Chapter 18
VIRGIL KILGORE: I'd like to be understood one time before I'm done. That's it. That's the whole ambition at this point.
JULIA NOVAK (off camera): By who?
VIRGIL KILGORE: (laughs) Anybody. Whoever's still in the room.
He came at three o'clock on Friday and he did not bring anything.
That was the first thing. No flowers, no envelope, no box, nothing under his arm. He came up the walk on Marlin Avenue in a jacket with his hands empty and stood on the step.
"Come in," she said.
"Can we sit at the table?"
"Yes."
So they sat at somebody else's kitchen table, in a rented house in Inglewood, on the second of May, in the afternoon.
He put his hands flat on the wood.
"I've got it in order," he said. "I've been three weeks getting it in order and I'm going to do it in order, and I'm going to get it wrong somewhere and I'd like to just keep going."
"Okay."
"I'm not asking you for anything today."
"Virgil —"
"No, I mean it as information, not as a — " He stopped. "There's no ask at the end of this. I want you to know that going in so you're not sitting there waiting for it. There's no ask."
Amber put her hands in her lap.
"All right," she said.
"I was thirty-eight," he said, "and I was finished.
"That's not a figure of speech. I'd told my brother on the phone the week before.
There was a man in Bowling Green who sold above-ground pools and he'd offered me a thing driving a truck and I'd said yes to him.
I'd said yes. I want that on the table first because everybody's got me down as a man who never gave up and I gave up on a Tuesday in a parking lot and I was going to sell pools. "
He was not looking at her. He was looking at the table.
"And then a woman came all the way across an empty room.
"You said — I've never repeated this to anybody, not to Novak, not to anybody — you said you're better than this room and you're going to have to be told that by somebody who's got nothing to gain, so it's going to have to be me. And then you said I've got a tour."
"I remember."
"You had a record out that I'd have crawled to be on. You were twenty-five years old and you were the best thing I had ever stood in a room with, and you'd already made a thing I knew right then I was never going to make."
Amber sat very still.
"Sixteen months," Virgil said. "That's how long I stood in the wings of your show.
Every night. And every night you'd go out there and do it, and I would stand at the back left with a beer I wasn't drinking, and I would think two things at once, and I have never told one living soul what the second one was. "
The refrigerator hummed. Outside somebody's kid went past on a bicycle.
"The first one was, God, look at her."
He turned his hands over on the table.
"The second one was, I'm never going to be that."
"Virgil."
"Let me get through it."
She stopped.
"Then in 2011 the phone rang," he said. "And I sat with you in a motel outside Memphis and you cried for about four hours and I held onto you and I meant every word I said that night. Every word. You can put me on any machine they've got and I'll pass.
"And underneath it — down where a man doesn't get spoken to —"
He had to stop.
She did not help him. That is the single hardest thing she has ever done in her life and she is glad of it now.
"I was relieved," he said.
The kitchen was very quiet.
"That's it. That's the whole thing. That's what I've been carrying since December and it's what I couldn't say in this kitchen in January when you asked me what was left.
" His voice had gone somewhere else. "Your life ended on a Tuesday and something in me rolled over and went back to sleep, because it meant there was only going to be one of us, and I got to be the one.
"And then three months later I married you in a church with sixteen people in it, and I was happy, and I was glad, and both of those were true at once and I have never once looked straight at it in fifteen years."
Amber sat at that table with her hands in her lap and did not say anything for a long time.
She had known. She would think about that later. She had known since about the middle of February, in the way you know weather, and she had built a whole shape in her head for it — he was relieved — and she had thought she was ready.
She was not ready. There is a difference between knowing a thing and having a man say it in your kitchen with his hands flat on the table.
"Say the rest of it," she said.
"There isn't any more."
"Yes there is."
He looked up at her for the first time.
"There's why you never said it," Amber said. "That's the part I asked for."
And she watched him go the last inch. She watched him get there, in a rented kitchen, at four in the afternoon, with nobody in the room and nothing to gain.
"Because if I said it out loud you could leave," he said.
Something in her chest came apart.
She had a whole minute of not being able to see the table properly.
