CHAPTER 15
ROMY
The Beachwood house is small and strange and mine.
Day one, I cry exactly once, standing in the kitchen holding a box, and then I put the box down and go buy light bulbs, because this house is going to be lit or I am going to die trying.
I buy forty bulbs. The hardware-store kid asks if I’m opening a restaurant.
Close, I tell him. I’m reopening a person.
Day two, Ellis arrives uninvited with a toolbox and a grocery bag, says “Don’t talk,” and spends four hours fixing the porch light, the sticking window, and the water pressure, and leaves without a single question about my marriage.
That’s the whole friendship right there. Twenty years and a toolbox.
Dean texts on day three: Not calling. Not asking you to come home. Are you fed?
I stare at it and cry a little, because that’s Dean’s whole soul in eleven words.
Fed, I write back. Lit. Working.
Good, he answers. He’s a wreck, by the way. And then, because he’s Dean and can’t help it: Not saying it to move you. Saying it because it’s true, and you have a thing for true things.
I do. True things. It’s the whole tragedy of my taste in men.
I don’t file. I want it noted somewhere, even if only in this paragraph: I do not call a lawyer in week one, or week two.
I don’t know what I am yet — separated, estranged, done — and I’ve spent too many years of my life rushing to know a thing before the room did.
The ring is in the dish where my mother’s necklace isn’t.
Some nights I look at it. Most nights I work.
Day four, I start Marisol’s record. Really start it.
She comes to the cottage because Ellis’s studio is being rewired, and we sit on the floor with the upright and a laptop, and she plays me the bridge she was afraid of, and I hear the thing underneath it, and I tell her, and she looks at me with nineteen-year-old eyes and says, “How do you do that?”
“Practice,” I say. “And a catastrophic personal life.”
She laughs. I laugh. It’s the first time I’ve laughed in that house, and I mark it: Friday, 2 p.m., the house got christened.
The gossip sites have the separation by day two, sourced to “a backstage insider,” which could be anyone from a publicist to a parking attendant.
The comments divide the world into team jerseys.
Samantha’s fans call me the ball and chain that got cut loose.
My people — I have people now, apparently, a whole demographic of women over thirty-five who know exactly what a hallway light is — post candle emojis under everything.
I read none of it. Marisol reads all of it and reports nothing, which is how I know it’s bad.
Knox calls on day five. I let it ring. He texts: Please tell me where you are. Not asking you to come back. I need to know you’re safe.
It’s the not asking you to come back that gets me, the first clause of his that has ever put me ahead of his need, and I sit with the phone for ten minutes and then I text him the truth: Safe. I have a house. You don’t know it. I want to keep it that way until I’m ready.
He answers: Okay. Tell me when.
No pressure, no second text. Dean’s advice, probably. I’ll take borrowed restraint; the genuine article was in short supply this year.
In between, life insists on itself. The plumber.
The farmer’s market. A session with Marisol that runs so long we order tacos twice.
My sister-in-law drives down from Portland unannounced and wordlessly reorganizes my kitchen, which in her family is a sacrament.
At night the canyon wind moves through the eucalyptus and the house smells new.
Two weeks in, I tell him he can come. One visit. Ninety minutes. I text him the address and the window of time, and he answers with a single word, Thank you, and I set the phone in another room, because that word from that man is a key I don’t want near any locks.
He arrives exactly on time. I watch him come up the staircase street through the front window, alone, no driver, carrying nothing, which must have cost him, because Knox Wildstone arrives places with things: flowers, guitars, apologies shaped like objects.
Empty hands is a sentence he wrote himself, and I notice, and I hate that I notice.
I don’t hug him. I let him in and I stand in my small living room and I wait.
He’s thinner. Two weeks of thinner. His eyes do the inventory of me, load-bearing points first, the stagehand’s check, and whatever he finds makes him look away, at the floor, at his empty hands.
“You look—” he starts.
“Don’t.”
“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”
He looks at everything once, slowly, a man walking a museum of someone else’s life. The upright. Marisol’s charts. The chipped mug on the draining board. His face does something at the mug, and he looks away fast.
“Romy.”
“Sit if you want.”
“I’ll stand.” He clears his throat. “The awards. I want to explain—”
“No.”
He stops.
“You want to explain the broadcast window,” I say.
“The staging, the orchestra, the clearances, the crew. The label. The documentary premiere and its timing. The two hundred people whose night depended on it. Your belief that music and marriage live in separate rooms.” I tick them off on my fingers, evenly, calmly, a woman reading a setlist. “And the big one, the one you think is the whole answer: you never wanted her. You never touched her. Nothing happened.”
