The Rehearsal

question, never provocative, never acute. I cost too much, I’m too well known, just to listen. They become wary of me. They bicker among themselves and then look sideways, daring me to act.
    “I leave early, always. I never stick around. I never invite them to know me better. I hold them apart, away from me, and by the third session when I walk into the room they’re like mice. All their dissension has melted away and their attention is focused entirely on me , on me absolutely. And then—” Stanley’s father pinches his fingertips together and then releases them like a puff of smoke. “After that, I can say anything,” he says. “The third session is golden. They listen to whatever I say. They hear me.”
    “Does this story have a moral that has something to do with virginity?” Isolde says, a little nervously.
    “No moral,” Stanley’s father says. “I don’t do morals. I do dirty jokes, and I do stories to pass the time.”
    “Good,” Isolde says. She turns away, and the shadows on her face disperse as she is swallowed by the glaring fog of the footlights and beyond.
    Stanley’s father looks at her with compassion and says, “Virginity is a myth, by the way. There is no on–off switch, no point of no return. It’s just a first experience like any other. Everything surrounding it, all the lights and curtains and special effects—that’s all just part of the myth.”
    Isolde turns back to look at him and all the shadows return, flooding back to fill the dark side of her face so she is once again halved, like a waning moon.
    Stanley’s father smiles. He says, “Stop believing.”
    Saturday
    “But still the counseling sessions persisted,” Julia is saying, “clinging to the school calendar like a baked stain that nobody was willing to chip away. Still we met to discuss the dubious rape of the girl who unbuttoned her shirt collar right down to the central white rosebud of her bra. We sat together and talked about the girl who sucked on a red lollipop at lunchtime rehearsal and let the boiled candy ball tug her lower lip down ever so slightly, so her mouth opened and you could see the moist rolling of her tongue.
    “And Mr. Saladin,” she continues, relentlessly. “Mr. Saladin, who need only have waited for the midnight stroke in five months’ time, the stroke that would transform Victoria from a child into an adult as surely as a carriage into a pumpkin, or a saddled horse into a dirty common kitchen mouse. It could have even been a birthday present, if he had only waited. At our counseling sessions we learned that Mr. Saladin’s crime was, first and foremost, impatience. We learned that the moral is: They stumble that run fast .”
    The mothers are captivated.
    “No, we didn’t,” Julia says. “We didn’t learn that at all.”
    She speaks like a magician or a ringmaster.
    “We learned that everything in the world divides in two: good and evil, male and female, truth and falsehood, child and adult, pleasure and pain. We learned that the counselor possessed a map, a map that would make everything make sense. A key. Like in a theater program where you have the actors’ names on one side and the list of characters on the other—some neat division that divides the illusive from the real. We learned that there is a distinction—that there is always a distinction—between the performance and the performer, the reality and the lie. We learned that there is no middle ground.”
    Julia surveys her audience.
    “Only those who watch,” she says, “and those who suffer being watched.”
    The mothers don’t dare to rustle.
    “But the counselor lied,” Julia says. “You lied. You lied about the pain of it, the unsimple mess of it, immeasurably more thorny and wretched and raw than you could ever remember, with the gauze veil of every year that passes settling over your eyes, thicker and thicker until even your own childhood dissolves into the mist.”
    The saxophone teacher is watching Julia from the side of the stage. She has a lump in her throat and a tight aching feeling in her chest. It might be pride.
    “Just think,” Julia is saying, “Victoria is probably with Mr. Saladin tonight, right now, laid out in an adolescent flush of pleasure somewhere, while her sister and her parents sit in the bruising dark of an auditorium on the other side of town. She is probably naked and crooning and stretched over him with her body limp and butter-slick. He is probably whispering into