Yet few young women would have come into their own by the age of twenty-one, and the predictable hit-and-miss of this period still didn’t explain why her suitemates greeted even her most confident performances with a penultimate enthusiasm. By contrast, when bundling back to the dorm in a posse after attending opening night of My Fair Lady, at which the promising Miss Finlayson as Eliza had drawn a standing ovation, the superlatives flew, and Susan’s confederates could have danced all night in the glow of their idol’s reflected glory. Susan Twitchel made a soldierly effort, but Grier Finlayson – now, Grier Finlayson was the real deal.
Indeed, so irrefutably had this hierarchy been established that both the Susan of that era and the Slooz of Christmas Future would grow equally confounded why at the end of that year it would still seem necessary to put the Also-Ran in her place one last time.
The pressure-cooker competition on a college campus was wont to suggest that students who distinguished themselves within its grounds – impressed the professors, led the clubs, copped the grades and Phi Beta Kappa keys – were streaking across a finish line at the head of the pack. Only senior year did it dawn dimly on some students – if only on the smart ones, and not the book-smart, but the biologically smart ones: the real race hadn’t even started.
It was this very creeping awareness that how well or badly they performed on their senior projects was of no earthly importance whatsoever that inevitably drove even the animal-smart kids like Susan to focus exclusively on that project with redoubled ferocity. The intolerable alternative was to face the fact that on the other side of graduation they had accomplished nothing, they were nothing, and they were lost.
To substitute for a senior thesis, IA students with music concentrations were required to deliver full-length recitals to live audiences. Susan planned a contemporary programme of original songs, and put together a cabaret to be performed in a dark, sticky campus bar at Columbia called the Culvert. Subtly worn down by her suitemates’ too-moderate approval all year, she was private about her line-up, and rehearsed only in a music-department practice room with the door closed. She mixed up the running order so that the few heavier tunes would never drag the mood of a set to morose. For this second semester, something had started to flow. She’d finally discovered rhythm, so this tranche of new work had drive. Yet the untried tunes felt vulnerable. She was still polishing the lyrics, more personally exposing than her earlier songs, which had hidden under a cloak of nonspecific glumness. She even dared a number called ‘Under the Radar’ that hinted at the experience of feeling underestimated, of cultivating a rising, unobserved excellence by stealth. In an attic nearly four decades later, she’d discover the first verse and refrain in red cartridge pen:
I broadcast on frequencies between your stations.
I lurk on tiny islands unclaimed by other nations.
I wail in registers only dogs and deer detect.
You’re colour blind and I glow candy-apple red.
Watch your back! I’m coming up under the radar.
Watch your back! I’m coming up under the radar . . .
Susan drafted a pianist a year behind her in the programme as an accompanist, who could duet with the oboe cadenzas that she incorporated into her tunes for the first time. Considering how the whole evening ended up making her feel, it was a testimony to the force pulsing through ‘Under the Radar’ that thereafter she continued to play around with oboe interludes, refining what would at length become her signature sound.
Make no mistake: the cabaret went swimmingly. Pulling out all the stops, she’d bullied friends, family, and fellow IA students into showing up. Once the first set was underway, the full house left off looking at watches, too. Anyone who appears in public will tell you that it’s wildly obvious from the stage how a performance is going down, and Susan led this crowd by the leash.
She was tapping into something, a presence. Finally at ease before an audience, she didn’t apologise in the intros, or resort to self-deprecation. She seemed to have expanded to fill out a wider perimeter, as if the mic amplified not merely her voice but her very being. This iteration of Susan Twitchel was just as true as the regular-sized one. She was acting all right, but the role she was performing was herself – not a fraud or simulacrum, but her real self. The more searing her vocals, the more vaulting her reedy intervals, the wittier her patter between songs, the bigger and more bona fide she grew. She finally grasped why some people crave live performance like a drug, and it wasn’t from a need for love, but from a lust for scale. There was an interior magnitude you could never achieve on your lonesome.
The quantity of new material being limited, it was fortunate that she’d reserved a couple of songs for encores. The other thing you can always tell from the stage is the difference between wholehearted and merely compulsory applause, and this clapping bounced off the low ceiling of the bar with a spanking resonance and rapid tempo that you never got from duty.
