CHAPTER 8
ROMY
I’m late to the jet because a truck backed into the rehearsal hall’s loading dock and took out the camera riser, and since I’m apparently the only person in California who can solve this.
It takes forty minutes and one very satisfying phone call in which a stagehand named Gus is reminded, with love, that he reports the vendor invoice to me and not to God. The riser lives. The taping’s saved. I drive to Van Nuys in a good mood, which tells you how early in the day it still is.
It’s a one-day trip, Van Nuys to Teterboro, a late-night TV performance tomorrow that’s basically a victory lap for the single.
The EP’s nearly done, two tracks left. The documentary’s into pickups and interviews.
This is the fun part, the junket part, and I was looking forward to five hours at forty thousand feet with my husband and nowhere to be.
I climb the stairs with my bag and stop in the cabin door.
Samantha is in the seat beside Knox.
Not my seat. I want to be precise. The plane doesn’t have assigned seats; it’s a leather-and-walnut tube of couches and facing chairs, and people sit where they sit.
But there is a configuration. There has been a configuration for a decade.
The table pair by the window, left side, is where Knox and I sit, across from each other, because he likes the window and I like the aisle and we both like the table for cards and setlists and, on one memorable flight, a very competitive game of hangman with Dean.
Samantha is in the window seat of that pair, and Knox is across from her, in mine.
The table between them is a whole life. Lyric sheets fanned out, two pairs of headphones, her coffee, his tea, a tablet open to the doc edit Aaron sent over. They’ve made an office. They’ve made a little office in my spot.
“Oh, hey.” Samantha looks up, all apology, hand to her chest. “Sorry. We started without you. Aaron sent the rough cut and there are notes due tonight, and you know how he gets.”
“How does he get,” I say. It’s not a question, and she doesn’t answer it.
Knox looks up from the tablet and smiles at me, easy, unaware, a man in the middle of a work task. “Hey, you fixed the riser?”
“I fixed the riser.”
“Of course you did. Come sit, we’re forty minutes into the edit and Aaron’s lost his mind, he wants the bridge sequence restructured—”
“Where should I sit,” I say.
And he looks around the cabin, finally, and I watch him see it. The configuration. The table. Her in the window, him in mine. His face does the smallest thing, not guilt, he doesn’t know enough for guilt yet, just the first flicker of oh.
“Take the couch,” he says, because what else can he say with the edit playing and the notes due and Miranda asleep across the aisle. “We’ll be done in an hour.”
The couch is six feet away and another country.
I sit on it. I open my laptop and answer Marisol’s producer notes, because I have my own record to make, and I listen with half an ear to the two of them at my table, timing their way through the doc cut.
She’s good at this part, I have to say it.
Her notes are sharp. She understands structure.
She keeps saying we, and the we refers, always, to her and Knox.
At one point she laughs at something in the edit and touches his wrist, brief, a second, the kind of touch a hundred collaborators have given him in front of me without raising my pulse.
I clock it. I hate that I clock it. I’ve become a woman with a ledger in her head, and the ledger keeps its own hours.
Samantha’s team is up front. Dean is on tour with the band’s other dates and not on this flight, which means no one narrates anything as a nature documentary, which is a shame, because the material’s right there.
Miranda wakes up once, surveys the cabin, me on the couch with my laptop, the two of them at the table, and I watch her do the same math I do.
Then she closes her eyes again. Miranda has managed rock stars for nineteen years.
She knows which calculations you say out loud on a plane and which ones you say in an office, later, alone.
Somewhere over Kansas, we hit chop.
Seatbelt-sign chop, the plane doing the occasional sideways shrug, and on the second bump Samantha grabs Knox’s forearm. Full-handed, fingers wrapped, a little gasp.
Knox looks at her hand. Then he removes it. Physically, deliberately, lifts her fingers off his arm, sets her hand back in her own lap, and points at her seatbelt.
“Fasten that,” he says. “Sign’s on.”
“Sorr—” Another bump. “I hate the little ones. I always think they’re going down.”
“They’re not going down.” He’s already back to the tablet. “Seatbelt.”
She buckles it. She doesn’t touch him again.
And there it is, the whole scene in miniature, the reason this is so hard to explain to anyone, including, mostly, him: he handled it.
Perfectly. Immediately. There is no version of events where Knox did anything wrong on this airplane, and I am sitting on a couch six feet away with my jaw aching from how hard it’s set.
He catches my eye once, over the table, and smiles. You okay? the smile says. Work stuff, almost done.
I smile back, because we are in a metal tube with fourteen other people, and mine is not a face that performs for cabins.
