PART I
1
When Laura was sixteen she wrote a perfect song. It was the first song she’d ever written, so she didn’t understand how hard it was to write even an okay song, or how hard it was to make anything new, in general. She still thought, then, that making something was primarily a way to have fun. She didn’t know that the song was perfect, just that it was as good as anything on the radio. She played it on her guitar alone in her bedroom, and then for her best friend, Callie, and then for her mother. Her mother made an approving noise and went back to paying attention to one of Laura’s brothers. Callie asked where she’d heard it and didn’t believe her when she said she’d written it, because it was the kind of song that sounds like it has always existed. Laura started to think that she must have heard it somewhere and remembered it. She hadn’t, though. She had written it.
The next day she wrote another song: this one wasn’t perfect; it wasn’t even okay; it was barely a song. This convinced Laura that the first song hadn’t really been hers. She was embarrassed about the whole thing, and so she pretended to herself that it hadn’t happened. She didn’t think about that first song again for years, and by the time she remembered, it was almost too late.
* * *
Now, at twenty-two, she stood in line outside a bar on the corner of Lafayette and Grand, sweating through a black dress that was absorbing all the heat of the midday sun. The other women in line were also wearing black, and some of them clutched the page of the Village Voice where the help-wanted ad had appeared. Some had printed out their résumés. Laura had never worked in a bar or restaurant. In Columbus, she’d worked selling cheap electric guitars to teenage boys at her family’s shop, and then for a while at the Gap in the outlet mall. So she hadn’t brought a résumé, but it didn’t matter. A man came out and walked down the line of women, assessing each one for an instant, then made his selections.
He looked at Laura and saw the way she smiled and made eye contact with no hint of wariness in her giant dark eyes, the expression on her face constantly saying something mildly incredulous, like, “Wow, really?” He guessed correctly that she was very new here. He walked back a step, pointed to Laura and two others, and told the rest they could go home.
Laura and the other two women stepped inside and blinked as their eyes adjusted from the glaring heat and brightness of the sidewalk to the chilled darkness of the bar. It was painted black, and the banquettes were dark red velvet, meant to give an impression of luxury, but like all bars in the daytime it stank and was sad, like an empty fairground. The guy who’d chosen them started training them immediately, without even asking their names. He had no way of knowing that they even knew English—and, as it turned out, one of them, Yulia, essentially didn’t—but it didn’t matter, because they weren’t being hired as bartenders or even waitresses. The ad had read “front-of-house staff,” and their job, as the guy described it, was to greet guests at the door and usher them to a banquette in either the upper or lower section of the bar, depending on how much money they looked likely to spend. Other than that, their job was to walk around in the bar and smile and chat. They were there to provide ambiance, like the chandeliers and the nicer-brand soap in the bathroom’s dispensers.
The pay was twelve dollars an hour, he said, plus sometimes the bartenders would tip them out. Twelve dollars an hour, plus (possible) tips—she would only have to work fifty-four hours a month, at most, to pay the $650 rent that her best friend and now roommate, Callie, informed her was an incredible bargain, considering their apartment’s perfect location on Third between First and A. Callie had lived in New York for almost five years now, because she’d gone to college there. Callie knew everyone, had regular haunts, and would have told Laura (if she’d asked) not to take the job at Bar Lafitte, might even have been able to hook her up with a better—less gross, more lucrative—bar job, but Laura was determined not to lean too heavily on Callie. She was trying not to just let all Callie’s friends become her friends by default.
Laura put her name on the schedule for a shift the next day and walked back out into the daytime, which now seemed even brighter. The blast of warm air carrying the sunbaked smells of piss and pavement felt good on her chilled bare legs and arms. She had shrunk into herself somewhat while inside the bar, and now that she was outside, she could expand fully back into her skin. She tried to ignore how relieved she felt to be out of there, and instead tried to feel happy that she now had a job. Having a job meant she would be able to afford to stay in the apartment she’d just moved into and could start making progress toward her goal: play shows, write more songs, get signed to a label, and make an album. She was going to become a professional musician. She would never go back to Columbus if she didn’t want to. The next time she saw her hometown it was going to be because she was on tour.
For the past week, she’d been saying hi to people whom she saw around the neighborhood more than once, thinking maybe those people would become her friends. The rules around saying hi were very different than they had been in Columbus, she had noticed. The man behind the counter at the bodega on her corner, which sold all kinds of Cadbury candy from the UK, had seemed surprised when she’d introduced herself on her second visit. He had been reluctant to reveal his own name, as if no one had ever asked him before.
Laura had broken up with a nice but boring boyfriend in anticipation of moving, one of a series of nice boring boyfriends that had begun when she was fourteen. Chris, Jason, Alex, Jason again, Darrell. She had never been in love. She liked to always have a boyfriend whom she wasn’t in love with so that she could have sex whenever she wanted and not have to worry about going on dates or having her heart broken or catching diseases. She had never been in love. She was in love with her music—she really was, and she sometimes told people so. But now she was determined to avoid even having another convenience-boyfriend. She wanted to be single, to know herself as a single person and to focus on writing songs. She listened to the Joni Mitchell album Hejira every day on her headphones, using a Discman that predictably skipped during her favorite track, “Song for Sharon,” which was about being an adventurer and not worrying about conventional trappings of female life. In that song, someone suggests to the narrator (ostensibly Joni) that she should settle down and have children or do charity work, and Joni responds that the cure for her melancholy is actually to find herself “another lover.” Laura loved that line so much.
* * *
It was nice to have the validation of getting a job, even a very easy bar job. Laura hadn’t gotten a lot of ego boosts lately, or actually ever. She had never been a great student, but she would often make up the distance between a C and a B by writing poems for extra credit, like the one about the Bill of Rights she’d written in eighth grade that rhymed “probable cause” with “due process clause.” Though she had changed in a few crucial ways since then, she still loved doggerel and patter and songs with complicated, weird, funny lyrics. She had gone to Ohio State University and studied English lit and spent a lot of time alone in her room with her acoustic guitar. Occasionally at an open-mic night she would play her songs for other people, who clapped politely and came up to her afterward and thought that she would consider being compared to Weird Al a compliment, which it sort of was, though she would have preferred to be compared to the Moldy Peaches.