CHAPTER 14
KNOX
The ovation’s still going when I come offstage, and I’m looking for the red dress before my ears have stopped ringing.
She’s not in the wing. Nobody will meet my eyes, and then a kid in a credential lanyard, twenty-two, maybe, some assistant I’ve never met, walks up to me with the expression of a man delivering a death notice and says, “Sir. Your wife asked me to tell you. She’s gone home.”
“Gone home,” I say.
“She said to give you a minute first, sir,” the kid says, and his voice wobbles, and that’s when I understand he doesn’t mean the house. He means gone.
Miranda tries to stop me at the after-party door an hour later and I say her name once and she steps aside, and I drive home with the windows down doing ninety on the empty 101, rehearsing the whole way.
I know how to fix this. That’s the thing I keep hold of on the drive.
I’ve fixed everything for twenty years. Broken deals, broken tours, a bassist who quit in Prague.
You find the person, you say the true thing, you fix it.
Romy is angry, and Romy is right, and I’ll say the true thing and we’ll fix it.
The gate opens. The house is dark.
That should tell me. It does tell me. I just don’t know the language yet.
I go in calling her name. Nobody answers, and the house has a sound I can’t place at first, and then I can: it’s the sound of a mix with the lead vocal muted. Everything’s still there. The thing it’s all for is gone.
Her closet has gaps in it. Not all of it.
She’s surgical, my wife, she’s taken what she needs and left the shape of everything else standing, which is so exactly her that I have to sit down on the closet floor.
Her notebooks are gone. The good pens. Her mother’s necklace, the one that lives in the dish by the sink when she gardens. The dish is empty.
The guitar she keeps in the bedroom, gone.
The portable rig from the studio annex, gone.
The framed photo from the Red Rocks soundcheck, gone from the hallway, hook still on the wall.
Her Grammy’s gone from the downstairs bathroom, the one she kept by the towels as a joke.
The joke’s over. The towels are still there.
In the kitchen, her coffee mug is gone. Not the fancy ones.
The chipped one with the guitar pick printed on it, the one that’s survived four kitchens.
She took the chipped mug and left the china, and that’s when my legs go, because the china was for a house, and the mug was for her life, and she has correctly identified which one she’s still living.
I find the ring on the piano.
Middle C. She’s left it centered on middle C, and I stand there with my hand on the fallboard and I can’t touch it, because if I touch it it’s mine to hold, and if it’s mine to hold she’s not wearing it, and this is the logic of a man with a panic attack, and I know it, and I stand there anyway.
Then I see what’s missing from the piano. The napkin. The framed napkin I gave her on our tenth anniversary.
She took the napkin.
No — she didn’t. I look again and it’s there, on the music rest, out of its place. Picked up and put back. She held it and she put it back, and I have to leave the room.
I call Dean. He answers on the first ring, which means he already knows, which means the whole backstage nation-state watched my wife leave and my brother is the only one who’ll pick up.
“Come over,” I say. “She’s gone.”
“I know,” Dean says. “Twenty minutes.”
He makes it in fifteen. He walks in with a bottle and no glass for himself, looks at me, looks at the ring still sitting on middle C, and sits down on the piano bench with the care of a man entering a hospital room.
“Say it,” I say.
“Say what?”
“Whatever you’ve got. You’ve had it loaded for a year. I’ve watched you not say it since the amp photo, so say it.”
Dean looks at me a long time. My brother has my face with all the ambition worn off, and right now it looks older than me. Then he says, “I don’t have anything loaded. That’s the thing you never got. Nobody does. Nobody’s been whispering about you and Samantha. Nobody thinks you slept with her.”
“Nothing happened with Samantha.”
He doesn’t sigh. He doesn’t roll his eyes. He just waits, and that’s worse, so I say it louder, and then I hear how it sounds in the dead air of my own hallway and I shut up.
“I know,” he says. “That’s what I’m telling you. Nobody thinks anything happened. Romy doesn’t think anything happened. She never did.”
“Then why—” and the sentence dies right there in my mouth, because even I can hear it.
“There it is,” Dean says quietly. “That’s the whole marriage, right there. You’re standing in an empty house asking why, and the answer’s been sitting next to you at breakfast for a year.”
“She never told me she was—” I stop. Start over. “She told me about the incidents. Every incident, I handled. I handled every single one, Dean. The posts, the sessions, the jacket. I blocked the— I talked to Samantha, I set rules, I—”
“Every time Samantha pushed,” Dean says, “you moved whatever line Romy was standing behind and called the new line reasonable.”
I sit down on the piano bench next to him. The ring is right there between us, above the keys.
