Chapter 16
The problem arrived on the fourteenth of May, at four in the afternoon, in a phone call from a lawyer at the network whose name Mila never afterward remembered.
He was extremely pleasant. He said the series was tremendous. He said everybody was thrilled.
And then he said that the fifth episode described, in the first person, a specific identifiable individual’s private conduct at a hospital bedside, and that while the piece named nobody, identifiability was not a matter of naming, and that a man in that position with that kind of money could tie a broadcaster up for two years without ever having to win.
“So what do you need?” Mila said.
“One of three things.” He had clearly done this before. “You take the fifth episode out. Or you cut it down to the point where nobody could place it, which — having listened to it, and I want to be honest with you — would leave you with about nine minutes of nothing.”
“Or?”
“Or he goes on the record,” the lawyer said. “In his own voice, consenting, in the piece. Then it isn’t an allegation. It’s a man saying what he did.”
* * *
She sat in the barn office for a long time after that with the phone in her lap.
Outside somebody was hosing a horse’s legs and the girls were arguing about a truck and the whole ordinary business of a Wednesday afternoon went on around her.
She could pull the episode. Then she had five good hours about a real thing and a hole in the middle of it where the only person who had been in the bed used to be, and she would spend the rest of her life knowing exactly why she had done it, and so would Nate, and so would the network, and it would be the smooth pleasant podium voice winning one more time.
She could gut it down to nothing, which was the same thing with more steps.
Or she could go to her husband and ask him to sign his own name to the worst thing he had ever done, in his own voice, for broadcast, in a piece he was contractually forbidden to hear.
And that was the part that stopped her cold.
Because the terms she had set in that aisle on the second of May — all of them, every line, the ones he had agreed to without one adjustment and had kept for nearly two weeks without a single lapse — made it impossible for her to ask him.
You will not read it. You will not hear it. You will not know when it airs.
How do you get a man’s consent to something he is not permitted to know the contents of?
* * *
She did not sleep that night and she was not proud of the reason.
It was not the piece. It was that somewhere around two in the morning, lying on top of the covers, she caught herself constructing the sentence — I need you to do this for me — and heard what it was.
It was the oldest deal in that marriage, upside down.
For eight years he had been a man who solved things for her without asking, and she had hated it, and had spent six months building a life out of not permitting it.
And now she was lying in the dark working out how to phrase the request that would put him back in the chair, doing the thing he was best at, for her, at enormous cost — and she would owe him, and he would know she owed him, and every single thing between them for the next forty years would have that underneath it.
She got up at half past four and made coffee.
You will not go to him, she thought. You cannot make the whole marriage a debt in the last week of May.
And then, at the same time, in the same kitchen, with the same clarity: and if you pull that episode you will never make anything real again.
There was no third thing. She looked for a third thing for two days. There isn’t always a third thing.
* * *
She told Nikki on the Thursday, out in the yard, because she had to tell somebody.
Nikki listened the whole way through with a hay net over her shoulder and then said, “Ask him.”
“No.”
“Mila—”
“If I ask him, he gives it to me. Immediately. Before I’ve finished the sentence, and with his whole chest, and he will never once bring it up again — and I will be married to a man who did that for me, forever, and I will know what it cost, and I will spend the rest of my life being careful with him.
” Her voice cracked on it. “That’s the thing I’ve been running from since November.
I’m not doing it to him. I’d rather lose the episode. ”
Nikki put the hay net down.
“You know what your trouble is,” she said. “You’ve spent six months making very good rules and you’ve got so good at it you’ve built one that’s got you in it.”
“Yes,” said Mila. “I have noticed.”
* * *
On the Friday she drove to Greenspring and did not go in.
She sat in the truck on the gravel for a quarter of an hour and then reversed out and went home, and she had not, at any point in that quarter of an hour, decided anything at all.
Larry saw her. She found that out later.
* * *
He came up the lane on Saturday morning at ten.
She was in the aisle doing entries on a clipboard and she heard the truck and thought, he’s broken it, with a lurch of something that was not entirely dread — six months of terms and here he was, unannounced, on a day she had not set, about a subject she had not named.
