by Simon Rich
Now, Simon had graduated from an expensive college, but he had almost no skills. All he liked to do was sit around in his underwear, making up jokes and then laughing at them. So God said, “Fine,” and let Simon do that as his full-time job. But instead of praising God for this miracle, Simon took everything for granted and even began to write some jokes that made fun of God. And Satan would read these jokes out loud to God, in an irritating voice. And although the Lord was angered, He was not yet prepared to admit defeat. “I will give Simon even more blessings,” He vowed. “And sooner or later, he will become a believer.”
So the Lord continued to bless the screenwriter with health and wealth and unfair tax breaks, which Simon claimed to be against politically but secretly voted for in every election. And then there came a day when Simon fell in love with a beautiful Christian woman. And Satan nudged God and said, “Now what?” And God let out a heavy groan and cried, “Has anyone ever been tested such as me?” And Job shot God an annoyed look. And God was embarrassed because He had not seen that Job was standing on the cloud with them. So He awkwardly led Satan over to a different cloud. And then He warped time and space so that Simon could date this pretty shiksa. And by this time things in Africa were getting really bad. And even Satan was like, “Shouldn’t you get on that?” But God was fixated on this Simon thing.
Soon it came time for Simon’s wedding. And Simon’s mother asked him if he wanted a Jewish ceremony. And God scooted forward to the edge of His cloud, anxious to see how Simon would respond. And Simon said that he would have to think about it.
And that night, for the first time since his Simpsons-themed bar mitzvah, Simon wrestled deeply with his faith. He thought about all of the blessings he’d been given while other, more deserving people starved and died. And the mad injustice of his life convinced him, unequivocally, that God could not exist. Because if God existed, then surely by now he would have gotten some horrible comeuppance.
So Simon told his mom that he didn’t want a Jewish ceremony but also that he didn’t really care, and that he would go through the motions if the thing was really short and she paid for it all. And after the wedding, at which pork was served, God gave Satan fifty bucks and said, “You win.” And Satan tried to gloat, but he couldn’t enjoy the victory, because God was so visibly upset. So he turned to the Lord with pity and said, “I’ll tell you what. Someday soon I’ll make Simon believe. I’ll give him that proof that he’s been waiting for.”
And God said, “What are you going to do to him?”
And Satan grinned and said, “You’ll see.”
Relapse
Zoe still got recognized sometimes. She’d be walking with Tom through the farmers’ market, pushing Alice in the stroller, and a tattooed person (they were usually tattooed people) would point at her and say, “Are you who I think you are?”
“Maybe!” was Zoe’s standard response. “I used to be in a band?”
“Yes!” the fan would say. And they would recite her band’s name, in a proud tone of voice, like a confident contestant on Jeopardy! “That’s the one!” Zoe would say. At this point the fan would almost always walk away. Sometimes, though, they would make Zoe’s day by complimenting one of her songs. It was usually her only hit—the single from her first album that had somehow made it onto MTV. Occasionally, though, they brought up an obscure track, something she hadn’t thought about in years, and all at once, the song would come to her, the lyrics, chords, and harmonies, and her eyes would glaze over, and her mind would flash back to the place where she had been when she wrote it, a squeaky bed in Amsterdam, on exotic hotel stationery, next to a smelly but sexy foreign club promoter, or on a tour bus somewhere in Nebraska, squinting at her notepad in the moonlight, her body still tingling from the rush of a solid, sold-out gig. Then Tom would make his joke about how the fan should buy the song on iTunes so they could get eight cents, and Alice would flail in her stroller, as if aware and offended that her mother had been thinking about the past, about the era that predated her birth, and Zoe would snap back to the present. “It was nice meeting you,” she would say. And after a handshake (her fans were too old for selfies), she would shoot Tom an eye roll, to conceal the thrill these encounters secretly gave her, and they would walk in silence to the parking lot and load all their shit into the Prius.
Quitting music had been a gradual thing, so gradual that Zoe had barely realized that she was doing it.
