Chapter 12
JULIA NOVAK (off camera): Is there anybody who knows all of it?
VIRGIL KILGORE: All of what?
JULIA NOVAK (off camera): Where it came from. The whole run of it.
VIRGIL KILGORE: (pause) Sure. Yeah. There's somebody.
JULIA NOVAK (off camera): Who?
VIRGIL KILGORE: You want to talk about ninety-eight or not?
Bess sent it without comment, which is how Bess sends things.
A listing. IN CONVERSATION: JULIA NOVAK — KILGORE. Corliss Hall, Thursday 7pm. Free, ticketed.
Amber looked at it on her phone in a rented kitchen in Inglewood for about four minutes.
Then she went on the website and put in her name — her actual name, because it did not occur to her until afterward that she could have used another one — and a ticket came back to her email in nine seconds with a bar code on it.
She did not tell Bess she was going. She did not tell Opal. She sure as hell did not tell Virgil.
Corliss Hall seats about two hundred and it was maybe two-thirds full: a film program, some faculty, forty people who had driven in.
Amber sat in the second-to-last row on the aisle with her coat on.
Nobody looked at her. That surprised her and then stopped surprising her. Nobody in that room had any reason to know what she looked like; she had been in the film for four seconds as a card with a coffee ring on it.
Julia Novak came out in the same washed-out black jacket. She sat in a chair that was too big for her and answered questions for fifty minutes.
She was good. Amber had expected to hate that and did not, in the end, get to.
She talked about the empty chairs and why she opened on them.
She talked about the four hundred hours and about how you cut four hundred hours, which is that you keep asking what the film is about until the answer stops changing.
She was asked about access and said access is the whole job and the whole danger, and that a man who lets you film him for two years is not being generous, he is running an experiment on himself and you are the instrument.
At about forty minutes a girl in the third row asked the question.
"There's a lot in the film about him being alone," she said. "But he's married. And she's barely — I mean, she's not really in it. Was that a choice?"
The room went a little quiet, the way rooms do.
Amber sat very still in the second-to-last row.
Julia took a second. Then she said:
"That's a fair question and I don't have a good answer for you.
I asked to interview her and I was told she didn't want to participate.
I took that at face value, and then I built the film around the hole where she should have been, and I told myself the hole was the point.
" She shifted in the chair. "I've thought about it a lot since October.
I think I made a good film. I also think I made it out of one thing I never checked. "
A man in a corduroy jacket near the front put his hand up next.
"Do you like him?"
The room laughed a little. Julia didn't.
"That's the best question I've had on this whole tour," she said.
"Yes. Enormously. He's the warmest man I've ever pointed a camera at and I'd have dinner with him tomorrow.
" She rubbed her eye with the back of her wrist. "And I've thought a lot about whether that's a problem with the film, and I've decided it isn't, because liking somebody is not the same as being convinced by them.
There's a whole hour of that movie where I like him very much and don't believe a word. "
"Which hour?"
"I'm not going to tell you that," Julia said, "because then you'd watch for it."
Somebody else put a hand up and asked about the music clearances.
Amber sat there with her heart going like a bird in a sack.
She waited.
The thing empties out slowly — the faculty first, then the students in a clump, then the four people who want to say something to the filmmaker and are working up to it. Julia stood at the front of the room and let all four of them talk to her.
Amber stayed in her seat with her coat on and her hands in her pockets.
At about ten to nine the last of them left, and a kid started stacking the front row of chairs, and Julia turned around to get her bag off the table and saw a woman standing halfway up the aisle.
She went white.
"Oh," she said.
"Hi, Julia."
"Oh God. Okay." Julia put the bag down. She had one hand up, not defensively, more like a person catching her balance. "Okay. Hi. Are you — I'm going to ask a stupid question. Are you here to yell at me?"
"No."
"You'd be within your rights."
"I've got two questions," Amber said. "That's all. And then I'll go and I won't do this to you again."
Julia looked at the kid stacking chairs.
"Hey," she called. "Can you give us the room for ten minutes?"
The kid left. The door clicked. There were two hundred empty seats and the two of them.
