Chapter 7
"You signed it," Odette said.
"I sign everything."
"You do, and we're going to fix that." She turned the page around. "October the fourth. Same week as the reissue deal. It's a standard appearance release for the companion film — ninety minutes of sit-down, joint, both principals, plus archive access."
Savannah looked at her own name. The loop on the S, the same loop she had been putting on things since she was fifteen.
"October the fourth," she said.
"Yes."
She sat with that a second. October kept turning up in her life like a coin in a coat pocket.
"What happens if I don't go?"
"They can sue you. They won't." Odette took her glasses off. "What they'll do is film him alone in a chair for ninety minutes, and cut in the archive, and the film becomes a film about a man and his career, and every frame you're not in is a frame somebody explains to themselves."
"So I go."
"So you go, and you say nothing you don't mean, and if a question is ugly you make them ask it twice." Odette put the page back in the folder. "They always sound worse the second time. Half of them won't do it."
They shot it at Cordelia Hall, in the rehearsal room off the north corridor, because a documentary crew will always pick the room with brick in it.
Room B.
Savannah stood in the doorway with her coat still on and let that be true for a second, and then walked in, because the alternative was standing in a hallway looking at a door and she had already decided in March that she did not do that.
The crew had built a set inside the room. Two lights on stands with big white sails on them, a rug that was not the room's rug, a bookshelf that had been carried in and filled with somebody else's books.
And two chairs.
Angled toward each other, about four feet apart. A good four feet. Somebody who knew what they were doing had put them there.
"Ms. Holloway. Marta Quill." The director was small and about forty-five with a pen behind her ear and reading glasses on a cord. "Thank you for doing this. I know the timing's not anybody's favorite."
"It's fine."
"It's not, but I appreciate you saying so." Marta pointed at the chairs. "You're on the left."
Savannah looked at them a second longer.
Four feet. Not two.
"Can we make it two?" she said.
"Two feet?"
"Two feet."
Marta Quill looked at the chairs, then at her, then at the chairs again. "Why?"
"Because that's how we stand," Savannah said. "If you put us four feet apart it'll read like a divorce, and if that's what you want, keep it. But you asked me here for the record and that's not how the record was made."
Marta moved the chairs herself.
Savannah sat down in the one on the left and looked at the empty one two feet off her knee and understood, about four seconds too late, that she had just done that to herself for ninety minutes.
The sound man was about twenty-five and extremely polite about it.
He ran the lavalier up the inside of her shirt with two fingers and a length of tape and never once touched her, which takes some doing, and she stood on a rented rug with her arms out from her sides like a woman being measured.
A woman powdered her forehead and told her she had good skin, which is a thing they say.
Deacon came in eight minutes late with a coffee he did not drink.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey."
That was all of it. He sat down in the chair on the right and the sound man ran the wire up under his jacket — a stranger's knuckles at his throat, working the clip onto the placket, which was a thing Savannah had done every night for nine years and had never once been thanked for or needed to be.
Then the man came back around and reseated her transmitter at the small of her back while Deacon sat two feet away with his hat on his knee and looked at the floor with a great deal of attention.
Savannah looked at the fake bookshelf and thought about how many rooms she had sat in like this, and how in every one of them he had leaned over at some point and said something under his breath about somebody's shoes.
He didn't.
"Sound speeds," somebody said.
Marta started easy. The Broken Bow round.
Who spoke first. Deacon told it the way he always told it, which was mostly accurate.
Savannah corrected one thing, which was that she had not asked him to play her song, she had asked him to stop playing over it, and the crew laughed, and Marta wrote something down.
Two feet is nothing. Two feet is a kitchen counter.
She had stood in two feet of that man two hundred nights a year for nine years and never once thought about it, and now she sat in it with her hands in her lap and could not get her body to quit taking readings.
His knee was eight inches off hers. When he shifted, the chair leg moved on the rug and she felt it through the floor before she heard it.
He ran warm. He had always run warm — he was the reason she had never carried a coat in a truck in February — and at two feet, under two lights with sails on them, a person's heat arrives whether anybody has agreed to it or not.
