The White Suit

I stayed late. The principals had gone. The swings had closed their books. The mandolinist had finished his bourbon and gone home. Michael, the substitute conductor, had gone. I was the last musician in the building, and I did not have a reason to stay, and I stayed.

In the wings the wardrobe team was working on Curly's white wedding suit. They had it laid out and they were hosing it down. The blood from the second act — Jud's blood, the murder at the wedding, the high-drama scene — came out of the cotton in pink ribbons that ran across the floor toward the drain. The water pressure was professional. The drain was placed where it needed to be. The team did this every night. By morning the suit would be white as a dove for the next performance of the same murder.

I watched. The institution was already restoring itself for tomorrow.

* * *

The first show had been five days earlier.

My mother had come. My sisters' in-laws had come. The seats were the kind I had access to because I was in the chair, and I had filled them with the people who had watched me prepare for this work my whole life. The seats were in eyeshot of the pit. From the platform Nathan ran the show with his arms and his breath. I sat in the chair that belonged to Hilary, wearing the in-ear mix that Hilary had asked the sound team to build for her, reading the markings on the music stand that Hilary had set for her own eyeline. Every signal in my ears that night was the signal Hilary had asked for. Every marker on the stand was the marker Hilary had set. I was wearing, in the most literal sense, another body's complete sensory apparatus. The work was to inhabit it well enough that the show ran.

It ran. The cues landed. The numbers built and released. The pit breathed with Nathan's arms. I followed the breath. I felt the chair receive me. I felt the rig translate, through Hilary's ears, into my own. I felt the show happen around me and I was in the show. Up in the seats my mother and my sisters' in-laws watched.

After the show we went to the Polo Club for dinner. A long table. The bread was passed. The candles burned down. People asked about the work. People said they had liked the music. I was thirty in two months. I had been a working musician for sixteen years. I had played hundreds of pit shows and toured the country and recorded and studied and apprenticed, and this was the night the years arrived at. I had standing.

Nathan and I had not spoken. We had never spoken. The relationship was conducted through the score and through his arms. He was on his platform. I was in the chair. The communication was musical and it was complete. He had received my playing and approved of it without ever turning toward me with his voice.

Two days later the email arrived.

Hi Doug, Great playing tonight — lots of good stuff throughout — I know you know some of the problem spots. Some of it felt like nerves, some of it felt like second-guessing, and a few moments I think you need to take a little more time in the shed with it. But it's not that far off from being in good shape. I'd be happy to have you back for a 2nd show, but I'll let you talk with Hilary to make the best call as to when.

Then the notes. Twenty of them. Measure-numbered. Specific.

m96 — play that quarter note melody louder (G#-D#) — it's super important and is just you.
Surrey: Are you using a capo? It should be capo-ed. m104 — don't arpeggiate/roll. it has to be super sync-ed with the rest of the band right on the downbeat.
Cain't Say No: m42-43 — was great — never shy away from that figure.
Lonely Room: Louder at the very top — total banjo solo — can be a full sound on those minor 2nds.
People Will Say Reprise: 8ths at m19 felt a little out of the pocket — really dial in the tempo with Eleonore (Bass) and my hands. I'd also take a listen to Hilary's pattern there — do what she does.
Oklahoma: Don't roll/arpeggiate any of the chords at m9-10-11-12. They should be super tight and crisp quarters. In general, take a look at this one — all the single note stuff can be louder — you are covering horn parts, so don't be shy with any of it.

Let me know if you have questions on any of these. Thanks Doug! NK.

I read it on my phone in the apartment. I read it again on my laptop. I read it again. The email was the first written validation from a conductor of that institutional standing that I had ever received. Great playing tonight. Not that far off from being in good shape. Happy to have you back for a 2nd show. The principal conductor of a Broadway production was teaching me. He was naming the measures by number. He was telling me when I had been great — m42-43 was great; m35 was great; m137 solo was great — and where I needed to take more time in the shed. He was already scheduling the return. He was telling me Hilary would put me on the books for later in August. The email was a relationship being initiated. The institution had opened a door.

I wrote back.

Dear Nathan, I'm still soaring from last night, it was such a privilege. Thank you for these notes, I'm eager to dial in all of this feedback, and suppose I'll be ready in a couple weeks! I won't be quite so nervous now that my first show is out of the way, looking forward. Thanks again!! Doug.

