The Rehearsal

fall?”
    Patsy thinks about this quietly for a second. The saxophone teacher raises her wineglass to her mouth and drinks. Patsy is beautiful tonight. Her hair is swept back into a tumbling handful at the nape of her neck, and her eyes are clear and bright. She wears a heavy brass locket, a gift from Brian, an antique and accidental-seeming piece that suits her perfectly, suits the stout capable breadth of her chest and the soft notched hollow of her collarbone. Patsy always suits her clothes, her costume. The image of her is always complete, the saxophone teacher thinks: it is impossible to halve her, undress her, subtract from her. The sax teacher cannot imagine removing the necklace, even in her mind—she can’t imagine Patsy unclothed, Patsy without the trimmings and trappings that she inhabits so completely.
    Patsy rolls the stem of her wineglass in her fingers.
    “I was never veiled or misted as a kid,” she says slowly. “You know, Santa Claused, Easter Bunnied, cabbage-patched, euphemized. I can’t remember any illusions. I can’t remember ever not knowing. Sex was never really a mystery. And there was no God in our house, so no mystery there. Of course I had first experiences like everybody else, made mistakes like everybody else, repaired and reinvented myself like everybody does. But I can’t remember ever really falling . I can’t remember if I was ever really innocent. I have no nostalgia for a time before.”
    She looks up at the saxophone teacher. “Is that terribly sad?” she says, and laughs.
    The sax teacher smiles and says nothing, and they both sit quietly for a while, touching their wineglasses with their fingertips, looking away.
    “Everything had a precedent,” Patsy says after a time. “Everything I have ever done had a template, a formula, a model, something public and visible and known . I knew the shape of everything I would ever meet, before I met it. The template always preceded the reality, the experience, the personal truth of a thing. I learned about love from the cinema, and from television, and from the stage. I learned the formula and then I applied it. That’s how it happened for me. My whole life.”
    She gives another little tinkle of a laugh. “Is that terribly sad?” she says a second time. “Is that very sad?”
    Up on the little dais next to the piano the double-bassist leans forward and says into his microphone, “One last song, folks. Here’s one last song.”

EIGHT
    May
    The day after the Theater of Cruelty lesson Stanley ran into the victim of the exercise on the main staircase. The boy was walking quickly with his head down, taking the stairs two at a time. His hair was cropped close to his skull now, to even up the patch on the crown that the masked boy had snipped. The shorter cut didn’t quite suit him. He looked a little frightened, his ears and forehead protruding too obviously from under the shrunken cap of hair. He was wearing a new shirt.
    “Hey,” Stanley said, reaching out a hand to stall him.
    The boy turned guilty eyes up at him and nodded a shy hello.
    “I just wanted to say that I went and complained,” Stanley said. His voice sounded huge in the stairwell, spiraling up and up to the floors above and ringing clear and hollow in the vertical shaft like the pealing of a bell. “About what happened. I went to the Head of Movement and complained.”
    “Thanks,” the boy said quietly. “But it’s all right now. It was just a dumb thing.” He made as if to continue downstairs, but Stanley stopped him, moving closer and cornering him so he was trapped flat, pinioned against the banister with nowhere to go.
    “I’m going to talk to the Head of Acting as well,” Stanley said. “I can’t believe that nobody else is doing anything about this. It’s disgusting. What they did to you was disgusting. And nobody cared.”
    The boy looked at Stanley inscrutably for a moment. He reached back with both hands for the banister, and stood there with his arms behind him, tugging gently on the handrail. Then he said, “I was a plant.”
    “What?” Stanley said.
    “I was a plant. The main guy—Nick, the guy in the mask—he asked me and arranged it all beforehand. I knew they were going to pick me, and I knew what was going to happen, mostly. I knew about the water, and he said they might slap me around a bit. I thought it would be funny. Just for a laugh.”
    Stanley was frowning. “But you bolted.”
    “I didn’t know they were going