“There’s room for everyone.”
“What’s Bedwin looking for, anyway?”
“He wants a stool for onstage. He said playing standing up makes him feel naked.”
Falmouth came glaring from the kitchen, startling them. “Don’t be so blatant with your mutinies,” he said ferociously.
“What do you mean?”
“That you imagine I’ve fallen so low I’d accept the charity of living in the squalor of your band is disgusting enough. What I really can’t fathom is how you awarded me the nickname ‘bathtub-dweller.’”
The interns rematerialized, stopping Falmouth in his tracks. They stood like Shakespearian courtiers, waiting to deliver their report. Jules Harvey, apparently attuned to the young women by some deep wavelength, emerged from the kitchen and bowed at them to begin, ducking his baseball cap with Buddhist complacency.
“We failed,” announced one of the interns. The other nodded, consenting that they spoke with one voice.
“Did you fire the gun?” asked Harvey.
“Yes. We fired the gun and opened a dialogue with what seemed like a reasonable faction.”
“I’m surprised they don’t yet have elected representatives,” said Falmouth.
“It also helps that Mr. Oo had the fire extinguisher,” the intern explained, ignoring Falmouth. “I think that got their attention more than the pistol.”
“Fire extinguisher?”
“A contingent of sound poets had lit a bonfire between two parked cars. But Mr. Oo put it out.”
“Go on.”
“At a certain point negotiations broke down. They figured out there isn’t anything to drink up here.”
“That’s not necessarily the case,” said Harvey. “I always have a few bottles in reserve.”
“You have to listen,” insisted the intern. “They don’t need us anymore. They intercepted your caterers. Someone leaked a rumor that the banquet wasn’t going to be made available to the dancers. That isn’t actually true, is it?”
Jules Harvey looked at Falmouth, who shrugged. Lucinda was impressed at Harvey’s effect on the students. She’d never heard them speak so many words while in Falmouth’s dominion.
“They’re having a sort of tailgate party now,” said the intern. “I think it’s even bigger than before. A couple of the servers are friends of ours from school, as it happens. They’re walking around with trays of chicken satay and tuna belly on rice crackers.”
Jules Harvey scratched his chin and adjusted his spectacles, summoning his deepest resources. The rest of them stood twitching slightly, deferring to his turtle authority.
“Go back downstairs, but don’t use the gun this time. What we want is more along the lines of a whispering campaign. Tell a select few that the band is about to start. Propose that they might want to get a good spot near the stage. You don’t have to talk to strangers. Let the majority be curious. Mention it to those server friends of yours, especially if they’re young and attractive.”
“Should we say which band?”
“They don’t have a name,” said Falmouth bitterly.
“It’s better that way. Just say the band is about to start. It implies that anyone would know which band it was, suggesting a reference to something already confirmed as desirable by others. That’s why they’re all here anyway.”
“To see the band?” asked Lucinda, confused.
“No. I mean because most of them heard someone refer to ‘that party everyone’s going to tonight,’ as if they should already know about it. Like ‘that restaurant everyone goes to,’ or ‘that girl everyone’s trying to date.’ It’s much better than anything specific.” Harvey urged the interns to the elevator. “Go now. Falmouth, come help me open the windows.”
“For jumping, I hope.”
“I want them to hear.”
“Hear what?”
“The band, of course. They’ll have to play loud.”
Lucinda understood now that her old friend had gone up against a force more profound than Jules Harvey. Falmouth’s past works had involved manipulating people’s despair, pensiveness, ennui. Those were malleable materials, lightly guarded by their possessors. The Aparty was another matter. Here, Falmouth had tried to appropriate other people’s happiness, and been met with that property’s devastatingly blithe resistance. Happiness was disobedient, had its own law. As a freshly minted local expert, Lucinda felt qualified to know.
matthew sat on the riser’s edge, taking the private interlude as an opportunity for tuning his guitar. For Matthew, Lucinda knew, this was a humbling ordeal, one which, like certain bodily functions, stood a better chance of being accomplished without witnesses. More than once at rehearsal he’d abandoned the effort and shamefacedly handed his guitar to Bedwin for adjustment. Lucinda felt a surge of tenderness. She almost wished they could leave Matthew alone there, not prick the bubble in which he dwelled, elegant as a black-and-white photograph of some legendary figure caught backstage. He’d shaved, trimmed his sideburns into neat wedges, donned a black turtleneck, shined his boots, made every attempt to retrieve himself from the kangaroo’s slough his apartment had become and make himself ready for the band’s unveiling. He’d be the last to know they were going to play aloud. Lucinda wanted to be the one to tell him.
