The Rehearsal

days showing greasepaint and street-side juggling and oil-drum fires and scratched guitars. Now he sat bowed with age and a clinging fatigue, reaching up to stroke his thin hair with a dry wrinkled palm, crisp and graying and faded like a piece of parchment left too long in the light.
    “Has it ever happened to you?” Stanley said suddenly. “Like the rape thing. Have you ever gone to see a play where something real happens and everyone just watches and thinks it’s part of the play?”
    “Yes,” the Head of Movement said. “A long time ago. I saw a man die of a heart attack. He was old. The curtain came down, that’s all. They asked us to leave. Everyone left very quietly.”
    “Who was he playing when he died?” Stanley asked.
    “Oh, it was an obscure little play that didn’t do especially well, as I recall,” the Head of Movement said, leaning back in his chair and looking at the ceiling to better conjure up the memory. He was relieved not to have to look at Stanley anymore. “Everything was rather beautiful, in a funny kind of way. He died in the last scene of the play and on closing night. We didn’t know at the time that he was dead—we thought perhaps a stroke. It didn’t look fatal from where I was sitting. But we read about it the next day in the papers.”
    The Head of Movement was rarely asked to recall scenes from his life in this way, and he savored the feeling.
    “The character he was playing was a man who has become rich by impersonating people and forging things and lying. Late in his life he returns home and finds that his family have no memory of him. It was as if he had never existed as a real man. That was roughly the way the story went.
    “I suspect that his character was going to die anyway,” the Head of Movement said, “in the final few pages. But of course I never saw the ending.”

SEVEN
    Saturday
    The saxophone teacher is waiting for them by the Coke machine. At first Isolde cannot make her out: the Coke machine is the only really memorable landmark in the Town Hall foyer and so it is typically besieged by a throng of waiting strangers who have also arranged to meet friends and family there. Then the crowd thins and Isolde sees her, tall and angular in a brown leather jacket, her hands folded in front of her, studying the people around her with a calm critical up-and-down gaze that Isolde has come to know very well.
    “Hi, Isolde,” the saxophone teacher says when she sees her, and smiles. “Did your mum drop you off?”
    “Yeah,” Isolde says, feeling strange. She has never seen the sax teacher outside her attic studio, and (the thought registers oddly) never at night. She accepts a program and bends her head to read it, affecting more interest than she feels.
    “There she is!” the sax teacher says, waving across the crowd at somebody. “That makes three of us.”
    A group of young musicians jostle past, edging between the sax teacher and Isolde so for a brief moment they are separately marooned in the crowd. The musicians sweep by in a cloud of cigarette smoke and perfume, nebulous and bubbling and clutching each other at the elbow with their slender musician fingers.
    And then the sax teacher says, “Isolde, do you know my student Julia? Julia has been my student for three years now.”
    Isolde looks up. She suffers a sick abdominal jolt of recognition as their eyes meet. Julia’s eyes widen very slightly and her cheeks flush pink.
    “Hi,” Isolde says quickly, struggling to mask a dawning bewildered embarrassment, and Julia nods hello, pressing her lips together in a brief and complicated smile.
    Out of her school uniform Julia looks older. She is wearing a black cardigan and long black skirt, her hair piled casually at the back of her head and coming loose in wisps around her temples. The dour and surly and willful Julia that Isolde saw in the counseling room is all but gone: somehow now she seems more fragile, as if the care she has taken with her appearance has exposed a sensitivity that she had no cause to exhibit before. Isolde’s heart is beating fast.
    “Do you two know each other from school?” the saxophone teacher says curiously, looking from one to the other with new eyes, as if the juxtaposition of the two of them together is making her see elements of each girl that she has never seen before.
    “Sort of,” Julia says quickly. “I’ve seen you around anyway.”
    “Yeah,” says Isolde. “But I didn’t know you played sax.” For