Back inside the house, Josh was laughing, and showing something on his laptop to Helen. He extended his arm and brought Vanessa to his side—she still had her coat on, and her small woolen cap—and held her next to him, so that the three of them stood together, watching whatever it was they were watching. Alan stayed put. He wasn’t hostile to technology. It was the dominance of the screen he disliked, the ubiquity of these canny icons, the fluorescent saints staring down in luminous surveillance from every wall. The screen had replaced the window. The abolition of privacy combined with the intensification of privacy—everyone coddling his little relationship with his little device. That wasn’t his line—it was Vanessa’s, and he was misquoting it a bit: she had written that “technology threatens the abolition of privacy and simultaneously promises the privatization of privacy,” a phrase he didn’t understand at first, it had to be explained to him; and which he then considered pure genius, of course. (The conference was written up in The Boston Globe, a piece that quoted Van’s grand statement. He suddenly realized that it must have been the conference where Vanessa and Josh first met.)
Alan looked over at the three of them: children, really. His first task was to bring Helen and Vanessa together after their foolish squabble about the bowl, but he was embarrassed to do it with Josh there. The sisters seemed to have made some kind of reconciliation, anyway. “We met the neighbors,” he said instead. “They go to a church in Malta.” No one seemed impressed or surprised, they were still looking at the screen, so he added: “Better to worship at a Maltese church than at the Second Baptist Church here in town.”
“Hey, you made that joke earlier,” said Helen, not looking up. “Disqualified.”
“And no one appreciated it sufficiently,” said Alan. “So you get it again.”
“The Second Baptist Church in Houston is, in fact, the second largest church in the United States,” said Josh. “Weird, eh? It’s a monster.”
“How does he know this stuff?” asked Alan.
“Vanessa has been to that church in Malta,” said Josh. Van looked awkward, and Alan thought that whatever Josh’s intentions, exposing her like that was a bit unkind. He must resist the temptation to come to his elder daughter’s defense. She could look after herself. He’d try to act as that Pope, the liberal one from the 1960s, put it: see everything, correct a little.
Vanessa explained, in a soft voice, that she’d been curious, as a neighbor and “as a philosopher, if that’s not too pompous,” about the kind of church the Dents went to, and “to see just how crazy and science-fictiony it was.” The congregation was very kind, surprisingly liberal, the sermon quite intelligent, and she saw not one but two of her Skidmore students there. It’s important to stay open, she added.
“You’re not suddenly going to get religious, are you?” asked Helen. She imbued “religious” with several shades of disdain.
“Well, religious is just someone else’s definition of what is sacred,” said Vanessa. “Music is a kind of religion for you.”
“I guess you’re right,” said Helen, minimizing the appearance of concession by paddling in her bag for her BlackBerry, pulling it out, and frowning at it. She was deciding to say something, perhaps: she closed her eyes, and stretched her long neck. She looked like a mother, thought Alan, for no reason he could quite explain.
“I might move from my current church, actually,” said Helen. “Farewell, Sony.”
“Well, this is news,” said Vanessa, looking naively at Alan.
Leaving Sony, she explained, was the right thing to do at this point in her career, after several successes; she wanted to travel less. If she moved now, she was still young enough to build another career in the same industry. Corporate life didn’t really suit her, she said, with an unconvincing grimace.
To Vanessa, Helen seemed as she had been since they were teenagers: intimidating, sure-footed, intimate only when under pressure. Even now, a mother, she carried with her the glamour of her erotic history, so busy and extensive, and so different from—until Josh!—Vanessa’s pallid, intermittent experiments. All those rumors: Helen used to hint at intimacies with a famous producer, a guitarist, a singer. The dark-haired guy from Crash Test Dummies … Josh righted the imbalance, thank God. Helen had a remarkable authority of otherness that their father possessed in abundance. Authority of otherness was the phrase that had just formed in her head, as she watched her sister being theatrically authoritative. Like Dad, Helen had the ability to turn away from the world, from distraction and entanglements, and become the work she was doing, to care about it absolutely while she was performing it, to the exclusion of everything else. Alan had little fatherly authority of the traditional kind. He rarely lost his temper, wasn’t irrational or physically imposing. He never bullied. His authority had to do with his ability to turn away from them and become someone else, someone who was not a father. It was the power of banishment, a royal canceling, an unblessing—kingly, in that sense, and queenly in Helen’s case. In their work, they showed they could do one thing, one thing only, and master it, and she felt this singular mastery as a reproach to her own lack of worldly success. Did she lack focus, ambition, sheer strength? Had she ever had real strength as a philosopher? Maybe for a brief period when she was working on her Ph.D. Maybe then, for about two years, at Princeton, she cared only about philosophy, maybe in those two years she was a kind of athlete of thought, hard-edged, single-minded, possessing great physical and mental stamina. Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing—she’d never read that Kierkegaard book (when you’d read one Kierkegaard you’d read them all, and The Sickness Unto Death was quite enough for her), but the title mocked her from the bookshelves. She didn’t will one thing only. She had no purity of heart. She didn’t will anything much, right now, except to continue to possess Josh. Anyway, philosophy wasn’t, couldn’t ever be, just one thing. But neither was music, or building a company. So what was this otherness they both had? Was it merely the ability to will a single obliterating triumph, rather than make do with several daily compromises, the very compromises that constituted life as she understood it?
