New York
After my record deal is signed, my new A&R guy at Lolli, Patrick Mackey, invites us to the Midtown office to discuss the direction of my first album.
He begins, “So, you’ve had sex.”
I exchange a glance with Sonny. I nod, confused. I’ve already confessed this. I was afraid to, but Sonny said it was something my new team should know.
Pat scratches an itch on his neck. Hesitates for only a moment. “Exactly. We’re thinking it’s the only other way to swing. Savannah Sinclair is a virgin. Gwen Morris is right there on the edge. They don’t have sex; you do. It’s one or the other. You’ve had it, and you’re not ashamed. Right?”
My body tenses. There are many flags planted in famous bodies. But there is also a part of me that relishes the impalement. Each time, it is a strange thrill. This makes me uneasy, because I cannot reconcile these contradictory desires: to push it in further, to rip it out.
Gwen chews a wad of gum, thrusts her hand into a jar of gummy bears. A candy choker is cinched around her throat.
I cannot take my eyes off her as she dances. The power of her body, the intensity of her gaze. I know she must have perfected the choreography during weeks of rehearsals, but it seems as if she was born for this video, for this moment, sprung fully formed from the head of some god.
When I call her cell, she picks up on the third ring. “Did you see it?” she asks breathlessly.
“Of course. It’s everywhere.”
“What do you think?”
“You’re amazing.”
“Now they’re looping me in with Savannah Sinclair, as if we’re the same person.”
“You’re totally different. She’s—” And I want to say less beautiful, less talented. But this isn’t the truth. Savannah Sinclair has a four-octave vocal range. Her riffs are ribbons of sound twirling through air. “Play with Me,” her debut single, was number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for weeks, until Gwen knocked her off. The video premiered on MTV a few months ago: miniature Savannah, shimmying through a dollhouse. Cleavage locked away, stockings to her knees, blush slapped on her cheeks. A golden cross swaying on her neck like a wagging finger.
We can’t help but turn against one another—it is easy to do. We are racehorses: whoever starts in front can always fall behind. Of course, I don’t know this yet. My turn hasn’t come. For now, all I can do is assure Gwen she is enough.
I hear her shout encouragement to a choreographer or background dancer. A stranger to me. “Sorry. Fuck. I feel like I’ve been cursing way more now, since Mike says I can’t. Or maybe I’m just paying closer attention to everything I say. If I curse in an interview, everyone will freak out. I never cursed before, did I?”
“Not really,” I say.
“No, that was always you. Or Rhiannon. Have you talked to her?”
“Nope.” We haven’t spoken in over a year.
“Same.”
“So are you really dating Wes Kingston?”
“Who said that?”
All I can hear is my own pulse. “The world.”
“I don’t know if I am.”
“How can you not know?”
“I guess if people talk, that’s fine. You know? The album is coming out soon.” She lowers her voice. “We went for a drive in Los Angeles. We kissed once.”
“What was it like?”
“It was like nothing.”
I understand.
“Anyway, I’ll call you later, okay? I gotta go.” The line goes dead. Her mall tour continues. She has described it as a front-row look at the backwaters of America. At each venue, there is a stage, two background dancers. Her tracks are beamed through the mall, drawing in shoppers. She performs a set of four or five songs, depending on the day, then signs autographs. These malls, she has told me, could all be cousins. But now? Her music video is on MTV. Her single is number one. Malls will become real stages.
Each morning, I am picked up from my hotel suite and driven to studios around the city. Inevitably, I hear “Bubblegum” during the ride, sometimes twice if there’s traffic. I also bought her CD, of course, one of the last copies on a display with her face on it at Tower Records. On the cover, her head is angled to the side in mock confusion, a pink bubble rising out of her lips.
In the vocal booth, my cheeks flush with heat as I sing about a sexuality I don’t know how to wield. Andy Sacks, one of my producers, asks if I’ll come out to the control room. He’s short, freckly. His pale eyes are always flickering over my chest.
“I still don’t know about that line,” I say.
He puts his hands on his hips, plainly frustrated. “The one you mentioned yesterday?”
I nod. It is I’m so wet / Can’t control the sweat. I try to convince Andy that this is too pointed, that subtlety can be even more suggestive.
