Trust Exercise(54)

The third Manuel is not a person but an observation. Is not a salient aspect of this character his special relationship with Mr. Kingsley? Does not this relationship so anger Sarah that she inflicts an unspeakable wound, a strange sort of revenge?

The attentive reader might also wonder, What did Karen know about Sarah’s strange act of revenge? Again, I wondered this myself. Had I seen things I’d not understood? Had I known things I’d somehow forgotten? To the first question, Doubtful. To the second, No way. I never forget anything. But Sarah’s reconstruction in her book of the lighting and set and backdrop were so true to my memories, I kept blaming myself that the action seemed unfamiliar. How completely Sarah transported me back to that costume shop, with its overtaxed garment racks poorly divided by signs made of wilting shirt cardboards. The iron, the ironing board, the hats left on the floor. Yes, exactly. All that, just like that. Enough to make me think the unfamiliar action must be equally true and I just hadn’t noticed. But no: no one inexplicably disappeared from our theatre class—except me. And no one had a very special, perhaps too special, perhaps so special as to unleash in Sarah a thirst for revenge, relationship with the man we’ve agreed to call Mr. Kingsley—except Sarah.

But you’ve heard all about that very special relationship already. Or have you?

Two terms my therapist used that I liked, among many, were “projection” and “restraining force.” I liked those terms because they were so concrete in the therapy context and so broad in the context of life. Projection: even if you don’t do therapy yourself, you’ll agree that for all its bad rap, projection is creative. It puts something, or rather someone, out there, that person supposedly having those feelings that are actually yours. While restraining force is creation’s true opposite, not destruction but creation’s cancella tion. Not-thinking, not-feeling, not-doing. Projection or Restraining Force: Something or Nothing. The bald lie, or the stark truth that never gets told. There is no Manuel, or there are several. Sarah did nothing like that, or she did everything, even things she attributes to others. Karen knew nothing, or she knew everything but the form that the story now takes. Sarah tells this story to reveal a hidden truth—or to hide the truth under a plausible falsehood, scrambling history unrecognizable with the logic of dream.

Does Sarah think the story makes her out as a good or bad person? Looked at one way, she’s a selfish, hurtful bitch. Looked at another, she might imagine she’s rescuing someone.

But the truth or falsehood of Sarah’s story, the purity or taint of her motives for being truthful or false—these aren’t ours to determine or speculate on. We apologize for the digression.



* * *



NOT LONG AFTER that night at The Bar with David, Karen went to the main branch of the public library and obtained her own copy of the article in the Bourne Courier-Telegraph. After reading it she found her belief in Martin’s guilt completely vindicated. Strangely, she could also grasp how David’s belief in Martin’s innocence might be completely vindicated. The article was one of those that used a local controversy to investigate the broader “culture wars.” At the well-regarded high school in Bourne, Martin had won teaching awards year after year for his theatre program while also fending off rumors that he engaged in “behavior unbefitting an instructor.” None of the rumors had ever been proved. Receptivity to them seemed to vary according to one’s view of the utility of arts education. Conservative parents who viewed the theatre program as so much time-wasting twaddle called for investigation and accused the school’s principal, an arts champion, of shielding a sex criminal. Progressive parents who viewed arts funding as being under siege called for the defense of Martin and the denunciation of a witch hunt in which, most regrettably, he was the witch. The difficulty of knowing which side had it right was made worse by the students, who almost always declined to speak out and the rare times they did, disagreed with each other. Finally, the previous year, a sixteen-year-old Theatre student at the school had told her parents that she and Martin shared a loving and consensual sexual relationship and that she was expecting his child. Martin denied being other than the girl’s instructor. The girl’s parents hired lawyers and demanded that Martin submit to paternity tests. Martin refused and was fired—but not charged with a crime, as the student retracted her claim. While the age of consent in the UK has been sixteen since the late nineteenth century, the article said, it is an offense for any person aged eighteen or older and who holds a position of trust (for example, a teacher) to engage in sexual activity with a person aged eighteen or under, as such activity abuses the position of trust. The school, perhaps in penance for its prior inaction, put out the word through alumni networks that it was seeking other victims of Martin’s alleged abuse. Lest this sound too judgmental, the article concluded with a quote from a theatre colleague of Martin’s: “Here’s a person of incredible talent who’s devoted his life to the teaching profession, and this is what he gets: fired from his job, his reputation destroyed, all on the basis of hearsay. And you wonder why talented people won’t teach.”

Not long after reading the article, Karen obtained a copy of Martin’s play, which he had been hoping to produce, star in, and direct, until his witch hunt interfered, and she read it with the same interest she’d brought to the newspaper story. She got the copy of the play from David. David, after being shaken and shocked by the news about Martin, and then affronted and outraged, had turned finally sardonic and crusading. The sardonic crusading took the opposite form of the shocked shakenness, which played out at The Bar, an ideal location for sitting, drinking, and scolding the world for being “fucking insane.” The sardonic crusading played out on the stage of David’s theatre. This progression, from being shocked on a barstool to crusading onstage, was in fact David’s cycle, the way his wheel always turned. First, David would passively suffer his shock. Then after a certain point, as if the suffering charged him with power, David would unleash a crusade to shock others, and make them suffer in turn. Then, exhausted or remorseful or both—because he always, in his crusading phase, attacked people and made them upset—David would feel shocked again and passively suffer. Rinse, wring, repeat. If I ever actually become a therapist, and David ever has money, I’d like to treat him. He interests me. He interests everyone, which is more than you can say about most people. I once heard an intoxicated commentator at The Bar opine that David did well with women because he was so unpredictable, but this was a drunk person’s observation. David is completely predictable. Half the time he’s in a funk and half the time he’s ferociously active. Half the time he suffers and half the time he causes suffering. I’ll leave it to a mental health professional as to whether this is textbook bipolar disorder or something more nuanced but for our purposes you only need to know that David’s sardonicism—a real word, look it up—about the treatment of Martin led to his crusade to put on Martin’s play. David recovered the letter Martin had sent him, mashed onto the floor mats of his car or in his bedsheets or underneath his coffee maker. He wrote to Martin fulminating against the idiocy and insanity of the world and asking for a copy of the play. You can easily believe that when Martin got this letter, he was gratified. So began a transatlantic correspondence between these long-separated members of the Elite Brotherhood of the Arts.