Trust Exercise

Neither can drive. David turns sixteen the following March, Sarah the following April. It is early July, neither one within sight of sixteen and the keys to a car. Eight weeks remain of the summer, a span that seems endless, but with the intuitive parts of themselves they also sense it is not a long time and will go very quickly. The intuitive parts of themselves are always highly aggravated when they are together. Intuition only tells them what they want, not how to achieve it, and this is intolerable.

Their romance has started in earnest this summer, but the prologue took up the whole previous year. All fall and spring of the previous year they lived with exclusive reference to each other, and were viewed as an unspoken duo by everyone else. Little remarked, universally felt, this taut, even dangerous energy running between them. When that began, it was harder to say. They were both experienced — neither was a virgin — and this might have both sped and slowed what took place. That first year, in the fall, each had started at school with a boy- or girlfriend who was going to some other, more regular place. Their own school was special, intended to cream off the most talented at selected pursuits from the regular places all over the city and even beyond, to the outlying desolate towns. It had been a daring experiment ten years before and was now an elite institution, recently moved to an expensive new building full of "world class," "professional" facilities. The school was meant to set apart, to break bonds that were better off broken, confined to childhood. Sarah and David accepted this as the sort of poignant rite their exceptional lives would require. Lavished, perhaps, extra tenderness on the vestigial boyfriend and girlfriend in the process of casting them off. The school was named the Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts, but they and all the students and their teachers called it, rather pompously, CAPA.

At CAPA, the first-year Theatre Arts students studied Stagecraft, Shakespeare, the Sight-Reading of music, and, in their acting class, Trust Exercises, all terms they were taught should be capitalized as befitted their connection to Art. Of the Trust Exercises there were seemingly infinite variations. Some involved talking and resembled group therapy. Some required silence, blindfolds, falling backward off tables or ladders and into the latticework of classmates' arms. Almost daily they lay on their backs on the cold tile floor in what Sarah, much later in life, would be taught was called corpse pose in yoga. Mr. Kingsley, their teacher, would pad like a cat among them in his narrow-toed soft leather slippers, intoning a mantra of muscle awareness. Let your awareness pour into your shins, filling them slowly, from ankle to knee. Allow them to grow liquid and heavy. Even as you can feel every cell, cradle it with your sharpened awareness, you are letting it go. Let it go. Let it go. Sarah had won admission to the school with a monologue from the Carson McCullers play The Member of the Wedding. David, who had attended a theatre camp, had done Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman. Their first day, Mr. Kingsley slid into the room like a knife — he had a noiseless and ambushing style of movement — and once they'd fallen silent, which was almost immediately, had cast a look on them that Sarah still saw in the back of her mind. It seemed to mix scorn with a challenge. You look pretty nothing to me, the look flashed onto them like a spray of ice water. And then, like a tease, it amended: ... or maybe I'm wrong? THEATRE, Mr. Kingsley had written in tall slashing letters of chalk on the board. "That's the way it is spelled," he had said. "If you ever spell this with 'ER' at the end you will fail the assignment." These words were the actual first he had spoken to them, not the scornful "you look pretty nothing to me" Sarah had imagined.

Sarah wore a signature pair of blue jeans. Though she had bought them at a mall she would never see anyone else wearing them: they were specific to her, very snug, with elaborate stitching. The stitching went in whorls and patterns spreading over the ass, down the fronts and the backs of the thighs. No one else even had textured jeans; all the girls wore five-pocket Levi's or leggings, the boys the same five-pocket Levi's or, for a brief time, Michael-Jackson-style parachute pants. In Trust Exercises one day, perhaps late in the fall — David and Sarah were never quite sure; they would not speak of it until summer — Mr. Kingsley turned off all the lights in the windowless rehearsal room, plunged them into a locked lightless vault. At one end of the rectangular room was a raised platform stage, thirty inches or so off the floor. Once the lights were turned off, in the absolute silence, they heard Mr. Kingsley skim the length of the opposite wall and step onto the stage, the edge of which they faintly discerned from bits of luminescent tape that hovered in a broken line like a thin constellation. Long after their eyes had adjusted, they saw nothing but this: a darkness like that of the womb or the grave. From the stage came his stern, quiet voice, voiding them of all previous time. Stripping them of all knowledge. They were blind newborn babes and must venture themselves through the darkness and see what they found.

Crawling, then, which would help prevent injury, and also keep them well off the stage where he sat listening. They listened keenly also, as, both inhibited by the darkness and disinhibited by it, by the concealment it gave, they ventured to venture. A spreading aural disturbance of shifting and rustling. The room was not large; immediately, bodies encountered each other and startled away. He heard this, or presumed it. "Is that some other creature with me, in the darkness?" he whispered, ventriloquizing their apprehension. "What does it have — what do I have? Four limbs that carry me forward, and back. Skin that can sense cold and hot. Rough and smooth. What is it. What am I. What are we."

In addition to crawling, then: touching. Not tolerated but encouraged. Maybe even required.

David was surprised to find how much he could identify by smell, a sense to which he never gave thought; now he found it assailed him with information. Like a bloodhound or Indian scout, he assessed and avoided. The five guys apart from him, starting with William, superficially his most obvious rival but no rival at all. William gave off a deodorant scent, manly and industrial, like an excess of laundry detergent. William was handsome, blond, slender, graceful, could dance, possessed some sort of race memory of the conventions of courteousness like how to put a girl's coat on, hand her out of a car, hold a door open for her, that William's rigid crazy mother could never have taught him as she was absent from his house for twenty hours at a stretch working two full-time jobs and in the time she was home, locked herself in her bedroom and refused to help her children, William and his two sisters, with meals or housekeeping let alone finer things like their homework; these were such things as one learned about one's fellow fourteen-year-old classmates, within just a few weeks, if a Theatre student at CAPA. William was the heartthrob of Christian Julietta, fat Pammie, Taniqua who could dance, and her adjuncts Chantal and Angie, who screamed with pleasure when William swung...