2007
1.
Tom, Myra, Julie 2
One night Julie and I got smashed at Authentic Korean and told Gordon and his wife, Cora, we were engaged. We’d made the decision a week ago. We were going to test marriage, Julie explained to them, like a new pharmaceutical, for side effects like weight gain and sexual dysfunction, and if everything was under control after three or four years, we were going to have three children. We’d been dating nineteen months.
We made a disclosure that both shamed and delighted us: For the past six of those months, we’d been speculating about what our children would be like. We’d invented elaborate personalities for all three, given them names. As we described them, Gordon produced a black pen from the pouch of his yellow hoodie. “You guys are awesome,” he said, and began to draw, dedicating one paper napkin to each child. An animator, he knew what he was doing, and it was hard not to believe in what he drew. It might have been the first grave error of the evening, letting Gordon draw our kids. It’s a principle from Islam, and Protestantism: There are some beings you just don’t make images of.
There was Tom, our eldest, whom we imagined Julie birthing in 2011. He looked ten. He stood beside a chemistry set consisting of a Bunsen burner and a single flaming tube. His sweater was V-necked, his mouth a small, vaguely anus-like vertical line. The second napkin was devoted to Myra, our middle child. She wore a leotard and held a parasol. In lieu of a burner, she came with a swan. On the third napkin was Julie 2, named for her mother, but a musician, like me. She sat in a cubical playpen, playing the cello.
With real children, once they’re born, you love them even if they were a bad idea. With these children, it was like that too; we couldn’t help but love them once they’d been permitted to exist. I pounded Gordon on the shoulder. Julie yanked off his baseball cap and threw it at his head. These were gestures of gratitude. We stood behind him, looking at our offspring spread on the table by the empty glasses. Julie folded them and slipped them in her purple bag.
An hour later, we stood side by side in our bedroom and taped the triptych to the pale green wall. It would have been embarrassing to tape the napkins to the fridge, as if we were showing off, but we decided we liked them here, where no one could look at them but us. Beneath the three new members of our family, we kissed.
Then we did something strange: We linked hands and speed-walked to the bathroom. We’d never had sex in the bathroom before. But we both knew that we didn’t want to do it in front of the kids, where the eyes on the napkins could see us. It was shocking to me, and I think to Julie too, how real to us the children were.
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Over the course of a year and a half, Julie and I had kept performing for each other, but the performances had become play. Being onstage or on camera, making strangers like watching us better than they liked watching other people, this was the joy we’d spent much of life pursuing. But now we could perform for each other without worrying if the performance was original or distinguished. A day came on which I realized, and confirmed, and reconfirmed, that my moments of greatest happiness in the past twelve hours had been: when we’d mixed a whey shake in the early morning before going to the gym and spat it into the kitchen sink, pretending to vomit; and after dinner, when she’d let me smell a minor dreadlock that had formed unbidden in her hair.
One weekend not much later, at a farm stand in Oxnard, a stiff Pacific wind had lifted her hair into a bower over her head, and she’d talked about how badly she wanted to be a different kind of celebrity from the kind she was. She wanted to be somebody who said things that were made up, to leave behind the guileless world of animal documentarians, and debut in the shrewder society of scripted entertainment. Steve Irwin had been killed by a stingray, but she didn’t want his throne. The comic remove from which she approached nature was all part of a five-year plan: build a following, build ratings; be credited with the crossover appeal of Julie vs. Animals; quietly go on auditions; wait for the right offer; leave Animals for a drama series. I could hear both the exhilaration and the fear of failure in her voice, above the wind.
I liked her ambition. But I didn’t want to be taken care of by a rich person. It was the confession itself that crowned the romance for me, the dropping of her guard. A week later, I woke her up in the middle of the night and proposed, and she cried, and then she wore a ring I’d borrowed money to buy.
After we had sex on the bathroom floor, Julie removed the napkins from the bedroom wall, so that, in the future, we would be able to have sex in bed, and placed them high on the bathroom mirror, reinforcing the new arrangement with extra tape. Then we had to get ready to go to a party. The party was being hosted by the new owner of the science channel that broadcast Julie vs. Animals.
Ratings had lately been adequate but unspectacular. The very notion of Julie vs. Animals being canceled, after two seasons, was too dark for us to discuss. Julie had been making payments on this house for only twenty months, and I still hadn’t managed to find a steady, non-Shapeshifter source of income. It came down to this: Our mission, for the evening, was to charm Jeremy, the science channel’s new owner.
