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dailyskyferreira · 5 years

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Sky Ferreira Returns With an uncompromising vision and the studio hours to back it up, the enigmatic singer is back with a new single—and a promise that her first album in six years will be worth the wait.

So, what’s Sky Ferreira been doing all this time? Well, for the last 35 minutes or so, she’s been in the bathroom.

“I’m so sorry,” she says when she finally emerges, eyes wet, arms full of winter layers. It’s a late-February afternoon at New York City’s Russian Tea Room, the fabled blini-and-caviar haunt of candy-red banquettes and eternal Christmas ornaments where Madonna once worked the coat check. About a half hour ago, the 26-year-old singer turned up for our afternoon-tea reservation only to disappear in an immediate whorl, as if a czarist vortex sucked her into the basement. What she had thought was an asthmatic flare-up, she now explains, was actually a pretty severe anxiety attack. A panicked twinge remains in her expression, like the distant memory of tasting a lemon. In town from Los Angeles for three days, she tells me, “I’ve been anxious to the point that I haven’t slept at all.”

It’s a nerve-wracking moment for Sky, a pop artist, actor, and model who’s lately been keeping a low profile. This is partly because she seems to find the social contract of the PR exchange stressful, but also because she doesn’t want to suck up all the air before she gets a chance to breathe. “You really can get sick of someone’s face,” she says, as only someone who has loaned their own to Jimmy Choo and Calvin Klein could. “I don’t see the point of doing a bunch of photoshoots or press when I don’t have anything out.”

The fact that she hasn’t had anything out might be the biggest stress of all. Signed to Capitol Records at 15, Sky spent years in teen-pop A&R purgatory—groomed as a naughty-girl-next-door type with mall-Shakira hair and prefabricated singles with names like “Haters Anonymous” and “Sex Rules” (“We are animals/No matter what we deny/Our bodies strong, like magnets” are actual words she sang)—only to have her minders decide she wasn’t worth the trouble and shelve her long-promised full-length debut. Rather than give up, she used money she’d earned modeling and finished the album without their help.

Released in October 2013, Night Time, My Time was a rare major-label triumph of craft over product, a purposeful barrage of seething recriminations coated with ’90s-grunge textures and ’80-pop incandescence. It sounded like “My So-Called Life”’s Angela Chase mainlining John Hughes films and channeling her existential anguish into a record—except Night Time was the vision of a 2010s 21-year-old, and the truths were all hers.

The right people loved it. In the spring of 2015, Sky announced her second record’s name was Masochism and promised its first single that summer. The summer came and went, then the fall, and some winter too. On that New Year’s Eve, she addressed the delay obliquely on Instagram (“I refuse to put out something that isn’t honest”) and promised “in 2016 you will hear it.” In 2016, you did not, and now it’s 2019, and, still, no album. At this point, she can’t post online without some commenters popping up to heckle, “where’s the album sky” or “MASOCHISM!!?” or “still waiting,” like they’re hungry people rage-texting Seamless.

These impatient fans aren’t alone in their enthusiasm. “She’s one of those beautiful, rare people who can probably do anything,” says Debbie Harry, who’s had Sky open for Blondie. “If there’s anybody I would ever be jealous of, it would be her.”

Naturally, all of this—the anticipation, the unfulfilled promises, the time lapsed since her last release—is adding to the pressure she puts on herself. She feels like she has to explain. “It wasn’t by choice.” It wasn’t creative paralysis, nor was it a creative hiatus. “I wasn’t just taking time for myself the last five years.” During that time, she landed a half dozen movie roles, but she says she didn’t decide to focus on acting instead. “I never stepped away from music.” She alludes to vague external hindrances: “I’ve been at the mercy of people the last few years”; “gatekeepers”; “the rug pulled out under me”; a “someone at my label” who undid the generous arrangement she had to work with Kanye West musical director Mike Dean; and the very real issue of a young woman telling men what she wants and not settling for less. Then the labyrinthine nature of her production process is, as you’ll see, akin to playing charades blind-folded while riding a dog, and everyone else guesses with kazoos. Plus, she’s a perfectionist. Obsessive. She’ll do 800 takes. She’ll consider every option—and then she’ll consider it again.

