Doxology. Nell Zink

it was a cash-only store. The crucifix had been blessed by a voodoo priest and was very expensive. Joe couldn’t help her out on the spot, but he told Daniel about her wish.

      “If she needs a shirtless guy with a beard, we can get her a G.I. Joe,” he replied.

      “We’ll make our own cross, and she can put him on it with rubber bands.”

      “If it’s a cross she wants, we can—no. There’s no way I’m making her a toy cross! What’s next? A toy cat-o’-nine-tails, so she can self-flagellate?”

      “Jesus is weird,” Joe remarked.

      “You can say that again!”

      “Why is he on the cross?”

      Daniel raised his eyes to heaven. “Oh, man, Joe. Well, historically, he wasn’t always on the cross. I think for something like twelve centuries, he was the risen Christ, fully dressed. Then there was Gothic art and, like, the black plague or something, so they switched to showing him on the cross. You know he died on the cross, right?”

      “Why?”

      “The weight of his own body, I guess. Makes it hard to breathe when you’re hanging by your arms.”

      “But he’s so skinny!”

      “Not in real life! He was always eating out with rich tax collectors, and he could make food appear by magic and turn water into wine, so he was a total land whale. That’s why he died so fast, like hours before the skinny dudes they crucified at the same time. The Romans didn’t even have to break his legs.”

      “That is so gross,” Joe said.

      “And he’s scared shitless up there, screaming out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ But you know who God was, who could have helped him the whole time? His dad!”

      “My dad would not do that.”

      “My dad would.”

      THE REVERBERATING CHRISTIANITY DEBACLE AGGRAVATED PAM’S SENSE THAT HER daughter was growing up without her. Every moment she spent at the office was a moment when some stranger and/or family member of ill will and worse intentions could plant a fateful wrong idea in Flora’s head.

      Joe tried to console her by recording selected playtime. It didn’t help. The cassettes merely made audible how he kept Flora in stitches. He was giving her a solid grounding in verbal wit, preschool style. Her parents’ role was to drop by nightly and impose dour worries about nutrition and rest.

      After the fourth and final taping session, Pam’s path forward became clear. One dialogue passage was as follows:

      JOE: Never rub your nub where people can see.

      FLORA: But I want to!

      JOE: [singing] Got to rub my nub in the club, rub my nub in the club, got to rub my nub in the club—now dub—see my nub nub nub nub nub nub nub nub in the club club club club club club club, it’s like a sub sub sub sub sub sub sub—

      FLORA: Don’t make fun of me!

      JOE: Then stop rubbing your nub and do the dance! [singing] Rub my nub in the club, chugalug in the pub, rub-a-dub in the tub … [etc.]

      FLORA: [clapping along] Rub my nub I rub my nub I rub my nub I rub my nub I rub my nub [etc.]

      Flora’s improvisation of a contrapuntal rhythmic chant made her seem extraordinarily musically accomplished for her age. At the same time, Pam experienced a heretofore unsuspected and overpowering need to raise her child herself. Flora was getting old for a babysitter. She wasn’t a baby anymore. Her psyche needed to be molded in Pam’s image, or Daniel’s at least. Otherwise, what was the point?

      “I need to cut down on my hours,” Pam said to Yuval the next morning as they stood drinking coffee in the office kitchenette. “My kid doesn’t even know my name. She calls me ‘Mom.’”

      “So you want to spend time with Flora.”

      “Yes. The problem is maternity leave is unpaid, and it’s a little late.”

      He sneered, wrinkling his nose. “Who told you that? Your union rep?”

      “Very funny!”

      “You’re the funny one here, talking about part-time work when I bill for you by the day. Clients are always telling me how many hours you work most days, or should I say minutes?”

      “Express yourself clearly, Yuval.”

      “That maybe it’s almost better if you limit time offsite? Like, dress up like you’re in marketing, run intense interviews about client needs, drip your famous honey sweetness on them, estimate billable days with some generosity to me, and deliver on time? Stay home. Work as you need. Flextime.”

      “I’d do that.”

      “But only two years. Maternity leave. In two years is performance review. I’ll be counting your billable days.”

      She called Daniel at his temp job with the good news. He said, “Your boss has a Messiah complex.”

      DANIEL THOUGHT THE SONG WAS GREAT AND LACKED ONLY ONE LINE TO BE PERFECT: “IF my right hand should offend you, cut it off.”

      With Pam at the controls of a four-track and the vocal stylings of Flora and Daniel, Joe recorded a bass-and-foot-tapping demo of “Rub My Nub.” The interplay between the four/four repetitions of “rub my nub I” and the syncopation of “cut it off, cut it off” was strikingly infectious. When Daktari heard it over the phone the next day, he said, “Ç’est ça, mon ami!”

      Joe’s reasonable response was “Sad monogamy?”

      He was summoned to a studio in Chelsea to rerecord vocals and two bass parts. It took two days. Without consulting him, Daktari then laid the recording over a big-beat synth percussion track. He hired a contrabassist to shadow the bass and singers to imitate Flora, ran the results through a compressor with multiple bowls of reverb (reverb was measured in units of the kind bud), and cranked up the presence until the song could work as a ringtone on a Nokia.

      The album Sad Monogamy (that was the working title; in the end it was released as Coronation) came together quickly, because Joe wrote a song almost every day. Daktari didn’t care too much about the other tracks. He didn’t even ask for changes in “Rub My Nub,” except for the title, which became “Chugalug.”

      THE STILLS AND RUSHES FROM THE FIRST DAY OF FILMING THE “CHUGALUG” VIDEO astounded Daniel. Watching the shoot on monitors was even more disturbing.

      He was a show business novice. His experience of comparing images with reality had been acquired firsthand. For example, he saw himself as an okay-looking guy who was not photogenic. In pictures he looked like a small-eyed, hairy potato. Smiling widened his strong jaw into something photographs invariably depicted as a moon face, right on the edge of pug. By contrast, he thought of Joe as not an okay-looking guy. He wondered how major-label-style publicity was supposed to work with a star like that. He imagined they would pose him far away, with contour makeup under dramatic lighting, or maybe on a beach, facing out to sea. Joe was short, five feet seven and a half at the outside with shoes on. He had a cute enough butt and square little shoulders, and if you issued him a smallish guitar—well, Dylan and Springsteen were little guys, right? Those were Daniel’s not uncharitable thoughts on the subject of Joe’s image. He was trying to be realistic.

      On screen, Joe became a rock god. His Muppet mouth became a twenty-tooth smile. His small head became enormous eyes; his girlish chin, an asset at last. His mousy bowl cut required only one sweep of the oiled brush to darken to a mass of chestnut waves under the lights. His short stature and neck made him fit neatly in the frame. His size made cheap props, such as the foam-and-cardboard wingback chairs the director had bought from IKEA (to be returned for credit the next day), look vast and luxurious. The effect of the camera on his skin was strangest of it all. Joe in real life had a yellowish cast. He was anemic-looking, sallow, not olive; not