I began to walk to and from the studio instead of driving, taking the weedy path along the lake before and after those long hours with a squeegee in one hand and a knife in the other. One night, when the air was cool and light, the double doors to the Theatre—Jes’s studio—were thrown wide open. The unmistakable strains of Stevie, singing “Wild Heart” as she got her makeup done, were flowing out of the doors and into the grass.

I could not resist.

The music folded over itself, again and again. I tiptoed inside the foyer, where a kidney-shaped ticket counter sat altarlike atop a black-and-white-checkered floor. Behind it was a framed poster with two women’s faces arranged like puzzle pieces—Persona, the Bergman film—and a wall painted silver. The doors were wedged open. The music blasted through them so loudly that I called it an invitation.

The aisles sloped downward, through rows of empty seats, upholstered in emerald corduroy and arranged in three wedges, semicircled around the stage. The walls and ceiling, with their peeling orangewood veneer, held parallelograms of acoustic paneling. In lieu of curtains, stacks of speakers framed the sides of the stage.

Jes sat alone on the stage at a folding gray plastic table covered in musical equipment and connected to earth by the umbilical cords of bright orange extension cables. Swaddled in yards of gauzy black linen, her dyed fingers pummeled the keys of a laptop, and her toes, encased in rubbery basketball sneakers, tapped away on the ground. She did not look up; she looked only at the screens in front of her.

Carey, with downy blond hair, caramel tan, feathers in her hair, sitting on the edge of a radiator in a window—exactly like Stevie—was projected on three screens around Jes, the refrain folding over and over again.

I slipped into the nearest seat and hid in the shadows. Jes began to play the electric piano at her side, manipulating the song, chopping it into pieces. On the screen behind her, Carey’s faces merged—repeated—bubbled up, intercut by short clips of other women. I caught Nadia Comaneci winning her perfect 10 and Vanessa Williams being crowned Miss America, then Carey dressed like a gymnast, dressed like a beauty queen, dressed like a businesswoman.

Carey’s faces went staccato, over and over again, shining back and forth. Stevie sang, and the words came out of Carey’s mouth. To my surprise, Jes joined her, voice soaring, the gold at the bottom of her mouth shining, black dust rimming the amber pools of her eyes.

On the screen, she cut to Carey’s mouth in close-up, like Beckett’s Not I. Then little girls dressed up for beauty pageants appeared. A girl, four or five, with a mouthful of jumbled white teeth and a tacky bedazzled leotard in a dirt yard—little Carey.