CHAPTER THIRTEEN
TOWNES
Beau Whitaker called me himself instead of letting his manager do it, which I appreciated more than I let on, because it meant he thought I deserved to hear it straight instead of secondhand.
"I'm not walking away because I think less of you as a writer," he said.
"I want to be clear about that. I still think 'The Light She Left On' is one of the best things anybody's written in this town in five years.
But my people are nervous about the story around you right now, the pulled song, the kill fee, all of it.
They think it makes me look like I'm hitching to something unstable. "
"I understand," I said, and I did, even though it cost something to say it evenly instead of arguing.
"For what it's worth," Beau said, "if things settle down on your end, I'd still want to work with you. That's not me being polite. That's me telling you the truth."
I thanked him and hung up, and I sat with the loss for a while before I let myself feel anything about it, because I'd learned something in the last month about the difference between a feeling that needed acting on and a feeling that just needed sitting with.
I lost more that month than the Whitaker deal.
Two other artists who'd been circling, interested in working with the guy who wrote "The Light She Left On," quietly stopped calling.
A magazine profile that had been in the works for months got shelved without explanation, though I could guess at the reason well enough.
Deb told me, without dressing it up, that my stock in town had taken a real hit, that pulling a song after a signed deal was the kind of thing that made people nervous about betting on you, no matter how good the work was.
I found, to my own surprise, that none of it hollowed me out the way I would have expected six months earlier.
There was a version of me, the one who'd spent years standing behind other men with a guitar telling himself he didn't care about recognition, who would have been devastated by this exact stretch of professional setbacks.
That version of me had wanted, more than almost anything, to be the guy whose name people looked for on the credits.
I still wanted that. I wasn't going to pretend the wanting had disappeared just because I'd made a hard choice.
But something else had shifted underneath it, something that made the professional cost feel like a fact instead of a catastrophe.
I'd lost income, and a couple of relationships that had taken years to build, and probably some reputation that would take longer than a season to rebuild.
I hadn't lost the thing that actually scared me, which was the possibility that I might spend the rest of my life being a man who was very good at writing about love and very bad at practicing it.
Rhett called to check on me a week after Beau's call, and I told him about the fallout, matter-of-fact, and he was quiet for a second on the line.
"You could have kept the song and kept all of it," he said. "You know that, right? Nobody would have known. You'd have Vega's deal, you'd probably still have Whitaker's project, you'd be sitting on top of the best year of your career."
"I know," I said.
"So why'd you actually do it? I know what you told me. I want to know if there's more underneath it."
I thought about that for a long moment, because it deserved a real answer instead of a quick one.
"Because I spent years telling myself craft was the same thing as permission," I said.
"If I wrote it well enough, changed it enough, made it universal enough, I told myself that made it mine to use.
I don't believe that anymore. Larkin trusted me with something because I was her husband.
She never trusted me with it as a songwriter looking for material.
Those are two different men, and I let the second one eat the first one alive without ever noticing it happening. "
"That's a hell of a thing to notice," Rhett said. "Most people never do."
"I didn't notice it on my own," I said. "She had to leave for me to see it."
I went back to work that week, not on anything Larkin-shaped, deliberately, a batch of songs for a newer artist about things that had nothing to do with my own marriage, and I found the writing came slower without the private well I'd been drawing from for the last year, thinner in some places, less immediately gripping.
Deb noticed too, gently, asking if I had anything with a little more edge to it, a little more of whatever had made the last two so powerful.
I told her I was working on it, and I meant something different by that than she understood, because the thing I was actually working on wasn't a song at all. It was learning how to be a person whose best material didn't come at somebody else's expense.
I spent an evening that week going through old session recordings, demos I'd never released, songs I'd written years earlier before Larkin and I were even married, back when I had nothing to draw from except imagination and other people's stories and whatever I could observe from a respectful distance.
Some of it was rougher than what I wrote now, less assured, but there was an honesty in it that had nothing to do with confession, a different kind of true, built out of empathy and craft instead of theft.
I'd forgotten I used to be able to write that way.
Somewhere in the years of success, I'd let the easier well take over, the one that didn't require imagining anybody else's interior life because I already had a woman across the table willing to hand hers over freely, trusting me not to misuse it.
I had misused it anyway, repeatedly, telling myself each time that this instance was different, smaller, more justified than the last.
I called my mother that week, something I didn't do often enough, and she asked how things were going, careful in the way she'd been careful with me since word had clearly reached her that something was wrong, though I hadn't told her the details and didn't plan to.
"I raised you to believe your songs could say anything," she said, echoing something she'd apparently already told Larkin, though I didn't know that yet.
"I don't think I ever taught you that some things aren't yours to say.
That's on me, maybe, as much as it's on you.
I used to love hearing you turn our family stories into songs when you were a teenager.
I never thought about whether everybody in those stories wanted to be turned into one. "
Her words sat with me longer than I expected.
I thought about all the stories I'd absorbed over a lifetime of being the kind of person who listened more closely than most, my mother's stories, my father's, friends', strangers' at bars late at night, and I understood, plainly, that I had never once, in all those years, developed the habit of asking whether the story belonged to me to tell.
I had simply assumed that noticing something gave me the right to use it, the same unexamined assumption that had led me, eventually, to do the same thing to my own wife without ever fully registering the line I was crossing.
I didn't have an answer for my mother that satisfied either of us completely, and we let the conversation move on to other things, but I carried the exchange with me for days afterward, turning it over the way I used to turn over an unfinished lyric, except this time there was no craft solution waiting at the end of it.
Just the slow, uncomfortable work of learning to ask permission for something I'd spent my whole life taking for granted.