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fayewonglibrary · 4 years

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Viva the Divas! (1996)

FROM AMERICA TO ASIA, STYLISH WOMEN SINGERS ARE FORCING THE BAD BOYS OF POP MUSIC TO STEP ASIDE

BY: RICHARD CORLISS

There was something feminine about Elvis. His mouth formed the pout of a sullen schoolgirl; his hair was swathed in more chemicals than a starlet’s; his hips churned like a hooker’s in heat. Presley was manly too, in a street-punk way. For him, the electric guitar was less an instrument than a symbolic weapon–an ax or a machine gun aimed at the complacent pop culture of the ‘50s. Performing his pansexual rite to a heavy bass line, Elvis set the primal image for rock: a man and his guitar, the tortured satyr and his magic lute.

He also established the androgyny of the male star. When a guy could provide his own sexual menace, long hair, coquetry and falsetto singing, who needed women? Oh, they were allowed to scream in the audience, or maybe sing backup, but not to rock on, down and dirty, with the big bad boys. Even today girls are no more encouraged to pick up a Stratocaster than to pilot an F-16. They are expected to play only one instrument: the voice.

And do they! After nearly 40 years as second-class citizens, women singers are staging their own revolution, The upheaval may be demure, even ladylike; Miwa Yoshida does not froth on the concert stage, nor is Faye Wong likely to trash a hotel room. But they have stormed the barricades where it counts: on the charts of best-selling CDs and in the hearts of a billion or so fans around the world. They have reconfigured pop music. This is the era of the pop diva.

Diva means goddess. The dictionary definition is more modern: “an operatic prima donna.” Let’s fiddle a little with those words. “Operatic”: note the strenuous, hyperemotional, aria-like feel to many pop ballads. “Prima donna”: remove its suggestion of imperious temperament and translate it literally as “first lady.” Voila! Celine Dion or Gloria Estefan, Whitney or Mariah, Madonna or Enya, Miwa or Faye, Toni Braxton or Tina Arena, Annie Lennox or Alanis Morissette. They come from the U.S., of course, but also from French and English Canada, from Cuba, Ireland, Scotland, France, Germany, Australia, Japan and China. In every country, in any language: la diva.

Like so many other forms of popular culture, the diva genre exists both locally and globally at the same time. Dion, from French Canada, alternates albums in French and English. Estefan, born in Cuba and raised in Miami, records in Spanish and English. Dion was chosen to open the Olympic Games in Atlanta with a pop hymn, The Power of the Dream, backed by a 300-member gospel choir, and Estefan was there on closing night to sing her anthemic Reach. Both singers embodied success stories as potent as any come-from-behind Olympic fairy tale: Dion, the youngest of 14 children who has become this year’s Diva Deluxe; and Estefan, brave survivor of a 1990 bus crash that broke her back, who is now back on top. “So I’ll go the distance this time,” she intones, “seeing more the higher I climb.”

Divas can’t climb much higher. They nestle at or near the top of their country’s music charts. Some, like Dion, Houston and Mariah Carey–not to mention, for the moment, Canada’s crack-voiced outlaw diva Alanis Morissette–have been on the Top 10 lists in Europe, the Americas and the Pacific Rim simultaneously. More important, most are damn fine singers. They are a link between the great voices of the past (think of Ella Fitzgerald, Ethel Merman, Edith Piaf) and the ears of people who can’t get attuned to the howling self-pity of much contemporary rock but aren’t ready to give up on pop music.

Like the Olympic spirit, the divas’ internationalist impulse reflects both a curiosity about other cultures and a nose for smart marketing. To spur Japanese sales of her Colour of My Love album, Dion added a new song, To Love You More, from the Japanese TV mini-series Lover, backed instrumentally by the Japanese ensemble Kryzler & Kompany. Dion sang it in English, but the locals didn’t mind: they bought 1.5 million copies.

A diva needn’t be Western to have the international flair. Nothing forces Yoshida, the soul-jazz sensation who fronts the band Dreams Come True, to go west to increase her Japanese fan base. She still writes and performs songs in her native language. Yet she usually records in Britain, and she cut her first solo set, Beauty and Harmony, in New York City with some top American sidemen. The collaboration produced vocals that were more precise, more regimented, than her past work. But it showed the need for even top regional artists to prove their chops in the U.S., which is still revered as the big leagues for singers.

