CHAPTER 12
ROMY
The Global Music Awards are in November, live from the Garden, and the booking lands in September: Knox and Samantha, opening the broadcast’s second hour, a full production number.
This is normal. The single spent the summer at number one.
The EP charted in forty countries. The documentary trailer has more views than most wars.
The biggest music show on television wants the two of them, Knox says yes, and I genuinely have no quarrel with any of it, right up until the production meeting notes cross my desk.
I still get the notes. Twenty years of infrastructure doesn’t unwind itself because the producer’s wife had a bad month.
The packet lands Tuesday: staging concept, camera plot, set design, running order.
I read it at the kitchen counter with my coffee, the way I’ve read a thousand of these, pencil in hand out of pure habit.
The segment opens with the single. Fine. Good. It’s a good song, I produced its arrangement, I want it to win things.
Then, page three: at the bridge, the band transitions. Key change, tempo drop, the orchestra — there’s an orchestra — comes up under the single’s outro and carries the room into a second song.
After Midnight.
They’ve titled the segment Lovers’ Medley. Somebody at the network gave my marriage a title treatment.
I read it once. I set the pencil down carefully, because snapping pencils is for people whose hands aren’t steady, and mine are steady. Then I drive to rehearsal.
Ellis calls while I’m on the freeway. Marisol’s single went to radio and the adds are strong, and for four minutes he talks about spins and I talk back, a whole functional person with a career and a life.
That’s the thing about a year like this one.
You get very good at being two women, and one of them is fine.
“You’re driving angry,” Ellis says, because he’s known me since the club days and can read my voice like a chart.
“I’m driving motivated.”
“Pull over when it becomes the same thing,” he says, and lets me go.
The soundstage is out in the Valley, and they’re mid-run when I get there, so I get to stand in the dark at the back and watch it.
The orchestra. The key change. Samantha at the center mic when After Midnight begins, singing the first verse, the one about the kitchen and the taped-up window, in her dress and her spotlight, and Knox beside her with his guitar, and they’re using my arrangement.
I wrote most of that verse standing in the actual kitchen, twenty-three years ago, waiting for the water to boil because we had to boil the coffee water in a saucepan.
The window behind me had a garbage bag taped over the hole.
We were twenty years old and poorer than the mice, and Knox played me the bones of the song on a guitar with a replaced tuning peg, and I sang him back the harmony that was missing, and we both went quiet, because some songs arrive whole and you know better than to talk over them.
He proposed six weeks later. He put a second-verse line in his vows, in front of everyone, while I held his hands and cried into my borrowed flowers.
And now it’s in a medley. It comes out of a key change into a forty-piece swell with a camera move the packet calls the Lovers’ Push.
Not the style of my arrangement. Mine. The voicings, the dynamic map, the bridge lift I wrote on a napkin in the middle of the worst fight we ever had.
She is standing in my spotlight singing my harmony over my arrangement of the song that contains my whole life, and the room is full of professionals applauding the swell.
Knox sees me between runs. He comes off the stage fast, and he’s smiling, because he doesn’t know yet what I know, and the smile dies while he crosses the floor, because he reads me as well as I read him. Better, maybe. He just applies it slower.
“No,” I say.
He stops three feet away. Up on the stage, the conductor is resetting the orchestra. Samantha watches us from the center mic with her water bottle and her patient face.
“I haven’t made the final decision,” Knox says.
“You let them build an orchestra before you made it?”
“The network proposed the medley structure weeks ago, Miranda flagged it, we were still deciding the second song—”
“She chose it.” It isn’t a question. I read the packet. I know whose team submitted what. “She proposed After Midnight, and everybody told you it was a beautiful idea, and you let them build this.”
“The segment needed a ballad. It’s the biggest love song we have, Romy, it’s the one that closes every show—”
“Do not,” I say, and my voice does something that stops his completely, “explain my own song to me. I know what it is. I know what’s in it.
The apartment. The window. The fight, the reconciliation, the harmony, the line you said in your vows, in front of both our families, while I held your hands and cried.
I know exactly what’s in it, because it’s us. It’s the song with us inside it.”
The stage lights swing somewhere behind him. The orchestra tunes. We stand in the dark and have this in whispers that aren’t whispers, a quiet that carries.
“Sing anything else with her,” I say. “Any song in the catalog. You have nine albums, you have four hundred songs, sing any of them. Sing Wire and Gasoline, she loves the bridge, she’ll faint with joy. Not that one.”
Up on the stage, they’re running the transition again without us.
The key change blooms, the tempo drops, and the first eight bars of After Midnight float out over the dark soundstage, and both of us stop talking, both of us, because twenty-five years in, the song still has the power to hush its own creators.
That’s what it is. That’s what she’s asking to borrow.
You don’t lend that out. You just don’t.
