The winners of the
National Book awards for 2019 were announced on November 20 at ceremony in New
York City at Cipriani Wall Street restaurant.
Today’s post offers an excerpt of winning fiction Trust Exercise by Susan Choi.
In
an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive
performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble,
ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their
acting classes. When within this striving “Brotherhood of the Arts,” two
freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go
unnoticed—or untoyed with—by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting
teacher, Mr. Kingsley.
The
outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of
their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school’s walls—until it does,
in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and
flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to
David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true—though it’s not false,
either. It takes until the book’s stunning coda for the final piece of the
puzzle to fall into place—revealing truths that will resonate long after the final
sentence.
As
captivating and tender as it is surprising, Susan Choi's Trust Exercise will
incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and
loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true
capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.
The Critics:
“Electrifying”
(People) • “Masterly” (The Guardian) • “Dramatic and memorable” (The New
Yorker) • “Magic” (TIME) • “Ingenious” (The Financial Times) • "A gonzo
literary performance” (Entertainment Weekly) • “Rare and splendid” (The Boston
Globe) • “Remarkable” (USA Today) • “Delicious” (The New York Times) • “Book
groups, meet your next selection" (NPR)
Chapter One Excerpt:
Trust Exercise
Neither
can drive. David turns sixteen the following March, Sarah the following April.
It is early July, neither one within sight of sixteen and the keys to a car.
Eight weeks remain of the summer, a span that seems endless, but with the
intuitive parts of themselves they also sense it is not a long time and will go
very quickly. 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.
Their
romance has started in earnest this summer, but the prologue took up the whole
previous year. All fall and spring of the previous year they lived with
exclusive reference to each other, and were viewed as an unspoken duo by
everyone else. Little remarked, universally felt, this taut, even dangerous
energy running between them. When that began, it was harder to say. They were
both experienced — neither was a virgin — and this might have both sped and
slowed what took place. That first year, in the fall, each had started at
school with a boy- or girlfriend who was going to some other, more regular
place. Their own school was special, intended to cream off the most talented at
selected pursuits from the regular places all over the city and even beyond, to
the outlying desolate towns. It had been a daring experiment ten years before
and was now an elite institution, recently moved to an expensive new building
full of "world class," "professional" facilities. The
school was meant to set apart, to break bonds that were better off broken,
confined to childhood. Sarah and David accepted this as the sort of poignant
rite their exceptional lives would require. Lavished, perhaps, extra tenderness
on the vestigial boyfriend and girlfriend in the process of casting them off.
The school was named the Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts, but they and
all the students and their teachers called it, rather pompously, CAPA.
At
CAPA, the first-year Theatre Arts students studied Stagecraft, Shakespeare, the
Sight-Reading of music, and, in their acting class, Trust Exercises, all terms
they were taught should be capitalized as befitted their connection to Art. Of
the Trust Exercises there were seemingly infinite variations. Some involved
talking and resembled group therapy. Some required silence, blindfolds, falling
backward off tables or ladders and into the latticework of classmates' arms.
Almost daily they lay on their backs on the cold tile floor in what Sarah, much
later in life, would be taught was called corpse pose in yoga. Mr. Kingsley,
their teacher, would pad like a cat among them in his narrow-toed soft leather
slippers, intoning a mantra of muscle awareness. Let your awareness pour into
your shins, filling them slowly, from ankle to knee. Allow them to grow liquid
and heavy. Even as you can feel every cell, cradle it with your sharpened
awareness, you are letting it go. Let it go. Let it go. Sarah had won admission
to the school with a monologue from the Carson McCullers play The Member of the
Wedding. David, who had attended a theatre camp, had done Willy Loman from
Death of a Salesman. Their first day, Mr. Kingsley slid into the room like a
knife — he had a noiseless and ambushing style of movement — and once they'd
fallen silent, which was almost immediately, had cast a look on them that Sarah
still saw in the back of her mind. It seemed to mix scorn with a challenge. You
look pretty nothing to me, the look flashed onto them like a spray of ice
water. And then, like a tease, it amended: ... or maybe I'm wrong? THEATRE, Mr.
Kingsley had written in tall slashing letters of chalk on the board.
"That's the way it is spelled," he had said. "If you ever spell
this with 'ER' at the end you will fail the assignment." These words were
the actual first he had spoken to them, not the scornful "you look pretty
nothing to me" Sarah had imagined.
Sarah
wore a signature pair of blue jeans. Though she had bought them at a mall she
would never see anyone else wearing them: they were specific to her, very snug,
with elaborate stitching. The stitching went in whorls and patterns spreading
over the ass, down the fronts and the backs of the thighs. No one else even had
textured jeans; all the girls wore five-pocket Levi's or leggings, the boys the
same five-pocket Levi's or, for a brief time, Michael-Jackson-style parachute
pants. In Trust Exercises one day, perhaps late in the fall — David and Sarah
were never quite sure; they would not speak of it until summer — Mr. Kingsley
turned off all the lights in the windowless rehearsal room, plunged them into a
locked lightless vault. At one end of the rectangular room was a raised
platform stage, thirty inches or so off the floor. Once the lights were turned
off, in the absolute silence, they heard Mr. Kingsley skim the length of the
opposite wall and step onto the stage, the edge of which they faintly discerned
from bits of luminescent tape that hovered in a broken line like a thin
constellation. Long after their eyes had adjusted, they saw nothing but this: a
darkness like that of the womb or the grave. From the stage came his stern,
quiet voice, voiding them of all previous time. Stripping them of all
knowledge. They were blind newborn babes and must venture themselves through
the darkness and see what they found.
