Trust Exercise(19)
He can see, Sarah thinks. He can see the hands aren’t really joined. They are linked but they somehow don’t touch. How stupid they must seem to him, that they can’t even follow his simplest direction. She is powerless to clasp David’s hands, to seize them, to communicate with touch. Sweat drenches her scalp; she can feel it worming under her hair. The floor beneath her seems to rise and tilt, again and again, describing the same arc without ever completing it. She is slowly falling out of her chair, a black sunstroke stain marring her vision. Far away David’s face hangs in the air, his cheeks tumescent with blood and his sightless eyes gleaming with rage. Sarah splits from herself; David might crush her fingers in his, snap the slender bones like so much dry spaghetti. If only he would. At length she grows dimly aware she is shaking with sobs. She hears the ugly noise long before she is able to pinpoint the source, and like the victim who is forced to inflict her own torture, unwilled she remembers the first time she came, and the wails she hadn’t realized were hers until she felt David weeping with joy on her neck.
The tone of Mr. Kingsley’s accusation has shifted and sharpened, for Sarah has brought the authentic emotion. She might not have done so with her hands, but poor thing: she is doing her best.
“Is that the best you can do?” Mr. Kingsley is shouting, red-faced. He’s shoved his glasses on top of his head, snagging a chunk of his hair which now sticks up in unprecedented disorder. “This is the girl you walked miles for. In the heat. With a stupid tennis racquet so your mom would think you’d gone to the club. Because you loved her, David. Don’t lie to her now and don’t lie to yourself!”
Their classmates are slack-jawed. Is there any possibility this is a play? Among them, emotional exhibitionism is commonplace. Confession is commonplace. Shrill recrimination, and reconciliation, are commonplace. This is different, in what way they cannot in the moment define. Some feel the urge to call out, as if at a sporting event, with encouragement or admonishment or outright insult. “Don’t give in to that cunt!” Colin wants to call out to David. Pammie wants to rush over to Sarah and conceal Sarah’s bowed head with her arms. Pammie once sat behind David while he sat behind Sarah, and thought to herself, If a boy ever looks at me for half a second the way he’s looking at the back of her head, I’ll die and go to God a virgin, I will not even need to be kissed. Chantal wants to say, “C’mon, be a man, David, the fuck are you getting so red-faced about?” Norbert, who would gladly lick Sarah’s ballet flats, wants to slap her across the face and say, “This is what you get for loving that dick when you could have had me.” Some who find their view blocked are tentatively kneeling on their chairs or fully standing. Sarah finally snatches her hands away, covers her face with the sieve of her fingers through which mucus and tears leak in clear, gooey threads that become sticky stripes on her arms.
“Foul!” Colin shouts, and relieved, nasty laughter erupts.
“Take five!” snaps Mr. Kingsley, displeased by the class’s irreverence. But he has one hand on Sarah’s right shoulder, the other on David’s left shoulder, and he leans in: they are not yet excused. Sarah cannot, will not, uncover her face, but she feels his lips brush the crown of her head.
“Well done,” he says into her hair.
Then she hears him speak softly to David. “I won’t rest until you cry.”
Sarah peeks between her fingers. Mr. Kingsley is smiling, in cold enjoyment of his prophecy. It is only a matter of time. David’s face is almost purple with effort. David lurches from his chair, knocks over several more as he less walks than falls out of the room.
“Take five, sweetie,” Mr. Kingsley says so that everyone foot-dragging, shoe-tying, purse-digging, faking some reason to stay in the room—everyone except David, who’s left—clearly hears. “You know where to find the Kleenex.”
Take five, sweetie.
* * *
“WHAT ELSE DID you tell him?” shouts David, who hasn’t spoken to her, even deigned to acknowledge her lowly existence, in months and who now strikes like a holy avenger as she and Joelle cross the parking lot toward Joelle’s car.
JOELLE: (interposing herself) Shut up, David! Leave her alone.
DAVID: (actually shoving JOELLE to one side with the palms of both hands, so JOELLE reels on her stiletto-heel boots, almost loses her balance) Did you tell him you won’t even talk to me, but you’ll fuck me in the music room hallway?
SARAH: I won’t talk to you?
DAVID: (over her) Or was he watching us fuck, did you set that up too?
JOELLE: (regaining her balance, roaring with terrific volume) You’re an asshole—
SARAH: (too stunned to speak—but DAVID has already turned his back on her, ERIN O’LEARY’S little car has pulled up; he gets in, slams the door, and his blond chauffeuse, expressionless behind sunglasses, drives him away)
SARAH’S MOTHER: Your life outside school isn’t any of his goddamn business. You know that, don’t you?
MR. KINGSLEY: Please begin, Sarah.
Sarah and David sit at the front of the room in the two chairs again. Their knees no longer touch, they are permitted to sit very slightly apart. David looks at Sarah without looking at her. He sees her without seeing her. He sits in the chair without being there. She doesn’t comprehend, not why he does this, but how; if she could do it, she would; she understands for the first time that David is the real thing, that David is going to make it in theatre, he may even make it so far, matter so much, that he can spell it “theater” if he goddamn feels like it, and she also understands that here at CAPA, with Mr. Kingsley, David is already finished. He will never play a lead. He will never be a star. He will leave the school with his weight of charisma untapped, unacknowledged, unpraised, obscured beneath a miasma of stale smoke and alcohol fumes, the “silly walks,” the polo shirt, the tennis racquet not merely discarded but utterly invalidated and forgotten by all but a few stubborn memory-keepers.