Chapter 22
Morgan
Renata never once tried to talk me out of it. She told me what it was going to cost me every day for nine days, and then she booked it.
She was at my door by seven the same morning, wearing a face I'd seen her put on for other clients in the worst hour of their lives but never once for me. She sat me down at my own kitchen island and went through it item by item.
"Walk me through what you think this does," she said. "Not what it feels like. What it does. Because I don't think you've let yourself add it up."
Then she added it up for me before I could do anything.
"Nobody's going to fire you," she said. "That's not how it works and it's what people always get wrong. Here's what I think happens."
The awards campaign would go first. That one she was certain of. You couldn't run a campaign about a man's transformation once the man's said out loud there wasn't one.
After that she was guessing and she said so.
The second film probably wouldn't die, it would just go quiet.
It would want another conversation and then another one.
Somebody would want to see how the first one performed.
If it performed they might come back around and if it didn't they wouldn't. Either way I probably wasn't hearing the word yes for a year.
Every room in town would price me differently. Not lower, necessarily. Just differently. Difficult. Unstable. Needs handling.
"That's the part I'm sure about," she said. "The rest of it depends on people I can't call and a movie nobody's seen. I've been wrong before."
"But."
"But you'll never be the easy call again.
I'm pretty confident about that. Right now you're one of the easiest men in this business.
That's your whole product. It's what your mother built and what I've sold for a living.
You're about to take it out back and shoot it at eight fifteen in the morning.
Nobody in a boardroom will ever look at you the same way again.
It takes years to come back from that. If you come back at all. "
Some didn't. I knew their names same as she did.
"And here's the part you really won't like," she said, and she put her phone down, which she never did.
"I can't protect you from it. I've spent my whole career making problems disappear for you and this is the one I can't, because you're the problem.
You're not going to let me fix it. So I need you to look at me and tell me it's worth it.
" She held my eyes. "And then I need you to tell me what you haven't told me yet.
What happens if you do all of this and there's nothing back there for you? Then what was it for?"
I'd thought about that. I'd thought about almost nothing else for days.
"Then it was for telling the truth once before I died," I said.
"Which I have never done. Not once, Ren, not in thirty-five years, not to you.
" It came out level and it stayed level.
She knew I meant it. "I'm not doing it to get him back.
If I were doing it to get him back it'd just be one more performance.
He'd know immediately because he's good at reading people.
I'm doing it because it's the truth and because they used a man who never said they could.
I need to fix that even if he never lets me back on his property.
The getting-him-back part isn't mine to script.
That's the whole point. That's the first thing in my life I'm willing to leave un-scripted. "
She looked at me for a long time. Then she picked her phone back up, and I thought that was her leaving, getting clear before the blast, and I wouldn't have blamed her.
Instead she said, "Then we're not going to do it sloppy.
If you're going to set yourself on fire you're going to do it live, in the morning, where they can't tape around you and half the country's got it on in the kitchen.
And I'm going to be standing in the wings when you walk off.
" She started typing. "Eleven years. And you pick now to mean something. "
They put me on at eight fifteen on a Tuesday morning, live, the official top of the press tour. The whole campaign was supposed to launch off that couch.
There was a clip teed up to roll. The featurette, the gold-lit version of me disappearing into the mountains. The host was a pro and a friend of the machine. She had her warm questions lined up about my transformation, my journey, the real cowboys who'd changed my life.
The plan, the studio's plan and my plan as of a week ago, was for me to sit there and be moved by my own footage to sell the country a story about a man finding himself over breakfast.
The lights were the same lights I'd lived under my whole life.
That was what I noticed, as I sat down and shook her hand, hitting my mark on the couch.
Same heat, same hum, same red eye of the camera that had raised me better than either of my parents.
There was a mug of coffee on the table in front of me that nobody intended anybody to drink.
I knew exactly how to be loved in that chair. I could have done it in my sleep.
She opened on cue, warm, leaning in. "So everyone has seen the trailer, everyone is talking about this transformation. You went out to a real ranch and learned to be a real cowboy. Tell us about it. Tell us what it taught you."
"It taught me I'm a thief," I said.
I felt the floor of the room tilt. She laughed a little, the reflex of a host certain the famous man was being charming, and waited for the punch line that would make it a joke. I didn't give it to her.
