Stanley walked out of his final audition feeling light-headed. He paused at the fountain in the foyer to steady himself and gripped the basin with both hands. He breathed quietly for a moment, looking past the porcelain masks into the foggy middle-distance of a recent memory, and after a moment he realized he was being observed. He straightened and gave the spectator a rueful sort of smile. She was an older woman, maybe the secretary, framed like a news-anchor behind the high administration desk in the foyer and watching him with her cheek propped upon her palm.
“You’ll be wishing you brought a hip flask,” she said. “Just had your audition, I guess.”
“Does everybody look like this?” Stanley said, emphasizing his already crippled posture with a little jerk of his spine and holding his hands limp. The woman laughed.
“More or less,” she said. “You have to watch the ones who look too happy. In my experience the ones who look too confident afterwards are the ones who don’t usually get in.”
“Oh,” Stanley said, drawing himself up slightly.
“I suppose it’s your first time auditioning,” the woman said. “Some kids try out three, four, five times. It makes you think what they’re doing with their lives in the meantime, just waiting all those years to finally get in.”
“Yeah,” said Stanley. “Yeah, wow. It is my first time.”
“They didn’t shake you up too much?” the woman said. “They can be quite mean, in the beginning. To break you in.”
She seemed bored, sitting there with her head on her hand in the echoing cavern of the foyer. All the surfaces were bare and clean, and the car park was empty through the high wall of glass.
“Nothing too painful,” Stanley said. “Nothing I didn’t deserve, probably.”
The woman laughed. Stanley watched her laugh. It struck him for the very first time that there were qualities of beauty that were unique to women, qualities that teenage girls could not possess: kindness lines around the eyes and mouth, a certain settling of the body, a weariness of poise and pose that was indefinably sexual, like the old glamour of a dusty taffeta dress or a piece of costume jewelery with a rusted clasp. The thought had not occurred to him before. He had supposed (though never truly consciously) that a woman was only attractive insofar as she resembled a girl; that her attractiveness fell away, by degrees, through her twenties and thirties until it was buried by middle age; that the qualities that women sought were always the qualities they once had, a backward striving that was ultimately doomed to fail. He had supposed that men slept with women their own age only because they could not snare anybody younger, or because they were still married to the sweetheart of their youth; he had not supposed that weary, veined and pear-shaped women were attractive in and for themselves—they were a second-best, he had imagined, a consolation prize. Now, with a weak stirring in the nerve-wracked cavity of his chest, he saw this woman through a different lens.
She was wearing makeup, a thin line of black behind the lashes of her upper eyelid that must have been straight and uniform when she stretched her eyelid out flat to apply the liner, but when she released the skin to blink and appraise herself the line had puckered, giving her a blurred, slightly clownish look that made Stanley think of an old and kindly whore. As she smiled he saw that her incisor was rimmed with the gunmetal gray of an ancient filling. The skin on the back of her hands was loose enough to frame the tendons and the veins, and her knuckles were pouchy whorls of white. A manufactured tan on her collarbone and on the V-shaped glimpse between her breasts gave the skin a fibrous look: the wrinkle-weave traveled both horizontally and vertically so the skin was soft and infinitely lined, like worn suede.
For the first time in his life Stanley saw that a woman was not simply a failed and hopelessly outmoded girl. She was a different creature entirely from the glossed and honeyed girls in the audition room: those girls, Stanley thought, could never play this woman until the day they became her, and from that day onward they could never play a girl.
“You’re right about the hip flask,” he said. “I reckon I’ll walk out of here and straight into the pub.”
“Have one for me,” the woman said. “And good luck. If luck counts for anything.”
Stanley passed through the double doors and out into the drowsy warmth of the late afternoon. As he turned the corner and left the gabled heights of the Institute behind, he thought to himself that he was probably the twentieth student that day to have exited the audition room, passed through the foyer, walked by the administration desk and exchanged words with the secretary before leaving the building. He wondered what she had said to the others, and how she had said it, and what they had thought when they looked her in the eye.
“Let’s see some chemistry,” the Head of Acting said, and nodded for them both to begin.
“I met him last week on the damp satin dance floor at the inter-school ball,” she said. The words tumbled out of her too quick, too early, before she had swallowed her nervousness and found her rhythm. “Everyone was balled up in a tight knot near the stage, forming a human noose around the girl and the boy in the middle. It’s so the teachers can’t see in. From the outside it looks horrible, all tight and pushing and pushing, like they’re trying to watch a cock fight or a captured bear. They all take turns in the noose. I was down the other end, just watching, and he walked up to me and asked me very quietly if I wanted a drink.”
She was sitting on the edge of the podium, her ankles hooked over each other, kicking out her legs in an idle, gentle way so her heels bounced and bounced. Stanley was standing a little way off with his hands in his pockets, watching her calmly.
“Soon I will walk you home in the bluish dark and ask if your hands are cold just for a reason to touch you,” Stanley said.
“He asked me if I wanted a drink,” the girl said again. She wasn’t looking at him. She had found her rhythm now, and her eyes were flashing. “I thought that meant he had some alcohol so I said, Yes. We’re breath-tested now, at the door before we walk in, we have to say our name and our address, and always there’s that little spasm of fear that you feel, coming out of nowhere, in case it comes up positive. Some of the boys take cameras in, just so they can fill empty film canisters with rum and drink it once they’re inside. Or they strap hip flasks to the inside of their legs. Most of them just bring pills. I thought he meant he had some alcohol so I said, Yes. He disappeared.”
“Even as I saw you I was disappointed,” Stanley said. “Can anything come of such an ordinary beginning? I asked myself. I looked at you and I thought of all the things you aren’t. Even before I spoke to you I was angry at you for not being more than you are.”
“He came back,” the girl said, “and I almost laughed. He had gone and bought us both a Coke, still all dewy and frosted from the fridge behind the bar, and he opened mine up for me with this quiet little flush of pride, like he was some black-and-white hero lighting my cigarette and fixing my drink just the way I like it. We talked for a while about leaving school and going to university and he told me he wanted to be an actor, and we watched the noose for a while.”
“I didn’t like you,” Stanley said. “I didn’t like you for detaining me at this never-ending stage of nervous silence and nothing-talk and worry. I didn’t want what you were offering. I stayed because I was angry and I wanted to show you that I thought that you were boring. I wanted to make you feel boring.”