Some stars of the Pacific, like Tina Arena, have long set their sights on America. An Australian who has sung publicly since she was five, Arena has an easy authority as vocalist and songwriter; her cool-teen voice matches her rock-easy compositions, which are so infectious that six-year-olds would learn them instantly and so familiar that you might think they were big hits a decade ago (they’re all new, all hers). When Arena gets precision and voltage into the songs–Heaven Help My Heart, Greatest Gift, Standing Up–she sounds like a kid sister to Elaine Paige, superb star of London musicals, who introduced such instant standards as Don’t Cry for Me Argentina (from Evita), Memory (from Cats) and a quite different Heaven Help My Heart (from Chess). But England is not Arena’s destination. She’s moved to Los Angeles because, like a lot of divas, she may believe she can’t be a star until she’s an American star.

Wong is too cool to entertain those ambitions. Indeed, she prefers to record in her native Beijing, where she can concentrate on her music, rather than in Hong Kong, where for years she was a formulaic Canto-pop singer known as Shirley Wong. Her striking, angular looks–think of an elongated pixie who moonlights as a sorceress–made her a natural for movies, but her debut made few notice; in Beyond’s Diary she played the girlfriend of a pop musician.

Gradually she found her own style, on records and on film. Her second picture, Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express, made her a hip pinup to sophisticated moviegoers on both sides of the Pacific. The film also internationalized her choice of music. She plays a dizzy waitress in a fast-food restaurant who is obsessed with going to California and playing, over and over and over, the 1966 California Dreamin’ by the Mamas and the Papas. Over the end credits she sings a Cantonese cover of the Cranberries hit Dreams. And now, on her Restless CD, she meets the international market on her own terms: five of the songs have no intelligible lyrics at all, and two irresistibly obscurantist cuts were written and produced by Scotland’s Cocteau Twins. Wong remains the spooky gamin of Chinese music, and Restless is a wondrous blend of Canto-pop and lollipop.

Wong’s approach alternates between a blissed-out whisper and bright piping in a register so high only Pekingese pups can hear it. That puts her squarely in one tradition of divadom: the vocal virtuoso. For decades, two Americans defined this style. Patti LaBelle, a gospel-trained ranter, has enthralled the faithful with her mad-woman riffs. Bette Midler, known internationally as the blowsy star of movie comedies, built her career as a throwback singer who could evoke Sophie Tucker’s bawdiness and Bessie Smith’s soul-in-hell emotional exhaustion with equal power and facility. The virtuoso mode can also be heard in the florid, world-weary style of France’s Catherine Ribeiro and, with glances back to the glamour of Piaf and Dietrich, in the bitter brilliance of Germany’s Ute Lemper. Though their styles were unique, all these women kept bright the flame of the traditional torch singer.

But none of them became international superstars or encouraged others to do the same. For that you can thank Houston (and her mentor at Arista Records, Clive Davis). It was an old recipe–great chops, exotic looks and a clever choice of material–that served Lena Horne, Abbey Lincoln, Eartha Kitt, and Houston’s cousin Dionne Warwick. But in the harsh prevailing winds of mid-'80s rap and heavy metal, Houston was a welcome spring breeze. Her delicacy of phrasing made songs like Saving All My Love for You and The Greatest Love of All easy listening in the best sense. Her prom-queen glamour made her an ideal star for the early video era, an antidote to Cyndi Lauper’s goofy-girl atavism and Madonna’s bad-girl sass. Her first album, Whitney Houston, sold 10 million copies.

Houston has retained her eminence, if not pre-eminence, while curtailing her output: she has released less than a single regular album’s worth of songs, only 10, since 1990. But her example and her relative quiescence have spurred a dozen divas-in-waiting. Many noted the structure of Houston’s big hits–a slow-tempo devotional tune that escalates from the foreplay of whispers to the explosive orgasm of wails and whoops–and made the mistake of imitating it. (Houston made that error too.) Dion’s early English-language albums are almost touching in their fidelity to the Whitney formula. It took her a while to realize she could relax on record.

Today’s top Whitneyesque star is Mariah Carey. Like Houston, she’ll mix ballads with synthesized dance music; she’s a handsome woman with a video flair; she has a patron in Tommy Mottola, boss of her record company, who is also her husband. Carey has even outsold Houston in the '90s, because she releases albums at a busier pace.

