The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton

liver-spotted hands, but in his mind he imagined them
     to be cold and moist and snatching.
    They all waited for the Head of Acting to say more, but he just drew his heels together and spread his arm to gesture them
     off the stage, signaling that the tour had come to a close.
    The first-years filed quietly past him and he watched them go, down the wheeled aluminum steps into the stalls, up the aisle
     past the rows and rows, and finally out into the marble light of the foyer. When they were gone he moved to the stage manager’s
     cubicle to kill the lights. He stood with his hand on the cool gray lever, and out of habit cleared his throat and called
     out a warning up into the flies: “Going dark.”
November
    Stanley walked out of his final audition feeling light-headed. He paused at the fountain in the foyer to steady himself and
     gripped the basin with both hands. He breathed quietly for a moment, looking past the porcelain masks into the foggy middle-distance
     of a recent memory, and after a moment he realized he was being observed. He straightened and gave the spectator a rueful
     sort of smile. She was an older woman, maybe the secretary, framed like a news-anchor behind the high administration desk
     in the foyer and watching him with her cheek propped upon her palm.
    “You’ll be wishing you brought a hip flask,” she said. “Just had your audition, I guess.”
    “Does everybody look like this?” Stanley said, emphasizing his already crippled posture with a little jerk of his spine and
     holding his hands limp. The woman laughed.
    “More or less,” she said. “You have to watch the ones who look too happy. In my experience the ones who look too confident
     afterwards are the ones who don’t usually get in.”
    “Oh,” Stanley said, drawing himself up slightly.
    “I suppose it’s your first time auditioning,” the woman said. “Some kids try out three, four, five times. It makes you think
     what they’re doing with their lives in the meantime, just waiting all those years to finally get in.”
    “Yeah,” said Stanley. “Yeah, wow. It is my first time.”
    “They didn’t shake you up too much?” the woman said. “They can be quite mean, in the beginning. To break you in.”
    She seemed bored, sitting there with her head on her hand in the echoing cavern of the foyer. All the surfaces were bare and
     clean, and the car park was empty through the high wall of glass.
    “Nothing too painful,” Stanley said. “Nothing I didn’t deserve, probably.”
    The woman laughed. Stanley watched her laugh. It struck him for the very first time that there were qualities of beauty that
     were unique to women, qualities that teenage girls could not possess: kindness lines around the eyes and mouth, a certain
     settling of the body, a weariness of poise and pose that was indefinably sexual, like the old glamour of a dusty taffeta dress
     or a piece of costume jewelery with a rusted clasp. The thought had not occurred to him before. He had supposed (though never
     truly consciously) that a woman was only attractive insofar as she resembled a girl; that her attractiveness fell away, by
     degrees, through her twenties and thirties until it was buried by middle age; that the qualities that women sought were always
     the qualities they once had, a backward striving that was ultimately doomed to fail. He had supposed that men slept with women
     their own age only because they could not snare anybody younger, or because they were still married to the sweetheart of their
     youth; he had not supposed that weary, veined and pear-shaped women were attractive in and for themselves—they were a second-best,
     he had imagined, a consolation prize. Now, with a weak stirring in the nerve-wracked cavity of his chest, he saw this woman
     through a different lens.
    She was wearing makeup, a thin line of black behind the lashes of her upper eyelid that must have been straight and uniform
     when she stretched her eyelid out