“I’m physical!” Meredith said. “I feel everything with my whole body and I’m not afraid to use it.”
“You’re not afraid to use it, but you’re afraid to say what you really mean!” Gwendolyn was nearly shouting. I glanced back and forth between them, alarmed at how quickly things had escalated. “You’re tiptoeing around it because we’re all sitting here staring at you,” Gwendolyn said. “Now, out with it. Out.”
Meredith’s easy elegance was gone, and instead she stood with her legs locked, arms held rigidly at her sides. “I have a great body,” she said. “Because I work fucking hard at it. I love looking this way and I love people looking at me. And that makes me magnetic.”
“You’re damn right, it does.” Gwendolyn leered at her like the Cheshire Cat. “You’re a beautiful girl. It sounds bitchy, but you know what? It’s true. More important than that, it’s honest.” She jabbed one finger at her. “That was honest. Good.”
Filippa and Alexander both fidgeted, avoiding Meredith’s eyes. Richard was looking at her like he wanted to rip her clothes off on the spot, and I had no idea where to look. She nodded and made to sit back down, but Gwendolyn said, “You’re not done.” Meredith froze. “We’ve established your strengths. Now I want to hear about your weaknesses. What are you most afraid of?”
Meredith stood glowering at Gwendolyn, who, to my surprise, didn’t interrupt the silence. The rest of us squirmed on the floor, eyes flicking up at Meredith with a mixture of sympathy, admiration, and embarrassment.
“Everyone has a weakness, Meredith,” Gwendolyn said. “Even you. The strongest thing you can do is admit it. We’re waiting.”
In the excruciating pause that followed, Meredith stood impossibly still, eyes burning acid green. She was so exposed that staring at her seemed invasive, voyeuristic, and I grappled with the impulse to yell at her to just fucking say something.
“I’m afraid,” she said, after what felt like a year, speaking very slowly, “that I’m prettier than I am talented or intelligent, and that because of that no one will ever take me seriously. As a performer or a person.”
Dead silence again. I forced my eyes down, glanced around at the others. Wren sat with one hand over her mouth. Richard’s expression was softer than I had ever seen it. Filippa looked slightly nauseous; Alexander was fighting back a nervous grin. On my right, James peered up at Meredith with keen, evaluative interest, as if she were a statue, a sculpture, something shaped a thousand years ago in the likeness of a pagan deity. Her unmasking was harsh, mesmeric, somehow dignified.
In a weird, bewildered way, I understood that this was exactly what Gwendolyn wanted.
She held Meredith’s gaze so long it seemed like time had stopped. Then she exhaled enormously and said, “Good. Sit. There.”
Meredith’s knees bent mechanically, and she sat in the center of the circle, spine straight and stiff as a fence post.
“All right,” Gwendolyn said. “Let’s talk.”
SCENE 6
After an hour of interrogating Meredith about her insecurities (of which there were more than I ever would have guessed), Gwendolyn dismissed us, with the promise that everyone else would be subjected to the same rigorous questioning over the next two weeks.
On our way up the stairs to the third floor, second-year art students bustling around us on their way down to the conservatory, James fell in step beside me.
“That was ruthless,” I said, sotto voce. Meredith walked a few steps ahead of us, Richard’s arm around her shoulders, though she didn’t seem to have noticed it. She moved determinedly forward, avoiding direct eye contact with anyone.
“Again,” James whispered, “that’s Gwendolyn.”
“I never thought I’d say this, but I’m looking forward to being shut in the gallery for two hours straight.”
While Gwendolyn taught the more visceral elements of acting—voice and body, heart over head—Frederick taught the intimate particulars of Shakespeare’s text, everything from meter to early modern history. Bookish and diffident as I was, I much preferred Frederick’s classes to Gwendolyn’s, but I was allergic to the chalk he used on his blackboard and spent most of my time in the gallery sneezing.
“Let’s go,” James said, quietly, “before Meredick steals our table.” (Filippa had coined that particular term at the end of our second year, when the two of them were newly in love and at their most obnoxious.) Meredith’s expression was still distracted as we edged past them on the stairs. Whatever Richard had said to soothe her, it wasn’t working.
Frederick preferred to conduct fourth-year classes in the gallery, rather than the classroom he was forced to use for the more numerous second-and third-years. It was a narrow, high-ceilinged room that had once stretched the entire length of the third floor but was unceremoniously divided into smaller rooms and studios when the school opened. The Long Gallery became the Short Gallery, barely twenty feet from end to end, walled on two sides with bookshelves and dotted with portraits of long-dead Dellecher cousins and offspring. A love seat and a low-slung sofa faced each other under the elaborate plasterwork ceiling, while a small round table and two chairs basked in the light of the diamond-paned window on the south side of the room. Whenever we had tea with Frederick (which we did twice a month as third-years and daily during class as fourth-years), James and I made a beeline for the table. It was farthest from the nefarious chalk dust and offered a sparkling view of the lake and surrounding woods, the conical Tower roof perched on top of the trees like a black party hat.
Frederick was already there when we arrived, wheeling the chalkboard out from an odd little spear closet wedged between a bookshelf and the noseless bust of Homer at the end of the room. I sneezed as James said, “Good morning, Frederick.”