Audition

by Katie Kitamura

Like all women, I had once been expert at negotiating the balance between the demands of courtesy and the demands of expectation. Expectation, which I knew to be a debt that would at some point have to be paid, in one form or another.

I remembered what it was like to be so young, and to be seen always in relation to the fulfillment of an older person’s desires.

had entered the stage of life where there is a certain amount of immutability, in middle age, change is experienced primarily as a kind of attrition.

Its source was an imbalance of want. Two people who want the same thing will never generate the same intensity as two people who want different things, or one person who wants into an absence, a void—as was in fact the case with Xavier, who wanted something from me that I could not give.

There are always two stories taking place at once, the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it, and the boundary between the two is more porous than you might think, that is both the danger and the excitement of the performance.

Like an actor moving on in the wake of a disastrous audition, shedding the skin of a role for which he had not been destined, and seeking out the next opportunity.

People always talked about having children as an event, as a thing that took place, they forgot that not having children was also something that took place, that is to say it wasn’t a question of absence, a question of lack, it had its own presence in the world, it was its own event.

You can be entranced by an idea, I said, and at a certain point you can no longer see the edges of it.

I thought that it was true that a performance existed in the space between the work and the audience, that it existed, and was made, in that space of interpretation.

Because in fact we don’t want to see the thing itself, on a screen or on a stage, we don’t want to see actual pain or suffering or death, but its representation. Our awareness of the performance is what allows us to enjoy the emotion, to creep close to it and breathe in its atmosphere, performance allows this dangerous proximity.

Anne on the one hand, and me on the other, Xavier’s mother.