He scratches his stubble. After some back and forth, we settle on Let’s sweat, baby / Draw it out of me instead. I twist my voice until he likes the shape.
“You have a boyfriend?” he asks.
“No.”
“Well, pretend like you’re singing in an imaginary boyfriend’s ear. Or someone you’re really, really into. Okay?”
I nod and return to the vocal booth, pulling my headphones back on. This I can do, and I know exactly who I’ll think of. The sun circles the window, offering and then denying light. We are still recording when the garbage truck labors down the street in the morning, crushing trash. So go the weeks I spend recording my first album. I had a vague idea of writing a few songs myself, but I don’t dare suggest this to anyone, since clearly no one expects me to write my own material. At least the world isn’t sharp yet. Studios are wombs: here creativity is gestating, here it is soft and dark. During this time, I don’t speak to many people other than my producers and engineers, Pat, and Sonny. I am eighteen in a world of older men. Of executives like Lyle Michaels, the head of Lolli, who stops by the studio every so often to listen to me sing. After Savannah’s and Gwen’s successes, he wants to put everything into my album—marketing dollars, promotion, a tour supporting a big name in the summer. You will be this, he says, and who am I to argue? I don’t have a compelling counteroffer.
Gwen is on my television. Seeing her there, bite-size and shimmering, I consider calling, but she rarely picks up these days. Our friendship has risen and waned; it’s been months since we’ve spoken. She’s standing next to Carson Daly, answering fan questions before a live performance on TRL. I don’t know the answers to many of them, which embarrasses me. Maybe we were only thrust together due to circumstance, clinging to each other in a transitional time, the way I imagine college roommates might.
“What is your favorite song to sing?” a fan asks.
“Oh, definitely ‘Let’s Take a Drive.’ That song just reminds me of driving around with my friends.” She nods and entwines her fingers together.
Another asks, “What about Wes Kingston? Is he just a friend?”
She laughs. “He’s a sweetheart.”
Sweetheart is a word with no pulse. Still, she keeps using it to describe Wes.
“What do you miss most about Arizona?”
She considers. This answer I think I know: She misses the endless sky, roads that stretch through rust-red desert. Maybe her grandfather’s skinny old horse, which lives on a ranch outside the sprawl of Tucson. A family cat. But she says none of these things. “Usual stuff. My friends from school. Playing soccer. I was an honor roll student. I sang in the school choir. I was super normal.”
I find this hilarious, almost offensive. Gwen Morris is not normal. She is energy, thrust, all forward momentum.
Carson says, “Your number-one request today, ‘Bubblegum,’ is next!” Screams drown him out. I change the channel.
The “Sweat” video soundstage is designed to look like a gym. There are ellipticals, yoga mats, muscly men pumping weights. I jog on a treadmill, my breasts bound by a tangerine sports bra. The director follows them with his eyes. He twists to glance at the monitor, then back to me.
I watch the playback, crossing my arms. Sonny leans over my shoulder to watch, too. There is a strange dissonance: myself, there, the coiled-up power of my voice, and the way I feel. “Don’t I look a little confused here, Sonny?” I ask, pointing to my face. “I look like I have no idea what’s going on. What is she thinking?” I rub my finger over my face on the monitor.
When I faint on cue, the actor playing my love interest runs over and squirts water over my chest. Originally, he was supposed to give me mouth-to-mouth, but I pull the director aside. My chest is where their eyes go anyway. Why not light a bonfire on it?
The actor’s face reminds me of a chair: square and functional. During a break, he tells me his name is Drew. He’s twenty-five, new to Los Angeles, working at a bar on weekends and living with six roommates in a seedy part of downtown. He says the city reminds him of grime collecting under a dresser, only revealed once you move it to a new corner.
I imagine having sex with him. While I wait for the album release, I fill every empty space inside myself with other people. Wes Kingston, this actor, strangers I pass on the street, characters I’ve seen on-screen. When these unbidden thoughts arrive, I darken the rooms in my mind like I’m letting down the curtains. There, I can want all the things I am ashamed to want, explore every sensation I haven’t experienced. There, shapes form stranger shapes.
“Is my hand good here?” Drew asks now. His calluses brush my waist.
“That’s fine.”
The track begins to play again. Dancers gyrate on the ellipticals, and I lip-synch over my own voice. Lights descend from above. I stare directly into the camera lens, and it unfurls like a dark flower.
