Trust Exercise(18)
This transit to the chair at the front of the room is equally unre membered. She finds herself facing herself in the full-length and full-width mirror. The other chair faces away from the mirror. An advantage she’s failed to seize.
“David,” Mr. Kingsley says. “Please take the other chair. Please move the chairs together so that your knees touch.”
Their classmates do not make a sound, but almost as one they lean forward. The sitting knee-to-knee is unfamiliar, but that’s not the piquant novelty. They who have stroked, rubbed, groped, and gripped in every possible configuration, at the behest of their teacher, in the name of their Art, can hardly be impressed with kneecap contact. What is impressive is the blunt singling out by Mr. Kingsley himself of what they’ve all, themselves, grown sick of tiptoeing around: David and Sarah and their all-important drama, of which they’re so proud that they won’t even share it. In Ego Reconstruction they skate over each other with ridiculous comments like “I appreciate the effort you made cleaning woodshop.” They’re haughty emotional hoarders; it’s about time they were brought down a peg. At the edge of her vision, Sarah feels the hungry encroachment, made only worse by the pockets of sympathy—Joelle and perhaps Pammie wide-eyed with anxiety for her, while Norbert’s lip curls at one corner. He’s hardly the only one eager for blood.
David’s knees, touching hers through their two pairs of jeans, do not feel like parts of a person. All four of their knees bump and flinch, blind bewildered convexities. It’s necessary to sit strangely primly, squeezing her thighs together, to maintain the commanded contact. Unbidden, unbearable, she recalls David’s face as he’d first entered her, in her twilit bedroom, on that hot afternoon. I feel like, he’d kept trying to tell her. I feel like … He’d felt like their bodies were made for each other, the tired cliché stripped of all but its startling truth.
She squeezes her eyes tightly closed, balls the memory up.
“Sarah, open your eyes,” Mr. Kingsley commands. “Sarah and David, make eye contact, please.”
She raises her eyes to his face. The blue agates grudgingly stare. The horizon dividing his lips. The button of his mole. His collarbone, partly disclosed by the V of his polo shirt, rising and falling a little too quickly. She seizes on this as a clue, and hope, which she’d thought she’d forsworn, explodes invisible and noiseless from her chest; but its force must be felt, because David recoils, the blue agates receding to points. “This is not a staring contest,” Mr. Kingsley is saying. “I want you to find a soft gaze. I don’t mean soft like weepy.” (Does he say this because either of them appears weepy? Sarah will not weep. She will, she tells herself with absolute bloodless conviction, sooner stop breathing than let herself cry.) “I don’t mean soft like tender.” (Does he say this because either of them appears tender? She’s already forgotten her vow of an instant before, her eyes well, they desperately rummage in David’s for some tenderness, then catch sight of themselves in the mirror and boil themselves dry with the heat of their shame.) “I mean neutral. Receptive. A neutral gaze, without anxiety or accusation or expectation. Neutrality is the self that we offer the other, alert and open, unencumbered. No baggage. This is how we come to the stage.”
Now that he’s got them up there in the chairs, maintaining eye contact, disallowed from staring, accusing, expecting, or experiencing anxiety, allegedly neutral, alert, unencumbered—for some minutes he seems to forget about them. He wanders the edge of the room, unhurriedly talking. What it means to be present. Integrity of the moment. Acknowledgment of … Freedom from … Of course one feels and one knows what one feels and at the same time is master of feeling, not slave; feeling is the archive upon which we draw, but the archive has doors or perhaps it has drawers, it’s got storage, an index, the metaphor for the archive of feelings has been lost on Sarah but she gets the idea. You’re fucked if it isn’t in order.
“David,” Mr. Kingsley says abruptly, returning to stand over them. “Please take Sarah’s hands. Sarah, please take David’s hands.”
David has advanced, receded, tilted, and swum in her paralyzed vision, his red polo shirt has grown blobby and almost subsumed him, but at the command David’s back in the chair with a merciless thud, all sharp, unkind edges and nails for eyes.
They join hands.
David’s hands are horribly inanimate, like meat, these hands of his that have been so alive to her.
Her own hands’ surfaces crawl in protest, these hands of hers that have wrung the pillow clutched against her gut, and pleasurelessly slimed themselves between her legs, in failed service of her longing for him. Her hands have regained him, and he feels like a corpse.
“I want you to communicate through your hands,” Mr. Kingsley instructs. “No words. Only touch.”
David’s hands remain inert. They do not squeeze, stroke, slap—but how are hands meant to communicate with hands? In fact, his have done so already. They don’t even hold her hands. Sarah’s hands are frozen to maintain the appearance that his hands hold hers. Her elbows are locked at her sides, her wrists and forearms tremble from the strain; if she gave up, her hands would clatter to her sides, David wouldn’t catch them.
Mr. Kingsley is orbiting slowly. “Is that the best you can do?” he demands. “Those hands know each other, don’t they. What do they remember? What could they tell us, if they knew how to talk? Or maybe they’d lie to us. Maybe they already are.”