CHAPTER 3
ROMY
The theater is a hundred years old and has the water stains to prove it, which is exactly why the label picked it. Nothing says stripped and intimate to a marketing department like a venue with one working bathroom.
It’s called the Orpheum, because they’re all called the Orpheum, and I love it on sight.
Crushed velvet seats, a proscenium arch with cherubs who have seen some things, a stage that’s hosted everything from vaudeville to a Lilith Fair soundcheck.
I spend the morning with the gaffer and the director, a patient Spanish woman named Ines, and by eleven we have it: two people, two stools, one vintage microphone, a single follow spot, and eight thousand pounds of gorgeous decay behind them.
Grainy. Intimate. Miranda’s two favorite words, and for once they describe something true.
The design is all restraint. I kill two of the house electrics and leave the dust in the air on purpose, because dust in a follow spot is free production value.
I put them on the dark wood stools instead of the chrome ones the label sent over, because chrome reads studio and wood reads confession.
Ines wants a second camera drifting on a jib; I talk her down to one locked-off wide and one handheld that breathes.
The whole point is that nothing moves except the music. Stillness is the flex.
“You’ve done this before,” Ines says.
“Once or twice,” I say, and don’t mention the two hundred shows. Modesty is also production value.
Knox arrives with his acoustic and his good mood. He finds me up a ladder arguing with the follow spot and stands at the bottom of it with his head tipped back, unhelpful and delighted.
“You look very official up there.”
“I am very official. Move, you’re in my light.”
“I’m always in your light.”
“Deep,” I say. “Write that down. Use it for the wedding album.”
He laughs and goes to tune, and I climb down and remind myself that this, this exact dumb exchange, is the thing nobody on the internet will ever get footage of.
Samantha arrives forty minutes later with a team of six and somehow still manages to look like she just rolled out of bed beautiful, which is a skill, which takes work, which I respect.
They rehearse the number twice, and it sounds better in the room than it did in the studio, because live rooms forgive nothing and this song needs nothing forgiven.
Ines and I watch from the aisle, and she keeps glancing at me with the face of a woman whose camera is about to make somebody very famous.
Then we hit blocking.
“For the last chorus,” Samantha says, standing, “I come off the stool. I cross to him during the build, and we finish face to face on the last line. Close. The song’s a conversation, the ending should look like one.”
Ines looks at me. I look at the stage. I picture the frame, because that’s my job, picturing frames: Samantha Saint stepping into my husband’s light, faces six inches apart, a hundred-year-old theater holding its breath.
It would be beautiful television. It would also be a screenshot the internet would be eating for a year.
“Widen the finish,” I say. “Keep her on her stool until the bridge, then she can stand and move to the edge of his light, not into it. Eight feet apart on the last line. The song carries close without the blocking carrying it further.”
“Eight feet,” Samantha repeats.
“Eight feet reads intimate on camera. Six inches reads something else.”
“Something else is kind of the point of a duet, no?”
“The point of a duet is the song.” I keep my voice pleasant, because it is still, at this point, a pleasant conversation. “The cameras will do the close work. You don’t have to.”
Samantha looks at me for a long moment, and then she smiles, and it’s a good smile, practiced and warm and about three degrees cooler than the one she gave my arrangement stories at lunch.
“Are you afraid I bite?” she asks.
“Only scenery so far.”
Ines makes a small sound that she converts into a cough. Knox, on the stage with his back to us, tuning, doesn’t hear any of it, which is a mercy. Samantha holds my look, and then she laughs, a real laugh, and shrugs.
“Eight feet,” she says. “You’re the professional.”
“She is,” Ines says, relieved, and the matter is officially closed.
The matter is not closed.
They film six passes over two hours. Ines gets gorgeous footage, the kind that makes A&R men weep into their expense accounts.
And on pass four, the best pass, the one where Knox’s voice cracks just slightly on the bridge in a way money can’t buy, Samantha comes off her stool at the build, as agreed.
Then she keeps coming.
It’s subtle. Nobody who hasn’t spent twenty years measuring stage distances would clock it.
She stops inside his light, inside the eight feet, maybe four feet, maybe three, close enough that the follow spot holds them in one circle, close enough that on the last traded line her face tips up to his and the camera, my camera, my frame, catches them at an angle that a stranger would describe as about to kiss.
Knox finishes the note. Then he steps back, off his mark, a half step, breaking the frame, and raises his guitar hand to end the song. He does it smoothly, professionally, a performer adjusting.
The footage doesn’t care about the step back. The footage is three seconds of two famous people sharing one circle of light.
“That’s the video,” Ines breathes beside me.
That’s the video.
The label cuts the three seconds into the teaser.
The teaser does eleven million views in a day.
Miranda emails me a bottle-of-champagne emoji, which from Miranda is a ticker-tape parade.
I stare at the freeze-frame on my laptop, the shared circle of light, the tipped-up face, and I have the very normal reaction of any woman watching her husband’s work: I close the laptop, and then I open it again, and then I close it harder.
By the weekend there are fan edits set to sped-up piano versions of the single, slow-motion zooms on the last traded line, compilations with heart graphics, and a combined name, because the internet can breed anything: KnoxSaint.
It trends. It trends hard enough that my sister-in-law in Portland texts me a screenshot with no comment at all.
