Chapter 4
VIRGIL KILGORE: I've got one talent and it isn't singing. I can walk into a room and tell you inside of a second what everybody in it needs from me. That's a useful thing. It's also the reason I've got about four people in my life who know me and about nine thousand who love me.
Lonnie came to Bess's studio, which told her everything.
In fifteen years Lonnie Barlow had never once come to a room he wasn't required to be in. He turned up on a Tuesday afternoon in November in a coat that cost more than the console and stood in the doorway of the live room, and Bess looked at him the way you look at a snake in a garage.
"Sweetheart," he said.
"Lonnie."
"Can I have ten minutes."
They sat in the tracking booth because it was the only place with two chairs. He didn't take the coat off.
"Wednesday," he said. "Three minutes on the carpet. One photograph, the two of you, he says something short, you don't say anything at all. Then you go in, you sit through the show, you're gone by eleven."
"No."
"Amber."
"No, Lonnie."
He nodded like she'd agreed with him. "Let me tell you what Wednesday looks like if you're not there, and then you can tell me no again and I'll go."
She didn't stop him. She has thought about that since.
"Right now the story's got two legs under it," he said.
"The wife left the premiere. The husband tried to buy the movie.
Those two things together are a story, and it will run for a year, and it'll be the frame on every piece written about either of you until one of you dies.
" He looked at his hands. "One photograph takes a leg off.
That's all it does. It doesn't fix anything, it doesn't mean anything, and I'm not asking you to feel a way about it. "
"You're asking me to lie to a camera."
"I'm asking you to stand next to your husband of fifteen years for the length of a commercial break."
"For him."
"No," Lonnie said. "For you, actually, though I know you won't hear it from me. He's fine. He'll be fine either way, and I say that as the man who's kept him fine for thirty years. It's you they've got a name for now."
She looked up.
"They do," he said. "It's not a bad one. That's what makes it stick."
"What is it?"
Lonnie stood and buttoned his coat.
"I'm not going to say it in front of you," he said. "Wednesday. Car at four."
She said no.
She said no to Lonnie in the tracking booth, and she said it again on the phone to Virgil that night in about four sentences, and he took it without a fight, which surprised her.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay?"
"You said no. That's the end of it." A pause. "For what it's worth, I told him it was a bad ask."
"You told him after he asked."
"I did." He breathed out. "Yeah. I did."
She almost softened right there. It was the first true thing he'd said in three weeks — no defense in it, no wounded music. She held onto the counter in Bess's kitchen and did not soften.
"Goodnight, Virgil."
"Amber."
"Goodnight."
Then Tuesday afternoon he went off script.
He was doing a radio thing, one of the syndicated morning-show sit-downs they tape in the afternoon, and it was supposed to be about the tour dates. Somebody's producer put the buy-back to him anyway, at the end, in the tone people use when they think they're being brave.
Bess sent her the clip at four thirty. Forty seconds.
Virgil looked terrible. He looked like a man who hadn't slept, which she happened to know he hadn't, because Lonnie's office had asked her at the end of October if she could talk to his doctor.
"Yeah, that was me," he said. "That happened. I'd have paid a lot more, too."
The host started to move on.
"It wasn't about the movie," Virgil said.
"Everybody's got it that I'm embarrassed of something in there.
I'm not. It's a good movie, it's a better one than I deserve, and Julia Novak's the real thing.
" He stopped. He was looking somewhere off to the left, at nothing.
"There's just a person that movie hurt. That's all it was.
I wanted to take it back and you can't take things back, and I made it worse, and I'd appreciate it if everybody would quit guessing about her. "
Then he said, "Anyway. Fort Worth is on sale Friday," and laughed at himself, badly, and the host let him off the hook.
Amber watched it four times.
It wasn't good. That was what got her. It wasn't a statement; you could hear him building it in his mouth as he went and it had a wobble in the middle and he'd said a person because he couldn't make himself say my wife on the radio.
Nobody had written it. Nobody had approved it. Lonnie would have opened a vein.
He had gotten one thing right, by accident, at the end: quit guessing about her.
She sat in Bess's kitchen with her phone in her hand for a long time.