Amber came down the aisle and stood at the front, and did not sit down, and neither did Julia.
"First one," she said. "Did anything happen between you and my husband?"
"No."
It came back instantly. No pause, no breath, no arrangement of a face.
"Nothing," Julia said. "Not once, not close to it, not a moment.
He never said a thing to me that he wouldn't have said with a crew in the room, because there usually was one.
" She met Amber's eyes and held it. "I'm thirty-eight years old and I've made two other films about men and I know exactly what you're asking me and the answer is no.
If you want, I'll say it in an email so you've got it in writing. "
"I don't want it in writing."
"Okay."
Amber discovered she had not planned anything past that.
She had carried that question for three and a half months.
She had carried it into a kitchen at one in the morning in October and been refused an answer, and she had carried it up the stairs and into her own bed and out to the barn, and there had been a version of this in her head — she can admit it now — where the answer was yes and something in her got to finally, cleanly, come apart.
"Are you all right?" Julia said.
"No."
"Do you want to sit down?"
"No." Amber put her hand on the back of a chair. "Second question. She asked twice, didn't she."
Julia's face did something.
"You know about the emails," she said.
"I found them in a box in my barn in December."
"Jesus."
"Answer it."
"Twice," Julia said. "March of last year and March of this year, twelve days before we locked. Both times in writing, both times to Barlow's office, and both times I was told you'd been asked and had said no."
"And you believed it."
"Yes." Julia did not flinch off it. "That's the part I'm not going to defend.
That's the whole thing I got wrong. I asked the manager, and the manager said no, and I let a man's employee tell me what his wife wanted.
" Her jaw tightened. "I've been doing this fifteen years.
I know better than that. I knew better than that at the time and I let it go because it was easier, and because the film was working, and because I had four hundred hours and a delivery date. "
Amber nodded slowly.
"I'm sorry," Julia said. "For that. Only for that. I'm not going to stand here and apologize for the film, because I don't think it's a bad film and I don't think you think so either."
"It's a very good film," Amber said.
"Yeah," said Julia. "That's the problem, isn't it."
Amber stood there with her hand on the back of a chair.
"Can I tell you something?" Julia said. "You didn't ask for it and you can tell me to stop."
"Go ahead."
"He talked about you constantly."
The room did a strange thing. It got very close in.
"Constantly," Julia said. "For two years. In cars. Waiting on light. Walking out to the barn. In a Waffle House in Dickson at two in the morning while my guy was asleep in the booth. Every single day, for two years, off camera."
"About what?"
"Everything. You picked the house. You caught a date wrong on something and he'd been arguing with you about it for a week.
You'd said something at a dinner that had made him laugh so hard he had to leave.
He told me about a motel in Owensboro at least three times.
" Julia's mouth moved. "He told me you're the only person he's ever met who says the true thing about a song.
He said it in the driveway with a coffee in his hand and I stood there like an idiot wishing my camera was up. "
Amber did not say anything.
"And every time I put a camera in front of him and said tell me about your wife, he'd give me twelve words and change the subject.
" Julia shook her head. "Every time. Two years.
I have got — I could show you — I have got maybe fourteen separate attempts on tape and they are the only fourteen times in four hundred hours that Virgil Kilgore is bad on camera.
He goes flat. He gets vague. He says she's the smartest person I know like a man reading a card and then he asks if we can get a coffee. "
"Why," Amber said. Her voice came out wrong.
"I thought he was protecting you," Julia said. "That's what I put on it. I thought, here's a man who's given away every other thing about himself and he's holding one back, and that's a good man, and I let it alone."
"And now?"
Julia looked at her.
"Now I think he was protecting himself," she said.
There it was.
Amber found that she had sat down after all, in the front row, in her coat, without deciding to.
"Say the rest of it," she said.
"I don't know if I've got the right —"
"Julia."
Julia sat down two seats away, sideways, with her elbows on her knees.
"He's the most open man I have ever filmed," she said.
"It's not fake. He told me about his father and the hat, and he told me things about his mother I cut because they were nobody's business, and he cried twice and did not once ask me to stop rolling.
That's not a performance. He'd tell a stranger anything. "
"I know."