When she first met Tom, they were both professional artists. It was at a New Year’s party in the hills thrown by some movie producer. She was there because the producer had used her MTV song in a soundtrack. Tom was there because the producer had optioned the film rights to one of his short stories. She remembered how he had looked at that party—his bangs flopping over his mischievous eyes, his boyish cheeks reddened by booze. When she asked him about his film deal, he spoke about it with convincing ambivalence. He was sure the movie would be bad, but he needed the money to pay the rent while he finished his first novel. They had sex upstairs, in some kind of storage room, surrounded by bubble-wrapped art prints that had come back from the framer’s but hadn’t yet been mounted on the walls. While Tom was fucking her, Zoe realized with shock that her song had started playing on the stereo downstairs. She came during the final chorus, while listening to her own disembodied voice.
The producer never adapted Tom’s story, and his novel was rejected by his publisher. He started writing press releases for a PR firm, ironically at first, then after a pay raise, in earnest. Zoe hung on to her passion a bit longer, releasing a politely received second record, then a poorly received third. Venues got smaller, band members quit, and CDs became an obsolete technology. Still, Zoe kept at it, tramping through Europe doing solo acoustic sets, opening for people half her age. One day she called Tom with a phone card from a soggy field in Leipzig, after playing an outdoor show for seven teenagers, one of whom had been so drunk on vodka that she had worried he was going to die. It was 5 a.m. in California, and she didn’t expect Tom to pick up the phone, but he answered on the very first ring, and the crackly sound of his voice brought her to tears.
Within a year of this rock-bottom moment, Alice was born, named after Alice Cooper but also Tom’s maternal grandmother, Alice Fishbein. Zoe threw herself into parenting, secretly relieved at having an excuse to not write songs for a while or give morning FM radio interviews or play humiliating, barely attended “concerts.” When Alice turned two, Zoe’s friend Rusty invited her to open for him on a twelve-city tour. Although she was tempted, the fact was she couldn’t justify the cost. Between gas and motels, she would barely break even. And when they added the cost of childcare, the trip became downright decadent. They were living entirely off Tom’s salary by this point, and Zoe was too ashamed to ask him to fund what amounted to rock-and-roll fantasy camp. She turned down Rusty over email, too sad to say the truth out loud—that she was done, really done, with all of it.
When Alice turned three, they bought a house in Silver Lake so they could be in the Ivanhoe school district. Their friends were all recovered artists of some kind, former aspiring actors or directors who had quit their selfish dreams to embrace the realities of adulthood. Their closest confidants were Andy and Jeff, two singers turned Realtors who lived down the street and had adopted a Korean girl exactly Alice’s age. Sometimes at dinner, after a few bottles of Pinot, they would talk about people like Rusty—people who were “still out there.” There was Tom’s old roommate Vincent, an experimental filmmaker, whose last four shorts had a combined one thousand views on YouTube. And Andy’s sister, Melissa, who had gone from minor roles in major films to minor roles in minor films to actual, full-on pornography. Zoe pitied these people. And when she looked around her home, at her balding but still handsome husband and her generic but tasteful West Elm couch, she thanked the universe that she had been spared such a fate.
She was absorbed in these sorts of thoughts one night when she began to hum a melody—a taut loop of notes that f
elt both familiar and strange. She knew it was something she had written, but somehow she couldn’t remember the name of the song. It took her a while to figure out why.
It was a new one.
Zoe was rummaging through the closet when she felt a forceful tap on her thigh. She turned and saw her five-year-old daughter, Alice, glaring up at her, her tiny arms folded across her tutu.
“We were playing balloons,” Alice said.
“We’re still playing balloons,” Zoe assured her. “But how about this? Instead of throwing the deflated balloon back and forth to each other, like we’ve been doing for the last several hours, why don’t you take the balloon into the living room, by yourself, and see how many times you can throw it in the air and catch it?”
Alice squinted at her mother, considering the rule change.
“I bet you can’t do a hundred,” Zoe said. “No one has ever done a hundred before. If you do a hundred, that means you’re the best.”
