The Rehearsal

they were gone he moved to the stage manager’s cubicle to kill the lights. He stood with his hand on the cool gray lever, and out of habit cleared his throat and called out a warning up into the flies: “Going dark.”
    November
    Stanley walked out of his final audition feeling light-headed. He paused at the fountain in the foyer to steady himself and gripped the basin with both hands. He breathed quietly for a moment, looking past the porcelain masks into the foggy middle-distance of a recent memory, and after a moment he realized he was being observed. He straightened and gave the spectator a rueful sort of smile. She was an older woman, maybe the secretary, framed like a news-anchor behind the high administration desk in the foyer and watching him with her cheek propped upon her palm.
    “You’ll be wishing you brought a hip flask,” she said. “Just had your audition, I guess.”
    “Does everybody look like this?” Stanley said, emphasizing his already crippled posture with a little jerk of his spine and holding his hands limp. The woman laughed.
    “More or less,” she said. “You have to watch the ones who look too happy. In my experience the ones who look too confident afterwards are the ones who don’t usually get in.”
    “Oh,” Stanley said, drawing himself up slightly.
    “I suppose it’s your first time auditioning,” the woman said. “Some kids try out three, four, five times. It makes you think what they’re doing with their lives in the meantime, just waiting all those years to finally get in.”
    “Yeah,” said Stanley. “Yeah, wow. It is my first time.”
    “They didn’t shake you up too much?” the woman said. “They can be quite mean, in the beginning. To break you in.”
    She seemed bored, sitting there with her head on her hand in the echoing cavern of the foyer. All the surfaces were bare and clean, and the car park was empty through the high wall of glass.
    “Nothing too painful,” Stanley said. “Nothing I didn’t deserve, probably.”
    The woman laughed. Stanley watched her laugh. It struck him for the very first time that there were qualities of beauty that were unique to women, qualities that teenage girls could not possess: kindness lines around the eyes and mouth, a certain settling of the body, a weariness of poise and pose that was indefinably sexual, like the old glamour of a dusty taffeta dress or a piece of costume jewelery with a rusted clasp. The thought had not occurred to him before. He had supposed (though never truly consciously) that a woman was only attractive insofar as she resembled a girl; that her attractiveness fell away, by degrees, through her twenties and thirties until it was buried by middle age; that the qualities that women sought were always the qualities they once had, a backward striving that was ultimately doomed to fail. He had supposed that men slept with women their own age only because they could not snare anybody younger, or because they were still married to the sweetheart of their youth; he had not supposed that weary, veined and pear-shaped women were attractive in and for themselves—they were a second-best, he had imagined, a consolation prize. Now, with a weak stirring in the nerve-wracked cavity of his chest, he saw this woman through a different lens.
    She was wearing makeup, a thin line of black behind the lashes of her upper eyelid that must have been straight and uniform when she stretched her eyelid out flat to apply the liner, but when she released the skin to blink and appraise herself the line had puckered, giving her a blurred, slightly clownish look that made Stanley think of an old and kindly whore. As she smiled he saw that her incisor was rimmed with the gunmetal gray of an ancient filling. The skin on the back of her hands was loose enough to frame the tendons and the veins, and her knuckles were pouchy whorls of white. A manufactured tan on her collarbone and on the V-shaped glimpse between her breasts gave the skin a fibrous look: the wrinkle-weave traveled both horizontally and vertically so the skin was soft and infinitely lined, like worn suede.
    For the first time in his life Stanley saw that a woman was not simply a failed and hopelessly outmoded girl. She was a different creature entirely from the glossed and honeyed girls in the audition room: those girls, Stanley thought, could never play this woman until the day they became her, and from that day onward they could never play a girl.
    “You’re