The lunchtime youth group shifts from a classroom to the school hall to cater for the swell in numbers, and with the counselor long since returned to his frosted cubby between the bursar and the nurse, the youth leaders rise to take his place. They conclude that, in all likelihood, He would do just as they are doing now, and as they regard their bracelets they feel a throb of satisfaction that they possess the single correct answer to the rhetorical question stitched around the band.
In a sense, Bridget comes to eclipse Victoria after all. Victoria’s questionable victimhood, the all-too-visible streak of her own reciprocation cannot, in the end, compete with the indubitable victim of a roadside smash. But the posthumous Bridget is not a singular and universal notoriety, celebrated as Victoria had been celebrated, herself the symbol and the locus of her fame; Bridget is an instrument, subtler and more pliable and vastly more diffused. It’s the best she could have hoped for.
“There was a girl at my high school who died,” the girls will say, years later. “She was hit on her bike coming home from work. God, it was sad. It really affected us, you know? All of us. I hardly knew her, but even so. It was so sad.”
“That’s it, then,” Patsy said, when the saxophone teacher received her teaching diploma. They looked at it, stamped with a blue watermark, silvered and inked and glossy under its pane of glass. “That’s it,” Patsy said, “you’re damned. A lifetime of the world assuming that you are a spinster, a closed thin-lipped efficient spinster who lies spangled and lock-jawed in her bed at nights and has no love or pleasure to light the room. It’s the one truth about music teachers, and everybody knows it: they are alone, always alone, limp and graying in their cold offices and waiting in the dark for their next student like a beggar waiting for a meal. Congratulations!”
They touched glasses lightly and drank.
“But you’re not a spinster,” the saxophone teacher said. She was still looking at the shining diploma, tracing the words with her eyes.
“But everyone still assumes. Or a lesbian. If they are generous, then they assume I am a lesbian.”
“That’s why she asked for that ring,” Brian said, pointing to the penultimate finger on Patsy’s left hand. “She said, Make it the biggest fattest old diamond you can get your hands on. This isn’t just a symbol, it’s a whole bloody advertising campaign.”
“And this is what you came up with,” Patsy said, waving her hand and making a disgusted face, as if the ring was worth nothing. They laughed.
“Anyway, well done, old thing,” Brian said, reaching across and covering the saxophone teacher’s hands with his own. “It all starts here.”
As Isolde unpacks her case the saxophone teacher talks enthusiastically about the upcoming recital, the venue and the other performers, and the chance for everybody to listen to everybody else. Isolde is not listening. She is going to mention the saxophone teacher’s complaint about Stanley. The thought of bringing it up makes her heart thump, and the advance phrasing of the question paralyzes her, consumes her utterly. She senses that the topic is dangerous, that she is somehow backfooted at the outset: she has done something wrong without her knowing, and she will lose.
There is a knock at the door.
“Hang on a minute, Isolde,” the saxophone teacher says serenely. “I think that’s probably Julia.”
“What?” Isolde says.
“I thought we could try the Raschèr duet with both of you together,” the saxophone teacher says. “You’ve each been learning one part and I thought it would be fun to bring them together properly.”
Isolde goes red. She looks at the saxophone teacher without speaking for a moment, and then says, “I didn’t know I was going to play it in a duet.”
“Well,” the saxophone teacher says, “I wasn’t sure if Julia would be able to make this Friday slot. It was kind of a last-minute idea. It really is worth playing against someone else, you know. There’s a whole new enjoyment to be got out of playing with another person.” She doesn’t advance to get the door: she hovers near Isolde, hands on her hips, and surveys her student.
“I would have practiced,” Isolde says. “If I’d known.” Her mouth is suddenly dry.
“You remember Julia, don’t you?” the saxophone teacher says.
“Yes,” says Isolde.
“Wonderful.” The saxophone teacher walks swiftly to the door to release the latch. “Welcome,” she says to the older girl.
“Hello, darling,” Julia says as she sweeps in, and all in an instant Isolde knows that Julia has stepped out of herself and become somebody else entirely: she is performing, and Isolde must too.
“Honey,” she says, and they kiss on the cheek like old friends, like thirty-something friends who were once teacher and pupil, once upon a time. The saxophone teacher has melted into the shadows by the wall.
“I know this is meant to be a rehearsal, Patsy, and there’s work to be done,” Julia says, “but I do need to talk to you. After what happened between us. I’m sorry to spring it on you like this. I’ve been going through what I want to say in my head, over and over, out there in the hall, and I think I just need to spit it all out before I’m too afraid to speak of it. That’s all. Is it weird?”
“It’s not weird,” Isolde says softly, but she takes several steps backward, away from the other woman. Her saxophone is in her hand. Julia’s sax is not yet out of its case, so they appear unevenly matched, Isolde with the bright arm of her instrument held close against her chest and Julia weaponless with her hands upturned to show the white of her palms.
“It just seems so desperately unfair,” Julia says. “That I am marked so indelibly, so ineffaceably, tattooed and blue with the ink of your name across my heart, and that your ink is washable, Patsy. It was always washable, and you knew that all along.”
“Come on, darling,” Isolde says. “You’re talking about just one kiss. You’re talking about a single red-wine-flavor of a kiss, in the dusky dark of one late evening, riding on the giddy thrill of a concert that sent your pulse to racing.”
“Yes,” Julia says, vehemently.
“A one-off.”
“Yes,” Julia says again.
“Come on,” Isolde says again, but weakly now. “We’re overreacting, surely. We’re behaving like teenagers.”
There is a pause and they look at each other.
“I think that this is worse than any other shame,” Julia says. “To be rejected not because of circumstantial reasons, or provisional reasons, or reasons of prior claim, but simply for the unitary and all-quenching reason that I am, and will always be, unwanted. I feel spotlit, pinned against the bright wasteland of a bare stage, with nothing to hide behind, nothing to blame.” She gives a cruel hard little laugh, not her own. After a moment she says, “Can’t you just tell me why? Can’t you just tell me why it’s Brian, and it isn’t me?”
Julia advances several steps. The other girl does not retreat. They are closer now, and Isolde looks her in the eye for a long moment before she speaks.
Isolde says, “I had always imagined that any woman’s choice to be with another woman would be a reactionary choice, defined mostly in the negative by the patterns she is seeking to avoid. It would, I always thought, only be after deciding she does not want men that a woman might conclude that she wants other women. It is a public stance, itself a kind of activism. It is a complaint. It marks a dissatisfaction. It is the kind of attitude only held by a particular type: emphatic, campaigning, radical, the kind of woman who would boycott certain companies on moral grounds, who would picket outside a factory gate.