Alice grinned, taking the bait. Zoe sighed with relief as her daughter picked up the balloon and ran into the living room, screaming with moronic determination.
“One toss! Two tosses!”
Zoe turned her attention back to the closet. It wasn’t easy, but eventually, under a hideous Moana blanket, she found it: the piano.
It wasn’t a real piano of course—just a Fisher-Price toy an uncle had given Alice for Christmas. Still, it had twelve keys—a full octave of notes—and thanks to Alice’s apathy toward music, it was in excellent condition.
Zoe placed the toy on the rug and tenderly stroked the row of plastic keys. Her Les Paul was somewhere in the basement, behind Tom’s abandoned cardio machines. But she didn’t need a guitar. Every melody on earth was composed of the same twelve notes. With twelve notes you could make anything you wanted.
“Sixty-three tosses…sixty-four tosses…”
There wasn’t a lot of time. Zoe hummed the first note of her melody and flicked her way up the piano, tapping each key until she found the corresponding tone.
E.
From there it was simple to map out the rest of the line—a descending streak of notes, winding down the A major scale.
“Eighty-one…eighty-two…”
She could hear the rest of the song now. A minor-key bridge and some grungy, power-chord-y sort of outro. She sang out the melody, throwing in some I’s and you’s, the embryonic kernels of what might become the lyrics. It was a confrontational song, aggressive, but triumphant. An anthem.
“What are you doing?”
Zoe turned around and swallowed. At some point Tom had entered the room.
“Just playing with Alice,” she said, casually flicking her wrist. “She wanted to try the piano.”
“No, I didn’t,” Alice said, emerging from behind her father’s legs. Her deflated balloon had lost more air during her tosses. She cradled the limp sack in her arm like a wounded animal.
“We were playing balloons,” Alice said. “And then you sent me away so you could do piano. Alone.”
Zoe forced a laugh. “She’s just joking,” she said. “Right, munchkin?”
“No,” Alice said.
There was a long pause. Zoe forced a tight smile. “I’ve gotta pick up the groceries,” she said.
Zoe drove past the Whole Foods and kept on going until she was deep in Echo Park. Rusty was waiting for her in his junk-strewn yard, acoustic guitar in hand.
“Got your text,” he said. “Let’s hear it.”
Zoe grabbed his Yamaha by the neck and launched right into it.
“Holy shit,” said Rusty, after Zoe finished up the outro.
Her face lit up. “You like it?”
“I fucking love it,” he said.
Zoe laughed and threw her arms around her bony stoner friend. It had been a couple of years since she’d last seen him, and it wasn’t until now that she realized how much she missed his company.
“Who’s your manager?” Rusty asked her.
Zoe shrugged. “He quit the industry, like, twenty million years ago.”
“Well, shit. You’re going to need someone to rep you,” Rusty said. “You’ve got a hit on your hands.”
Zoe could feel her heart pounding in her chest.
“I know someone,” Rusty said. He grabbed a pizza delivery menu off the ground, took out a Sharpie, and scrawled down an address. “I’ll set the whole thing up,” he said. “How’s one p.m. Friday?”
Zoe searched her brain for prior commitments. Alice had some kind of bullshit on Friday. But she had some kind of bullshit every day. If she waited for a day when Alice didn’t have some kind of bullshit, she’d be waiting for the rest of her life.
“I’ll be there,” she said.
She was pulling into her driveway when she realized she hadn’t picked up any groceries. Fuck it, she thought. Fuck it all.
The manager lived in Hollywood, in the shadow of the Capitol Records building. She double-checked the address and knocked on the door.
“Is that Zoe?” asked an older man’s voice.
“Yeah!”
“It’s open. Come on in.”
Zoe took a deep breath and entered the house. She’d put some thought into her outfit, settling finally on a blue velvet blazer and her Dinosaur Jr. tee shirt. She’d also brought along a rough demo she’d made of her song. She was making sure her name was spelled correctly on the jewel case when she heard her husband’s voice.
“Hi, honey.”
