Audition

by Katie Kitamura

What is it? he asked Xavier, and I could already hear the curiosity beneath the thin layer of trepidation. The curiosity instantly deepened, perhaps was tempered with relief, when Xavier replied, A play.

I had been wrong about one thing at least, all that time it had not been Hana who had been working, but Xavier.

Tomas cleared his throat and said, So you finished it.

What kind of play? I asked at last and Xavier looked at me.

He replied, A monologue. And the next question rushed out of me before I could stop it. What kind of part? He nodded as if he had expected the question, and I knew he had heard the greed in my voice, just as I myself had heard it. A woman of your age and general disposition, he said. A woman who can no longer distinguish between what is real and what is not real.

I felt the renewed force of his ego as it pushed its way forward, he had changed past the point of recognition. He had become himself. I gave a short laugh. Isn’t that a little on the nose? I said, and got to my feet. What should I do with this?

He wants you to read it, I said sharply from the doorway. He wants to know what you think. But Tomas shook his head, and then he said to Xavier in a perfectly reasonable voice, in a gentle voice, Who would you like to read it first? I imagine it is not me.

Then he offered them to me, fingers already slackening. I imagine this is for you.

I looked at Xavier, at his face trying to conceal its hope, I looked at Tomas’s hand extended toward me, and I came back into the room.

In the space between them, a performance becomes possible. You observe yourself, you watch yourself act, you hear yourself speak, a line that is articulated and then articulated again, and the meaning that is produced is at once entirely real—as it is experienced on stage, as it is experienced by the audience—and also the predictable result of your craft, the choices you have made, the control that cedes freedom.

I stand on the stage. I look out into the audience, which is full, the kind of house that Xavier must have dreamed of, possibly from the very start. Xavier, whose ambition has the depth and power of my own.

Always to be seen, in those days it was almost an end in itself, because it was in being seen that I could say for certain that I existed, that my limbs were real as I touched them, that my being was intact as it peered out into the world. A stay against the turbulence within me—that was, perhaps, the purpose of all this.

But such things do not last, not in the way that he thinks. The recognition comes and goes, too many parts—those onstage and in life—don’t endure, and once they are gone, their logic is impossible to regain. Mostly, there is only the emptiness they leave behind.