CHAPTER 13
ROMY
The four days before the awards, the house is so quiet I learn things about it. The refrigerator has a second hum under the first one. The piano goes slightly flat in cold weather, and I sit down and tune it, because I refuse to leave it worse than I found it.
Marisol’s single gets its first top-ten add on Thursday.
She texts me nineteen exclamation points, and I text back the proud-producer reply she deserves, and then I sit in my car in the garage and have the only cry of the whole week, forty seconds, no more, because a nineteen-year-old’s voice on the radio is supposed to be the headline of my life this week, and it can’t be.
On Friday I decide what to wear.
I wear the red dress.
If I’m going to do this, I do it as myself, at full power, in the dress I wore the night Knox won his first of the big ones and carried me across a hotel lobby while I laughed at him to put me down.
I do my own makeup. I drive myself. When the red carpet people call my name, I turn and give them the smile, because the only story I refuse to hand anyone is the one where the wife stayed home and cried.
A hundred yards down the carpet, Samantha is doing press in white. I don’t look at her. She doesn’t look at me. The photographers call both our names and neither of us turns at the same time, which is the only coordination we’ve managed all year.
Someone from a tabloid yells, “Romy, are you excited for the medley?” and I give them my best forty-watt smile and say, “It’s a beautiful arrangement.” It is. I wrote it.
Knox and I haven’t spoken in four days. He’s called.
I’ve answered twice, both times logistical, both times ending the same way: him starting the sentence about the segment, me asking if the answer’s changed, the answer not changing.
Last night he stood in the bedroom doorway and said, “Tell me what you’ll do,” and I said, “I’ll be there,” and he looked so relieved that I almost pitied him, which tells you what he thought “I’ll be there” meant.
Backstage at the Garden is its usual self, a small nation-state of headsets and hush.
People hug me. People look at their shoes.
The floor has known for weeks what the set is; you can’t rehearse an orchestra in secret, and I catch the glances, the sympathy arranged carefully out of sight.
Tessa finds me at catering and doesn’t say anything at all, just stands beside me, which is worth more than most of the talking.
Samantha passes me once backstage, early, on her way to vocal warm-ups, a whole entourage orbiting her. She stops. The orbit stops with her, well-trained.
“Romy. I’m so glad you came.” She says it warmly, eyes shining, every bit the gracious co-star. “I know tonight is — I know it’s a lot. I just want you to know I’m going to take care of it. The song. I know what it means.”
She knows what it means. She’s telling me she knows what it means, in a corridor full of witnesses, and there’s not one word of it I could ever repeat to anyone and sound sane.
“Sing it well,” I say.
Her smile widens. “I always do.”
Then it’s time, and I take my place in the wing, first row of the dark, where I have stood for half my life.
The single goes first, and it’s good. Professional opinion, from the woman who built its arrangement: it’s great.
The crowd is up, the cameras love them, Samantha is radiant and precise and Knox is Knox, and for three and a half minutes it’s just a hit song on a big stage, and I let myself watch it the way I used to, proud of the work.
Beside me in the wing, a young backup singer is whispering that it’s the most romantic thing she’s ever seen. She’s maybe twenty-two. She means it. That’s what the machine does best: it manufactures a story so clean that even the people inside it believe they’re watching love.
Dean is on stage right, and between songs he looks across the whole width of the stage and finds me in the dark.
He doesn’t wave. He doesn’t nod. He just holds my eyes for one long second, and in it is twenty years, and Tokyo, and the sign-out sheet, and everything he can’t say from behind a guitar.
It’s the only thing all night that nearly breaks me.
Then the key change.
I’ve been bracing for it all night and it doesn’t help.
The tempo drops, the orchestra comes up, and the opening bars of After Midnight roll out across Madison Square Garden, my voicings, my dynamic map, and the crowd recognizes it and makes a sound I’ve only ever heard from the inside of it, twenty thousand people inhaling at once.
Samantha sings the first verse. My spotlight. My blocking. My song about my kitchen.
She’s good. That’s the obscenity of it, the part no one will print.
She sings it beautifully, every lift where I put it, and she sings the harmony line, my line, the melody I hummed to a man on a broken couch twenty-three years ago, and Knox plays and sings the lead and he doesn’t look at her.
He looks at his guitar, at the crowd, at the floor. Anywhere.
Second verse. The apartment verse.
The one with the address in it, practically. The one with the line.