Down from Connecticut for the occasion, her parents took her out for a congratulatory dinner, so she didn’t get back to the suite until nearly midnight. When she entered the kitchen, Pam mumbled an anodyne ‘nice job tonight’ and fled to bed. Grier was pacing in her quilted magenta bathrobe. The Sidekick was perched upright on the high stool, eyes shiny and darting, like a bird of prey on an outstretched arm.
‘How was dinner with your parents?’ Myra asked.
‘A cut above okay,’ Susan said. ‘You know, the Indian place. They put the same sauce on everything, but it’s a good sauce.’ She didn’t want to talk about dinner. None of her suitemates had come up to her after the show, which she excused in the magnanimity of her success as their allowing fans who’d a distance to travel home to monopolise the star. Obviously they’d have plenty of opportunity to wax eloquent about Susan’s tour de force back at the dorm.
This was that opportunity.
‘Do you want to change?’ Myra solicited.
‘Not really,’ Susan said quizzically. ‘This is pretty comfortable.’ Wearing all black was hackneyed, but she’d varied the textures with a silk shirt and leather vest. The jeans fit for once, and she’d bought the boots especially for the cabaret. With a slim red scarf at her neck as a snazzy accent, in Susan’s terms this was dressing up. She was reluctant to swap the hip duds for a bathrobe, thereby resigning herself that the highlight of her undergraduate education was officially over.
‘Because I’m afraid we’re going to have to talk,’ Myra said, clasping her hands on her knee.
Susan didn’t get it. ‘Has something happened?’
‘We think so, yes.’
‘Myra, will you stop being coy?’ Grier exploded at last, raking her fingers through the ethereal fluff of hair. ‘You copied me! You copied me, okay?’
‘. . . Ho-ow?’ Susan asked carefully, having trouble adjusting to a very different encounter than the Aw, shucks bow-taking she’d anticipated.
‘Well, let us count the ways.’ Myra curved her elbow atop her knee, rested her chin on her knuckles, and slid a forefinger alongside her cheek. The motion was feline, the pose inquisitional. ‘Style, delivery, content. If someone had led me into the Culvert blindfolded, I’d have bet the farm that I was at Grier Finlayson’s senior recital.’
‘You don’t have a farm.’ It was the sort of stalling crack one concocted in a state of stupefaction. ‘And maybe the reason you don’t have a farm,’ Susan added, ‘is you’ve made lousy bets like that with it.’
‘I’m not saying the imitation was necessarily intentional,’ Grier said.
‘No?’ Myra said. ‘Then why was she so secretive about all this new material? Scuttling off to a rehearsal room, when usually she fishes for compliments by practising here?’ They must have conducted this conversation in Susan’s absence, and were repeating it for her benefit.
‘I can see how just being around someone else’s work all the time, it could get into your head,’ Grier said.
‘You mean the way women start menstruating together,
’ Susan said sourly.
‘But at a certain point, you have to step back and realise you’ve been influenced,’ Grier said. ‘Or worse. That you’ve been channelling someone else’s voice. You step back and realise that – that what you’re writing doesn’t belong to you!’
‘It’s called stealing,’ Myra said.
‘It’s also called the sincerest form of flattery,’ Grier said. ‘But Susan, I just can’t . . . I really don’t need that kind of compliment right now. I’m under a lot of pressure. My stepmom’s gone back to drinking, I just gained another two pounds on a diet of canned green beans, that essay on Joyce is due at the end of this week and I haven’t even started it, and my senior recital is twelve days from now and I just don’t need this!’
‘Don’t need what?’ Susan cried. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Yet she was about to discover that the more she denied the charge, the more valid it would appear. Later she’d puzzle over how one ever proclaimed one’s innocence without sounding guilty. I did not! perfectly translated Oh, shit, you caught me.
‘Seriously,’ Myra said. ‘That stuff you sang tonight didn’t sound, even to your own ears, strangely familiar?’
‘It sounded familiar because I’ve been working my ass off on these tunes since mid-term break, and when you sing your own work over and over, yes, it starts to sound fucking familiar!’
