Zoe
Philadelphia, 2002
It was the week before Christmas, and JC Dobbs on South Street was hosting its annual Battle of the Bands.
By that time, the world had survived Y2K and 9/11.
Britney and Justin had wowed the crowds in matching denim at the American Music Awards; George W.
Bush had declared Iran, Iraq, and North Korea the “axis of evil”; and Kelly Clarkson had won American Idol’s first season.
Of those headlines, Grossberg cared the most about only the last one, and she took it as a promising sign.
If a regular girl from Texas could vault to superstardom, a regular girl from Philadelphia could too.
had turned twenty that winter.
She was still living at home, attending a desultory handful of classes at the Community College of Philadelphia, still chasing her dream of pop stardom.
Which seemed perfectly attainable, something she could achieve with the right set of circumstances, sustained effort, and a few lucky breaks.
And why not? Young women all around her were ascending to the ranks of superstardom.
Some of them were enormously talented.
was the first to acknowledge that she couldn’t sing like Christina Aguilera or Mariah Carey or write music like Alanis Morissette or Jewel.
But there were also the Mandy Moores, Jennifer Lopezes, and Britney Spearses of the world, who were cute instead of beautiful, who were talented dancers, competent actresses, and good-enough singers but were mostly, in ’s perception, extremely hard workers, willing to throw themselves into a fast-moving, sharp-toothed machine and not care that it might hurt them.
Some of those girls had started their careers with stints in Disney movies or television shows before moving to music, sometimes with a detour through reality TV, always with plenty of attention from the tabloids.
They’d been polished and packaged and sent out into the world: pretty and shiny and slightly interchangeable.
And then those girls had become rich, famous, and adored.
They showed up on red carpets and on TV, and in the pages of Us Weekly and In Style and People, and, assumed, they stopped conversations in every room they entered.
That was what wanted.
She was pretty enough, talented enough, and, even though she’d been an indifferent student, she knew that she could work hard, when the goal was something she actually cared about.
In high school, had put together a band called Girl Power! (the exclamation point was part of the name).
The group was composed of four of her friends: three girls plus Tommy Kelleher, who’d been Cassie’s classmate at the Curtis Institute.
had met Tommy at the last of her sister’s recitals she’d deigned to attend.
She’d barely noticed him back there, banging on the timpani, but Tommy had noticed her, and at the punch-and-cookies reception, he’d come sidling up to shyly introduce himself.
She’d learned his name, and that he’d moved to Philadelphia from Minnesota when he turned seventeen, and that his mom had moved out with him—a not-uncommon arrangement among Curtis’s youngest prodigies.
That September, his mom had gone back to Duluth, leaving nineteen-year-old Tommy with his own apartment on Pine Street and her old minivan to drive.
Tommy wasn’t bad-looking.
He was taller than , a little chunky, with curly brown hair and a shy smile.
He had a twangy Midwestern accent, he spoke with a bit of a lisp, and he was obsessive about music, the way all the kids at Curtis were.
He seemed nice enough, and her band needed a drummer, and she could tell right away, from the besotted look on his face, that Tommy would be happy to help.
The minivan was also a plus, insofar as her parents and her bandmates’ parents had all gotten sick of the girls monopolizing their cars to transport their gear.
And so had gone out for coffee with Tommy, at La Colombe on Rittenhouse Square, where she’d told him that she had a boyfriend (a lie) and that her band needed a drummer (the truth).
Tommy, perhaps hoping that he’d start as a bandmate and end up as a boyfriend, had happily come on board.
Girl Power! covered other female musicians’ work, pop songs from Britney and Christina and Shania Twain.
They’d been playing every gig they could get since had finished high school.
That night, at Dobbs, the plan was for them to perform “Wannabe.”
would take the part of Baby Spice.
She had clip-in hair extensions, the better to re-create Emma Bunton’s high white-blond ponytail; white platform basketball sneakers; and a powder-pink latex minidress, purchased at Zipperhead on South Street, that was hell to put on and even harder to take off.
A Miracle Bra, uncomfortable but effective, pushed her breasts up and out, creating impressive cleavage.
Three of her four bandmates had done their best to approximate their assigned Spice.
Janelle Garces, the girl playing Sporty Spice, wore loose-fitting tracksuit pants and a sports bra; Sammi Johnson, as Scary Spice, had used a pick to push her short Afro to its absolute limits.
