Except that Russell Crowe is most definitely not playing the violin. The first giveaway is the audio, which doesn’t match what a violin would sound like in a small wooden room of a ship. More egregiously, in one crucial shot, Russell Crowe doesn’t even bother to move the fingers on his left hand. And during a pizzicato section of the music, Crowe’s plucking finger is nowhere near the strings.
It occurs to me at some point during the movie that this is a big-budget production ($150 million, I’ll find out later). There are frighteningly believable scenes of nineteenth-century naval warfare, an astounding replica of a ship in a hurricane-force storm complete with a churning ocean, and dead-on sound effects of howling wind and cracking wood. And yet, to have Russell Crowe fake-play a violin in an even half-convincing manner has escaped Hollywood’s finest technicians. Oh, sure, they cut the shot away from Crowe’s fingers real quick. But in the end any amateur musician can see that the violin scenes are fake. And it’s not so much because of Crowe’s immobile fingers but in the way he holds the violin. He cradles it too tightly to his body, as if he is afraid he will drop it, like a father with a newborn baby. It’s the universal pose of nonviolinists; every single person who has ever asked to try a few notes on my violin has become visibly frightened once I actually hand it to them. It’s lighter than they expect, and they realize just how delicate it is. They marvel that something so insubstantial can produce such a weighty sound—a sound so closely resembling a full-throated human voice. They are unnerved by the combination of fragility and power. Just holding a violin can make the most macho Hollywood actor look vulnerable.
And if you don’t look closely, the violin can make the most panic-stricken young woman appear to be as strong as a sea captain.
An Easy Person to Work With
New York City, August 2003
After filming the God Bless America PBS special, you go right back to applying for jobs from the sun-drenched living room of your new apartment, which now has a grape-colored couch that you found in a garbage heap on the street. The couch’s cushions are missing and it has wacky arms that look like the nubs of black telephone poles, but it doesn’t smell bad and isn’t infested with bugs, so you consider it worth the muscle it took you and a friend to wrangle it into the elevator. You sit on the purple couch with telephone-pole arms and type cover letter after cover letter. The goal is to get a job writing in the Middle East, but at this point you’ll take pretty much anything. You get your first cell phone and stare at it, waiting for your future to call you.
And then one day, after a few months of applying for jobs while paying your rent with Ensemble gig money, you do get a job (or rather, a paid internship, which to you is the same thing), in journalism. At the New York Times. The woman on the phone asks you to come to the office for an interview, and you race to the Chelsea address she gives you. When you arrive, you realize that this is not the address of the New York Times. But whatever, who knows how this stuff works.
The woman is in her late fifties and dressed in tailored designer clothing, every strand of her hair so perfectly placed that you wonder whether she is wearing a wig. You’ll later find out that she was once the editor in chief of a famous fashion magazine, which is exactly the part she looks. She sits behind a large, immaculate desk that has a box of Kleenex and antibacterial lotion positioned on the corner just so. Everything—from the pens in her penholder to the perfect stack of legal pads to the gleaming canister of paper clips—looks as if it has been arranged for a photo shoot of chic office life. She explains to you that her company contracts out “special projects” for the magazine section of the Times. You’re not quite sure what “special projects” means, but what you envision, gleefully, is assisting with Pulitzer-winning long-form journalism. She asks you if you are interested in fashion. You are not, but you know your way around an H&M well enough to pass as someone who does, or so you think, until she looks you up and down and you realize you haven’t fooled her.
A few days later she calls you back to offer you the job—a three-month internship that pays double minimum wage and will be enough, with your Ensemble gigs, to pay the rent and the utilities and have enough left over for your student loan payments. She emphasizes that if you take the internship (as if you are in any danger of refusing it), you will be able to put the New York Times on your future résumé; of course, you know that the future résumé is the whole point of this operation, that it might be your ticket to a full-time job at the Times or in the Middle East or both. You also know that many successful female reporters first do time in fashion—that as a woman your only way into a newsroom might be through the Style section. When you arrive at the office the next day, she hands you a press badge, which you grab from her as if it’s a winning lottery ticket. It says Jessica Hindman, Editorial, New York Times. If you had owned a camera, you would have taken a picture of it and sent it home to your parents, or maybe even your local hometown newspaper, which was fond of covering any story in which the town’s “youth” were up to something besides selling crystal meth or shipping off to Iraq.
It takes you a few days to realize that, press badge aside, you are not working for the New York Times. The “special sections” that your new company produces are advertorial inserts, glossier and better-produced versions of the grocery store coupons that fall out of your hometown newspaper. Your job is to help with the logistics of fashion shoots wherein models pose with designer merchandise, although you spend a good portion of your day merely stapling things. And sometimes unstapling them and restapling. (“In the magazine world,” your boss lectures, “everything must be vertically stapled.” She gestures at a stack of one thousand incorrectly stapled documents. “You’ll need to redo all of this.”) You realize that when your boss emphasized that you could put the New York Times on your résumé she had left off the last part of the sentence: “even though you won’t actually work there or help to produce anything published by it.”
