Chapter 7 #2
"I wanted to say it to your face today instead of you finding it in a screening room in September." Marta blew across her cup. "I've made nine of these. The part everybody remembers is never the part anybody planned."
"You could cut it."
"I could."
"But you won't."
"No." She said it without one ounce of apology, and Savannah liked her more for it, which was inconvenient. "I'll tell you what I will do. I won't score it. No piano under it, nothing swelling. Just the room."
Savannah turned that over.
Piano under it would have made it a tragedy. The room by itself would just be two people in chairs, not answering a question.
"That's fair," she said.
"It's not fair. It's the most I've got." Marta poured the rest of her coffee out on the concrete. "For what it's worth, Ms. Holloway, you gave me the best forty minutes I've shot on this picture, and about six of it was you fixing his story."
He found her in the north corridor by the water fountain that had never worked.
"Savannah."
"I'm not doing this here."
"Then tell me where."
She turned around. The wire was still down her shirt. She'd forgotten it, and it meant she had to keep her voice under a certain size, and she resented having to think about that.
"Do you have anything to tell me," she said.
"About what?"
"That's an answer."
Deacon rubbed the back of his neck, up under the hairline. "Ask me a question and I'll answer it. Any question. Right now, in this hallway, with a film crew forty feet away. I mean that. There's nothing you can ask me that I won't answer straight."
She had it in her mouth.
Is October the truth.
Six words. She could feel the shape of them behind her teeth. He was standing there with his hands open, and he was not lying about being willing, she could see that, and all she had to do was say it and she would know.
And she would know.
That was the trouble. Right now she had a floor under her, and the floor was October, and it was an ugly floor but she had built five months of thinking on top of it. If she asked, and the answer was worse, then everything she had rebuilt since March got rebuilt again from a lower number.
She was not tired of being angry. She was tired of starting over.
"Not today," Savannah said.
"Savannah—"
"You said any question. You didn't say when." She pulled the wire out from her collar and handed it to the sound man coming down the hall. "I'll ask it. Just not because a documentary put us in a room."
She left him standing by a water fountain that didn't work.
She sat in the truck in the north lot a while before she started it.
The laugh was the easy part and she did that one first. It was a real memory, it had been good, and she was allowed to have had it.
Then she did the rest of it, which was what she had sat down in a cold truck to do.
Nothing had happened. She made herself put it accurately, the way you write down what you actually hear instead of what you went in expecting: a woman sat in a chair for ninety minutes, and turned toward a man once, and made a noise, and turned back.
And she had asked for the two feet herself.
She sat with that one considerably longer.
Silas Rourke's place was a garage in Eastland with the door bricked in.
Foam on the walls, gray and sun-faded in one corner where a window used to be.
A board that had been good in about 1997.
A coffee maker with a brown ring cooked onto the plate.
There was nothing on the walls. No plaques, no framed anything, no photographs of him standing next to people.
She had been in two-thousand-dollar-a-day rooms with less gear and more wallpaper.
"Sit anywhere," he said. "Coffee's bad."
"I've had bad coffee."
"Not this bad."
She'd been right about that. He poured two anyway.
He played her four minutes of something off the board, no vocal, just a guitar and a bass and a shaker, and he did not watch her face while it played, which she appreciated more than she could have explained.
"That's four weeks old and it's stuck," he said when it ended. "You hear where."
"Yes."
"Say it."
"You've got a two-bar turnaround at the end of the verse that's telling everybody what's coming next." Savannah put the cup down. "Cut it to one and the chorus gets to be a surprise."
Silas Rourke sat back on his stool and put his hands on his knees.
"Yeah," he said. "That's what I called you over here for. Not that. But that's it, and it took you nine seconds, so we can skip a lot of talking."
"Call me over here for what, then."
"My record." He said it plainly. "I've got a deal to make one under my own name, which at fifty-eight is either a very good idea or the beginning of a sad story. Twelve songs. I want to write ten of them with you."
Savannah did not say anything.
"Now I'm going to say the terms out loud before you get any ideas about what kind of favor this is," Silas said, "because if I don't, you'll spend two weeks deciding whether I'm being kind to you, and I don't have two weeks."
