“You can’t, really,” says Isolde. “Once you’ve been dumped by one group. The other groups get suspicious. There’s nothing to do except hang out in the library and always come to class at the last possible moment so it’s not like you’re sitting alone and waiting.
“Most of the girls keep best friends for security,” she adds. “You’ve always got an ally that way, and you’re less likely to be dumped.”
“So how did your sister climb her way back up?” the saxophone teacher asks. “If she really was ruined, as you say.”
“She fell in with some boys,” Isolde says. “She started crossing the road at lunchtime and hanging out with the St. Sylvester boys down by the river. Just her and the boys. That was like her weapon. The girls started coming back to her after that.”
“Have you ever been dumped?” the saxophone teacher says. “By a group, I mean.”
“Nah,” Isolde says. She is wrapped up in her scarf and her coat now, and she shrugs in a general, helpless way to show the conversation has come to a close.
“See you next week,” she says, and just for a moment the saxophone teacher feels a stab of something like sadness, wanting very much to ask Isolde to stay. These weekly half-hour snatches of Isolde’s life are to the sax teacher only the lighted squares of kitchen windows along a dark street, showing a brief and yellowed glimpse into the throat of a house but nothing more.
Isolde has glazed over with politeness now that the lesson has ended, standing near the door with her music case already in her hand. The precious quickened intimacy of the lesson is now lost, and the saxophone teacher can only smile and wave her out and say, “See you Monday, Isolde. Take care.”
Patsy has brought croissants and ham, and a soft yellow cheese which depresses under the blunt edge of the butter knife. Already they have talked for nearly an hour and the saxophone teacher has watched Patsy with a kind of bursting desperate look, straining and wounded like a stuck deer. She looks as if she might burst into tears. Patsy doesn’t seem to be noticing.
“Patsy,” the saxophone teacher says finally. “Do you know something? Whenever I am alone and intimate with anybody else, whenever I am at ease, or making someone laugh, or kissing somebody, or making someone feel truly good—whenever I feel like I am being really successful as a lover, doing it right—at all those times, part of me is wishing that you were watching me.”
“That’s a weird thing to say,” Patsy says, giving the sax teacher a quizzical half-frown. She is already withdrawing, sitting back and bringing the heel of her hand to her cheek to push away a strand of hair and becoming swiftly impenetrable, as if she is determined to misunderstand whatever the sax teacher will say next. All in an instant she is stony and aloof.
“I don’t mean that I wish you were there,” the saxophone teacher says. “What I mean is that everything I do with other people becomes a kind of proof. As if I were invisibly proving something to you. As if I were saying, all the while, This is what you didn’t see in me. This is what you could have had. This is what you missed out on.”
“You want me to be jealous,” Patsy says.
“No,” the saxophone teacher says. “It’s not that I want you to be jealous. I just want you to see me at my best. Sometimes I act as if you really were watching, just to prove it to myself. Sometimes I say things when I’m at my most intimate that don’t even make sense to the person at hand. They’d only make sense to you. If you were watching.”
“Honey,” Patsy says, quietly.
There is a silence.
“Of course I’m going to rehearse all of this in the mirror,” the saxophone teacher says at last. “Before I say it to you. I’ll rehearse it over and over. Until I have the confidence to tell you this, out loud.”
“Tell me about Isolde,” the saxophone teacher says outright, when Julia arrives for her lesson on Monday afternoon.
Julia raises her eyebrows as she wiggles out of her anorak and slings it over the back of the armchair. She is still radiating the cold winter air she has brought into the room with her, and the sax teacher catches it in a brief current, breathing it in like an alien scent.
“Tell me about Patsy,” Julia says.
“Who?” the saxophone teacher says stupidly, letting her arms fall to her sides, and then in irritation she pulls at her sleeve and says, “I mean, I know who Patsy is. I meant why.”
Julia shrugs. “There’s a sign up in my homeroom,” she says, “and it says, Who’s asking the questions in this classroom?”
The saxophone teacher narrows her eyes. “How do you know who Patsy is?”
“All your letters are addressed care of Patsy,” Julia says, pointing. “Is she your lover?”
The saxophone teacher flushes scarlet. “This is Patsy’s studio,” she says in a dignified voice. She twitches her chin up. “Patsy left me the studio.”
“Like in a will?”
“No, she’s not dead. It still legally belongs to her. That’s why the letters are addressed care of her post-box.”
“So she’s not your lover.”
The saxophone teacher taps her fingers on the desk. “Tell me about Isolde,” she says.
Julia runs the tip of her tongue over her bottom lip, and then she says, “We meet in the drama cupboard at school. Nobody’s ever in there, and we wedge the door shut anyway. We make a nest out of nuns’ habits and Nazi uniforms and hoop skirts, and when the bell rings we leave one after the other, with a decent break in between, so nobody notices.”
“And?”
“And what?” Julia says.
“That’s not enough,” the saxophone teacher says. “It’s not enough, just to know that you’re in there. How did you get there? How did it start?”
“Why do you want to know?” Julia says. “You’ll still be on the outside looking in. Even if you know everything, even if you know all the things you shouldn’t, even then you’ll still be on the outside. Why did she leave you this studio?”
They are tense, like two dogs chained apart.
“As a vote of confidence in my music,” the saxophone teacher says. “She taught me saxophone, once upon a time, but she got arthritis early. It started in her thumbs and then spread outward, like a slow and painful inkblot, outward from her thumbs across her hands. She had to stop teaching. She went back to university, and I just took over her studio. I replaced her, I guess. I pay rent to her now.”
“She was your teacher?”
“Once, yes.” The sax teacher hesitates, her hands clutching at her elbows, but then she draws a breath and says quickly, “What do you do in the drama cupboard?”
“Mostly we talk,” Julia says. “There’s only gib board between the drama cupboard and the practice rooms so we have to be quiet. That’s how Mr. Saladin and Victoria got found out, Isolde said. Somebody was in the drama cupboard and they heard them through the wall. It’s always pitch dark in there—we don’t dare to turn on the light because it’ll shine under the door. My favorite thing she does in the dark is she makes her two forefingers into little calipers and she keeps checking to see if I’m smiling, feeling my face in the dark and lying there with her fingers resting, just lightly, at the corners of my mouth. That’s my favorite thing.”
“What do you say? When you talk. What do you say to each other?”
“We talk about the preciousness of it all,” Julia says. “How fortunate we are. How lucky we are that the accident of my attraction coincided with the accident of hers. We just lie there and marvel, and feel each other’s skin, and inside I feel years and years older than I actually am—not like I’m weary or wise or anything, but more like what I’m feeling is so huge it connects me to something still huger, something infinite, some massive arc of beautiful unknowing that is bigger than any kind of tiny trap of time, or space, that might otherwise contain me. It feels like that one moment, that one tiny shard of now, that brief and perfect moment of touching her skin and tasting her tongue and feeling so utterly captured, so caught in her, that moment is all I’m going to need to nourish me for the rest of my life.”