"That clip you're about to play," I said. "Don't play it. I'm asking the control room not to roll it and I'm asking every outlet carrying this to pull it tonight."
"I'm not sure that's—"
"It's a family's home. It's a working ranch in Colorado with people living on it, and there's two seconds in there of a man's back that he never gave his permission for.
" I had to stop. I'd had this worked out in the middle of the night and it fell apart in my mouth on live television.
I sat there in front of the whole country with nothing prepared and just started talking.
"They knew why I was there. That's the thing.
I paid to be there and everybody knew what I was doing and they taught me anyway.
What they didn't know was that eight weeks later a marketing department would cut ninety seconds of it to sell tickets to me.
Nobody asked them for permission for that.
I could have asked them and I didn't, because I knew what the answer would be. "
"Morgan—"
"I'm done doing that to them."
The host was very good. She kept her face.
"Are you still making the movie?"
"Yes."
"Because it sounds like—"
"I'm on set Monday. I'll be there every day they need me.
Bauer's owed that and so is every person on that crew.
None of this is their fault." That was the only thing I said all morning that came out smooth, because it was the only part I'd known the answer to for a week.
"I'm not quitting anything. I'm just not selling that version. Everyone deserves better than that."
She glanced off past me. Somebody in the dark behind the camera was telling her something in her ear and she was deciding whether to take it.
"Help me understand," she said. "Because people are going to hear this and think you've turned on a film you're proud of."
"I'm proud of the film."
"Then what are you turning on?"
"The transformation." I could hear myself getting it right and I didn't care anymore whether it was landing.
"That's the story we built because it tested well.
I didn't find myself out there. I found people who were already exactly themselves, who didn't perform a single second of their lives for me or anybody, and I brought a camera to their door. "
She recovered, because she was the best in the business at recovering, and went where the whole country wanted her to go. "Can you at least tell us who they are? The people who changed you this much?"
I could see the segment it made. The famous man humbled, the salt-of-the-earth family, the perfect close. It would've been the best four minutes of television I ever gave anybody.
I'd wanted to give an audience what it came for since I was nine years old.
"No."
She waited for the rest of it.
"They get to stay nobody. I came here to take my name off them, not to put theirs on me." Somewhere behind the lights a producer was deciding what to do about me. "So no. You don't get them. Nobody does. That's the end of the story you can have."
I gave them a few more minutes, because bolting would have been cruel to the crew. But the warmth went out of that room the same way it went out of every deal I ever watched die. I knew the exact temperature of it. I had spent my whole life keeping rooms warm.
It was the cleanest air I ever breathed.
Renata was in the wings when I walked off, exactly where she said she'd be. Her phone was buzzing in her hand but she wasn't looking at it. The studio was on it. Bauer's people were on it. The word was already going out, the one she'd warned me about.
She put the phone in her pocket.
"Well," she said. "That's done." And then, lower, almost to herself, "You looked like somebody up there.
Not your brand. You." She squeezed my arm once.
"Go on. Go do the rest of it, the part I can't come for.
And Morgan." She waited till I turned. "And don't bring him money.
" She pointed at me. "I know you. You're already working out a number in your head and how you'll convince him.
Don't. He'll hear it for exactly what it is and you will not get a second run at this. Show up with nothing."
I flew into Denver and I didn't rent anything.
There was a dealership off the highway on the way out of the city. I bought a white three-quarter-ton off the lot and paid for it outright, because I was going over a pass in the dark and I couldn't afford to be wrong about a vehicle.
It took an hour and a half and a stack of forms with a woman named Charlene who did not know who I was. She taped a temporary tag in the back window and told me the real plates would come in the mail.
Then she asked me where to send them.
I gave her an address I had no right to give anybody.
I turned the phone off before my flight and left it off. Everyone would want a statement and not one of them could reach me. I'd never in my life been that hard to find.
Then it was just me and the road. I had four days before I was due back on a set and I'd already used most of one.
I came up the valley with the sun beginning to set, no deal in my pocket and no check in my hand. For the first time in my life I didn't have a version of the scene prepared. Nothing in the cab but me and a temporary tag in the back window.
I didn't know if he'd see me. I'd earned every bit of not being welcome. But the peaks came up out of the dusk ahead of me. Chapel and Steeple and Spire.
I pointed the truck at them and drove on. Too late was a thing I'd find out about when I got there. Empty-handed was the only honest way I had left to arrive.