blackening and bruising and seeming to draw the sky downward. The saxophone teacher crosses the room and turns on the lamp, twitching the curtain against the lowering sky.
    “I don’t know what I would do,” she says, without looking at Julia.
    “I’d lie,” Julia says, already narrow eyed and pursuing the thought. “I would make up silver lies studded with shards of perfect detail like mosaic splinters, sharp and everlasting, the kind of tiny faultless detail that would make them all sure that what I said was true. I would have alibis. I would bring in other people and teach them a story, and rehearse it so carefully and for so long that soon they’d all start to believe that what they said was actually true.”
    “It sounds like a lot of work,” the saxophone teacher says calmly, but her hands and eyes are still and she is watching Julia with all her attention now. “What’s in it for you?”
    “It would change what everyone says about me at school.”
    “What does everyone—”
    “That I like girls,” Julia says loudly. The collar of her