Music for Wartime (5 page)

I don’t tell her I’m suddenly and deeply sick of messing with people. I say, “We need her on our side. She’s not an NPD.” The casting directors are great at spotting borderline narcissistic personality disorder, the kind that makes you just crazy enough for great TV but not crazy enough to destroy a camera with a baseball bat. The best casts are around 50 percent NPD, but no more. Astrid was picked for her charisma and talent rather than her belief that she was destined to be famous. “I see her shutting down in interview if she thinks we’re manipulating her.”

“I’m just saying Kenneth had
very
high hopes for the Love challenge interviews.”

“You can go to town on Leo, then. Tell him she’s pregnant with his child.”

Ines laughs, pretends I’m not annoying her, and we finish our lattes. “I wish you were living at the colony. I’m not into hanging out with the camera guys.”

I wish I were, too. The loneliest thing in the world is lying awake beside someone asleep. Beth snores quietly, like a little girl, and she turns her back and grabs all the sheets up around herself. It feels as if she’s ignoring me, as if—through her closed eyelids—she should be able to see that I’m sad. She should startle awake and ask what’s wrong. But she never does. She just mumbles and steals another pillow, and I’m alone in the dark for hours with my worst thoughts.

As we walk up the endless grass hill to the colony, our shoes in our hands, Ines says, “You don’t seem happy.” She’s known me a few years, on and off, so I figure she’s probably right. “Can I ask something? Why exactly are you with this person?”

I’m saved from answering by Dale running toward us, telling us Kenneth is pissing mad that we’re late and asking if we brought back lattes.

“Where do you think we’re hiding them?” I ask, and he swears and runs his hand through his Mohawk and races back to the house.

Ines takes off to help mike up the judges and I check in with Kenneth, and the whole time I’m tearing at my thumbnail and trying to answer her question, as if I’m a contestant and
must
answer the question, and must rephrase the question as part of the answer.

I am with Beth because:

I’ve been fighting against her leaving for so long that it’s the only thing I know how to do. It’s like that’s my character arc, like some producer has said, “We need you to be the high-strung girl with the short hair who doesn’t want her girlfriend to leave.” And, like the best contestants, the ones chosen for their compliance, the ones who are secretly actors in their real lives as well as pianists or dancers, I go along with it. Because what other role do I have? Because who else am I?

Ines and I always sit in at the back of the judgment room so we don’t have to get debriefed before the interviews. Kenneth is brilliant. He lines the five remaining artists up in front of the bookshelves, then tells them we won’t tape for a few more minutes—when really, the cameras are already rolling. He tells them to stand still for the light guys, and then says, “We’re having more digital issues. We’re gonna be here pretty late tonight, folks.” And the sleep-deprived artists, dehydrated and trying to hold still and awaiting judgment, give the most beautiful looks of disgust and despair. The cameras are getting it all. The editors will splice it in with shots of their work being critiqued, or a competitor winning.

Kenneth has managed to pull something like this off every episode, and they always fall for it. Once he had a camera guy give all the contestants incomprehensible instructions in a thick accent, while the other cameras captured the grimaces of confusion. At the third judgment, he directed Ines to have a loud phone argument with a boyfriend in the corner of the room. That time we had enough snickering and eye-rolling to manufacture an entire implied rivalry between Leo and Gordy. It became one of our best plotlines.

Later, Ines and I will ask the artists, one by one, to go through the whole day, speaking in the present tense and pretending they don’t know what’s ahead.

“I’m so nervous,” they’ll say, long after the judgments are over, “because I don’t know if the new puppets are even going to hold together.”

The glorious present tense—that blindest of tenses, ignoring all context, all past and future failures.

Even the losers, the ones who know they’ve just been sent home, are somehow willing to talk about their work optimistically, as if they’re about to strut onto the stage of the colony’s Little Theater and show their best stuff. We’ll say, “Okay, it’s ten minutes before the show starts, and you’ve just been called in. What are your hopes? What are you excited about?”

And off they go, like puppies who don’t get that no matter how many times they hump their master’s leg, he always swats them with the paper. “I’m so excited for the judges to see my work!” cry the artists who’ve just been mocked and upbraided and grilled for the two hours that will be edited down to five on-screen minutes. As if by trying hard enough, they can convince us to love them again.

They remind me of someone.

Leo should go home, it’s obvious—all his compositions are the same anemic jazz in various minor keys—but our matchmaking has spared him. It’s Markus, the sculptor, the great crier, that they eighty-six. His Love sculpture is incredible, really: a three-foot-tall heart made of bars, like a rounded cage. He coated each wire of the framework in lumpy clay, then painted the whole thing bright blue. Inside the heart was a live dove he had procured at a pet store in town with his fifty dollars in “funding.” The problem was that the dove, stuck inside the cage for six hours waiting to be judged, had made a fairly convincing public bathroom of the heart floor. The judges used that as their excuse: “You didn’t plan ahead. You didn’t think about longevity. We wanted love, and you showed us a sad old dove. We wanted excitement, and you showed us excrement.” Kenneth had written that one down for them on a note card.

Markus gives us a nice monologue about how they can’t expect his best work when there isn’t even time for the clay to dry, how he’s more about emotional realism anyway, and you can’t do emotional realism on a schedule. He says the colony has been good for his soul, and then he cries and tells us how famous he’s going to be.

Beth has left me a note on the refrigerator door: “Don’t eat risotto. It has my germs.”

She hasn’t told me she’s sick, and there are no mountains of Kleenex lying around, but maybe it’s true. I’d be the last to know. I read the note again. If this is some message about the status of our relationship, or some cryptic directive as to how I can salvage things, it’s utterly lost on me. The risotto is half-gone anyway.

I write “OK!” on the bottom of the note, and I add a smiley face and a heart. Then I think better of it and rip off the bottom edge, but some of her writing rips off too, and she’ll notice. I take the whole note and tear it into little shreds and drop them in the garbage.

Even after all our work, by the end of the shoot Kenneth has decided to drop the love arc. “We’re way more into Leo’s falling-out with Gordy, and I think we’ll want to paint Astrid as kind of a loner, so that everyone roots for Sabrinah,” he says. “She’s going to win.” They’ll never use the beautiful footage of Leo blushing, just like they’ll throw away 99 percent of everything that happens. Those are the last four standing: Beautiful Leo, Gordy the Mediocre Painter, Sabrinah the Shouter, and Astrid the Blonde.

We have two days left on the shoot. They’ll be told that the final prompt is “November,” then do their last interviews and shoot the promos for the finale. They’ll go home to work on a portfolio of five pieces, preparing to come back before the judges and the almighty agent to present their work and make a case for their careers. They’ll tell us all to love them, to care about their work, to see that they alone have embodied November.

Of course, it won’t actually be November. It’s only June now. They’ll have ten weeks off and we’ll shoot the finale the last week of September. But it will
air
in late November, and that’s all that counts: not what time it is here, but what time it is on the other side of the TV screen.

By the end, I never see Beth awake. I don’t know if we’re broken up, if we’re reconciled, if we’re the same as we always were. All I have is her unconscious body, beside me in the dark when I get into bed and beside me in the earliest gray light when I roll out. It might be a nice way to fade out of things: a life-size Beth doll to wean me off the real thing.