Bedwin had found a step stool in Jules Harvey’s kitchen. He placed it on the riser in the clear spot behind his monitor. Then Denise led him away, promising snacks, leaving Lucinda and Matthew with the equipment. Matthew offered her a hand up onto the riser. She accepted for the pleasure of the contact of their palms, his cool, hers hot. She was in a fever, her body an engine churning at toxins. Matthew reached out and brushed a lock of hair from her forehead. He spoke gently, as if he’d been the one to rouse her from the late-afternoon fugue on her couch.
“You have a wild happy look in your eyes.”
“Denise seemed pissed that I missed the sound check.”
“It mostly involved Falmouth criticizing our clothing.”
“It might be more important than you think. Jules Harvey wants us to play. I mean, with sound coming out.”
“What about Falmouth’s important art?”
“It’s still important in principle. But something more spontaneous decided to happen in actuality.”
She rescued her bass from its fuzzy coffin, then moved to plug in to her amp and begin tuning. She felt Matthew peering at her, unbudged from his seat on the riser. She wondered if he’d made himself pretty for her sake. She wondered if her provocations on the telephone, the kanga dootie song, had somehow shifted him slightly in her direction again, as opposed to that dim specter she’d encountered in the supermarket.
“Lucinda?”
“Yes?”
“I need to talk to you about the, uh, marsupial situation.”
“I owe you an apology.”
“I don’t care about that,” he said, with a warmth and sincerity that instantly absolved her of both break-in and phone call. “I need your help.”
“Yes?” She felt her breath catch, slightly.
His eyes grew shy. “Maybe this isn’t the right time.”
“Anytime,” she said.
“Tomorrow, let’s talk tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
Denise and Bedwin returned, Bedwin with both hands around a sardine sandwich. They’d been consulting with the interns, who now scuttled across the great empty room in the direction of Jules Harvey’s kitchen.
“Jules wants us to start in five minutes,” said Denise. “We need a set list.” She unfolded a sheet of paper and smoothed it against the riser’s plywood, then uncapped a marker and waved the others to kneel beside her.
“Start with ‘Monster Eyes,’” said Lucinda.
“We’d play it to an empty room,” said Denise. “All they’ll hear from the street is the bass line.”
Matthew said, “So let’s pick something that’ll sound good from the street. Something loud that we don’t care about, like ‘Hell Is for Buildings’ or
‘Crayon Fever.’”
“I don’t want to play ‘Crayon Fever’ at all,” said Denise. “We can’t start with something old and depressing. We have to inspire ourselves.”
“‘Dirty Yellow Chair,’” suggested Bedwin.
Denise wrote it in block letters at the top of the page.
“We’re wasting that as the first song, too,” said Lucinda.
“No, she’s right,” said Matthew. “We need to hear ourselves sound good.”
“Then ‘The Houseguest,’” said Bedwin, pointing a finger at the blank space where Denise’s marker circled in the air. They all looked at Bedwin, who only chewed his fish sandwich noisily. This new task of constructing a set list might rightly belong to their auteur.
“What about ‘Temporary Feeling’ next?” said Denise, looking to Bedwin now.
“Mmmm, ‘Astronaut Food,’ then ‘Temporary Feeling,’” said Bedwin. The others nodded, as though hurrying to board a vehicle that might depart without them. The sequence of songs began to feel inevitable in the manner of language or music itself, as though Bedwin were revealing to them a hidden grammar embedded in the band’s motley offerings.
