Into the Woods

11 Lean In

11

LEAN IN

Teddy

Gretchen and I spent the rest of the week having sex, which was a twist I had not seen coming.

No, correction: Gretchen and I spent the rest of the week having sex when we weren’t doing our jobs.

To my surprise, I was increasingly digging my job. The music kids were of wildly varying abilities—none of the others had anywhere near Anna’s level of talent—but most of them, if you talked to them for a while, turned out to be cool. It took a certain amount of dedication, of seriousness of purpose, to spend a month in the woods working on your craft.

Don’t get me wrong, I was still my usual grumpy self. Anna aside, I was still letting the counselors do the heavy lifting. But I was hanging around at the end of the day when the whole crew worked on “Bohemian Rhapsody.” They’d even talked me into playing bass for it.

It was, to my ongoing surprise, fun.

And shit, when was the last time making music had been fun ?

Anna and I were getting together pretty much every other day. By the end of week three, I thought it was time to introduce the idea of making a demo I could send to Brady. I hadn’t brought it up after my phone call with him because I’d wanted to sit with the idea, make sure it felt right—for me and for Anna. But yeah, this girl was going places, and selfishly, I wanted to be along for the ride.

She was astounded. “You were serious when you were talking about me making an album?”

“Yeah, but you can’t just ‘make an album.’ I mean, you can, but no one will hear it without some kind of deal. I talked to my manager after we spoke, and he said he’d listen to a demo.”

“So I guess you do have a manager,” she said wryly.

I smirked. “Turns out I do.”

“But… how would this work?”

“We book some studio time, hire some session musicians. Or maybe not even. Between the two of us, I think we could play everything. We aim to record maybe half a dozen songs. ‘Take It Easy,’ but, like you said, mostly originals. If you’re OK with it, I’ll start involving myself more in the writing. I’ve been holding back a bit, conscious that here, I’m meant to be your teacher and not your collaborator. They’ll still be your songs. But I think I can help—I have some ideas. We’ll share songwriting credit with your name first.”

I paused, trying to get a sense of how she was taking this. She looked shocked but not displeased.

“If we don’t feel like we have enough songs by the end of camp,” I went on, “which we almost certainly won’t, we keep in touch, send them back and forth. Do some Zoom rehearsals. Then, when we’re ready, we record.”

“Where? Where do we do this?”

Good question. I knew studios in New York I could book. But I could hardly invite a high school girl to crash with me in New York. “Minneapolis. I’ll fly in when you’re ready. And of course your mom can be there.” I sometimes forgot that camp wasn’t reality. Which was a bummer—on more than one front. “We’ll run this all by her.”

“I don’t want my mom there.”

“Well, someone should be there.”

She was looking at me like I had two heads, which I guessed meant she felt safe with me.

“You mean in case you suddenly have a personality transplant and decide to offer me drugs and/or take advantage of me?”

I laughed, but I was stupidly pleased that she thought it would take a personality transplant for me to do something shitty. I was starting to get the feeling that this was going to work. Not just musically, but that Anna and I were going to mesh as collaborators in the real world, outside the creative soup of Wild Arts. “You know I’m not going to offer you drugs, and I know I’m not going to offer you drugs, but the world doesn’t know I’m not going to offer you drugs. But we can work out the logistics later.”

“What’s in this for you?”

Ha. She was skeptical. Good for her. “I get to say I discovered Anna Sommer.”

“Maybe you should be my manager.”

“Oh God, no. You don’t want that. I don’t want that. But if you do get to make an album, I’d love to produce it, if you’ll have me. And assuming we like working together on the demo.”

She blinked rapidly, like she was having trouble assimilating what I was saying.

“You should know I have no experience as a producer. I mean, I was there for all the Concrete Temple records, obviously, and I had opinions. But I was never the producer.”

The blinking continued.

