Trust Exercise

by Susan Choi

The intuitive parts of themselves are always highly aggravated when they are together. Intuition only tells them what they want, not how to achieve it, and this is intolerable.

To David, love meant declaration. Wasn’t that the whole point? To Sarah, love meant a shared secret. Wasn’t that the whole point?

Having bought back a friendship she no longer wanted by defiling the one thing she cared about most, Sarah knows it doesn’t matter that she enjoins Joelle to a “secrecy” that puts Joelle into raptures.

“You were supposed to stay with her in that moment, with tenacity and honesty. And that’s what you did.” “I wasn’t honest. I lied!” “And you’re aware of the lie, and aware of the reason you told it. You were there in that circumstance, Sarah.

“I feel like, in telling her we’re still friends, I’ve put myself in a trap.” “You’ll find your way out.” “How?” “I said you’ll find your way out.”

Mr. Kingsley seemed to grow more contented and patient the more that she cried. He sat smiling benignly. Under the narcotic of his patience she felt tempted to share the real reason she was crying, but thinking of it she cried too hard to speak, and then she’d been crying and thinking so long, she felt she’d actually talked about David, perhaps even been told what to do, and a strange peace overtook her that might have just been exhaustion. Mr. Kingsley still smiled benignly. He seemed more and more satisfied. “Tell me about life outside school,” he said when her guttering breaths had grown calm.

SO MUCH OF what they do, with Mr. Kingsley, is restraint in the name of release.

Access to one’s own emotions = presence in the moment. Acting = responding with authentic emotion under made-up circumstances.

Her mind startles her with the wish to be dead. To be dead, instead of in pain. Suicide, she realizes, isn’t opting out of the future, it’s opting out of the present, for who can see more of the future than that? Reference to the future, to its unbroken promise, is the reflex of those for whom the future’s mirage still exists. Such people are lucky, deceived.

Jennifer the failed suicide, Greg the orphan by force, impoverished Manuel, and her, Sarah—they’ve all been robbed of heedless childhood and that’s why they’ve been chosen, their precocious adulthood acknowledged. All kids want such glamorous knowledge. The darkness of it. The hardness of it. The realness of it. The cold fact that life really is fucked.

Acting is: fidelity to authentic emotion, under imagined circumstances. Fidelity to authentic emotion is: standing up for your feelings. Is this not the one thing, the one thing, he has tried to teach them?

David’s knees, touching hers through their two pairs of jeans, do not feel like parts of a person. All four of their knees bump and flinch, blind bewildered convexities.

“I mean neutral. Receptive. A neutral gaze, without anxiety or accusation or expectation. Neutrality is the self that we offer the other, alert and open, unencumbered. No baggage. This is how we come to the stage.”

David lurches from his chair, knocks over several more as he less walks than falls out of the room.

Every morning she X’s a calendar in her mind’s eye: one day closer to feeling less pain.

Sarah’s continuation as a student at CAPA is largely a condition of her mother’s being able to forget that the school exists.

David had failed at acting at Northwestern and he’d switched to playwriting and failed at that because he never finished the plays he started and he’d switched to directing and turned out to be very good at it.

David was obsessed with the past, and not just certain parts of it. All of us, I think it’s fair to say, fixate on things from our past, maybe wanting them back the way they were, maybe wanting to go back and change them. Either way, this fixation on parts of the past seems pretty common. David took the tendency to an extreme. The whole of his past obsessed him. The past was like the country he was exiled from, and any vestige of it, even me, was fascinating to him. David seemed to have decided, very early in life, that the best of his life was already behind him, and all his present achievements with his theatre company interested him only because they gave him a connection to his past.

More than a decade of dedicated self-abuse had ruined his looks and when he was tired or drunk, his face looked like a ball of molding clay that had been thrown against a wall. Yet his charisma, which you could no longer confuse with his looks, was more noticeable. It almost seemed independent of him. The physical David would sit slumped at the bar staring into his glass while his charisma stalked the room, pushing some people away, pulling some people close.

Drunk as he is—or maybe because he’s so drunk—he does a very good nun. A face hung on a hook and dragged low by a weight—the weight of wickedness that’s too regrettable to even discuss.

restraining force.”