We were still drunk from Authentic Korean, but we tried to refresh ourselves by splashing cold water on our faces. We flicked water at each other, Julie starting it, I retaliating, to prove, I think, that we were fun people, that despite the weirdness of our recent behavior, we were not becoming one of those cute but disconcerting couples that live, like schizophrenic individuals, in their own tiny worlds with their own points of reference, loyal to their own inscrutable codes. That we were not only the awkward, self-conscious, overly performative ex-dweebs we knew ourselves to be, but also enchanters.
The master bathroom of Julie’s house—I still thought of it as Julie’s house—had two sinks, side by side. We could wash our faces and brush our teeth at the same time and console each other about how we looked. We called the sinks the battle stations, because of the Star Trek/Battlestar Galactica feeling we derived from speaking to each other while standing parallel. And tonight’s party would be a scene of battle. In addition to the new owner, there would be people who, in the darkest sanctums of our souls, we considered cool. These people could not be allowed to suspect we thought about them in bathrooms.
In the wide mirror, beneath our imaginary kids, I could see excitement and dread in our reflections. I saw a twenty-eight-year-old and a twenty-nine-year-old assessing the persistence of youth’s afterglow in their faces. I saw a couple calculating its worth in the eyes of the world.
I could not say this, so I said: “My cheeks look fat tonight. I feel like when God designed me, he was like, ‘I’ll concentrate fat in his face.’ I feel like that’s what He does with Jews in general, to make them look like giant babies, so you don’t want to kill them.”
“You look skinny,” said Julie. “If you have cheeks it means you won’t look like a skull person when you’re old.” She tamped her lipstick on a yellow Post-it that bore her notes from an interview with a game warden.
“And it’s not just Jews people hate,” she continued. “One of my great-great-uncles was slaughtered by the Turks. We’re a two-genocide couple.”
“Your boobs look really beautiful,” I said.
“Really?”
“They’re like these magical glowing orbs.”
“You know what’s magic?” She sat on the toilet and lifted her silver smock above her belly. “My fat can sing Louis Armstrong songs.” She squeezed two folds of stomach fat into a mouth and made it move while she sang “What a Wonderful World.”
“I can do that too,” I said.
“That’s absurd.” She shook her head. “Your fat can’t sing Armstrong.”
“No, but it can sing James Taylor.” If her stomach fat, dark, hairless, was Louis Armstrong’s mouth when squeezed into motion, my stomach fat, pale, covered in short black hairs, was James Taylor’s mouth. I made my fat sing “Carolina in My Mind.”
Julie reached for her laptop, which sat on the floor by the toilet. Googling each other before we went out was one of our gearing-up-for-battle rituals. If people were going to look us up when they got home, we wanted to know what they’d see. We wanted to know who, outside our two-person world, we actually were.
Julie typed and waited for the screen to load. “I’m sorry, sweetie. That f*cktard article about you is still at the top.” She spoke mournfully, pronouncing f*cktard with gentleness, as if mindful of the French suffix.
The feature on the decline and breakup of Shapeshifter, published last week on the most respectable music-review site in America, in which I said things that made me sound like a commerce-minded, maniacal whore, which, compared to my former bandmates, I was, had become a widely read, blogged-about fable. The story it told was that even though Shapeshifter had possessed the winning combination of a cynical, hit-obsessed bass player (myself); a pure-hearted singer with a choirboy voice; and a surefire, radio-friendly anthem written chiefly by the singer but partly by the avaricious bassist, we had been indifferently marketed, and our sales had been derailed by shifting radio-promotion laws and the growth of online piracy. It concluded we were victims of the industry.
It was nice of the reporter not to mention that we were also victims of being kind of shitty. Critics didn’t so much hate us as find themselves incapable of caring about us enough to experience an invigorating hatred. We were, we gradually learned, 6.6 out of 10, hooky new-wave, post-Arcade-Fire decency with a vein of California somnolence, passable post-punk-post-dance with a beat you can nod to, not unhappily.
“Does mine still start with the Peabodys video?” Julie passed me the laptop.
The Peabody Awards ceremony footage in which she tripped on the hem of her scarlet gown and toppled into a nest of gift bags—this video, after twenty-nine Julie vs. Animals episodes, remained at the top of the screen. I nodded and stroked her head.
We were quiet for a moment as she smoothed her hair. I peed. “We’re both horse-f*cked,” I sang in James Taylor’s voice. She extended the melody in Louis Armstrong’s: “Horse-f*cked to death.”
Side by side, we washed our hands. “You’re perfect,” she said. “You’re all I want.”
“You’re my dream-girl princess,” I said. Julie touched the napkins on the way out of the bathroom. I did this too. We were like teenage football players thwacking the insignia of a school, painted on a wall, on the way out of the locker room and onto the field. We went out, to charm the new owner of the science channel for the sake of our future children, to fight for something greater than ourselves.