“Right, sure, there’ll be an audience by the time of ‘Astronaut Food,’” said Denise. Lucinda imagined the drummer was anticipating their showpiece, the two women harmonizing on the single microphone.
“Why not ‘Monster Eyes’ after ‘Temporary Feeling’?” asked Matthew.
Bedwin nodded, and Denise jotted it down.
“‘Secret from Yourself,’” said Lucinda, captivated now.
“‘Hell Is for Buildings.’”
“‘Sarah Valentine.’”
“‘Nostalgia.’”
“‘Canary.’”
“Maybe hold ‘Actually Quite Funny’ for a first encore?”
“What about ‘Tree of Death’?”
They called out the names eagerly, unafraid of mistakes. Denise wrote nothing down without Bedwin’s oracular consent. In this manner the set list was hashed out.
the first chords, chunks of noise, rebound in the gulch of buildings. They seem, to those on the sidewalk, an atonal clatter, one unrelated to the tick and throb of drum and bass which had reached them independently, conveyed an instant before through the curb to their calves and knees, perhaps even as high as their genitals. Soon, though, the listeners’ ears wrangle the dissonant sounds into sensible conjunction, a kind of on-the-spot reconstruction of this music’s sense in the first place. Any listener schooled in the form could peel it off echoing architecture as easily as resolve it through a radio’s static. Those staticky growls were, sure, amplified guitars, echoing in the cage of the drumbeat. Vocals, too, though distorted by the street’s reverb effect a general drift was discernible, twice through a verse, building to a chorus: hey, everyone knows how this works, knows it in their bones, even if unable to articulate it exactly: rock ’n’ roll. It’s what makes this band sound alike to any other that makes them intriguing, at this distance: they could be the Beatles, heard from the street. Or, just as easily, the Beards. The crowd buzzes with the general sense that an obscure evening has located its raison d’être. At least you’d have to go upstairs to know. Whoever they were, they were playing live, and you, on the sidewalk with skewered Thai chicken in your hand, are missing the set. Anyway, you were curious to see what this famous party loft was about after all, despite the spontaneous curbside revel’s rude charms.
The band concluded their opener’s last chorus just as Mr. Oo levered open the freight elevator doors and the first clutch of guests spilled onto the floor. Someone—Jules Harvey? the appropriated interns?—had located a master control panel for the loft’s lighting, and fiddled until the stage was encircled with a blobby series of wide purplish spots from a track of lamps mounted behind the band, angled to glare in the eyes of anyone standing near enough to discern the band’s faces, and casting the floor between stage and elevator into dark. Without footlights to provide underlighting, the band appears mysteriously remote, silhouettes draped in indigo as they confer with one another and their set list, nodding, perhaps mumbling a word or two, but inaudible above the low crackle and drone of speakers broadcasting nothing but their own electronic readiness, at top volume. A female voice, the drummer’s, counts “One, two, three, four,” and the second song is launched, with a single rim shot like a firecracker, igniting the guitarist. He’s a feeble figure, hunched atop a tall stool, and apparently unable to play without watching his fingers, but who now lays out an unexpectedly slab-like power chord, stretching a sneakered toe from where it had been curled inside a spoke of his stool to trigger a distortion pedal on the stage floor.
“The Houseguest” is a weirdly grim number, a defiant tirade by a guest wronged by his hosts, over a set of changes that might be the billionth rewrite of some three-chord chestnut, “You Really Got Me,” say, or “Twentieth Century Fox,” but played with conviction and vigor by the band, who associate the song, one of their earliest, with the uncovering of their own capacity to join in birthing ferocious noise. No one’s ever quite dared to query the guitarist, who delivered this lyrical concept to the band whole formed, on its source; no one ever will. The song’s a confidence builder for the singer, who finds that it liberates some element of rageful self-pity his own temperament usually quashes. He loves twisting his body as he bellows the raw quatrain that fits into a gap of feedbacky silence between the rolling changes:
I’m the house GUEST
I can’t get no REST
In your guest BED
I’ll sleep when I’m DEAD
The moment he’s delivered the word “dead” the singer’s voice is drowned in the band’s wave again. Though he’ll go on enunciating the houseguest’s complaint, these are the sole words a listener could distinguish with any confidence, and certainly the only ones that matter. The singer’s altered by them into a performer with a series of false faces to wear, urgent charades to put across. The band feels this, and it’s one reason the song is an unquestioned favorite. Tonight the band’s audience feels it too.
