Trust Exercise(45)

Saying these things, if she says them, Karen will be aware of the deceptively offhand way she puts the most enviable aspects of her life in the foreground. She will be so aware of this effort to cultivate envy, and the effort to conceal the effort, that it’s going to be hard to believe Sarah isn’t equally aware, despite the ample evidence of Sarah’s inability to grasp her, Karen’s, feelings. Synonyms for “ample” include “bounteous,” “copious,” and “plenteous” but not, according to this particular thesaurus, “voluminous,” which in its entry lists synonyms including “big,” “huge,” “roomy,” “capacious,” and … “ample.” Sometimes synonymousness only travels one way. The dictionary tells us that “voluminous” travels out of the past from the Latin word voluminosus, meaning “having many coils,” which travels from the Latin word volumen, a roll, which, reversing direction again, travels to the Middle Ages to become a word in English, “volume,” which means a roll of parchment that’s been written on. Anybody can look these things up. A given person’s facility with words is not in fact their knack, gift, or talent; it only means they own a thesaurus and a dictionary. The way we were raised—by “we” I mean me and Sarah; by “raised” I mean given the ideas that most mattered to us, and it wasn’t our parents who did this but our teachers and friends—talent was the only religion, the only basis for belief that wasn’t mocked. Talent was a divine thing embodied in humans and you either had it or you didn’t, you were blessed or you weren’t. Either way, you worshipped it. If you were blessed with talent, you worshipped it by using it, and no sin was worse than letting talent go to waste. If you weren’t blessed with it, you worshipped it by serving the people who had it. You had better be joyful, not jealous. Karen and Sarah, you girls know without you we could never do mainstage, you girls are a pair of wardrobe wizards, lucky us that you’ll run costume crew! Did Sarah audition for mainstage every year despite having the range of a toad when she sang? Yes, she did. Did Karen audition for mainstage every year, she who soloed with her church choir? Yes, she did. Was either of them ever cast, even in a bit part, even once in four years? No, never. They were permanent members of that mysterious majority, the talented enough to get into the school but not talented enough to serve as its stars. They must serve as the background against which the stars shined. They must feel joyful to do this and never resent it, although admission to the school had seemed like a promise that each passing year was remade and then broken again. Every year one of the seemingly permanent losers was unexpectedly cast in a lead, which both kept hope alive and increased the humiliation. Senior year it was the guy we’ll call Norbert. Norbert. By then, Karen had returned to her childhood world of dance with a vengeance, though instead of ballet she took modern and pretended to look down her nose at acting. She’d chosen acting as a fourteen-year-old: a mere child, she had chosen an art meant for children. Senior year she was gracious about it, happy to lend a hand with the costumes so that all the Theatre children could have a good time. Of course they should know she’d be studying modern in college. Sarah struck much the same pose, but with writing. Scribble, scribble, scribble went Sad Sarah in her Solemn Notebook. The only difference being that Sarah succeeded, having aimed lower and chosen a talent anybody could fake with the right kind of tools. Try and fake dance: you can’t do it. True arts require discipline, they require that you sculpt muscle and bind it to bone. I haven’t danced since college because I’m a realist and I understood early enough that I wasn’t going to be a professional dancer any more than I was going to be a professional actor, because although I’m really lean I’m too short and too wide. I maybe should have been a swimmer but anyway. Anyway, Karen hasn’t danced in a decade, but strangers still see at a glance that she used to dance seriously, they see it in her posture, that’s how ingrained she made it, how much work she put in.

The hard work of herself, on the hard muscle and bone of herself. Nobody else’s stuff dragged in to make something seem ample, bounteous, copious, plenteous, or voluminous.

I’d come to the bookstore fully intending to sit down in the audience. I imagined Sarah seeing me, maybe as soon as she stepped to the mic or maybe after she’d already started to read. Either way, I imagined her recognition of me would have the same sort of effect on her voice that bumping into the turntable had when we used to play records. Her needle would jump and then fall back again and she’d pretend to keep going, but there would have been that little break, that flaw in the smoothness. Maybe only she and I would notice, but I didn’t need other people to notice, in fact I didn’t want other people to notice. I wasn’t after some public moment, with the crowd as my tool. When we were children, or students, or whatever we were at the place we’ll refer to as CAPA, we were taught that a moment of intimacy had no meaning unless it was part of a show. The ways we liked and hated and envied and bullied and punished each other never seemed satisfyingly real unless Mr. Kingsley put them onstage during Trust Exercises, and he chose very few of our moments. Sarah and David, it should be obvious to anyone, were envied by all of us for the attention they got. In fact, that was their stardom, a different kind of stardom than being cast in a lead but in the long run more potent. Being a legit star at CAPA was a Pollyanna enterprise requiring that you have straight white teeth and be able to sing and to fit a whole set of ideas about life that we were too young at that point to recognize as ideas or as you might say a belief system. Unlike most of us I’d been raised in a religious belief system but even I didn’t recognize at that age that CAPA stardom was also a belief system, and not just the way that life was. David and Sarah’s different stardom gave the clue to some alternate universe where everything was reversed, and instead of discovery and love and success were distortion, disconnection, and failure. That was the show they starred in. The exercises Mr. Kingsley made them do, it occurred to me many years later, were a kind of pornography. I only meant to say that I decided to not surprise Sarah in front of an audience. I didn’t decide this out of kindness to her. I just didn’t want to give her the moral high ground.