‘That little dying fall at the end of the line?’ Myra needled. ‘The deliberate breaking on the high notes? You could have taken a course in Grier’s vocals. Congratulations, you aced the final.’
‘Our voices don’t sound the same in the least,’ Susan protested. ‘Grier’s projection is way better, and she’s got, I don’t know, more – mass.’
She’d meant to disarm by sucking up, but the choice of noun, amongst women, was unfortunate. ‘Thanks,’ Grier said.
‘Your voices sound similar enough when you shove the mic down your throat,’ Myra said sweetly.
‘It wasn’t only the colouration,’ Grier said. ‘It was the lyrics, too. Bringing in whales in the second number, and then you mention an egg timer in the refrain, which is exactly the same as “Kerosene”, which I wrote in December—’
‘So we’re both suggestible!’ Susan cried, waving her hand at the egg timer on the counter between them. ‘The rest of the lyrics don’t overlap at all!’
‘If it were only the once,’ Grier went on, ‘maybe it would be a coincidence, but once you throw in several dozen coincidences it’s not called coincidence any more, it’s called a pattern! A consistent, relentless, and yes, for all I know purposeful pattern, and I just feel robbed! The way you used all those slant rhymes—’
‘Practically every songwriter on earth uses slant rhymes!’
‘And the juxtapositions – the “rancorous cherry blossom” and the “tedious joy” and the “woolly wine”—’
‘That was wooden wine—’
‘Oh, who cares, it’s the same technique! The same jarring, dissociative, apples-with-oranges, slightly surreal fish-on-an-operating-table technique, and where do you think you got it? The “glittering sorrow” and “gushy belligerence” and “angry relaxation” . . . The “careful daring” and “brave cowardice” and “idiotic intelligence” – all that good badness and evil virtue . . . I mean, I was too embarrassed to take notes in the Culvert, but it was like – it was like you weren’t, you weren’t too embarrassed, almost like you had been taking notes!’
Susan didn’t recognise any of these citations. But when Grier was on a roll, Susan had learned early in the academic year not to interrupt.
‘Taking notes in more than one sense,’ Myra chimed in. ‘Taking Grier’s notes. The melodies. Like, that fourth song, what you called “Gangrene” or something—’
‘ “Gargoyle”,’ Susan corrected, but her voice was starting to catch.
‘Hmm-hmm-hmm,’ Myra hummed in an ascending arpeggio. ‘That’s straight out of Grier’s “Rock Covers Paper”.’
‘Three notes? You can’t accuse someone of musical plagiarism on the basis of three notes!’
‘It was a lot more than three notes, Susan,’ Myra chided, looking away as if out of decorum.
There were two of them, and they corroborated each other, while Susan’s lonely refutation was subjective and self-interested. She was beginning to feel crazy. Was there something to the allegation after all? Had she subconsciously absorbed lines and riffs and whole phrases to which she’d only half-listened in the dorm, and then unwittingly parroted back that background noise in the guise of new compositions? But how could that be? That hadn’t been what it felt like to write them!
‘I—’ Susan floundered. ‘I don’t know, I – I really just don’t see it, I – I was so excited because the tunes finally started to tick over, and I could hear them unspool in the back of my head almost like they were playing themselves, and I was at long last able to really say something, express what I feel and stop hiding behind the, you know, mopey vagueness of the earlier stuff . . . To be more heartfelt, like the songs I made up as a kid and sang to my little brother . . . I thought the new material was pretty good, I . . . thought it sounded like me, the real me for once, and now you . . . I don’t see it, I . . . I wasn’t trying, I wasn’t trying to . . .’ To her horror, Susan had started to cry.
‘Typical,’ Myra remarked under her breath. ‘Turning around who’s really the injured party.’
Grier put a hand on Susan’s shoulder as the ‘thief’ crumpled into an aluminium frame chair at the dining table. ‘Okay, I believe you, I believe you can’t hear it, or at least that you don’t want to hear it, and why would you? I believe you didn’t do it on purpose exactly but you also have to understand how it makes me feel. I mean, I’m glad you like my stuff and I’m even kind of touched you like my stuff but I can’t help it, I’m also upset, all right? I feel a little – a little abused, taken advantage of, like you think you can just help yourself to me. Like I’m some smorgasbord, and there will always be enough to go around. But I don’t have anything extra to give away right now, you understand? This stuff with my stepmom, it’s left me wrung out, and school’s almost over and I have no idea where I’m even living this summer and that kind of anxiety always makes me eat – and then you come along and . . . take the one thing I have to protect me, my only solace, the one thing that’s mine, the very centre, the core, the essence of what’s mine.’
