CHAPTER 4
ROMY
The televised performance has a dress rehearsal the week before broadcast, in a rented arena in Burbank with the full rig, and this is where I live now. Camera positions, lighting cues, the exact second the follow spot widens for the last chorus. My natural habitat. My office with no chairs.
I’m at the tech table with my headset and my coffee when Dean wanders over during a reset, picks an apple off the craft services tray, and stops chewing.
“Romy.”
“Dean.”
He’s looking at the stage. Samantha has come out for the run-through in a fringed suede jacket over a black bodysuit, hair down, boots with a stacked heel, and on anybody else it’s just a good outfit.
On Samantha Saint, at a Wildstone-adjacent rehearsal, it’s a photograph I have seen before. It’s a photograph I’m in.
It was 2003. The Red Rocks show, the one from the live album cover.
I sat on the stage edge during soundcheck in a fringed suede jacket over black, hair down, boots with a stacked heel.
It’s one of the four or five pictures of me that ever made it into tour books, because I was usually the one behind the camera.
Not identical. Nothing you could ever call out in a meeting. The fringe is a different length. The boots are a different make. It’s a cover version of an outfit.
Dean, who was on that stage in 2003, who tuned his guitar six feet from where I sat, takes another bite of apple and says, casually, around the apple, “That yours?”
“Apparently ours.”
He snorts. Then he looks at me, and the snort dies somewhere on the way out, because my face is doing whatever my face is doing. Dean has known me since I was nineteen. He can read me from the cheap seats.
“That’s weird,” he says, quieter.
“Yeah,” I say. “Pass the coffee.”
The run-through goes fine. The outfit sings well. I fix two camera cues and a light that’s clipping Knox’s jawline.
During the dinner break I find Samantha in the greenroom holding Knox’s leather jacket up off the back of his chair, admiring it.
Not wearing it. Holding it. The jacket is vintage, black, cracked soft at the elbows, the original Wildstone tour jacket he bought in a vintage shop in Austin on the first tour that ever made money.
I was there. He spent rent money on it and ate gas station burritos for a week, and it is his single most beloved object that isn’t a guitar.
“This is incredible,” she says. “Is this ’03? This has to be ’03.”
“Austin,” Knox says, taking it from her, friendly, draping it back over his chair. “Hands off. It’s older than you.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“It’s mine,” he says, still friendly, and goes back to his phone, and she smiles at the jacket for one more second before her plate of grilled chicken wins the contest.
I clock it. I clock everything. It’s the job and it’s the curse.
After lunch I go hunting for a spare com pack in the production office and find Samantha instead.
The office has a corner the tour manager uses as a lending library: old tour books, photography archives, the big coffee-table volumes the label puts out every anniversary, all of it hauled along for the wardrobe and video teams. Samantha is sitting on the floor with her back against a cabinet, surrounded.
Tour book from 2003 open on her lap. The photography archive box open beside her.
Printouts fanned around her in a semicircle, and even from the door I can see what’s on them.
Stage shots. Backstage shots. Early years.
“Research,” she says, before I’ve said anything. Her voice is easy. “For the shoot concepts. If we’re doing more visuals together, I want to understand the band’s whole visual history, not just the greatest hits. This band has a look. Nobody talks about how much of it is deliberate.”
“The band had a lighting designer with opinions,” I say. “Several of them are standing in this building.”
She laughs. “See, that’s what I mean. That’s the stuff I want to know.” She holds up the 2003 book, and on the open page, small but unmistakable, is Red Rocks. Me on the stage edge. Fringe. Boots.
She doesn’t turn the book toward me. She doesn’t have to. She lets me see it in her lap for exactly as long as politeness allows, and then she closes it and stacks it with the others, smooth as a dealer clearing a table.
“The explanations are always good,” I say.
“They’re true,” she says, smiling up at me from the floor. “Ask anyone. Researchers gonna research.”
“It’s a reasonable explanation.”
“Thank you.”
“That’s not what I said.”
Her smile holds. Mine holds too. It’s a very polite standoff in a production office, two professionals, one box of photographs between us, and then her assistant appears at the door with a schedule question and the moment dissolves into calendars.
I take my com pack and go.
The photo session is Thursday. Some glossy music weekly is doing a joint cover, Knox and Samantha, the single’s victory lap, and the label’s concept is rehearsal-room casual: instruments, amps, rolled sleeves, two artists caught mid-work.
I’m there because Miranda asked me to keep it from turning into a perfume ad, her actual words, and because the alternative is sitting home refreshing the internet, which I have sworn off.
Knox shoots his solo frames first. He’s good at this, twenty-five years of covers, he gives the photographer six usable expressions in four minutes and then starts clowning to make the assistant laugh.
I watch from the monitor cart with my arms folded, enjoying my husband being handsome for money, the most honest work he does.
Then they reset for the joint shots, and the photographer’s team drags Knox’s road-worn amp stack into the frame as a prop, and Samantha, in high-waisted jeans and a white tank, hops up and sits on the top amp.