Olivia Friedelle, as Ginger Spice, had a Union Jack minidress and red pleather platform boots.
Poor Tommy, assigned the role of Posh Spice, had declined ’s offer of a wig, and wore his usual jeans, white tee shirt, and the black leather vest that he’d decided, somehow, encapsulated the essence of rock and roll.
had figured, after a childhood and adolescence spent in concert blacks, Tommy would be thrilled by the chance to branch out, but it was always the same: white shirt, black vest, jeans.
It was fine, told herself ...
and Tommy in drag might have been more of a distraction than a boon.
She’d drilled the girls on the dance moves, she’d packed the audience with a few dozen classmates and friends.
Victory was, if not assured, at least strongly possible.
Not only was there money for the contest winner; there was, allegedly, going to be a scout from a record label at the show—at least, that’s what everyone was saying.
A person with the power to give the life she wanted would be there, watching her perform.
And then, mere hours before the show, ’s friends kicked her out of the band.
The trouble began at their run-through, the afternoon of the show, when Janelle, the girl playing Sporty Spice, had accused —correctly, it eventually emerged—of flirting with her boyfriend.
denied it, but Scary and Ginger both took Janelle’s side.
The band had voted, and, even with Tommy defending her, was out.
After Janelle delivered the news, drove herself home to Fishtown and locked herself in the house’s single bathroom, where she stuffed her fist into her mouth to stifle her screams of rage.
Then she wiped her eyes, touched up her mascara, and looked at herself in the mirror, waiting for options to present themselves.
It didn’t take her long to realize that there was only one real possibility.
nodded, gave her ponytail a tweak, and went downstairs, in search of her sister.
She found Cassie, as usual, at her piano, the battered upright that Sam had purchased, secondhand, after Cassie’s teachers told him that the electronic keyboard would no longer suffice.
Her sister was working on some dense piece of classical music that didn’t recognize, playing the same phrase over and over and over, with her eyes closed and her mouth slightly opened, swaying a little in time with the notes.
She looked possessed, thought, and wondered, for the thousandth time, how Cassie could be so unaware of how she presented herself, why she didn’t try to look even slightly more normal.
Never mind, thought, as she put on her brightest smile.
She leaned over the top of the instrument and waited, looking down at Cassie, who was wearing a version of what she wore every day: a double-extra-large sweatshirt that hung almost to her knees, pale-blue high-waisted jeans that bagged at her ankles, and a pair of bulky, padded white sneakers.
Her hair was scraped back from her face and knotted at the nape of her neck.
knew that her sister combed her hair when it was wet, pulled it back, and went to sleep, on her side, leaving her with a bun that resembled a squashed squirrel’s tail.
It was beyond depressing, thought.
And so unnecessary.
Some mousse at her roots could take away the frizz; an actual hairstyle would be a vast improvement, and a few swipes of bronzer would make Cassie look more like someone who occasionally encountered sunlight.
Even if Cassie was bigger than most girls, she didn’t have to dress like a senior citizen on her way to walk laps at the Oxford Valley Mall.
Never mind, thought again.
Never mind Cassie’s appearance.
What she needed was Cassie’s voice.
“I need you to do me a favor,”
she said, when her sister finally noticed her presence and stopped playing.
Cassie looked at her warily, as said, as quickly as she could, “My friends kicked me out of the band, and I need you to sing with me at Dobbs tonight.”
For a moment, Cassie just stared.
Then she shook her head, turned back toward her sheet music, and started playing again.
plopped down on the piano bench next to Cassie, nudging her with her hip until her sister was forced to lift her fingers from the keys.
“Please,” she said.
“I don’t sing anymore,”
Cassie muttered.
This was true.
The impromptu concerts they’d performed in bed as little girls had stopped years ago.
wasn’t sure exactly when, or why.
They’d never talked about it.
Still, could remember Cassie’s voice, rich and clear and comforting as a hug in the darkness.
“You can sing,”
said.
“And I need you.”
“Why?”
Cassie said to the keyboard.
“Just get up there and sing by yourself.”
“You’re the one with the really good voice.”
Cassie didn’t reply to the compliment, or even seem to notice that she’d been complimented.
stared straight ahead and forced the admission past her lips.
“If I sing by myself, they’ll laugh at me.
Janelle and Olivia and Sammi.”
She looked her sister in the eyes, her expression saying, You know how that feels, don’t you? You know how much it hurts when people laugh.
