Track 10 Delilah
Delilah
Delilah spends the drive from Pittsburgh to Cleveland trying to write a song.
She reclines the passenger seat and puts her feet up on the dash, her journal open on her knees, and taps her pen against the pages as she waits—and waits, and waits, and waits—for the words to kick in.
Usually when she writes, the music flows into her like a river filling a basin. Sometimes it’s gentle, sometimes full of rapids, but the current is always there, something she can count on to keep her moving. Keep her floating.
But now the water is still. She writes a line, strikes it out. Writes another, strikes it out. Flexes her fingers through a chord progression, moving her hand across the imaginary frets of a phantom guitar, then shakes out her hand.
She closes her journal and turns to look at Emmett.
It turns out that yes, they do have a driver’s license, and they handle Roscoe with an ease she doesn’t expect.
They look relaxed, content, with one hand on the wheel and their other arm resting against the partially open window, the wind ruffling their hair.
“Hey,” she says. “Tell me something.”
Emmett glances at her. They’re wearing Delilah’s spare sunglasses, the nonprescription ones. The slim, translucent rainbow frames look out of place against their otherwise plain, conservative style, and it makes her smile. “Like what?”
“Ugh, I don’t know.” She knocks her head against the seat. “Something inspiring?”
Emmett snorts. “No pressure, then.”
“You want to talk about pressure? I’ve got thirteen days to throw together an album that’s supposed to make people think I’ve got all my shit under control, and that means I need to write like ten songs, minimum, before we get to California.
I’m already behind schedule. I should have written at least one yesterday. ”
“You were driving all day yesterday,” Emmett points out.
“And?”
“Do you think that pushing yourself to an unrealistic creativity schedule might in fact be harming your creative process?”
“I was afraid you were going to say that.” Delilah considers them for another moment. This would be much easier if Emmett were not, objectively, such an extremely good-looking person. She taps her fingers against the cover of her journal.
“Come on, we’ve got another hour to Cleveland,” Emmett says, reaching out to pause Iris’s podcast, which has been telling them about queer music history for the past forty-five minutes, making Delilah’s imposter syndrome increasingly worse. “Tell me what you’re working on.”
Delilah leans her head back against the headrest and lets out the squawking groan that Sam always said sounded like a dying chicken. Emmett gives a surprised, unrestrained cackle that might be the most unattractive sound she’s heard from them.
“What was that?” they sputter.
“That’s the I don’t want to talk about my writing sound,” Delilah says. “It’s supposed to be very distracting. Did it work?”
Emmett shakes their head, clearly trying not to grin. “Only very briefly. You ruined it by asking.”
“Rookie mistake,” Delilah laments with a sigh.
She wants a cigarette in the itchy, frustrated way she always wants a cigarette when she feels like she’s not writing well enough.
The pack in her bag tugs at her like a siren song, tempting and sweet, but she’s pretty sure Emmett won’t pull onto the shoulder just so that she can climb onto Roscoe’s roof and smoke one.
Even if she did manage to sweet-talk them into it, Alex would somehow sense it from across the country and come down on her like the wrath of God.
So instead, Delilah sighs again, then tells Emmett about what she’s at least attempting to write—not a furious bitch-fest of a breakup album, as tempting as it is, but something deeper, more hopeful, more inward-facing and contemplative and maybe even sweet. Something like this trip. A reclamation.
“So it has to be good, you know?” she finishes. “It has to be good. It has to be great. Because this might be the only chance I get.”
Emmett is quiet for a few moments. “That’s a lot of pressure to put on yourself.”
Delilah shrugs. “That’s show biz, babe.” Emmett makes a sound that borders on a scoff. “What? You don’t think so?”
“No, I believe you. I just don’t think that’s all there is to it.” They tap their fingers against the steering wheel. “You care about this, and you want to do it well, I get that. That’s normal. No one wants to do something badly. But you haven’t sounded like this before.”
“You’ve known me twenty-four hours,” Delilah points out. “I could be like this all the time.”
“True,” Emmett allows. “But are you?”
Delilah dances her pen across her knuckles, a trick she picked up from Iris. “Maybe. I don’t know. Sometimes.” She closes her eyes. “I feel like I have to earn it.”
