The Rehearsal

moment. “She will never convincingly play that part. She is trapped inside her little round eyes and inside the smooth perfect symmetry of her face. All I could think while I was watching was that she would never think those lines. Not her. Not that face. That face would never dare. If I went and saw her in performance I would walk out and say, Lady Macbeth was all wrong.” The Head of Movement tossed his head in frustration. “I look at them all,” he said, “and I see so much hope and vigor and determination, all trapped inside faces that will never sell, that will never be remarkable—modern, pampered, silken faces that have never known tragedy or hardship or extremity, or even… God, most of them have spent nearly their whole lives inside . That girl—Lady Macbeth, today. It is like she’s made of plastic. She is too smooth and round to be real. She will never escape that smoothness and that roundness. She will never escape her face.”
    “You’re in a very bleak mood, Martin,” the Head of Acting said, unwrapping an aspirin and dropping it neatly into his coffee. “I didn’t think she was that bad. I rather liked her freshness. ‘Come to my woman’s breasts, and take my milk for gall’—I thought that was marvelously seductive. She wasn’t trying to be evil .”
    “She wasn’t trying to be evil because she didn’t understand a damn word of what she was saying,” the Head of Movement snapped.
    There was a silence. The Head of Movement bent his head and gulped from his mug in an indelicate snatching way, gasping between each hot mouthful, his throat contracting like a reptile’s when he swallowed. The Head of Acting thought, That’s a bachelor’s habit, bred of always eating alone. He felt sorry for the Head of Movement suddenly, and put his paper down.
    His dissatisfaction with the world always has such a terribly personal quality, the Head of Acting thought; he is freshly disappointed each time anything falls short of an ideal, and he wears his disappointment like a child. It showed a curious kind of innocence for a man of his age—a foolish self-sabotaging kind of innocence, for he knew that he was going to be disappointed, and still he believed.
    The Head of Movement’s instinct inclined toward simplicity and scruple, and yet he was not a scrupulous man: instead he was anxious and undecided and complaining, suspended between points of view. He was forever in the shadow of a principle, forever in the shadow of some floodlit cathedral swarming with bats in the dark, and while he might admire it and worship it and fear its massive contour, he could never bring himself to truly touch it; he would never knock and enter.
    The Head of Acting watched him wince and scowl into his coffee and draw his shoulder blades together and toss his head as if his skin had shrunk. The Head of Acting thought, It is as if, in some deep recess of him, he is still a teenager who has not yet lost that selfish blind capacity to fall in love, and fall badly. He wondered if he was jealous of the man’s anxiety, jealous of the agony of his choices, jealous of his tortured sense of failure and the failed justice in the world.
    “Is it a bad batch this year?” the Head of Acting said. “Is that what’s getting you down?”
    The younger man flopped into a chair like a punctured balloon. “No,” he said, drawing out the word in a doubtful way.
    “You were asking yourself, masks or faces.”
    “Yes,” the Head of Movement said, and sighed. “I used to believe in faces. All my life I believed in faces. I think I might have finally changed my mind.”
    February
    Whenever a door was closed at the Institute another always opened, popping gently forth, invisibly nudged by a draught that could never be contained. The shifty current gave the buildings a muttering, ghostly feel. If Stanley closed a door behind him, he always listened to hear another click open, like a faithful echo, out of the shadows further up the hall. All the doorknobs rattled. Hairline cracks webbed the enamel like dirty lace.
    The academic year began with a lavish production of King Lear , directed by the graduating students and starring all the tutors, proud and flashing in burgundy and gray. The title role was played by the Institute’s previous Head of Acting, long since retired, a sinewy man with long teeth and thin white hair scraped neatly forward over his forehead like a monk. About a month after closing night a costume, freshly