A gossip site runs a body-language expert who says, with a straight face, that four feet apart on a stage is “the distance of unfinished business.” She is not entirely wrong, is the thing. That’s the thing I don’t say to anyone.
I show Knox on the couch that night. He has his reading glasses on, the ones he pretends not to need, and an acre of Sunday night sprawl, one arm along the back of the couch behind me. He watches the fan edit, winces at the heart graphics, and lands where he always lands.
“It’s fans being fans. They shipped me with a backup dancer in 2011. They shipped Dean with a sandwich.”
“Dean did love that sandwich.”
“He did. He still talks about it.” He scrolls, amused, past an edit of himself and the backup dancer, past one of him and a Grammy statuette with the caption name a more iconic duo. “Look. Twelve thousand likes, and the Grammy and I had zero chemistry.”
“You held it very tenderly.”
“I was proud of it. That’s different from wanting to take it to dinner.” Knox sets the phone down, face down, and pulls me into his side. “Romy, it’s noise. It’s free promo for the single, Miranda’s over the moon, nobody who matters thinks I’m leaving you for a fan edit.”
He’s not wrong. That’s the exhausting part.
He’s never, technically, wrong. I lie against his shoulder and listen to the ballgame murmur from the TV and let it be noise, because he asked me to, and because the alternative is auditing my husband’s mentions at eleven on a Sunday, and I have done a lot of undignified things for this industry but I draw the line there.
Then Samantha reposts one of the compilations. The sped-up one, the slowest zoom, the hearts. Her caption: You people need hobbies.
Three words, a wink, eleven million views. The comments eat it alive. She knows exactly what she’s doing with three words, and what she’s doing is pouring a thimble of gasoline on a campfire, because the wink says I’m in on the joke, and the joke is my marriage.
I find Knox in the studio and put my phone in front of him.
“I want her to stop reposting this stuff.”
He looks at the caption. “It’s a joke at the fans’ expense. She’s telling them to get hobbies.”
“Knox.”
“It’s teasing them, not agreeing with them.”
“Knox.” I sit on the amp across from him, the way I’ve sat for twenty-five years of hard conversations, and I wait until he’s actually looking at me.
“I have never asked you to manage another woman’s behavior.
I’m asking now. The edits are fans being fans.
She’s not a fan. She’s a professional with a hundred million followers who just co-signed a video of her nearly kissing my husband with a wink.
I want it down, and I want her to stop feeding it. Please.”
He holds my gaze. I watch him work through it, the instinct to soothe, the instinct to explain the internet to a woman who helped build his career on it, and then, to his credit, the moment where he sees my face and stops.
“You’re serious,” he says.
“As a heart attack.”
“Okay.” He picks up his own phone. “Okay. I’ll talk to her.”
He talks to her that night. I don’t ask for the transcript. The compilation disappears from her page within the hour, and the fan accounts scream about it for a day, and then the internet, goldfish that it is, moves on to a feud between two DJs.
I think that’s the end of it.
Three days later we’re back in a rehearsal room at Knox’s studio complex, running the single with the touring band for the televised performance Miranda booked.
Broadcast cameras see everything and forgive nothing, so I spend the first hour rebuilding the blocking around the band: where Knox can roam, where Samantha stands for the traded lines, which angle the director will actually take when the bridge hits.
The broadcast director is a live-sports guy who keeps calling the song “the play,” and I keep answering anyway, because he may not know music but he knows lenses, and lenses are my native tongue.
Knox is running harmonies with Dean when I slip out to find a bathroom, and on the way back, in the concrete corridor by wardrobe, Samantha steps out of a doorway in front of me.
Alone. No team of six. No cameras. Her arms folded, casual, a woman who happens to be standing exactly where I’d have to pass.
“Romy.”
“Samantha.”
“I took the post down.”
“I saw. Thank you.”
“Knox asked me to.” She tilts her head. “Well. He told me you were uncomfortable, and asked me, as a friend. Which is sweet. He’s very sweet about you.”
“He’s sweet about most things.”
“Mmm.” She looks me over, slow, head to toe, an assessment with a smile attached. “You really do watch everything, don’t you? The blocking. The camera. The posts. Me.”
And there it is, finally, the conversation under all the conversations, standing in a concrete corridor with its arms folded. I don’t have to reach for my answer. I’ve had it ready since the video went up.
“Only things trying to climb into my marriage.”
For half a second the warm practiced smile slips, and under it is something flat and measuring, a woman recalculating the height of a fence.
Then the smile comes back up, brighter than before.
“I’m just making music,” she says. “Same as you. Same as him. It’s what we all do, right? Make music.”
“Right,” I say. “Music.”
She steps aside to let me pass, gracious as a hostess, and I walk past her down the corridor and back into the rehearsal room, where Knox is laughing at something Dean said and the band is vamping the bridge.
Knox catches my eye over the guitar. You good? he mouths.
I nod. I’m good. I’m great.
Samantha follows two minutes later, calling for a water, easy and bright, and picks up the rehearsal exactly where it left off. A professional. Nothing happened in that corridor. Ask anyone. There are no cameras in corridors.
I stand at the back of the room with my blocking notes, and I watch her sing harmony with my husband, and I think about fences.