THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019 27
he said. “It’s like an ear, but made of
stone and wood.” He turned toward the
double entrance at one end of the tun-
nel, where a man, wearing an oversized
pair of headphones, was passing by while
singing, tunelessly but boldly. “I think
that was a Meat Loaf song!” Sarsgaard
whispered. He tore into a snatch of the
rotund belter’s old hit “Paradise by the
Dashboard Light”: “Let me sleep on it!
Baby, baby, let me sleep oh-hon it!” H e
broke off. “If you like singing in the
shower, come to Meadowport Arch.”
Sarsgaard has been musically inclined
since childhood. “The piano, the guitar,
the mandolin, some violin,” he said. “I
play many instruments poorly. But my
kids”—he has two daughters, ages thir-
teen and seven, with his wife, the actress
Maggie Gyllenhaal—“think I’m amaz-
ing.” He laughed. “Years ago, I had the
opportunity to play with Ornette Cole-
man. He really believed music and sound
weren’t two different things.” A wom-
an’s footfalls echoed as she walked past:
clip-clop, clip-clop. “Like, for instance,
those sandals slapping the floor. That’s
got a musical rhythm. But, for Coleman,
music didn’t even need to be organized
according to rhythm.” He began laugh-
ing again. “Which is probably why he
let me be on the drums.” He went on,
“We talk about dolphins, and whales,
and birds, and they’ve got their jam, andit’s lovely, but humans are unbelievable
with their music. We don’t just use our
voice, but we amplify our voice through
instruments, through horns, through a
tunnel.” He gestured around him.
A chubby toddler with a tuft of Tweety
Bird hair, accompanied by a caretaker
with a mass of braids coiled on top of
her head, passed by, enacting a kind of
call and response, whose vibrations
bounced off the tunnel’s walls: Cuckoo?
Cuckoo! Cuckoo? Cuckoo! “My older daugh-
ter plays the oboe, and the younger plays
the violin,” Sarsgaard said. “I’ve told them
to bring their instruments down here,
see how they sound, but I think they’d
be too self-conscious. A little self-con-
sciousness isn’t a bad thing.” The sound
of a plane filled the air, then faded. “I
don’t listen too much to music when I’m
acting, because its influence can be re-
ally strong,” he continued. “For instance,
the girlfriend from high school who broke
up with me? Like, the tragic one? She
liked the group Styx, and when she broke
up with me she made me a mixtape that
had the song ‘Come Sail Away’ on it,
twice. So every time I hear that song I’m
immediately, like, ‘She’s breaking up with
me, because she needs to be free!’” H e
hummed a little, then broke into song:
“I’m saaaailing awaaaay ...” It sounded
pretty good.
—Naomi Fry“I’m afraid your son has been confusing ‘your’ and ‘you’re’
when he mercilessly bullies his peers online.”• •
1
THEPICTURES
WHAT’STHEFREQUENCY?
T
he actor Peter Sarsgaard made his
way past Grand Army Plaza and
through the north entrance of Prospect
Park the other day, toward the low-slung
tunnel known as Meadowport Arch.
Once beneath the arch, which was de-
signed by Frederick Law Olmsted and
Calvert Vaux, in 1870, to provide a gate-
way to the park’s gloriously expansive
Long Meadow, Sarsgaard snapped his
fingers once, tentatively, then several
more times, quickly. The snaps produced
a hollow, vibrating echo, and Sarsgaard,
who was wearing a worn blue T-shirt
and brown lace-up boots, looked pleased.
“Who doesn’t love a reverb?” he said. As
he settled down in the cool dimness, on
the wooden bench that lines the tunnel,
a lightly panting jogger trotted by. “She
seems to still be anaerobic rather than
aerobic,” Sarsgaard, who is a runner him-
self, said. He cocked his head as if to
better parse the amplified huff and puff
of the woman’s breath.
Sarsgaard recently starred in the indie
movie “The Sound of Silence,” in which
he plays Peter Lucian, an emotionally
detached sound expert who, in his job
as a so-called house tuner—a profession
that does not exist in real life—attempts
to harmonize the soundscapes of peo-
ple’s living spaces. In the process, he not
only becomes the subject of a fictional
Talk of the Town column but also de-
velops an uncertain relationship with a
woman, played by Rashida Jones, whose
apartment proves resistant to tuning. “I
think music and sound are much more
intuitive than Peter believes they are,”
Sarsgaard said of his character. He
rubbed his palm over the scruff cover-
ing his jawline. “Unlike him, I don’t think
the world needs to be tuned,” he said.
“I like the strange frequencies, the un-
comfortable frequencies.” He’d been
coming to sit under the Meadowport
Arch for years now—to read, to think,
to catch his breath mid-jog, and to lis-
ten to whatever sound snippets come
his way. “Everything is amplified here,”