And so you spend three months stapling and unstapling and ordering lunches and coordinating the shipment of various designer items to various fashion shoots in the West Village. You work with your boss and one other intern and never meet a single person who works for the Times.
But one day, she does offer you something valuable. It’s nine o’clock on a Friday night and you’ve been in the office stapling and unstapling for twelve hours. The other intern—who lives in her parents’ brownstone on the Upper West Side and comes to work every day in tailored silk blouses and pleated pants and a rotating array of designer handbags (which makes you look even more the ragamuffin, with your fifteen-dollar red clunky Mary Janes from T.J. Maxx, which you thought were hip but your boss calls “circus inspired” and adds that you might have better luck shopping at Club Monaco)—has gone home in a huff, unable to hide her exhaustion and outright disdain for your boss.
“It’s late,” your boss says. “Will you be able to get home all right?”
This is surprising, for she rarely asks anything about your life outside of the office. You tell her you’ll be fine.
Your boss watches you as you continue to sit on the floor, unstapling, stapling. She has a strange expression on her face, as if she has been surprised by something.
“I don’t normally say this,” she says. “Not before someone has finished interning for me. But you . . .” She pauses, as if searching for the right words. “You are a very easy person to work with.”
“Thank you,” you say, beaming. And the compliment sticks with you because your boss is not the sort of person to give one easily. It sticks with you because even though you have no interest in doing what she does for a living, you respect her for who she is and are grateful for a compliment from someone like her, a successful woman from a generation of women who had to fight even harder than you do.
But years later you will look back on this moment and realize that perhaps her words were meant less as a compliment and more as a warning. Yes, you were “a very easy person to work with”—T
he Composer thought so, too. But perhaps this had less to do with some winsome personality trait and more to do with your pliability, your utter desperation to succeed, your need to be loved by your superiors, no matter how ridiculous or ill-advised or fraudulent the thing was that they were asking you to do.
God Bless America Tour 2004
New Orleans
I sit on a park bench under a swamp tree—one of those huge trees in New Orleans covered in moss—eating a rainbow snowball in the warm afternoon breeze, and I think: I could quit. Stroll down this sidewalk with my dripping snowball and never turn back. Get a job serving pitchers of beer in some New Orleans dive. What is that Bob Dylan song? Work for a while on a fishing boat right outside of Delacroix? That, I think. I could do that. Maybe if I worked on the water I wouldn’t have to worry about having to pee all the time. If I really had to pee (you don’t have to pee) I could just pee while treading water on the side of the boat.
The New Orleans PBS station surprises us with an extravagant reception. There is shrimp étouffée, a silver platter of frog-shaped artisan chocolates, bouquets of fresh roses, and so much champagne that they insist we take an entire case of it with us, along with a set of glass champagne flutes, an offering that Kim, Harriet, and I gladly accept. The Composer makes us give it back, saying he doesn’t want alcohol in the RV. We sulk. But losing a case of free champagne is the least of my problems. I can no longer make it through the entire seventy-five minutes of the concert. I have begun to flee the stage during The Composer’s halftime speech, run to a bathroom to pee (I don’t have to pee) and then run back, just in time for The Composer’s closing line: “I worry about all of you out there and will pray for you tonight to stay safe.” (After the concert, the champagne toasts begin and we gorge ourselves on shrimp and chocolate in the rose-filled reception room of the WYES station. In less than a year, it will be underwater.)
Some part of me expects to be fired for running off the stage. It would be reasonable for The Composer to demand a violinist who can make it through a seventy-five-minute concert without fleeing the stage in terror. But The Composer, who fails to accommodate basic requests like stops for dinner and cases of free champagne, is wholly compassionate toward my plight, which I struggle to explain to him and everyone else. He doesn’t interrogate me for details or ask why I’m acting like a crazy person, or, worse, accuse me of actually being a crazy person, though this is, without a doubt, what I have become. He just looks at me with the same look he gives the brassy-haired, middle-aged women who listen to his music, women who work two jobs because their husbands have died of cancer, women whose sons have died in car accidents, women who feel so anxious after a day of teaching special ed or nursing Alzheimer’s patients or taking shit from the boss that they live for that moment in the car after work, the moment they turn on the CD player and take a deep breath. The Composer looks at me the way he looks at these women and seems to understand exactly what it is that I’m going through, even though I can’t understand it myself.
But unlike the women at our concerts, relaxing music is not my method of choice for unwinding at the end of my day. Relaxing music is the opposite of relaxing for me. Relaxing music gives me panic attacks. I make a mental note to put it on my medical charts should I ever need surgery or fall into a coma—Patient Has Lethal Allergy to Relaxation Music—just in case the hospital pipes The Composer’s music through the corridors and recovery rooms, as many of them do. I try the other obvious methods: deep breathing, exercise, yoga stretches, long walks, showers, reading, zoning out to the TV, and, when all else fails, a glass of merlot with a three-cigarette chaser (by the end of the tour, three glasses of merlot with a nine-cigarette chaser). Nothing works. My mind is a CD player with a broken Fast-Forward button, thoughts flying by faster than I can hear them, zooming past any restful pause.