But the primary reason it’s taken so long: Sky doesn’t just want her new songs done, she wants them to be good. By good, she means, executed the way she intended, no matter how long she waited to find the right violinist. Properly mixed so they don’t accidentally sound like pop-punk in the car, because “someone puts some shit on my voice” and she forgot to play them in an Uber. (Sky never learned to drive.) Songs that know their place in the broader pop continuum, not what’s hot on streaming. “I’m not looking for ‘a moment,’” she says. “I’m looking for a career—and real careers, you build them.”

She’s deemed two songs good enough to share with me. The first single, “Downhill Lullaby,” is a five-and-a-half-minute, goth-noir, chamber-pop piece—with strings!—that could have easily closed an episode of the revived “Twin Peaks.” (The association may be deliberate: Sky appeared in the show’s 2017 return, deeply admires its director, David Lynch, and the series’ music supervisor, Dean Hurley, produced the song alongside her.) Another forthcoming track, tentatively titled “Don’t Forget,” is a new wave time warp, a lovely bit of nostalgia therapy for people who were never there—even if it is, according to Sky, “about burning down houses.”

By now we’re settled into a booth, one Sky has selected in the empty part of the restaurant, far away from her manager and publicist, who’ve come along to chaperone. Her natural espresso roots have outrun her hair’s blonde highlights, and her dark T-shirt reads “CHICAGO METAL MANIA.” We’ve managed to order tea by asking the waiter to bring what he likes (a nice, orangey, spicy chai) and then momentarily horrify him when Sky asks if, instead of sending the teeny triangular sandwiches with mayonnaise back to the kitchen (she hasn’t touched them, and mayo makes her gag), we can give them to someone who’s homeless. “I’ll get you the ones without mayonnaise,” the waiter says, taking them away.

��I don’t have a back-up plan,” Sky says. “I never have. I don’t have an education. I don’t know how to, like, play music in the [traditional] sense. I’m socially awkward and stuff—I couldn’t really do a lot of other jobs either,” she says. “Literally, there’s no other option for me. So this has to work.”

There are many Sky Ferreiras. There’s Sky the model, a Hedi Slimane muse who’s walked the runway for Marc Jacobs and perfected a glare so haunted the Bates Motel must be jealous. There’s Sky the actor, who played a key supporting role in director Edgar Wright’s big-studio heist flick Baby Driver, but doesn’t have an agent. There’s Sky the live performer, who battles stage fright, but who also opened a 2014 Miley Cyrus arena tour, fell down an elevator shaft on night three, and still took the stage the next day.

There’s also the Sky here at the Russian Tea Room, whose left dimple comes as a surprise because, come to think of it, you’ve rarely seen photos of her smiling. The Sky who shouldn’t eat gluten because of an autoimmune condition, but doesn’t really tell people about it because it sounds like bullshit. The Sky who’s watched enough “Game of Thrones” to see her pets’ personalities reflected in the show’s characters. (For the record, her cat Egg would be a Lannister, while his brother Squirrel would be from the North.)

This Sky speaks in em dashes. It’s less that she loses her train of thought, and more that her thought train is screeching onto a new track. Sometimes you’re right there with her, but other times you’re watching the conversation from a distance like a detached caboose that just kept going straight. “I know I keep going in circles,” she says, “but my mind kind of always does that—spins.”

You don’t interview this Sky as much as steer her, but first you listen. “I’ve always been really shy,” she says, six minutes in. “I was actually mute for years when I was a kid.”

Little Sky Tonia Ferreira hummed along to the radio before she could talk. Raised around Los Angeles, mostly Venice Beach, her young parents split when she was a baby. Her dad tended bar, sometimes with her in tow, and when his roommates got cable, she devoured MTV. “I always hung out with a lot of adults,” she says. “I was, like, one of those kids.”

Being one of those kids meant she didn’t know how to talk to the kids who knew how to talk with each other. She was bullied constantly. She also had trouble with numbers and spelling—she suspects she’s dyslexic, but never got tested—and for a while, was so unhappy, she stopped talking altogether. “I had really long hair, didn’t speak, and had dark circles around my eyes,” she says, describing herself as a child. “I looked kinda feral.”

As the story goes, Sky’s first-grade classmates didn’t know she could talk until she sang “Over the Rainbow” in school. “As long as I can remember, I’ve felt the most like myself when I was singing,” she says. (Roughly 18 years later, she covered the Wizard of Oz ballad at David Lynch’s Festival of Disruption, and the director still raves about her version, telling me, “It was incredible. So beautiful.”)

