The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton Read Free Book Online Page A

article with her head on one side. She dabs her finger absentmindedly at the crumbs on her plate.
    “I completely understand, Mrs. Miskus,” the saxophone teacher is saying into the phone. “Oh goodness no, I never metthe man,
     but let me tell you something about him all the same.” (Patsy gets up now, fishes for her coat. The saxophone teacher follows
     her with her eyes as she talks.) “Mr. Saladin left a legacy behind him, a special breed of wide-eyed, fascinated, provocative
     mistrust which has swept through my students like a virus. The violated girl is shadowed by whispers and elbows and blind
     aching jealousy everywhere she walks. When the lights go out, the parents cry and ask each other what did he
do
to her, but the girls are burning with a question of their own: what did
she
do? What does she know now that makes her so dangerous, like the slow amber leak of a noxious fume?”
    Patsy wiggles into her coat, waves, blows a kiss. She is leaving.
    “They try to imagine her stroking his face and arching her neck and whispering things, special things that nobody’s ever said
     before. They try to imagine her up against the wall of the music room, breathing fast and shallow with her eyes closed and
     her hands clenched in fists on the wall above her head. They try to imagine the ordinary things, like How about lunchtime?,
     or I couldn’t sleep last night, or I like the shirt with the stripes better. They think maybe now when she clutches her arms
     across her chest, when she smoothes her hair down at the side, when she suddenly falls silent and bites her lip hard, they
     think maybe these things mean something now that they didn’t mean before. They try to imagine, Mrs. Miskus. They try to imagine
     what these things might mean.”
    The saxophone teacher is silent now, listening, fingering the phone cord. The door slams in the stairwell.
    “I understand,” she says after a while. “Your poor fragile sensible daughter feels dirty by association and she wants to put
     as much distance as she possibly can between herself and that horrible man. You tell her I have a space on Tuesday at three.”
Friday
    A notice goes up to say that rehearsals will resume. A new conductor has been found for jazz band and senior jazz ensemble
     and orchestra, identified in bold type as Mrs. Jean Critchley. The unnecessary naming serves to emphasize the
Mrs.
and the
Jean
.
    “Course they got a woman,” says first alto darkly. They are standing in the corridor in a bedraggled clump.
    “I liked Mr. Saladin,” says Bridget in her stringy unfashionable way.
    “Is he in prison already?” says first alto.
    “Probably under house arrest,” says double bass. “So he doesn’t reoffend.”
    “Bullshit,” says first trombone. “He’ll just be at home in his pajamas watching daytime television.”
    They run out of things to say and spend a moment regarding the name of Mrs. Jean Critchley, identified in bold type.
    “She sounds like a bitch,” says first alto, voicing what they are all thinking anyway.
Friday
    “I went to see Mr. Partridge about an extension after school yesterday,” Isolde says. “He was in his office, and when I came
     in he sort of exploded out of his desk and said, Let’s talk in the hallway, come on, out. They all do that now. They’re afraid
     of enclosed spaces.”
    The saxophone teacher watches her and thinks, This is the dawn of a new Isolde, a hardened deadened Isolde who has witnessed
     the dirty and perverted glamour of the world but stillnurses a tiny kernel of doubt because she has not yet felt what she
     has heard and seen.
    “Anyway we went out into the hallway,” says Isolde. She swings her saxophone around so it is hanging limply off one shoulder
     like a schoolbag, both hands at her shoulder holding the strap. She shifts her weight to the other leg and sticks her hip
     out and blinks her big eyes, converting in an instant into a sweet and undeserving victim. The lights change, becoming