The hotel in Manhattan has a lobby full of people pretending not to look. We get to the suite at midnight. I’m in the bathroom washing the plane off my face when Knox comes in, leans on the counter, and says, “Okay. You’ve been quiet since Kansas.”
I dry my hands. Buy the seconds.
“It’s the seat thing,” he says. “And the arm. Romy, she grabbed my arm in turbulence and I took it off, you watched me take it off. What did I miss?”
“Nothing. You missed nothing. That’s the thing I can’t get through.
” I sit down on the closed toilet lid, because my legs are tired of holding up this conversation.
“Knox. Every single thing has an explanation. The seat isn’t assigned.
The work was urgent. Turbulence is scary. Every object in the pile is innocent.”
“Because most of them are normal things—”
“Individually,” I say. “Individually, every one of them is a normal thing. I know. I’ve had this exact fight with myself a hundred times. I’m not standing here telling you any one item is a crime. I’m showing you a pattern, and you keep explaining the objects.”
He goes still at that. Leans back against the counter, arms folded, and for once doesn’t answer fast.
“The table where we always sit has someone else in it,” I say.
“My outfit’s on someone else’s body. My photograph gets restaged with someone else in it.
The song that lived in our house gets played at 2 a.m. for someone else.
The woman tells me to my face, maybe I enjoy him, and calls it a joke.
And now I get on our plane and my seat has someone else in it, and I’m supposed to sit on the couch and answer email and not notice that the pattern is my life, with me removed from it one object at a time. ”
“I hear you,” Knox says, finally. “I do. And I’m not telling you you’re crazy, I hope you know I’d never—” He drags a hand through his hair.
“But Romy, I look at all of it, the whole pile, the way you’re asking me to, and I see a young artist who’s a little obsessed with the band, who’s careless about boundaries, who’s maybe got a crush she handles badly.
I don’t see someone trying to replace my wife.
That’s a big story. I can’t get all the way there on a seat and a jacket and a grab at my arm. ”
“A story,” I repeat.
“That’s not—”
“No. You’re right. It’s a story. It’s the story of a woman studying a marriage and rehearsing the lead role, and the two people it’s happening to are standing in a bathroom, and one of them calls it a story.”
He doesn’t get angry. Knox doesn’t. He just stands there with his arms folded, looking at me, and I can see him doing the thing he does: separating it into boxes. Music here, publicity there, work in this one, marriage in the good one with the lock on it. He genuinely believes the boxes hold.
“What do you want me to do?” he asks, and it’s not a fight-back question. It’s a real one, tired and honest. “Tomorrow. Practically. Tell me and it’s done.”
“No more shared travel. If she flies, we fly separately. No more work in hotel rooms or at the house, rooms with engineers only. And when the EP promo ends, it ends.” I’ve had the list ready for weeks. I hate that. I hate that I have a list.
“Done,” he says. No bargaining. He never bargains, he means it every time, and that’s almost worse, because it means every boundary I’ve got was drawn by me, after the fact, one incident at a time, while the pattern keeps drawing itself ahead of us.
He comes and sits on the edge of the tub, across from me, and takes my hand, and we sit there in the marble bathroom of a hotel neither of us will remember, holding hands between the toilet and the tub like the glamorous people we are.
“I hope you’re right,” I say.
“About her?”
“About all of it.”
He squeezes my hand. “I’m right,” he says, gentle. “You’ll see. The promo ends, the documentary airs, everyone moves on, and next year this is a story we tell.”
I want to believe him so much it has a physical address. It lives under my ribs, right where the fear does, and they share a wall.
Somewhere downstairs, in some other suite, Samantha Saint is asleep with our table configuration in her muscle memory and my husband’s arm-grab already rewritten in her head as something else.
The taping the next night goes perfectly.
That’s the part I keep for myself: Samantha hits every mark, every camera, every beat of my blocking, flawless, radiant, not a toe out of place, and when the host asks about the collaboration she calls Knox “a dream” and gestures at the whole band, inclusive, correct, blameless.
She can be perfect when she wants to be.
She can be perfect for exactly as long as perfect is useful.
Watch the hands, I think, from the wings.
Knox comes off buzzing, finds me in the wings first, kisses my temple in front of the whole floor crew. “Good?”
“You were great.”
“We were great,” he says, and means the band, and means me, and means all of it in one generous armful of a word.
On the flight home the night after, the seat configuration is back.
Knox at the window, me across from him, gin rummy for pennies, my feet in his lap.
Samantha flies commercial with her team, off to her own tour dates, and the cabin is ours again, and Knox is in a mood so good it’s almost boyish, and I can feel him waiting for me to say it: see, the storm passed, you were worried about nothing.
The storm did not pass.
The storm is just doing press in another time zone.