He got out. He did not come into the barn.
“I know I’m not supposed to be here,” he said, from the yard. “I’m going to say one thing from out here and then I’ll go, and you don’t have to answer it.”
Mila came to the doorway with the clipboard still in her hand.
“Dad says you sat on the gravel yesterday for a quarter of an hour and didn’t come in,” Jason said. “He’s got about nine words and he spent four of them on that, so I’d say he thought it was important.”
She did not say anything.
“So here’s the thing.” He stood in the yard in the May sun with his hands at his sides.
“You are in trouble about something and you have decided you are not allowed to tell me, and I have worked out that it is probably my fault, and I am not going to ask you what it is, because I agreed not to and because asking is the whole disease.”
“Jason.”
“I’m not finished. It’s about nine more seconds.” He took a breath. “I don’t know what it is. I don’t want to know what it is. But whatever the thing is that you are sitting in that truck not asking me for — the answer is yes.”
The swallows went over the yard.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s the whole of it. Yes, in advance, sight unseen, no conditions, no questions, and if it costs me everything I’ve got then it costs me everything I’ve got. You don’t have to tell me what it is and you don’t have to explain it and you never have to mention it again.”
* * *
She stood in a barn doorway with a clipboard in her hand and could not speak for a moment.
“You can’t do that,” she said.
“I’ve just done it.”
“Jason, that is insane, you have no idea what you’ve—”
“I know exactly what I’ve done,” he said, “and I’ve been working up to it since the second of May, and I’d like you to think about why it took me two weeks.”
He crossed about half the yard and stopped, which was closer than he had come since February.
“Because it’s the only thing I’ve got left that’s worth anything,” he said. “It’s the only thing. I can’t do anything for you. I’m not allowed to and I shouldn’t be allowed to and I’ve stopped wanting to be. So the only thing I can give you is that you never have to work out how to ask me.”
* * *
She told him anyway.
Of course she did. She stood in that yard and told him the whole of it — the lawyer, the three options, the nine minutes of nothing, and the reason she had sat on his gravel for a quarter of an hour on Friday afternoon without coming in.
He listened. When she got to the part about the debt — about being married forever to a man who had done her an enormous favor — his face did something she had never seen on it.
“Is that what you thought it would be?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Mila.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “Christ. Okay. No. Listen to me, because I want to get this exactly right and I’ll probably only get one go at it.
“It is not a favor. It cannot be a favor, because it’s not mine to keep.
That’s the part you’ve got wrong.” He dropped his hands.
“I’ve spent six months with my own file open and every single thing on it was me deciding what other people got told.
The finding at the hospital. The room at the back of the house.
The statement. The horse. Her name on a form because I couldn’t face the phone.
“And the worst one — the actual worst one, the one under all of them — is that I took the truth about our marriage and gave it to somebody who wasn’t you.
“So no. It’s not a gift. It is the one thing in this entire business that is genuinely, straightforwardly owed, and you have been standing in a yard for two days trying to work out how to be polite about asking for your own property.”
* * *
He recorded it on the Tuesday, in the cottage, at the table, with the moving blankets still up in the corner.
Jody rigged him and left. Mila sat opposite with the recorder between them and her hand on the built-up knob, and before she pressed anything she said the things she was required to say and then some things she was not.
“You can stop at any point. You can strike anything. If you want it read back you get it read back. If at the end of it you say no, it does not go in, and nothing changes between us, and I will pull the episode and I will not hold it against you for one second of my life.”
“I know.”
“Say it back.”
“I can stop, I can strike, I can say no at the end.” He almost smiled. “You’re very good at this.”
“One more.” She held his eye. “Nothing in that microphone buys you anything. Not with me. This is not a route back to the house and you do not get to think of it that way, now or in twenty years.”
“Mila,” Jason said, “I have not thought of a single thing I’ve done since November as a route back to the house, and I would like that on the tape as well.”
She pressed record.
* * *
He talked for two hours and twenty minutes.