She lived with her grandmother, who worked as a hairdresser. One time when Sky was around 7, she sang for one of her grandmother’s clients. Impressed, the man suggested she join a gospel choir. The man was Michael Jackson. So she did. Jackson also gave a 9-year-old Sky some grown-up advice that’s shaped her approach to art and music ever since: “He was like, ‘Don’t focus on things that are just around you—you need to look back to the history of music.’ And that’s what I did.”

Yes, Sky went to the Neverland Ranch—“a lot.” She also went to Jackson’s other houses. No, she didn’t witness anything untoward. “It wasn’t just because I was a girl,” she tells me, a few days before the controversial HBO documentary Leaving Neverland aired. “I was around a lot of kids.”

Yes, she’s grown hesitant to talk about her grandmother’s larger-than-life client—for all the reasons you’d expect, along with a few you might not. Like, that it’s difficult for people to wrap their minds around the fact that the King of Pop could be a formative elder acquaintance in the casually anodyne way of, say, a dancing-school teacher or a little-league coach—someone whose small encouragements could be so big. “I was really quiet, but when someone sees something in you...” she says of Jackson, before abandoning the thought. “I had a connection to him, but I’m not, like, his family.”

Sky has also routinely been asked to account for the bad behavior of men in her orbit. A dominant narrative surrounding Night Time, My Time’s 2013 release was her relationship with indie rock band DIIV’s frontman, Zachary Cole Smith—an ex-boyfriend with whom she was arrested that September. He was the driver of the vehicle in which heroin, ecstasy, and a stolen license plate were found (and someone who’s since publicly acknowledged his struggles with addiction). Throughout that album cycle, the arrest became a more delicious red herring than anything Sky had actually done.

“The thing that’s still so fucked up about that: I didn’t have a drug problem, I dated someone who had a drug problem, I was in a car with someone who had a drug problem,” she says. “No one wants to talk about how my charge got dropped.” And the whole Kurt and Courtney star-crossed mythos that dramatized the headlines around the arrest? Spare her. “I was really young; I wasn’t even 21 yet for most of it. That wasn’t my great love story of my life,” she says, adding, “The people that have treated me so much better—they’re the ones who deserve the attention, not that guy.” (Presumably, one of those people is her current partner, Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, frontman of the Danish punk band Iceage.)

Those who have followed Sky’s personal life could easily read “Downhill Lullaby” as an extended metaphor about a tumultuous relationship: “I can see that you want me/Going downhill too/Going downhill into a lullaby.” But she’s adamant about distancing her songwriting from the egos of her ex-boyfriends. “That’s the one rule I made,” she says. “The one thing that I’ve always had is my music. If someone treated me badly, they don’t get to have that. I don’t want to drag the weight of what they did around forever.”

For Sky Ferreira, time is not a flat circle, but rather a sticky mass of saltwater taffy. She tends to run late, but once she’s present and engaged, she can summon an Iron Man endurance. At the Russian Tea Room, two hours of conversation easily floats into six-and-a-half, and eventually we’re the last diners to leave. Somewhere in this elasticity, she talks about her refusal to give up on the work. “I’ve literally been using my life savings to do this record.” She is not motivated by money—to her, time isn’t money, but money is a thing to buy more time.

This springy relationship with time can make Sky seem almost anachronistic. In conversation, her offhanded pop-cultural mentions span director Todd Solondz’s 1995 cult indie Welcome to the Dollhouse, Courtney Love, the 1980 Loretta Lynn biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter, the 2018 iteration of A Star Is Born, and the cheerful ’60s sitcom “The Andy Griffith Show” (which she concedes, “No one my age knows”). Sky’s reference points, like Michael Jackson once advised, exist within a totality, not a blip.

One of her artistic lodestars glows brighter than the others: When Sky was 13, she discovered David Lynch. “He’s the first person who ever saw the world the way I saw it,” she says. “It was the first time anything made sense.” You can see Lynchian dream logic throughout her work. In fact, the staggering, airy title dirge from Night Time, My Time came to her in a dream. “I wrote it in the middle of the night, half-asleep,” she remembers about the album closer, which was built around a line spoken by the doomed girl at the center of the “Twin Peaks” saga. “Then I woke up the next day and I finished it in an hour. I still have the notes; the handwriting’s all fucked up. ” When she finished the song, she knew the album was finally done.

