Music for Wartime

THE NOVEMBER STORY

Markus 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?”

She rolls her eyes. “It wouldn’t bother me if Leo flirted.”

Bingo.

We tell Leo, “So, Astrid told us she thinks you’re cute. She said she wouldn’t mind if you flirted a little.”

There’s a sudden wash of blood under his freckled skin.

I say, “What do you like about Astrid?”

“Astrid is a talented glassblower. I think she’s a real threat.”

“Do you think she likes your music?”

“I hope that Astrid likes my music.”

At least ninety percent of his blood is in his face now. Ines says, with a smile to let him know she’s not really serious but that she still expects an answer, “A lot of viewers will be wondering if you’re really gay. Are you?”

“I’m not gay. I’m attracted to women. There are a few cute girls here.”

Ines looks triumphant. They’ll use that last sentence over a shot of him awkwardly stepping aside to let Astrid pass him in the dining room.

Back at our little apartment in town above the old lady’s garage, Beth spends hours trying to figure out what she feels. She’ll start sentences this way: “It’s just that sometimes I think that maybe I feel like…” I imagine her chasing her emotions with a straight pin, trying to jab them down in place before they get away again. They always get away again.

I tell her, “It’s okay to make decisions with your brain.”

She says, “I don’t work that way.”

Beth’s hair is long and curly and always in her eyes, and I’m so used to getting people to pull their hair out of the way for interviews that I want to grab hers and tie it back.

All day long while she’s supposed to be designing websites, she sits on the couch writing in her journal, trying to decide if she wants to stay with me and someday have children, or if she needs to discover more about herself by dating other people and “excavating other parts of her personality.” Then when I get home she reads me her journal. I tell her she’d give great interview.

But really she wouldn’t. We don’t even cast the people who can’t make up their minds. We take the ones who issue blanket statements and manifestos, the ones who live by pithy mantras. If we ask a contestant how he feels, we want him to say, “I’m on top of the world!” or “I feel like a sack of shit!” The camera doesn’t have patience for someone who feels iffy, weighs the options, equivocates. And maybe that’s why I want to throttle Beth when she tells me she’s been making a list. “Of the pros and cons,” she says. “Of our relationship.”

I ignore this and tell her how Ines and I are making two people fall in love.

“That’s sick,” she says.

“Why?”

“I thought this one was supposed to be a serious show. Like, focused on the actual competition.”

It is a good show — not like in L.A. when I worked on The Princess and the G—but she’s been against it ever since I told her we’d have to pack up and spend the month in Pennsylvania. They’d let her stay with me if we wanted to live in the east wing of the artists’ colony along with most of the crew, but she wants nothing to do with it. “It would be all inside jokes,” she said before we came out here, “and you’d be talking about, I don’t know, key grips and best boys. It’s just that sometimes I think I feel like you have more in common with those people than with me.” When I told her I’d be gone from five in the morning till one at night, that I’d rarely be awake in our apartment, she shrugged. It wasn’t the point.

And now, in a different town, with a different bed, a different couch, different windows, it feels like the spell has been broken. More to the point, it feels like the set has been struck. All the things that held our two lives together have been replaced by other, different things, and our bodies seem out of place here, like awkward actors with bad scenery. I moved the mirror from the bedroom to the living room, hanging it next to the window, approximately where our mirror is in L.A. I got Beth to flip the refrigerator door so it would open from the left, like ours at home. When my cousin, as a joke, sent us a cheesy postcard of the Santa Monica beach, I hung it on the bathroom wall.

When Beth asked about it, I told her I was just nesting. “You’re producing,” she said.

Ines is mad that she can’t flirt with Leo now. “He was the only cute guy here,” she says. She means out of everyone — the crew, the producers, the cast, and the entire population of Strathersburg, Pennsylvania.

Kenneth tells us they have footage of Leo and Astrid giggling in a hallway, choosing adjacent seats at the big dinner table in the formal dining room, taking an early morning jog. “My genius Cupids!” he calls us, and we know he says this more to encourage our future work than to tell us our job is done.

By the next round of interviews, we’re able to say, “So you and Astrid are spending a lot of time together. Is there anything you want to tell us?”

On nice days, Craft Services sets up picnic tables out on the grounds. Today, people keep stopping me in the buffet line. “Heard you made Kenneth very happy,” they say, and “Those two gotta name their first kid after you.” I smile and feel not nearly as good as I thought I would. I’ve done sleazier things every day for the past five years, but for some reason this one is starting to feel wrong. Beth is getting to me, maybe. Or maybe I’m growing up. Or maybe it’s something about being outside L.A., here in the real world, where the normal rules of behavior should somehow apply.

Kenneth comes up and slaps me on the shoulder. “We’re changing the next prompt to Love. This is great stuff, Christine.”

When I get home early, a little after midnight, Beth is stirring risotto and watching The Godfather. I say, “What if we buy a house when we get back home?”

She says, “Do what you feel.”

“No, I think we, plural, should buy a house.”

She slowly pours more chicken stock into the pot and then says, “Sometimes I feel like you’re crushing my head.”

