CHAPTER 6
ROMY
This isn’t alarming. Knox keeps musician’s hours, always has, and the house is full of places he might be: the studio, the piano, the couch with his phone and a documentary about some extinct amplifier. I lie there a while anyway, listening to the dark, and then I remember the notebook.
My arrangement notebook, the black one with the duct-taped spine, is sitting in Studio B at the complex, because I left it there after Tuesday’s session.
I have my own session at nine, with my own artist, a nineteen-year-old named Marisol who writes verses that make me feel like I’ve been using the wrong ears my whole life.
We’re cutting her first single, and the chart’s bones are in that notebook.
This is the part nobody prints: I still take my own work.
Not Wildstone work. Mine. Somewhere between the tours and the lighting plots and the video walls, my husband’s career quietly annexed my calendar, and it took me years to notice and longer to push back, but I pushed.
I take one artist at a time, I produce them properly, and Marisol is the best thing I’ve touched in three years.
The notebook has her whole record sketched in the margins.
I could reconstruct the chart from memory. I’ve built arrangements on napkins, on the back of setlists, on my hand. But the notebook is the notebook, and I’m awake, and the drive at 2 a.m. is the only beautiful drive Los Angeles offers.
I pull on jeans, leave the lights off, and take the car.
The complex is dark except for the security desk and, third floor, one lit window. Studio B. I wave at Marcus on the desk, who has guarded this building since before it was Knox’s, and who buzzes me through with the nod of a man who has seen every hour there is.
“Knox is up there,” he says. “With the singer.”
“The singer?” I repeat.
“The pretty one.” Marcus returns to his game of solitaire with the total disinterest of a man who has watched forty years of singers come and go. “They been here since eleven.”
I take the stairs because the elevator at 2 a.m. in an empty building is a horror movie I don’t need to audition for, and I’m halfway down the third-floor corridor when I hear the piano.
I know the song before I’m close enough to hear it properly.
Eight bars. Minor. Unresolved. The fragment from our living room, the one Knox poked at on Sunday nights, the one that got into the drywall.
Dunno. Something. It’s been floating around our house for weeks, half-born, waiting for him to decide what it wants to be, and it is currently being played, in Studio B, at two in the morning, for Samantha Saint.
I stop outside the door. Through the narrow window I can see the room: Knox at the piano, and Samantha on the couch, barefoot, shoes on the floor, knees tucked up, watching him play with her chin on her arms. No band.
No engineer. No session booked on the board I checked downstairs out of habit.
Two people and a piano and a song that, twelve hours ago, belonged to my living room.
There’s nothing to see. That’s what I tell the part of me that’s already cataloguing. There’s no touching, no sin, nothing a court would recognize. A man is playing piano. A woman is listening. I’ve been in this exact room a thousand times.
That’s the problem. I’ve been in this exact room a thousand times, and it’s mine, and right now someone else is sitting in it barefoot.
I open the door.
They both look up. Knox’s hands come off the keys, and the last chord hangs in the monitors, decaying, the only thing in the room that doesn’t know it’s in trouble.
“Hey,” Knox says. Not guilty. That’s the thing that will keep me up later. There’s no guilt in it at all. “Couldn’t sleep. What are you—”
“Notebook,” I say, and I cross to the console and pick it up, the black one, duct-taped spine, right where I left it, and I hold it up as evidence in a trial nobody else knows is happening.
“Romy, hey.” Samantha unfolds from the couch, easy, unhurried, not bothering with her shoes, and why should she. “We got stuck on the bridge of the bonus track, the label wants it Friday, and Knox said—”
“That one?” I say.
It’s quiet. It’s not loud. Knox looks at the piano, and then at me, and I watch him understand completely and instantly, because after twenty-five years there are no slow arrivals between us.
He knows what song that is. He knows where it’s been living.
He knows whose it was while it decided what to be.
“We were stuck,” he says. “I played what was in my head. It was just the thing in my head.”
“He played it once,” Samantha says, “and I heard where it wanted to go. Immediately. It wants to lift on the—”
“So did I,” I say. “At home.”
Samantha looks between us, and for a flicker of a second I see her understand she’s stepped into a conversation that’s older than her entire career, and then the professional smile comes back up and she reaches for her shoes, gracious, always so gracious.
“I should get some sleep anyway,” she says. “Big day tomorrow. Romy, it was nice to— thank you. Good night.” And she’s gone, barefoot down the corridor with her shoes in her hand, and I can hear her humming on the stairs.
She’s humming his melody. My melody. The eight bars from my living room, in her mouth, on her way down my husband’s stairs.
For a minute neither of us says anything. Knox closes the piano lid, gentle, a man closing something that shouldn’t have been open.
