Chapter Twenty-Six
By the time they order dessert, Greta has made Ben watch at least a dozen different performances from some of her favorite artists, an unofficial highlight reel she didn’t even know she was in possession of: Green Day at Woodstock and Prince at Coachella, Radiohead at Bonnaroo and the Stones at Glastonbury. Something has loosened inside her again as she skips from video to video, showing Ben the ones she loves most, the volume turned low, the two of them huddled so close over her phone that she can feel the warmth of his breath.
As the last notes of “Wild Horses” carry out into the night, Mick Jagger raises his hands in the air, and the crowd cheers, and Ben leans back in his chair with a dreamy smile. “That was really nice.”
Greta laughs. “Really nice?”
“It was,” he says with a shrug.
When they finish watching Arcade Fire play Lollapalooza, the algorithm that shuttles viewers from one video to the next suggests Greta James at Outside Lands, and Ben sits forward so fast he nearly knocks over the bottle of wine.
“Play it,” he says, clearly a little drunk now.
Before she can object, he’s already reached forward to jab the button, and there she is, wearing black leather pants and a white tank top, her lipstick already smeared from the mic, beads of sweat on her forehead as she plays the opening chords of “Done and Done,” the first song she ever released, the first song that got her noticed. Seeing herself on that stage, all angles and edge, her hands flying over the strings so fast it looks like a magic trick, her eyes glinting with defiance as the audience roars back at her, you wouldn’t know she’d started writing it after she and Jason had ended things for the thousandth time, alone in her apartment in the middle of summer with a broken air conditioner, the heat pushing up against the windows so that everything felt damp and heavy and hopeless. The song had started as an elegy but had gradually become something more forceful than that, something more empowering, and that day she debuted it—somehow both forever ago and no time at all—it swept out over the crowd with a pulsing energy that felt almost magnetic.
Even now, on a screen the size of a deck of cards, she can feel the power of it. Not just the song but the performance, and she brings the phone closer and studies the video like it’s someone else entirely up there, trying to locate the confidence behind her face the way you’d use a metal detector on a beach.
She rarely watches her own performances, and there’s something strange about seeing this one now. She feels both immensely proud and also wildly distant, as if it doesn’t belong to her anymore. As if someone else made that track. Someone else sauntered across that stage and absolutely crushed it. Someone else took a formal bow at the end, and then—as the applause continued to grow—waved at the crowd as she walked offstage.
Someone else. Surely it had to be someone else.
“Wow,” Ben says when it’s over, and Greta sets the phone down. The waiter appears behind them with their desserts: a slice of cheesecake for Ben and a strawberry tart for Greta. She tucks in right away, but Ben is still watching her. “That was…it was…”
“Really nice?” she suggests, and he laughs.
“And then some.”
She reaches over for a forkful of his cheesecake. “Isn’t it weird?” she asks once she’s done chewing. “Achieving your dreams?”
“How so?”
“It’s like, if I’d shown that to my twelve-year-old self,” Greta says, gesturing at the phone, “she would’ve lost her mind. To be playing up there in front of all those people?” She shakes her head. “It would’ve been a total dream come true. Just that one song alone. Did you feel the same way when you published your book?”
“I guess so,” he says thoughtfully. “But after watching that, it feels…quieter.”
Greta laughs. “But if twelve-year-old Ben could see you now, what would he think?”
“He’d be pretty psyched I’m in Alaska,” he says with a grin. “And he’d think the book was cool. But that kid was also kind of a nerd.”
“The odds are so crazy, right?” she says, taking another bite. “To actually make a go of it. To be one of the best. It doesn’t matter if you’re a guitarist or a writer or a soccer player or whatever. It’s all so unlikely.”
“Until it’s not,” Ben says, and she smiles at him.
“I remember a few years after college, this hotshot manager came to a gig I had at a bar on the Lower East Side. My best friend, Yara, was playing keyboard with me then, and I told her that all I wanted was for this guy to sign me. I didn’t care if anything else happened after that. I was waiting tables at the time, and I thought I just wanted some validation—some sign that this was all going somewhere. That would’ve been enough, you know?” She looks out the window at the perpetual dusk. “Yara—she laughed at me. She said, ‘If you sign with him, you’ll want to make a demo. And if you make a demo, you’ll want a label to pick it up. And if a label picks it up, you’ll want to hit the charts. Nobody ever wants just the one thing.’ ” She turns to Ben, who is watching her intently. “And she was right.”
“So what do you want now?”
She smiles. “What a question.”
On the phone’s screen, the algorithm is suggesting the next video: Greta James Loses It at BAM. She watches Ben’s eyes fall on the words, then flick away again.
“You’ve seen it,” she says, “haven’t you?”
He’s quiet for a moment; then he nods. “I looked you up that first night.”
She reaches over to switch off the phone, and Ben leans forward.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I don’t think it’s as bad as you think. It was real and it was human and you should never apologize for that.”
“Thanks,” she says in a voice full of emotion as she reaches over to take his hand. They’re still sitting there like that, eyes locked, when Greta hears her name being called and looks over to see Eleanor Bloom.
She’s waving as she approaches them, her huge earrings swinging like chandeliers. “There you are,” she says as Greta disentangles her hand from Ben’s and stands to give her a hug. But a few feet short of the table, Eleanor stops dramatically, her eyes going wide. “You look just like your mother in that dress.”
Greta glances down, disoriented. “She never wore anything like this.”
“You don’t remember her when she was your age,” Eleanor says as the rest of the group makes their way over: Todd and Davis and Mary, followed by Conrad, who is wearing his one good shirt, with its wrinkled collar under a sports coat.