Trust Exercise(24)
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MANUEL’S PARENTS APPEAR on opening night and seat themselves as best they can, near the back, until Colin, who is working as an usher, at Mr. Kingsley’s direction persuades them to move to the second row center, the first and second rows having been taped off and marked “VIP.” Colin’s first attempt to move the parents doesn’t work, they are politely bewildered. He has to fetch Joelle from backstage, where she is covered with loops of duct tape and safety pins, in readiness for wardrobe emergencies. Joelle comes out and with much compensatory smiling and laughing explains to the parents that seats have been saved just for them. They move with great reluctance, as if expecting to find they’re the butt of a practical joke. They’re both short compared with Manuel, solemn as carvings, exceptionally ill at ease. When the performance is over Sarah, having slipped upstairs into the light booth where Greg Veltin is running the board, sees Mr. Kingsley, his arms piled with flowers right up to his chin, press one of the bouquets on Manuel’s startled mother. Mr. Kingsley’s husband, Tim, is helping him distribute the flowers, and the two men, very alike with their clipped, glossy hair, their expensive wool V-necks over brightly hued shirts, and their knife-pleated trousers and glittering shoes, seem to diminish Manuel’s parents even more just by talking to them, despite how clear it is they’re raining down compliments. Mr. Kingsley is wearing his glasses, and Tim wears a mustache, and this is probably how Manuel’s parents can tell them apart, Manuel’s parents who are a paired species also in their dowdy church clothes.
Sarah feels relieved when Mr. Kingsley and Tim have moved on to the cast, who receive their flowers with regal entitlement.
The show is a thorough success. Erin O’Leary is adorable as Adelaide; dorky Tom Dieckmann, who cannot really sing, is nevertheless the perfect wiseacre as Nathan; and Manuel’s wooden acting is wiped from the spectators’ minds when he raises his voice in a song. Watching him act almost seems like a requisite penance, the price of the voice. Slantwise Sarah looks at Greg Veltin, so adorably handsome with his freckles and thick auburn hair and his tall, slender body. Last year, in Anything Goes, he had danced like Astaire. That too was vicarious grace, of the sort that exalted them all. No less can Greg sing, perhaps not like Manuel, but with his own irresistible brightness, as clean as a sailor’s white suit. Pammie and Julietta have made a cult of him, Pammie in particular barely able to breathe in his presence. She goes pink as a ham if he says hi to her. Not long ago Sarah used to see him ride off in Mr. Kingsley’s Mercedes at lunchtime. Now he sits in the light booth. “Why didn’t you audition this year?” Sarah wonders, she hopes not rudely. Everyone has wondered and been too shy to ask, assuming the reason is his personal crisis, about which he is so placidly unforthcoming.
“You know,” Greg says, as if it’s a question he hadn’t considered, and finds genuinely interesting, “I think I just realized I had stuff to learn in the wings. I mean, there’s such opportunities here that we shouldn’t pass up. Like this light board? Mr. Browne says it cost twenty-four thousand dollars.”
“But you’re one of the best singers and dancers at school. Anybody can run the light board.”
“Thank you,” Greg says. “That’s so sweet.”
“I mean it,” Sarah insists. “You would have been perfect as Sky Masterson.”
“Manuel was amazing.”
“You would have been better.”
“You’re the sweetest,” Greg says kindly, shutting her down.
The party is at Mr. Kingsley’s huge, beautiful house that he lives in with Tim. Only the current Seniors have been here before, in their sophomore year, the last time Mr. Kingsley was willing to host. “Does anyone want to tell me,” he says before doing the toast, “why Tapatia Taqueria won’t let us rent their backyard anymore?” Everyone laughs. There’s Martinelli’s Sparkling Cider and soda and all sorts of cookies and snacks laid out on fancy platters on a big buffet table inside, but outside, alcohol trickles into the yard from their cars. Here a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, there a six-pack of Bartles & Jaymes. The yard is vast, landscaped, labyrinthine, with brick walks and large shrubs and places to sit out of view of the house. They know Mr. Kingsley will ignore pot and alcohol out in the yard so long as they’re discreet. Out in the yard, their conversation mostly concerns where to go next, understanding as they do that for the hosts and for themselves, the party is a pleasant obligation. Mr. Kingsley and Tim are no more interested in hosting a wild party than the backyard denizens are interested in being wild in this genteel locale. They’ll stay an hour, go in and say thank you, get back in their cars, and be wild someplace else.
Inside, a very different party is proceeding on completely different lines. Here, no one wants to be anywhere else. They’re taking turns at the piano and singing, they’re hoping Mr. Kingsley will talk about Broadway, they would never imagine Mr. Kingsley might want them to leave. Yet they’ll all leave, exalted and tired, long before overstaying their welcome.
The two parties share some guests, trade some guests, enjoy the presence of most guests exclusively. Julietta and Pammie, Taniqua and Angie, Erin O’Leary and Tom Dieckmann, among many others, are inside eating chips, drinking soda, and singing their throats sore. Tim has a few solemn Juniors and Seniors around him on the screened-in porch, talking music and art. Joelle rolls easily from indoors to outdoors and back. A tight crowd in the kitchen, earnest chitchatters clogging the stairs. David’s so allied with shadow that Sarah’s not even sure whether he’s here, and, like Joelle, but for different reasons, she restlessly goes back and forth, in and out, from the sting of Colin’s bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the supple darkness to the caustic orange grit of Doritos in the house’s harsh light. She’s unable to feel at ease anywhere. She gets past the earnest chitchatters who are clogging the stairs and goes up, looking for a bathroom that doesn’t have people sprawled outside its door. Down the second-floor hallway are posters for shows, real professional shows in New York. Godspell. Follies. The hallway is lined in beige carpet that swallows all sound, and Sarah ventures its length, as if her noiselessness means she is also unseen. Here at the end of the hall is a spreading mosaic of photos in colorful frames, Mr. Kingsley and Tim standing shoulder to shoulder and grinning in various rooms, or at various scenic vistas. Sometimes Tim has his arm around Mr. Kingsley’s shoulders, and sometimes Mr. Kingsley has his arm around Tim’s. They always look hale and collegial. Sarah wonders if it is a prejudice in her, deep-rooted, unconscious and unintended, that makes her unable to see that they’re lovers in any one of these pictures. She wonders if, on the other hand, there’s some persistent reticence on their part, posing for a third party, that makes every picture this way, independent of her. She wonders what a photo of her and David would look like, if it could capture some aura they both sought to hide.