Men will confess they’ve jerked off to me in this video. Sometimes they are sheepish and embarrassed, describing teenage lust. Sometimes they are boastful and territorial, as if their eyes can still push me into bed. I never know what to do when they tell me this.
Gwen calls. I can’t believe it. She says, “I’m on the bus right now, so I might break up a bit if we go into a tunnel.”
In the background, I hear the steady groan of an engine, the suction of an open window.
“That’s fine. I don’t have much time anyway.” I’m refilling my water bottle in the bathroom sink of the studio. I lean toward the mirror and pluck out stray eyebrow hairs with my fingers. We are both silent for a few moments. I’m not sure we remember how to talk to each other.
“I’m so tired,” I eventually say.
“Yeah, I’m so fucking tired, too. I might collapse right here, honestly.” She tells me she rehearsed for the tour nonstop for three weeks and now she can’t fall asleep at night. She gets an hour at most. Her dancers like to drink on their bus after shows, but she can’t manage it. She’s too exhausted. Now she’s turned down too many invitations, so they all avoid her.
“They probably think you don’t want to be friends with them.”
“But I do.”
“They’re just intimidated by you. You have to initiate.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “It’s my face. It’s my face that’s the problem. I’m serious. I remember, when we were together in Los Angeles, people would come up to us all the time to ask for directions. No one ever comes up to me when I’m alone, but with you, they always do. There’s something about your face. You have a very friendly face.”
“Everyone always tells me I look like someone they know, but they can’t remember who. They always ask if we’ve met before.”
Through the phone, I can hear the bus pull into a gas station, her murmuring to someone beside her. “Anyway, it’s fine. My face naturally repels people and it’s fine.” She sounds so sad as she says this. Her beauty is remote, something to observe from a safe distance, as if she’s surrounded by sensors and bulletproof glass. “So, I was shooting this cover.”
“What cover?”
“Rolling Stone.”
“Oh, shit.”
“I know.” She describes the set for me. A photographer who looks like a hawk, always swooping down to adjust her. A bathtub swaying with gallons of milk and floating Lucky Charms marshmallows. She looks naked inside it, but the opaque waterline is just above her breasts. She’s instructed to place one thigh on the rim, so she does it. There’s no one there but the photographer and Mike, who loves the shot, says it’s provocative.
“Of course, I wanted to look beautiful,” she says. “I really, really wanted to look beautiful. Now I’m not sure how I feel.”
I tell her it’s okay. I probably would have posed nude in the bathtub if the photographer had asked me, and this thought is woven with strands of pride and shame. I have trouble separating them—they are too tightly bound. I’m uncomfortable with the attention I receive from older men, but I’ve also been taught to anticipate it. And how can one look be two different temperatures at once? I can see this is what she’s struggling with, too.
“Anyway, let’s talk about you,” she says.
“Why? There’s not much, compared to you.”
“Stop it.”
“Well, Lolli wants this song called ‘Sweat’ to be the first single. We shot the video last week.” What else is there to say? “Have you watched anything good?”
“No, I have no time. The dancers were watching an episode of Buffy and I caught a little of that. You know what I think sometimes? I think it’s like we’re living in a tunnel. Like the world is happening around us, and we’re moving, too, but separated from it all by these thick walls. What do people even like these days? You know? What’s even happening?”
“You are what’s happening.”
She takes a while to respond. I wonder if she’s looking out the window. She’ll be on a highway now, somewhere on the northeastern coast, maybe even close to where I grew up—gray beaches, sharks circling beneath clueless seals.
“Maybe,” she says reluctantly. “There must be other things.”
The Rolling Stone cover is kerosene. The bathtub, the milky thigh. She’s asked about it in every interview. I will eventually be asked similar, recycled questions: Do you think you set the right example? Is this what a role model does? Do you feel responsible? Don’t you want to be good? Aren’t beauty and goodness synonymous? Aren’t we conditioned to believe this?
On that cover, Gwen looks like she has sex. She hasn’t. But she is captured in a moment, her head tilted, eyes bright, thinking something that must be so delicious, so erotic, it lights her on fire. America is depraved and crazed, so it can’t get enough. It digs its teeth into her.