“Look, Anna, you’re crazy talented. I truly believe you can make a career of this if you want to. I would be thrilled to help however I can. I admit I’m not exactly riding high on my own career right now.” Hell, maybe I should join her band. “I know people, though. I can get your demo in front of them, and your songs will do the rest. Maybe it’s too soon. Maybe you want to finish high school first. You should finish high school, whatever happens.” Maybe I should have led with that. “But I don’t see why you can’t do both. It’s not like a record deal is going to drop in your lap tomorrow.”

“Honestly, I’m a little overwhelmed,” she said. “I’m excited, but I never thought about my life going like this. I’ve been thinking of music as a hobby.”

I thought about Tristan and his boundless sense of self-worth. I thought of Gretchen and her dancers and their theory about “girl” songs.

Had I stumbled into becoming a music-industry feminist? Was I the next Jack Antonoff? I chuckled. I could think of worse things.

“Let’s focus on what’s in front of us, why don’t we?” I suggested. “We don’t have to make any big decisions right now. Let’s just work on the new song. We’d be doing that anyway.” She had a song on the go about being the only person in a concert audience not filming the show, and it was awesome. It was a breezy, observational song on the surface, but underneath that, she was saying something about how we choose to experience—or not experience—the world. Like I said, she was a huge talent.

“Yeah, OK.” She started strumming but suddenly stopped. “Teddy?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

“No problem,” I said, though I was pumped that she was open to the idea of working toward a demo. Like, disproportionately excited. Damn. Camp had made me soft.

I was conditioned to pop a semi every time there was a knock on my door, which was awkward because although most of the time the visitor was Sourplum, occasionally it was Jack.

So when a knock came around three in the afternoon on the Saturday of the third week of camp, I untucked my T-shirt and arranged it so it covered the front of my shorts, just in case.

It was Gretchen, but she wasn’t wearing her usual spy getup. Which meant either she had dropped her devotion to the covert nature of our liaisons, or she wasn’t here for that. I was voting for option A, so I wordlessly stepped back to let her in.

“I can’t stay.”

Well, that was disappointing.

“But I got you something.” She handed me a plastic thing I couldn’t identify. It was a small white cylinder with a pump-like mechanism.

“Is this a bicycle pump for a Barbie doll? Or, no, a sex toy for Ken? I mean, he doesn’t have genitals, right? So maybe he needs some help?”

She threw her head back and cackled. It was a full-on witchy cackle. She was doing well on her crone-ification mission.

“It’s supposed to extract the venom out of mosquito bites.” She shrugged. “I went to town with Maiv this morning, and it was in a display near the counter at the drugstore, so I impulse-purchased it.”

“That’s…” Really nice. I was tickled she had thought of me. It felt like a long time since someone besides Auden had. “Thanks.” I had to clear my throat. Damn, I was going soft: getting emotional over a mosquito venom pump.

But I was also going hard.

Life with Sourplum was confusing.

I decided to lean into the hard side of things. I was more comfortable there. I waggled my eyebrows. “You sure you can’t come in?”

She had “come in” every night this past week, late. I hadn’t been sure how weekends were going to work, but I was open to an afternoon delight.

Hell, I would do it anytime, anywhere with Gretchen. I wasn’t sure if it was this whole last hurrah/no romance thing making it feel like the stakes were low, or if we just had chemistry, but damn. The woman made me come so hard I sometimes feared I was going to damage myself. And the awesome part was, it seemed to go both ways. She was multiorgasmic, but not, like, in a performative, porny way. It was really something.

“I can’t. I’m meeting the dance girls for an extra rehearsal.”

“How’s it going?”

“Great, except for Tristan. I’m going to fire him today, actually.”

I winced. “I’m sorry.” I’d given her Tristan because he was a little shit, and had thought of the role as a punishment for him. That wasn’t something I was proud of from this vantage point. Little Women , but with dancing, from what I’d picked up now that I was more present in the goings-on at camp, was sounding like it was going to be amazing. But even if it wasn’t, what kind of person was I that my “help” was less than no help? Why would I give a fellow artist “help” that would hinder her? One interpretation was that I wanted to hinder her—or at least that I didn’t care about hindering her. That I didn’t respect what she was doing.

