Audition Katie Kitamura Quotes

It seemed an unlikely choice, this large establishment in the financial district, so that I stood outside and checked the address, the mane of the restaurant, I wondered if I had made a mistake. And around me the waiting darkness.

the most obvious explanation is often also the correct one.

I need to go, I said to Xavier, and before he could reply I rose to my feet and stepped back from the table, I had nothing else to say, I could only repeat, I need

It had been a heedless moment. I had entered the stage of life where there is a certain amount of immutability, in middle age, change is experienced primarily as a kind of attrition.

But never mind about his love life—we had known Said for many years and it was always the same thing, too dull to relate much less live through, I didn’t know how he did it—how is the new work?

More and more often, I was surprised by the person in the mirror, it was not the lines at my mouth or the hollowness around my eyes, it was the lag in recognition that was the most troubling, the brief moment when I looked in the mirror and did not know who I was.

You’re not cheating on me again, are you? No, I whispered at once, and I was a little frightened as I said it. He nodded and said, Forget I mentioned it, and opened the door for me and we stepped out.

After that day in the restaurant, things were never entirely the same between Tomas and me. It wasn’t a façade or a pretense that suddenly fell away—our marriage was much more than mere surface or appearance—it was the substance of our relationship itself, guarded by a shared reality, that changed. You pull at the ropes tied to the statue, you pull and nothing happens, and then you pull and you pull again and the whole thing topples over.

This was undoubtedly because, for the first time in many years, I saw our marriage for what it really was, something fragile that could still be tarnished or lost.

But it did, first for a week, and then for a month, and then for so long that it became habit and routine, and in that small act of domesticity, I recommitted myself to the marriage. It was banal, indisputably bourgeois, the coffee cups and the stupid pastries—but that was almost the point. To return to that ordinary life, with its coziness and safety, all those things that are so easy to despise and dismiss. In those rituals of daily life, I committed myself to the marriage, in all its mundanity, all over again. At least for a time.

But then I also thought that if ever an actor had lost sight of the shore then it was this one, he had stumbled deep into the interior, and I wondered if he worried that he would never find his way out, if the world of fiction had lost its protective powers, the line between reality and invention undone.

Because in fact we don’t want to see the thing itself, on a screen or on a stage, we don’t want to see actual pain or suffering or death, but its representation. Our awareness of the performance is what allows us to enjoy the emotion, to creep close to it and breathe in its atmosphere, performance allows this dangerous proximity.

I knew that what Tomas—what the waiter, and the middle-aged couple sitting at the nearby table, what they had all been misled by was the current of intensity running between Xavier and me. Its source was an imbalance of want. Two people who want the same thing will never generate the same intensity as two people who want different things, or one person who wants into an absence, a void—as was in fact the case with Xavier, who wanted something from me that I could not give. More than that—he wanted something that I could not begin to fathom, a desire with which it felt dangerous to collude or to involve myself.

People always talked about having children as an event, as a thing that took place, they forgot that not having children was also something that took place, that is to say it wasn’t a question of absence, a question of lack, it had its own presence in the world, it was its own event.

It was in the aftermath of the miscarriage that the affairs began in earnest. They were usually brief, they never threatened to encroach upon our marriage, although at times they could take me by surprise, I could become more absorbed than I intended. They were an expression of restlessness rather than discontent, of that I was certain. Still, it became increasingly difficult to find my way back to Tomas, and I was aware that the situation was becoming fraught, the apparatus of our marriage growing rickety, things could not continue in this way. I assumed Tomas knew about the affairs, perhaps some part of me was waiting for him to say something, to intervene, perhaps some part of me needed him to.

Here, it is possible to be two things at once. Not a splitting of personality or psyche, but the natural superimposition of one mind on top of another mind. 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.

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.

I know that Xavier is seeking the same thing, and it is possible he has already found it. To know that he exists to the world, and in the world, in a continual sequence of recognition. 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.

I looked across at Tomas and I knew he was not convinced, that some part of him wished to stay inside the performance, inside the fantasy, I could see the thought moving through his head and nearly settling, what was a family if not a shared delusion, a mutual construction?

But the deeper the complicity, and the longer it is sustained, the less give there is, the more binding and unforgiving the contract, and in the end it took very little for the whole thing to collapse.

The play closed. Those final performances were empty, I was only going through the motions, everyone around me and in the audience could tell. I had wrung the thing dry. And yet when it was over, I still felt its absence.

Or perhaps he was only acting out. Perhaps it was only that, and less than I thought it was. Can things be unsaid and undone, can the clock run both ways, backward and forward, can the story unspool in both directions?