Patsy shakes her head again, as if she can’t believe her own folly, and reaches the heels of her hands up to her temples to smooth the hair away from her aging face. Her wrists are delicate. The saxophone teacher follows the movement with her eyes.
Wednesday
“I heard she’s on Prozac,” everyone is saying by the second week, or, “I heard they had to put her on Ritalin after she was found out, she was that out of control.” Victoria is now marked, doomed to accept one of the polar fates that diverge before her. “Either she’ll end up being totally promiscuous for the rest of her life, and her body will become this weapon she depends on but she’s not really sure how to wield,” the girls whisper, “or she’ll end up this emotional shell, hollowed out and listless and blank. It’s one or the other. You’ll see. She’s screwed up now. It’s one or the other.” They watch her greedily to see which road she will take, craning forward when she comes into a room, and deflating with disappointment and relief when she leaves again.
Victoria shows no signs of taking either path. She is downcast and polite with all her teachers, and in the schoolyard she tries with limited success to patch up the friendships that have been so damaged by her betrayal. The girls look askance at her, especially the ones who were once Victoria’s closest, with whom she should have shared her secret but did not. She asks polite things about the months she has missed, and the girls respond truthfully, but all the while looking at Victoria as if from a long way away, caught between pity and disgust.
“Did your parents ever meet Mr. Saladin?” one of the girls asks one lunchtime. “I mean after you left school. Was there like a meeting or something?”
“Yeah,” Victoria says. “All four of us together.”
There is a sudden fascinated hush. All the girls pause and look at her.
“He’s still way younger than my dad,” Victoria says, “so it was still kind of us against them.” She doesn’t say anything more. She finishes her apple and wanders off across the quad to drop the core in the rubbish bin. When she comes back the bell has rung and the girls are dispersing, looking longingly up at her as they fish for their bags and stow their lunch wrappers away.
“You realize the only way you can make up for this betrayal,” the girls want to say, “is by telling us everything, sparing no detail.”
“You would be a celebrity among us,” the girls want to say, “if you only gave us everything, told us everything, let us in.”
The girls want to say, “It’s unfair that you should have this advantage over us. You are selfish to keep such valuable and dangerous knowledge for yourself.”
The weeks go by.
Monday
“I enjoyed your performance last week,” the saxophone teacher says when Julia arrives. “Your performance of the ride home after the concert, both of you in the car together. What you were feeling. What you saw. I enjoyed it.”
“Thanks,” Julia says.
“Did you practice?” the saxophone teacher says eagerly. “Like I asked?”
“Some,” Julia says.
“What have you been focusing on?”
“I guess big-picture,” Julia says. “How one girl comes to seduce another.”
“Let’s start big-picture then,” the saxophone teacher says, and gestures with her palm for Julia to begin.
“I’ve been looking at all the ordinary staples of flirting,” Julia says, “like biting your lip and looking away just a second too late, and laughing a lot and finding every excuse to touch, light fingertips on a forearm or a thigh that emphasize and punctuate the laughter. I’ve been thinking about what a comfort these things are, these textbook methods, precisely because they need no decoding, no translation. Once, a long time ago, you could probably bite your lip and it would mean, I am almost overcome with desiring you. Now you bite your lip and it means, I want you to see that I am almost overcome with desiring you, so I am using the plainest and most universally accepted signal I can think of to make you see. Now it means, Both of us know the implications of my biting my lip and what I am trying to say. We are speaking a language, you and I together, a language that we did not invent, a language that is not unique to our uttering. We are speaking someone else’s lines. It’s a comfort.”
Julia’s saxophone is lying sideways across the lap of the cream armchair, the mouthpiece resting lightly on the arm, and the curve of the bell tucked in against the seam where the seat-cushion meets the steep upholstered curve of the flank. The posture of the instrument makes the saxophone teacher think of a girl curled up with her knees to her chest and her head upon the arm, watching television alone in the dark.
“I don’t know how to seduce her,” Julia says. Her eyes are on the saxophone too, traveling up and down its length. “Sometimes I think that it would be like trying to bewitch her with a spell of her own invention if I tried to smile at her and bite my lip and cast my eyes down, if I tried to look vulnerable and coy. Would it even work? Even the thought makes me feel disarmed and sweaty and undone. But what’s the alternative? Should I behave like a boy, play the part of a boy, do things she might want a boy to do?
“Is that how it works?” Julia says, rhetorical and musing now. She is still looking at the saxophone, lying on its side upon the chair. “Like a big game of let’s-pretend? Like a play-act? It feels like there’s this duologue about a girl and a boy who fall in love with each other. And maybe the actors are both girls but there’s only these two parts in this play, only two, so one of them has to dress up: one of them has to be mustached and breast-strapped and wide-legged and broad to play the boy.
“If you’re just looking at the costumes and the script and the curtains and the lights, all the machinery of it, then you’ll just see a boy and a girl having a love affair. But if you look at the actors underneath, if you choose not to be deceived by the spectacle of the thing, then you’ll see that it’s actually two girls. Maybe that’s what it has to be like whenever two girls get together: one of the girls always plays the part of the boy, but it’s both of them that are pretending.”
“Oh, but why can’t the two girls just perform a duologue about themselves?” the saxophone teacher says, enjoying herself. “A play written for two girls.”
“There aren’t any,” Julia says. “There aren’t any plays about two girls. There aren’t any roles like that. That’s why you have to pretend.”
“Surely you’re mistaken, Julia,” the saxophone teacher says. “Surely that isn’t right.”
Julia shrugs and looks away into the sheen of the piano and her own blurry image reflected back. She says, “There is one thing going for me, despite all this. Danger. There’s a seduction in that. That’s the card I’ll have to play, I suppose. I’ll have to amplify how forbidden it is, how unscripted and unprecedented, the danger of it.
“The element of danger is what will turn any happy-flutter in her chest into a powerful and thudding fear. That’s what I have going for me: the force of her feeling, the massive release of her trepidation, when at last she surrenders and responds. If she surrenders. Whatever she ends up feeling, at least it won’t be ambivalent. It will be either the terror-struck forbidden heave of her desire, massive and explosive like the breaking of a dam, or it will be the massive repelling force of her revulsion, her opposition, her denying me. Either way, I’ve made her feel something. She’ll have to feel something. Whatever happens next.”
Friday
The girls at Abbey Grange are forever defining each other, tenderly and savagely and sometimes out of spite. It is a skill that will be sharpened to a blade by the finish of their fifth and final year. It is the darkest and deadliest of their arts, that each girl might construct or destroy the image of any of the rest.