One big difference: Houston sings straight soprano with some church inflection; Carey is a coloratura. She could even be called a cubist, for she appraises nearly every note in every song from a dozen or more angles. In When I Saw You from her current Daydream CD, Carey breaks the word knew into an amazing 26 separate notes (this is only an estimate: we played these four seconds over and over, and got up to 26 just before we went mad). Her jazzy riffs suggest demon virtuosity, but it could also be musical browsing. Maybe Carey can’t decide which interpretation is the right one, so she tries them all.

Like Carey, many female singers co-write their music. Many others don’t, and are thus handicapped by pop’s 30-year tyranny of singer-songwriters. Hey, if you don’t write, you’re not an artist. “Vocal interpreter” used to be an honorable job description–good enough for Ella, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole. Now the epithet is often an insult. It conjures up images of a Las Vegas lounge singer crooning Feelings.

All right, maybe the top pop songwriters of the day–Babyface and David Foster (who collaborated on Dion’s The Power of the Dream) and Diane Warren (who helped Estefan write Reach) aren’t Gershwin and Stephen Foster and Harry Warren. But they can write good songs for good singers. These three composers all had a hand in Toni Braxton’s fine Secrets CD–dusky, mellow, infectiously commercial, like a grownup Tina Arena.

And there’s plenty of other good music to record. Alison Krauss, a child fiddle prodigy from Illinois and later a world-class bluegrass singer with her band Union Station, became a star with her 1995 compilation Now That I’ve Found You. The set puts Krauss’s mountain-stream soprano on pretty display. She caresses standards from R. and B. (the title song), gospel (the soul-lifting When God Dips His Pen of Love in My Heart) and the Paul McCartney catalog (an elfin I Will). Think of it: a singer with no gimmick but a passionate talent and a great, rangy taste in music.

If there’s a knock on the modern divas–whether pop, like Carey, Houston and Dion, or pure, like Krauss–it’s that their material is just too amiable. Much of their music is not just middle of the road; it tiptoes on the white line in the middle of the middle of the road. Dammit, they sing like girls! And in social norms, the pop diva adheres to the proper side of the gender split in music. She is expected to be a sister before a lover; the operative slur word is “nice.” Pop is the boarding school where the good girls live. Rock is the shooting gallery where the naughty boys hang out.

Somewhere between these extremes there should be an outlaw diva. She can do cool-guy things: write songs about malaise and disorientation, play a harmonica, take herself very seriously, sell 16 million copies of her first big CD. Why, she could be Alanis Morissette–the anti-Whitney, the pariah Mariah, the outre Faye, the mean Celine.

Anyway, that’s how the 22-year-old comes across on a first listen of the Jagged Little Pill album. Morissette’s songs sound aggressive, grudging, desperate. Her alto lurches among the octaves, from growl to shriek. A typical phrase will end in a gasp, as if one of the emotional inferiors in her songs had suddenly retaliated by pressing thumb and forefinger on her windpipe. The voice of Sinead O'Connor, you imagine, in the mind of Patti Smith.

But Morissette is not that simple. A former teen star in her native Canada, she’s smart enough to give her choruses sing-along melodies–the likely contribution of co-writer Glen Ballard, who formerly produced Wilson Phillips, the trio of cool-harmonizing, second-generation pop stars. In the perkier tunes (You Learn, Head over Feet), the singer overdubs tight harmonies that might have come from Wilson Phillips. And that is Morissette’s dirty little secret: inside her edgy plaints are craft and a yen to please. She’s a mainstream diva in spite of herself.

Morissette may soon discover that the rock machismo she approximates is often just an acid flavor of the month: a hit, a burnout, a trivia question. But being a diva is a life’s work. The Scottish Annie Lennox has been at it for 20 years, developing a husky voice and a gift for weaving a dramatic spell that is almost visual. Her 1995 Medusa album has 10 old and new songs written by others. The opening cut, No More “I Love You’s,” relies on Lennox’s evocation of love’s demons–“Desire, despair, desire, so many monsters”–and her conjuring up, in a mid-song monologue, of a little girl for whom these monsters come to life. A woman’s bed of sad passion has telescoped into a child’s bedroom fears at midnight.