None of that was true, but that was a reasonable conclusion, given the facts. And the real truth wasn’t any more palatable: I’d been so wrapped up in my own angst when I got here that I couldn’t see beyond myself. I’d thought of most human interactions as battles. Me versus them. I would have liked to be able to blame that on Scott, but it takes two to tango.

“It’s OK,” she said in response to my apology.

“It’s really not,” I said. “I promised you a Laurie, and I got you a shit one.”

“I appreciate that. All he has to do is count and spin in this scene—we’ve made it so he doesn’t even have to dance—but he can’t do it. Won’t do it. Worse, he’s doing these little ‘subtle’ sneers at my girls. I’d been trying to cut him some slack, thinking, Well, he’s a teenage boy, and he’s been voluntold to be in this very girly production. But you cut someone too much slack, suddenly you don’t have a functional rope anymore. You don’t have a show. So he’s out.”

She was such a badass. It was hot.

“Though I admit I’m not sure how firing him is going to go. I’ve ejected plenty of kids—or their parents—from my studio over the years.”

See? Badass.

“But in that case, it’s my studio. I can’t kick Tristan out of camp, so I have to think about how I’m going to handle it.”

“Let me fire him for you.” It was the least I could do.

She squinted at me. “You would do that for me?”

“Well, I don’t know if it would be ‘for you’ so much as it would be cleaning up my own mess, but yes.”

“It’s OK. I’ll figure it out. But thanks. I appreciate the offer.”

“You want me to get you a new kid? A good one?” I paused. I felt really bad about this. Which was weird, but it was what it was. “Or I can play the role myself if you like?”

That cracked her up.

“What?”

“While I would very much like to see you playing the part of Laurie, we are good.”

“You sure?” I told myself to stop pushing. Did I want to be Laurie in Little Women , but with dancing? No, I did not.

“Laurie being played by our resident adult rock star would lend a distinctly creepy note to the proceedings, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“How old are you, anyway?”

“Thirty-five.”

“Ooh,” she said laughingly. “A younger man.”

“How old are you?”

“Forty at the end of the summer.”

Wow. She didn’t look forty.

“Hence the man cleanse, I guess,” she added, shrugging. “Maybe once you turn forty they fast-track you for cronedom.”

She was kidding. I thought.

“Anyway, I appreciate the offer, but I have a plan that requires no boys whatsoever.”

“Kind of like your plan for life generally.”

“Kind of,” she agreed with a cheeriness that was hard to parse. It made me vaguely uncomfortable. It wasn’t that I was going to be all torn up when Sourplum and I had to part ways, but I was going to miss the spectacular sex. She, apparently, was not. It was disconcerting to see how easily she was going to be able to walk away.

She started to go—I could recognize that she was cueing up a leap or a jump to dismount my porch—but I grabbed her arm and said, “Come in for thirty seconds.”

She made a mild noise of protest, but she came. I pushed her gently against the inside of the door and planted one on her. I was addicted to kissing her, now that we’d broken that barrier.

She had that heart shape in her lips, which I’d learned—while tracing it with my finger and expressing admiration for it, mortifyingly—was called a Cupid’s bow. I just wanted to… eat it. All the time.

It was strange, though, to be kissing her knowing it wouldn’t be leading to more. If we were having a last hurrah—meaning, as she’d said, sex and not romance—what was I doing luring her inside for the purpose of kissing her? Why was I getting myself all riled up to no end?

I broke the kiss. She looked a little dazed but rolled her eyes when I said, “Thanks for the mini sex toy.”