David, I believe, suffered from low self-esteem yet never had any difficulty believing in the singular importance of his work. This is a distinguishing trait of members of the Elite Brotherhood of the Arts.

actors, poorly educated egomaniacs though they may be, understand about power.

allow me to break in again and observe that in my experience people who drink never don’t when they find themselves with a nondrinker. In fact, they drink more. Nondrinkers make drinkers uncomfortable. The situation they’re afraid of—getting drunk in the presence of someone who’s sober—is exactly the one they create.

Karen and Kevin, before and after their parents’ divorce, always had their own rooms: enormous rooms with low, stained ceilings, dirty matted shag carpet, accordion-style closet doors that had come off their tracks, sliding windows in aluminum frames that stuck and shrieked and developed a weird, whitish rust, like salt deposits, that came off on your hands. One room like that was bad enough, but two was killing. All through their childhood Karen and Kevin had continually migrated into one room or the other, they resisted each having a room of their own, they understood in their bodies, if not in their minds, that two bodies in one room defeats the room, but one body in one room is defeated. And so each kept sneaking into the other one’s room—sneaking, because throughout their childhood there was always someone holding the opinion that they shouldn’t share a room, whether stating it directly or not.

As I got older, though, my mother stopped parading my memory. She stopped bragging about it or hitting her enemies with it. Instead, she started running it down. My memory had been the ultimate proof of any points that she wanted to make, but it strangely disproved any points of my own. I might remember some incident, sure, but I did not understand it. Anybody whose brain was so cluttered with dull trivia like the approximate number of ounces of toothpaste left in the tube didn’t actually know what things meant. My mother first exploited my memory, and then insulted it, but the conclusion I reached didn’t change. My memory was my innermost self and I had to protect it.

The result of her forgetfulness—or the reason for it?—might be her “imaginative gift” for rewriting the past, but did this mean she was more, or less, likely to perceive someone else’s emotional truth? If she forgot my emotional truth—assuming she’d ever known it in the first place—was she now all the more on the lookout for it? Or would she just lend me hers, like my mother would do, and ignore a bad fit?

as Sarah embarked on her fourth daiquiri, Karen realized that something had changed. It wasn’t just Sarah’s blood alcohol level. Sarah, who had been so obviously shocked and terrified in the bookstore when Karen appeared—who had been, at that moment, and whether accidentally or not, perfectly in touch with the emotional truth of the situation, which was that Karen despised her—had now nestled into a new, fraudulent understanding, of Karen’s creation, with all the unquestioning trust of a baby. That new, fraudulent understanding was that Karen and Sarah had never ruptured. They had always been friends. They had never stopped loving each other, simply drifted apart. And Karen realized that she, Karen, had known all along that Sarah, for all her charisma and beauty and knowingness, which is different from knowing, was fundamentally forgetful, insecure, untrusting of her instincts, and anxious for praise and acceptance.

Nostalgia is a “sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past.” It comes from the Greek nostos: to return home, and the Greek algos: pain.

David at thirty could have been mistaken for a man nearing fifty. David was bald, his brow and jowls and shoulders drooped as if they were subjected to enhanced gravity, he couldn’t clear his face of stubble fast enough, he’d gotten thicker all over and had the pallor of a chain-smoking drinker whose only time outdoors is the time he spends getting into and out of his car.

We never know, when life reunites us with someone, how closely our stories will match.

This was David’s typically self-centered and not totally wrong point of view, that the moment was all about him.

“Don’t you want to know how you come off in it? Don’t you want to see how she depicts you?” Karen asked. “It’s not me. It’s fiction.” “My turn to call bullshit. That whole thing about fiction not being the truth is a lie.” “So I’m guessing you read it.” It made no difference to this conversation that Karen had read only half. The point was that disciplined Karen had failed to resist, while impulsive David had succeeded.

Possibly first love, despite all the fuss, is only mating with ideas attached.

All these weeks of rehearsal she had willfully ignored the fact that Martin was the author of the play but now the play spoke to her in his voice and she understood something about him. Why, asked the actors onstage, had their friend killed himself? And why not? asked the others who argued with them. It was his Self to keep or destroy. Why should customs or, God forbid, laws interfere with the ways we dispose of our Selves? Because we’re none of us alone in this world. We injure each other. Why should another be injured by choices I make for my Self? You’re choosing for another when you make choices. We overlap. We get tangled. You can’t help but hurt.