Cassie shook her head.
gave her sister a hard look that said, You owe me.
You owe me for the time at Natalie Freeman’s birthday party in first grade when the kids said you couldn’t play musical chairs because you’d probably break the chairs and I said I’d tell Natalie’s mom unless everyone said they were sorry.
You owe me for the sixth-grade camping trip when no one wanted you in their cabin and I told my friends they had to let you stay with us.
You owe me for the time we went to the King of Prussia Mall and those boys followed us around oinking and mooing and I yelled at them and made them stop.
You owe me for every time I sat with you on the bus and let you come trick-or-treating with my friends.
You owe me a lot.
Take care of your sister, their mother had told over the years.
The words had played like a mantra in her head from the time they were little girls, and her mom had made wait a year so that she could start kindergarten with Cassie, and be her protector.
Cassie owed her for everything had sacrificed, for everything it had cost her to spend so much time taking care of her sister.
didn’t say any of this.
She just waited, silently, until, finally, Cassie muttered, “I can’t.”
“Can’t what?”
“Can’t sing.
Onstage.
People are going to stare at me.”
“So what?”
asked, not even trying to deny that people would, indeed, be staring.
“Who cares if they’re staring? You’re good!”
Cassie pressed her lips together tightly, shaking her head.
“And it’ll be dark.
And most of them will probably be drunk, anyhow.
And I’ll be there.”
left the rest of that sentence implied—they’ll be looking at me, not at you.
Cassie shook her head again.
could feel herself getting angry.
Getting desperate.
Only what were the levers that would move her sister?
“I don’t understand you,”
finally said.
“Everyone goes on and on about how talented you are, about what a gift you have.”
let herself sound angry, let the words talented and gift come out especially barbed.
She made an abrupt gesture, raising her hands, palms open, in the air.
“What’s the point of being able to sing like you can if no one hears you? What’s the point of a gift if you don’t share it?”
For a moment, Cassie sat motionless, doing her best impression of a statue.
wondered what Cassie was thinking before deciding that wondering would do her little good.
She had no idea how Cassie’s brain worked.
So she waited, until, finally, Cassie asked, without looking at her, “What do you want to sing?”
hopped into the air, squealing with joy.
“‘Save the Best for Last’?”
“Won’t work,”
Cass said shortly.
“Let’s do ‘Why.’ You know? Annie Lennox?”
She hummed a few bars.
knew that Cassie might play only the works of composers who’d been dead for hundreds of years, but her sister listened to all kinds of music, from girl groups from the 1950s and 1960s to country to R that she could make them feel what she wanted them to feel.
And Cassie could do this all the time.
Whenever she wanted, marveled, feeling the first threads of envy gathering inside her, twisting and knotting into something nasty and sharp-edged.
Just keep singing, she thought.
Keep singing, and you’ll win.
Cassie’s back straightened, her voice getting louder, more confident.
“I may be mad / I may be blind / I may be viciously unkind ... But I can still read what you’re thinking . . .”
And then Cassie surprised her, singing over the verse that should have been ’s: “And I’ve heard it said too many times / That you’d be better off / Besides, why can’t you see this boat is sinking.”
’s eyes opened wide in surprise.
Part of her wanted to turn and storm off the stage, go back home, lock herself in the bathroom, scream some more, at yet another betrayal.
Instead, she dropped her voice low, humming along as Cassie sang, “Let’s go down to the water’s edge / And we can cast away those doubts.”
What had started as a duet was becoming more like a solo.
didn’t know how to stop it, or even if that was what she wanted to do.
She could hear the audience’s rapt silence as Cassie reached the end of the song, a recitation; a lament.
A farewell.
“This is the book I never read / These are the words I never said . . .”
sang softly in the background, the repeated words, “You don’t know,”
a counterpoint to the song’s sharp-edged anguish.
“I don’t think you know how I feel,”
Cass sang, making her voice quieter and more intense, almost whispering the final line.
“You don’t know what I fear.”
There was a long beat of silence ...
and then an explosion of applause so loud that it was startling.
Cassie’s eyes flew open and she looked around, her mouth slightly agape, her expression startled and fearful.
caught her sister’s eyes across the stage and mouthed the words, Thank you.
In that moment, the jealousy was gone.
All she felt was gratitude.
Not envy at how much better Cassie was, not resentment, not anger at how deftly and completely Cassie had stolen the spotlight.
