Zenith of Desire: The Hollywood Incubus

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He was also twelve. She was ten.

These were two facts that coexisted beautifully with everything else in her mind, and absolutely did not, in Robyn’s fierce assessment, require any adult resolution. In her mind, two years was nothing. It was practically the same age. It meant they could understand each other. It was a pure, intoxicating childhood crush that felt heavier and vastly more real than anything she had ever experienced.

She listened to his acceptance speech with the intense, breathless attention she brought to everything he ever said in public. It was the quality of a person who inherently understands that certain rare things being spoken into the universe deserve to be heard completely, without interruption.

When he looked into the camera and said, *The seven million aren’t just a number—they’re seven million decisions to remain open,* Robyn sat slowly back down onto the carpet. She crossed her legs and looked at the screen for a long moment.

She was one of the seven million.

She had been one of them since that humid day in August when her cousin first pressed play on the boombox. When the very first, haunting vocal harmony of ’Song of Enchantment’ had arrived and done what it did to her chest, altering her breathing, and creating the specific quality of silence that she desperately needed to sit in for several minutes after the tape clicked to a stop.

She had remained open to the magic.

And he had noticed.

Or, her rational mind corrected, not *her* specifically, because he was a superstar in New York and didn’t know a girl in Barbados existed. But he had noticed the *category* of person she was. The brave category of person who had been willing to let the music reach into their soul. He had looked at the massive, intimidating Grammy audience and said *thank you* to the seven million for being exactly that kind of person.

And Robyn Rihanna Fenty, ten years old, sitting on the faded floor of her living room in Bridgetown at an hour that was significantly, illegally past her bedtime, felt the overwhelming warmth of being deeply acknowledged by someone who did not even know they were acknowledging her. It felt like a secret message, broadcast across the ocean, meant only for her.

When he picked up the gold Grammy and softly said, *The music is real—it’s nice when the institutions confirm that,* she clapped. She sat by herself in her living room and clapped her hands together with the unapologetic enthusiasm of a person for whom this victory was deeply personal.

Her mother appeared in the doorway, drying her hands on a towel.

”He’s very talented, that boy,” Monica said softly, leaning against the doorframe. She used the measured tone of an adult making an honest, objective artistic assessment, while simultaneously managing the acute awareness that her daughter’s emotional relationship with this assessment was operating at a significantly more intense, fanatical frequency.

”He’s the absolute best in the world, Mama,” Robyn declared, turning around with the unshakeable certainty of ten.

Her mother looked at the television screen, where Marvin was gracefully walking back down the glowing Grammy stairs, looking like a miniature James Bond in his charcoal tuxedo.

”He’s twelve, Robyn,” her mother reminded her gently, a small smile playing on her lips.

”Almost thirteen,” Robyn shot back immediately, entirely defensive, using the exact tone of a girl who had this biographical information readily available and memorized. ”And I’m almost eleven! We’re practically in the same grade.”

Her mother looked at her blushing daughter for a long moment amused by the intense, childhood infatuation.

”Bed,” Monica ordered, pointing down the hallway. ”After the next commercial break.”

”After all of his awards!” Robyn negotiated planting her hands on her hips. ”He still has Record of the Year!”

Her mother’s raised eyebrow strongly suggested that this late-night negotiation was not yet resolved in Robyn’s favor.

---

Wyomissing, Pennsylvania

Eight-year-old Taylor Alison Swift was absolutely not watching the 40th Annual Grammy Awards from the floor.

She was watching them from the plush, floral-patterned couch in the Swift family living room in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. She was tightly wrapped in a thick, knitted blanket with her knees pulled up to her chest, her small chin resting on her kneecaps.

It was the physical configuration of someone who is fully invested in what they are watching, and has subconsciously organized their entire body to physically reflect that intense concentration.

The Grammys were important. Taylor had inherently understood for quite some time that the Grammys were the most important thing in the world.

She had been passionately singing since she was very small, constantly putting on shows for her parents. She had been acting in local community theater productions since she turned eight. She had been told by adults—often enough that she had deeply internalized the truth of it—that she was genuinely talented. She understood that the entertainment industry was a real, physical place that real, talented people went to.

And she believed that, with enough grueling work, extreme luck, and the combination of gifts that she appeared to possess, it might one day be a place she went to as well.

Tonight, Marvin Meyers was currently the most compelling evidence on earth that the entertainment industry was a real place that kids could actually win. Because Marvin was only twelve years old, and he was currently standing on the legendary stage of Radio City Music Hall, casually accepting the biggest awards in music in front of the entire watching world.

Taylor had already read his novel, *Ready Player One*. She had needed her father’s help to decipher some of the more technically dense, pop-culture coding passages, but she had loved it. She had found in the pages something profound that she was still working through in her young mind—the terrifying feeling of a digital world that was rapidly coming, described flawlessly by an author who somehow seemed to already be living inside it.

But the book was nothing compared to the music.

She had listened to the *Marvin 1* cassette tape on her Sony Walkman so many thousands of times that she knew the exact moment in each track where the specific emotional quality that she heavily associated with Marvin’s magic arrived. She knew the exact second where something deep in her chest shifted. The moment where the music suddenly went from being just a song she was passively *listening* to, into becoming a physical space she was suddenly *inside* of.

It was something she was experiencing, rather than just intellectually processing.

She was very, very interested in exactly how he managed to do that without using a single lyric.

She was interested in it the exact way she was interested in everything regarding the intricate craft of musical performance. She watched him with the terrifying attention of a prodigy who fundamentally understood that intense, analytical interest was the very beginning of understanding, and that structural understanding was the beginning of doing it herself.

She also thought he was extremely, paralyzingly handsome.

