Chapter 12 #2
"But that's exactly it. It's free." She turned her hands over.
"It costs him nothing. I'm a woman with a camera who's going to fly home.
There's no consequence in me. He can hand me the worst thing he's ever felt and I'll put it in a movie and he'll never have to sit across a breakfast table from me the next morning and be somebody who said it. "
Amber sat in the front row of Corliss Hall and looked at the floor.
"You're the only person in his life who could actually cost him something," Julia said. "So you're the one person he's never told."
She had prepared herself for a great many things and she had not prepared herself for this.
She had wanted — she is honest about it — she had wanted the answer to be a woman.
She had wanted, for three and a half months, some version where a man is weak in the ordinary way and there is a person to be angry at and a shape to the story that anybody in Nashville would understand in one sentence.
What she had instead was a man who had spent two years telling a stranger in a Waffle House in Dickson that his wife was the only person who says the true thing about a song.
It was smaller than an affair. So much smaller, and it went so much further down.
"It's not love, is it," Amber said.
"What?"
"Him not telling me. Everybody's going to want it to be love. He was protecting her, he didn't want to burden her." She heard her own voice go flat and level, which is what it does. "It isn't. It's just that I'm the expensive one."
Julia didn't answer, which was the correct answer.
Amber sat there for a while.
And something came loose. Not relief; she would not call it relief for another two months.
But the floor she had been standing on since October — I am a woman whose husband gave two years of himself to somebody else — went out from under her and there was different floor underneath it, closer down and harder, and it held.
He had not given it to Julia Novak.
He had spent two years unable to say it out loud to anybody who was going to still be in the kitchen in the morning.
That was not a betrayal she was outside of. That was a thing she had been living in the middle of for fifteen years without a name for it, and now she had the name.
"I want to say one more thing," Julia said, "and then I'll leave you alone forever, which I mean sincerely."
"Go on."
"I can get you into the film."
Amber looked up.
"Not the bonus thing," Julia said quickly.
"I know about the bonus thing and I think it's insulting, and I said so, and I got told it wasn't my call.
" She sat forward. "I mean the film. It's got a theatrical window and then it sits there for twenty years.
There's a version where I go back in and re-cut the middle third.
I'd shoot you myself, one camera, and I'd put the tour back and I'd take out the sixty-four-minute section or reframe it, and Northfield would scream about it and then they'd do it, because right now they've got a picture with a hole in it and a story in the trades about a man who tried to buy it back. "
She was leaning forward with her hands out. She meant every word.
"I'd fight for that," Julia said. "I'd fight hard. I owe you that and I'd like to do it."
Amber sat in the front row and considered it honestly, for about ninety seconds, because it was honestly meant.
Then she said, "No."
"Amber —"
"No, and I want to tell you why, because you asked me a fair question and you'll get a real answer.
" She stood up and put her hands in her pockets.
"That film exists. It played in a theater on the thirteenth of October in front of three hundred people who all know me.
My husband watched it in June and had three notes and none of them were about his wife.
You cannot un-happen any of that. All you can do is go back in and add me, later, after, because somebody complained. "
"That's not what it would be."
"It's exactly what it would be," Amber said. "It's another twelve minutes. It's a bigger twelve minutes."
Julia sat back.
"I'm not going to be the correction," Amber said. "I've spent three months being the thing that got left out. I'm not going to spend the next twenty years being the thing that got put back in."
The room was quiet.
"Okay," Julia said. "Okay. That's — yeah."
"I'd like the film to stay exactly as it is."
"Can I ask why?"
Amber thought about it.
"Because it's honest," she said. "It's the most honest thing anybody's ever made about my marriage and nobody involved meant it that way. Leave it."
Julia walked her out because there was no other way to get to the street.
They went down the corridor past the flyers and the vending machines, and neither of them said anything until the doors.
"For what it's worth," Julia said, "and it's worth nothing —"
"Say it anyway."
"I've spent fifteen years getting people to tell me things.
It's the only thing I'm good at." She pulled her jacket closed.
"I've never once had a subject I couldn't get to the bottom of.
He's the only one. And I want you to know it isn't because he's shallow.
It's because there's one door in that man and it's not in the room I was standing in. "
Amber nodded.
"Goodbye, Julia," she said.
"Goodbye."
The garage on Twenty-First is the kind with the low ceiling and the yellow paint, and her truck was on the third level, and she got in and did not start it.
She sat there with her hands in her lap.
Nothing happened. Nothing had ever happened. Three and a half months of a question and the answer was nothing, and there was nowhere to put any of it, and no one had done anything to her that a person in her world would recognize as being done.
She thought: I could go home tonight.
She turned the thought over and looked at it from underneath, which is a thing she had gotten much better at since October.
She could. She could drive to Cheatham County right now and tell him what Julia Novak said in an empty lecture hall, and he would break — he would absolutely break, he'd go to pieces, and it would be real.
And then, she thought, he would probably say no.
That was four days old and she had not got used to it. Eighteen inches away in a dead man's spare room with the ice on the window, and her husband had taken her by the wrists and declined her, and given a reason she could not get around. You'd get in the truck in the morning and it wouldn't count.
So it would not even be that. She would drive out there with a thing Julia Novak told her, and hand it to him, and he would refuse to take it, and she would be in her own truck by eleven with nowhere to put any of it.
Because he still would not have said it.
That was the whole thing. Julia Novak had said it.
Julia Novak had handed her, in a rented hall, the single truest sentence about her own marriage that anybody had ever said out loud, and Amber's husband had spent two years mumbling it into car windows to a woman with a camera.
She started the truck.
She drove down three levels of that garage and paid at the gate and pulled out onto Twenty-First, and she did not turn west.