Trust Exercise(14)

Now, as Mr. Kingsley called, “Next!” to the auditioners waiting concealed in the wings, Ellery clamped Sarah’s elbow again. “Am I dreaming?” he squeaked.

Manuel had come onstage, an apparition. Perhaps it wasn’t Manuel. He wasn’t dressed like Manuel, in the slightly too-small and slightly too-youthful striped Tshirts you could tell, just from looking, had been bought from the sale rack at Sears, or maybe from the Purple Heart Thrift Store, by Manuel’s unknown mother, after being discarded by whoever had bought them at Sears. The shirts Manuel wore every day had pills, and faint, ancient stains of the kind that defeated all efforts, and they squeezed his upper arms and his neck. For pants, Manuel wore corduroys that had almost no cord left. And regardless of weather conditions, Manuel never took off his jacket, the same fake-wool-lined corduroy jacket they’d first seen him in, and that seemed to them now as permanent as a turtle’s scuffed shell. The onstage Manuel was missing this traditional garb, though not dressed any better. He wore a pair of black slacks that were shiny with age, and a grayish-white button-up shirt that, despite being short at the sleeves, was tightly buttoned at the cuffs, emphasizing the bony excess of his wrists. The feet were encased in hard black leather shoes that looked too small, and the usual bushy brown hair was combed back from the face exposing large, startled eyes, unfamiliar to all, beneath an equally novel, creased brow. A sheaf of paper was gripped in the hands. The Manuel-apparition looked like a waiter, an unhappy and poorly dressed waiter. Sarah realized with amazement he was dressing, as well as he could, for the part. Guys and Dolls would of course call for old-fashioned menswear: leather shoes, slacks, a button-up shirt. Not one other boy, for the sake of the audition, had made the slightest alteration to his everyday clothes. They’d all auditioned in their Levi’s and polos and dumb slogan Tshirts.

It did seem possible this was a dream. As on the day of the sight-reading test, a titter passed over the house, instantly extinguished when Mr. Kingsley stood up from his place in the center of the third row. “Okay, Manuel. What do you have for us?”

Ellery squeezes Sarah’s hand, and Sarah squeezes back. On his other side he has Joelle’s hand. On Sarah’s other side is Pammie. Joelle and Pammie are squeezing their eyes shut and clutching their cheeks; Pammie is so agonized she balls up in her seat like a hedgehog. Both Joelle and Pammie, for their separate if equally feminine reasons, feel a motherly pity for Manuel, though neither has managed to befriend him. He doesn’t afford the slightest opportunity, speaking to no one—not even Pammie, with her pious childlike fearlessness, can get him to answer her cheery “Hello!” Sarah hears Pammie fervently mumbling. It’s possible, in fact likely, that she’s praying.

“What do you have for us?” Mr. Kingsley repeats.

Manuel again turns that mesmerizing color of a live coal. At length he says, barely audibly, “I am going to sing the ‘Ave Maria’ of [a bunch of syllables Sarah can’t hear].” Strings seem to be tied to his elbows, equally pulling on him from both sides, so that, in his tensile, motionless state, he might fly to pieces. Then the stage-left string breaks, and he lurches toward Mr. Bartoli, extending his music. Mr. Bartoli pages through it, nods. “Shall I begin?” he asks.

Manuel wrings his hands in a fretful grandmotherly way, abruptly drops them to his sides. Mr. Kingsley, still standing, his back to the rest of the house, says, “Manny, I know you can do it.”

He speaks as though he and Manuel are entirely alone. Yet no one in the house fails to hear him, to the very last row.

It’s possible for silence to change quality. The silence had been enforced, the silence of quashed merriment. Now it’s the silence of genuine puzzlement. Mr. Kingsley never uses nicknames or pet names. To indicate an altered attitude he sometimes calls them, instead of their given names, Ms. or Mr. and then their last name. This denotes bemusement, disapproval, and much in between, but whatever the case there is always a distance implied. “Manny” observes no such distance. “Manny” doesn’t even observe that there might be some forty-odd people elsewhere in the room.

Mr. Kingsley sits down again. The back of his head, with its limited features, its expensive haircut, and the ends of his spectacles’ temples hooking over the backs of his ears, is nearly as expressive to them as his face—it radiates a peremptory certitude. “Come on. You know what I want. Give it to me.” If the back of his head can say this, just imagine the front. (Ms. Rozot: “If the pen can do this, how much more the whole body!”) Manuel—Manny?—seems to be in wordless communication with this hidden front of Mr. Kingsley’s head. He gazes into it, receives something from it—he looked different when he first came onstage, and he somehow looks different again. With what might almost be called self-possession he nods to Mr. Bartoli. Mr. Bartoli raises his hands, brings them plunging back down. Manuel sucks air into his lungs.

To this point in her life, Sarah has associated opera with Bugs Bunny in braids, PBS, overweight men wearing tunics, shrieking women, and shattering glass. She’s never understood, certainly because she’s never seen a live opera but also because she’s never heard a half-decent performance, not even in part, on TV, that opera, in fact, is the highest redemption of longing. That it’s her own anguish, salvaged by music. The victorious army’s fight song, in defense of her mute, savaged heart.

Now she understands why Ms. Rozot has warned her to not turn away from her pain.