Rebecca Makkai: Music for Wartime

They remind me of someone.

Leo should go home, it’s obvious — all his compositions are the same anemic jazz in various minor keys — but our matchmaking has spared him. It’s Markus, the sculptor, the great crier, that they eighty-six. His Love sculpture is incredible, really: a three-foot-tall heart made of bars, like a rounded cage. He coated each wire of the framework in lumpy clay, then painted the whole thing bright blue. Inside the heart was a live dove he had procured at a pet store in town with his fifty dollars in “funding.” The problem was that the dove, stuck inside the cage for six hours waiting to be judged, had made a fairly convincing public bathroom of the heart floor. The judges used that as their excuse: “You didn’t plan ahead. You didn’t think about longevity. We wanted love, and you showed us a sad old dove. We wanted excitement, and you showed us excrement.” Kenneth had written that one down for them on a note card.

Markus gives us a nice monologue about how they can’t expect his best work when there isn’t even time for the clay to dry, how he’s more about emotional realism anyway, and you can’t do emotional realism on a schedule. He says the colony has been good for his soul, and then he cries and tells us how famous he’s going to be.

Beth has left me a note on the refrigerator door: “Don’t eat risotto. It has my germs.”

She hasn’t told me she’s sick, and there are no mountains of Kleenex lying around, but maybe it’s true. I’d be the last to know. I read the note again. If this is some message about the status of our relationship, or some cryptic directive as to how I can salvage things, it’s utterly lost on me. The risotto is half-gone anyway.

I write “OK!” on the bottom of the note, and I add a smiley face and a heart. Then I think better of it and rip off the bottom edge, but some of her writing rips off too, and she’ll notice. I take the whole note and tear it into little shreds and drop them in the garbage.

Even after all our work, by the end of the shoot Kenneth has decided to drop the love arc. “We’re way more into Leo’s falling-out with Gordy, and I think we’ll want to paint Astrid as kind of a loner, so that everyone roots for Sabrinah,” he says. “She’s going to win.” They’ll never use the beautiful footage of Leo blushing, just like they’ll throw away 99 percent of everything that happens. Those are the last four standing: Beautiful Leo, Gordy the Mediocre Painter, Sabrinah the Shouter, and Astrid the Blonde.

We have two days left on the shoot. They’ll be told that the final prompt is “November,” then do their last interviews and shoot the promos for the finale. They’ll go home to work on a portfolio of five pieces, preparing to come back before the judges and the almighty agent to present their work and make a case for their careers. They’ll tell us all to love them, to care about their work, to see that they alone have embodied November.

Of course, it won’t actually be November. It’s only June now. They’ll have ten weeks off and we’ll shoot the finale the last week of September. But it will air in late November, and that’s all that counts: not what time it is here, but what time it is on the other side of the TV screen.

By the end, I never see Beth awake. I don’t know if we’re broken up, if we’re reconciled, if we’re the same as we always were. All I have is her unconscious body, beside me in the dark when I get into bed and beside me in the earliest gray light when I roll out. It might be a nice way to fade out of things: a life-size Beth doll to wean me off the real thing.

On the last day of the shoot, I’m up in the house’s attic, searching among piles of abandoned furniture for a rug, since one of the judges spilled coffee on the cream one. I look out the window, down to the grounds, and there, back near the woods, with no one else around, Leo and Astrid are kissing. Passionately, but slowly, like they’ve done it before, his hands in her hair, her hands in his back pockets. A giddy flood of adrenaline sends me halfway down the stairs on my way to tell Kenneth, before I stop and think. Kenneth would love me for it forever. I could maybe get someone to lug a camera up the narrow stairs and shoot them before they walk away. I wonder for a long time afterward why I don’t. It might be because I hate my job, or it might be because I still believe in love.

Instead I walk back up the stairs, as quietly as I can, as if they could hear me way out there on the grounds. I lean against the window frame and watch them. It’s a movie, and I’m the only one in the world with a ticket.

And then there’s this: Did we make them fall in love, or were they already on their way? And if it’s all our fault, then are they really even in love?

Ines carries my weight for the last interviews. “Tell us why you’re going to win,” she says. “Tell us why Leo deserves to lose.”

Afterward, she asks me what’s wrong. “I’m just not sure what I’m going home to,” I say. “Back in L.A.”

She thinks I’m talking about jobs, and she tells me she’ll be working on the new one about anorexics gaining weight back. She thinks she can hook me up.

We shoot the artists packing and leaving, we shoot them looking out the backseat window of a moving car, and then suddenly we’re done. Instead of going home to Beth, I stay for the party. The camera guys do actual keg stands on the lawn. Ines says, “They’re living out their fraternity fantasies.” We’re standing on the porch watching, and she’s well on her way to drunk. She says, “I’m going to sleep with Blake tonight.” Blake is the hairiest one.

“Go for it,” I say, and attempt to get drunk myself. I won’t miss the place at all.

In September, Astrid, I think, will bring back delicate glass leaves and gray bubbles. Gordy will paint empty city streets. Sabrinah will dance like an empty tree. Leo will play sad, beautiful, modern things on the piano that only I will know are for Astrid. And I’m certain I’ll be coming back here alone.

Before the shoot starts, Ines and I and everyone lower on the totem pole will run around making the place look like November: desolate and cold and fading. We’ll stand on ladders to pull leaves off the trees. I’ve done it before. I’ve done stranger things, too. We’ll spray some of the remaining leaves yellow, some red. We’ll make everyone wear a coat. We’ll kill the grass with herbicide.

It’s sick and it’s soulless, but it’s one of the addictive things about my job: Here, you can force the world to be something it’s not.

We’ll take the four contestants one by one into the foyer and put them on that ridiculous chair, and ask them, Why do you deserve to win? How passionate do you feel? What do you love about your work? How much do you love your work? What is this sucker punch, love, that ruins us so completely?

And can you say it in a full sentence?

I n the fourth week of drought, at the third and final performance of the Roundabout Traveling Circus, the elephant keeled over dead. Instead of stepping on the tasseled stool, she gave a thick, descending trumpet, lowered one knee, and fell sideways. The girl in the white spangled leotard screamed and backed away. The trainer dropped his stick and dashed forward with a sound to match the elephant’s. The show could not continue.