He gets to it, the vow line, the one he said to me with his hands shaking in front of everyone we love, and his voice frays on it, a real fray, not a performed one, and the audience oohs, because they think it’s the song. Only three people in this building know what just frayed. Him. Me.
And her.
Final verse. The arrangement builds exactly where I built it to build, and Samantha turns to him, and she reaches for his hand.
He doesn’t take it.
He keeps playing. His eyes are closed. The biggest television moment of his year is happening at the end of his own arm and he keeps playing, and she lets her hand drift back to the mic, smooth, a woman who has already won and can afford to be gracious about the hands.
Last note. The orchestra swells. She leans in close to him, close enough that the Lovers’ Push camera gets exactly what the network paid for, and Knox doesn’t lean back, doesn’t lean in, finishes the song and lets it end.
And then Samantha Saint turns, finds me in the wing, in the dark, in my red dress, and smiles at me.
Small. Satisfied. Private. A smile with no camera anywhere near it, just for me, just between the two of us. A smile to keep. A keepsake of a smile.
I understand, standing there, that she’s right.
Tonight she is right. She said all along she was just making music, and she was, and I kept explaining the objects, and the object was always this: not my husband’s hands.
His history. And she just sang it back to him on live television while the whole world applauded, and he let it happen with his eyes closed, and the letting is the thing. The letting was always the thing.
I take off my ring.
Twenty years, and it comes off easier than I expect, which is the saddest sentence I know. I hand my backstage credential to the nearest assistant, a boy of maybe twenty-two who looks at my face and then at the ring in my other hand and goes pale.
“Give him a minute,” I say. “Then you can tell him I’m gone.”
“Mrs. Wildstone—”
“Just Romy,” I say. “It was always just Romy.”
The ring is warm from my hand. Twenty years warm. I think about leaving it with the boy, and then I don’t, because it’s not a credential. Nobody scans it. Nobody hands it back to you at the end of the night.
I leave before the ovation ends. Through the service corridors, past the loading dock, into the November cold with no coat, the dress and the ring and nothing else, and I get in my car and I drive.
He calls before I’m through the tunnel. Then again. Again. The phone lights the passenger seat eleven times, and on the twelfth I answer, because there are things that should be said and things that should never be said, and I’ve spent a year learning the difference.
“Where are you?” His voice is ragged. The noise behind him is the after-party starting without its host.
“Away from your show.”
“Romy, come home. Come home and we’ll— it was one performance. Whatever you’re feeling, it was one performance, we’ll talk about it, we’ll—”
“It was the one song,” I say, “that I asked you not to give her.”
Silence. Down the line I can hear the party, glasses and bass, the sound of his world continuing.
“I didn’t give her anything,” he says.
And there it is. Simple. Sincere. Completely, catastrophically beside the point, the whole year in one sentence, every boundary and corridor and 2 a.m. piano in it, him standing at the center of a wrecked marriage still counting what he didn’t hand over.
“That sentence,” I say, “is why I’m leaving you.”
“Romy—”
“You’ll want to know what happens next, so here it is, because you’ve earned honesty if you’ve earned nothing else.
I’m not calling a lawyer tonight and I’m not calling you tomorrow.
I’m going to go sleep in a house you don’t know about, and in the morning I’m going to produce a record, because one of us still makes music for the right reasons. Goodbye, Knox.”
I end the call. I end the next one too, and the one after that, and then I turn the phone off and drive the rest of the way in silence, up the hill, through the gate, into the garage.
The house is dark and enormous and ours.
I pack in the dark, because the lights are a message to the gate cameras and I am done sending messages.
Clothes. Notebooks. The good pens. My mother’s necklace.
The black duct-taped arrangement notebook, first into the bag, the one with Marisol’s record in the margins.
The little property up in Beachwood that I bought in 2011 with the production royalties and never told anyone about except my accountant, because every woman in this town eventually learns to own one door nobody else has a key to — that house has been empty for years, and tonight it stops being empty.
I take the napkin — the original, framed, the one he gave me on our tenth anniversary — off the piano, and I stand there holding it a long time.
Then I put it back. It isn’t mine to take. It isn’t mine anymore at all. That’s the whole night, right there.
The ring I leave on the piano keys, centered on middle C, where he’ll see it before he sits down.
In the car, at the gate, the dashboard clock says 12:47. After midnight.
I don’t laugh. I would have, a year ago. There’s a whole inventory of things I would have done a year ago, and I drive through the gate doing none of them.
I take one last look at the hallway when I go back for the second bag.
Then I turn the light off myself.