“I’ll see you at home,” he says.
“You will,” I say, and I take my notebook and go.
Knox and I drive home separately, because we came separately, which means we don’t have the fight until 3 a.m., in the kitchen, over tea neither of us drinks.
In the car I don’t cry, because there’s nothing to cry about. That’s the maddening geometry of it. Nothing happened. I keep both hands on the wheel and rehearse the sentence all the way up the hill, because if I say it wrong it becomes a fight about a couch, and it isn’t about a couch.
“Say the whole thing,” he says. “Whatever you’re not saying, say it.”
“I don’t want any more two-in-the-morning sessions with her. Alone. I don’t want them.”
He stares at me. “Nothing happened. Romy. I played piano. She sat on a couch. Marcus was downstairs the entire time.”
“I didn’t say anything happened.”
“You didn’t have to, you’re standing in my kitchen at three in the morning with your coat on like you caught me—”
“Stop.” And he stops, because I don’t raise my voice and he knows what it means when I do. “I didn’t say anything happened, because nothing happened. I believe nothing happened. That’s not the boundary and it never has been.”
“Then what is it?”
“Tell me something first. The bridge. She said she heard where it wanted to go.”
He rubs his face. “She heard a lift into the pre-chorus. She sang it back to me. Romy, singers hear things, that’s what they—”
“I heard it too,” I say. “Sunday before last. You played it after dinner and I hummed the exact same lift from the couch and you said, and I quote, don’t help me, I’m enjoying the struggle.
” I set my tea down untouched. “So when I hear it, I’m interfering with your process.
When she hears it, at two in the morning, it’s a breakthrough. ”
“That’s not—” He stops. Starts over. “It’s different and you know it’s different. You’re my wife. It isn’t a contest.”
“No,” I say. “It isn’t. She doesn’t get to enter it anyway.”
I make myself say it properly, the true shape of it, because he deserves the true shape and not a fight about shoes on a couch.
“That song was ours,” I say. “Not ours on paper. Ours the old way, before anyone else touches it. You play fragments at home for months, and I hear them through walls, and they stay in the house until you know what they are. That is the one piece of the process that has never had anybody else in it. Not labels, not managers, not the band. Me. And tonight I stood in a corridor and heard it coming out of Studio B for a barefoot stranger at two in the morning.”
“She’s not a stranger, we’re making a record—”
“At two in the morning, Knox. Alone. Playing her the unfinished thing.” I wrap my hands around the cold tea.
“I know you don’t want her. I have never once thought you want her.
But sharing unfinished music alone at that hour is intimate, it is, and you gave her a room that’s only ever had us in it, and you didn’t even notice you were doing it. That’s what I’m asking you to stop.”
He’s quiet for a long time. The fridge hums. Somewhere a pipe ticks, the house settling, the sounds of a home I’ve known for fifteen years.
“I don’t see it that way,” he says finally, and I feel the floor tilt, and then he keeps going.
“Music’s just work to me, it’s all just work until it’s done.
But you do see it that way. And you said it without accusing me of anything, which is more than most people would’ve managed standing in that hallway. ”
He comes around the counter and puts his forehead against mine, the way he does, the stadium noise long gone out of him.
“No more late sessions,” he says. “No more private ones. If she wants to work at 2 a.m., she can work with an engineer and a full room, and the unfinished stuff stays home. Where it belongs.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry about the song.” He means it. I can hear it. “I didn’t think of it as ours yet. It was just the thing in my head.”
“It was the thing in our house.”
“Yeah.” He closes his eyes. “The thing in our house.”
We go to bed eventually, and he falls asleep fast, out in under a minute, a man who’s apologized and been believed. I stay awake a while longer, listening to the pipes.
The boundary is set. He’ll keep it. In twenty years, when Knox gives me a boundary with his eyes open, he keeps it. I’ve never known him to break one.
What I lie there wondering, watching the ceiling go gray, is why I keep having to draw them.
In the morning there’s a text from Miranda before I’m out of the shower: Heard about the new session rule. Consider it enforced. x. Which means Knox called her at 7 a.m., which means he meant it, and I note that with the part of my heart that still keeps score in his favor.
At nine I’m in a different studio across town with Marisol, running on three hours of sleep, rebuilding the chart from the notebook, and the song comes alive under her hands so fast we both laugh.
Work is the best hangover cure for a bad night.
Nobody hums anything here that isn’t hers.
It’s a good day. It’s such a good day that I almost outrun the question I went to bed with.
Almost. It catches me at a red light on the way home, out of nowhere. The true ones always find you.
Why am I the only one who can see where the lines need to go before something steps over them?