Then she called the car service herself and moved the pickup to the studio.
The dress was black and she'd had it four years and it still fit, which she took as a personal victory.
The carpet is not what it looks like on television. It is a chute — a long roped lane with risers on one side and a wall of photographers at the end, and it moves in stops and starts, and everybody in it is cold. Amber had done it maybe a dozen times in fifteen years and had never once enjoyed it.
Virgil was waiting at the head of it, and when he saw her his whole face went.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey."
"You came."
"Don't make a thing of it."
"I'm making a small thing of it."
"Virgil."
"Okay." He put his hand out and she looked at it and then took it, and they went.
It happened forty feet in.
They stopped for the first bank of photographers, and he stepped in beside her and put his hand at the small of her back — not low, not showy, the exact place he had put it since she was twenty-five years old, the flat of his palm at the base of her spine with his thumb hooked slightly.
And her body went where it goes.
She felt it happen — the drop of her shoulders, the quarter turn in toward him, the way her weight shifted onto the hip nearest his. Fifteen years of a hand in one place. Her body did it before her head got a vote, and by the time her head got a vote the shutters were already going.
She kept her face on. She had a good face for these. But she stood there in the light with her spine humming and thought, clearly and with real fury: that isn't fair.
"Three minutes," she said, through her teeth, smiling.
"Three minutes," he said.
It was seven.
The rest of it was work.
That is the part nobody outside understands about being married to somebody like Virgil.
The carpet, the seat-fillers, the two hours of a show he'd seen thirty times, the after-party in the Whetstone suite with the low lamps and the good bourbon and a hundred people who all wanted ninety seconds — all of it is a shift. You clock in. You clock out.
Inside, a girl of about twenty-six won something.
Amber didn't catch the category. She caught the walk up, and the shaking hands, and the paper the girl didn't need and read from anyway, and then the girl got to the end of her list and looked out into the dark and said:
"And Virgil Kilgore. I don't know you, sir. But I watched that movie about you three weeks ago and I called my mama at midnight and told her I wasn't quitting."
The room went up.
And the camera — because of course it did, because that is the entire job of a camera at that show — came off the girl and found row eight, and put Virgil Kilgore's face on nine million television sets, and Virgil did the thing where he holds a hand up and shakes his head like it's too much.
And it put Amber Galloway on nine million television sets too, because she was sitting next to him, and she had two seconds' warning, and she smiled.
She has seen the clip since. She looks fine in it. She looks like a woman who is happy for her husband. Nobody watching that broadcast would have seen anything at all, and that is a skill, and she acquired it the way you acquire any skill, which is by doing it several thousand times.
What she was thinking, in the two seconds, was: I watched that movie about you.
Not I watched that movie. About you.
The lights came back and the show went on and Virgil leaned over and said, "Who is that?"
"I don't know."
"She's good. Find out who that is."
"Okay," Amber said, and wrote it down in her phone, because that is also what she does.
And they were good at it. God, they were good at it.
They had a whole language for it. He would say how we doing and she would say a number between one and ten and he would move the night accordingly.
Twice she caught somebody's name for him half a second before he needed it.
Once he steered a man away from her with a hand on the man's shoulder and a joke so smooth the man went off thinking he'd won something.
At about ten she went down the hall at the Whetstone suite to find a bathroom, and there were two women at the end of it by the ice machine, one of them holding both their drinks.
She heard four words. She has never been able to decide whether she heard them right.
"— no, but that's the —"
Then the one facing her saw her and her face did something, and the other one turned around, and both of them lit up like a Christmas window.
"Amber! Honey!"
"Hi," Amber said.
They were lovely. They were so lovely. One of them held her hand in both of hers and said she looked wonderful and asked how the barn was coming and said her husband still talks about the Fort Worth show in 2019.
Amber said thank you. Amber asked after somebody's daughter at school in Knoxville.
Then they went back in, and she went on down the hall, and stood in a bathroom stall at an after-party with her hand flat on the wall.
That's the —
That's the what.
Lonnie had said they've got a name for you now and refused to give it to her, and she had spent a week not thinking about it on purpose, and here it was, four words in a hallway with the ending sanded off.