Music for Wartime (3 page)

It was when Radelescu stopped playing and turned with concerned eyes that Aaron began to cry like a much younger child. He was tired like he’d never been, and the wet chill of a fever washed unmistakably over him, and the room was a storm-tossed boat. When he sank to the ground he felt hot urine on his leg and ankle. He still gripped the violin in his left hand and the bow in his right, remembering somehow not to let them drop.

His father was above him, touching his hair and forehead, first saying, “No matter, no matter,” then whispering words like an incantation: “May this be the worst you ever feel.”

Behind him, among the drunken guests, the ones who’d heard the story of Bonn at dinner, who’d seen the quiet, pale boy grow paler and fall, rose a murmur: He has had a vision, they were saying. The young rabbi has had a vision.

M
arkus is a gifted crier. We just say, “Tell us how your grandfather would feel,” and he gushes like Miss America. “My grandfather would be so proud of me,” he says, and blows a kiss to the sky.

Or we ask if he feels that his whole life has been a struggle. He says, “I just feel like my whole life has been just this huge struggle,” and then he starts snorting and choking and holds up a finger.

The producers love the criers, and they love the cocky bastards, and they love the snarky gay men. The others, we try to get drunk. If there are any straight guys, we flirt. (Ines flips her hair. I undo one more button on my blouse.) If necessary, we feed them lines.

I don’t try very hard anymore to explain to Beth what I do, why my voice is never actually on the show. Really, I think she’s pretending to be confused. I think she likes saying, “Okay, but why don’t they just have the contestants talk to the camera on their own? Aren’t they smart enough?”

She eats her unfrozen lasagna on the couch with her heavy blanket around her, even though it’s the middle of June and pretty warm, and if I try to tell her about Sabrinah screaming at the judges, or Astrid getting drunk, she says, “Don’t tell, you’ll ruin the show for me.” Even though half the time, she doesn’t watch what I’ve worked on. And so I stop talking, because what else could I possibly talk about?

Hour after hour, Ines and I sit side by side in folding chairs. The contestants sit on what looks like a throne—something oak and leather the producers found in the library. Ines is great at maintaining a lethally bored expression, so that whoever we’re interviewing feels compelled to say more and more interesting things—more outrageous, more emotional. More likely to make their relatives change their names and move to Arizona.

Or we say, “This isn’t who we picked. We picked someone vivacious, opinionated, funny. Please remember that the producers have the final decision.”

We say, “We’re not getting a character arc from you. This is going to be boring TV.”

We say, “Remember that this is a job, that we’re paying you, and your job is to answer all the questions.” Then we ask, “What do you hate about Lesley?”

“I don’t hate her,” they say.

“Yes, but you need to answer the question.”

“Well, she’s pretty sure of herself. I mean, she’s
good
.”

We say, “That’s great, go with that. What does her confidence remind you of?”

“Umm, like a gorilla? Like, this big silverback gorilla that’s bigger than you?”

“
That
’s what we’re looking for. Now we need a full sentence. About how you hate it.”

“Lesley’s been swaggering around like some big silverback gorilla, like, beating her chest and telling everyone how great she is. It’s driving me crazy.”

If you’ve ever seen
Starving Artist
, if you’ve ever even heard of it, you’re probably a gay man between twenty-five and forty. We gather artists from all different fields—this season a sculptor, a painter, a dancer, a poet, a singer-songwriter, a glassblower, a graphic artist, a playwright, a piano composer, and a puppeteer—and stick them in an old, defunct artists’ colony in northern Pennsylvania for twenty-three days. We give them prompts: The first episode was “Nightmare.” Then “Shakespeare.” Then “Baseball.” They work for a day and a half, creating something small and potentially beautiful and always tragically rushed, and then they’re judged, eliminated, given warnings, awarded prizes, the usual deal. The poor playwright got a fifty-second performance limit on each play. It seemed like nothing, but it was an eternity on air, and we were giving him at least twice as much screen time as anyone else. He went home sobbing after the second elimination, twitching and covered in hives. The winner gets an agent and a hundred-thousand-dollar grant. The losers get publicity cut with humiliation.

I come home upset about the playwright, and I try to tell Beth. She says, “But I thought the point for these people was the exposure.”

I say, “I don’t think that’s what he even wanted. He wasn’t typical.” His name was Lincoln, and he seemed so surprised by everything, so constantly startled by the number of people involved and by our lifting his shirt to retape his mike. “People are going to remember him as the twitchy hive guy, and I don’t think he’ll even know how to take advantage of the publicity.”

“Then why did he sign up?” Beth is knitting at the speed of light with tiny wooden needles. She’s the kind of person who can undo a knot in any necklace and get broken toasters to work again. That was how we met, in fact. We lived in the same building in L.A., and when she looked out her second-story window and saw me throwing a toaster in the Dumpster, she called down that she bet it was just the heating element, and she could fix the calibration with a screwdriver. And a beer.

Right now I shrug at her question. Because I don’t know why Lincoln signed up for the show. Optimism, I suppose.

But I don’t say that. This is the way a lot of our conversations have been ending lately: one of us asking a question, the other not answering.

My job is to pretend to be everyone’s friend. Back in the day, you could have just taken a guy into a corner by Craft Services and said, “I think you’re the most talented one here. It’s ridiculous how Gordy’s getting all these wins, when he paints like a drunken toddler. Do you know what he said about you?” But now they’re savvier. They like to think they’re in on the production aspect. So you say, “You’re doing well, but we need to plan for your postshow marketability. We’d like to help you develop a catchphrase.”

Eight days in, the producers tell us we need a romance arc. Kenneth says, “It has to be Leo and Astrid, because she’s the hottest girl, and he’s the only straight guy. We have to go hetero on this.” And then he says to me, “No offense, Christine, it’s the network, they’re asses. And they don’t get our demographic at all.”

Ines says, “You expect us to make them fall in love?”

He slurps his coffee through the lid and then looks at the ceiling. “Yep.”

The next time Astrid sits down, she’s just escaped elimination—she’s in that wonderful spot between ecstatic and vulnerable. She’s the glassblower, and the judges are getting bored with her. I want to tell her she’ll be safe if she can just pretend to love Leo, but I don’t think she can act that well.

So I say, “How do you feel about Leo being the only straight guy here?”

Astrid has long blond hair with a pale blue streak. Her nose is pierced, and she’s beautiful. If you saw her on the street, you’d think she was already famous. “Leo’s getting along well with everyone. It’s got to be hard being the only straight guy here,” she says to the camera.

Ines takes over. “Can you see anything happening between the two of you?”

“I don’t see anything happening between me and Leo,” she says, but she’s blushing, so we can use it. “He’s cute, but I’m focusing on my art right now.”

I would have stopped there, knowing we got “He’s cute,” but Ines, brilliant Ines, keeps going. “What do you think about his flirting with you? Is it distracting you from the challenges?”

Astrid tilts her head and her hair falls down in waves. “I don’t think he is.”

“But if he were. Would that bother you?”

“No.”

“Can you say it in a full sentence?”