“Earn what?”
“I don’t know…the studio time? The contract?
Alex, because otherwise she basically doesn’t get paid?
” The sun through the windshield is warm against her eyelids, and she lets herself believe that’s why she doesn’t open her eyes when they threaten to sting.
“All of it. Because otherwise it’s just…
it’s just me, you know? And that’s not enough. ”
Emmett is silent for a long moment. They sound terribly, almost unfairly sad when they finally say, “Who told you that?”
No one, Delilah thinks, and maybe that’s the worst part. She’s the only one who’s ever said it, and only ever to herself, and she doesn’t even know why. “Does it matter?”
“I don’t know,” Emmett says quietly. “Doesn’t it?”
Delilah smiles into the sun, and doesn’t look anywhere other than at the darkness behind her eyes. “If I figure it out,” she says, “I’ll let you know.”
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is a massive pyramid of steel rebar and glass, rising out of the Cleveland skyline like one of the wonders of the world.
Delilah was seven the last time she was here, when she and her mother made a stop on one of their summer trips.
She has hazy memories of being less interested in the exhibits than she was in the instruments, of her mom telling her to Look, don’t touch, of begging for overpriced merchandise to bring back to show her friends.
As she and Emmett make their way through the exhibit halls, she feels a mix of nostalgia and an odd lack of anxiety.
Maybe it’s Emmett, with all their open curiosity and obvious interest. Playing tour guide gives her something to do other than fixate on everything the artists memorialized here have achieved that she hasn’t, and she talks mostly without listening to herself, following the floor plan and exhibit map she memorized before the wedding-that-wasn’t.
“When Sam and I were going to come, my plan was to basically do a scavenger hunt,” she tells them as they ride the escalator up to the fifth floor.
Emmett, peering over the railing at the crowd milling around below them, glances back at her. “What were you going to look for?”
“Seriously? It’s like you’ve barely been paying attention to me at all.
” Delilah waggles her phone at them. “We’re on the hunt for all the secret gays.
Or not so secret, depending.” Emmett cocks their head, and she takes the hint to continue.
“There are a ton of queer artists and artifacts and stuff, but they’re not usually front-and-center about it, y’know?
A lot of the artists were closeted, or at least the popular narratives about them are pretty straight. Not everyone can be Bowie.”
“Who’s Bowie?”
Delilah, nearly stumbling off the elevator as they hit the top, rounds on them in horror. “Emmett.”
They stare at her in wide-eyed innocence for a moment, and then grin. “I’m not that sheltered.”
She smacks their arm. “Don’t do that to me. I almost had a heart attack.”
“Sorry,” they say, clearly not sorry at all. “What was on your list? Let’s see what we can find.”
They make it into their own kind of game, one that starts as a genuine search for photos and videos and objects—David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust suit, Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” music video ensemble, Billie Joe Armstrong’s Les Paul Junior, Janelle Monáe’s white tuxedo jacket, Joan Jett’s Gibson, Janis Joplin’s Porsche—and becomes a wandering exercise in people-watching, looking at the crowds milling around them through the museum and trying to guess why they’re there and what kind of music they like and whose memorabilia they’re most excited to see.
To Delilah’s absolute delight, Emmett’s observations start out timid but get progressively more thoughtful and complex and borderline snarky as they feed off Delilah’s own sly remarks.
About a young white guy in a leather jacket, with hair swept into a tall faux-hawk: “Aspiring rock star trying to decide whose stage persona to imitate.” On seeing a black-clad teenager trailing grumpily after a pair of adults and two younger children: “Baby goth on a family road trip, offended that Paramore hasn’t been inducted yet.
” Whispered into Delilah’s ear when they’re on an escalator behind a trio of androgynous young people with multicolored hair: “Almost certainly doing the same spot-the-secret-queer-stuff scavenger hunt we are, and probably winning because they’re younger and faster and there’s more of them. ”
Delilah pretends to knock them off the escalator for that one, all fake shocked offense, and their laugh echoes off the high ceilings, bright as the sun streaming in from the skylights above them.