Chapter 9 #2
Because she had worked it out at some point over seven weeks in a kitchen: the day she stood in a room and sang a piece of Jesse Rawls's biggest song to a crowd that was watching her do it, she would not be a songwriter taking back her bridge.
She would be his wife, on a stage, singing about him.
That is what it would look like from every seat in the building, and what a thing looks like from the seats is the only thing a room ever gets.
Four months of people telling her story for her.
She was not going to hand them the last of it in a dance hall for a jar of tips.
She played the second one instead, the new one, the one she'd taken the good line out of that afternoon, and it went better than the first.
And then she got off the stool and went and sat down and ordered a beer with hands that were shaking so hard she had to put both of them around the glass.
"Well," Trina said.
"Don't."
"I'm not saying anything."
"You're crying."
"It's the smoke," said Trina, in a room where nobody had smoked since 2009.
The woman came over at nine.
Georgia had noticed her earlier — sitting alone at the end of the bar with a coffee, grey coming in at the front of her hair, dressed like somebody who worked in a room with no windows in it. She had not clapped particularly. She had watched.
"You wrote both of those."
"I did."
"The first one's got no chorus."
"No."
"Don't put one on it," the woman said. "Everybody's gonna tell you to put one on it."
Georgia looked at her.
"Marlee Bowman," the woman said, and sat down without being asked, and moved Trina's plate about two inches to make room for her coffee. "I've got a room outside Dripping Springs. You've got about forty seconds before I start telling you what I think of the second verse."
"Go ahead."
She went ahead.
They talked for an hour and ten minutes.
Marlee Bowman did not mention Jesse Rawls.
Not once — not obliquely, not with a delicate pause, not with that sideways sympathetic thing people did with their eyebrows.
She did not say how are you holding up. She did not say I've been thinking about you.
She asked whether the third line of the second verse was doing a job or just filling a hole, and when Georgia said it was filling a hole, she nodded like a mechanic being told about a noise.
"How many have you got?"
"Songs?"
"Songs."
"I don't know. Thirty? Forty."
Marlee's eyebrows went up about a quarter inch, which Georgia would learn, over the following winter, was the largest gesture the woman owned.
"How many are like those two?"
"I don't know."
"Find out," Marlee said. She wrote a number on a napkin — an actual number, on an actual napkin, in the year of our Lord — and pushed it across.
"I'm not offering you anything. I want that understood, because people in this business say things at tables and then don't call.
I've got a room, I've got a week open in October, and I want to hear the other thirty-eight. That's the whole offer."
"Why?"
Marlee Bowman put her cup down.
"'Cause I sat in that chair for four hours listening to people who want to be looked at," she said, "and then a woman got up there and told sixty people to quit being nice at her."
She put her hat on.
"And then somebody hollered for the famous one and you said no.
" Marlee looked at her for about a second longer than was comfortable.
"That's the part I drove out here for and I didn't know it till it happened.
There's about four hundred women in this state who can write a verse.
There's not four who'll turn down a sure thing in a room that wants it. "
"It wasn't strategy."
"I know it wasn't. That's why it's worth something.
" She picked up her coffee, looked at it, and set it back down without drinking any.
"One more thing and then I'll go, and I want you to hear it plain, 'cause I don't say it twice.
I don't work on records about a marriage.
Not yours, not anybody's. If what you've got in that notebook is forty songs about a man, then you and me are gonna have a real short October. "
Georgia thought about the notebook. Four years of it. A woman in a house listening to a truck.
"Some of it's about a man," she said.
"That's not what I asked."
"No." Georgia turned the napkin over on the table. "It's about a house. And the woman in it."
Marlee Bowman nodded once, the way a mechanic nods.
"All right then," she said.
She left.
Georgia drove home a little after ten with the windows down.
The county road was empty. The hall's bulbs went out of the mirror at the first curve. She had the napkin in the coin tray and the guitar in the seat beside her like a passenger, and the air coming in was finally, at the tail end of August, about two degrees cooler than blood.
Somewhere around the low water crossing, she realized.
She had not thought about him since four o'clock.
Not once. Not through the fear, not through the sixty people, not through the beer or the hour and ten minutes. Seven hours of her own life had gone by with her entirely inside it, and Jesse Rawls had not been in the room.
She pulled over onto the caliche.
She had expected — if she had ever let herself picture it at all — that this would feel like getting out from under something. Air. Daylight. The thing everybody promises you.
It did not feel like that.
It felt like coming home from a funeral to a house where somebody has quietly gone through and taken all the photographs down, and finding that you cannot decide whether to be grateful.
Fifteen years. He had been the weather she lived in.
Every single thing she had done since she was twenty-two she had done inside the fact of him — for him, against him, around him, in spite of him — and tonight, for seven hours, she had simply been a woman who wrote songs, and she had been happy, and the price of that happiness was the discovery that she could go seven hours without him and be fine.
If she could do seven, she could do a day. If she could do a day, then everything she had built her whole adult life out of was a thing she had not actually needed, and had spent sixteen years paying for anyway.
Georgia sat on the side of the road in the dark with her hands on the wheel.
"Well, hell," she said, out loud, to nobody.
Then she pulled back onto the road and drove home to a house with three bolts on it, and sat down at the kitchen table, and got the green notebook out, and worked until one in the morning.