And she agreed. Another anonymous email: “You were right. Not time yet, is it? Sorry, sorry. You’re right—don’t come near me, please! Don’t give up on me, please. And, lo! It’s a different world today, no? In case you are feeling the need to keep tabs on me from your cool distance …” and a blue-bottomed link to a site where celebrity spot-tings around New York were texted in by subscribers and then redistributed instantaneously to the site’s membership, addresses and maps dispatched to cell-phone screens for efficient ogling. A sidebar on the home page listed hourly updated Newly Exploding Novas, and number four on that list:
Cait O’Dwyer, Singer
. Julian subscribed, fed credit-card digits to his screen, imaginary money to track his imaginary love. He was allowed ten Stars for the price of his basic membership but selected only her. The site informed him that he was one of 4,886 who followed her movements, a number up by 400 since the day before. On second thought, he added Alec Stamford, hoping they would never be reported geo-chrono-synchronously He was one of 32 watching Stamford move through space, a figure holding steady, but his phone began informing him of the painter’s position almost immediately: ASTRONOMICAL UPDATE FROM THE
OBSERVATORY.com
. STAR SPOTTED, 7:19 pm: ALEC STAMFORD BUYING FOOD FROM 67th ST. ‘WICH-WAY TEXT *88 FOR MAP.
If she was joking, it was a good joke. She didn’t take fame any more seriously than this. But, beyond that, she was acknowledging and asking him to acknowledge her expanding fame’s potential to blur his appeal. And maybe hers, too. If he meant to continue, he should know that others would be watching her as well, keening for her attentions. Continue to be different from all of them, she was politely requesting, and threatening. Prove yourself.
(She had, in fact, struggled over the text of that email, his silent rejection of her drink offer leaving her unsure of how—even if—to proceed.)
“Do you want lunch with Alec Stamford next week?” Maile called through his open door, an invitation negotiated through assistants, like courtiers arranging a royal wedding. The gallery slave who called on Stamford’s behalf said the agenda was a business proposal, Maile reported, maybe two weeks work. Maile had never heard of Reflex but spoke up in favor of a music video as a step forward for Julian. “I’m going to see you recognized as a director if it kills me,” she said. But Julian accepted the lunch because he wanted to see someone else who knew her, and to study someone who had lived through what was awaiting her.
BY THE MORNING
of his lunch date, he’d been notified at least daily of the painter’s whereabouts. The reports were not slowed by the arrival that morning of the long-awaited
Times
“profile” on Stamford, Milton Chi eager from the first word to hone the razor edge of his glinting critical teeth:
Some artists defy description, and I don’t mean that nicely. Alec Stamford, vaguely familiar from your older brother’s record collection, is, like so many criminally foolish pop stars before him—Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Ringo Starr—making us look at his paintings. It should come as no surprise that they are dreadful. They throw out ropes of allegory, but Mr. Stamford is not nearly a strong enough artist for the ropes to reach all the way to us, to deliver clear meaning, nor is he magician enough to make them light, allusive, to let his ideas float effortlessly, just out of reach of our comprehension, to lure us off an aesthetic cliff. The work is just repellent, which, come to think of it, his music was, too
.
They met at a new Haitian-Thai fusion, which the gallery assistant had suggested, and which Maile had accepted only to tease her boss. Julian arrived first, was seated, and a minute later his contemplation of the menu was interrupted by his quaking phone. ASTRONOMICAL UPDATE FROM THE
OBSERVATORY.com
. STAR SPOTTED, 12:38 pm: ALEC STAMFORD, HAI-THAI RESTAURANT, 28th STREET, TEXT *88 FOR MAP. Julian looked around. Alec was nowhere to be seen, but also nobody was putting their phone away, fresh from reporting a pop star from two decades earlier. No fans of an art provocateur had their noses pressed against the restaurant’s front window, waiting to see him lunch under the mural of Papa Doc Duvalier and Yul Brynner.
Stamford came out of the bathroom, loudly apologizing for the shoddy service at the restaurant as he walked past waiters and diners, then, sitting down, immediately brought up the
Times
assault as a “victory.” He then fluttered vague professional possibilities at Julian. There was interest at an entertainment channel in a documentary about Stamford’s career, “the transition from music to canvas and all that, the consistency in the ideas even as the medium has shifted.” Despite or because of Milton Chi’s hard work, the gallery wanted a salesy film about the process of the painting, Stamford staring at the blank canvas, the brush suddenly flying, snippets of dialogue about art and influence. “Your name has come up in all the discussions, it goes without saying,” he said anyhow.
