Wonderland by Stacey D'Erasmo Page A

his left ear, leaning forward, listening, his bad foot twitching. In his studio, he always played the music loud, filling the room with long, melodic loops of sadness. The inevitable next question. No, he didn’t. It’s true that he never cared how loud or long I slammed away at the guitar, starting at twelve, in Wellfleet and Trondheim and Rome and London and on St. Mark’s Place. True that he helped sell T-shirts in the days of The Squares, brought his latest girlfriends to shows, sat in the front, attentive, tapping a finger on the table. He has always liked my voice, that’s true, too; he liked the depth and oddness of it, the roughness. That’s his line drawing of an anxious little elephant on the front of
Bang Bang.
His drawing skills were extraordinarily fluid; he covered the walls of our rooms, as children, with menageries of creatures real and invented. But the music didn’t touch him; he likes a melody. He balked at
Whale,
squinted at
Bang Bang,
was more or less polite about
The Pillars.
When I sent him an early mix of
Wonderland,
he emailed me, “So happy you’re working again, Annie. Seems like an awful lot of thought went into this.” I mean. The inevitable next question: yes, of course I saw the connection with Simon. No kidding. He translated parts of
Whale
into Arabic, read me his teenage poetry over the phone, laughing at himself, although the poetry was pretty good. Knowing, which happens slowly, takes you only so far. The listening, which happens in an instant, is difficult to refuse.

At the Chateau
    T HE BARKING OF the deer fucking in the woods outside the chateau was very loud. They were especially active at twilight, which was also the time they usually grazed. When they fucked they made harsh, bellowing sounds that seemed to bear no relation to pleasure. Gigi, who’d heard the males’ strangled calls, said their veins stood out on their necks as they craned forward, attenuated, straining, barking hoarsely.
    “Such beautiful creatures,” she said, “making such a terrible sound in such a terrible way. How can that be?”
    “Like us,” said Cleo, my backup singer, who was also a painter. She pushed at the soft candle wax that had dripped onto the table, frowning. She had strong, square hands, a strong, square voice; she was expensive, and she knew it.
    The others—Ethan, the producer; David, the sound engineer; Jean, the bassist; and Hubert, the all-around rhythm section—made demurring murmurs that hovered soggily in the humid July evening. Gigi, the concierge and major-domo of this domain, maintained a judicious silence, head tilted toward the woods. Condensation beaded on the wine glasses, the water glasses.
    The seven of us were at dinner at the long table in the overgrown garden. It was our last week, and we were failing. We had come to the chateau to make
Bang Bang,
my second album, which was going to take me even higher. Ezra, my new friend and patron, had arranged this, shaking the chateau out of the folds of his robes. Legendary records had been made there, legendary things had happened, and more legendary, darker things were rumored to have happened. But so far, for us, nothing was happening.
    “They’re just looking for some touch,” said Ethan, spooning sugar into his tea. Large and bald with faintly pointy ears, Ethan was the genius producer of that moment, the Magnum, the Magus, the Dream, the man who knew your other self, your past lives, your shadow side, and could coax it all onto tape. When he was working, he went off his medication, which meant that sometimes he slept all day and sometimes he didn’t sleep at all. At the chateau—he’d been there before, of course, many times—it was his custom not to sleep.
    “But are they ever getting it?” said Gigi. “They sound like they’re dying.”
    Cleo molded the soft candle wax into a small, naïve head, rolling it in her palm. “We’d better get it tomorrow,” she said. “We’d better get something. I have