I followed her outside. She leaped off my porch, as I’d known she would, and something kind of… stuck in my chest. I watched her jog off, but when she was a few yards away, she turned back. There was something about the angle of the afternoon sun, the way it hit her hair, which was piled on her head in a messy bun in such a way that the pink was extra visible. The catch in my chest deepened. I told myself it was regret over how profoundly I had misjudged her initially.

“Hey, Knight,” she said, like she was trying to get my attention, though she had never lost it.

“Yeah?”

“Campfire tonight. You coming?”

“I am now.”

She beamed at me and skipped off.

Damned if, a couple of hours later, I didn’t have the bones of a new song. But I didn’t know if it was any good, and I was exhausted. Even though the songs were finally coming—this was the third now—writing was slower than it used to be. Harder, too. Instead of songwriting feeling like solving a puzzle, the way it used to, it felt like solving a puzzle while wrestling a bear.

Maybe I worked better with collaborators. But I was increasingly feeling like whatever happened in the long term, the next album needed to be mine. Mine alone. Not because I needed to prove myself to Scott, but because I needed to… I didn’t even know. Prove myself to myself? That didn’t feel quite right. I knew that with Brady on board, and given the Concrete Temple pedigree, I’d be able to get a record made. It was more that the record that was beginning to take shape in my mind was a different kind of record. A solo record not just in the sense that it was me without the band, but a solo record in the most elemental sense of the word: a record made by a man alone in the woods. I guess because this album was about this place—Wild Arts, but also “this place” psychologically. This limbo I was in, which, once I stopped fighting it, was an interesting, if sometimes uncomfortable, place to be.

The record was going to be different stylistically, too, which was a bit wild. Three songs in, I had to accept the fact that I was writing a folk-rock album. I was playing the songs on the keyboard or acoustic guitar, so they maybe sounded extra folky at this stage. I was imagining giving them some edge in the studio. But there was no way around the fact that these songs had more in common with Peter, Paul and Mary than with Concrete Temple.

It remained to be seen whether this marked the beginning of a new era for me or was just something I needed to get out of my system—a one-and-done before I went back to the harder stuff. Or maybe I’d move into producing for people beyond Anna.

Regardless, I’d broken the logjam. I really was working on a solo album now, even if not as quickly as I might have hoped at the outset of the summer.

I grabbed my phone to call Auden since I had some time to kill before dinner. I’d ignored a FaceTime from her the other night because I’d been getting it on with Gretchen.

“Are you OK?” Auden asked when she picked up.

“I’m fine.”

She cracked a smile. “I think we’re the only family who gets alarmed when a call comes in during daylight.”

“Ha. Yeah, I don’t know, there’s something about this clean air or some shit that continues to have me out like a light well before midnight.” Of course, it could be the mind-blowing orgasms. Either way, these days I wasn’t conscious during our usual chat times. “What are you doing?” She was wearing her darkroom clothes—she had converted a closet in her apartment into a darkroom.

“I’ve been experimenting with this thing called light painting.” She reversed her phone camera. “I don’t know if you can see this.” It was a dark scene—it looked like a forest, or maybe a garden?—with big circles of yellow light that almost appeared to be moving. “You use a superlong exposure on a moving light source—in this case, me in Bryant Park with a glow stick. You can also move the camera around a static light source. I haven’t tried that yet. This is just practice.”

As per usual, Auden’s “just practice” looked amazing. “That looks like something you’d see in a gallery.” Also as per usual, she waved me off. “I wish it was darker, though. Maybe I should go into the depths of Central Park.”

“You should come here,” I said, reviving my earlier invitation. “It’s dark here. And there’s a painter here, Maiv Khang. Look her up. You’d love her, and I think she’d be interested in this light painting thing. She’s doing a series on the overlap of city and nature. And—” I felt like a huge dork saying the rest. “You could see my music kids do their final performance.”

“Your music kids? Aww!”

“We’re working on this big cheesy finale—‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’” Which I suddenly very much wanted Auden to see.

