It also felt like a huge ethical overstep, an outright lie in a way that the branding and marketing didn’t approach. I almost made a joke about Milli Vanilli, but Peter has had the ethical part of his brain turned off, so that wasn’t an argument that would carry any water with him.
He said, “Your reasoning?”
I held up a hand. “Peter,” I said. “It’s midnight. I just spent two hours on stage. I’ll be happy to discuss it with you later. But I think fiscally, as well as brand-wise, it’s a bad idea.”
The money argument always went over better with Peter than any appeals to personal decency or artistic integrity. Say one thing for elective sociopathy: It made him predictable.
“I don’t think that’s what’s bothering you,” he said.
“No?”
“Your face did that thing.” He copied it, then grinned. “Like you just stepped in dead rat.”
His next gesture took in my augmented body, the permanent surgical arch of my feet to Barbie toes. There’s a little repulsor unit implanted in the heel that does most of the work, and makes the stage shoes bearable for a two-hour show. Keeps me from developing plantar fasciitis, too. Supposedly.
He said, “You’ve never hesitated to do what it takes.”
“That’s marketing. It’s different. This is about…” I didn’t want to say authenticity. “…authenticity.”
His eyebrow went up. He didn’t say what he was thinking. And I didn’t know how to explain what I meant—that making a splash was one thing. Mediating, managing, even spinning the sense of intimacy with the artist was one thing.
Selling yourself in a totally false package was something else.
“Look, sweetheart,” he said. “You’re a savvy businesswoman. One of the smartest I’ve met. You know how this game is played. Theater and flash. It’s not really you.”
“Well, it couldn’t be, could it?” I patted down my frizz. Nobody pays for an authentic celebrity with bunions and contact lenses and Botox appointments. They pay for a cunning facsimile of authenticity. A scaffolding they can drape their fantasy over to make it three-dimensional. Not reality.
Real people have real feelings, and real feelings are ugly and complicated. Real feelings are the bleeding edge. Real feelings make people uncomfortable. Nobody spends their beer money on uncomfortable. Part of turning people into consumers is making them think your product will make them like themselves better, not ask themselves harder questions. You have to trick them into confronting uncomfortable. What did John Waters call it? A counterculture stealth bomber? Something like that.
Peter said, “How is it different than convincing the front row that that torch song you’re making love to is really for them?”
I shrugged. “I’m paid to emote, Peter. Not to have emotions.”
He pursed his lips and swirled his wine. My better judgment was under siege. They’d be eating rats and sawdust in there before I knew it, and then it was only a matter of time.
I nibbled a thumbnail. “It’s different, that’s all.”
“Your numbers have been better than they are,” he said slowly. “I had to call in some favors to get them to consider you as a flagship for this. Twist a few arms.”
Whatever happened to ‘They asked for you specifically’? I let the wine touch my upper lip. I licked it off.
I really was too tired for this. “I’ll talk it over with Mitchell.”
“Neon—” His mouth said my name, but his eyebrows said, Are you really taking business advice from that guy?
“Tomorrow,” I said. “No show tomorrow. I’ll have some time to look at numbers, Okay? Have Clarice send them over?”
He scowled, but I knew the species and subspecies of his scowls by heart. This one was a scowl of assent.
At least I liked those better than the sneaky smiles.
I took a mouthful of wine and whiffled air over it to release the bouquet. It was still delicious, despite the churning in my stomach. I’d write it differently in the song.
“I can stick around for a day,” he said. “I want to hear your answer in person.”
And that was Peter for I intend to keep the pressure on.
I Should Never Have Slept With Him: The Neon White Story.
“Damn, honey,” Mitchell said. “He didn’t even ask you if you wanted to get your shoes off first?”
He was sprawled sideways across the boxy beige armchair on the darker beige carpet of the beige-walled hotel room, the tip of one sock-clad foot flipping, flipping, flipping. His head lolled over the opposite side of the chair, dark curls half-hiding his eyes. One of his spidery arms was cocked at a weird angle, the other hugged in close to his chest. He balanced a tablet in front of his eyes and fingertip-skipped through screen after screen of information. His frown got deeper. He huffed and made disgusted cat noises, and I paced and yawned and picked my hair and scavenged an unappetizing room service tray on the theory that it would do my system good to eat something, even if that something was pretty nasty.
Rocks on the road. But they don’t let you write paying-your-dues songs anymore after your third platinum record.
Finally, Mitchell let the tablet fall against his chest. His eyes closed and he seemed to doze for several minutes. I had just given up watching him and gone back to see if there was any warmth left in the coffee when he said, without expression or gesture or opening his eyes, “What have you told him you’re going to do?”
I dolloped in cream. The coffee was gray from reheating. “Talk to you.”
He sniffled dismissively. “Gamble either way. If it flops and you adopted early, you’ll look desperate. If it takes off and you didn’t pick it up out of the gate, you’ll look out of touch.”
“And so the oracle confirms the truth I already knew.”
That at least got him to crack an eyelid. “You gotta get rid of that guy.”
I knew. Honestly, I’d known that for five out of seven years. But that sort of thing—abandoning a relationship—doesn’t come easily to me.
“Does he have a rollout proposal?” Mitch, for reasons of his own, never seemed to say Peter’s name. I wondered if it was conscious avoidance or subconscious disgust.
I rolled my neck, trying to get the tension out. The room was ugly, but the bed hadn’t been too bad. “I thought I might offer to wear the widget for a week or two, just to see what it records,” I said.
He swung his feet to the floor and sat up, corkscrew curls stretching and bouncing like springs as they first caught against, then released from, the rough weave of the upholstery. “Why do you have to record anything? They’re just making it up, right?”
“For the same reason my face has to be under the makeup, I guess. The illusion of depth.” I made a face over the coffee. “Apparently, they can. They can do all kinds of magic with it. But that’s…cheating. Soulless.”
“They used to say the same thing about multitrack remote recording.”
“They were probably right.”
He laughed, knuckled the corners of his eyes, and said, “And intimacy in art is a construct anyway. Art isn’t really about raw unmediated access to reality: that’s reality. You get that at the bus stop. Art is about interpreting reality, pointing up certain aspects of it, focusing attention. Editing.”
Most of my conversations with Mitch could loosely be characterized as “preaching to the choir.” I indulged myself in a little bit of that now, and paraphrased something we’d both said before: “Art isn’t art if it doesn’t have a frame.”