Because she had been in that room too. That is what nobody in this story has ever said to her — not Julia in an empty lecture hall, not Bess on a couch, not Opal above a bakery.
She had stood in the wings of her own show at twenty-five and watched a thirty-eight-year-old man do a thing she could not do, which was walk into a room of strangers and be loved by it, immediately, for free.
She had wanted that so badly her teeth hurt.
And she had married it, and she had spent fifteen years handing him tape and dates and provenance, and she had told herself the entire time that she was being useful.
"I did it too," she said.
He looked up.
"Don't," she said, because he had started to speak.
"Don't be kind about this, it's mine. I sat in that barn for fifteen years being the only person who knew where all of it came from, and I told myself that was love, and about a third of it was.
" She had to stop and start again. "The rest of it was that as long as I was the one who knew, I didn't have to go find out whether I was still any good. "
The kitchen was very quiet.
"You were relieved in 2011," Amber said.
"I was relieved in about 2014. That's when I stopped playing in the car with the windows down and started playing with them up.
" She wiped her face with the heel of her hand.
"So we've both been sitting in that house for a decade being grateful for something we'd never say out loud, and I want that on the table too, because I am not going to build the next fifteen years on you being the only one who did something. "
He sat with that for a long moment, and did not try to take it off her, and did not say a single kind thing about it, which she noticed and will remember for the rest of her life.
"All right," he said at last. "Then here's the rest of mine, because I'm not done and I'm not going to be let off in the middle.
"That's the whole architecture. I can tell a stadium anything, I can tell a woman from New York with a camera anything, because none of them can do a thing to me.
They hear it and they go home and I go home and nothing's different in the morning.
" He wiped his face with the back of his wrist, once, and kept going.
"You could hear it and be gone. So I put everything I've got in rooms where it's free, and I have done it for thirty years, and you married a man who spends his whole life being honest at people who can't cost him anything.
"And the person I love most on this earth is the only one I've never told the truth to.
Not once. Not in fifteen years." He shook his head slowly.
"That's not a mistake I made, Amber. That's not a bad night or a bad year.
That's the shape of me and I built it on purpose and I did not know I was doing it until about the fourteenth of December. "
She discovered she was crying.
"I'm not going to say I've fixed it," he said.
"I've had five months. A man doesn't fix that in five months and I'd be lying to you and I'm done lying to you.
" He put both hands flat on the table again.
"I know what it is now. That's all I've got.
I know what it is and I know it's mine and there's nobody else in it. Not Lonnie. Not Novak. Not a movie."
He sat back.
"That's everything," he said. "That's what I'm going to go and say to Jonelle Crowder on Tuesday, and you've heard it first, and that's the arrangement now for the rest of my life."
She did not forgive him at that table.
She wants that written down somewhere, because the version people tell has him confessing in a kitchen and her falling into his arms, and it was not like that and it would have been worth nothing if it had been.
What she did was sit there for about a minute with her hands over her face. And then she took them away and said:
"Thank you."
"Amber —"
"Don't. I'm not — " She got up and got a glass of water she didn't want, because her legs needed to do something. "I'm going to need a while with that."
"Take a year."
"I don't need a year."
"Take whatever you need."
"Virgil, shut up," she said, not unkindly, and he shut up.
She stood at the sink with her back to him.
"Go on Tuesday," she said. "Say it exactly like that."
"Okay."
"I'm not coming."
"I didn't think you would."
"And don't call me after," she said. "Don't tell me how it went. Don't send it to me. I'll read it when everybody else reads it."
He was quiet for a second.
"That's a hard one," he said.
"I know it is."
"Okay," said Virgil.
He got up and put the chair in and went to the door, and stopped there with his hand on the frame, the way he had in January.
"There's no ask," he said again. "I want to say it one more time. Whatever happens after Tuesday — I'd have needed to say that out loud to you before I died. So it's done and I'm glad it's done and it doesn't have a price on it."
Then he went.
The piece ran on the ninth of May at six in the morning.
Bess texted her at 6:04. Carly at 6:11. Opal Waller, of all people, at 6:40, which Amber did not know Opal was capable of.