Ninety minutes. She answered the questions.
Then the van.
"It was an Econoline," Deacon said. "Bought it off a guy in Dickson with two hundred and ten thousand on it. It had a — what was it. It had that thing on the side, the ghost of a decal where they'd peeled it off. Some kind of — I want to say a bird."
"A lily," Savannah said.
He turned his head.
"It was a florist's van," she said. "You could see the stem in the right light. We spent a year and a half driving to shows in a van with a ghost lily on the side and you called it a bird for nine years."
"I called it a bird because a lily's embarrassing."
"You cried at a Waffle House, Deacon, you don't get embarrassed."
The crew came apart.
"He tipped her twenty dollars," Savannah said to the camera, because she had been telling this story for nine years and it had never once worked when she told it. "We split forty-two dollars from the door, and the waitress said she'd heard us play, and he tipped her twenty out of twenty-one."
"She had heard us play," Deacon said.
"There were thirty-one people in that room and she was not one of them."
"She'd heard of us."
"She had not heard of us. Nobody had heard of us. She was being nice to two kids eating one waffle between them."
"Well." He turned his hat over in his hands and looked at the floor and let it sit exactly as long as he always let it sit. "She got twenty dollars out of it. Somebody had a good night."
They lost the room for a solid fifteen seconds. The boom operator had to reset. Marta Quill was laughing with her hand over her mouth and her pen bouncing.
Savannah was laughing too.
That was the thing she would take apart later in a parking lot. Not that she laughed. That she laughed the way she used to laugh, all the way down, with her head back, and that for about four seconds she had forgotten every single thing that had happened since March.
It was a real memory and it was hers and it had been good, and she got four seconds of it.
She had also turned in the chair. Both knees. Her whole body had come around toward him the way you come around toward a stove in a cold kitchen, somewhere underneath the level where she had any say in it, and it had happened on two cameras.
The man running the second camera was named Denny Boaz. He was maybe sixty, and he had been quiet all afternoon, and he had a face like a man who'd loaded trucks for thirty years before he ever touched a lens.
Marta was checking her notes. There was a gap.
Denny said, "Can I ask one?"
"Go ahead," Marta said, not looking up.
He leaned around the camera and he asked it the way you'd ask a woman at a hardware store where they kept the wire nuts. Friendly. Nothing in it at all.
"The new record. The solo one." He nodded at Deacon and then back at her. "Did you have a hand in that too, or was that all him?"
The window unit was not running. Somebody had killed it for sound.
Savannah heard the lights ticking.
She could feel Deacon go still beside her, the whole length of him, in the way you feel a bass player miss a change without hearing it.
He turned his head toward her about two inches, and stopped, because he understood a half second too late that turning toward her was itself an answer, on camera, in focus.
Nobody in that room knew. That was the thing. Denny Boaz did not read the trades. He had been in Kentucky in March shooting a barn.
"No," Savannah said.
"No?"
"No. That's all him." She kept her voice level and pleasant and gave him nothing to feel bad about, because he had not done anything, and because the tape was rolling. "I wasn't in the room for any of it."
"Well," Denny said, and started to say something friendly, and then the shape of it got to him, and he sat back behind the camera and did not finish the sentence.
Deacon said, "She wasn't."
Two words. Flat, out loud, on the record.
It was the truest thing anybody had said all day and it sounded like a man confessing in a courtroom, and Marta Quill said, "Let's take five," about three seconds later than she should have.
Savannah sat with her hands in her lap and looked at the fake bookshelf.
Twelve minutes ago they had been laughing about a van.
She knew exactly what the film would do with it, because she had sat in edit bays. The laugh, and then the silence. Somebody would put those two things back to back, and it would be the best ninety seconds in the whole picture, and they would be right to do it.
They had taken a real afternoon of her life and made it into footage. And the part of her that was still a professional understood it was very good footage.
She went out to the loading dock during the five and stood in the cold with her arms crossed.
Marta Quill came out after her with two paper cups of coffee and handed one over without asking.
"I'm going to use it," she said.
"I know."