Crawling,
then, which would help prevent injury, and also keep them well off the stage
where he sat listening. They listened keenly also, as, both inhibited by the
darkness and disinhibited by it, by the concealment it gave, they ventured to
venture. A spreading aural disturbance of shifting and rustling. The room was not
large; immediately, bodies encountered each other and startled away. He heard
this, or presumed it. "Is that some other creature with me, in the
darkness?" he whispered, ventriloquizing their apprehension. "What
does it have — what do I have? Four limbs that carry me forward, and back. Skin
that can sense cold and hot. Rough and smooth. What is it. What am I. What are
we."
In
addition to crawling, then: touching. Not tolerated but encouraged. Maybe even
required.
David
was surprised to find how much he could identify by smell, a sense to which he
never gave thought; now he found it assailed him with information. Like a
bloodhound or Indian scout, he assessed and avoided. The five guys apart from
him, starting with William, superficially his most obvious rival but no rival
at all. William gave off a deodorant scent, manly and industrial, like an
excess of laundry detergent. William was handsome, blond, slender, graceful,
could dance, possessed some sort of race memory of the conventions of
courteousness like how to put a girl's coat on, hand her out of a car, hold a
door open for her, that William's rigid crazy mother could never have taught
him as she was absent from his house for twenty hours at a stretch working two
full-time jobs and in the time she was home, locked herself in her bedroom and
refused to help her children, William and his two sisters, with meals or
housekeeping let alone finer things like their homework; these were such things
as one learned about one's fellow fourteen-year-old classmates, within just a
few weeks, if a Theatre student at CAPA. William was the heartthrob of
Christian Julietta, fat Pammie, Taniqua who could dance, and her adjuncts
Chantal and Angie, who screamed with pleasure when William swung and dipped
Taniqua, when he spun her like a top across the room. For his part William
exhibited no desire except to tango with Taniqua; his energy had no sexual heat
like his sweat had no smell. David steered clear of William, not even brushing
his heel. Next was Norbert: oily scent of his pimples. Colin: scalp scent of
his ludicrous clownfro of hair. Ellery, in whom oil-scent and scalp-scent
combined in a way that was palatable, almost appealing. Finally Manuel, as the
forms said "Hispanic," of which there were almost no others at CAPA
despite the apparent vast numbers of them in the city. Perhaps that explained
Manuel's presence, perhaps he was some sort of token required for the school to
get funding. Stiff, silent, with no discernible talent, a heavy accent about
which he was clearly self-conscious. Friendless, even in this hothouse of
oft-elicited, eagerly yielded intimacies. Manuel's scent, the dust-steeped
unwashed scent of his artificial-sheep's-wool-lined corduroy jacket.
David
was on the move now, crawling quickly, deftly, ignoring the shufflings and
scufflings and intakes of breath. A knot of whispers and perfumey hair
products: Chantal and Taniqua and Angie. As he passed, one of them grabbed his
ass, but he didn't slow down.
Almost
right away, Sarah had realized her jeans marked her, like a message in Braille.
Only Chantal would be as distinctive. Chantal wore every day without fail a
thigh-length cardigan in a very bright color like scarlet or fuchsia or teal,
belted tightly at the waist with a double-loop belt with punk studs. Different
cardigan, same belt, or possibly several identical belts. The moment the lights
had gone out someone had scooted beside Sarah and scrabble-grabbed until
finding her breasts, then squeezed hard as if hoping for juice. Norbert, she'd
been sure. He'd been sitting nearby, staring at her, as hegenerally did, while
the lights were still on. She'd leaned back on the heels of her hands and
shoved hard with both feet, regretting she was wearing her white ballet flats,
which were turning quite dingy and gray, and not her pointy-toe three-buckle
boots with the metal-tipped heels she'd bought recently with her earnings from
working both weekend opening shifts at the Esprit de Paris bakery, which job
meant that she rose before six every day of the week, though she often did not
go to sleep before two. The tit-grabber, whoever it was, had silently tumbled
back into the dark, without even a sharp exhalation, and since then she had
continued on the heels of her hands and her feet, crab-shuffling, keeping her
ass down, her thighs folded up. Perhaps it had been Colin, or Manuel. Manuel
who never stared at her, who met no one's eyes, whose voice she wasn't sure
she'd yet heard. Perhaps he was pent up with violence and lust. "... all
kinds of shapes in the dark. This one is cold, it has hard edges, when I place
my hands on it, it doesn't respond. This one is warm with a strange bumpy
shape: when I place my hands on it, it moves. ..." Mr. Kingsley's voice,
threading the darkness, was intended to open them up, everything was intended
to open them up, but Sarah had closed and grown porcupine's bristles, she was a
failure, her most recent recitation in Shakespeare had been awful, her whole
body stiff, full of tics.