All of that would come later.
In that moment, all was conscious of was the applause and the pleasure of knowing that she’d won.
Without planning on it, she kissed the tips of the first two fingers of her right hand, and raised them toward the sky, thinking, Thank God. Thank God for Cassie.
As she stepped offstage, Chloe stopped her and touched her shoulder.
Her face was slack with wonder, her eyes wide and shiny.
“That was,”
she said, and swallowed.
“That was astonishing.”
“So where is he?”
asked.
“Who?”
Chloe replied.
“The scout?”
Chloe just shrugged.
“I think that was just a rumor,”
she said.
’s shoulders slumped.
Of course, she thought.
Of course, after all that, it was a lie.
She told herself that maybe it was for the best.
A scout who’d seen that performance would have wanted Cassie, not her.
Chloe hadn’t lied.
There was not a music scout at the show, but there was one on his way to Philadelphia.
While she and her sister were onstage, a man named David Katz, a record-label executive and the eventual agent of their destiny, was on an airplane, in a middle seat two rows up from the rear of the plane, flying from Los Angeles to Philadelphia, where he’d spend the last two weeks of December with his sister, meeting his newest niece, and trying not to think about his ex-wife.
He hadn’t been there, but his nephew Simon had.
Ten hours after the Dobbs show ended, David Katz stood in his sister’s kitchen in Narberth, nibbling the edge of a latke, and listened to his nephew with a faintly condescending smile.
“Back up.
Tell me again.”
“They’re sisters.
Cassie and Grossberg.
I went to school with them.
Cassie’s at the Curtis Institute now, and ’s at CCP.
She did the talent shows at school and plays around here.
I’ve heard her, but not with Cassie.
Last night, they played in a Battle of the Bands at a club on South Street, and they were incredible.”
David considered his nephew’s starry-eyed expression and thought that Simon probably had a crush on one or the other of them, or maybe both.
The fact that one sister was at Curtis certainly suggested musical legitimacy ...
but if they were that good, wouldn’t Relic’s scout, who attended open mic nights and triple-A baseball games and minor-league hockey tournaments up and down the eastern seaboard, just in case the kid singing the national anthem was another Whitney Houston, have heard of them?
That was likely, David knew.
But, he had to acknowledge, it wasn’t impossible that the sisters were an unknown quantity.
It did happen.
Boyz II Men had been Philadelphia high-school students once ...
and, a few generations back, so had Daryl Hall and John Oates, although they’d been in college, at Temple University, when they’d been discovered.
Talent had to come from somewhere, and these girls were young.
It was possible they hadn’t played on a stage where a scout might have heard them.
When he asked his nephew if one or both of the girls had ever made the anthem rounds, the boy just shrugged.
“I don’t think so.
Cassie’s really, really shy—like, she barely talks—and I think ’s more into the, um, performing piece of it. The dancing, you know?”
Wonderful, David thought.
A pathologically shy girl and a dilettante.
But after hours of his new niece drooling on his shoulder, he’d be eager to get out of the house, happy to have an excuse for a few hours’ worth of freedom.
The next morning, he bundled up in his brother-in-law’s borrowed winter coat, and, with Simon in the passenger’s seat of his sister’s car, he’d sped off along the Schuylkill Express toward Fishtown, scowling at the falling snow.
He and Suzanne had moved west right after they’d gotten married, and David had sworn he was done with Northeast winters forever.
David loved LA.
He loved the little two-bedroom house that he and his bride had rented, high in the hills, on the edge of Laurel Canyon.
He loved the weather, loved stepping into the yard to pluck lemons and avocados and silvery-skinned plums; loved that he didn’t need to buy rock salt or snow tires, and no longer owned a scarf or gloves.
He’d been happy.
For seven years, he and Suzanne had been happy together.
Don’t think about it, David told himself as he eased the car along the icy ruts that had formed on the narrow streets.
“Don’t the plows come through here?”
he asked as the car fishtailed and wobbled.
Simon just shrugged.
Finally, David parallel parked and made his way along a barely shoveled sidewalk to knock on the rowhouse’s front door. “Hello!”
he’d said, his voice bluff and nonthreatening.
“I’m David Katz.”
His first impression was not promising.
, who’d opened the door almost before he’d finished knocking, was pretty enough, fine-boned and slim-hipped, with the kind of oval face and regular features he knew would photograph well.
