Trust Exercise(53)
That night at The Bar, as they began to talk about the “witch hunt” against Martin, it didn’t take long for Karen to suspect that David wasn’t shaken by the thought of Martin being a predator. Rather David seemed shaken by the thought of women lying about Martin, a person whom David, all these years later, viewed as a role model and sort of spiritual colleague, an example of how David thought a working theatre artist should be. In the fourteen years since David and Karen had seen him, Martin had remained teaching at the same school. He’d remained that irreverent, exemplary teacher, always winning the awards and always almost getting fired. He’d remained the guy students called “the biggest influence on my life” or “the only person at that school who connected with kids” or other such hyperbole. He’d taken his students not just to CAPA that long-ago time, but all over the world, offered them opportunities they’d never imagined, broadened their horizons, taught them to believe in themselves, and so on. All this information came out of the article, which David seemed to view not as one possible version of a possibly unknowable reality but as a simple window onto the life of someone David barely knew, whose past magically touched upon his—in other words, a sacred person. Karen knew David had always viewed the cancellation of Candide as proof of the hypocrisy—or, to use Martin’s word, “starchiness”—of this “little burg” David and Karen call home. Karen further guessed the cancellation of Candide had played its role, alongside Beckett and Northwestern, in the way David viewed himself now: theatre rebel, proud discomfiter of paying audiences. Martin having paved the way, the article must seem to David like evidence of a world gone mad, in which the vengefully lying were rewarded and the truth-telling teacher and artist destroyed.
“Do you not believe he slept with his students?” Karen finally asked. Karen had realized there was nothing she could say, at this moment, that wouldn’t shred the jaded unshockable costume she was still somehow wearing, that wouldn’t shred it into rubbery strips. At moments like these, a most useful technique is to ask the other person a question. It shouldn’t be a leading question, but Karen’s question, we admit, had some slant. All we can say is, the room had some slant. I was trying to stay on my barstool. I was trying to remain an old, dear friend of David’s.
“I’m sure he slept with his students. I’m sure they slept with him. They knew what they were doing! We knew what we were doing. Remember what we were like?”
“We were children,” Karen said carefully, as if it were David who ought to be handled with care, David who might be injured by the conversation. But apparently, despite taking precautions, Karen still caused offense. David gave a scornful laugh.
“We were never children,” he said.
* * *
THE ATTENTIVE READER might wonder, What ever happened to Manuel? Will Karen reveal his fate to us? I wondered this myself. After reading what I read of Sarah’s book, before seeing her at the Skylight bookstore, I went to my bookshelf and pulled down my high school yearbooks. Yes, reader, I kept them. They were quality items, those yearbooks. Their title was Spotlight! With the exclamation. It is not without care that I turned the stiff, glossy pages. Few inscriptions marred the endpapers. What effusions the few did contain didn’t reveal anything unexpected. No writer had claimed space with a colored Flair pen who did not find the yearbook’s owner “a sweet girl,” “so nice!” destined to other than an “awesome future.” Turn the page, then; pass the frontispiece of none other than David glancing over his shoulder, wearing the last of his hair and a Mao jacket. Pass through Administration with a pang; those office ladies took more care of you than your own mother did. Pass through Dance and Music (Instrumental and Vocal), through the Winter Ballet and The Jazz Ensemble Takes Manhattan! Theatre is the headliner here. It not only comes last but has the most pages. Study them all: four classes of Theatre students each year for four years, and there’s still the strong chance that “Manuel’s” DNA includes chromosomes from another department. We’re seeking the fate of Manuel in his various origins, for though I won’t claim there was no Manuel, I guarantee there was no one Manuel. Of clear sources I count at least three.
The first Manuel was a Theatre student, “Hispanic” as the forms say, who lacked all discernible talent. No more could C. act than dance, no more sing than drive nails into wood. He could not even glue feathers onto a hat. What was he doing there? It isn’t my puzzle to solve, but whatever the reason, it didn’t expire. C. was our classmate all four years. He departed as he came, unremarkably. He neither achieved prominence nor prematurely disappeared. Although he never had a girlfriend or boyfriend while we were in school, last I heard he’d gotten married, gone into business, had a couple of kids, and was doing just fine.
The second Manuel was a Vocal Music student, also “Hispanic” as the forms say, whose name you may know if you listen to opera. He is one of the school’s biggest success stories, and his voice, like Manuel’s in the surprising audition, truly conjures the ranks of the angels. He never came out as gay while at our school but he certainly is. However, P.’s talent wasn’t discovered at our school but years earlier in his childhood. Nor was he a protégé—or more—of Mr. Kingsley’s. P. was the pride of the Vocal department, so consistently booked in professional opera from the age of thirteen that he never even deigned to audition for the school mainstage. He continued from our school to Eastman, and a stellar career. I saw him perform once, as Sharpless in Madama Butterfly, when I lived in New York. Afterward I briefly considered waiting for him at the stage door with the handful of starry-eyed others all cradling bouquets. But I had no claim on him. I’d known of him but he’d never known me. I decided against and went home.