The reply was the reply of a person inside the five days. Still soaring. Such a privilege. Eager to dial in. Won't be quite so nervous. Looking forward. I was thirty. I was inside the relationship. I was scheduling our next encounter. The principal conductor had written to me, and I had written back, and the channel was now open.

The second show was five days away. Hilary had it in the books.

* * *

Five days.

I drilled the notes. I worked them measure by measure. I put the iPad on the music stand in the apartment and ran the score with Nathan's video taken from a fixed angle, and at every flagged measure I stopped and worked the correction. Capo-ed. Quarter notes louder. Don't arpeggiate the last note of Surrey — single pluck from the whole band. Dial in the tempo with Eleonore and Nathan's hands. I treated the email as scripture. I built a checklist from his words. I drilled the checklist. The body was being machined into a refined version of itself, against a set of corrections written by the principal conductor I had not yet spoken to.

The chest hair was coming off in stages. I had been getting into the best shape of my life for a year — the kind of work that requires daily attention and that nobody around you sees until the right moment — and the moment was now. The morning after the second show was the annual Westport beach trip with my college friends, the trip we had been doing every summer since 2009. The body was being readied for its reveal. The chest shave was scheduled for the morning of the second show because I would be at the beach the next day and I wanted the unveiling to be clean.

My brother was flying in from London Business School. He would be in town for one night before catching a flight to a destination wedding on the other coast. He had not been at the first show. The second show was the show he would see. I had gotten him a seat. My mother was coming again. The lobby after the show was the small window I had imagined for the three of us — the brother who had not seen the first show, the mother who would now see her son in the chair for the second time, me — before he peeled off to his flight, my mother went home, and I left in the morning for the beach.

I prepared the joke for my brother. He would find the shaved chest hilarious. He would laugh in the lobby. The laugh was the brother-laugh I had been waiting for, and I had built the year's work up to the moment of producing it.

The cans of chili were in the apartment. The store-bought cornbread was on the counter. The flannel snap shirt was hung over the chair. The cowboy boots were by the door. I had practiced eating the intermission food the way I had practiced the breaks, because the intermission was a transition the body had to handle smoothly and I could not afford friction. I had dialed in every variable I could predict. I had been preparing for the run for weeks. I had been preparing for the beach for a year. Most of all I had been preparing for Nathan, against Nathan's email, in his absence, with five days to make the corrections he had given me into reflex.

Those five days were the most accomplished and validated I had ever felt. I had it. The thing the years had been for, I had. I walked around the city with the email in my inbox. I drilled. I shaved. I ate. I slept.

* * *

On the morning of the second show I shaved the chest. The hair came off clean. I looked at the body in the mirror. The body the year had built was there. The body would be at the beach in twenty-four hours.

I went through the rehearsal one more time. The iPad with Nathan on it. The cans on the counter. The shirt on the chair. The boots by the door. Everything calibrated. Everything checked.

At the theater Hilary told me Nathan was out tonight. I do not remember the moment. I do not remember whether she said it backstage or at the half-hour call or as I was setting up the rig. I remember that she said it casually, the way one principal player tells another principal player about a substitution that has been worked out in advance. Oh, Nathan's out tonight. Michael's covering. The substitution was, to Hilary, a fact of the production. Substitute conductors happen. Michael covers when Nathan is out. No one thinks twice. The information traveled through the principal player to the substitute player as a courtesy, not as an institutional notification. It was a green-room mention.

I received it casually. I did not yet know what I was receiving. I think I said something like oh, okay. I think I went back to my rig. The five days of drilling I had done against Nathan's notes were the drilling I had done. They could not be undone in the minutes before downbeat. Whatever it was that the corrections were going to produce in me, in conversation with Nathan's arms on the platform, was not going to be produced tonight, because Nathan would not be on the platform. The keystone of the engineered relationship I was inside of was being lifted out, casually, by Hilary, in a green-room aside, while I was wearing her rig.

The wardrobe shirt was a different shirt from the one I had practiced in. The chest hair was already coming back. I could feel it inside the t-shirt under the costume. Prickly. Patchy. It snagged against the seams in a slightly different way than the apartment shirt had. I noticed. I noticed everything. The body had been calibrated to a degree of precision that made every new variable register.