For that’s what they’ve become, in the space of a song: an audience. Drinks or cigarettes in hand, in bunches of two and three and four, unused Walkmans clipped to their belts or shoved in a purse, attentive to the band or babbling at conversations uninterrupted from their beginnings on the sidewalk, acquaintances of Falmouth’s and Harvey’s, journalists from local weeklies, art collectors, disc jockeys, graduate students, catering staff, an uncertain few who’d called the complaint line in the past week and been enlisted to the Aparty by Falmouth’s interns, curious seekers who’d received no invitation at all, even a few who’d spontaneously stopped their cars to see what the fuss was about—all had meandered together into a single entity, one massed along the periphery of purple light that covered the stage, and scattering from that front toward the kitchen, where Harvey and the interns now splashed together vodka and mixers, just to keep the atmosphere up. The party had become a show. It had never even considered being a conceptual art piece. It never would.
Without pause the band’s into “Astronaut Food.” On this number, more melodic and inviting than the previous, the women in the band make a bid to usurp the singer’s spotlight, and about a hundred men watching ask themselves why they’ve never had the eyes before to see they ought to have asked the drummer or the bassist on a date. Jubilantly singing into the single microphone the two women look fresh and alive, a thousand percent less ordinary than at the retail outlets or previous social gatherings from which these men are fairly certain they recognize them. As if sensing this shift, the singer glares at the audience between verses, daring them to presume in their dawning hunger for the figures onstage. This, in turn, is sensed by and thrills the women, who seem in a way to be taunting the singer behind his back.
This band’s got something, and some of the something they’ve got is the allure of an enclave at odds within itself and yet impenetrable to others, its members exchanging small gestur
es of disaffection within their troupe that makes others crave to be included in the fond dissension.
“Temporary Feeling” is quieter, in a way that disseminates silence in the room, chatterers and gabblers at the loft’s edges hushed by the effort of those nearer to the band who strain to follow the lyric. As far as anyone can make out it’s an intimate tale, in murmured passages of unrhymed lyric, prose stanzas which might or might not be the singer’s own confession, pages exported from a journal. Another magic spell this band trades in is the mystery of authorship: If a heart’s revealed here, whose? If a famous conceptual artist is putting on this show, should something about this band be taken to be in quotation marks? Is this band a stalking horse? Is the song a fiction, or a cover version, or the lament of someone hiding in plain sight? Who’s moving that mouth?
Seeded with quiet, the crowd hears itself exhale between the waning final chord of “Temporary Feeling” and the advent of their own clapping. This first full and unembarrassed burst of applause marks a threshhold in the audience’s belief that tonight’s performance is no accident but the event they’d come here to witness in the first place. It’s into the face of this loose barrage of cheers and whistles that the four members of the band, not pausing to mutter “Thank you” or to revel in praise they’d be petrified to believe they’d earned, serves forth, with a drum kick and a bass thrum and a chiming guitar figure, the instantly legible hook of their next song.
The song is “Monster Eyes,” and it comes set to make an impression. For band and audience alike, the evening finds its watershed, dividing Before from After. In the audience’s case, the watershed divides the perfectly agreeable songs they can no longer quite remember from the one they’ll go out humming, the one that causes everyone, during its third chorus or through the howl of cheers that erupt in its wake, to lean into someone’s ear and bark through cupped hands, “These guys are good!” or “I love this song!” The rest of the band’s set will unfold as confirmation: the audience has seen and celebrated something, and is entitled to feel special for having done so. Jules Harvey has done it again. Or Falmouth Strand. You weren’t sure what anything had to do with anything else, but cool people were certainly involved. You weren’t wrong to come out tonight. You’d found yourself right in the thick of something. You had to be there, the night they first played “Monster Eyes,” and you were.
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