More
than anything she feared running up against Julietta or Pammie, both so earnest
and so unself-conscious, like children. They'd be joyfully stroking whatever
their hands lit upon.
She'd
been found. A hand grasped her left knee, ran its palm down the front of her
thigh, the swirled ridges of stitching. She could feel its heat through her
jeans. Just like that, in the pit of her stomach a hollowness came, a trapdoor
swinging silently open, as if Mr. Kingsley's voice had been the nagging wind,
ineffectively rattling the lock, which this hand had now sprung.
The
one hand remained on her thigh while another found her right hand and raised
it, laid it flush on a lightly shaved face. It took her thumb, limp and
helpless, adjusted its position, and pressed it as if meaning to make a
thumbprint. She felt beneath the pad a slight bump, like a mosquito-bite welt.
David's birthmark, a flattened chocolate-colored mole, the same diameter as a
pencil eraser, on his left cheek, just offshore of his mouth.
They
had not, to this point in their scanty acquaintance, discussed David's mole.
What fourteen-year-olds talked about, even took note of, moles? But Sarah had
wordlessly noticed it. David wordlessly knew that she had. This was his mark,
his Braille. Her hand no longer passively lay on his face but held it, as if
balancing it on his neck. She slid her thumb over his lips, as distinct in
their shape as his mole. His lips were full but not feminine, closer to simian.
Slightly Mick Jagger. His eyes, though small, were set deep and resembled blue
agates. Something intelligently feral about them as well. He was not at all
normally handsome but did not need to be.
David
took her thumb in his mouth, tongued it gently, did not slobber it, kissed it
back so it lay once again on his lips. The thumb traced the cleft of his lips
as if taking their measure.
Mr.
Kingsley's voice must have continued, unraveling guidance, but they no longer
heard him.
David
had never in this way deferred a kiss. He felt skewered by lust and as if he
could hang there, afloat on the pain. Up floated his hands, in tandem, and
closed over her breasts. She shuddered and pressed against him and he lifted
his hands just a fraction away, so his palms only grazed her nipples where they
strained the thin weave of her cotton T-shirt. If she was wearing a bra it was
a soft wisp of one, a silk rag encircling her ribs. Her nipples rained down in
his mind in the form of hard glittering gems, diamonds and quartzes and those
faceted clumps of rock crystal one grew in a jar on a string.
Her
breasts were ideally small, precisely the size of the cup of his hand. He
weighed them and measured them, marveling, brushing them, with his palms or the
tips of his fingers, the same way again and again. With his now-cast-off
girlfriend from his previous school he'd evolved the Formula and had then
become imprisoned by it: first Kissing with Tongue for the fixed interval, then
Tits for the fixed interval, then Fingering Her for the fixed interval before,
culminatingly, Fucking. Never a step neglected nor a change to the order. A sex
recipe. Now with a shock he realized that it needn't be thus.
They
knelt, knees to knees, his palms cradling her breasts, her hands clutching his
skull either side of his face, her face pushed into his shoulder so that a patch
of the cloth of his polo shirt grew hotly wet from her breath. He turned his
face into the weight of her hair, basking in her aroma, exulting in it. How
he'd found her. No word to describe it except recognition. Some chemical made
her for him, him for her; they were not yet too fucked up by life that they
wouldn't realize it.
"Make
your way to a space on the wall and sit against it. Hands relaxed by your
sides. Eyes closed, please. I'll be bringing the lights back in stages, to
smooth the transition."
Well
before Mr. Kingsley completed his speech Sarah broke away, crawled as if
fleeing a fire until she hit a wall. Pulled her knees to her chest, crushed her
face to her knees.
David
was scorch-mouthed, felt strangled by his underpants. His hands, so exquisitely
sensitive moments before, were as clumsy as if stuffed inside boxing gloves. He
palmed and palmed his hair, which was short and unvarying, off his forehead.
As
the lights came on each stared steadily forward into the room's empty center.
The
crucial first year of their learning continued. In classes with tables, they
sat at separate tables. In classes with chairs set in rows, they sat in
separate rows. Hanging around in the halls, in the lunch-room, on the benches
for smoking, they adhered to separate nodes of conversation, sometimes standing
just inches apart, turned away from each other. But in moments of transition,
of general movement, David's gaze burned a hole through the air, Sarah's glance
darted out, then away, like a whip. Unbeknownst to themselves they were as
noticeable as lighthouses. In repose, even when they both stared straight
ahead, the wire ran between them, and their peers changed their paths to avoid
tripping on it.
They
needed distance to give them fresh darkness. At the end of the year, one knee
restlessly bouncing, eyes sweeping the room's farthest corners, knuckles
manically popping, David paused next to Sarah and asked, thickly, for her
address. His family was going to England. He'd send her a postcard. She wrote
the address briskly, handed it to him, he turned on his heel.
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