So Sky’s cameo in “Twin Peaks: The Return” had the meta-ness of astral projection. She played Ella, an enigmatic bar patron who talked about a penguin and flaunted a “wicked” armpit rash. “She played that scene so perfectly,” Lynch tells me. “She inhabited that character and made it real from a deep place. When she scratched that rash, you could really feel the itching!”

“Downhill Lullaby” summons the creeping orchestral gloom of “Night Time, My Time.” A sweeping arrangement in five parts, Masochism’s first single begins with a sashay of strings and an interpolation of the unmistakable squee of the Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” followed by a murmuring, angered bass. Sky exhales a numb indictment—“You leave me open/When you hit me”—and amid the layers of kettle-drum thunder and keening violins, there’s seduction and revenge, confusion and queasiness, silkiness and elegance. It sounds like the last thing Daniel Day Lewis’ Reynolds Woodcock hears before the poison takes hold in Phantom Thread.

This habit of visualizing music—Sky does it too. Except for her, it’s the first step of many in the song creation process: “I see it like it’s projected in a movie theater.” “Downhill Lullaby,” in particular, began with a vision of water in darkness. “Lakes kind of terrify me,” she explains, recalling a childhood memory of feeling lost in a Maryland forest that packs a similar unease. “In a lake, by yourself, you look at the bottom and it’s murky and still and you can’t really see anything or feel anything—and if you do, it’s fucking terrifying. It always feels like something will grab you and pull you under.” The eeriness became the foundation for the song.

She likens the ordeal of making “Downhill Lullaby” to Mickey Mouse’s Fantasia turn as the sorcerer’s apprentice. “You know how all the brooms are making a gigantic mess and the water starts rising and rising and rising and rising?” she says. “It was sort of like that: Magical, but at the same time, ‘What is going on?’ And then cleaning it all up.”

Her technique is more like a collagist—one who both scavenges her raw materials and oversees the fabrication—than a traditional songwriter. Conceptually, she works backwards, starting a song with an imagined outline of the final arrangement, isolating each sound element, and then embarking on the oft-laborious task of identifying studio musicians with the time and patience and willingness to conjure each sound individually, so that once she’s gathered all the pieces, she can begin the meticulous process of putting them all back together.

This unorthodox approach to songwriting has led to recurring logistical difficulties for Masochism. Namely, figuring out how to articulate what she hears so that someone who’s not in her brain can actualize it. “Nobody really understood what I was trying to say or wanted to do on paper,” she says. “It was a really long process.”

Sky never learned how to read music and she’s too self-conscious to use instruments that aren’t her voice in front of others. So if there’s an obvious reference point—like a certain note in a ’90s-radio staple she wants imitated—she’ll play that for her collaborator. But when there’s not, she’s often like a conductor asking to summon a mood.

In the case of Danish violinist Nils Gröndahl, who recorded all the strings on “Downhill Lullaby,” she recalls telling him: “‘Play it as if you’re one of the birds in Snow White, singing underwater, while slowly being suffocated by plastic.’” And you know what? In the end result, it’s easy to hear all that.

Additionally, Sky is even more particular about her final mixes. She will only be satisfied after she’s evaluated her song in seven different listening contexts: a car stereo; a smartphone with “regular” headphones; a smartphone with Apple earbuds; a smartphone’s built-in speaker; on a laptop; through “really bad, bad computer speakers—like the ones that came with Dells back in the early 2000s”; and the lush splendor of the studio, which is a personal luxury because, as she notes, “most people aren’t gonna listen that way.”

And she goes through this convoluted course of action for every song. It’s no wonder Masochism has taken so long. Says Sky, “I’ve accepted this is how I work and stopped feeling bad about it.”

Two Fridays after her insomniac New York trip, Sky is on the line, self-confidence restored, completing a high percentage of her sentences. Earlier in the week, she received the “Downhill Lullaby” master, immediately dropped her phone and shattered its screen, so now she’s on speaker. “I was like, I hope this isn’t a metaphor?” At least she’s laughing.

As for Masochism. She tells me she produced most of it herself, wrote with Los Angeles-based dream-pop artist Tamaryn, and worked with Ariel Pink collaborator Jorge Elbrecht. The proper album is coming, Sky swears, almost positively in 2019. Granted, she said the same thing last year—and the year before that and the year before that and the year before that—but this time, she has finally loosened her grip on some songs.