Brett was in his costume. He played guitar and pedal steel. He had not missed a show. He was wearing the same wardrobe pieces he had been wearing eight times a week. He smiled at me. He said, I can smell my jeans. I laughed. He laughed. He meant it as welcome — this is what the work smells like, this is what devotion smells like, this is what your body's costume becomes when you are in the chair long enough. The line was generous. He was telling me what credentialed presence costs and what it produces. I would not be there long enough to find out. Brett's jeans were the credential I would not accumulate.

The swings were in their corner. A man and a woman. The man had a novel. The woman had a magazine. They sat. The institution paid two salaries to have two bodies available in case the system needed redundancy. The institution understood that the system could fail and had built in the redundancy for itself. I was not a swing. I was a sub. There was no salary for me to read a book. I was in the chair.

Michael came to the platform. He had the demeanor of a chill jazz cat. Soft, easy, a player's player. He raised his arms. The downbeat fell.

I cannot tell you exactly what went wrong. Nothing went wrong in a way the audience would have heard. The show ran. The cues landed. The dancers danced. The numbers built and released. But the precision I had carried into the pit, the precision I had spent five days producing in answer to Nathan's email, was not the precision the night required. The corrections I had drilled were corrections inside Nathan's relationship to the score, and Nathan was not in the room. Michael was running the show. Michael's downbeat was not Nathan's downbeat. Michael's breath before the cue was not Nathan's breath. The corrections did not have an interlocutor. The body kept up. The body did not lock in. I had over-adapted, with discipline, to a target that was no longer in the room.

I knew it in act one. I knew it the way you know things in your sternum before you know them in your head.

* * *

Intermission. The stagehand found me. He said my mother had left this for me. He held up a folded bathing suit.

I had asked her to bring it. I was going to Westport in the morning and I had not had time to swing by her place. The bathing suit was real fabric in his hand.

He said my mom and brother had left during intermission. My brother was tired. He had to be at the airport early.

I took the bathing suit. I held it. The seats I had gotten them — the seats I had access to because I was in the chair — were empty for act two. The family friend who was sitting within eyeshot of the pit was still there. The family who had come to see me, at my invitation, in the seats I had arranged for them, was not.

My mother had not chosen my brother over me. She had chosen his early flight over my act two, because the flight was legible to her and the act two was not. She did not know I was being killed in the pit. She knew her son from London was about to travel to a wedding and needed sleep. She did what she could. She left me the bathing suit. The gesture was the residue of a motherhood that could not hold both sons at the same intermission. Her motherhood of him sabotaged her motherhood of me. I do not blame her for it. I am also not over it.

I ate the chili. I ate the cornbread. I went back into the pit.

* * *

Act two. The AV problems started in one of the high-drama scenes. Something with the projection, something with the playback, the technical infrastructure of the mixed-media moments failing in real time. The audience may not have noticed. The pit noticed. Michael noticed. The room got tighter.

Curly broke a string. He was singing in character, in costume, playing the guitar that was part of his costume, mid-scene. A string went. He had to keep going. He transposed the part up an octave on the intact strings, on the fly, without pausing. He held the scene together. He saved the moment. After the show people would clap him on the back. The principal who improvises is a virtuoso. His adaptive intelligence is the proof of his credential.

I watched it from the pit, inside Hilary's rig, listening through Hilary's monitor mix, with the seats I had arranged for my family empty behind me. The asymmetry was immediate. Curly's body was permitted to adapt and be honored for it. The institution had built the recognition of his adaptation into the structure of how it credentialed him. My body was being judged for its inability to adapt to a variable I could not have predicted, inside a sensory apparatus that was not mine, in a chair that was not mine, in a costume that did not fit, against a conductor who had not given me the notes I had drilled for five days. The principal who improvised under pressure became more credentialed. The sub who improvised under pressure became unemployable. The institution had two protocols for the same act and the protocol it applied to you depended on whether the institution had already decided you belonged.

I knew this in the pit. I think Michael knew it too. The mandolinist may have known it. The audience did not. The show went on.

* * *

After the show I went to the dressing area with the mandolinist. He was an old friend from touring bands in 2012. He was the principal mandolinist on the production. He had a nightly ritual: fancy bourbon, one pour, at the end of every show. He poured me one. Michael joined us.