I could quit. I could call Jake, the manager, tell him I have a medical emergency, give him a few days to find a replacement violinist, then flee to the safety of my parents’ house in Virginia. It’s true that I’m under contract, but health is health, I reason, emergencies are emergencies. Jake would probably understand. The Composer would definitely understand.
But I don’t quit. There’s the money to consider, for one thing. For the entire eleven-week tour, I’m contracted to receive a four-figure sum that sounds so large to me it might as well be millions of dollars. (Six months later, when doing my taxes, I’ll realize that after the money is taxed and expenses deducted, I earned three thousand dollars for the three-month tour.)
More than anything, I tell myself that getting paid to tour around America as a violinist is exactly what I wanted to do when I was a kid. I tell myself that at this very minute, a zillion teenage violinists in rural America are practicing their hearts out, fantasizing about doing what I’m doing right now. And now here I am, and I’m not going to quit.
Do You Know What’s Missing in This Book?
“Do you know what’s missing in this book?” a writer friend asks me.
“What?”
“The guy,” she says.
“The guy?” I ask. “Do you mean The Composer?”
“No, silly,” she says. “The guy. The nice, handsome, well-educated boyfriend who makes you see that your career with The Composer is dumb and a waste of time. The one who cures your panic attacks by telling you to stop being such a self-destructive workaholic idiot. The one who inspires you to get down with the things in life that really matter, like marrying him and having his babies and moving to the suburbs and coaching swim team. You know, the guy. He should be making his appearance in this book right about now.”
“The guy?” I say. “There is no guy. I mean, excuse me. Spoiler Alert: There is no guy.”
“Come on,” she says. “There’s always a guy in books like this.”
“What do you mean books like this?” I say, huffily. “Books about ambitious, artistic-minded women from small towns who are attempting to follow their dreams in New York City?”
“Exactly,” she says. “Maybe you could make one up.”
“I’m not going to make one up!” I say. “I’m sorry to disappoint, but I figured out that my career with The Composer was dumb all by myself. I didn’t need a guy to tell me! Plus, as I’m trying to demonstrate, fake-playing the violin isn’t so much of a career as it is a metaphor for—”
“At the very least put in some fucking.”
“Fucking?”
“You’re fucking people during all of this, right? I mean you were in your early twenties, living in New York City. Maybe you can put some of that in.”
“Sure, I was fucking people, but none of those people were The Composer! And goddammit! This book is difficult enough to write without worrying about fucking, for fuck’s sake! Imagine if poor George Orwell had to include all the fucking he was doing while fighting the Spanish fascists!”
“That book would be better if there was more fucking,” my friend says.
“How about this,” I say. “I’ll include this very conversation in the book, with some major editing so that we both sound more clever and succinct than we actually are, and then the book will include both ‘the guy’ and ‘fucking’ and we can all check those things off of our lists for elements needed in books about young, career-minded women in New York City. Then we can all move on.”
“It’s your book,” she says.
“Fucking right it is.”
Thousands per Minute
December 2003
When the God Bless America special airs on PBS stations across the nation, a few months after it was shot in New Hampshire, people in your hometown begin to spread the Good News, send good tidings, speak the Good Word that is rural American Gospel:
I saw you on TV.
For there you are, in your black concert dress and your violin. You are on TV. Following your dreams. For you have a reeyell gift.
But it isn’t until you begin to appear live on the home shopping channel QVC that the folks back home
really begin to take notice. The Composer’s first few appearances on QVC are tests: You appear on the channel at times like 3:30 in the morning, 4:17 in the morning, 2:37 in the morning. These are the times assigned to newbies; if The Composer can sell a certain number of CDs at 3:30 in the morning, he’ll be invited back for primetime. So you set your alarm for 2:30 a.m. and wake up in a Pennsylvania hotel. You are shuffled into QVC’s studios and onto a set that looks like a cross between David Letterman’s stage and a suburban living room. You play your violin (in front of a dead microphone while the CD does the work) and are beamed out live across America. A few seconds go by. Then dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of people begin ordering CDs.
In between songs the poofy-haired, Christmas-sweatered QVC host gushes how beautiful, how soothing, how relaxing this music is. And at this special price, she asks, why not order multiple sets of CDs and give them away as Christmas presents? Who wouldn’t love this music? And they are all original compositions, folks, by this composer, this American composer, folks, this handsome wonderful man standing right here. And The Composer smiles his goofy smile and says he is truly blessed and prays that his music will touch people’s hearts and prays that everyone who is listening will be blessed, as he is. And calls come in with testimonials of how The Composer’s music has cured the caller’s cancer, asthma, sadness, general malaise. The calls come in saying the music is beautiful and wonderful and good.
And as you play your violin you watch the sales numbers on a monitor, thousands per minute, see exactly which high notes on the pennywhistle cause the most calls to come in. The sales rise and fall with the music, and the money rolls in, and The Composer is moved to primetime, and you play while watching the sales numbers rise. The up and down of the sales monitor mimics the up and down of the notes on your sheet music until they seem like one, a national symphony of commerce, the most authentic-sounding American music of all.
Sounds Like Titanic Page 15