The second sister was a different story.
She was heavy, with deep-set eyes and hair that was a dingy, flat brown and somehow looked both thin and frizzy.
Even with a diet, even with implants, even with all the things that cosmetics and lighting and stylists and surgeons could do, David couldn’t see it.
He sighed mentally, resigning himself to a wasted half hour.
The pretty sister had dressed for a beach outing instead of a snow day, in tight jeans and a checked plaid shirt, knotted at her midriff, and clunky black sandals with platform soles.
The other sister wore black leggings and a loose-fitting black jersey tunic, with seasonally appropriate dark-blue wool socks on her feet.
David shook hands with .
He nodded at Cassie, who ducked her head and muttered something that might have been hello.
He met their parents, whose names he forgot as soon as they’d said them, and he let himself be ushered to the sofa as the fat girl settled down behind the piano, and her sister stood beside her, with a guitar strap over her neck, her fingers resting awkwardly on the strings.
“Cassie’s taken piano lessons for fourteen years,”
said, her voice breathy and rushed.
David did the math, realizing that Cassie would have had to have started her lessons at four years old, and decided her sister was lying.
Through the window, he could see a snowdrift in cross-section, with half a dozen ribbons of grime running through it.
There was a splatter of yellow along its side and a cigarette butt frozen midway down, a geological sampling of urban life.
Twenty more minutes, he reminded himself, and thought of his lemon tree, back in Los Angeles.
“Whenever you’re ready,”
he said, forcing a smile.
The girls’ parents were standing side by side in the doorway, staring adoringly at their daughters, in the manner of every parent at every school concert and play ever.
An old line from a poem he’d learned in high school came swimming to the top of his brain: and I, Tiresias, have foresuffered all.
Then Cass struck the first notes on the piano, and the sisters sang together, their voices ringing through the small, low-ceilinged room.
“I’ve been cheated / Been mistreated / When will I be loved,”
and David Katz forgot about English-class poetry; forgot to think, forgot to breathe.
The hairs at the back of his neck prickled.
His forearms bristled with gooseflesh as he tried to keep still, tried to keep his face from showing what he was thinking ...
which, as soon as his brain stopped flashing exclamation points, was These girls are the real deal, quickly followed by They’re going to make me so rich.
The fat girl’s voice was a marvel: agile and supple and full of shades from bright to dark.
She sang with power and control, with a range of at least three octaves, maybe more.
She could belt, and then sing in a delicate head voice, then drop down into a rolling vibrato.
If he’d closed his eyes, he could have been listening to Linda Ronstadt, or Carole King, or Carly Simon, one of the all-time greats.
David stared, fighting the impulse to hustle the girls out of the house and into his sister’s car, so he could drive them straight to New York City and sign them before they played another show or even just left the house and gave someone else the chance to discover them.
His mind sped ahead, from getting the girls signed to finding them a songwriter to recording the first single to releasing the first album to having it go platinum, a sixty-second fast-forward that ended with David in a new mansion, with an entire grove of lemon trees, declining, through his assistant, to take his ex-wife’s calls.
Even as he made his plans, he was already grasping the essential problem.
Any reasonably pretty teenage girl could be made to look beautiful, and Grossberg was more than reasonably pretty.
Cassie Grossberg was a disaster.
There were fat girls of whom people said, “She has such a pretty face.”
There were also your Cass Elliots, your—he hesitated to even think the name, then gave himself permission—your Arethas, whose talent was so goddamn enormous that it didn’t matter, in the end, what the container that held it looked like.
All that mattered was the voice.
Maybe they could fix Cassie.
And if they couldn’t, maybe they could hide her.
But first they had to sign her.
And her sister, who seemed to be part of the deal.
Which meant charming Mom and Dad.
David mentally spat on his hands, reviewing his tactics, preparing to go to work.
“Nice,”
said David, careful to sound approving, impressed, but not too eager.
“Very, very nice.”
He put on his most winning smile, a smile custom-built to elicit confidence from the parents of young and impressionable girls.
“Tell me what kind of training you’ve had,”
he said.
answered for both of them.
In a high, girlish voice, she told him about all of her dance classes at the local YMCA, and the band she’d formed in high school.
“And Cassie just sat down at the piano at her nursery school and started playing,”
said the mom.
“It was amazing.”
“Amazing!”
repeated.
Cassie still said nothing.
“Do you play mostly classical music?”