This was an entirely separate, vastly more confusing interest that she was currently experiencing with the slightly disconcerting, overwhelming intensity of an eight-year-old girl who has not yet fully developed the emotional framework for managing her first, massive celebrity crush. Every time the camera zoomed in on his dark, charcoal tuxedo, his perfectly styled hair, and those impossible, deep blue eyes, Taylor felt a sudden, frantic fluttering in her stomach that made her want to hide under her blanket and squeal into a pillow.

When the Best New Artist announcement finally came, and the room in Radio City went warm with applause, and the camera found Marvin walking gracefully to the stage, Taylor sat up straighter on the couch. She dropped the blanket, focusing on the television with the completeness of a person for whom this was the most important moment of the current broadcast year.

Every time his face flashed on the screen, Taylor’s heart did a complicated, happy little flip. She bounced slightly on the couch cushions, totally captivated by his dark, brooding charm that somehow translated perfectly through the cathode-ray tube of the television.

His speech was extraordinary. She listened to it with the attention she only gave to things that she fully intended to carry forward into her own future career. The incredibly brave, shocking acknowledgment of Erykah Badu, which Taylor thought was both brave and undeniably right.

The poetic, beautiful description of the seven million record sales as ’decisions to remain open.’ The chilling way he said *’The music is real’* at the very end, speaking with the quiet certainty of a man who did not need the room to agree with him, because he already knew the truth.

She grabbed the small, spiral-bound notebook and the glittery gel pen she always kept beside the couch for exactly this kind of inspiration.

She quickly, furiously wrote down three specific, beautiful phrases from his speech that she wanted to remember forever.

Then she put the notebook down and watched the rest of his walk off the stage with the pure, uncomplicated joy of a young girl who is watching a boy she intensely admires being universally recognized by the adult world.

”He’s so incredibly smart,” Taylor said aloud, speaking to no one in particular, her eyes glued to the screen.

Her mother, Andrea, passing through the living room with a steaming cup of chamomile tea, paused behind the couch. ”He’s very talented, sweetie,” she agreed softly, watching the recap of his speech.

”He’s *smart*, Mom,” Taylor repeated, turning around with the fierce insistence of someone drawing a critical distinction that matters deeply to them. ”He said that beautiful thing about the seven million people, and it wasn’t... it wasn’t just a fake, nice PR thing to say to a crowd. It was the *true* thing. He actually knew it was the true thing.” She looked up at her mother, her blue eyes blazing with understanding. ”That’s different than just being talented.”

Her mother looked at the television screen for a long moment, watching the twelve-year-old boy navigate the press room with ease.

”Yes,” Andrea murmured, a hint of genuine awe in her voice. ”I suppose it is.”

Taylor turned her attention completely back to the screen.

Hours later, when the massive Record of the Year announcement finally came, and Marvin walked gracefully to the stage again, Taylor grabbed her notebook.

When he stood at the podium and beautifully described ’Song of Enchantment’ as *a song about the experience of encountering something that opens you...* Taylor—eight years old, sitting in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, shivering slightly with inspiration—wrote that exact phrase down in her notebook. She wrote it with the intense, focused intention of a young architect actively preserving something incredibly important for her future blueprints.

She would think deeply about his poetic phrase—*the open of something that finds the part of you that you’ve been protecting and makes it available to the air*—for the next several, formative years of her life.

She would, eventually, write multi-platinum songs about exactly that feeling. And she would never forget the boy who taught her how to name it.

---

Six-year-old Selena Marie Gomez was not, technically speaking, watching the 40th Annual Grammy Awards.

She was currently sitting on the faded carpet in the living room of her family’s modest house in Grand Prairie, Texas, directly in front of the television where the Grammys broadcast was currently playing. However, at exactly six years old, the cognitive distinction between consciously *watching* a complex industry telecast and simply existing happily in the loud, flashing vicinity of something that happened to be *on* was not entirely clear to her yet.

What was absolutely, undeniably clear to her little heart was that she really, really liked the music.

She had been told repeatedly by her young mother, Mandy, that Marvin Meyers was a very talented, very special boy who made very good music. This parental assessment had been confirmed by Selena’s own daily, obsessive experience of the *Marvin 1* cassette tape. Her mother played it constantly in their beat-up car while driving to auditions and acting classes.

Selena had heard those five wordless tracks enough times to memorize the exact, swelling moment in each song where she instinctively wanted to squeeze her eyes tightly shut, lean her head against the car window, and feel the vibrations more completely.

She did not possess the adult vocabulary to articulate what the music did to her nervous system. She was six. She would spend a lifetime developing the emotional language for it later. What she possessed right now was simply the raw, unfiltered biological experience of it. It was a golden quality of warmth and openness that physically arrived in her chest whenever his music was playing.

She strongly associated that feeling with absolute safety, and with something else she couldn’t quite name yet—something vast and beautiful that was significantly larger than just safety.

When Marvin’s face suddenly flashed onto the television screen to accept his first award, Selena dropped her crayons, abandoned her coloring book, and practically ran to stand as close to the glowing glass as she physically could. She looked up at him very, very carefully.

He was—she desperately searched her limited, six-year-old vocabulary—*nice-looking*.

She instantly amended this thought internally, because ”nice-looking” was exactly what her mother casually said about acceptable-looking things at the grocery store, like a clean apple or a folded sweater. This boy was fundamentally different from that.

He was *really, really really* nice-looking. He was nice-looking in the magical way that certain rare things in her small world were vastly more themselves than other things. Like how her favorite, worn-out stuffed animal was somehow vastly more of a stuffed animal than the other stuffed animals on her bed. Like how his songs were vastly more *music* than the noisy songs on the radio.

*****

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