Trust Exercise(30)

Meanwhile, among the girls, surprisingly it had not been Joelle’s house but Karen Wurtzel’s that became the headquarters. Karen’s English guest, Lara, had in no time at all learned and broadcast what facts about Karen nearly two years of Trust Exercising had not excavated: that Karen’s mother, Elli, unlike Karen, was pretty and fun and would stay up till all hours drinking Bartles & Jaymes and watching telly and talking and laughing while Karen stayed locked in her room and only came out to ask her own mother to please make less noise. Joelle and her two guests, Theodosia and Lilly, having hit it off like the proverbial house afire and spending the late hours after rehearsal driving Joelle’s Mazda everywhere but the forty-five minutes to Joelle’s inconveniently located home, started sleeping at Karen’s; after which, as had happened with the boys, the fourth English girl, Pammie’s guest, Cora, protested at being left out and migrated to Karen’s, Pammie trying to follow, but finding herself not invited.

After these domestic rearrangements, which took less than a week, the clique hardened its form.

Their first day at CAPA, the English People debuted as a leadership class. Though in many ways they looked physically younger than their American peers, the boys—Simon, Miles, Julian, and Rafe—being slender and smooth, their faces and chests still entirely hairless, and the girls—Lara and Cora, Theodosia and Lilly—being girlishly skinny, with no hips or breasts, the English People nevertheless separately, and even more so en masse, seemed older, their wits sharper, their knowledge more extensive and at the back of it somehow impenetrable. Perhaps cultural difference explained this. Perhaps it was all a mirage they induced with their accents, poor imitations of which became a widespread affliction of the sophomore class. The impression of power they gave seemed not wrought, but inevitable. That David or William or Joelle or Sarah or any of them had imagined impressing the English was now so unimaginable as to best be forgotten.

The two English grown-ups—Martin the teacher/director and Liam the star—first appeared after lunch, given that they were grown-ups, not visiting students, and so didn’t take classes. When everyone had assembled in the Black Box, Martin and Liam sat onstage with Mr. Kingsley, like Mr. Kingsley backward on their chairs, while Theodosia and Lilly and Lara and Cora, Rafe and Julian and Simon and Miles, sat anonymously in the risers with the rest of the students. Bantering back and forth with Mr. Kingsley about the Touring Life, One Hotel Seeming Just Like Another, and the Pleasures of Home, Martin and Liam seemed cut of that same kingly cloth as the aptly named teacher. Martin and Liam were capable of the same ostentatious air of relaxation: that manner of behaving as if unobserved, to broadcast the serene consciousness of being closely observed. Martin and Liam and Mr. Kingsley, entirely ignoring their students, trading theatrical badinage between their improperly utilized chairs, formed not a clique, grown-ups being understood not to form cliques, but another sort of unit, perhaps best called a club. To Sarah, the existence of the club registered just below thought, as a sensation of hopeless exclusion. To David the existence of the club registered as an angering challenge he wished to reject—but in such a way that Mr. Kingsley and Martin and Liam would be abashed, and desirous of winning his favor. To Joelle it was merely three men, two of whom she’d not before assessed. Joelle quickly found Martin too old and dismissed him to the same inert heap where lay gay Mr. Kingsley. Liam, by contrast, was in range. As if her eyes were a stethoscope, Joelle measured his blood: high temperature, swift tempo. Energy zigzagged unpredictably through him like the charge through a poorly wired lamp. He had arrestingly unique, ice-blue eyes such as you read about in fairy tales, but they transmitted to Joelle some sort of muffled desperation. This was a good-looking guy who would never be sexy, due to what sort of deficit or obstacle it didn’t interest Joelle to discover. Dismissing Liam as well, Joelle returned to passing notes with Theodosia and Lilly about the packet of cocaine in Joelle’s makeup bag, and with whom they should share it at lunch.

Liam had been Martin’s star student some handful of years before this, and Martin had staged Candide specifically for him, which Martin’s current students seemed to accept with no trace of resentment. Liam was twenty-four, six years out of high school. Of Martin’s age no one was sure. Sarah would not learn Liam’s story, including his age, until Liam told her himself, later on in this Month of the English. Mrs. Laytner had been unusually visible since the English arrival, intersecting as it did with ambitions she had for the school. Their multimillion-dollar theatre, with its two hundred feet of flyspace, its four hundred red velvet seats, its twenty-four-thousand-dollar lightboard, would host touring dance companies, orchestras, and whatever else one found in such beacons as Los Angeles and New York. While the Bournemouth Candide marked the American debut of its director and precocious young actors, its greater importance was as CAPA’s debut as a venue on the stage of its city. A first performance of Candide during the regular school day was reserved for CAPA students and teachers, but this was only to keep them from taking up space at the two weekends of public performances, all of which had sold out in advance, after a photo-filled feature in the city newspaper, more evidence of Mrs. Laytner’s exertions.

By the day of the first performance, the CAPA “sneak preview,” the English People are almost halfway through their stay. They seem both familiar and foreign, as if they have always been here and as if they have just now arrived. Familiar are their faces and voices, their postures, their gaits—any one of the CAPA students can pick out any one of the English from the ocean of heads in the hall, across the width of the lot ducking into Joelle’s Mazda or vaulting into David’s convertible Mustang. Foreign is almost everything else. Well as the Sophomores know one another’s private lives, which Mr. Kingsley has made them yield up like paying dues into a fund, they’ve learned so little about their English peers they do not even notice how little they know. They don’t know if Rafe lives in a large house or in squalid government housing, if Cora is a knowing virgin or a discreet libertine. They can’t crack the code of their clothes, if there is such a code, or of their accents, which to them all sound the same. They don’t know what roles any of the English people, apart from Liam, are playing in Candide, nor what roles there are, nor even what the title role is, if “Candide” is a name or a thing. Busy as they are with this quarter’s Costume History and Shakespearean Monologue and American Songbook, not one of them has read Candide. They may imagine that its title has an exclamation point. They have never seen a rehearsal because it goes without saying that the English People have no need to rehearse. They have never seen sets, props, or costumes because these don’t exist. The English People travel light.