Vanessa got up to go and make some coffee. She remembered spending a boring afternoon in her father’s office. She was too young to understand what was going on, but was impressed by how utterly transformed Alan was, once at work—it was as if he’d put on a magic cape. He spoke a language that was almost foreign, a closed, coherent system, and he spoke it with fluent power. He expected a junior employee to entertain his nine-year-old daughter; twice, he looked up from his desk and looked at her and right through her: not coldly, but with efficient neglect. She imagined that Helen, so like their father in several ways, functioned similarly when at Sony.
It was Josh who drew Helen out: “Anyone who knows about the technology can see the music industry establishment is way behind the curve. Right? In, like, ten years there’ll be no record stores, and CDs will be as outmoded as old 78s.”
“It may not be quite as fast as that,” said Helen, bending forward as she spoke, more animated now, the surpassed BlackBerry forgotten in her left hand, “but that’s the future, yeah. Basically. A move away from the studios, also away from radio, and toward the computer, the phone, the screen.”
“‘Video really did kill the radio star,” Josh said with excitement.
“‘In my mind and in my car,’” Helen sang, with her hand over her mouth.
“It’s a famous song, Dad,” explained Helen. Her eyes were gleaming. “The point is, the studio isn’t relevant any longer, or won’t be, won’t be the unit of power—not in the same way. The musicians will have greater power—”
“Because, going forward, they’ll probably be recording and producing and selling themselves all at once,” added Josh. “They’ll own the label.”
“Right. And there’s justice—for decades the studios essentially shafted their musicians, imposed punitive contracts, often mismanaged the marketing. Malcolm McLaren with the Sex Pistols. And what about Motown—most of those musicians got almost nothing for their work. They had to sue Berry Gordy for royalties, yet he made a packet from the label. Do you know why you hardly ever hear crash cymbals on the classic Motown songs?”
“No, but you will tell me,” said Josh, smiling. Quite flirtatiously, Alan thought, with sudden alarm.
“Because many of the recordings were done in what were basically the living rooms and basements of ordinary Detroit houses. The mics weren’t good enough—crash cymbals would have overwhelmed them. Actually I feel pretty utopian about this. I’ve never been a producer, I started as basically a company accountant, because I had a degree in economics, and supposedly knew about money, and became ‘an executive,’ whatever that means. I think we’re on the verge of a moment when someone like me, who was traditionally considered at best a suit and at worst the enemy, could become the ally of really great new musicians. I want to liberate them to do their best stuff. Back to a Motown sort of model, but without the exploitation. A revolution.”
“That does sound utopian,” said Vanessa, who had come into the room with the coffeepot. She wanted to sound as neutral as possible.
“It has to be utopian, because I’d be running a business that also functioned, at least at first, like a philanthropic foundation.”
“But it couldn’t be a charity, it surely has to be a business?” asked Alan.
“Oh, by the way, Dad could be involved,” Helen said jubilantly.
“Would you?” asked Vanessa. Alan shrugged, opened his hands to the air. For a second, with both women looking at him expectantly, he was forty years old and they were young children, asking nothing more than whether he would come outside and push the swing he’d attached to the massive dusky copper beech. Mummy was bored of doing it. Nothing more: he could do that.
“Yes, I might well,” he answered.
“What would you do?” asked Vanessa. Alan said that he wasn’t sure, but that perhaps his experience in building and managing a reasonably successful company from scratch would be of help.
For some reason, a statement that would have been easy for him to utter in a familiar context made him awkward, in this house in Saratoga Springs, with another generation, perhaps two other generations, watching him. He added that he had a few business rules that had worked well for him over the years. He might get them into a book one day. Josh asked what they were, and again Alan felt strangely shy. “Well, do you know the real reason why we beat the Germans in the Second World War?”
“Wait, who’s we…? I’m just kidding,” said Josh.
“Because we had better supply lines than the Germans did. That’s a fact. The British were more efficient than the hyperefficient Germans … Well, the same goes for civilian life. You’re only as good as your suppliers, all the way down the chain. Sort out who supplies you, find the people you can really trust, and that’s half of the work done there.”
“Interesting,” said Josh, turning away.
“Dad is famous for his ‘rules,’ in our family,” said Vanessa happily. She loved being with her family. It was all she wanted, really. “Some of them make sense and others are extremely mysterious. Who wants coffee?”
“In what way mysterious?” asked Alan, mock-woundedly, smiling at Vanessa.
“Well, the one about how you should always back your car into the drive, because the journey out is more important than the return. I think that counts as practically a piece of metaphysics in the business world.” Everyone was amused, and Alan realized that this was the first time he’d heard Josh laugh—the lad seemed to suck in air even as he expelled it.
“You also used to say,” added Helen, “the one thing a parent can reliably do for his children is to give them swimming lessons, so they don’t kill themselves by drowning.” There was—so Alan felt—a quick silence in the room, and Helen moved on rapidly. “And you used to tease Van, when she was at her most vegetarian, that it’s very hard, when eating a roast chicken, to think it wasn’t expressly created to be eaten.”
“Ha, I’m not sure that’s a rule, exactly,” said Alan. Vanessa, passing coffee, added a few more: Dad always assumed that people who had bidets in their bathrooms were into “kinky stuff.” And much as he admired Nelson Mandela, it was an uncomfortable fact—Van emphasized the word “fact”—that the quality of South African white wine had declined since the end of apartheid. And he was oddly proud of never having had hiccups.
“You’ve never had the hiccups?” asked Josh.
“Not to my knowledge.”
“That’s a weirdly cool achievement,” he said.
“You know, I think so, too,” said Alan, unsure just how sarcastic Josh was being.