10. Tess
Tess
My mother calls at almost eleven on a Saturday night, which she has never done in her life.
“Turn on the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The Instagram. He’s on it, he’s on it right now, Dana’s girl texted me.”
I’m on the couch with a bowl of cereal, because I’ve been eating cereal for dinner for two weeks like a divorced man in a sitcom. I open it and there he is, and the number in the corner is climbing so fast it’s just a smear.
He’s on the floor. That’s the first thing.
Back against a wall, phone propped on something at chest height so the angle’s slightly up and unkind, and there’s a lamp behind him throwing a flare into the corner of the frame.
Nobody has lit this. Nobody has framed it.
There’s a water stain on the ceiling in the top left.
He looks like a man who’s been crashing out in a car.
“Okay. So.”
He drags both hands down his face.
“Two weeks ago I sat in a chair on television and a woman asked me a direct question and I lied to her. And I’m not going to say I misspoke or that I was working from bad information or any of the other ways there are to say this without saying it.
I knew. I did it because telling the truth was going to cost me and lying wasn’t. ”
Somebody in the comments asks if this is a bit.
“I have a daughter. Her name’s Sadie. She’s six months old, she came five weeks early and she had a hard start, and I wasn’t there for any of it, and that is not because nobody told me.”
I put the bowl down on the floor.
“Tess Broderick tried to tell me she was pregnant for six months.” Her name lands in my living room like a chair going over.
“She called this office. She emailed. She sent an ultrasound certified and somebody signed for it. She left a message on my private line saying it out loud so there could be no confusion about it. Then she wrote me a letter, and then she stopped, and I understand why she stopped.”
He looks off to the side and comes back.
“She did not sell that story. I want that in front of every person who’s been in her messages for two weeks. She didn’t sell it, she didn’t leak it, she has never taken a dollar off my name in her life, and if you sent that woman something, you did it because I gave you permission to.”
The number goes past a million and I stop looking at it.
“Somebody who worked for me kept her away from me. I’m not saying his name, and I’m not going to let this turn into a story about him, because.”
He stops. The pause goes on long enough that I think the stream’s frozen.
“Because he only got to do it because I let him. I told him to handle her. That’s my sentence, that’s the actual words I used, and then I spent thirteen months carefully not asking a single question about what that meant. You don’t stay ignorant that long by accident. It’s work. I worked at it.”
Behind him a door opens and shuts. He doesn’t turn around.
“And then there’s the other thing.” He leans in and now the phone’s too close and I can see how raw his eyes are. “I said on that broadcast, and I’m going to quote myself so nobody has to go find it, whatever happened between us was never what she apparently imagined it was.”
He stops again.
“She didn’t imagine it. I loved her for a year and a half and I made her hide in her own house to do it, and when it got expensive I stood up in front of forty million people and told them she’d made me up.
That’s the worst thing I’ve ever done to another person and I don’t have anything to put next to it. ”
His hand comes up toward the phone and stops.
“They’re my family. So if you go at them you’re going at my family and I’ll spend the rest of my life on it. That’s all. That’s everything I’ve got.”
He reaches out, and then, right before it cuts:
“Tess, if you’re watching this. I’m not asking you for anything. Don’t call me. I’ll be where I said I’d be.”
Dark.
I sit on my floor next to a bowl of cereal for a long time.
Then the world starts. By the next morning, the truck people are gone, which the trades write up as a mutual conclusion of the partnership.
Two arena dates go from on sale to postponed with no explanation attached.
His label puts out four sentences that manage to be about integrity and accountability without ever specifying whether the problem is the lying or the admitting.
A morning-show host in a good suit calls it career suicide.
Alana Chu opens her Monday broadcast with four sentences of her own.
She doesn’t gloat and she doesn’t soften it.
She says that she asked a man a direct question in good faith, that he answered it falsely, that her program was used, and that she’ll have more to say when she has something worth saying.
Then she moves straight to a story about a school bond, which is the most devastating thing she could have done.
And the tide turns for me, which happens fast and doesn’t feel like relief.
The same accounts that told me what they’d do to me now want me to know they always knew.
A woman who called my daughter a paycheck sends me a paragraph about how she cried at the livestream.
Somebody starts a fundraiser for my studio window without asking, and I spend an afternoon getting it taken down.
The glass guy comes Monday and won’t take my money.
He says his sister had a baby early too, and then he stands there with his hands in his pockets until I say okay.
My inquiries go from cancellations to more messages than I can answer.
I know what most of them want, and it is not a portrait.
My mother comes over on Sunday and cleans my kitchen without being asked, which is how she conducts an argument.
“He said your name,” she says, at the sink, with her back to me.
“He did.”
“On the television and on the other thing, the one Dana’s girl showed me.”
“Yes.”
“Well.” She wrings the cloth out. “I’d like it on the record that I have never once said a word about that man to you.”
“You’ve said a great many words about that man to me.”
“I’ve said them to your brother,” she says. “It’s different.”
On Thursday a reporter calls the studio line. She’s polite. She tells me she’s giving me the chance to comment first, which is what they say when they’re going to do it anyway.
“Comment on what.”
“We’ve confirmed the outlet paid forty thousand dollars for those photographs, and we have the account it landed in.” A pause that’s meant to be kind. “Ms. Broderick, do you know who sold them?”