Zoe looked up and swallowed. The living room was full of familiar faces: Tom, their neighbors, Andy and Jeff, and Rusty.
“What is this?” she said. “What’s going on?”
A tanned man in a sweater stepped out from the shadows.
“My name is Dr. Jenson,” he said gently. “It’s great to finally meet you.”
He thrust out his hand. Zoe shook it awkwardly. “Are you the manager?”
He smiled sympathetically at her. “I’m sorry we misled you,” he said. “It was the only way to get you here.”
Zoe looked around in a panic. “What the hell is going on?”
“I know this all must be confusing,” Dr. Jenson said. “But it’s actually very simple. The people in this room love you like crazy. But they’re scared to death of losing you. And that’s why we’re here.”
Zoe felt her knees grow weak.
“This is an intervention?”
“We know you’ve been making art again,” Tom said. “We know about the song. We know everything.”
Zoe glared at Rusty. He stared down at his lap, too ashamed to make eye contact. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I had to tell them.”
“This is crazy!” Zoe said. “Why do you care if I start writing music again?”
“We just don’t want you to get hurt,” Tom said.
“Is it that?” Zoe said. “Or is it that you’re fucking jealous?”
Dr. Jenson smiled patiently. “Why would they be jealous?” he asked.
“Because they’re fucking failures!” Zoe said. “Tom, your novel sucked ass. It made no sense!” She turned to Jeff and Andy. “And you guys, I looked up that show you said you met in, and it wasn’t even a real show! It was a Broadway-themed restaurant! You weren’t singers; you were waiters!” She slammed her demo down on the table. “I’ve got something going here, and I’m not going to let you drag me down.”
“You’ve been down this road before,” said Dr. Jenson. “Tom told me about the dark days. Playing in a field somewhere, miles away from your family.”
“That was different,” Zoe said. “It won’t end that way this time.”
“It always ends that way,” said Dr. Jenson.
“Look,” Andy said. “Everyone dabbles with art in their twenties. You write, you act, you direct. You try it all. But it’s not sustainable.”
“What about Jeff?” Zoe snapped. “He still sings.”
“Jeff can control it,” Andy said. “He does karaoke once a week, and he’s satisfied. Some people are l
ike that. You’re not.”
Zoe turned to Rusty. “Dude, come on,” she begged. “You know in your heart this is bullshit. Let’s get out of here. You can open for me on tour—I’ll let you do a folk set!”
Rusty shook his head stiffly. “I can’t.”
“Why not?” Zoe demanded.
Dr. Jenson placed a palm on Rusty’s shoulder. “Do you want to tell Zoe your news?”
Rusty reluctantly looked up at Zoe. His eyes were damp with tears.
“I’m getting help,” he murmured.
“What?” Zoe whispered.
“I can’t do it anymore,” he said. “The shitty tour buses. The sad motels. I’m going to New Horizons in Tampa.”
He handed Zoe a brochure, and she shakily flipped through the pages.
“It’s a treatment center for artists,” Dr. Jenson explained. “One of the best in the world. They make it easy for you to quit. They’ll prescribe wine, so you can control the cravings. After ninety days, you’ll come back here and be yourself again. A friend, a wife, a mother.”
“I can be all those things and make art at the same time.”
Dr. Jenson nodded at Tom. He exited the room and returned moments later, holding Alice in his arms.
Zoe shook her head bitterly as Tom cajoled their daughter into speaking.
“Go ahead, munchkin,” he said in a saccharine tone. “Tell your mommy what you wanted to say.”
Alice looked into her mother’s eyes. Her voice was unusually loud and sounded well rehearsed. “We used to play balloons. Now that you’re doing art again, we don’t have time to do balloons.”
“Good job!” Tom said. “That was very brave!” Alice flashed her mother a smug look as her father covered her with kisses.
“That’s it?” Zoe said. “I have to quit making art because she misses her goddamn balloons?”
“It’s not just that,” Tom said. “One time you were so busy writing a song, you left her alone with a balloon. What if she had choked on it? Huh? What then?”