‘I don’t see it.’ Susan had dropped her head and was shaking it back and forth so that her hair got stuck in her snot.
‘I’ve heard apologies before,’ Myra said. ‘And honey lamb, that didn’t sound like one.’
Grier broke away. ‘Look, this is pointless,’ she told Myra. ‘I told you, what’s done is done. She may not “see it”, but the committee will, which means I’ve got twelve days to come up with a whole new programme. I’m damned if I’m graduating from this dump with the faculty claiming that I copied her.’
Little remained of the semester, and Susan made herself scarce at the suite. But she still had to return to sleep, which meant that she couldn’t altogether miss out on what had become the dominant drama of their quintet: the composition of completely new songs for Grier’s recital. The Prima Donna pulled multiple all-nighters, which required a handful of illicit uppers, a steady stream of caffeine, and countless cans of string beans.
Shortly after the already-celebrated showdown over alleged copycatting, on an afternoon Grier had crashed catatonically to bed and Myra was out, Susan corralled Pam against a countertop with a mug of malted milk. ‘Okay, you were there,’ Susan said. ‘Was I doing some kleptomaniacal imitation of Grier – channelling her – or are those two out to lunch?’
Pam’s plain face constricted. ‘Well, I can see, from some perspectives, how they might have interpreted it that way . . . But I can also see how you might not recognise the similarities, or maybe even how, for you, there wasn’t much to recognise . . .’
‘You just said exactly nothing.’<
br />
‘I don’t want to get caught in the middle.’
‘What a shock.’
Pam’s eyes flashed with a flintiness that Susan didn’t know was in her. ‘What I do think is that this is a terrible way to end senior year, and you and Myra and Grier should try to reconcile and put this behind you. If you don’t, I think you’ll all regret it.’
‘You can’t “reconcile” if you’re living in alternative universes. I’m not apologising for something I didn’t do, and they’re the ones, in my view, who owe me an apology. Which won’t be forthcoming either. So I repeat: off the record, if that makes it easier. Was there anything to that accusation? You’re the only one without a dog in this race.’ At the time, it still seemed a stylish expression.
‘Only you know.’ With that, Pam slipped between the counter and Susan’s malted milk and pronounced no more on the matter.
Call it ungenerous, but grace is rare at barely twenty-two, and Susan declined to attend Grier’s recital. Presumably after all the theatrics, the young woman the suite had nominated as their one true wunderkind did fill out her concert with entirely fresh material, though if the snatches escaping Grier’s bedroom were any indication the new songs sounded pretty much like the old ones.
Barring an exchange of phone numbers on graduation day that Susan interpreted as an empty exercise of social form, that would have been it, save for a postscript near the end of the ensuing summer. Out of the blue, Myra called Susan at her sublet and asked her to come by for a drink. (Unsurprisingly, she and Grier had found an apartment together, and they, too, had stayed on the Upper West Side.) Intrigued, and coming to realise that all along she’d been hoping that the doyens of 12C would eventually come to like her, Susan accepted the olive branch.
Yet rather than providing for a halting truce, the occasion was jittery and superficial, discussion mostly centring on home décor, until those two got to the point – pulling out a case of potions and an order form. Grier started chattering about how much more fully her hair was growing in now, and she wasn’t being confiding. Obviously desperate for income to cover their rent, these newly matriculated liberal-arts graduates had signed up to sell supplements for a nutritional company that conformed to the personalised-harassment-cum-blackmail model of Amway and Tupperware. Susan Twitchel wouldn’t have got her invitation to submit to this sales pitch until late August, because clearly the doyens had already run through their genuine friends, first cousins, and neighbours in the building, and were now down to the long-shot B-list. Mortified for all concerned, Susan didn’t buy anything, and left most of her Chablis.
A Short Affair Page 20
