The Rehearsal

actor? I don’t know. You could probably tell me that.”
    “So what would you say he was good at?”
    “The arts,” Stanley said doubtfully, thinking hard. “He’s a romantic. He got that from me. He sure as hell didn’t get it from Roger.”
    “Is Roger his stepfather?”
    “Yes.”
    “What’s he like?”
    “Mild,” said Stanley. “Laughs even if he doesn’t think it’s funny. Runs out of things to say and then looks frightened, tries to escape. Sure he’s a nice man though. I wouldn’t marry him. But he’s a nice man.”
    “Is he a good father to your son?”
    “He’s a good stepfather to my son.”
    “All right,” the Head of Acting said, turning to include the rest of the group huddled at Stanley’s feet. “Let’s open up the floor. Any of you can start asking Stanley’s father questions. Anything you like.”
    “Do you see yourself in Stanley?” called out a girl in the front row.
    “He’s a little more careful than I was at his age perhaps. He’s an innocent kid. I wasn’t as innocent as he is.”
    “Do you think he’s still a virgin?” This was from one of the tousled boys in the back. The Head of Acting looked around sharply, but Stanley didn’t flinch. He shrugged and smiled.
    “There’s a certain manner about him,” he said. “Something unspoiled. I couldn’t say. Wouldn’t want to say.”
    “What’s the worst thing about him? His worst fault?”
    Stanley looked down at the floor and drew his lips between his teeth to think. “Trusting people too much,” he said at last. “Trusting people who aren’t worthy of being trusted.”
    “Have you told him that’s what you think?”
    “No,” Stanley said. He flapped his arm irritably. “What would be the point of that? He needs to make mistakes or he’ll never get anywhere. And that’s not the sort of father I am.” He tossed his head impatiently and twitched out his cuffs again.
    “What do you think Stanley thinks of you?”
    “I think that underneath it all I disappoint him,” Stanley said. “He’s disappointed and he’s angry because on one level he really wants to rebel against me. He wants to tear down everything I stand for, make me see myself for what I am, but he can’t. I’m not that person in his life. He doesn’t need to rebel against me, because I’m not the one who makes the rules. I’m just the outsider, the man who turns up every now and again. If he tried to really rebel against me I’d just laugh at him. I think he resents me for that. It’s a disappointment to him.”
    “You can see all that?” asked one of the boys from the floor with a pointed skepticism, as if to imply that Stanley wasn’t quite remembering the rules of the exercise. The Head of Acting was sitting back with his arms folded, watching Stanley intently with narrowed eyes.
    “Yes,” Stanley said simply. He spread his hands again. “I’m a psychologist. It’s my job to see things.”
    August
    “We’ve got information!” the boy Marcus was crying out when Stanley slipped into the rehearsal room and took his seat on the floor. “Polly had a friend of a friend who was the abused girl’s best friend, and she knew basically everything. We interviewed her and wrote everything down!” He waved a little notebook in the air, flushed with his own success.
    “What’s some of the stuff?” somebody called out.
    “Like, he was her music teacher,” Marcus said, flipping open his notebook in excitement, “and she took private woodwind tutorials with him, for alto sax. And when they drove anywhere she used to lie on the floor in the backseat with a rug over her. And in his spare time he painted in oils, just as a hobby, only he never painted her because it would be evidence and he wasn’t that stupid. But he wanted to, he said, God he wanted to, because when she came all the blue-map veins on her sternum and her throat would all come up, rise to the surface of her skin just for an instant, and he always said that if he could capture her at just that moment, it would be the best thing in the world he had ever done. He knew it instinctively. They had a joke that he could do a series of paintings, an exhibition. He said he had never seen anything like it, someone who changed so much in that split-second instant, as they came. It was his favorite thing about her.”
    Marcus flipped through his notebook, turning over the pages.
    “Oh, there’s so much ,” he said, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “We can