If she came, maybe I could also talk to her about Mom. I hadn’t forgotten what Gretchen said, about leaning into the pain Mom had caused as a way of trying to discharge it. I wondered if that was what I was doing with my album, with all this folk-rock.

I also hadn’t forgotten what I’d said to Gretchen in return, that I didn’t think I could do that—lean into the Mom junk—without Auden being willing to do the same, or at least willing to witness me doing it. “Please come,” I said, letting the urgency of my desire infuse my tone. “It would mean a lot to me.”

She paused long enough that I thought I might have won her over, but then she said, “I can’t.”

I sighed. Yeah, not everyone had jobs they could take off from at a moment’s notice. “I know.”

“No, I mean, I can’t .”

“What?”

“Teddy, I’ve never left New York City.”

“That’s not true.” Was it? “You went to that retreat in the Hamptons last summer. We were just talking about that the other day.”

“I went to that retreat for one day, had a full-blown panic attack while wading in the water, faked food poisoning, and left early.”

What? My mind was having trouble grabbing on to the notion that my sister had never been farther from the city than the Hamptons. Auden was wealthy. She went to spas and Broadway shows and lived in a large—by New York standards—apartment filled with art. Some of it was by friends, but some of it was top-shelf stuff she bought at galleries. She had a guest room she wasn’t letting me occupy this summer and a spare walk-in closet she used as a darkroom.

Surely she was overstating things, forgetting a business trip at the very least. Her firm had a secondary headquarters in Los Angeles. But… I thought of all the times I’d suggested she take the train up to Boston to see a show. She’d always declined. “I went to like three hundred Concrete Temple shows when I was a teenager,” she would say, referring to our early gigs in dives around New York. “These days, I can see you once a year at Madison Square Garden and call it good.”

“That promotion you turned down last year…,” I wondered aloud.

“Would have required me to spend a ton of time at the LA office.”

“Auden, I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything. But now you know why I can’t come to see your camp show. I would love to, but I can’t.”

“And that’s it?” You’re just going to be like this for the rest of your life? I didn’t want to say it quite so bluntly, though. I was still reeling from this bomb she’d dropped, and I didn’t want to overreact. The Hilton Garden Inn episode had represented my lifetime allotment of overreaction.

She sighed. “Sometimes I think maybe I should try another big city, one that doesn’t feel that different on the ground from New York. Chicago, maybe? Toronto? Now that you’re not touring so much, maybe we could… try to go somewhere together?”

“Of course, anytime. But maybe you need a therapist. Maybe you need—”

“Massive pharmaceutical intervention?”

She was trying to be funny, but I wasn’t feeling it. “Possibly. But mostly a therapist. I feel like you can drug yourself, sure, and maybe that’s part of the fix, but is it really going to get better—really, actually better—if you don’t understand the root cause?”

“I’m pretty sure the root cause is Mom.”

I huffed a bitter laugh. “Yeah.” Of course it was. “But then you need to talk about the root cause.” All that shit Gretchen had said—she’d been right. “You have to talk about it before you can get it to loosen its hold on you.”

“I guess.”

She didn’t sound enthused. “Do you want to talk about it with me?” I was no therapist, but maybe I could get her comfortable with the idea of talking. Hell, I wanted to talk. Wasn’t that half the reason I’d invited her to Wild Arts?

That gave me pause. Auden and I had talked a lot this summer, but it was always about me. What I was doing. What I was—or wasn’t—writing. I wanted her to come visit because I wanted to see her. I wanted to feel the things I would feel if she came here.

“You know,” she said quietly, “this is why I didn’t want you staying with me this summer. I didn’t want you to figure it out.”

“I feel terrible that I never realized this.”

“I worked hard to hide it from you.”

“But you’re not hiding anymore.”

She shrugged, but the gesture was too casual. “I guess it’s getting too exhausting to keep hiding it. From you, anyway.”