"All right."
"Fifty-fifty. Everything we write, straight down the middle, words and music, no splitting hairs about who had the idea, because nobody ever knows and everybody lies.
" He counted it off on his fingers without any drama, like a man reading a parts list. "Both names on the front of the record.
Same size type. Not with. Not featuring.
Not in the little print on the back where they put the engineers. Same size."
"Silas."
"I'm not done. You get an equal say on takes, on players, and on what stays off the record, and that last one's the only one that matters and you know it.
" He held up the fifth finger. "And my publisher papers it as a co-writer deal before we write one line.
Not a handshake. Not a work-for-hire. On paper, first, in your lawyer's hands, and if she doesn't like it we do it her way. "
The refrigerator in the corner kicked on.
"Why," Savannah said.
"Because I heard the bridge."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the whole answer." He shrugged. "I've written with sixty people.
Four of them could do what you did in that room.
Two of them are dead and one of them won't leave Maine.
" He picked his coffee back up. "I'm fifty-eight.
Ruthie's got me on a list of things I'm supposed to do before I quit driving at night. This is on it."
Savannah looked at the foam on the wall.
"There's one more thing," Silas said, "and then I'll shut up."
"Go on."
"I know what's happening to you. Everybody knows, it's a small town with a big airport.
" He set the cup on the board, on a ring that was already there.
"I'm not doing this if it's a move. If you're going to say yes because it puts a burr under that man's saddle, then say no, and I'll still buy you a coffee once a year.
I'm too old to be somebody's leverage and you're too good to be using anybody. "
"That's insulting."
"It's a little insulting."
"I'd never do that."
"I know," Silas Rourke said. "That's why I said it out loud instead of wondering about it. Now it's said and neither one of us has to carry it."
He got a guitar off the wall hook and put it in her hands without asking whether she wanted it, which is either the rudest or the most respectful thing one writer can do to another, and she never has been able to decide which.
"Play me your fix," he said. "The turnaround. One bar."
She played it.
He listened with his chin down and then reached over and moved her third finger one fret without a word, and it was better, and it was so obviously better that she laughed.
"That's ugly," she said.
"It's ugly on paper. It's not ugly out loud."
They worked forty minutes. He had a line he'd been sitting on about a man who keeps a truck he can't drive. She took it and put it in second person and it stopped being sad and started being mean, and he said huh and wrote it on the back of an envelope in handwriting like a ransom note.
They got four lines.
Four lines is nothing. Four lines is a Tuesday.
But she had not been in a room where a line got better because two people were in it since a kitchen table at the Harpeth House, and she could not have said when that was, and her whole body knew it before she did — her shoulders had come down, her jaw had come unlocked, and she had been leaning forward on the stool for half an hour like a woman at a table with a map on it.
She noticed it, and made herself sit back, and it was already too late.
He did not give her a card. He walked her to the door and said his publisher's name and said to have her lawyer call whenever, and that he wanted to write through the summer and cut in the fall, and that he would hold the slot open a little while but not forever, because he was fifty-eight and the arithmetic on that got worse every year.
She sat in the truck in the gravel with the engine off.
She got the pen out of the cup holder and found the copy shop receipt for thirty cents in the door pocket and turned it over and wrote it down, because writing things down was how she found the thing that was wrong.
50/50, all of it. Both names, front of the record, same size. Equal say — takes, players, what stays off. Papered first. Her lawyer's terms.
She read it twice.
Then she sat back and understood what she was looking at.
She was holding a receipt with a list on it, and the list was, item for item, line for line, exactly what her husband had handed a twenty-four-year-old in October. Equal billing. Equal say. Your name the same size as mine. Come be a real one.
He had built that for somebody in five months. Nobody had ever built it for her in nine years, and she had never once asked, because she had believed that what they had was better than terms.
There was no reason on earth to say no.
That was the entire problem, and she sat in a gravel lot in Eastland turning a thirty-cent receipt over in her hands, and could not for the life of her find the sentence for what she was afraid of.