“She told you the pattern,” he says. “I watched her tell you, in kitchens, in cars, on a plane. And every time, you went and found the one innocent explanation for the one object she was pointing at, and you handed it back to her like you’d fixed something.
She wasn’t pointing at objects, Knox. She was pointing at a direction. ”
“The awards—”
“The awards, yeah.” He rubs his face. “Let me ask you something, and you answer it honestly, because I’m your brother and it’s 2 a.m. and nobody’s filming. She asked you not to sing that song with that woman. When did you know that? Before the orchestra. Before the staging. Before all of it.”
I don’t answer. The clock ticks. Somewhere upstairs a pipe does the thing the pipes do, and I think, she knows why the pipes do that, she knows everything about this house, and I’ve lived here fifteen years and I don’t know where the fuse box is.
“Yeah,” Dean says, reading my face. “That’s what I thought.”
He stays the night, in the guest room, the one I slept in for two nights like an idiot tourist in my own marriage. In the morning he makes coffee wrong and neither of us says so.
At the door, leaving, he stops with his hand on the frame.
“You want my actual advice? Once. Then I’m done.”
“Give it.”
“Don’t chase her this week.” He says it flat, a man who watched me chase everything I’ve ever wanted. “She didn’t leave to be followed. She left to be heard. If you show up at her door before you’ve figured out what she was saying, you’re just one more object with an explanation.”
Then he’s gone, and the house goes back to its muted-mix sound, and I stand in the entryway understanding that my brother just told me the truest thing anyone’s told me in years, and that I have no idea yet how to do what he said.
Samantha texts at 9 a.m. I don’t know how she knows already. Everyone knows already.
Are you okay? I’m hearing things and I’m worried about you.
Then, an hour later: She walked out over a PERFORMANCE? Knox. She’s punishing you for making art. That’s not love. That’s control.
Then, by lunch: You did nothing wrong. I need you to hear that. You did NOTHING wrong, and she’s making you the villain of a story she invented.
I look at the three messages for a long time, sitting in the kitchen where Romy’s chipped mug isn’t, and I notice the thing I never once noticed in a year of corridors and studios.
Every sentence is about her and me. There’s a we hiding in every line of it, and the we isn’t her and a song. It’s her and me, against my wife.
I block the number. Then I call Miranda and tell her to start unwinding every piece of joint promotion that isn’t contractually nailed down, and she says, “Already started,” in a voice I’ve never heard from her, and I don’t ask how long she’s had it ready.
Miranda comes over that afternoon with the unwind plan, printed out, tabbed, and she doesn’t say I told you so, which from Miranda is a form of grief.
“Film clearances take the longest,” she says, all business, because business is the only gift she has to give me.
“The EP’s committed through the award cycle.
I’ve killed the spring joint appearances.
She—” A pause, Miranda deciding something.
“She called my cell at six this morning. Not yours. She knows you blocked her. She wanted me to know she’s ‘available to you as a friend during this difficult time.’”
“What did you say?”
“I said my client isn’t taking meetings.
” Miranda stacks her papers, and then, not looking at me: “Twenty years, Knox. I’ve managed you through every kind of weather there is, and the only fight I ever saw your wife lose was the one where she tried to get you to hear her.
” She picks up her bag. “You can hate that I said it.”
“I don’t hate it,” I say. “Get out of my house anyway.”
She goes, and she’s right, and we both know she’ll be back at nine tomorrow with the call sheet, because that’s what the job is.
The lawyers will take weeks. There are film clearances, the EP’s tail, award-season commitments already signed.
I sign what they put in front of me, and every signature takes her further away from us, and I understand that the machine I let get built is now the machine I have to dismantle bolt by bolt, and that the difference between building it and dismantling it is that nobody applauds the second thing.
Late that night I sit at the piano. The ring’s in my pocket now. I couldn’t leave it on the key.
I don’t play. I get a notebook instead, one of hers she didn’t take, a blank one from the stack in the studio, and I open it and I write at the top of the first page like I’m back in the apartment with the taped-up window, and what comes out is the first true sentence I’ve put on paper in a year.
You were in the room before anyone clapped.
I look at it a good while. Then I turn the page, and I write another one.
I learned every crowd’s name and forgot to ask what yours cost.
I cross out forgot. Write chose not to. Cross out the whole line. Start again. Whatever this is, it doesn’t get the easy verbs.
I keep writing, and the house makes its sounds around me, and I leave the hallway light on, all night, every light in the hall.
She kept them on for me for twenty years. Every night I was out being a stadium, there was a forty-watt bulb burning in a hallway in Los Angeles, and I walked toward it every night thinking it was wiring. Just wiring, something the house did by itself.
I can’t sleep in a house where they’re off.