32 THENEWYORKER,MARCH23, 2020
BEACH GLASS
Who knew this too could become endangered or extinct?
They gave me a little pail so I collected beach glass and shells.
Who knew the sound in a seashell wasn’t your own blood—
No more than the ocean? It was the shell’s chambers breathing,
A voice of air: Not churning breakers, nor a pulse in your ear.
In the sun’s furnace glare, the cloudy smooth gemstones
Couched an interior fire. Like shells, progeny of the beach.
Back then, who knew talcum powder could ignite cancer?
Cobalt from Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia. Emerald from Coke.
Wildroot Cream-Oil, Desert Flower, Serutan—the years
Eroded their pale glitter. I had a friend once who loved
Buying the water that came in plastic bottles: Nature
Mastered by invention. Who knew those very bottles could
Strangle the ocean? Did their chemicals make him sick?
Prone on the sand, I studied an inch from my eye the jagged
Clear granules they told me were seeds of molten glass.
—Robert Pinsky
recording session the band held shortly
after the nomination hearings of the
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh;
like many women, Apple felt scalded
with rage about survivors of sexual vi-
olence being disbelieved. The title track
came to her later; a meditation on feel-
ing ostracized, it jumps between lucid-
ity and fury. Drumsticks clatter sparely
over gentle Mellotron notes as Apple
muses, “I’ve been thinking about when
I was trying to be your friend/I thought
it was, then—/But it wasn’t, it wasn’t
genuine.” Then, as she sings, “Fetch the
bolt cutters, I’ve been in here too long,”
her voice doubles, harmonies turning
into a hubbub, and there’s a sudden
“meow” sound. In the final moments,
dogs bark as Apple mutters, “Whatever
happens, whatever happens.”
Partway through, she sings, “I thought
that being blacklisted would be grist for
the mill.” She improvised the line while
recording; she knew that it was good,
because it was embarrassing. “It sounds
bitter,” she said. The song isn’t entirely
despairing, though. The next line makes
an impassioned allusion to a song by
Kate Bush, one of Apple’s earliest mu-
sical heroines: “I need to run up that
hill/I will, I will, I will. ”
O
ne day during my July visit, Ames,
Apple’s ex-boyfriend, stopped by,
on his way to the beach. “Mercy, you
are so powerful!” he said, as the dog
jumped on him. “I’m waiting for her to
get calmer, so I can give her a nice hug.”
Apple had described Ames to me as her
kindest ex, and there was an easy warmth
between them. They took turns recall-
ing their love affair, which began in 2006,
when Apple attended a performance by
Ames at the Moth, the storytelling event,
in New York.
For years, Ames had written candid,
funny columns in the New York Press
about sex and his psychological fragil-
ities, a history that appealed to Apple.
They were together for four years, then
broke up, in 2010; five years later, they
reunited, but the relationship soon ended
again, partly because of Ames’s con-
cerns about Apple’s drinking. Ames re-
called to Apple that, as the relationship
soured, “you would yell at me and call
me stupid.” He added that he didn’t
have much of a temper, which became
its own kind of problem.
“You would annoy me,” Apple said,
with a smile.
“I was annoying!” he said, laughing.
They were being so loving with each
other—even about the bad times, like
when Ames would find Apple passed
out and worry that she’d stopped breath-
ing—that it seemed almost mysterious
that they had broken up. Then, step by
step, the conversation hit the skids. The
turn came when Ames started offering
Apple advice on knee pain that was
keeping her from walking Mercy—a
result, she believed, of obsessive hiking.
He told her to read “Healing Back Pain,”
by John Sarno. The pain, he said, was
repressed anger.
At first, Apple was open to this idea—
or, at least, she was polite about it. But,
when Ames kept looping back to the
notion, Apple went ominously quiet.
Her eyes turned red, rimmed with tears
that didn’t spill. She curled up, pulling
sofa cushions to her chest, her back
arched, glaring.
It was like watching their relationship
and breakup reënacted in an hour. When
Ames began describing “A Hundred Years
of Solitude” in order to make the point
that Apple had a “Márquezian sense of
time,” she shot back, “Are you saying that
time is like thirty-seven years tied to a
tree with me?” Ames used to call her the
Negative Juicer, Apple said, her voice sar-
donic: “I just extract the negative stuff.”
She spun this into a black aria of self-
loathing, arguing, like a prosecutor, for
the most vicious interpretation of herself:
“I put it in a thing and I bring out all the
bad stuff. And I serve it up to everyone
so that they’ll give me attention. And it
poisons everyone, so they only listen to
it when they’re in fucked-up places—and
it’s a good sign when they stop listening
to me, because that means that they’re
not hurting themselves on purpose.”
Ames pushed back, alarmed. If he’d
ever called her the Negative Juicer, he
said, he didn’t mean it as an attack on
her art—just that she could take a nice
experience and find the bad in it. Her
music had pain but also so much joy and
redemption, he said. But Ames couldn’t
help himself: he kept bringing up Sarno.
Somehow, the conversation had be-
come a debate about the confessional
nature of their work. Was it a good thing
for Apple to keep digging up past suffer-
ing? Was this labor both therapeutic and
generative—a mission that could help
others—or was it making her sick? Ames
said that he didn’t feel comfortable ex-
posing himself that way anymore, espe-
cially in the social-media age. “It’s a
