The hopefuls shifted awkwardly but nobody spoke.
“My performance was a parody,” the Head of Movement said after a long pause. “It could only ever be a parody because I do not know this young man. I am old and comfortable and I don’t really understand his nervousness, or his uncertainty, or his hope. I cannot possibly understand these things just by watching him walk for fifteen seconds. In parodying this young man I disperse all possible complexity. I reduce him and I insult him. Your performances will be insulting too if you do not truly understand what you are pretending to be.”
The gymnasium was very quiet. The Head of Movement said, “You cannot mime what you don’t understand. You cannot penetrate death, or God, or a woman. To attempt any of these things is to aim for sincerity rather than truth. Sincerity is not enough for students of this Institute. Sincerity is a word for hawkers and salesmen and hacks. Sincerity is a device, and we do not deal in devices here.
“Mime,” he said. “We will begin very simply. Everybody up.”
“At the Institute we encourage our students to have sex,” the Head of Acting said. “You need to know your body in this profession. You need to know yourself. You need to explore all parts of you. However, graduates of the program will probably tell you it is not a good idea to sleep with each other. This is a small pool, and in any case, two actors together is always a terrible thing.”
There was a little rustle of delight as the students looked around at each other to compress their lips and roll their eyes and giggle faintly at the prospect, and just for an instant any coupling, any combination of any pair among them, was possible. In this instant they all became potent, latent, cusping, even the ill-formed and sexless ones who would later be shunned or overlooked. Their hearts beat faster.
“We encourage you to explore the reaches of your body, test its limits and its scope,” the Head of Acting went on. “We encourage you to get fit, to fall in love, to get hurt, to masturbate.”
He enjoyed the collective flinch, manifested in a kind of sudden unmoving sternness, all of them looking gravely forward in silent straining proof that they were mature enough to hear the word out loud. Boys who, four months ago, would have snickered and reached for the collar of their nearest friend to swipe and then shove his head away, who would have yelled out a name at random, and laughed as the named boy scowled and flushed and hunched down further in his plastic bucket-seat, who would be swiftly and silently adding genitals to every conceivable diagram in the fifth-hand textbook spread open on his lap—these boys were silent and respectful and their eyes were wide.
The girls in the crowd were silent too, holding their jaws rigid and their eyes still. Only boys could be wankers and tossers and jerks: boys were exponents of this solitary function by default, a common fact which softened the shaming, and prevented any indicted boy from being truly alienated or destroyed. For the girls, however, this territory remained inexplicably taboo. Four months ago they would have simply frowned, taken on a pinched and nauseated look perhaps, and shaken their heads very faintly, to forever banish the topic from their lunchtime circle on the dusty grass. Now they were uneasy: they heard the Head of Acting speak the word out loud and were suddenly fearful, lest such a flat and prudish denial of the act was somehow—in the eyes of a man they all sought to impress—wrong. Somehow in the short summer between high school and the world beyond, a cosmic dial had turned: self-knowledge was now a quality that lent a girl a kind of husky darkness, a careless self-sufficiency, an appeal that was worldly and yearning and jaded all at once. The girls sat stiff and tense on the gymnasium floor and tried to look as casual and as solemn as they could.
This was the Head of Acting’s method: to make sacred everything these students might regard profane, and then challenge any one of them to blanch, or laugh. It worked. The students looked up at him, all of them without the usual proud mechanisms that would make them need to cry, Everybody masturbates but me.
“Good,” the Head of Acting said softly. “Now everybody get up and form a circle.”
In their haste to leap up and obey him they were clumsy and flat-footed and gauche. They scrabbled to unknot themselves and form a ring. The Head of Acting watched them fumble, and he smiled.
“What do you think, Martin?” the Head of Acting said, tapping his fountain pen against his cheek. “I thought Number 12 was very teachable.”
“Willing,” said the Head of Movement. “Eager without being impatient. I’d say definitely a Maybe.”
“Too many on Maybe,” said the Head of Voice, spinning the whiteboard so the others could see. “We need to start making some definite decisions or we’ll be here all night.”
“It’s because there are more and more Maybes each year,” said the Head of Acting irritably. “The kids are losing something. Twenty years ago, kids were soft and supple and compliant. Now they’re like planks of wood. Everywhere you look you see fucking Maybes.”
He threw himself back into his swivel chair, and the suspension caught him, buoying him back up again so he bobbed crossly for a moment until the momentum died.
At the top of the whiteboard the Head of Improvisation had written Ambition, Teachability, Sociability, Talent in her cramped sideways hand. The words tapered as they advanced across the board, so Ambition was written much larger than the rest, and Talent narrowed to a spearhead against the raised silver lip of the frame. The Head of Acting tilted his head back and regarded the petering list down the length of his nose. Sociability was new. It had been Collegiality for a number of years, and Courage for many years before that. It had been Courage when he had first started teaching. The changes marked a devolution, the Head of Acting thought.
“Teachability,” he said aloud. “For the boys, it means their potential to be taught about themselves, about their own bodies. For the girls, it means their potential to forget, to be able to forget everything they’ve been taught about themselves and about their bodies.”
“Oh, come on,” the Head of Improvisation said. “You act as if the boys and girls are utterly different species.”
“I’m just aware that there are differences.”
“I don’t think the differences are that huge. How about this boy—Number 12. How are this boy’s chances and choices any different from any of the girls’?”
She was cross with the Head of Acting tonight, cross with the pointed sulky air of profound disappointment that was his by rights, as Director of the Institute and possessor of the casting vote. He was sulking majestically, like a spoiled king.
“Well,” the Head of Acting said, “he’s not concerned about his beauty, for one thing. He’s not concerned that every role he takes will flatter him, that every photograph will be backlit and soft focused, forever. He’s willing to be ugly for the sake of his art.”
“Which is all very convenient,” the Head of Improvisation snapped, “because all the unbeautiful roles, all the character roles, are written for men anyway.”
From across the table the Head of Movement watched them bicker, and wondered at his own stance. He thought he saw a surly vein of misogyny in the older man, swollen over the years into a bluish pucker at his temple that never quite disappeared, and he thought he saw an exposed nerve in the woman, some hypersensitivity, some indecent raw form of hysteria that made him want to wince and look away. The Head of Movement often felt like this: marooned between two points of view, suspended. He sighed.