“Is it agoraphobia?” My mind was searching for a diagnosis. A word.

“I feel like it’s the opposite. Fear of empty places. In New York, there are always people around. You’re always close to anything you could need—food, friends, hospitals. You can get anywhere on foot.”

“What happens if you try to… push yourself? You said you had a panic attack in the Hamptons.”

“Yeah. I get itchy. My skin literally itches. I get black spots in my vision, and I feel like I’m going to pass out.” She paused. “And Teddy, it’s getting worse.” She squeezed her eyes closed for a moment, and when she opened them, she leaned closer to the phone and looked intently at me. “After you left, I regretted not letting you stay here. I realized that if you’re not doing your usual touring stuff, where you have your army of handlers and a prescribed schedule, anything could happen. I think that’s why I’m telling you about this now. Because it feels like… it’s spreading to you. Not like it’s contagious, but like I’m going to start having the same panicky feeling about you now. What if you got lost in a forest in Minnesota and I had to fly out there and, I don’t know, find you?”

This was why she’d been so freaked out when we’d spoken that night. This was big. But it wasn’t something we could solve right now, so I decided to try to lighten the mood. “They have park rangers for that.”

“What if I had to fly out there and identify your body?”

“They have FaceTime for that.” But maybe she wanted me to push her, not protect her, which was always my instinct. “I would, however, love to see you. But coming here sounds like it would be too much too soon. Why don’t we plan to work up to taking a trip together? Somewhere less dramatic than northern Minnesota. But you need to talk to someone. Besides me. In addition to me. I can help you find the right person.” I had no idea how people went about finding therapists, but I’d figure it out. “I’ll go with you if you want. Hell, I’ll find my own therapist. I’ll get someone lined up for the fall, when I’m back in town.”

Weirdly, this situation with Auden was making me feel better about the demise of the band. This was something that needed my attention. A way to be useful. Which I realized was just more of me making Auden’s shit about me, but hey, baby steps.

She smiled weakly. “You’d do that for me?”

“Of course.” I hesitated over saying more. But maybe it would help her to hear it. “Honestly, I’ve been doing my own reckoning up here, with regard to the Mom stuff. Realizing it has more of a hold on me than it should, or than I’d like it to. I’d like to… get out from under it.”

She looked somewhat cheered. “So maybe we can… try to do that together? Or in parallel?”

“It’s a deal.”

“Tell me something about you before we hang up, so I feel like less of a freak.”

I knew she was wanting to end the conversation on a lighter note, and while I normally never would have told her about Gretchen, I felt like she’d told me something big, and I wanted to do the same. Not that this was big. It was, as Gretchen said, about her getting her last hurrah. Though of course I was enjoying myself, too. So not big, but the kind of gossipy news that would make Auden squeal.

“I have spent every night for the past week sleeping with a woman here. That’s why I haven’t been answering your calls.”

“What!” Her shriek was gleeful, which was what I’d been aiming for. “Is this the woman you got lost in the woods with?”

“Yep.”

“Tell me about her.”

“It’s casual—a camp fling. There’s nothing to tell.”

“I’m not saying kiss and tell. Tell me some stuff about her . What’s she like? Is she a musician? Come on. Throw me a bone.”

“She’s a dancer, the ends of her hair are dyed pink, and…” The next thing that came to mind was her thighs, but I couldn’t say that. “She kind of pushed me into this reckoning I was talking about.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. This does not sound casual.”

“It is casual. Casual just means we’re taking advantage of our circumstances. It doesn’t mean she can’t have an impact on me. She’s smart that way. She grew up poor, like us. She knows shit.”

“You sound smitten.”

“I’m not smitten . I’m just telling you the facts. If you want to add wild interpretations to them, that’s your business.” I was getting annoyed now.

“Is Karlie still in your apartment?”

“I… don’t know.” I hadn’t thought about Karlie for weeks. I also didn’t know why it mattered. Except… it sort of felt like it did.