The final number on Medusa is Paul Simon’s 1973 Something So Right. In Lennox’s gorgeous reworking, she answers the pessimism of No More “I Love You’s” and completes the album’s circle. “Some people never say the words I love you, / But like a child I’m longing to be told.” Again a girl in a woman’s supple voice, Lennox finds salvation foraging in a child’s garden of cries from the heart. Lennox might be Piaf here–there’s that eerie understanding of a lyric–but with the fever adjusted to room temperature.

Piaf is still an icon, both for her poignant life story and for her ability to hurdle emotion over the language barrier. But in the world market of the '90s, when virtually every album with gigantic global sales is in some form of English, what’s a diva to do? Cultivate her own garden, for the worldwide boom in CD sales means there are more people searching for something different. Morissette’s album is bubble-gum music next to Tori Amos’ Boys for Pele, with its forbiddingly opaque lyrics, a voice that runs amuck over the octaves and the famous inside photo of Amos with a suckling piglet at her breast. Yet the album has sold millions. Moral: You can’t be too weird. You must be you.

That is the message attended to by Wong in her recent take-me-or-leave-me mode, and by Yoshida in her American experiment. It surely applies to singers who harbor nations within themselves. Enya, the Celtic lass whose ethereal soundscapes might have emanated from a very gentle UFO, sings in Gaelic, English and Latin–the languages of family, school and church. Her melodies are so mellow as to seem downright shy, yet they’re so popular that an entire genre of new music is known simply as Enya.

By that standard, the pop brand of Cuban-American music should probably be called Gloria. With time, the Estefan sound has grown full and wise, Latin rhythms accompanying rather than defining the melody. Estefan has also learned to write for her voice and disposition; on her latest album, Destiny, she has taken her own advice. Reach–higher.

And Celine Dion has reached inside. The Falling into You CD, a supercharged superproduction, will yield perhaps half a dozen smasheroo singles, and it’s a treat to hear her belt a song to bits. But a bigger piece of her heart can be found on The French Album. There the girl from Quebec sings in her mother’s language and in a voice so ardent and discreet it reminds you of Elvis in the intimate ballads he recorded in his time off from creating the bad-boy iconography of rock. Murmuring like the heart just before sleeping, Dion’s voice summons the power and the glory of the diva.

–With reporting by Charles P. Alexander/Montreal

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SOURCE: TIME MAGAZINE

#1996

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mrmichaelchadler · 5 years

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Bright Wall/Dark Room March 2019: Love You for 10,000 Years by Kelsey Ford

We are pleased to offer an excerpt from the March issue of the online magazine, Bright Wall/Dark Room. Their latest issue is a look back at the films of 1994, as they celebrate 25th anniversary this year. In addition to Kelsey Ford's below piece on "Chungking Express," the issue also features new essays on "Pulp Fiction," "The Shawshank Redemption," "Reality Bites," "Speed," "Three Colors: Red," "Through the Olive Trees," "Amateur," "The Last Seduction," "Color of Night," "Dumb and Dumber," and "U.S. Go Home." The above art is by Tony Stella.

You can read our previous excerpts from the magazine by clicking here. To subscribe to Bright Wall/Dark Room, or look at their most recent essays, click here.

The Hong Kong of Chungking Express is electric, frenetic, dense. People crowd and push and elbow, a collective urge with neon-blurred edges. Their lives are casual chaos. And yet, the characters feel isolated and lonely, separate from each other with rare exception; their melodic interiors can’t quite sync with their daily tumult.

Cop 223 (Takeshi Kineshiro) runs when he’s sad because “the body loses water when you jog, so you have none left for tears.” The femme fatale (Brigitte Lin), an exhausted drug smuggler, wears a blonde wig and sunglasses as armor. Cop 663 (Tony Leung), recently broken up with by his stewardess girlfriend, lingers around the food stand where Faye (Faye Wong) blasts “California Dreamin’” too loudly. They’re all incidental, their lives clashing before glancing away.

In an opening voiceover, as Cop 223 races through the crowded streets, he says, “Every day we brush past so many other people. People we may never meet or people who may become close friends.”

This, more than anything, informs the ethos of Chungking Express: loneliness and the hope that, maybe, someday, it won’t be quite as potent as it is now.

