“Oh,” Stanley said.
“You should have gone,” the boy said. “Closing night last night. It was kickass.” He nodded toward the gramophone he was carrying. “Lots of musical guys in the batch this year so we went with a sort of a musical thing, really diverse and abstract. If you’d seen it, it would’ve blown your mind.”
Stanley watched the boy inflate, and noted the shift from they to we. He sensed that diverse and abstract were key words, buzz words that had the power to set the speaker apart and mark him as one of the chosen. This boy was studied in his carelessness, tossing his head like a pony and turning his hip out so he stood like a model in a menswear magazine.
“This your first time auditioning?” the boy asked. He moved now, walking over to the secretary’s office door and bending at the knee to place the gramophone carefully on the floor below the wall of oiled golden pigeonholes. Stanley heard the voice of his high-school drama teacher: Move as you say your line, not after you say it.
“Yeah,” he said. “Should I be worried?”
“Nah,” the boy said coolly. “Just relax and have fun and don’t try too hard. It’s way less of a big deal than everyone makes out.”
“Did you have to audition for Wardrobe?”
“No.”
Stanley waited, but the boy didn’t say anything further. He straightened up and tried the door of the secretary’s office half-heartedly, but it was locked. He looked again at Stanley.
“The thing that’s strange about this place,” he said, “is that nobody has anything terrible to say. Even the ones who don’t get in—have you talked to the ones who don’t get in?”
“No,” Stanley said.
“They always say, I know I want it now. I’ve seen a glimpse of what goes on in there and I might not have got in but I’ve got a fire in me now and by God I’m going to work and work and try again next year and I’m going to keep auditioning until I get in. They say, What an honor and a privilege to have been able to audition with these amazing people, spend a weekend at the Institute and get a glimpse into where real talent comes from. They say, That place is truly a place of awakening. Do you find that weird?”
Stanley shrugged uncertainly. He had stepped back a half-step while the boy was speaking and he could feel the radiating cool of the porcelain basin against the small of his back.
“Nobody gives the finger as they walk out the door. Nobody says, Thanks a fucking heap. Nobody says, I didn’t want to come to your pissant ugly school for dicks anyway. Nobody says, Bullshit I’m not as good as that guy, or that guy, you tell me exactly why I didn’t get in. Nobody says anything terrible at all. Do you honestly not find that weird?”
“It’s a prestigious school. I guess people just feel really strongly about that,” said Stanley.
“Yeah,” said the boy, contemptuous all of a sudden, and visibly dismissing Stanley as a person with nothing to offer and nothing to say. “Anyway, good luck. Might see you round here next year.”
“Yeah,” said Stanley. He felt ashamed of his own dullness but he was too preoccupied with his anxiety about the audition to care. He turned back to the fountain and shoved his hands viciously back into his pockets, listening until he heard the boy’s footsteps dwindle away down the corridor and finally the heavy velvet thump of the auditorium door.
THREE
The morning paper reads Teacher Denies Sex With Student.
“Poor Mr. Saladin,” says the saxophone teacher. “Poor Mr. Saladin, with his slender hands and his throbbing lonely heart and his face like—”
“It doesn’t show his face,” interrupts Patsy, who is feeling cranky. “He’s holding his jacket over his head.”
The phone rings.
“They imagine it all the same,” says the saxophone teacher, “the thirsty mothers with their sad black eyes. They imagine sharp little teeth and a wet gulping swallow. They imagine small bluish pouches underneath his eyes.”
Patsy contemplates the article with her head on one side. She dabs her finger absentmindedly at the crumbs on her plate.
“I completely understand, Mrs. Miskus,” the saxophone teacher is saying into the phone. “Oh goodness no, I never met the man, but let me tell you something about him all the same.” (Patsy gets up now, fishes for her coat. The saxophone teacher follows her with her eyes as she talks.) “Mr. Saladin left a legacy behind him, a special breed of wide-eyed, fascinated, provocative mistrust which has swept through my students like a virus. The violated girl is shadowed by whispers and elbows and blind aching jealousy everywhere she walks. When the lights go out, the parents cry and ask each other what did he do to her, but the girls are burning with a question of their own: what did she do? What does she know now that makes her so dangerous, like the slow amber leak of a noxious fume?”
Patsy wiggles into her coat, waves, blows a kiss. She is leaving.
“They try to imagine her stroking his face and arching her neck and whispering things, special things that nobody’s ever said before. They try to imagine her up against the wall of the music room, breathing fast and shallow with her eyes closed and her hands clenched in fists on the wall above her head. They try to imagine the ordinary things, like How about lunchtime?, or I couldn’t sleep last night, or I like the shirt with the stripes better. They think maybe now when she clutches her arms across her chest, when she smoothes her hair down at the side, when she suddenly falls silent and bites her lip hard, they think maybe these things mean something now that they didn’t mean before. They try to imagine, Mrs. Miskus. They try to imagine what these things might mean.”
The saxophone teacher is silent now, listening, fingering the phone cord. The door slams in the stairwell.
“I understand,” she says after a while. “Your poor fragile sensible daughter feels dirty by association and she wants to put as much distance as she possibly can between herself and that horrible man. You tell her I have a space on Tuesday at three.”
A notice goes up to say that rehearsals will resume. A new conductor has been found for jazz band and senior jazz ensemble and orchestra, identified in bold type as Mrs. Jean Critchley. The unnecessary naming serves to emphasize the Mrs. and the Jean.
“Course they got a woman,” says first alto darkly. They are standing in the corridor in a bedraggled clump.
“I liked Mr. Saladin,” says Bridget in her stringy unfashionable way.
“Is he in prison already?” says first alto.
“Probably under house arrest,” says double bass. “So he doesn’t reoffend.”
“Bullshit,” says first trombone. “He’ll just be at home in his pajamas watching daytime television.”
They run out of things to say and spend a moment regarding the name of Mrs. Jean Critchley, identified in bold type.
“She sounds like a bitch,” says first alto, voicing what they are all thinking anyway.
“I went to see Mr. Partridge about an extension after school yesterday,” Isolde says. “He was in his office, and when I came in he sort of exploded out of his desk and said, Let’s talk in the hallway, come on, out. They all do that now. They’re afraid of enclosed spaces.”
The saxophone teacher watches her and thinks, This is the dawn of a new Isolde, a hardened deadened Isolde who has witnessed the dirty and perverted glamour of the world but still nurses a tiny kernel of doubt because she has not yet felt what she has heard and seen.