Rebecca Makkai: Music for Wartime

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.