The Rehearsal

some reason the thought of Julia as the saxophone teacher’s comfortable old-time student is strange to her. She startles herself with the realization that the private confidences and successes and failures that she has shared in her lessons each Friday were, for the saxophone teacher, only one recurring episode in weeks and months and years of shared confidences and successes and failures—that she herself is only one among many. Isolde wonders what Julia tells the saxophone teacher when they are alone.
    “Why aren’t you in jazz band?” Isolde asks quickly. Her shyness makes the question sound accusatory. She is aware of the saxophone teacher’s eyes flicking from her to Julia and back again, as if Isolde is the final piece of a puzzle that will enable her to understand Julia, and Julia is the final piece of a puzzle that will enable her to understand Isolde. It makes Isolde hot and uncomfortable, and inside her shoes she squeezes her toes together in frustration.
    “I don’t really have school spirit,” Julia says. “I’m not that kind of person, I guess. If there was something smaller and more underground I might give it a go. I’ve thought about starting a band.”
    “Oh,” Isolde says, wondering at this new concept that you might be good at something but not have to prove it by playing for the school.
    “I played in a band in my first year of university,” the saxophone teacher says. “We had some dreadful name. I can’t even remember what we called ourselves now.”
    “Was it the Sax Kittens?” Julia asks. “Was it Sax, Drums and Rock ’n’ Roll?”
    “We weren’t nearly that clever,” the saxophone teacher says. “God, we were awful. We used to do this thing at the end of each gig that was really easy but it always got the crowd going. I’d stand next to the guy who played tenor and at the end of the song he’d flip his sax around so I’d blow into it while he was still fingering the notes, so we were both playing the one instrument. I suppose it must have looked quite difficult—people always screamed like we were doing something amazing.”
    Julia is grinning now. “You’ve got a dark jazz past,” she says. “You’ve played gigs .”
    “I’ve done some things in my time,” the saxophone teacher says, pretending to be haughty.
    They both turn to Isolde to let her share in their joke, and Isolde smiles quickly.
    “Oh, I remember,” the saxophone teacher says. “We were called the Travesty Players.”
    “What does the Travesty Players mean?” says Isolde.
    “It’s a term from the theater,” the sax teacher says. “A travesty role is a part which is meant to be played by a person of the opposite sex. So if you were going to play Hamlet, the program would say, ‘Isolde in the travesty role of Hamlet.’ ”
    “Oh,” says Isolde.
    “Why did you choose it for your band name?” says Julia.
    “We were all into gender back then,” the saxophone teacher says cheerfully. “Ask your mother.”
    She is lively tonight, but Isolde finds herself shrinking back, finding the intimacy too forceful and defiant, as if the saxophone teacher is a prisoner released for this night only, drawing the girls close to her in a hard and glittering pincer-grip and demanding they share a part in her slender lonely joy. Julia seems at ease, smiling and pressing the saxophone teacher for more details about her dark jazz past, and Isolde regards her jealously.
    Her cardigan is buttoned with gold dome buttons and is unraveling slightly at the hem, giving her a careless scholarly look that makes Isolde feel young and clumsy and naïve. She is wearing a silver turquoise ring on her ink-stained nail-bitten fingers, and tight-knit fishnet stockings underneath her skirt. Isolde drinks it all in and then feels oddly disappointed, looking at this newer, more complete version of Julia who is a whole person and not just an idea of a person. She feels jealous and excluded and even betrayed, as if Julia has no right to exist beyond Isolde’s experience of her.
    Isolde turns her attention back to the program. The soloist is a foreigner, photographed in black and white with his chin on his fist and his saxophone gleaming against his cheek. He looks moody and implacable and gifted. He is playing in front of the symphony orchestra tonight, and pictured opposite is the conductor, a plump jolly man with his baton loose in his hand like an idle dagger.
    “A great soloist,” the saxophone teacher is