Chapter 13
VIRGIL KILGORE: I've been lucky in one particular way and it's not the one people think. I've had the same people around me a long time. You get to a certain place and everybody around you is new and they're all auditioning. Mine aren't. Mine have seen me be nobody.
He drove himself to Twentieth Avenue, which he had not done in about nine years.
The light was off out there. It had been off since Christmas Eve, except for the twenty minutes at the end of January when he had cut the lock off it with her voice in his ear, telling him which shelf.
Barlow Management is in a brick two-story off Twentieth with a magnolia in front that Lonnie's wife planted before she died.
There are eight parking spaces. Virgil has been coming to that building for twenty-two years and there has never once been a spot he had to think about, because the one nearest the door has a sign on it, and the sign says KILGORE.
He sat and looked at the sign for a second.
Then he parked in the street.
Sherry at the front had her coat still on.
"Well, look what the — " she said, and then saw his face, and stopped, which he was sorry about. She has three kids and she has typed every contract of his life.
"Morning, Sherry."
"He's got Maddox at ten."
"He doesn't now," Virgil said, and went up the stairs.
Lonnie was at his desk with his glasses on and the trades in a stack, and he looked up and took the glasses off and smiled, and the smile was completely genuine, and that is the part Virgil would think about later in the truck.
"There he is," Lonnie said.
"Lonnie."
"Sit down. You want coffee? Sherry —"
"No."
Something in the room changed shape.
Lonnie put the glasses on the desk. He is sixty-six and he was in a gray suit at nine in the morning in his own office with nobody to see him in it, and he sat back in his chair and folded his hands and waited, the way he has waited on a hundred hard rooms.
"Say it," he said.
"I'm done."
Lonnie did not move.
"Say the rest of it," he said.
"I'm done, Lonnie. That's the whole of it. I'm not doing this with you anymore."
"After thirty years you're going to want to give me a reason."
"You know the reason."
"I do not," Lonnie said, "know the reason."
And here is the thing Virgil had driven twenty-two miles being certain about and had not once considered: Lonnie meant it.
He sat there across the desk in his suit and he was not performing bewilderment, he was not stalling, he was not doing the courteous soft-shoe he does with promoters. He was a man being told a thing had gone wrong and honestly turning over his files for it.
"Is it the picture?" Lonnie said. "Because I'll tell you right now I fought Northfield on the buy-back and I'd fight it again —"
"It's the emails."
Lonnie's face did nothing.
"You'll have to help me," he said.
"Julia Novak asked to interview my wife. Twice. In writing. And you told her Amber said no."
"Ah," Lonnie said.
He said it the way a man says ah when he finds a receipt he'd misfiled. Not caught. Located.
"That's right," he said. "March of — the first one was two springs back."
"You told her Amber refused."
"I did."
"Amber was never asked."
"No," Lonnie said. "She wasn't."
Virgil sat down after all, because his legs had started to be a problem.
"Why," he said.
Lonnie leaned forward and put his forearms on the desk, and he was not defensive, and that was the whole disease.
"Because it's a film about you," he said.
"That's not a cruel thing, Virgil, that's a fact about the object.
A hundred and eighteen minutes and a distributor and a delivery date.
You bring the wife in and you've got a marriage picture.
Novak's good — she's very good — and she'd have gone at it, and she'd have gotten it, and then there'd be a section in the middle of your documentary about a woman who had a record deal and lost it, and every review in the country would have led with that. "
"That's true, though."
"It's true and it's not the picture."
"It's my life."
"It's a hundred and eighteen minutes," Lonnie said. "Your life is not a hundred and eighteen minutes long."
Virgil sat in that chair with his hands on his knees.
"And you never said one word to me."
"You were copied."
"Lonnie."
"You were copied on both, and you never asked me a single question about either one, and I have never once in thirty years had to explain a thing to you that you didn't want explained.
" Lonnie said it without heat, without accusation, as a matter of record.
"That's the arrangement. That has been the arrangement since 1996 and it has made you a very great deal of money and it has kept a hundred bad mornings off your desk.
I'm not going to sit here and pretend it was something else. "
"You should have told her."
"I should have asked her," Lonnie said. "That's the fair version. Yes. I should have asked her and I didn't, because I knew what she'd have said."