“Downhill Lullaby” may sound like dying Disney birds and “Don’t Forget” may be electro-pop arson, but Sky promises “more poppy” songs on Masochism too, as well as more “abstract,” orchestral stuff. “It’s very big, but also very violent,” she says, half-chuckling. “But not all the songs are super-dark.” Beyond that—the number of songs, tracklist, other credited collaborators—who can say? Sky can’t yet. She has some songs in mind she’d still like to write.

#sky ferreira #2019

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3one3 · 7 years

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The Sequel - 845

Quiet Storm

André Schürrle, Juan Mata, other Chelsea/BVB players, and random awesome OC’s (okay they’re less random now but they’re still pretty awesome)

original epic tale

all chapters of The Sequel

Scuba diving had to wait until Wednesday. Captain Theo wanted to take Lilly XO and her family down to Hyères, or more specifically, to the area around the Île du Levant and the Parc national de Port-Cros. He said there were good spots for rookie diving there, there was a nature reserve to explore, and a nudist village. André thought that all sounded wonderful, and consented to spending much of Tuesday sailing instead of anchored somewhere. Christina napped a lot. She needed it, and it was surprisingly easy to sleep even while the 56m boat was underway and moving at speed. Everyone spent a lot of time on the fly bridge too, and took turns learning what to do at the helm. Lukas liked it up there in the wind. He liked playing in the lounge and watching musical Disney movies too. Only the dogs were grateful when Captain Theo decided to call it a day outside the entrance to the harbor in Hyères and suggested the family go ashore to check out the sprawling town and have some dinner. He would take them around the islands in the morning.

Christina found two things of interest right away when she fired up Google Maps. The first was a racetrack directly behind the marina and associated hotel, of the equine variety. It was a simple dirt track with some dirt paddocks in the infield and small bleachers. The website for the facility was useless, so she couldn’t find out if anything fun was happening there. The second point of interest was another racetrack, of the go-kart variety. And it was on the way to the denser part of Hyères where they could find lots of restaurants to choose from. Naturally they had to go do some racing. The staff wouldn’t let André take Lukas for a ride around the circuit, but it was still fun to race against the other random people there for some early evening competition. Christina got Espen to give it a go too. The nanny was pretty handy behind the wheel, much to her employer’s surprise. None of them won any of the arrive-and-drive races. Young kids seemed to have an inherent advantage in that they weighed much less than the adults.

After motorsport came dinner. Christina found a restaurant with an expansive garden, uncomplicated food, and a live band that covered everything from Bob Marley to Harry Belafonte without skipping Springsteen in between. She got drunk after the first course and made her own dance floor with her son when dancing on her banquette- cushions on top of wood pallets- wasn’t satisfying enough. With a Corona in one hand and a delighted child figuring out how to dance in the other, there was no question for André that his wife was still in a good place, even without Juan, even without Dirk, and even with him around her for a day and a half. He watched her try to show Lukas how to do a spin while she held his hand, and pick him up to dance with him on her hip, and let go of him and invite him to dance across the floor between them and into her arms, completely unbothered by the other people watching her or by the fact that they were the only ones dancing. The lead singer of the band complimented them and urged them on. André didn’t know what the guy said because it was in French, but it made most of the other dinner guests laugh. Only when the rider realized he was eating the fried chicken tenders that came on her Caesar salad did she return to the table.

“Do you need another beer, pretty girl?” he laughed when she gulped the last of her bottle and set it down so she could help Lukas with his tiny steak.

“Sí, por favor. Or...oui s’il vous plaît.”

“One more for her,” he told the waitress who returned to the table when Christina did, presumably to see if she needed anything as everyone else was already all squared away. What she needed most was an explanation for her salad.

I thought it was weird that it comes with chicken fingers, she thought once she was done cutting the baby’s food into baby bites so he could feed himself. She stared at the large bowl André slid back in front of her. It’s even weirder that it has big chunks of hardboiled egg, whole cherry tomatoes, endive, red onions, and a Parmesan chip made from like 6 bucks worth of cheese sticking out of it. Also, no sign of Caesar salad dressing. How does a Caesar salad not have Caesar dressing? Forlorn inside, the rider glanced around the rugged wooden table in hopes that her dressing was just in a side dish, misplaced. Ordering a Caesar salad was an internationally safe option for her. She had it everywhere. Sometimes it came with a creamy dressing, and sometimes an oil-based one. Either was fine. It could be tangy, or cheesy, or even mustardy. It could even have recognizable anchovies in it and she’d still eat it. There could be small variations on the theme and it would be perfectly acceptable. The mixed greens and inexplicable add-ons before her were puzzling, and disappointing. What’s he eating? Is it any better, Christina wondered curiously as she shifted her searching glance toward the plate across the way. Eww! His squid actually looks like squid! They’re like whole little squids! And what’s that goopy yellow stuff in the dish? Ugh. No. Nothing good to steal there.

