Maya and I threw ourselves a Female Singer-Songwriters From When We Were In High School Youtube Party, and Dave indulged us. I played the above Fiona Apple video directed by Apple’s then-boyfriend Paul Thomas Anderson.
I said, “It’s weird that this song’s in Bridesmaids, a movie featuring P.T. Anderson’s new girlfriend.” I remembered how when Garden State came out Zach Braff said that he tried to get Paper Bag on the soundtrack (a detail I remember mainly for how annoyed I was that so much of his musical taste overlapped with mine), but Fiona Apple’s people said no. I wondered why she’d say no to that and yes to Bridesmaids (questions of quality aside), and I wondered what Maya Rudolph had to do with it.
Dave said, “Do you think P.T. Anderson got Jon Brion in the break-up?” We talked about the Extraordinary Machine album, how its release kept getting delayed, how Fiona’s fans protested the record label, made “Free Fiona” t-shirts and buttons, shared the leaked Brion-produced tracks, until Apple herself said she was the one unhappy with the record, and when it was released a year later, most of Brion’s contributions were scrapped. (Since then, Apple and Brion have in fact collaborated several times, and it’s tempting to invent an elaborate email correspondance detailing their reconciliation— “Look, man… Things got weird.”)
Maya said, “I feel like this is more a Paul Thomas Anderson video than a Fiona Apple video. It’s so glamorous. Look how uncomfortable she looks.” I said, “No, I think that’s just what she looks like,” but the observation reminded me of a photograph taken of me in a past life. It’s a picture of ______ and me the weekend we first met. We’re in a subway car. My arm is around her and I’m smiling broadly. She’s looking down into her purse. In this past life I always liked the photo because I thought it spoke to how happy ______ made me, and how quickly she meant so much to me. She hated the picture. “We hardly knew each other then. You were so presumptuous, to put your arm around me. I remember thinking, what is he doing?”
I knew what she was saying, but I couldn’t help loving the photo. The picture was taken before I knew she hated getting photographed and in fact it was one of the few pictures I had of her, of us together. I couldn’t help how grateful I was to have met her and how much the picture filled me with warmth. It’s funny how instinctively we attribute meaning to things— pictures, songs, relationships, lives. We like to create narratives, control things somehow, make the stories our own.
After ______ and I broke up, years after, in another life, I pulled out the old picture once when I was feeling nostalgic, but somehow, suddenly — and irreparably — I couldn’t help seeing what she saw.
