Trust Exercise(35)
“Table for four,” Karen told the host as the host pirouetted in welcome.
“Right this way!” the host cried. “Are you going to need high chairs, honey? Not even boosters?”
“I dooo want a boothstah, I dooo!” Liam said.
At the booth Karen slid in first. As if scoring a run Martin slid in beside her, slamming her against the booth’s inside wall. “So ter ribly sorry!” he cried. “Are you injured? We must take a pulse—I’ll be gentle. Cold as ice. Is there a doctor in the house? Perhaps a licensed dietician? Liam, crumple up these napkins for a fire, I believe Karen’s heart has stopped beating—”
“Let go,” Karen said, laughing, for even she could not withstand Martin’s earnest assault—but it was different with Karen than it had been when Sarah mirrored Martin’s and Liam’s hilarity. Sarah knew she had been copying, while Karen had somehow reclaimed her own place. It no longer mattered to Karen that Sarah was here.
Sarah wound up seated opposite Karen. Liam, beside Sarah, sat opposite Martin, consumed by his role as Martin’s foil, co-conspirator, and jester. “D’you know Liam used to have fatal stage fright?” Martin was telling Karen. “D’you know I used to have to tell him to bring extra pants on the nights he performed?”
“He liked to see me play dress-up,” said Liam.
“In case of accidents.”
“D’you mean like that time you zipped your willy, Martin? Don’t worry, Karen, it caused only minor deformity.”
“I’ll cause you a minor deformity!”
Neither Sarah nor Karen could compete with this, nor were they invited. But Karen needed only to train her attention on Martin. He’d cast her in the role of watching him, as he’d cast Liam in his multiple roles, and Sarah in her part as a sort of wordless prop by which Martin could give Liam occasional scoldings. “Poor Sarah’s bored stiff!” Martin said. “She’s going to be wondering why she came out with us instead of having all the great wicked fun she had planned.”
“I was just going to pick up my mom,” Sarah began.
“Devoted to her mum, just like you, Liam, and yet it’s me discovering these points in common. Why aren’t you getting to know each other? Do I have to do everything?”
Wit, or what passed for it; a nimbleness of insults and baffling allusions; the quick pivot, the cavalier non sequitur, the comically extreme reaction. Sarah had always imagined herself possessed of such talents. Hadn’t she been a lunch-hour intimate of Mr. Kingsley’s? But Martin’s conversational virtuosity—or perhaps his unremitting energy for dominating social situations—overmatched her completely. She became quiet and even stupid in its presence. She tried to lay hold of Karen’s passive spectatorship, which seemed, at least in the moment, to possess more dignity than her own tentativeness, but Karen’s refusal to meet her eyes, to acknowledge her presence, to in any way admit her into comradeship, seemed to deny her Karen’s manner toward Martin and Liam as well. Since becoming a student at CAPA, Sarah often had the classic nightmare of finding herself about to go onstage without knowing her lines, or even her role, or even the play, and though this situation lacked the abject terror of those dreams it was similarly paralyzing.
Although Sarah also spoke, laughed, ate half a club sandwich, even flirted with Liam—at least, had she been watching herself from a neighboring table it would have appeared that she did all these things. They had arrived at the Big Boy around five and now it was almost seven. “Crikey, we have shopping to do,” Martin said. “Come along, come along. What did you tell people, Liam? Seven thirty or eight?”
“I don’t know,” Liam said. “I think I just said after seven.”
“You’re such a complete imbecile, or perhaps you’re a dreamer, a beautiful dreamer, and we’re all your beautiful dream.”
“Why d’you look so much like my worst nightmare, then?”
“D’you ever have that nightmare,” Sarah tried, “where you’re in a play, but you never rehearsed, and you don’t even know what play it is?” She’d done the thing she most despised, of attempting to parrot their accent. Mustering the strength to speak words, she couldn’t even use her own voice.
“Yes!” Liam was shouting, as if she’d guessed the answer to a lucrative riddle. “All the bloody time! That’s my worst nightmare!”
“Another remarkable point in common. There you go, Sarah, you’re drawing him out. I think you two ought to do the drinks shopping and Karen and I will do snacks, but don’t take all night. We’re already late and we don’t even know if we’re late for seven thirty or eight due to Liam’s remarkable idiocy.”
“Where are we going?” Sarah asked Liam once they were alone, cleaving the arctic glare of the supermarket with the rattling cart preceding them as if they were a young couple pushing a “pram.” Separated from Martin, Liam had grown quiet, and intently attentive to her, and correspondingly handsome; he watched her push the cart as if enthralled. For a moment, after she spoke, he seemed to study her words on the plate of his mind, as if unsure how to consume them.
“To our place,” he said.
“You mean—Mr. Kingsley’s?”
“Yes. Jim’s place. And Tim’s. Mustn’t forget Tim. Tim and Jim, Jim and Tim. D’you think they fancied each other because their names rhyme? And they wear the same size trousers.” Liam giggled, exposing his compromised teeth—if only he would keep his mouth shut.