David asked her.
Cassie nodded, very slightly.
“But she can play anything by ear,”
said the dad.
“Anything at all.”
“Voice lessons?”
David asked.
The girls shook their heads.
David took a brief moment to marvel at it, to wonder about Cassie’s untapped potential, to let himself imagine how good she could get.
“And , how about you? Have you taken any guitar lessons?”
It turned out she hadn’t.
It further emerged that knew only three chords, which her sister had taught her the night before, on the guitar, which was on loan from a neighbor.
No matter.
David’s heart was beating faster than it had since the last time he’d done cocaine.“Do you have any original music?” he asked.
shot an anxious glance at her sister.
“It’s fine if you don’t,”
David said quickly.
He was already flipping through his mental Rolodex, thinking about who was available, who’d be the right fit, as another part of his brain tried to remember which island his boss, Jerry Nance, and his supermodel girlfriend were currently visiting.
Anguilla? Antigua?—one of those A places.
David wondered if the move was to get Jerry on the phone, tell him what he’d heard, and insist Jerry fly back to New York before anyone could get their hooks into these girls, or if he, David, could just get Cassie and to a conference room in the label’s New York office, put them on speakerphone, and let them play for whichever execs he could round up in the week between Christmas and New Year’s.
The good news was that his boss wasn’t the only one who’d decamped to some sunny paradise.
Other bosses had, too, which increased his chances of being able to slip the girls into the city quietly and sign them without other labels finding out.
“Do you have a name?” he asked.
The sisters exchanged a fast glance.
“The Grossberg Sisters?”
asked the fat one.
David schooled his face, thinking, Absolutely not.
Under no circumstances.
“We’ll see,”
he said instead.
“How about the Griffin Sisters?”
said the pretty one.
The fat one looked at her, puzzled.
“Who are the Griffins?”
asked Dad.
“It’s a made-up name.
It’ll be better,”
said the pretty sister.
“For, like, our privacy.”
“And for anti-Semites.”
The fat girl’s voice was low, but not so low that David couldn’t hear her.
“Carole King changed her name,”
he offered.
“And Bob Dylan, of course.
Lots of Jewish people in the, ah, performing arts do it.”
“Natalie Portman!”
said the pretty sister, coming in with a reference more pertinent to her world than either Carole King or Bob Dylan.
“It just makes breaking through a little easier,”
David said.
The pretty sister was nodding.
The fat one looked unconvinced, and the parents just looked bewildered.
“The Griffin Sisters,”
David said, tasting the words.
Testing them.
“I like it.”
What he liked even more was that the sisters were willing to be flexible, and they hadn’t gotten attached to something silly.
The Beach Boys had once been the Pendletones; the Red Hot Chili Peppers, God help them, had called themselves Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem and some version of David had been tasked with talking them out of it.
“If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to make a few phone calls,”
David said, reaching for his BlackBerry as he got to his feet.
He practically skipped outside, barely feeling the cold as he called his assistant in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
“Find Jerry,”
he instructed her, speaking quickly.
“Tell him he’s got to get back to New York as fast as he can.
I found an act he’s got to hear.
No one else knows about them yet—they’re teenage girls, just out of high school.”
“Got it,”
said Kelly, who knew when to just keep her mouth shut and listen.
“Call Helen,”
he continued.
“If she can’t be there, find out who from A it is God’s will that they use their talents to give back to the world (he’d once used that line to coax a reluctant Mormon into postponing his two-year mission to South Africa and signing a development deal instead).
Whatever it takes, he told himself, and looked at the girls, and announced, with absolute, unwavering sincerity, “I think the two of you are fantastic.
I’d feel very honored to bring you to New York City to meet my boss.
I’m pretty sure he’d like to offer you a deal.”
Less than twenty-four hours after David Katz heard Cassie and Grossberg singing in their parents’ living room in Fishtown, he had the girls, plus Mom and Dad, bundled into a rented SUV, cruising north on the New Jersey Turnpike.
The previous evening, he’d made his apologies to his sister and brother-in-law, promised his nephew courtside Lakers seats if he signed the sisters, and had gotten the message to Jerry, once they’d reached him (the A place turned out to be Aruba).
These girls are the real deal.
We need to lock them down before someone else finds them.
The timing, David mused, as he piloted the enormous vehicle along the fast lane, could actually work in his favor.
