The Rehearsal

plays.”
    The saxophone teacher nods as she pictures the bar in her mind: she knows it very well, the stained diamond pattern of the wallpaper, the dark paneling that ends in an elegant lip at shoulder-height, the reddish brass lamps collared to the wall and bleeding artful fingers of rust in downward rays. It’s Patsy’s favorite place to sit and drink, and the sax teacher has spent hours in that sticky shadowed corner over the years. She can see the ornate plaster frame of the mirror behind the bar, chipped gold and peeling, and the brass plaques on the lavatory doors, spotted gray with age.
    “We walk in,” Isolde is saying, “and Julia says sit down. She’ll order drinks for the both of us, so I go and fold myself into a corner booth, peeling off my coat and my scarf and checking my reflection in the dark glass of the window by the door. I watch as she leans over the bar and says something to the barman, and she picks up her change and two glasses, and he waves his half-cut lemon at her and says, Get away from me! and they both laugh. She slips into the booth and says, Sorry, I didn’t even ask, is red okay? And I don’t want to say that mostly what I drink is vodka or rum mixed with fruit syrup to mask the taste, and the only time I’ve had red wine is when we stole a bottle from Nicola’s mum and decanted it into half a bottle of Coke so you wouldn’t be able to tell.”
    Isolde’s mouth is dry. She wets her lips.
    “I take a sip,” she says, “and it’s foul, fouler than when we mixed it half with Coke and drank it under the bleachers on the rugby field. I ask Julia if she’s turned eighteen yet and she looks a bit annoyed, as if she’d rather talk about something else. She says she has, last week. It was her birthday last week. I say the wine is good. Then we start talking about you, what we think of you, probably because you’re the only real thread of connection between us.”
    The music is crooning and uncomplicated. The saxophone teacher can see it: the cheerful aging three-man band, stepping with their bare feet over the yellow extension leads, the double-bass player nodding and smiling over the glossy wooden shoulder of his one-legged woman-shape, the pianist leaning in and out of the light, the drummer dropping down to a one-handed beat for a couple of bars as he reaches over to take a drink from a sweaty beaded glass of beer, golden under the tasseled fringe of a lamp.
    “Afterward,” says Isolde, “after we finish our drinks, we’re walking down the street toward her car and I’m a bit light-headed. I’m laughing too much. And then Julia says, Most of the girls at school are afraid of me, a bit. It’s nice that you’re not scared.”
    Isolde stops. She’s in a yellow pool of streetlight now, wide eyed and short of breath, with her fingers clasping convulsively at the cuffs of her jersey. The music slips into a new accelerated phase, becoming more insistent and discordant. Isolde stiffens.
    “I looked at her and I said, I am a bit. I am a bit scared. But it wouldn’t be worth it if I wasn’t.”
    Isolde gives a little cry, a strangled involuntary half-sob that afterward will be the only thing the saxophone teacher can remember.
    “And Julia looks at me,” she says, “and then grabs the sleeves of my coat, real fistfuls, grabs the fabric and pulls me toward her really hard. And I think I remember there’s one tiny moment before we come together, it’s like we stalled for a moment just at the last instant, and I could feel her breath on my upper lip, sweet and hot and quickly panting. I could smell the black spice of the wine in the small pocket of space between us, and then she kissed me.”
    Isolde isn’t looking at the saxophone teacher; she’s looking out, out over the mossy rooftops and the clustered antennae and the pigeons wheeling and wheeling against the sky.
    “Only it wasn’t a kiss how I thought it would be,” she says. “She took my bottom lip between hers, and she bit me. She bit my bottom lip, but not so it hurt, more like she was tearing at it very gently, pulling at it with her teeth. And I guess I kind of pulled my head back and gave this gasp and opened my mouth a bit and she still had my bottom lip in her teeth, not so it hurt, really tenderly, like she’d captured it and she couldn’t bear to let it go.
    “And then we were up against the wall,” she says, “and I remember my eyes were closed and my hands were clenched in fists on the