to be in Munich on Saturday.”
Jean, the perfect boy whom everyone wanted and no one could have, said, “Munich!” and drained his wine glass.
Hubert, the sinewy curlicue, glowered at Cleo, whom he could not forgive for wanting him so blatantly. “Don’t let us keep you.”
“We’ll get something,” I said. “We’ve already gotten
something.
A few tracks.”
A deer bellowed into the night. Another echoed him. “Poor prick,” said Ethan.
I kept the thought to myself that the deer were an embodiment or emanation of Simon, calling to me, barking himself hoarse from some alp. I saved up that thought to tell him later, during the night we had planned in Paris. I also kept the thought to myself that the record was going to blaze up, phoenix-like, at the eleventh hour. I knew that this would happen, but I knew that saying it would seem like the worst sort of whistling in the dark, the witless confidence of the ingénue, the outsider. No one would trust me if I told them how beautiful it was going to be.
Instead, I said, “Ethan and I have been working on some new arrangements,” which was a lie, but it wouldn’t be by morning.
Ethan winked at me. He knew that meant that I had enough coke to get us through the night. He tugged on his ear, coughed, lit a cigarette. I missed Jonah—his trichotillomania, his socks, his bad breath, which smelled to me like concentration. I missed the missing Buddhists. But Ethan was almost strange enough, something of a eunuch vibe to him, and he was willing to stay up all night, every night, as long as it took, as long as I needed. He brought paper and pencils, nicely sharpened, to our sessions so that I might consider writing down the lyrics. He also brought extra erasers, schoolhouse-red rectangles. He gave me entirely nonseductive neck rubs at three in morning. To myself, I called him the River Boat Captain. I saved that to tell Simon, too.
“I will bring out the cheese,” said Gigi, turning gracefully from the table to head toward the chateau, which, when lit up, looked like something out of an Advent calendar.
Ethan leaned back in his chair, cigarette between his teeth, stretching his big arms to take in the night. “Shove your negativity, Cleo. Music is love. And war.”
A deer—the same one?—barked, barked again.
You might think from this exchange that we didn’t like one another, but in fact the opposite was true: the seven of us had fallen deeply in love, which may have been part of the problem. I hadn’t known any of them before, though some of them knew each other. They all knew
Whale;
they had seen me in concert. When we met at lunch in the garden the first day, the air was thick with unvoiced opinions, not all of them bad. The first thing we had agreed on was that we liked the chateau. It was small and gently dilapidated. Wasps lived in the rafters of the music room. Ethan was allergic to wasp stings; every day, he seemed to be risking his life for art, eyeing the rafters warily as we all worked, half expecting death to swoop down from the heavens. The walls were damp, we felt damp in our clothes, the furniture seemed sodden. The small, algae-infested pool, homeopathic, pushed the dampness away for a few hours in the afternoon, if it wasn’t raining. Our days ambled around a small, circular track: get up from our damp beds, bread and coffee laid out by Gigi in the big kitchen, quiet midmorning time to stretch and read and smoke, lunch in the echoing dining room, trying to make music into the evening, often into the night, in the music room. Ethan and I, up after everyone else had gone to bed, trying things that didn’t work, barking until morning in that vast room with the Persian carpets everywhere, all full of cigarette burns, stained, torn. The long, wavy windows onto the garden.
The magic had come on us slowly. It grew, binding us together, and then, all at once, after a few weeks, it set. The chateau became our submarine; we found one morning
Jean, the perfect boy whom everyone wanted and no one could have, said, “Munich!” and drained his wine glass.
Hubert, the sinewy curlicue, glowered at Cleo, whom he could not forgive for wanting him so blatantly. “Don’t let us keep you.”
“We’ll get something,” I said. “We’ve already gotten
something.
A few tracks.”
A deer bellowed into the night. Another echoed him. “Poor prick,” said Ethan.
I kept the thought to myself that the deer were an embodiment or emanation of Simon, calling to me, barking himself hoarse from some alp. I saved up that thought to tell him later, during the night we had planned in Paris. I also kept the thought to myself that the record was going to blaze up, phoenix-like, at the eleventh hour. I knew that this would happen, but I knew that saying it would seem like the worst sort of whistling in the dark, the witless confidence of the ingénue, the outsider. No one would trust me if I told them how beautiful it was going to be.
Instead, I said, “Ethan and I have been working on some new arrangements,” which was a lie, but it wouldn’t be by morning.
Ethan winked at me. He knew that meant that I had enough coke to get us through the night. He tugged on his ear, coughed, lit a cigarette. I missed Jonah—his trichotillomania, his socks, his bad breath, which smelled to me like concentration. I missed the missing Buddhists. But Ethan was almost strange enough, something of a eunuch vibe to him, and he was willing to stay up all night, every night, as long as it took, as long as I needed. He brought paper and pencils, nicely sharpened, to our sessions so that I might consider writing down the lyrics. He also brought extra erasers, schoolhouse-red rectangles. He gave me entirely nonseductive neck rubs at three in morning. To myself, I called him the River Boat Captain. I saved that to tell Simon, too.
“I will bring out the cheese,” said Gigi, turning gracefully from the table to head toward the chateau, which, when lit up, looked like something out of an Advent calendar.
Ethan leaned back in his chair, cigarette between his teeth, stretching his big arms to take in the night. “Shove your negativity, Cleo. Music is love. And war.”
A deer—the same one?—barked, barked again.
You might think from this exchange that we didn’t like one another, but in fact the opposite was true: the seven of us had fallen deeply in love, which may have been part of the problem. I hadn’t known any of them before, though some of them knew each other. They all knew
Whale;
they had seen me in concert. When we met at lunch in the garden the first day, the air was thick with unvoiced opinions, not all of them bad. The first thing we had agreed on was that we liked the chateau. It was small and gently dilapidated. Wasps lived in the rafters of the music room. Ethan was allergic to wasp stings; every day, he seemed to be risking his life for art, eyeing the rafters warily as we all worked, half expecting death to swoop down from the heavens. The walls were damp, we felt damp in our clothes, the furniture seemed sodden. The small, algae-infested pool, homeopathic, pushed the dampness away for a few hours in the afternoon, if it wasn’t raining. Our days ambled around a small, circular track: get up from our damp beds, bread and coffee laid out by Gigi in the big kitchen, quiet midmorning time to stretch and read and smoke, lunch in the echoing dining room, trying to make music into the evening, often into the night, in the music room. Ethan and I, up after everyone else had gone to bed, trying things that didn’t work, barking until morning in that vast room with the Persian carpets everywhere, all full of cigarette burns, stained, torn. The long, wavy windows onto the garden.
The magic had come on us slowly. It grew, binding us together, and then, all at once, after a few weeks, it set. The chateau became our submarine; we found one morning
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