Michael had the demeanor of the man on the platform — soft, easy, a player's player. He sat with us and he drank with us. He was about to be one of the two people whose verdict would close the relationship Nathan had opened five days earlier. He knew it. I think I knew it. We sat there together and drank the bourbon and the mandolinist talked about something I cannot now remember, and the institution's social form ran perfectly, and the substance of the collegial relationship had already been evacuated. The procedure was the drink. The meaning was gone. The man who was about to assassinate me shared his ritual with me, and we both knew, and we both drank.

The mandolinist may not have known. He was the principal. His chair was not in question. The bourbon was his nightly ritual and the ritual continued whether or not one of the sitting musicians at the table was being unmade.

* * *

I stayed after they left. I did not want to walk out into the city yet. I wanted to see the theater empty. I knew the night had been the last night of something and I wanted to be present at the closing of it the way I had been present at the opening of it, five days earlier, in the silent communication with Nathan's arms.

The wardrobe team was hosing Curly's white suit. The blood from the second act came out of the cotton in pink ribbons across the floor. The water pressure was professional. The drain was located precisely where it needed to be. The team did this every night and they would do it again tomorrow night and the night after that, until the run closed or the production transferred or the institution moved on to its next staging of someone else's wedding-and-murder. The white suit was being made white again.

I walked to the 1 train.

The weeping started before I hit the threshold of the station. It did not stop. It did not stop on the platform. It did not stop on the train. I was inconsolable in public. People looked. People looked away. I held the bathing suit. I held my banjo case — my banjo, not the show's, because the show's banjos stayed in the pit. I was wearing a t-shirt over the chest hair that was growing back and I was crying on the 1 train home from a show I had just been killed in, and the bathing suit my mother had left for me was in my lap, and the beach weekend was in the morning, and I knew already that the email was coming, and I knew already that I would spend the weekend carrying a wound I would not yet be able to name to the friends around me, and I did.

* * *

The next morning I got into a minivan with eight friends and two dogs and all of our luggage and we drove north to Westport. I had my disciplined fiber crackers and a tub of high-protein cottage cheese in a small cooler at my feet. The year of training had a fueling protocol and the protocol was still running. The body that had been killed in the pit the night before was eating cottage cheese in the third row of a minivan on its way to the trip the year had been for. The friends were loud and excited and the dogs were excited. I ate the crackers. I ate the cottage cheese. I had not told anyone yet. The email had not arrived. The bloodbath was something only my body was carrying, and my body was carrying it the way it carried everything, by continuing to do the disciplined work it had been trained to do.

The bathing suit my mother had left with the stagehand was in my bag. When we arrived I wore it. I went in the water. The body that had been built for the trip arrived at the trip, on schedule, and the body that had been killed in the pit arrived too, and the two bodies were the same body, and I do not know how to describe the misery of inhabiting both at once.

In the kitchen of the beach house, I took off my shirt to change. The friends were around. Marck was there. Marck had been a kosher butcher in his teens. He looked at the chest where the stubble had been coming back in for two days now, prickly and uneven and patchy in the way regrowth is. He said, dude, your chest looks like a side of pork before being processed.

I had been waiting all year for someone to notice the body the year had built. I had been waiting forty-eight hours to hear the laugh I had prepared the joke for. The brother who would have laughed was at a wedding on the other coast. The friends who would have noticed the body the year had built were now noticing the body the shave had ruined. Marck read my body the way a butcher reads a body. Not as the payoff. As the raw material. The accuracy of his reading was the wound. He was not wrong. He was a butcher. He saw meat.

I laughed because there was nothing else to do.

* * *

The email came mid-week. There was a thunderstorm. The neighborhood lost power. The whole grid went dark. I was reading the email on my phone screen by the light of my phone screen. The institution found me through the only channel still operating. The grid that had carried the music and the touches and the lighting cues and the score was dark. The institution's reach was greater than the infrastructure. Suspended from time, from the power grid. The message arrived anyway.

Hi Doug, Thanks again for coming in this past week to the OK pit. Sorry I wasn't there, but I've spoken to my Assistant Conductor, Michael, as well as Eleonore, our In-House Contractor, and at the moment I just don't think it's a good fit for the show. I'm going to ask Hilary to release the dates she had you on the books for later in August. Sorry for the tough news — I really do appreciate the work you put into the book, and I really do wish you all the best! Many thanks, NK.