"You said she'd say no."
"She'd have said yes," said Lonnie.
The room went very quiet.
"Come on," Lonnie said, almost gently. "You know that. That woman has been running that barn for fifteen years for nothing. Course she'd have said yes."
Virgil got up and went to the window.
Out front the magnolia had nothing on it. Down at the end of the row a girl was putting a parking ticket under somebody's wiper.
"I want to make sure I understand you," he said. "You knew she'd say yes."
"Yes."
"And you told a filmmaker my wife said no."
"Yes."
"Why."
And Lonnie Barlow, who has never in his life raised his voice, said:
"Because you'd have let her."
Virgil turned around.
"You'd have let her do it," Lonnie said, "and it would have been a fine interview, and she'd have been marvelous, because she is marvelous.
And two of those minutes would have been about the year Sawtooth dropped her, and one of them would have been about what happened to her after, and the whole country would have watched it and done the arithmetic.
And you would never have been able to be in a room with her again. "
Virgil stood at that window and did not say anything for a long time.
"So I did what I have done for thirty years," Lonnie said, behind him.
"I took the thing off your desk. You have never in your life had to look at the price of yourself, Virgil, and that is not an accident.
That is a service. I have been paid handsomely for it and I have been glad to do it and I would do it again this morning. "
Virgil ended it standing up, at the window, with his back to the room, which he regrets.
"It's done," he said. "You'll get the letter today. Culpepper's drawing it."
"All right."
"Touring goes with you." He said the words flat, one after another, because he had made himself learn them in the truck.
"The whole company's yours anyway on paper, you built it, I'm not going to fight you for a bus company.
The European routing's dead — Halvorsen won't do it with anybody else and I'm not going to ask him to.
That's spring of next year gone. I know what that costs. "
"You don't, actually," Lonnie said. "But go on."
"There's nothing else."
"There's Sherry."
Virgil shut his eyes.
"There's Sherry, and there's the two girls in the back, and there's Culpepper's whole practice, which is fourteen people and about sixty percent you.
" Lonnie's chair creaked. "I'm not saying it to move you.
I'd say it about a hardware store. I'm saying it because in thirty years you have never once asked me who the people are and today would be the day. "
"Tell me what they need."
"I'll send it."
"Send it to me. Not to anybody. Me."
"All right," Lonnie said.
He turned around at last.
Lonnie was standing behind the desk with his hands at his sides, and he looked exactly like himself, and Virgil understood that this man was going to go to lunch.
"Can I say one thing to you," Lonnie said.
"Yeah."
"I've been very fond of her."
"I know you have."
"I have. Thirty years I've watched her carry the back half of your life and never ask for anything, and I have liked her more than I have liked you, and if you told her that she'd laugh at you.
" He straightened a pen on the desk. "And I'd do it again.
I want you to understand both of those at once, because I think you're standing there waiting for me to be a snake and I'm not going to be one for you.
There's no snake, Virgil. There's just a man doing his job for a man who never once said stop. "
Virgil stood in the door.
"That's the part," he said.
"What?"
"That's the part I came here about." He had not known it until it came out of his mouth. "You've never done one thing I didn't want. Not one, in thirty years. And I've spent this whole month trying to find where you lied to me and there isn't anywhere, and so it's — "
He stopped.
"Yeah," said Lonnie, not unkindly.
"It's just me all the way down."
"That's generally how it works," Lonnie said. "Good luck, son."
He did two more things that day and told nobody about either one.
He called Northfield himself, on his own phone, from the truck on 12, and killed the twelve-minute segment.
The woman on the other end asked twice whether he'd like her to run it up the chain first. He said no.
She asked if there was messaging around it and he said there's no messaging, just don't make it, and she said all right, Mr. Kilgore, in a voice that suggested this had never happened to her.
Then he called his publicist and told her to stop.
Not to correct anything. Not to place anything. To stop — no items, no friendly paragraphs, no calls to a magazine to say a nice thing about his wife, nothing about Amber Galloway to anybody, warm or cold, ever again unless Amber Galloway said so herself.
There was a silence on the line.
"Virgil," she said, "some of what's running is good for her."
"I know it."
"There's a piece coming Thursday that's —"
"Kill it."
"She'd like it."