Chapter 11 #2
He said the next part plain, because there was no version of it that was going to sound like anything else.
"I'm done, Holt."
Holt did not move for about three seconds.
"No, you're not."
"I am."
"You're two weeks out." He said it flat, and he was not pleading, he was doing arithmetic out loud, which was the only language either of them had ever fully shared.
"Thirty-one cities. Three buses. Crew of thirty-eight, and thirty of them turned down other work in January because my office called them.
Corrigan's got a build in a shop in Atlanta right now that gets loaded on a Wednesday.
There's promoter guarantees on twenty-two of those buildings with my company on the paper, and there's a piece of the insurance that's written against my signature, and if I walk out of this today, the first thing that happens is not that you feel better.
The first thing that happens is a bond company calls a lawyer. "
"I know."
"You don't know. You have never once known.
" Holt held a hand out. "Here's what we do.
I finish the run. I take my commission and I do the job I've done for fifteen years and I hand you off clean in November to whoever you want — I'll make the calls myself, I'll write the letter, I'll say whatever you want it to say.
Nobody loses a job. Nobody eats a guarantee.
You want to be rid of me, be rid of me on the first of December and it costs you nothing but a phone call. "
It was, Deacon thought, the best argument anybody had ever made to him about anything.
It was also true.
"No," he said.
"Give me a reason that isn't a feeling."
"I don't have one."
"Deacon—"
"I don't have one," he said again. "You're right about all of it.
It's going to cost me money I can't get back and it's going to cost a bunch of people a month of hell, and I'm doing it anyway, and I know exactly how that sounds, because a man who does the right thing two weeks out is a man who's making everybody else pay for his conscience.
" He picked his hat up off the chair. "And if I let you run it to November, then in November I'll have played thirty-one buildings on a structure that took sixty-five cents off her dollar for nine years, and I'll have decided that was fine as long as the buses were paid for.
And I'd be able to live with that, Holt.
That's the part I can't get around. I'd be able to live with it fine. "
Holt looked at him a long moment.
"You're going to lose the tour," he said.
"Maybe."
"You're going to lose about half your year and you're going to have to call Ridgeline yourself tomorrow, and they're going to be so nice to you on the phone."
"Yeah."
"What do you want me to have done?" Holt said, and it came out of him with an edge on it that Deacon had never once heard, in fifteen years, at any hour, in any hallway. "Tell me the thing. Nine years ago. What was I supposed to have written in that margin?"
"Her name first."
Holt stared at him.
"It's a box," he said.
"Yeah," Deacon said. "It's a box."
He asked for the original on his way out and Holt got it for him without one second of hesitation, which told Deacon everything he was ever going to know about how Holt had understood the last nine years.
It came out of the fireproof cabinet behind the door in about forty seconds.
Blue backer, ribbon down the side, both their signatures on page fourteen, hers with a loop on the S that she had spent five years learning to make.
Deacon carried it down the hall past nine framed covers of his own face.
Marlene was standing up behind the desk. She had heard. The whole floor had heard, the way a floor does.
"Do you want me to call your wife?" she said.
She said it the way she had said it four hundred times, as a job, as a line item, no edge on it at all, and Deacon stood there in a hallway holding a blue folder and understood that Marlene had been the person who called Savannah for nine years, and that his own answer, every single time, had been yeah, have Marlene do it.
"No," he said. "Marlene."
"Sir."
"I'm sorry."
She looked at him. Then she sat down and picked up her phone, because there was a Boston promoter at two, and there still would be.
He drove the folder to a courier office on Charlotte and sent it to Odette Callahan in Berry Hill, signature required.
He did not put a letter in it.
He thought about it in the parking lot for a good while, and everything he came up with was either an explanation or a request, and there was no version of it that wasn't him asking to be seen doing it.
So he put the folder in a cardboard mailer and wrote the address and left the sender line blank, and the girl at the counter said, "Do you want a return on this?"
"No, ma'am."
The rehearsal room was booked through the end of the month under his own name, not the production's, and he went there at nine that night with a key and a case of water and did not tell anybody where he was.
The back half of the set was eight songs.
He got the arrangement sheets out and spread them across the floor in order, and then he got the stems up on the laptop Corrigan's people had left, and he sat on the edge of the riser and listened to the summer.
Ridgeline's note, in July, had been two sentences long. The stacked harmony reads as a duo. Recommend we thin it.
He had not fought it. He had not even thought about it.
He had sat in a room with an engineer for two afternoons and they had pulled the third-above line out of six songs and replaced it, where the arrangement went thin, with a doubled lead and a pad.
It had taken about nine hours total. He remembered thinking it sounded bigger.
It did sound bigger. It sounded like one man in a field.
Deacon put the parts back.
He did it by hand, on paper, in pencil, because he could not read a screen for that long. Eight songs. He wrote the second voice back in where it had been, and then, on four of them, he wrote it in where it had never been at all, in places the songs had been asking for it since the Harpeth House.
He wrote it in her key. He knew her range better than he knew his own — the bottom of it, where she never went, because there had always been a baritone parked in it.
He had not learned it off a tuner. He had learned it off nine years of it arriving at his left ear from two feet away, every night, close enough that he got some of it in his own jaw.
On three of them he took himself out entirely and left eight bars empty.
He could not sing it. He tried, in falsetto, into his phone, standing in the middle of an empty room at midnight, and it was one of the worst sounds he had ever made, and he listened back to it twice anyway to check the shape.
It was not that he could not get up there.
It was that he knew exactly what it was supposed to sound like from eight inches off his left shoulder, coming up through the side of his own head before it ever got to his ear, and there was no version of that available to a man alone in a rented room with a telephone.
At one in the morning he pulled two mic stands out of the case rack and set them up at the front of the riser, two feet apart, because that was the distance, and she had defended it against three directors, and he had let her, and he had never once in nine years asked her why.
He knew why. Everybody who had ever bought a ticket knew why.
Two feet is not a staging note. Two feet is close enough to feel the heat come off somebody without touching them, and to hear the breath they take before a line, and to come in with them instead of after them.
It is a body's distance. He had stood in it four nights a week for nine years and had thought of it, when he thought of it at all, as a mark on a floor.
He sat down on the riser between them.
The gap was right in front of him at about eye level, with nothing in it, and he looked at it a while the way a man looks at an empty chair.
There was nobody to call. That was the whole shape of the night, and it took him until about two to get all the way around it.
He could not call her. Not with this. Calling her with this would make it a thing he did at her, and she would hear that in about four seconds, because she heard everything in about four seconds, and she would be right.
He picked the phone up anyway at ten past two and got as far as her name on the screen and put it face down on the riser.
Then he picked it up again, and the second name his thumb went to, out of fifteen years of pure animal habit, before he had one conscious thought about it, was Holt's.
Deacon sat in a rented room with two microphones standing two feet apart and laughed at that, out loud, alone, for a good while.
Then he turned the lights off in the room and went home to a house with the kitchen light already on, because he was the one who left it on, and there had never been anybody else in that house who did.
He had been in it by himself since March. Fifty-some nights. He had gone on sleeping on his own side of the bed the entire time, which he had not decided to do and had not noticed until about the fourth night, and had gone on doing anyway.
He stood at the sink and drank a glass of water he did not want, because it was something to do with his hands.
Then he went up and lay down on his side of it, with the other side made up because he was the one who made it, and he thought about what he had spent that day and understood that it had not bought him one thing, and was not supposed to.