Trust Exercise(32)
Greg Veltin performed his last cue and turned his attention to Mr. Kingsley, still in the front row showing the rest of the house the expressionless back of his head. To his disappointment, Greg couldn’t derive any clues about the state of Jim’s, or rather, Mr. Kingsley’s, face, from the back of his head. Greg was no longer sure what he’d expected, or what he had hoped for. The show was over—had they taken their bows? Not having started with raising a curtain, they couldn’t end with lowering one, so just walked off the stage. As throughout, the audience, once released from the spectacle, could not reach consensus on how to react. Some stampeded for the doors. Some remained as if roped to their seats. Even these motionless ones, like Pammie, appeared torn between opposing impulses, in Pammie’s case the passive immobility of shock, and the active immobility of rage. Pammie’s seatmate, Julietta, didn’t stay to find out. For Julietta, the only thing worse than watching the show would be talking about it.
* * *
“HI-HO!” CALLED AN English voice in a manner both sarcastic and sincere. Assume friendly intent? Assume mockery?
Sarah looked up from her boots. She was sitting on the hood of her mother’s ancient Toyota Corolla, at the corner of the front parking lot. Sarah was parked here to avoid everyone, and so far she’d succeeded. She would have succeeded even in the back lot which was unusually empty, her classmates having left for the day. The Sophomores had no rehearsals, indeed almost nothing to do, until the end of the month. Instead of being performers this month they were supposed to have been learning the role of presenters—drumming up publicity and printing up programs, ushering patrons to seats, counting the box-office take. But Candide had been canceled.
Neither Martin, who had called out “Hi-ho!,” nor Liam, who sat in the passenger seat of the car Martin drove, seemed regretful. Martin was the author of the stage adaptation of Candide as well as its director. Liam was not merely the star, but the star for whom Martin had chosen Candide. They were far from home, in a city the April climate of which was already hotter than their native one ever approached on its worst days of August, and they had brought, as their ceaseless plaint went, too many “jumpers” and “trainers” and not enough of whatever nursery words they employed to mean T-shirts and sandals, and they were living as houseguests, in some cases decreasingly welcome. Were Martin and Liam angered, or embarrassed, or even pleased, to find themselves idle where they had expected to be presenting six performances in the space of ten days? It was impossible to say, as Sarah knew, because we cannot read minds but can only react honestly in the moment.
“Hi,” Sarah says carefully. There is much to confuse her here. She has never spoken to or been spoken to by either Martin or Liam, for all the hours she’s spent in their presence at school. She has never seen either of them in a car without Mr. Kingsley, their host, at the wheel. Having just, at long last, received her own license, a milestone the enormity of which is equaled only by its sense of anticlimax and its failure to grant her relief from her pain, Sarah is hyperaware of those occasions when a body and a steering wheel conjoin. She wonders whether Martin is licensed to drive in this country. Somehow she doubts that he is. The car Martin is driving isn’t Mr. Kingsley’s Mercedes. It’s a teenager’s car, a stylish beater of the exact make Sarah desperately covets, a convertible Bug, midway through extensive dermatological renovation. Its shell is heavily plastered with what Sarah assumes is a rust medication. In this year of their sixteenth birthdays, cars, or the absence of cars, are the only significant emblems. Sarah knows she knows this car but she can’t place it, the car having only recently appeared in the lot, around the same time as Sarah’s mother’s impoverished Toyota, which Sarah hopes is not connected to herself in the minds of her peers despite how hard she has fought for the right to drive it. The crucial thing is not to be dropped off at school by her mother. Sarah is allowed to drive from her mother’s workplace to school, and from school to her mother’s workplace. This is why she’s still in the CAPA lot, although there’s no rehearsal. Her mother’s workday doesn’t end until six.
“Fancy taking a spin in our chariot?” Martin goes on, Liam grinning encouragingly. It’s Karen Wurtzel’s car, Sarah realizes. Karen’s father has been helping her restore it. Somehow in her taciturn remoteness Karen has made the car’s deficits into an asset, proof that she actually knows about cars.
“I have to pick up my mother from work,” Sarah says, so surprised by the invitation she does not think to lie.
“Where’s her job? Is it near?”
“She’s a secretary at the university.”
“Might have been there, we’ve seen every bloody attraction, is it the one down past those fountains? Why don’t we follow you there, you can drop off the car with your mum and then come on with us and have dinner.”
It’s so simple the way he describes it—like driving itself, when one thing shape-shifts into another, for example her solitary vigil in the front parking lot smoothly eclipsed by Martin and Liam making ridiculous faces they know she can see in her narrow rearview, secondarily framed by the bug-spattered glass of Karen Wurtzel’s windshield. Down Fountain Boulevard she leads them, underneath the linked arms of the live oaks, the afternoon sun her attentive spotlight, the Toyota Corolla suffused with an alien splendor.