Chapter 3
VIRGIL KILGORE: You want to know what nineteen years does to a man? It makes him polite. That's all. I was the politest failure in the state of Tennessee. I said thank you to everybody who ever told me no, and I meant it, and I hated all of them.
She slept on Bess's couch for four nights and did not once change out of what she'd worn the day before.
She noticed it on the third morning, sitting up with the quilt still over her legs and the same sweater on she'd put on Tuesday, and she thought about it for a while and then didn't do anything about it.
There was a duffel by the door with two shirts in it.
She had packed it at six in the morning on Wednesday while Virgil was asleep upstairs, moving through her own bedroom like a burglar, and she had picked two shirts because picking more than two would have meant something.
Bess made coffee at five thirty every day of her life and did not make a thing of Amber being there. That was the gift. No hovering, no soft voice. She banged around the kitchen the way she banged around the kitchen and left the pot on the warmer and went to work.
The fourth morning she sat down on the arm of the couch instead.
"You going out to the farm today?"
"No."
"You said that yesterday."
"I did."
Bess drank her coffee. "You want me to say the thing or you want me to not say the thing."
"Not."
"Okay," Bess said, and got up, and at the door she said it anyway. "You've got that look on you. The one from when we were young. Like you're building the case for why it's fine."
"It's four days, Bess."
"I know how long it's been," Bess said, and left.
Signal ran it Thursday morning. Two paragraphs, in the round-up column, under a photograph of the step-and-repeat.
KILGORE'S WIFE EXITS PREMIERE
It was not even wrong, which was somehow worse. It said she had left the Cranford ahead of her husband and had not been seen at the after-party at the Whetstone suite, and that the couple had been married fifteen years, and that Amber Galloway is credited on the film for archival work.
Credited on the film for archival work.
She read it twice and then put the phone face down on Bess's coffee table and went and stood in the kitchen for a minute.
The phone did what phones do. By ten it had forty-one messages on it.
Not one of them was unkind. She would think about that for a long time afterward.
Not one person came at her sideways. A woman she'd sat next to at a dozen straight benefit dinners sent three paragraphs about how strong Amber was.
Somebody's wife sent a heart. A publisher she barely knew wrote, thinking of you both, whatever this is.
Whatever this is.
The kindness was the worst of it. If they had been vicious she could have gotten angry, and anger she could use. Instead she got two dozen women being tender at her, and under every single message was the same thing, unsaid and perfectly audible.
We're not surprised.
They had all been watching for fifteen years.
They had all seen the same arithmetic she refused to do.
She had been walking through those rooms since she was twenty-six thinking she was a woman with a private life, and it turned out she had been a small ongoing story the entire time, and now the story had a second act and everyone was being very gracious about it.
She answered none of them.
At noon her mother called. Amber looked at the screen until it stopped.
Nadine left a voicemail, which she has done perhaps six times in her life, because she considers them a waste of a phone.
"It's your mother. The Sowell girl showed me a thing on the computer about you and Virgil. I'm not going to ask you about it." A pause long enough that Amber thought it had cut off. "The furnace is doing that noise again. Don't send anybody. All right."
That was the whole message. Nineteen seconds.
Amber sat on the edge of Bess's couch and listened to it twice, and the second time she caught the thing she'd missed — that her mother had said you and Virgil, in that order, which was not the order Nadine Galloway had used for fifteen years. It had always been Virgil and you.
She thought about calling back. She got as far as the screen.
Then she thought about what her mother would say if she cried on the phone, which is nothing, which is the worst available response, and she put the phone down on the cushion and went and took a shower instead.
Opal Waller's office was above a bakery on the east side and smelled like it, which Amber decided was either very good lawyering or a complete accident.
Opal was fifty-seven and had the calmest hands Amber had ever seen on a person. She listened to the whole thing without writing anything down. When Amber finished she was quiet for a second.
"Okay," Opal said. "What do you want?"
"I don't know what my options are."
"That's not what I asked."
"I know."
"People come in here and ask me what they're owed," Opal said.
"I can tell you what you're owed. It's not complicated and it's a big number and it'll take fourteen months.