None of this was impossible, though it was unlikely. It was uncomfortably likely, however, that Alec Stamford had gone into the bathroom and reported his own presence at the restaurant to a fan-tracking website. And now—as he spoke of his art career and the renewed and simmering appreciation of his old music, as he read the menu through his pince-nez, as he sent wine back with “Oh, now really, this won’t do, will it?” after insisting the poet-waiter taste it and agree that it was swill—the gap between the man and the music was painful to Julian, because those old Reflex songs had meant something to him and did so still. (After booking the lunch meeting, Maile downloaded “Sugar Girl” and kept playing it on her computer into the evening, and Julian had to resist the urge to put his hands on her shoulders.) But now the songs eroded in the presence of the singer. Julian imagined this self-promoter doing those old tunes—the great ones that struck a balance between cynicism and hopefulness, that cast hopefulness as the underdog that everyone wanted to win but probably wouldn’t—and it was grotesque. Julian feared the music would be lost entirely if Stamford proved himself more of an ass at this meal. And he was Cait’s friend? Cait was now entering the same tunnel of self-love that produced this man?
Great music, his father used to lecture him, was often made by wretched people. The wise fan carefully avoided learning anything about the creators of any music that mattered, shut his eyes to biographies of martinet jazz drummers or anti-Semitic composers, and surely avoided lunching with tediously still-living pop stars of his overly impressionable romantic youth. What would his father have said about falling in love with a girl on her way up the charts?
“There were some big names at the gallery the other night, friends of mine. Did you recognize anyone? Yeah, the usual downtown suspects.” Alec dropped names, and Julian let them land.
“I recognized that singer there,” he said after the parade. “Cait O’Dwyer? Is that her name?” But Stamford turned away and snapped at a man at a neighboring table, “Do you mind?” though Julian had missed whatever offense had been committed.
“What?” said the accused.
“I’m
sitting
here,” the painter argued.
“Do I mind that you’re sitting there?”
“Christ,” Stamford spat, turning his back on his newborn nemesis. “I get migraines, these just awful, awful migraines from people like that, you know? There are times you’re treated badly
because
you’ve got a recognizable face.”
“Tell me what you’re working on now,” Julian prompted.
In fact, Cait was almost certainly quite the same, in some way, as this patent-leather-spatted fool tipping the second bottle until its curling tongue of wine drooped. They were all, unfortunately, just people, these sorcerors and sorceresses. His treasured feeling that Cait understood him—was in some way singing to him—was not only an illusion but a commonplace one, like a belief in lucky numbers, and not only that but a manufactured and manipulated illusion, hacked together by a performer with ambitions (deathless ones, like Stamford’s), with handlers and market advisers and career plans.
The only real ones, the pure ones, were the dead ones. A recording made by a dead singer is different not only because of the lesser (and thus more emotionally trustworthy) technology but because of the purity that remains on the tape after the merely human is discarded. Sing movingly of heartbreak once, on tape, and that’s art; do it night after night in front of paying customers, sing of adolescent emotions when you are in your fifties, sixties, seventies, ironically laugh at your pain over and over again, and that’s artifice, no more “important” than what Julian did for money, perhaps even less. And Cait wanted some fuel from him? To prove himself, not give up, inspire her? To feed her insatiable appetite for fresh emotion and experience? Like this man across a plate of plantain and lemongrass describing how some incident of heartache and conflict—likely utterly avoidable, pointless, and childish—was transmuted nevertheless into a “work.”
“There’s a, uh, uh, bon mot in there somewhere, if I can find it,” Stamford said, almost apologetically, a little deflated now since the beginning of the meal. “You, uh, your,” he began, but after two bottles and an hour of talking about himself, the transition was rough. That he spoke incessantly about Alec Stamford was no surprise, but that he so aggressively defended his right to do so finished off Julian’s hope for work, for the meal, for musicians.
