Trust Exercise(16)

She cries, as expected by him, and she eventually masters her tears, as also expected by him. She cleans her face and blows her nose with his Kleenex and disposes of it in his trash. She even takes out her Sportsac of makeup and unhurriedly fixes her face. When she snaps shut her compact she feels his approval as clearly as if he had spoken. “So,” he says, pleased. “Why don’t you tell me what’s actually happening.”

She tells him. Not all that same day; they’re already out of time. But now she is a regular. Their meetings wholly evident, and wholly unacknowledged, as is any exclusive liaison, by those it makes complicit, yet excludes. David sees, and grinds his molars together by day and by night to the point that the dentist has threatened to make him a mold to wear while he’s asleep. David, God help him, has no consciousness of discarding Sarah, but of being discarded. Here’s a girl, unlike any other girl he’s ever been with, who, once told of his love, doesn’t grab hold of his hand, hang herself on his arm, drag him out to the mall or the movies with the chattering flock of her friends, but to the contrary, spooks like a horse when he walks in the room. Swathes herself in cold air and then dares him to try and reach her, and how can he? Is it possible their whole love affair was a misunderstanding? David had known she slept with guys who were older than he, in some cases much older. Seeing her embarrassment, their first day back at school, David had felt like a charity case. She’d allowed him, but he shouldn’t let anyone know. And then the thing in the hallway, strange proof: she’ll come to him when nobody’s looking.

Or is it possible, Sarah says to Mr. Kingsley, that their whole breakup is a misunderstanding? Isn’t it possible, Sarah begs Mr. Kingsley, that David still loves her? How could he say that he did, and then not?





“Do you love him?”

“Yes.” Then, unnerved by her certainty, “I mean, maybe. I think.”

“Have you told him how you feel?”

“How could I?”

Acting is: fidelity to authentic emotion, under imagined circumstances. Fidelity to authentic emotion is: standing up for your feelings. Is this not the one thing, the one thing, he has tried to teach them? At first she thinks he’s barked out of anger, then grasps that he’s laughing. Perhaps he is laughing at her, but at least he’s not angry. “God,” he says, and even in the sanctum of his office his laugh is a stage laugh, artillery fire. “Thank you. I forget sometimes: it’s a process. And, you know, it never ends. That’s the beauty of it.”

She doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but once she’s cleaned herself up yet again with the box of Kleenex, she puts on her wise, weary face. “So it is,” she agrees.

“What about your mother?”

“What about her?”

“How are you getting along?”

“I don’t know. Not that bad. Not that well. Even when we’re not fighting we don’t really talk.”

“She drives you to work on the weekend. You must talk in the car.”

“Not really. It’s so early in the morning. We just get in the car and drive there.”

“I think the bakery job is too much. You should be sleeping on the weekend. Having fun.”

“I need the job,” she says tersely, because Mr. Kingsley is as unlikely as her mother to sympathize with her implacable pursuit of a car. She’s unaware that her tone might suggest the brusque pride of the abjectly poor, particularly when paired with her tatty punk wardrobe. She does resent the absence in her life of a pale blue Karmann Ghia convertible, but she knows she’s not poor. Not rich, certainly, in the little two-bedroom apartment behind the chalk X with her mother’s long-serving Toyota. But not poor.

He is silent a moment, thoughtful. “You and David come from very different worlds.”

“How do you mean?”

“David comes from a world of privilege.”

She doesn’t wonder how he knows this, or whether he’s guessed. “I suppose more than me.”

“He’s not working.”

“No. He doesn’t have to. When he turns sixteen, his mother and Philip will buy him a car.”

“Who’s Philip?”

“His stepfather.”

“Ah. Is that a recent thing?”

“It can’t be that recent. His mom and Philip have a two-year-old baby.”

“So David’s the big brother,” Mr. Kingsley says, smiling.

She smiles also, to designate David this way. “He already was. He’s the oldest from his mother’s first marriage. Then his mother left his father for Philip, David thinks because Philip had money. David’s real dad never had any money. David says his parents, his mom and real dad, burned his childhood house down to collect the insurance. So in that sense, originally, he’s not from such a privileged background,” she concludes, overwhelmed by her flood of disclosures.

But Mr. Kingsley does not judge her craving to talk about David. He does not judge her breathless uncertainty, now that she’s stopped. He reaches out, across the corner of his desk, and takes her hand. “You got to know each other,” he observes. She nods mutely, all fluency diverted again from her tongue to her eyes.

That night when Joelle drops her off, after ten, her mother’s at the kitchen table in her robe. Usually by this hour she’s behind the closed door of her bedroom. Her mother’s brown hair, streaked with kinky white strands, hangs down loose to her shoulders. She’s wearing men’s athletic socks on her feet. “Your teacher called,” she says.