The Rehearsal

concentration as he listened to the Head of Movement speak.
    “With you,” the Head of Movement was saying, “I think that this Institute will fall short in several respects. That’s what I wanted to say yesterday—I recommend something postgraduate, even an internship. The mime school. You’re going to be unfinished at the end of next year. Unfinished and hungry.”
    The Head of Movement was speaking earnestly but without the clipped, rehearsed quality that usually characterized his speech. Stanley regarded the pair of them jealously through his sliver. The boy was sitting with his leg hiked up under him and his fingers stroking the frayed upholstery, nodding carefully as the Head of Movement spoke, and suddenly it struck Stanley what was so odd about the situation: they are friends , he thought in wonder.
    “I value your opinion completely,” the unmasked boy said, leaning in close, and in that instant Stanley remembered the golden boy, greased and glittering like an artificial dish sprayed with lacquer to be photographed for a cuisine magazine. The golden boy had gleamed, and this boy was gleaming now.
    Stanley swallowed and felt a bitter injustice in his throat. He recalled a vision of himself, in the Head of Movement’s office, pushing away tears as he shouted in complaint. Even now he felt a flicker of self-congratulation that he had responded to the Theater of Cruelty exercise in that violent way. Why hadn’t the Head of Movement been impressed, then? Why hadn’t the tutor relaxed into a rare and sudden intimacy, inspired by Stanley’s fragile openness to confess a vulnerability of his own? Why this boy, Stanley thought, this smooth-faced unmasked boy who was no better or worse than the rest of them?
    “It’s funny,” the Head of Movement was saying now, “in many ways you’ve really… well. Woken me up, I suppose.”
    “My growth is projected on to him… it is found in him ,” the unmasked boy quoted, and through his secret sliver Stanley saw both of them smile.
    “Shared or double birth,” the Head of Movement said. “Not the instruction of a pupil but utter opening to another person.” He was silent a moment, and then he added, “Well remembered.”
    They sat there and looked at their shoes, enjoying the shallow silence of the room. Behind the cold discolored flank of the sewing machine, Stanley watched and felt bitter. He waited two long hours, with cramp in both knees and a terrible hunger gnawing at his insides, until the boy and the Head of Movement finally ended their conversation and left the room.
    July
    “Let’s improvise it,” one of the first-year boys suggested. “Let’s start with what we had last week and see where that goes. I really liked what was happening with the two characters together, both of them saying things that the other doesn’t really hear, like neither of them is fully present for the other.”
    “We’ll just start rolling,” one of the girls said. “First Mr. Saladin and then the girl, rotating like that. Anyone can get up at any time. Anyone can play either of them, doesn’t matter who. We’ll just try and keep the scene moving and see what happens.”
    “We’ll get a real dialogue going.”
    “That’s right.”
    There was a brief pause as everyone digested the formula and swiftly began to prepare what they would later say. Then one of the boys got to his feet. He transformed into a different person as he stood up, a man rising like a phoenix out of the pallid, ashy figure that had been the boy. Once he was standing, hands on hips and his jaw thrust back and his bare feet apart and solid on the floor, nobody doubted who he had become.
    The man said, “When the girls spoke of it, they said all the way , as if the process was a passage, a voyage, some sort of ritual first crossing of a dimly charted sea. Victoria said those words to me— all the way . She asked a question. She asked, Do you want to go all the way with me? as if her departure were already scheduled, her moorings already cast, and I could simply choose to board and join her, to sail away with her and disappear. All the way , she said. Every inch of it. Every inch of that windblown ocean-salted bucking rolling passage. Every inch.”
    He sat down. There was the briefest of pauses again, and then Stanley stood up. He stood with his weight on one leg like a girl, one arm crossed over his chest and holding his hip, the other gesticulating with a crooked elbow and a flat