The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton Read Free Book Online Page A

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 still nurses 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 duller and more diffuse, until Isolde is standing in the creamy lilac light of a late-afternoon school corridor with all the lockers hanging empty and open and the chip packets scudding across the floor like silver leaves.
    “So I go, I was just wondering if I could get an extension or whatever, because things have been so hard at home—”
    And she seamlessly slides her sax off her shoulder and into her arms, holding it loosely underneath the bell with both hands, and pressing it flat against her pelvis in a casually protective way, as a man might hold a folder against himself, standing in a corridor with a student in a shaft of creamy lilac light after all the others have gone home.
    The saxophone teacher reflects how much she