“What are you looking for?” André asked.

“Salad dressing. There’s lots of shaved cheese on my salad, and things that don’t belong on it, but no dressing.”

“Eat the chicken in the meantime and when she comes back you can ask her for some.” He wasn’t as concerned about her salad. His plate of “whole little squids” was very appetizing, and Espen was already enjoying her veal meatballs. Lukas was shoving a French fry in his mouth. “The chicken is good. I don’t know what it’s doing on a salad, but, eh.”

“How many Instagram stories did you post of me dancing?” his mom inquired knowingly while transferring the breaded chicken to her bread plate so that she could cut it.

“None. I don’t need to share my holidays with three million people.”

“Mkay.”

“And you’ve been dancing all day. Whenever you weren’t sleeping. Dancing in the gym. Dancing in the shower. Dancing in the mirror after the shower. Dancing while steering the boat. Dance-“

“Okay we get the picture,” Espen assured the footballer. “Chris likes to dance when she’s in a good mood, and Luke likes to dance in every mood, especially if there’s any Shakira music.”

“Oh!” Christina’s outburst made everyone stop eating and look up, and even the waitress delivering her Corona abruptly froze and looked confused. She then asked her for the salad dressing- tentatively, of course, because she was afraid she was asking for something she wasn’t meant to have, as if she’d misunderstood the menu in the first place or something- and tried to make it sound like that wasn’t why she shouted “oh”, because it wasn’t. It was about dancing. “Do you think there are nightclubs around here with Latin music? That are open on Tuesday nights?” André and Espen both looked at her disapprovingly. “I wanna go out dancing for real.”

“I know of a club in Antibes with a Havana theme?” Espen offered, turning the rider’s face white.

“Yeah,” she frowned. “I know that one.”

“Is it not good? We’re going back that way in a few days, no?”

“It’s owned by one of Juan’s dad’s friends,” Christina supplied flatly. “They just played regular top 40 club music when I was there,” she added, trying to make it sound like her reaction was to the type of dance club it was rather than the memory of the role her visit there played in the night that changed her life during the Euros.

“What do you want Latin music for anyway?” André asked while she took the first and best sip of the cold beer.

“Isa got me hooked on a couple of artists. It’s fun to dance to. Not that you’d come dance with me anyway.” A tongue poked out between baby pink lips to taunt him for his lack of interest. It’s really a shame. We could be so sexy together if he had any rhythm. Damn it, where’s Reus? I need Reus to have any real fun on a dance floor. He’s in a knee brace anyway. Le sigh. Christina had another sip of beer and a bite of the chicken, and the dance club conversation was over. It was of no interest to André, and André was in charge of conversation, agenda, and decision making. He had been all day, or since he arrived in Cannes, really. His wife didn’t exactly ask his permission to do things like get up and dance with Lukas, or ask him what she should do on the boat on the way to Hyères, but she recognized when the decision was made to go ashore for the evening that she was deferring to his judgement and desire at every turn. The realization made her wonder if she was doing that at home too, on a “local” level- meaning she let him decide the day to day things while she was making her own big choices, like when to go away to compete and when to schedule time at home. She wasn’t really sure if she had been doing that or not, and thought it possible that she was deferring to him on those things to compensate for the big decisions, like she thought he deserved to choose what they did together when she was home because her big choices were so hard on him, and perhaps it wasn’t even a conscious thing on her part. The logical subsequent question was whether that potential deference was a source of some of their problems.