When I was a junior in college, I’d been in a long distance relationship for the better part of the last three years. It was spring and something felt like it needed to change, I needed to stop hoping my boyfriend would call me back. So I bought a copy of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse.

At first, the act of reading the book became an act of ending the relationship, and then it became an act of getting over the loss of that relationship. I stopped three-quarters of the way through, when I no longer needed it. That book stayed on my shelf for years, the bookmark in its place. Both are gone now; I can’t remember when that happened.

Built in fragments and arranged alphabetically, A Lover’s Discourse is like a deconstructed love story. Barthes believed the lover’s discourse was one “of an extreme solitude.” As he explores “absence” and “disreality” and “silence,” he separates the one doing the loving and the one being loved. The discourse becomes less about love than about the person performing the act of love: “The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.”

There are many ways to read A Lover’s Discourse. I choose to read it as a solitary monologue. A way of categorizing and explaining and dissecting, undoing a narrative and placing its articulated parts out like an undone body: these are the stories we tell ourselves about our place in the world, and these are the stories we tell ourselves about others.

Wong Kar-Wai’s lush and bright Chungking Express is built as a diptych: two stories featuring lovelorn cops wandering the streets of Hong Kong. The movie’s atmosphere and story are like one intense infatuation. The colors are bright and fast. Every object is happy or sad or filled with portent. The songs play over and over again, each time becoming more and more steeped in the emotional turmoil of the characters hitting repeat on the boombox.

In the first story, Cop 223 fixates on cans of pineapple. After his girlfriend breaks up with him on April 1st, he treats it as an April Fools joke. For a month, he buys cans of pineapple that expire on May 1st. He stacks the cans in his kitchen, an accumulation of his affection. In the movie’s signature, pensive voiceover, he says: “I tell myself that if May hasn’t come back by the time I’ve bought 30 cans, then our love will expire too.”

His frustration is bound to these expiring pineapple cans. When the market stops stocking cans that expire on the 1st, because it’s the 30th, he yells at the clerk, “With you people it’s always, Out with the old, in the with the new!” He asks, “How do you think the pineapple feels?” May 1st comes and there’s still no reconciliation. To mark the ending, Cop 223 systematically opens each can, forking the fruit into his mouth, adding spice to the slices, offering some to his dog.

On the other side of the break up and the heap of emptied cans, what’s there to do? He goes to a bar, drinks, throws up, and decides to fall in love with the next woman to walk through the front door. That the next woman is wearing a blonde wig, red sunglasses, and a raincoat doesn’t phase him. He can’t know she’s a drug smuggler. His approach is insipid and young. In three different languages, he asks her if she likes pineapple. She rebuffs him. When he says he wants to get to know her, she says, “You can’t get to know me.”

It’s easier this way, easier to turn her into an unknown, so her true edges can’t press up against the absence he’s trying to fill. The pair go back to a hotel and she falls asleep, crashed out over the bed, while he curls up on the windowsill and watches TV. He needs distraction and she needs a safe place to sleep. For one night, they’re perfect.

From Barthes’ entry for “The Unknowable”: “The other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance is done away with.”

A Lover’s Discourse is the negative of a love story, highlighting the moments before and after, when the narrator is alone and rolling over the story like a well-worn stone. One consistent truth he returns to: that the idea of someone is safer than actually getting to know them, that it’s always safer to leave that person in the environs of your mind, rather than allow them to violate the rules you’ve set in place for how they should behave or who they should be.

From that same entry: “I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know.”

Wong made Chungking Express during a break from another film, Ashes of Time, and the intimacy of Chungking can be sourced to its quick, two month shoot. Without permits, they had to rush any street shots; the apartment they used for Cop 663’s belonged to Wong’s longtime cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, at the time.

Wong is known for writing and rewriting his scripts while he shoots, relying on serendipity within scenes to let him know where they need to go next: “If you are paying attention, you realize that every story can go in so many directions. And each of those directions can also go in many more directions.”

In an interview with John Powers for WKW: The Cinema of Wong Kar Wai, Wong describes his style of filmmaking like the construction of a garden. “You plant a tree in the garden and you expect it will be a perfect tree. But then something happens, maybe a storm blows off a branch and you realize that it no longer looks the way you expected.” The metaphor is extended; he plants a bush, then two flowers, and then digs one up. On and on. “Then, at some point you stop, and if you’re lucky, what you have will be beautiful. It won’t be what you expected, but the garden will still be beautiful.”

