Trust Exercise(15)
Manuel sings. His Spanish accent, which he drags like a weight on his uncertain journeys amid English words, is a bona fide now. Who else among them could sing this, even if they were blessed with the voice? Who else among them is blessed with the voice? Manuel sings, it seems, to horizons beyond the light booth. His eyes are cast up, anxiously, as if he’s aware he is barely retaining the fickle attention of God. So plaintively does he exhort this remote audience that Sarah glances back over her shoulder, expecting to see ranks of angels, their feet floating just off the ground. Instead she sees the faces of her classmates, rapt with unself-consciousness, the joyful respite from the problems of self. She too has passed out of herself, so thoroughly, so happily, that for a moment even David’s face is strange to her, and not just because his eyes are full of tears.
Her body twists forward again as if slapped, as Manuel, like a fountain, upraises his arms and their glorious burden, his final note, into the air. As if they awaited this gesture, the house detonates: clapping, whistling, foot-stamping, Ellery leaping up to shout, “Hombre!” Onstage Manuel, streaming with sweat, grins while wringing his hands. We’ve all had this dream, Sarah thinks. The dream in which, to the world’s surprise and our own, we turn out to be best.
Mr. Bartoli pushes the piano bench smartly behind him, crosses to Manuel, claps him on the shoulder, and pumps him warmly by the hand. They’re only forty-odd kids but they make the noise of a full house. They keep going, on their feet, so that except to the rows nearest him, Mr. Kingsley goes almost unnoticed when, pushing his spectacles onto the top of his head, he roughly draws his sleeve across his forehead and eyes. Then, “Someone write down the date!” he shouts at them. “Manuel Avila’s public debut!”
* * *
IN THE PARKING lot, at lunchtime, Sarah sits hunched on the hood of the Mazda with Joelle, Sarah scratching sometimes in her notebook, the two of them smoking clove cigarettes, Sarah ignoring the sandwich her mother has packed her. Her mother packs for Sarah, every morning, even when they’re not speaking, as now, a sandwich of meat from the deli, sliced cheese, Grey Poupon, a slice of tomato, and lettuce on some kind of a bakery bun that will have either poppy or sesame seeds. “Your sandwich looks like a restaurant sandwich!” Joelle once exclaimed in wonder, and since then Sarah doesn’t unwrap it, but when lunchtime is over drops it into the trash as they’re going inside. She does so with her face turned away, as if not having seen herself do it might mean that she hasn’t. On the far side of the lot the pale blue Karmann Ghia pulls in, perhaps some litter from the Del Taco drive-through carelessly tossed on the floor, perhaps David, ridiculous in a pair of Ray-Bans, enthroned on the passenger seat, but if Sarah has not in fact seen this, it might mean it isn’t the case. No one can prove it’s the case. Her eyes are night headlights; they only see what’s just ahead. It’s an unending labor, this policing of vision and thoughts.
“You look exhausted,” Mr. Kingsley says, once he’s shut his office door with a click that broadcasts the length of the hall. The ticket of admission. The door has shut on faces pretending absorption in the bulletin board, as if anyone need consult beyond his or her memory to obtain the full cast list, which was posted last week (Sky Masterson: Manuel Avila). Her fellow students are loitering in the hallway outside in the hopes of obtaining what she’s just received: his particular summons. Pride and humiliation strangely mingle their tastes in her mouth, or perhaps it’s the tart, rancid coffee to which she has lowered her face. He’s handed it to her, in a Styrofoam cup, from his personal drip coffee maker. Pride she’s been chosen, humiliation at what she presumes are the grounds for his choice. They all know the students with whom he is sometimes seen driving away, at lunchtime, in his olive Mercedes; whom he detains with no more than a look, as the rest of the class filters out of the room; behind whom he closes the door to his office at lunchtime. They’re the Troubled students, the borderline ones, whose sufferings are eagerly whispered the lengths of the halls. Jennifer, who missed school for a month and now only wears sleeves that hang well past her wrists. Greg, the incandescently beautiful Senior, with whom Julietta and Pammie are madly in love, who despite his impeccable clothes, dazzling smile, and kindness, was thrown out of the house by his father, and now lives at the YMCA. Manuel, whose stark poverty is newly palatable because coupled with talent. And Sarah, about whom they say—what?
She’s so in love with David she let him fuck her in the hall! And now he’s dumped her.
“I don’t get a lot of sleep,” she concedes.
“Why not?”
“I have this job. At a French bakery. I have to be there at six in the morning on weekends. Both days.”
“What time do you go to sleep on the nights you have work?”
“Maybe two.”
“What time do you get up on weekdays?”
“The same. About six.”
“And you’re going to bed when? On weekdays.”
“The same. One or two.”
“You’re going to kill yourself,” he observes, and she thinks he’s predicting an event in the future, her actual suicide, and then realizes he’s speaking figuratively, or probably figuratively, about the long-term effects of not sleeping enough.
“I am really tired,” she agrees, and just like that, she is crying again. Her shoulders hitch, and try as she might she can’t stop bringing up chunks of wet, ragged noise. She knows it’s expected yet knows equally that sometimes, some greater forbearance is also expected. Mr. Kingsley is not Ms. Rozot. Jennifer the failed suicide, Greg the orphan by force, impoverished Manuel, and her, Sarah—they’ve all been robbed of heedless childhood and that’s why they’ve been chosen, their precocious adulthood acknowledged. All kids want such glamorous knowledge. The darkness of it. The hardness of it. The realness of it. The cold fact that life really is fucked. And Sarah, with her Morrissey Tshirts and her unfiltered Camels and her sleep deprivation and her willful compliance with sexual hungers, she’s been asking for this awful dispossession, with one mind she’s been hot on its trail, and now that she’s got it she longs to go back. If she could only go back, and eat the sandwich her mother packed her, with its thoughtful tomato.