It was a lot bigger than fairness. Christina came up with a lot more when she dug into the subject while she and Lukas watched André and Espen go round and round the go-kart track. Dortmund was André’s. He lived there first, and he made a life there without her. He had friends there that were just his. He knew the city better. He knew Germany better. She felt there was something to that- that she was a second class citizen in the family because she was away so much, because she wasn’t from there, because she had to ask him where to go for things and explanations for basic cultural questions, and because he had a life outside of his marriage there. And she thought maybe he’d kind of gotten used to that. Back in the fall when they were waiting for the house to be finished, Christina thought her player changed a lot because he wasn’t living with a woman anymore, and he had more independence. He got reacquainted with sharing his home with her again, and with being considerate of another person in his day to day happenings, but because of that deference and authority she was inadvertently yielding to him, the balance in their relationship was still a bit askew. His being wholly dismissive of the dance club notion reminded her of that, because she thought there was a time when he would have at least pretended to be interested just because she was. The rider didn’t know the significance of any of that, but thought it useful to have considered it and added it to the worksheet, so to speak. There was plenty of time to ponder it at the table because despite André’s enjoying and appreciating her bubbly happiness and radiance, he largely ignored her at the dinner table in favor of interacting with the baby and talking to Espen about her vacation. Christina just ate quietly like someone who didn’t expect to be engaged in the conversation, including when it turned to what to do after dinner.

“It’s a 30-minute walk back, so we’ll just do that, yeah?” the BVB man suggested. “Mausi can ride in the stroller when he gets tired.”

“Is it 30 minutes at my walking speed or yours?” his girl asked dubiously. “Is it really safe to walk on the main road at night? Why don’t we just get a taxi?” My flip-flops aren’t meant for long distance walking, and it’s almost dark out, and I kind of wanted to put the baby and the nanny in a car back to the boat and then go find a cute lounge or patio or something to have a couple glasses of wine with boyfriend, since we’re not going dancing. I guess there’s wine on the boat, she concluded.

“If you want,” André shrugged. He was signing the credit card receipt for the check, and it caught him off guard when he looked up and caught her frown. “Did you want to do something else?”

“No. Not really.”

“No, or not really?” He knowingly sought clarification because there was a distinction in her two-answer answer. “No” meant he was in the clear. “Not really” meant there was something she wanted to do and just didn’t want to make a big deal out of it but could do so later, to his detriment.

“No.”

“Okay.”

That was that. They did all go back to the boat, but they did also take a cab, so Christina couldn’t really say he just got his way by default. Part of her wanted to yell and shout at the rest of her for looking for something to get upset over. A different part of her wanted to consider all the facts and evidence, and quit pretending about certain elements of her relationship struggles. It was well past Lukas’ bedtime by the time the launch approached the fold-out deck at the rear of Lilly XO, so bedtime procedures were commenced immediately. Espen claimed the TV in the living room and commenced the binge watching of Amazon shows saved up for months with her vacation and her working boat holiday in mind. André changed his clothes and then pondered which part of the boat he and his girl should claim. They could watch TV outside, or in bed. They could use the hot tub up on the top deck, or they could sit on the beanbag up there and do nothing. They could sit anywhere and have a drink. There were board games, and cards. There was music. It seemed to him like someone had finally pulled Christina’s cord from the socket and she was out of energy, so he didn’t imagine she’d be doing any more dancing. Indeed, she looked sleepy and a little “leftover drunk” when she emerged from her own wardrobe change. She padded right by him on the couch in the lounge, mumbling something about it being too stuffy in there, and continued outside into the cooler, fresher night air. He caught up to her while she stood between the couch and the dining table, trying to decide where to put herself.

“You okay, Prinzessin?” André asked, not really that concerned, when he hugged her from behind. She had an adidas hoody on with a big front pocket, so he put his arms through there and squeezed her tight for a second. Georgina was on his heels.

“Can I get anything for you?” she asked politely.

“Want anything?” the footballer parroted.

“Will you have a glass of wine with me?”

“Sure, baby.” He kissed her temple and then used his hold around her middle to turn her 45 degrees to face the chief stewardess. “She needs wine,” he smiled at said stewardess. “What kind?”

“Something chilled and fresh but not too fruity.”

“Something chilled and fresh but too fruity.”

“Got it,” Georgina smiled. She turned on her heel and disappeared into the lounge.

“Why are you so small?” André asked rhetorically after putting his chin on his girl’s head and leaning on her heavily. He had to bend down quite a bit to be able to do that.

“Why are you so tall?

“I’m not. I’m normal. You’re small.”

“K.”

“What’s up with you?” He leaned clear over her head and looked down at her upside down. I can’t help but think she’s been kind of quiet since dinner. She can’t be tired. She slept more today than probably all of last week, I’m guessing. “Tired?” Christina just shrugged and teetered under his weight as she tried to walk away. “Where you going?”

“I dunno. I was gonna sit on a lounge chair but I just remembered they’ve been put away.”

“Want to go upstairs?”

