The Rehearsal

intention of winning a short-term companion or a grope. Now as she looks at Mr. Saladin, calm and smiling and unruffled in his clean pressed clothes, his scarf knotted neatly around his throat, his elegant triple-veined leather gloves and his windswept hair, Bridget suffers a lusty rush of bewildered wanting that tightens like a fist in her groin. For the first time in sixteen years she feels impelled to flirt for the sole purpose of ruining somebody else, driven to recklessness by the dim and thrilling notion that here , at least, is a man who will see her in only sexual terms. She reaches out and pinches the laminate edge of the counter between her thumb and her fingertips, rocking back on her heels in a flirty way, offering herself as bait just so she might have the pleasure of watching him bite in vain.
    “What are you doing now? Do you have a new job?” she asks. “We miss you at jazz band.”
    “For now I’m painting houses,” Mr. Saladin says. “I’m in between things. So the new conductor is putting you through the paces?”
    “Mrs. Jean Critchley,” Bridget says. “She’s okay.”
    “I know the name,” Mr. Saladin says. “I’ve seen her play live. She’s good.”
    “Yeah,” Bridget says casually. Mr. Saladin smiles and looks around him, as if he means to amble off, and so Bridget says all in a hurry, “We had to go to counseling after you left, in case we were damaged. It was lame.”
    Mr. Saladin raises his eyebrows. He doesn’t speak for a moment. Then he says calmly, “That doesn’t sound like much fun.”
    “It was lame,” Bridget says again, and she almost feels inept, but then she remembers that here , at least, is a man who will understand and forgive her naïveté: to this man, her clumsy adolescence is not a handicap but a prize. The fist in her groin stiffens again, clenching like a swiftly tightened screw.
    “Victoria still hasn’t come back to school,” she blurts out before Mr. Saladin can speak again, trying in her gauche and rumpled way to talk casually, like the beautiful girls at school talk casually, tossing their hair over their shoulder and turning out their feet like show ponies. “Has she left for good?”
    “No, I don’t think so,” says Mr. Saladin. “I imagine she’ll be back before exams.”
    “That’s good,” says Bridget. She smiles in what she hopes is an encouraging way, wanting to show that she is on Mr. Saladin’s side.
    “Good to see you, Bridget. Keep on with your music,” says Mr. Saladin. He smiles at her and strolls off toward the neon wall of new releases. “I’ll go and see what you’ve got on offer.”
    “It’s two for ten,” Bridget calls out after him.
    She stands there for a moment before retreating back to her stool. Out of habit she checks the security screen and sees a couple furtively entering the adult nook, clutching each other and giggling as they trail their fingers along the spines. She watches as the woman selects a title and they laugh at the various postures pictured in miniature on the back. The man says something quietly, and the woman pretends to be furious and slaps at him with the end of her scarf. They laugh.
    After Mr. Saladin leaves, Bridget looks up his rental history and is disappointed to find no porno. She learns that he is thirty-one.
    Saturday
    After the applause, the three of them sit for a moment in silence. The lights come up over the audience, restoring color to the wraiths, and all around them the crowd begins to shift and laugh and chatter, reaching down for their scarves and their programs and their clutch purses as if released from a spell. The saxophone teacher is lost in a memory and doesn’t stir, her hands limp from the applause, her eyes large and vacant and turned toward the stage. Julia sits forward on her seat and turns to Isolde suddenly, and says, “Do you want a lift home? I’ve got my car here. It’d be no problem.”
    Isolde hasn’t yet learned to drive and Julia’s offer makes her feel young and inexperienced and graceless, as if she is being forced to reveal that she can’t read or that she is still afraid of the dark. The older girl seems impossibly mature to Isolde, like Victoria’s friends always seem impossibly mature, powdered and scented and full of secrets and private laughter, contemptuous of little Issie for all that she does not yet know. “Thanks,” is what Isolde says to Julia now, smiling quickly and ducking her head. “That would be great. I was