The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton Page B

us both a Coke, still all dewy and frosted from
     the fridge behind the bar, and he opened mine up for me with this quiet little flush of pride, like he was some black-and-white
     hero lighting my cigarette and fixing my drink just the way I like it. We talked for a while about leaving school and going
     to university and he told me he wanted to be an actor, and we watched the noose for a while.”
    “I didn’t like you,” Stanley said. “I didn’t like you for detaining me at this never-ending stage of nervous silence and nothing-talkand worry. I didn’t want what you were offering. I stayed because I was angry and I wanted to show you that I thought that
     you were boring. I wanted to make you
feel
boring.”
    The Head of Acting was watching them impassively. Stanley could see him out of the corner of his eye, holding his head very
     still.
    “I’d already decided,” the girl said. “He wouldn’t have known that. As soon as I saw him I decided the way it was going to
     be. He never had a chance.”
November
    “Why do you want to be an actor, my boy?” Stanley’s father asked. The capillaries were standing out in his cheeks in bold
     little threads. Stanley could tell he was drunk only by the way he ducked his head slightly every time he blinked.
    “They asked me that in my audition,” he said. He watched his father refill his wineglass, and suddenly didn’t feel like being
     honest. “I just want to have fun with it, I guess.”
    “Not in it for fame and fortune?”
    “Oh,” Stanley said, watching as his father reached across the table and emptied the bottle into his own glass. “No. It’s more
     of a… no. I just want to have fun.”
    “Good man,” said Stanley’s father. “I’ve got a joke you might like.”
    “Yeah?” Stanley said. This was his least favorite part of the evening. He tried to read his father’s wristwatch from across
     the table. They had already ordered dessert, tiny splashes of cream and color on vast white plates, and soon his father would
     be hailing a pair of taxis and slipping fifty dollars into his breast pocket and clapping him on the shoulder and walking
     away. Outside the street was slick and oily with rain.
    “What’s the most common cause of pedophilia in this country?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Sexy kids.”
    “That’s funny.”
    “It’s good, eh?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I got it off a client. Have I told you about him? The one with the angel voices. You’ll love this, Stanley. This guy is honestly
     something else.”
    Stanley sometimes tried to imagine what it would be like to live in the same house as his father, to see him every day, to
     walk past him dozing on the couch or brushing his teeth or squinting into the fridge. Their yearly outing was always at a
     different restaurant, and Stanley could catalog his relationship with his father in a string of names: The Empire Room, The
     Setting Sun, Federico’s, La Vista. Sometimes his father rang him on the telephone, but the two-second delay of the international
     line made him sound distant and distracted and Stanley always worried he was talking too little or too much.
    “You were an accident,” was how his father explained it many restaurants ago. “Our relationship was casual, respectful, and
     very brief. She found out she was pregnant and decided to keep you, even though my practice was moving to England and it was
     likely I’d never come back. I said I would keep in touch and help out wherever I could. And I saved your life—she was going
     to call you Gerald. I stepped in.”
    “Thanks,” Stanley said.
    “No problem,” said his father, waving a piece of squid. “But believe me, sperm is a serious business.”
    Stanley looked at him now, drunk and flamboyant and mischievous and laughing at his own story. He was a little afraid of his
     father. He was afraid of the way the man delivered his opinion, afraid of the crafty watchful antagonism that left Stanley
     uncertain whether he was