I decide to ignore this. I sit on the couch and spend a few minutes watching Vito Corleone make people offers they can’t refuse. I say, “What’s wrong with it if we help two people find love?” She doesn’t even get what I’m talking about, so I have to remind her about the whole Astrid and Leo thing. I don’t know what I’m hoping for — a friendly debate, maybe. I’m hoping for us to stay up, talking and eating on the couch. My body doesn’t need sleep anymore.

But she just stares at me. “Because you can’t tell people how to feel,” she finally says. “Those aren’t their real emotions.”

“Right,” I say, “but we’re not telling them what to do. We’re just playing Cupid.”

“You’re playing God.”

I do sense that she’s talking about more than just the show, but I’m too tired to work it all out. When the risotto is done cooking, she puts it in the refrigerator without eating any and heads to bed.

Vito Corleone dies with an orange peel in his mouth, and I call to Beth that she’s missing the best part.

Astrid sits down in the interview chair and asks if we can turn the cameras off. “Sure,” we say, and give Blake, the camera guy, the signal to cover the red light but keep taping.

She leans forward and says, “I know what you guys are trying to do. With your questions about Leo. I get that you’re supposed to create drama and everything, but frankly this is insulting.”

I look at Ines, hoping she can lie better than I can. “All we’re doing,” she says, “our role, is just to speed along what would happen in the real world if we had a lot more time. Let’s say in real life you know a guy, and maybe after six months, something starts to happen. Okay, so here we don’t have six months. We have two more weeks, and that’s if you stay to the finale. We’re not making you date him, Astrid. We’re just stirring the pot.”

“Well, I want you to stop.”

“Okay,” I say, “sure,” although Ines is looking at me strangely. “Turn the camera back on, Blake. Remember present tense, full sentences. So Astrid, tell us about this week’s prompt.”

She straightens up in the chair, tucks her hair behind her ear, and smiles, suddenly full of energy. “This week’s challenge is Love. I’m super excited to show the judges I can go beyond simple blown shapes and do something really spectacular. I’m really gonna rock this one.”

Ines and I take our only half hour off in five days to head out to the one coffee shop in Strathersburg, and we must look odd perched there at the tall table with our BlackBerrys, surrounded by men with newspapers and potbellies. “Why in the hell did you say we’d leave her alone? Tell me it’s part of some master plan.”

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.

On the last day of the shoot, I’m up in the house’s attic, searching among piles of abandoned furniture for a rug, since one of the judges spilled coffee on the cream one. I look out the window, down to the grounds, and there, back near the woods, with no one else around, Leo and Astrid are kissing. Passionately, but slowly, like they’ve done it before, his hands in her hair, her hands in his back pockets. A giddy flood of adrenaline sends me halfway down the stairs on my way to tell Kenneth, before I stop and think. Kenneth would love me for it forever. I could maybe get someone to lug a camera up the narrow stairs and shoot them before they walk away. I wonder for a long time afterward why I don’t. It might be because I hate my job, or it might be because I still believe in love.

Instead I walk back up the stairs, as quietly as I can, as if they could hear me way out there on the grounds. I lean against the window frame and watch them. It’s a movie, and I’m the only one in the world with a ticket.

And then there’s this: Did we make them fall in love, or were they already on their way? And if it’s all our fault, then are they really even in love?

Ines carries my weight for the last interviews. “Tell us why you’re going to win,” she says. “Tell us why Leo deserves to lose.”

Afterward, she asks me what’s wrong. “I’m just not sure what I’m going home to,” I say. “Back in L.A.”

She thinks I’m talking about jobs, and she tells me she’ll be working on the new one about anorexics gaining weight back. She thinks she can hook me up.

We shoot the artists packing and leaving, we shoot them looking out the backseat window of a moving car, and then suddenly we’re done. Instead of going home to Beth, I stay for the party. The camera guys do actual keg stands on the lawn. Ines says, “They’re living out their fraternity fantasies.” We’re standing on the porch watching, and she’s well on her way to drunk. She says, “I’m going to sleep with Blake tonight.” Blake is the hairiest one.

“Go for it,” I say, and attempt to get drunk myself. I won’t miss the place at all.

In September, Astrid, I think, will bring back delicate glass leaves and gray bubbles. Gordy will paint empty city streets. Sabrinah will dance like an empty tree. Leo will play sad, beautiful, modern things on the piano that only I will know are for Astrid. And I’m certain I’ll be coming back here alone.

Before the shoot starts, Ines and I and everyone lower on the totem pole will run around making the place look like November: desolate and cold and fading. We’ll stand on ladders to pull leaves off the trees. I’ve done it before. I’ve done stranger things, too. We’ll spray some of the remaining leaves yellow, some red. We’ll make everyone wear a coat. We’ll kill the grass with herbicide.

It’s sick and it’s soulless, but it’s one of the addictive things about my job: Here, you can force the world to be something it’s not.

We’ll take the four contestants one by one into the foyer and put them on that ridiculous chair, and ask them, Why do you deserve to win? How passionate do you feel? What do you love about your work? How much do you love your work? What is this sucker punch, love, that ruins us so completely?

And can you say it in a full sentence?