I'd rather ask the other question first, because I've watched a lot of women get exactly what they were owed and find out it wasn't the thing they were after. "
Amber looked at the window. There was a pigeon on the sill doing nothing.
"I want him to have known," she said.
"Say more."
"Not to have — " She stopped and started over.
"Everybody keeps asking me if I'm okay about the movie.
It's not the movie. He sat with a woman for two years and told her things he has never said to me.
Not one thing. Not the shed, not the parking lot, not any of it.
And he'd have told me they were nothing.
He'd have said, that's just talk, honey. And then he put it in a movie."
Opal nodded slowly.
"So I want him to have known," Amber said. "That's not a thing you can get me."
"No," Opal said. "It isn't."
"Then I don't know what I'm doing here."
"You're doing the sensible thing, which is finding out where the exits are before you need one." Opal uncapped a pen at last. "Let me ask you three questions and then you can go home or to your friend's couch or wherever you're going, and you don't have to do a single thing about any of it."
She asked three questions. Amber answered them.
At the door Opal said, "One piece of advice you didn't ask for."
"Go ahead."
"He's going to do something large in the next week or two.
They always do." She said it without any edge at all.
"It's going to be the biggest thing he's ever done and it's going to cost a fortune and it will not have anything to do with what you just told me.
Try to remember that isn't a failure of love.
It's a failure of imagination. It'll still be hell to watch. "
It took him five days.
Bess found it first, on her phone at the studio, and turned the screen around. It was already everywhere by then.
Kilgore camp approached Northfield with an eight-figure offer to withdraw KILGORE from release, per two people with knowledge. Northfield declined. A representative for Kilgore did not respond.
Amber read it standing in the middle of the live room at Cleves Street with a set of headphones in her hand.
"Eight figures," Bess said.
"Yes."
"He tried to buy the movie."
"Yes."
"Amber."
"I know."
"That is the single dumbest —"
"I know, Bess."
She put the headphones down on the console because her hands had started to do something she didn't like. She thought about Opal Waller saying it will not have anything to do with what you just told me, and about how she had walked out of that office half insulted on his behalf.
It was worse than dumb. That was what nobody was going to say out loud.
It was worse than dumb because of what it announced.
He had gone to a distributor with a number, which meant a room full of people now knew that Virgil Kilgore wanted this film gone, and the only reason a man wants a film gone is that there is something in it.
By Friday the story was not the movie cut his wife out. The story was what's in the movie.
He had taken a private humiliation and paid eight figures to make it a public one.
And he'd have done it, she knew, at about four in the morning. He'd have been up all night and gotten to the hour when he couldn't stand being a man who couldn't fix a thing, and he'd have picked up the phone. And the whole time he was doing it he'd have been thinking about her face.
Her phone rang. Virgil.
She let it go.
It rang again twenty seconds later, which was how he had always called her, and she watched the screen and did not touch it, and then a text came up.
I know. I know. I wasn't thinking straight. Tell me what to do and I'll do it
She looked at that for a long time.
Then she wrote: You never asked me what I wanted before you did it.
The three dots came up right away. They went for a while. Then they stopped. Then they came back, went for a while, and stopped again.
Nothing came.
Bess put her to work, which was the kindest thing anybody did that week.
Not real work. Bess had a folk duo in on Wednesday and she stuck Amber in the corner of the control room with a legal pad and had her write down takes, which is a job for a nineteen-year-old and which they both knew was made up.
Amber did it anyway. Take four, false start. Take five, complete, good chorus. Take six, singer flat on the turn. It was restful in a way she hadn't expected, sitting in a dark room being useful about something that had nothing to do with her.
At about four the duo went out for food and the room emptied and Bess went to make a call.
There was a guitar on a stand by the door. There is always a guitar on a stand by the door. This one was a beat-to-hell dreadnought with a pickguard worn through in a crescent, and Amber had been looking at it sideways for two hours.
She got up and picked it up and sat down on the arm of the couch with it.
It was in tune, roughly. She put her left hand where it goes.
And nothing happened.