He’s gone very still.
“I know all of it, Knox. I understood every reason before I left. I could give the explanation better than you can, I’ve had it running in my head since September. None of those reasons changed what I asked you.”
“Romy—”
“I asked you for one thing in twenty-five years,” I say, and my voice holds, because I promised the light bulbs.
“One. I put the whole marriage in one sentence: sing anything else with her, not that. And you stood in a dark soundstage and heard me say as your wife, and you got in your car and drove to a meeting about it.”
That’s when he goes down.
He doesn’t crumple. He kneels. He kneels on my small living-room floor, a man in a cathedral, this enormous famous wreck of a man, and his voice comes out torn open.
“Tell me what to do. Romy. Tell me and I’ll do it.
I’ll cancel the rest of the promo, I’ll cancel the film, I’ll pay the network whatever the breach costs, I’ll tell the label to bury the EP.
I’ll walk away from the whole year. Tell me what fixes this and it’s done, today, I don’t care what it is.
There’s no machine left that I’d trade for you. ”
And there it sits, the whole offer, burning on my floor. A year ago I would have caught it with both hands. Today I hear it for what it is: a list. He’s brought me a list of machines to smash, and he wants me to pick which ones, and he wants that to be love.
I look down at him, and God help me, part of me has wanted this, the grovel, the knees, the collapse of the machine. And the rest of me sees it so clearly I could cry: he’s asking me for the answer. Again. He’s handing me the pen and asking me to write the way out.
“And tomorrow?” I say.
“What?”
“You’ll cancel it all today. And tomorrow there’s a new thing, a new contract, a new collaborator, a new reason. What happens tomorrow?”
“Whatever you need. Whatever you say.”
“That’s the whole problem,” I say, and it comes out gentle, because it’s a terrible thing to say to a man on his knees and I refuse to say it hard.
“You still want me to produce the apology. You want me to write the fix, and you’ll sing it beautifully, and you’ll mean it, and nothing will have changed, because I will have done the work.
Like always. The songs, the shows, the boundaries, the marriage.
Knox, I drew every line we ever had. I’m done being the one who knows where they go. ”
He cries then. Not performing, not pretty. My husband cries on my rental-cottage floor with his hands hanging at his sides, and what he says through it is: “I never wanted her. Romy. I never once wanted her. You have to know that.”
“I do know it.” I sit down across from him, on the floor, because I can’t loom over this. “You keep saying that like desire was the only thing you were capable of giving away.”
He looks up at me.
“You never gave her your body,” I say. “I know. You gave her my seat. My light. My photograph. My hallway. My song, with my harmony in her mouth, at my tempo, in front of the world. You gave away every piece of me that was holding us up, one at a time, and each time you checked your own heart, found no affair in it, and called the marriage safe. Knox. I wasn’t asking you to not want her. I was asking you to keep me.”
He doesn’t say anything for a long time. The pipes tick. Outside, somebody’s radio plays three streets down.
“What am I supposed to do?” he asks at last, and it’s not the machine asking anymore. It’s just a man, and it breaks my heart, and I let it break my heart without reaching for him, because reaching is the whole habit I’m breaking.
“Figure out why I had to keep teaching you what counted,” I say. “Not what to cancel. Not what to say. Why I had to keep teaching you. When you know, you’ll know what to do. I can’t want it for you.”
I ask him to leave. He goes. He gets up off my floor and wipes his face and stops at the door, and for one second I think he’s going to say the thing that would wreck my resolve completely, whatever it is, and instead he says, “The house is good. It’s right.
It sounds like you,” and then he’s gone down the staircase street, empty-handed, the way he came.
I don’t cry after. I expected to. Instead I sit at the upright and I work on Marisol’s bridge until the light changes, and it’s good work, mine, in my house.
Ellis texts: You alive?
Alive, I text back. Session Thursday?
Wouldn’t miss it, he says.
Across the city, in a house full of lights nobody turns off, Knox Wildstone does not call me for instructions.
He goes back to the notebook.
One more thing lands before the week ends. Miranda emails me, personal account, three lines: The unwind is real. The film has no footage of you without your consent — I checked the contracts myself. And I am so sorry, Romy.
I believe her. It’s a strange club now, the people who believed me late, and I don’t hate any of them, and I don’t sit at their tables either. There’s a difference between forgiveness and re-enlistment. I learned it in a soundstage in the Valley.
I hear about the notebook later.