One leg hooked over the other. Chin tipped down, eyes up at the camera. One hand resting on the amp handle, fingers curled just so.
I know that pose like my own handwriting.
It’s the photo. The photo. 2004, the Platinum tour book, the one picture of me that ever got famous in its small way, me sitting on Knox’s amp during a soundcheck in some arena in Ohio, leg hooked, chin down, hand on the amp handle.
A fan page once voted it the tenth best Wildstone photo ever taken.
Tenth. I remember, because Knox pretended to be furious it wasn’t fifth.
Not identical. Never identical. The tank is a different cut. Her hand is an inch to the left. It’s a cover version of a photograph of me.
I walk onto the set before I’ve decided to.
“Can I help you?” the photographer’s assistant says, alarmed, because nobody walks onto a set.
“Samantha.” My voice comes out pleasant. I worked on it in the four steps over. “Did you find the original in the archive? In the production office? Or did they print it for you?”
The set goes quiet. The photographer lowers his camera. Samantha’s expression does something complicated and lands on confused innocence, a beautiful piece of work.
“The original what?”
“The amp. The pose. The hand on the handle.” I step closer, and I’m still smiling, which is the part that will scare me later, how pleasant I stay. “2004. Ohio. Me, on that amp. Well, an amp. This one’s older.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I sat down, it felt right.” She shrugs, easy, and looks at the photographer. “It was instinct.”
“Very specific instinct.”
“Romy.” Knox’s voice, from the edge of the set.
I turn. He’s standing there in his rolled sleeves with his guitar still on, and his face is doing a thing I almost never see on it, which is recognition arriving before he can stop it.
He knows the photo. He’s looking at Samantha on the amp, and I can watch him place it, watch the years flip past, watch him land on Ohio.
“Change the setup,” he tells the photographer. “No sitting on the amps. Different blocking entirely.”
“Knox, the amp shot’s the cover,” the photographer says.
“Then you don’t have a cover yet.” Not loud. Knox doesn’t do loud. “Change it.”
The set moves fast when Knox Wildstone says change it.
Samantha hops down, good-natured, a little puzzled, performing puzzlement for a room that wants to believe her, and they reset with stools and guitars, and the whole thing takes ninety seconds.
Professional. Blameless. Nothing happened.
Ask anyone on that set. A singer sat on an amp, and a wife mentioned a photograph, and the famous man changed the shot, and everyone went back to work.
My phone buzzes in the car line on the way out. Dean, who wasn’t anywhere near that set: Tell me she didn’t sit on the amp.
I stare at it. Then: How do you know about that?
His reply takes a minute. Saw the BTS clip the label posted. Before they cut it. I was IN Ohio. I was standing next to the amp.
So that’s two of us who keep a photo library in our heads. I put the phone away without answering, because I don’t have an answer that doesn’t sound like a verdict.
In the car afterward, Knox drives. He doesn’t turn on the radio, which is how I know he wants to talk about it.
“That was odd,” he says.
“Generous.”
He drums his thumb on the wheel, thinking.
“Here’s a theory. She grew up on this band.
She’s been swimming in our imagery for weeks, the archive, the tour books.
Maybe it’s osmosis. She’s absorbing twenty years of Wildstone and some of it’s leaking out.
Artists do that. I stole half my early stage moves from guys whose posters were on my wall. ”
“You stole moves from men.”
“Okay?”
“The outfits she copies are mine. The photo she recreated is mine. Not yours. Not the band’s.” I turn in the seat to face him, because I need him to hear this next part as words and not as mood. “Knox. She isn’t studying the band. She’s studying where I stood.”
The signal changes. He doesn’t go. The car behind us honks, and he goes.
“I hear you,” he says, finally. “I do. I just—” He stops. Starts over, which Knox almost never does. “I don’t know yet. What she is. What any of it adds up to. I know how it looked today. I changed the shot.”
“You changed the shot,” I agree.
“It counts.”
It does. It’s also not an answer, and we both sit with the not-answer the rest of the drive home, through the gates, up the hill, into the garage, where he parks and kills the engine and neither of us gets out right away.
“Ohio,” he says at last, quiet. “Tenth best photo ever taken.”
“You were furious.”
“I was robbed,” he says, and it’s almost a joke, and we both almost laugh, and then we go inside and have dinner and don’t talk about it again.
That night I lie awake doing math I don’t want to do, counting things that each have a reasonable explanation.
The vintage tee at the studio. The questions about where I sat, what I sang.
The fringe. The amp. The jacket she held for one second too long.
Six items, six good explanations, six acquittals, and the sum of them keeps staring at me from across the bedroom ceiling.
Knox sleeps beside me, untroubled, one arm across the space where I should be sleeping too. He changed the shot. He heard me. He’s trying, in the Knox way, which is to deal with each thing as it comes and trust the marriage to hold the rest.