Trust Exercise(11)
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AT LAST, THE ends and the means seem to match.
They have a new Movement teacher, who will teach them to move. They will learn to move by moving; they will learn to free their movements by free movement. The Movement teacher’s mission is so simple Sarah finds it idiotic. There is something else about the Movement teacher Sarah vaguely dislikes. She’s not sure how to feel when she realizes her dislike stems from the fact that the new teacher is female. Mr. Kingsley, Mr. Browne, Mr. Freedman, Mr. Macy who does set design, dramaturgy, and theatre history: all men. Ms. Rozot will teach them Movement. From the moment they meet her, they all disrespect her, covertly. Something in Mr. Kingsley’s gaze, as he introduces Ms. Rozot, warns them: they may mock her but they’d better keep it quiet.
She is a dancer and “multidisciplinary performer,” and she trembles with joy at the prospect of being their teacher. “Teaching is a sacred trust,” she gushes. “You are the future.” Despite their secret disrespect they are secretly flattered. They’ll give her a chance.
Since the tryst in the second-floor hallway, David has severed the wire. There is no longer even anger as a point of connection. His gaze backpedals from Sarah’s like a magnet escaping its likeness. He has mastered the trick of existing elsewhere even when they are in the same room. An alien lives in his body; amnesia has sponged clean his brain. With each confirmation that David has vanished, Sarah feels more anguished and exposed, as if her moment of desperate abandon were still going on with the whole gaping class in attendance. Movement class will be held in the Black Box; they arrive as the Seniors are leaving, and Sarah sees David pausing with Erin O’Leary. Erin is a Senior, petite and blond, her flawless face grave with the consciousness of her preeminence. Erin has a film credit, a SAG card. She drives a pale blue Karmann Ghia convertible. The sheer quantity of her superiorities is laughable; she’s like an implausible fictional character. Her tiny body, with its ideal, tiny hips and tiny breasts and compact little ass, drags generalized attention like a net. The boys, even the Senior boys, fear her: she is rumored to date real, established actors whom she meets on her “sets.” The girls loathe her. She travels in a cylinder of rarefied air, untroubled by her social isolation: she’s only here because it’s trashy to drop out of high school. Next year, she’ll attend Juilliard.
“Where are you headed?” David says to Erin.
“Restoration Comedy. You?”
“Movement.”
“Ugh, I hated it. We ought to get showers.”
“Oh, you’re okay,” David says, to which Erin laughs charmingly. She is so perfectly, adorably small that the crown of her glossy blond head barely grazes his chin. She gazes up at him, contentedly submissive. A girl who can do anything she wants. Can date a Sophomore if she wants. Anoint him.
Sarah plows into the Black Box, blind with revelation. Her cheeks, armpits, and crotch squirm with needles of heat, her familiar stigmata. Within the fist of her chest, her ribs snap like so many dry twigs. “Welcome!” Ms. Rozot is exulting. “Welcome to Movement.” Right away Ms. Rozot has them leave their chairs, their books and jackets and purses, and come down to the great square platform of the stage. Sarah has difficulty relinquishing her pile of books, folders, spiral-bound notebooks, the tattered, fractionally digested paperback of Tropic of Cancer on the top of the heap like a cake decoration; she has been pressing the pile to her chest like a shield or a bandage, and giving it up she feels physical pain. Her chest groans at the fresh exposure. She can hardly stand straight. David is somewhere behind her, she can feel him there—looking at her? When she can’t turn around and look back? Perhaps they’re all looking at her. They all know her dilemma. Yesterday, trying to escape David’s baffling absence, which she now understands, she’d climbed up to the fly rail and instead of solitude found Pammie, Pammie’s face blotched and sticky with tears. Twenty-four feet in the air, they’d had no recourse but to speak to each other, two girls compelled by their classwork to a level of intimacy far beyond what they shared with the rest of the world, and yet also two girls who had never once traded a single superfluous word. “You love him, don’t you,” Pammie said.
The Black Box was just as it sounded, a black box of a room with a large platform stage at the center low enough to require no stairs, four sets of riser seating on each side, and aisles around the platform and around the sets of risers. During performances, black drapery made the aisles behind the risers backstage, four velvet hideaways also clandestinely useful at times, but today the drapery is furled, the box is open to its walls and its faraway ceiling, crisscrossed by the lighting catwalks. They are to walk, walk, walk—move, move, move!—all through this marvelous space; they must make themselves free to explore every inch. Not the catwalks or ladders, no. [Laughter.] “All right, you are all very clever! You will explore all terrestrial inches. In literature, there is an idea called automatic writing. You write without resting your pen. The pen must keep moving and moving; perhaps it is writing ‘Why the fuck do I have to keep writing?’” [More laughter, shocked and charmed, at her profanity. Her profanity, tinged as it is with her accent, is more charming than shocking. Is it possible they could respect her?] “Well, this unbroken movement, of the pen, unlocks the secrets within. And if the pen can do this, then how much more the whole body? Let your body lead you. Your only order to it: never stop moving. Otherwise, it is in charge! I will help you with music.”