18. Tess
Tess
Janelle apologizes four times in the first minute and then tells me she’s calling against advice.
“They’re going to come to you directly. Today, probably. I wanted you to have some warning and that’s all I can give you, and after this I’d be grateful if you never said we talked.”
“Who are they?”
“The label. Rob’s people are on it too but the label’s driving.”
“Driving what.”
“They’ll explain it better than I would,” she says, which is a woman refusing to say a word.
They arrive later that morning, two men and a woman carrying fancy pastries nobody touches.
The woman does the talking. She’s good. She’s warm without being slick, she uses Sadie’s name and doesn’t ask to see a picture, and she opens by saying she wants to acknowledge that the last five months have been unimaginable, and it lands about seventy percent sincere, which is very high for the room. Then she starts.
“So the thinking is a conversation. A real one, network, prime, and you’d pick the interviewer from a list we’d give you.”
“A conversation with me.”
“With you. Not with him. This is your side of it, in your words, and nobody edits you.”
One of the men slides a folder across and doesn’t open it.
“There’s a visual component,” she says.
“Meaning.”
“Meaning at the moment there’s an enormous market for images of your daughter, and the way that market gets destroyed is if there’s an authorized one. Then it’s worthless. Then nobody’s parked outside a pediatrician.”
“An authorized what?”
She smiles slightly. “An image.”
“A photograph?”
“If that’s the word you’d rather use.”
“It’s the word.” I keep my hands in my lap. “You want a photograph of my baby, released on purpose, by us.”
She says it kindly. “One photograph, your photographer, your approval, your framing. You’re a professional, so you’d have more control over it than anybody’s ever had over anything like it.”
“Keep going.”
There’s a documentary. Feature length, a theatrical window, a director whose name I actually know.
The working shape is Shane learning to be a father.
There’s a song. New, his, about all of it, with a writing credit offered to me, which I didn’t know was a thing you could offer somebody.
And there’s an appearance. The two of us, somewhere with cameras, so that people can see it happen.
“And what’s the fifth thing,” I say.
“There’s no fifth thing.”
“There’s always a fifth thing when four of them are free.”
The other man opens the folder then and turns it around, and it’s a single page, and there’s a number on it.
Nobody says the number out loud, and I’ll think about that later.
Three adults in my studio and not one of them will put it in the air.
I look at it long enough that they think I’m reading it.
It would pay for her college. It would buy a house with a fence, and it would mean the next time an insurance company denies a claim I could just pay the thing and hang up the phone.
“You don’t have to answer today,” the woman says.
“I know.”
“And I’d like to say, on my own behalf and not the company’s, that nobody here is asking you to forgive him. Whatever’s between you two is yours. This is an offer of work for a story that’s already public.”
That’s a very good sentence. Somebody wrote that sentence.
He comes for his evening visit like always.
I don’t do the routine with him. I’ve got the folder on the counter, and Sadie’s down early because she’s been fighting a tooth all week, and I let him get all the way through the door before I start.
“Did you know?”
“Know what.”
“Don’t.”
He stops with his jacket half off.
“Three of them came here this morning. Folder, a director’s name, a writing credit for me, which I assume was your idea because it’s the kind of thing you’d think was generous.”
“Tess.”
“An interview. A photograph of her. A documentary and a staged reunion.” My voice is climbing and I let it go.
“And I have been standing in this kitchen since eleven o’clock building the speech I was going to make when you walked in and pitched it to me, and here’s where I got to.
If you can look at the worst year of my life and see a product, then you’ve learned nothing.
Not one thing. You’ll have done the therapy and the evening visits and the bottles and the notebook and you’ll still be a man who thinks the way to fix us is to sell us better. ”
He hangs the jacket on the back of the chair.
“I said no to all of it already.”
I stop.
“What.”
“They pitched me that morning in a conference room downtown. I said no inside two minutes and then I put it in writing that afternoon because I know how they work.” He rubs his face.
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you carrying it, and that was wrong, because they went around me anyway and you’ve spent your whole day building a speech. ”
“You said no.”
“Yeah.”
“To the number.”
“To the number.”
I put my hands on the counter because they need somewhere to be, which is becoming a habit.
“Then why do you have that face on.”
He’s quiet a second.
“Because there’s a second half.”
“Say it.”
“When I turned it down, Chase told me they’ll be making a documentary anyway.
Just a different one.” He says it evenly, like a weather report.
“They don’t need me to make a film about me.
They’ve got the masters, twenty years of footage, the Alana tape, the livestream, and a hundred hours of B-roll they own outright. ”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No, it’s better. For them. The version where I cooperate is a redemption story and everyone’s seen forty of those.
” He looks up. “The version where I don’t is about a man who lied on television.
And they get to run the denial. All of it.
On a screen the size of a house, for as long as that gets to exist.”
I understand what that means before I want to.
“They’d use the sentence.”
“They’d put it in the trailer.” He doesn’t blink. “It’s the best thirty seconds of footage anybody has on me. There’s no world where a marketing department leaves it in a box.”
The refrigerator kicks on behind me.
“Can you stop it?”
“Not by asking.”
“Then how.”
“There’s a clause.” He takes a breath. “The archive moves if the contract terminates a particular way. It’s expensive. It’s the most expensive door in my life and I’ve had lawyers on it since Wednesday, and it’s real, and it works, and it costs about everything I’ve got that isn’t already hers.”
“Shane.”
“I’m doing it.”
“You’re not spending your career to keep a sentence off a screen.”
“It’s not a sentence.” His voice finally goes.
“It’s the thing she types into a search bar when she’s eleven.
That’s the whole calculation and there isn’t a second part to it.
Somebody’s about to make that available in high definition forever and I get one chance to buy the door shut before it opens. ”
I can’t look at him.
“You’d be starting over.”
“I’d be forty years old with a house off Manor and a truck.” He almost laughs. “I built all of it being the guy who could never be caught. It’s about time some of it cost me something.”