Julian attempted, “I did a shoot last year for a diamond company a lot of lasery, intense but very well-aimed light, an intimate look, fine detail, maybe something we could apply to—” He mistakenly still thought his credentials were up for discussion.
“I have never been able to tolerate diamonds or pearls, and I’ll tell you why,” Stamford replied, a broad smile on his face implying a fine and relevant anecdote to come. Instead, his monologue roamed from diamonds to computers to cars to driving the Cote d’Azur to lavender fields in Provence to lavender as a perfume to lavender as a color on his palette for a new series of paintings to his friendship with Mick Jagger to a dog he once trained to pee whenever Stamford whistled a major sixth, and then he brought the dog to a friend’s house, and the friend put on “All Blues” by Miles Davis, and before Stamford, in a panic, could reach the CD player—long details here about him trying to push past guests, waiters, named celebrities, furnishings—the dog just soaked the entire place. Any effort to distract Stamford from his past, his projects, his plans, was muscularly overpowered. If there was a job to be won here, Julian would have to wait very patiently and care far more than he did. He stayed at the table only in the hope he would hear some new insight about Cait or some sun-flare of detail from her private life, but he also feared he would hear something that painted her a Stamfordite lavender. “You, uh, what about you?” the painter said over coffee, but the question required obvious exertion, rehearsed but garbled at delivery. “Send your reel to my gallery. I’ll take a look,” he said at the door, and disappeared into the traffic and crowds.
Outside, Julian dialed Reflex up on his iPod,
Lost in the Funhouse
, just to confirm how badly its power had faded. The lyrics were puerile, the music hackneyed, even the instruments had become tinkly and creaky, and Julian tagged the album for deletion, then shut his iPod down, for fear of a broader contamination, as if an airborne musicidal virus were loose.
His cell rang as he headed back to his office, but it was Alec, so Julian let him go straight to voice mail. “Oh, oh, oh,” the painter sang when Julian finally listened an hour later on the toilet. “You are wicked, boy. I’m watching you from across the street, and you just
screened
me! That’s no way to start a working relationship. All right, so you know, that reminds me. There’s something I forgot to ask you. Why
didn’t
you ring her bell? I watched you stand there for minutes, and you never rang her bell. She’s a nice girl. Spinning in circles, muttering to yourself like a crazy man. Why not pay a call?”
IT DIDN’T REALLY CHANGE ANYTHING
, of course, Julian told himself, but still, something was spoiled now. He sat at his desk, closed his eyes against the sun and screens, tried to sort out the story he’d been telling himself for weeks, their floundering founding myth. She hadn’t looked down from her window and challenged him to be more original, hadn’t started all this. Alec, of all people, had teased him, and that is how he and Cait had begun. They were never a secret, organic and original, sprouted from nothing but the combination of each other. Alec had watched them, pushed them together. They were the product of that second-rater’s mind.
Of course it didn’t matter, not one bit. Though she hadn’t started this, hadn’t mysteriously learned who he was, she later had sent him to her key, spoke to him on the telethon, asked him for drinks. Julian started scribbling notes, trying to sort out who had done what and when and therefore why, how they’d found each other, even if the end result, today, was the same. But a note of ordinary tedium had started to drone.
As their story unraveled on the page before him—as he could no longer remember whose phone call or email or video had been caused by whom or had meant what—he felt himself finding reasons not to want her anymore, finding solace in thinking she was like Stamford, that Stamford was her future self. He knew this was childish even as he felt it, his feelings unraveling like their story. And he knew, too, that this was that flaw Rachel used to find in him, his retreat from feeling when it suited him, his pride at not being caught flat-footed by some strong emotion. If it was all Stamford’s doing, Julian could go back to his comfortable solitude, if he hadn’t already wrecked it in his reckless pursuit of this child star.
And it happened, and he watched it happen: laughing drily at Stamford’s secret, oafish hand in it all, and at his own adolescent fantasy that he’d been involved in something unique, he now wandered away from Cait, not to other women but to a trial run of permanent elderly iciness, drifting out to his end on a meringue floe, the trip he had begun—pushed out to sea by Rachel and Carlton—when Cait had distracted him and he had stupidly cuddled up to her music and her image, his last effort to avoid the only fate he was really suited for. And for the next three weeks a stream of cold air poured into him, and he felt his little adventure gliding into the vast and overpopulated past.