“K.”

The player nodded to his right, beckoning her to head back from whence they came so they could take the stairs up from the junction between the outdoor lounge and the inside one. Her walk in that direction was considered- she almost walked on her toes- instead of relaxed. Her short answers and her whole demeanor said there was something amiss with her, or at the very least, less than ideal. He poked her butt as she climbed the tiny stairs in front of him, and got no reaction. Instead of asking for a third time if she was okay, he tackled her at the top of the stairs and carried her, running, around the hot tub and one of the masts, and threw her onto the deep and cushy beanbag before also throwing himself on it.

“Ugh, Jesus, babe. My tummyyyy,” Christina groaned on her back. “That was worse than being sideways in rough water. I just aaaaate.”

“Are you gonna barf?” André asked, smiling. He rolled over to rub her stomach via that sweatshirt pocket. He liked the word “barf”. It wasn’t part of his vocabulary before he met his wife.

“Yes,” she told him with mock contriteness. “All over you. Repeatedly.”

“Love you too, baby.”

“Stop smirking at me,” she scowled while affecting an allover, full-body stretch with her arms above her head. He felt her torso shift as her top half went one way and her bottom half went the other. Her body vibrated a little as it reached the limits of its ability to stretch. In the back of his mind, he thought about how nice it was to feel her body move about under his palm. His girl as a living, breathing creature was something to marvel at sometimes. Sometimes it made him feel very connected to her to experience the sensation of feeling her physical form do things, particularly involuntary ones. Sometimes it made him feel very powerful, because he knew and could see that he had the ability to influence her involuntary movements. Sometimes it just made him feel the opposite of loneliness, and that was the hardest one to really understand.

“You’re an adorable little person,” he sighed, dropping the smirk. “I wish I liked it less when you get quiet and timid, but it’s cute. It’s not always because you’re upset or sad, so I guess it’s okay, eh?”

“Okay?” Christina squinted at him, confused. She had no idea what he meant.

“I think sometimes you get like this- you stop talking unless someone talks to you first, and you tiptoe around, and you make sort of sad faces- when you’re very busy thinking about something in your head.”

“As opposed to thinking about it in my knee?”

“Pfft! You know what I mean. It’s cute though. Except when it’s because you’re upset, or scared about something. What’s on your mind tonight, Prinzessin?” André questioned softly. He leaned on his elbow but stayed close.

“Nothing.” The bronzed little person beside him rolled onto her elbow too, and mingled her short and smooth legs with long and hairy ones. The fuzzy coating made them soft in a different way than hers were. His were like a cozy blanket and hers were like silk.

“Are you sure?” She’s lying, he thought.

“Mhm. Ooo, wine.” Her face brightened when she saw Georgina’s head pop up from the stairwell with two glasses of Côtes de Provence rosé. Whatever is on her mind must not be that serious if some pink wine erases it, the rising sophomore Bee decided. He sampled his pink wine and waited to see what Christina would do or say next.

She curled up perpendicular to him and leaned on his hip, making herself comfortable at his expense. Her arm dug into his side. That was evidence of her state too. It seemed unlikely she’d want to be close if whatever was on her mind, and sapping away resources, and forcing her to outwardly power down to compensate, was in any way to do with him. She held her glass in her palm and her thumb and used the rest of her fingers to gently feather around his stomach, just inside the bottom of his t-shirt and just above his sweatpant-like shorts. She liked that spot. Serious muscle felt firm against pressure, but his skin was smooth and soft and even kind of loose. Almost nothing tickled him, so she could feel and poke around there however she wanted without bothering him.

“Did you ask them to get rosé?” the player asked curiously. “You don’t normally drink it.”

“No, but I didn’t give them a bottle list or anything. It’s good,” Christina shrugged.

“Are you going to tell me what’s up with you tonight? Since dinner? Or do I have to guess?” André smiled. He was sure there was something using up all of her processing power. She didn’t seem particularly down or upset- just quiet and aloof, off in Christinaland.

“Nothing is up with me.”

“Just so you know, I don’t mind. As I said, I think this is cute, this thing you do. I don’t only enjoy being with you when you’re either dancing, talking my ear off, or sleeping. I enjoy this too. You convince yourself sometimes that I only like spending time with you when you’re smiling.”

“I know.”

“And you don’t have to talk to me, but I can just listen if you want to.”

“I know.”

“Is there anything you want me to listen to?”

“Soon.”

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