The Unsinkable Greta James(66)
Greta shakes her head. “No, opening up to new people. Don’t you ever wish you could skip forward, like on a record, and know everything without having to go through the motions?”
“God, no,” he says. “I love this part. It’s like conducting research before you sit down to actually write. You find all these interesting facts and random ideas, but you still don’t know exactly what they’ll turn out to be yet. It’s all possibility.”
Without thinking about it, Greta kisses him, one hand on his knee, the other on the table, the starry lights all around them. When she leans back again, she takes a deep breath and says, “My mom died suddenly, and then I broke up with Luke, also suddenly, and then I tried to perform a song I’d only just written and fell apart onstage—like, really fell apart—and the video went viral, and the critics trashed the song, and my new album got pushed, and I completely stopped performing, which is the part I’ve always loved most, and it was only supposed to be for a little while, but now it’s been three months, and I haven’t been onstage once, and I’ve got to play Gov Ball this weekend, and the label is worried I’ll go rogue again, so they want me to stick to the script, showcase the new album, play some of the hits, and basically make a clean break from what happened last time, since they’re counting on the livestream to get things back on track, but I’m starting to wonder if that’s not the right move here, if maybe Mary is right and the only way out is through, and I owe it to myself to try again, but at this point, I’m worried that no matter what I play, I’ll fall apart for a second time because I’m still kind of a mess, and if it goes badly again, I’m honestly not sure my career can survive it, and then everything else will come crashing down too because it’s pretty much my entire identity, and honestly, I really hate the idea of my dad being right about it all, not to mention everyone else who doubted me along the way, especially Mitchell Kelly, who heckled me when I played ‘Lithium’ at the eighth-grade talent show, even though he’s probably working some depressing desk job now and would never listen to music as cool as mine, and before you say anything, I realize this is all psychological, but it feels very, very real at the moment, especially the fear, which is something that was never an issue for me before, and yeah, maybe I’m lucky to have gotten this far on hard work and sheer nerve and blind fucking faith, but it doesn’t mean I don’t want more, because I do, I want so much more, and I keep thinking about this profile that Rolling Stone did of me a little while back, with the headline GRETA JAMES IS FLYING HIGH, and this picture of me floating up in the clouds, and how lately, it’s felt like just the opposite, like I’m sinking fast, and if I don’t do something, I might never be able to pull out of it, which I have to—I have to—because the only thing I know for sure is that I’m not ready to come down yet. Not by a long shot.”
She pulls in a shaky breath, and Ben stares at her for what feels like a long time.
“What,” he says finally, “is Gov Ball?”
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.