“Are you truthful?” my acting teacher asked on the day he became upset with me.  His yelling fits are a ritual for us, occurring at least once every time I study with him; I tell myself that he hates me so much, he loves me.  As though I were a daughter, one he feared was lost, and whose loss frightened him.

“No,” I said.  “I am profoundly untruthful and corrupt.” 

 

I spoke these words.  I was not lashed for them; my teacher genuinely did not expect them.  The question is meant to be something close to rhetorical.  I was working on a scene with the boy.

 

We had a discussion later about what such a question means--”Are you truthful?”  To me it means nothing, and less, worse than nothing; it is part of the formless, pointless palaver that has infected the arts throughout the Western world.  The boy, of course, could not understand my reaction.  He is yet too young and of too golden a life to understand that from words seep real malaise, deep wrong.

***

Despite my trepidation, my travel to New York City went flawlessly, and consequently I spent far more time at the airport in my city than was necessary.  But I treasured that; I recorded everything clearly in my mind, the trivial things like sitting on the floor of the lounge to plug in my mini laptop and write or listening to music on the little CRJ that flies between my home and the Big Apple, if anyone still refers to it that way.  The first night, a Saturday, I was there without the boy, and had the company of the woman who rents out the flat where I stay (she has become a friend over the past few years) and a friend of hers, both of whom are delightful.  I took them to dinner, at which they were unreasonably flattered, and we spoke of our complicated love lives.  Both women are nearly twenty years older than I; we went to a wonderful neighbourhood restaurant and ate and drank with abandon, eventually joined by another friend of theirs, a Belgian woman, who joined us for wine.  Near the end of the meal a striking African-American woman, wearing sunglasses indoors, sat down at the nearby piano and played jazz tunes like there was no-one else in the world.  She was accompanied by a man on a stand-up bass.  The place was full and warmly-lit and humming, and I was reminded, not for the first time, that that storied city is filled with good people, many of whom have looked kindly on me in various situations.  I marked that, too.  I am not the sort of person who can afford to dismiss others’ kindness even in theory.

I must return this summer for a weekend, on my own, and spend it with these women.  I do not want the city only to bear the weight of my time with the boy.  Haunted things are fed like other things.  We can turn them to ashes before they take deep root, if we want to.

***

My biggest obstacle, in the opinion of my teacher--and some directors with whom I have worked--is my tendency to intellectualise everything.  I am smart.  I, in my teacher's words, resist.

 

"You could exhaust anyone," he roars, "and you know it!"

 

People cry in these workshops with extravagant abandon.  I do not.  Any tears that escape are quiet.  They earn their emergence.  They are truthful.

 

***

Once again there was no sound of the buzzer.  Someone in the small building had seen him at the door--was it the same person who opened it to him two years ago?--and let him in, seeing him with his suitcases.  

Shave-and-a-haircut, two bits.

He had sent me a text message while still in his own country in response to one I had sent to let him know I had arrived and all was well.  He sent another just as he was about to catch his transport to Manhattan from JFK.  I had peered out the window to the street a thousand times, awaiting him, as eagerly and pointlessly as a child awaiting the return of a travelling parent or a young girl looking for her date.  In the end the knock came when I did not expect it.

I opened the door and there was the smile, the timeless face.  Those pelagic eyes.  Six months.

He has changed much in the two-and-a-half years that I have known him.  He had the appearance of a boy when I met him; now I see a man.  The actor in him knows the value of his physical beauty and its cultivation, and I have seen him grow in awareness of this and watched in fascination as he wields this power and sees how it affects others.  I watch him watching himself watching others.  He is big and powerful now, more than ever like a classical sculpture in his body, and almost alienatingly beautiful, like no living thing I have touched.  Playfulness, to which he declared his allegiance last summer, is now foremost in him.  He is full of tricks and jokes and impressions.  I laugh and scold, taking my cues like the actor I also am.  Untruthful, corrupt.

 

***

Our first night together, I awoke to find both of us lying on our backs, our hands linked between us in our sleep, like effigies on a tomb.