Typically, by the time an artist made it to one of the big labels—Atlantic, Arista, RCA, Capitol—they were known quantities.
They’d been discovered as kids and come through Broadway or the Disney machine—à la Britney, Christina, Ryan Gosling, and Justin Timberlake—or they’d been scouted as young adults, playing at a bar or a concert hall or an open mic night, usually after they’d been at it for a year, or years, plural, and had built up a fan base.
All the labels had scouts; all the scouts went to the same shows and listened to the same stations; they attended the same open mic nights and Battles of the Bands.
If one label had heard of a group or a performer—if there was a church soloist in West Philadelphia who sang “Ave Maria”
like an angel, or a boy from South Jersey whose “Star-Spangled Banner”
at the ribbon-cutting for a new Costco brought tears to the attendees’ eyes—chances were, all of them had, which made it unlikely for a deal to be one-and-done: one performance for one label, followed by a signed contract.
That was the feat David was hoping to pull off.
He’d asked—repeatedly—and his nephew, both girls, plus their parents had told him the same thing.
had performed at school talent shows, and Cassie at piano recitals, but they’d never performed together in public until two nights ago, where David’s nephew (God bless him and keep him) had heard them.
It seemed almost too good to be true ...
but, David figured, the Universe owed him.
He was broke, his wife had left him (for a woman! his brain insisted on adding, as if that made it worse).
His back hurt when he woke up, more mornings than not, and his hair was visibly thinning.
The point, he thought, as he drove through the Lincoln Tunnel, was that he was due for a win.
He zipped through the tollbooth and visualized how it would go, assuming that Cassie and would impress Jerry as much as they’d impressed him.
The label would find the girls a songwriter who could write them a hit.
Figure six weeks to write it and record it, to put a band together and see if they could get Cassie looking a little more presentable.
The label would release a single, and the girls would be sent on a cross-country radio-station tour, visiting three or four or five stations a day, performing for the DJs and the program directors, or at small concerts the stations would set up.
And then they would wait.
Maybe a big station’s programming director would fall in love with their song, would march it down to the DJ’s booth and order it played every hour.
Maybe a music director would want it for a big TV show or a commercial.
Once, an artist might have been condemned for letting his or her art be used for commerce, but these days, it seemed, there was no such thing as a sellout, and commercials were just another way to introduce your music to the masses.
David had some half-formed idea that rap music, with its celebration of material wealth and penchant for name-checking brands, had done something to erase that stigma, but he hadn’t completely worked out how.
Once the car was parked and his party had been loaded into an elevator, David told the girls how it would go.
“You’ll just be performing for a few people.
Jerry runs the label, and Helen Leary’s part of the A that she was being transparent and forthcoming and was looking out for the girls’ best interest, while David had his own best interests in mind and was attempting to hustle them into a deal before they could meet with other labels and turn it into a competitive situation.
Which, of course, was more or less what he’d been doing. Fuck!
David knew, as the old Kenny Rogers song went, when to hold ’em, and when to fold ’em.
He smiled weakly, unfisted his right hand, and pulled a business card out of his wallet.
“Keep in touch,”
he said.
“We’d like to stay in the running.”
Mom accepted the card as if it had been lightly coated in slime.
And for the rest of his life, whenever David heard the Griffin Sisters’ songs on the radio or on TV or on the Muzak in Trader Joe’s, he’d think back to that moment and wonder how different everything would have been if the girls had slipped through his fingers, if they had signed with another label.
Would everything have changed? Would Cassie have written the same songs with someone else, or different songs, even better ones?
Would their album have been a hit? Would Cassie and still be making music together?
Would they have met Russell D’Angelo some other way ...
or would the story have played out the same, just with a different man, or even a woman, taking Russell’s spot in the triangle?
It wasn’t worth dwelling on.
David knew that.
But sometimes he couldn’t help himself from wondering.
Lying awake in Los Feliz, in the six-bedroom house the Griffin Sisters had bought him, listening to the rustling of the desert wind and the distant howling of coyotes, he would wonder if he should have seen it coming, and if he could have stopped it.
Some nights, the winds would carry the sharp scent of lemons.
They’d always smell like despair and triumph, mixed together, the pain of losing his wife, the joy of landing the sisters.
He’d breathe in the bittersweet tanginess, feeling lucky, feeling sorry, and he would wonder where Cassie Griffin had gone, and if she was still making music, all by herself, somewhere far, far away.