“Romy.” He shoves a hand through his hair, and when he speaks again he’s not arguing, and that’s almost worse.
He’s laying out facts, gently, the way you’d lay out a body.
“The staging’s built. The broadcast cues, the clearances, the orchestra charts, forty musicians booked and charted around this transition.
The network has promos running. This isn’t a setlist call at a club date.
It’s a machine, and the machine is built, and it’s moving. ”
“I don’t care.”
He goes quiet.
“I don’t care,” I say again, softer. “You have told me for a year that it’s one song, it’s one session, it’s one flight, it’s one jacket.
Fine. Now I’m telling you: it’s one song.
My one. The one thing I’ve ever asked you to keep out of the pile.
” I make myself breathe. “Sing the single. Do the whole medley structure with the second-biggest song and let the orchestra saw away at whatever they want. But not After Midnight. Not with her.”
“Romy.”
“I’m asking you as your wife.”
He flinches. Actually flinches, his whole face, because we don’t use it. That’s the rule neither of us ever wrote down. Twenty-five years, and I have pulled every string there is between us except that one. We’ve kept that one out of the machinery. It’s the string you only pull once.
“I know,” he says.
“Then say no to them.”
“I can’t—” He stops. Looks at the stage, at the orchestra, at Samantha watching us from her spotlight, and then back at me, and his face is a man being pulled apart by two teams of horses.
“I hear you. I hear you, and I need you to hear me. There are two hundred people on that stage whose night depends on—”
“I need an answer, Knox.”
“And I can’t give it to you standing in a dark room with the run starting again.” His voice cracks on it. “That’s not no. It’s not no. I’m asking you to let me think.”
“Who else is in the room while you think?” I ask. “Miranda? The network? Her?”
“Nobody’s in the room.”
“There’s never nobody in the room, Knox. That’s the whole year. There’s always somebody else’s schedule in the room, and this time you’re letting them sit in it while you decide whether I count.”
“Think.”
“Yes.”
I take a long look at him. My husband. Twenty-five years, the napkin, the window, the hallway light. A man who has never once, in all our life, told me no to my face.
“If you need a committee meeting,” I say, “to decide whether my no counts, that tells me plenty.”
I leave before the run restarts. It’s important to me that I leave on my own feet, in daylight, without anyone walking me out.
Miranda calls me in the car. I almost don’t answer, but she’s earned nineteen years of answered calls.
“He’s going to do it,” she says. No hello. That’s Miranda. “You should hear it from me. The network, the label, the doc premiere timing, the whole machine, you’re right about all of it, and he’s going to do it anyway, because he’s wrong. He is wrong about this one, Romy.”
I pull over to the shoulder. Mulholland, the city spread out below me like a lighting plot.
“You told him?”
“I told him his wife asked him for something simple and personal, and that in thirty years of watching people in this industry set fires, I have never once seen a good reason come out of an orchestra.” She pauses.
“He’s not having an affair. I want that on the record between you and me.
He’s a good man. But good men drown in inches, same as anyone. ”
“Why are you calling me, Miranda?”
“Because somebody in this outfit,” she says, “should behave like your friend, and it apparently isn’t going to be my client this week.”
“The awards are in three weeks,” Miranda says. “Whatever he decides, decide something for yourself too. Not for him. For you. Will you be there?”
It’s a real question and we both know why.
If I’m absent, the story writes itself: the jealous wife, the boycott, the marriage in crisis.
Samantha Saint gets to stand in my spotlight, sing my harmony, and grieve my absence on the red carpet, all in one night.
If I’m present, I stand in a wing and watch my marriage get performed at me with an orchestra.
“I’ll be there,” I say.
“That’s either very brave or very stupid.”
“Yes,” I say.
I sit on the shoulder until my eyes are dry enough to drive.
Dean calls at nine. Dean never calls at nine.
“Tell me he’s not doing it.”
“He’s thinking about it.”
A long silence, and then Dean, who has spent a year translating my husband’s silences with me, says the thing nobody else will: “There’s no version of that song with her in it, kid.
I played it the night he wrote it. It’s you two.
If he puts her in the middle of it on television, that’s—” He stops, because Dean doesn’t finish sentences about his brother’s marriage. “Tell him I’ll say it to his face.”
“He knows how you feel.”
“Knowing and hearing are different,” Dean says. “I’ll say it to his face anyway.”
He doesn’t call that night. He texts, once, at 1 a.m.: I love you. Still working it out.
I stare at the words until they blur.
Working it out. The song is a napkin and a window and a vow, and my husband is at the office, working it out.
I don’t text back. There’s no answer that fits in a phone, and I am done being reduced to what fits in things.
I put it face down and go to sleep in the middle of the bed, and for the first time in twenty years, I don’t leave the hallway light on.