The Rehearsal

wasn’t sure if Julia would be able to make this Friday slot. It was kind of a last-minute idea. It really is worth playing against someone else, you know. There’s a whole new enjoyment to be got out of playing with another person.” She doesn’t advance to get the door: she hovers near Isolde, hands on her hips, and surveys her student.
    “I would have practiced,” Isolde says. “If I’d known.” Her mouth is suddenly dry.
    “You remember Julia, don’t you?” the saxophone teacher says.
    “Yes,” says Isolde.
    “Wonderful.” The saxophone teacher walks swiftly to the door to release the latch. “Welcome,” she says to the older girl.
    “Hello, darling,” Julia says as she sweeps in, and all in an instant Isolde knows that Julia has stepped out of herself and become somebody else entirely: she is performing, and Isolde must too.
    “Honey,” she says, and they kiss on the cheek like old friends, like thirty-something friends who were once teacher and pupil, once upon a time. The saxophone teacher has melted into the shadows by the wall.
    “I know this is meant to be a rehearsal, Patsy, and there’s work to be done,” Julia says, “but I do need to talk to you. After what happened between us. I’m sorry to spring it on you like this. I’ve been going through what I want to say in my head, over and over, out there in the hall, and I think I just need to spit it all out before I’m too afraid to speak of it. That’s all. Is it weird?”
    “It’s not weird,” Isolde says softly, but she takes several steps backward, away from the other woman. Her saxophone is in her hand. Julia’s sax is not yet out of its case, so they appear unevenly matched, Isolde with the bright arm of her instrument held close against her chest and Julia weaponless with her hands upturned to show the white of her palms.
    “It just seems so desperately unfair,” Julia says. “That I am marked so indelibly, so ineffaceably, tattooed and blue with the ink of your name across my heart, and that your ink is washable, Patsy. It was always washable, and you knew that all along.”
    “Come on, darling,” Isolde says. “You’re talking about just one kiss. You’re talking about a single red-wine-flavor of a kiss, in the dusky dark of one late evening, riding on the giddy thrill of a concert that sent your pulse to racing.”
    “Yes,” Julia says, vehemently.
    “A one-off.”
    “Yes,” Julia says again.
    “Come on,” Isolde says again, but weakly now. “We’re overreacting, surely. We’re behaving like teenagers.”
    There is a pause and they look at each other.
    “I think that this is worse than any other shame,” Julia says. “To be rejected not because of circumstantial reasons, or provisional reasons, or reasons of prior claim, but simply for the unitary and all-quenching reason that I am, and will always be, unwanted . I feel spotlit, pinned against the bright wasteland of a bare stage, with nothing to hide behind, nothing to blame.” She gives a cruel hard little laugh, not her own. After a moment she says, “Can’t you just tell me why? Can’t you just tell me why it’s Brian, and it isn’t me?”
    Julia advances several steps. The other girl does not retreat. They are closer now, and Isolde looks her in the eye for a long moment before she speaks.
    Isolde says, “I had always imagined that any woman’s choice to be with another woman would be a reactionary choice, defined mostly in the negative by the patterns she is seeking to avoid. It would, I always thought, only be after deciding she does not want men that a woman might conclude that she wants other women. It is a public stance, itself a kind of activism. It is a complaint. It marks a dissatisfaction. It is the kind of attitude only held by a particular type: emphatic, campaigning, radical, the kind of woman who would boycott certain companies on moral grounds, who would picket outside a factory gate.
    “I recognize a shade of this quality in you—the hardness of your opinion, your skepticism, the implicit challenge every time you speak. But there is another quality of yours that dawns strangely on me—a childlike helpless quality of vulnerability, a need. It is this quality that has awakened a new possibility in my understanding of the world: that a woman’s choice of another woman might be a free choice in and of itself, not a handicapped pick of second-bests, not a halved choice of remainders once the men have all been