Chungking. Our lives are hard, but sometimes, in the midst of all the furor and tension and exhaustion, sometimes there is a flicker of something nice, someone looking out for you. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can find a pocket of relief.

Chungking Express constantly doubles, even beyond its diptych structure. There are two women in blonde wigs, two stewardesses, two Mays. The characters often catch themselves in reflection, as if the image of them fragmenting along a wall feels more apt than the truth. The act of devotion is also doubled, both the end and the beginning of a romance, and the ways one can easily slip from one mode to the other.

Chungking Express is an entire movie about having a crush.

In the second story, The Mama & Papa’s “California Dreamin’” is on constant repeat. It’s a song that Wong called “innocent and simple, like summertime in the 70s” and played for his cinematographer, Doyle, when he was first trying to describe what the movie would be about. Faye blasts the song over and over again at the snack stand, so loudly she can’t hear customers or her own thoughts. This isn’t the only song threaded through Chungking; there’s also Faye Wong’s cover of The Cranberries’ “Dreams” and Dinah Washington’s potent “What a Difference a Day Makes,” which scores the flashback of Cop 663 and his stewardess girlfriend lolling around his apartment, drinking beer, flying toy airplanes, kissing against his closet.

Faye first notices Cop 663 when he starts hanging around her snack stand during his shifts. At first, he’s there to pick up meals for his girlfriend. But then she leaves him and his order becomes a simple black coffee. In the ex-girlfriend’s absence, Cop 663 imagines that everything in his apartment misses her as much as he does. “Since she left, everything in the apartment is sad,” he says. “I have to comfort them all before I go to sleep.” His soap has lost an unhealthy amount of weight, it needs to have more confidence; he tells his towels to stop crying but they continue to drip; his stuffed white bear holds too many grudges. A layer of grime has grown in the stewardess’s absence.

This is the grime that Faye scrapes away at in secret, after stashing the apartment key his ex left in an envelope for him at the snack stand. She waters his thirsty plants, buys him new towels and curtains, fills his aquarium with living fish, washes his sheets, changes the labels on his cans. His dim life livens, even if he doesn’t understand why or how.

One afternoon, he comes home while Faye is still there. In voiceover, words still heavy with loss, he says, “She used to jump out and scare me, but she hasn’t done it much recently.” He plays hide and seek, even though he knows the stewardess isn’t there hiding. It becomes a game of cat and mouse. Faye inhabits the space he wishes and expects the stewardess to be in. He checks the bathroom; Faye presses against a wall; he turns around; Faye’s ducked beneath a blanket.

Cop 663’s attentions drift from the stewardess’s absence and toward the increasingly frequent presence of Faye. Maybe he senses what she’s been doing. Maybe her proto-Manic Pixie Dream Girl vibe has gotten to him. Either way, he asks her to grab a drink with him in the California Bar, the same bar where Cop 223 met his blonde woman in shades. Faye doesn’t show and Cop 663 is left alone, a mirror of the scene where Cop 223 asked the blonde woman if she liked pineapple. There are, after all, different types of being alone.

“To try to write love is to confront the muck of language,” Barthes writes in his entry for “Inexpressible Love.’ “That region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little.” Which is the exact tightrope Chungking Express walks. Everything is important––every can of pineapple, every dripping towel, every loop of “California Dreamin’”––mimicking that all-encompassing feeling of infatuation. These small items hold an entire story. The heartbreak and the hope and the waiting.

But infatuation can become a closed loop. It’s scary to step outside of it, to start talking to someone rather than something. It’s easier, perhaps, to fly across the world to California than it is to cross the street and enter the bar named California, where the guy you like is expecting you. Chungking Express understands this, and the moments when its characters take those small risks feel like rewards. It’s worth it to be careful.

It takes time, yes, but eventually Faye finds her way back to the snack stand. Now she’s the one in uniform, a stewardess on leave, and Cop 663 is the one behind the counter, having bought the stand from Faye’s former boss. Faye’s energy is like a spiral about to snap. At any second, she might leave. But then Cop 663 asks her to draw him up another boarding pass; the ink on the one she’d left him the year before had long faded. So, she doesn’t leave.

This time, she stays.

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