The email that opened the relationship and the email that closed the relationship were five days apart. Both signed NK. Both addressing Doug. Both warm. Both professional. Both complete. Great playing tonight and I just don't think it's a good fit for the show were sentences in the same hand, in the same voice, with the same generosity of tone. The institution did not change its register when it severed the relationship. The institution had one register, and the register was warm, and the warmth was the medium of both the welcome and the dismissal.

Nathan had not been there. The judgment was rendered on his behalf by Michael and Eleonore. Michael had drunk the bourbon with me. Eleonore was the bass player whose pocket Nathan had told me to lock into. Both of them had heard me play. Both of them had been with me in the pit. Both of them had then, in some channel I was not part of, conveyed their assessment to Nathan. Nathan had passed it through. He used my first name. He said all the best.

I read the email by the light of my phone in the blackout. I did not respond. There was no response to compose. The channel was closed.

* * *

I did not speak to my brother for six months.

He had done nothing wrong. He had been tired. He had a flight in the morning to a destination wedding. My mother had decided he needed his sleep more than I needed his witnessing. The silence between him and me was not at him. The silence was at the structure that placed him in the position of being protected by our mother at the moment I most needed her to stay. He had not asked for the protection. He had received it. The silence was the only response I had to a family system that had organized itself around his need at the cost of mine, and I could not articulate it then, and I could not articulate it for months.

During the six months he sent me a letter. I never opened it. I have not opened it. The envelope is in the back of a drawer in my bedroom, behind the things I move when I look for something else. I know what it weighs. I have moved twice since 2019 and the envelope has moved with me. I have not opened it.

The pandemic ended the silence. Broadway went dark in March. Every musician in the city lost their work. The asymmetry between him and me, between the brother whose life had continued and the brother whose career had ended — that asymmetry was dissolved by a global revocation. He had now lost what I had already lost, or close enough. The structure that had isolated me was no longer in operation, because the structure had collapsed for everyone. We started talking again.

About a year after the letter, we were in the same room together for the first time in long enough that the question could be asked face to face. He asked me whether I had read it. I said no. He was upset. We did not talk about it further. The letter went back to being the thing it had been before he asked, except now it was also the thing he had asked about and I had refused. He has not asked again. I have not opened it. The letter is still in the drawer.

* * *

Within hours of the email arriving in the blackout, before the power came back on the block, I was already careening. Lying in the dark with the phone screen as the only light, the music career visibly ending, the body still on the beach trip with two more days to perform itself as if nothing had happened — somewhere in that interval the next system began to organize itself in my head. I did not yet have the vocabulary for what I was reaching for. I had not yet heard the words volumetric capture or spatial audio or motion capture in any context that made them mine. What I had was a body that knew exactly what the pit had failed to provide, and an instinct, urgent as nausea, that some other medium would have to be built in which a body like mine could survive a substitute-conductor night.

One month later I started ITP. It felt like a clean break. A new building. Somewhere to be, every day. The summer of training had been a simulation — the chest built for a witnessing that did not occur, the fueling protocol still running past the body's purpose for being fueled, the disciplined system performing itself in the absence of the career it had been preparing for. ITP gave the body a schedule that was not a simulation. There were classes. There were people. There was a place to walk to in the morning that was not the apartment where the chili cans had been timed against the intermission. The wound did not stop. The wound stopped being the building I was in.

In my first semester I built a device I called MIDI BLadE. A pair of fencing foils wired with accelerometers and gyroscopes, gestures translated into MIDI signals, the swordplay producing live composition in Max. Fencing and music fused into a single system whose technical thresholds I had set. I did not know, building it, what I was doing. The artifact arrived before the theory. I built the thing my body had been reaching for in the blackout, in the form the affordances of the new medium let me build, and the theory of what I had done has been articulating itself ever since. This essay is one of its articulations. So is the book the essay sits inside. So is every system I have built and every system I am about to build.

The pit could not be modulated to my body. The institution had no protocol for the body that had trained against one conductor's downbeat and found a different conductor on the platform. There was no scaffolding. There was no redundancy that included me. The redundancy was for the production. I have spent the years since building, in other media, the redundancy that would have included me. I am still building it.

* * *

The white suit was clean by the time I left. The wardrobe team had finished. The blood was gone. The cotton was returning to white the way it returned to white every night, ready for tomorrow's wedding.

There was no hose for me.

I felt like I was murdered at my wedding.