20. Tess
Tess
Idon’t tell him I’m coming. I tell my mother I need her for four hours and she doesn’t ask why, and I drive to the lot with a pass under my name that Janelle got me that morning, and I stand in the wings behind a man in a headset who’s been told I’m a producer’s cousin.
The set is the same because it is the same.
Two chairs. The fake window with the fake city behind it.
He walks out and the room does the thing rooms do, that big warm collective noise, except there’s a wobble down the middle of it, because nobody’s certain what they’re supposed to be feeling. He’s thinner. Plain shirt, no collar to fuss with. Alana lets him sit down and doesn’t say hello.
“I want to start where we finished. Because you and I sat in these chairs in April and you looked me in the face and lied to me.”
“I did.”
“Let’s watch it.”
They roll it. On the monitor over my head and on the big screen behind them both, and there he is in April with the ankle on the knee, and there’s the smile, and there’s her voice asking whether he has a daughter.
No.
He watches all of it. Not his hands, not the floor. He watches himself do it on a screen in front of a live audience, and from where I’m standing the only thing moving in his body is his jaw. The lights come back.
“Why?”
“Because it was cheaper.”
“That’s a small word for it.”
“It’s the right one. Everything bigger I could say would make it sound like something happened to me.” He shifts forward. “Nothing happened to me. I sat in that chair and did the arithmetic and the lie came out cheaper.”
“You’ve said publicly that someone on your team concealed the pregnancy.”
“Somebody did.”
“Would you like to name him?”
“No.”
She waits. He doesn’t fill it.
“Because you’re protecting him.”
“Because if I give you a name this turns into a story about a bad manager.” His hands are still.
“And it’d work. There’s a guy in that story who did something genuinely terrible, and everybody watching gets to be angry at him instead of me, and I walk out of this building in better shape than I walked in. Which is exactly why I’m not doing it.”
“Then who is responsible.”
“I told him to handle her.” He says it evenly.
“Thirteen months before any of this, I told a man to handle the woman I was in love with. Then I filed an emergency custody action against her in April without reading past page two of it, and I want that in this interview, because it’s the part I keep not being asked about.
” He looks at Alana. “He didn’t take anything from me. He picked up something I set down.”
Somebody in the audience makes a sound.
“Ms. Broderick hasn’t spoken publicly.”
“No.”
“Has she forgiven you?”
“I’m not going to talk about her feelings on television.”
“That’s a fair position. Let me come at it differently. Do you have a relationship with her.”
“I have a daughter with her.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
He smiles a little, and it isn’t the record store one. It’s the small crooked one that used to happen in my kitchen.
“You’re very good at this.”
“I’m aware.”
“Alana, here’s the problem.” He puts his elbows on his knees.
“Last time I sat here, a woman’s private life became something people were allowed to discuss because I decided to discuss it.
She never agreed to that. She’s never agreed to any of it.
So anything I tell you about how she feels is me doing the same thing again in a nicer tone of voice. ”
Alana lets it sit. She’s letting the room decide, and I can hear the room deciding.
“Let me put it another way, then. Since April, what have you actually done.”
“Not much that photographs.”
“Try me.”
“I go over most evenings.” He says it like a man reading a shipping manifest. “There’s a medicine she takes for reflux and it goes in the side of the cheek.
She hates hats. If you rub between her shoulder blades slowly enough she will settle eventually, and if you do it fast she thinks it’s a game and you’ve lost her. ”
“That’s it.”
“That’s it.”
“You understand that’s not much of an answer for a program like this.”
“I understand it’s the whole answer,” he says.
“Will you show us a photograph of your daughter?”
I go cold. I am standing in the darkness at the edge of the set and my hands stop working, because there is one on his phone. There are hundreds on his phone. Every one of them exists because I said he could.
“No.”
“There’s an enormous amount of goodwill toward you tonight.”
“I know.”
“A photograph would settle it.”
“That’s the reason not to.” He shakes his head. “My daughter isn’t evidence of my redemption. If I put her face on that screen, then what I’ve done is use her to make people like me, which is the thing I did to her mother, and I’d be about ten months from having done it twice.”
The audience does something that isn’t applause. It’s lower than that and it goes on a while. Alana glances down at her cards, which she hasn’t done all night.
“We had hoped, and I’ll say this was my ask and not the network’s, that you’d play something.
” She doesn’t turn around, but the lights are already changing and somebody in the wings is moving.
“There’s a song you wrote during the relationship that’s never been released.
We understand you’ve played it recently. There’s a guitar behind you.”
He doesn’t look at the guitar.
“No.”
“It would be a remarkable moment.”
“Yeah, it would.”
“So why not.”
“Because it belongs to a woman I asked to live in the dark,” he says. “It’s the only thing of ours that hasn’t been sold or leaked or filed or explained to a lawyer. If I play it here, within minutes it becomes a clip, and in a week it’s a sound on the internet under a video of somebody’s cat.”
“Shane.”
“I’ve already used her pain to move a record once and it cost me my whole life.” He stands up. “I’m not doing it again in a nicer shirt.”
He unclips the mic himself, which I’ve been told you’re not supposed to do, and puts it on the arm of the chair.
He tells Alana thank you in a completely ordinary voice, like a man leaving a dentist. And then he walks off.
He comes past the man in the headset, past the cable run and the flats and the water table, head down, rubbing the back of his neck the way he does, and he doesn’t see me until he is almost in front of me.
He stops so hard the guy behind him nearly goes into his back.
“Tess.”