CHAPTER 16
KNOX
The tour resumes in January because the tour was always going to resume.
Music doesn’t stop for a broken marriage.
Ask the entire blues section of any record store.
Twenty-eight cities, sold out, contracts older than my separation.
Miranda offers me the out: insurance, postponement, a dignified pause.
I turn it down, because a stage is the only room left where I know what I’m doing.
The first week on the road is a study in absence.
Nobody on a tour bus asks me what I want on the rider; that was always her, and for a year the rider just appeared, correct, and I never once asked who made it correct.
Now the promoter in each city presents me a menu of things I apparently like, chosen by a woman I made leave.
Dean starts sitting with me at breakfast without being asked.
Tessa walks me through my own cues twice, gently, in case I’m concussed. I might be.
I don’t call her. Dean’s advice sits heavy on me: she left to be heard, not followed. So I listen to the silence, which is what she’s been asking me to do since June, and I take notes.
Before Denver, we do the surgery. I sign the letter ending all future creative work with Samantha Saint: no sessions, no performances, no film pickups, nothing past the obligations already in lawyers’ hands.
Miranda terminates her access to Wildstone-controlled venues, one credential at a time, and you’d be amazed how many keys a year of collaboration hands out.
The woman had eleven separate passes in eleven separate systems. We find them the way you find termites.
We miss one.
Denver, night one, ninety minutes before doors. I’m in the dressing room running scales when Tessa, who’s stayed loyal to both of us in a way I don’t deserve, knocks and puts her head in and says, very carefully, “Security has a situation. Level three.”
Level three is the corridor outside my dressing room.
I should say what I feel, walking out there, because it’s not what I expected to feel.
Not anger. Not even fear, though Tessa’s face had fear in it.
What I feel is a huge, tired clarity. There’s one more door I didn’t close, and here she is behind it.
I spent a year leaving doors open and calling it professionalism.
Here is what walked through. I’m not even surprised, and not being surprised turns out to be the saddest part.
Samantha’s standing there when I come out, between two members of my security who are doing the job politely, and she looks wrong.
That’s the only honest word. The gloss is still there — the coat, the hair — but it’s put on wrong, too much of everything, and her eyes are moving too fast, and I understand with a cold drop in my stomach that I’m seeing her without the editing.
“Tell them it’s me,” she says.
“You shouldn’t be here. You know you shouldn’t be here.”
“Your wife had my access killed.” She says it loud enough for the corridor, and the corridor pretends not to listen.
“A year of work, the biggest record of my life, and I can’t get through a door at your show?
She is destroying the greatest creative partnership you have ever had, and you’re letting her do it from wherever she went. ”
“The partnership is over, Samantha.”
She blinks. I don’t think anyone’s said it to her flatly before. There’s been a year of maybes, a year of doors held open because the work was good and the numbers were good and I told myself that was the same as innocence.
“Did she tell you to say that?” A little laugh, fast and wrong. “Is she texting you the script? Is she—”
“I’m saying it.”
The corridor is very quiet. The crew has stopped pretending to work.
“You were alive with me,” she says. Then her voice goes up, cracks open, and there’s the thing underneath at last, no melody on it. “Those sessions. You felt it. The mic, the two in the morning, the awards — I know what that was, Knox, I was standing in it too—”
“I was recording an album.”
She stares at me.
For a second, nobody breathes. The old move, the one I could’ve made for a year, is right there: soften it, offer her something, a closed door with a window in it. Miranda calls it talent-management. Romy calls it the reason we’re not in the same house. I let the silence stand.
“That’s what it was,” I say, and I keep my voice level, because there’s a part of me that wants to shout and I’ve decided that part doesn’t get the wheel anymore.
“A record. A good one. I was doing my job, and my job was never you, and I am sorry — genuinely — that nobody said that to you in plain words a year ago, because it might have saved everyone a lot. I’m saying it now. ”
“She trained you.” She’s shaking her head, eyes wet and moving fast. “She’s spent twenty years training you to feel guilty every time another woman reaches you creatively.
That’s what that marriage is. A leash with a harmony part.
You were the biggest thing in music before you started apologizing for it—”
“That’s enough.”
“She doesn’t DESERVE you—”
It comes out of her as a scream, and it carries.
Down the corridor, around the corner, into the loading dock.
I hear it stop conversations two rooms away.
My head of security steps in then, both hands up, doing the job with grace, and Samantha lets herself be walked out, and the last thing I see is her looking back at me with an expression I finally, finally recognize, because I’ve been living in its house since November.
It’s the face of someone whose song just got taken away.
After she’s gone I stand in the corridor a minute with my heart hammering, and then I call Miranda, and then the head of venue security, and we do what should have been done in the summer: every credential in every system, cancelled tonight.
Documentary passes audited and reissued with photos.
Samantha Saint barred from every Wildstone-controlled facility, permanently.
Anything that has to happen between us happens lawyer to lawyer, in writing, forever.
The old credential she used was a film-crew pass with an expiry date someone fat-fingered a year out. Nobody’s fired over it. I made sure of that. I’m done with solutions that cost the wrong people.
“She’ll escalate,” Miranda says on the phone. “You know that?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I know that now.”
The show that night is a good one. Loud and clean.
I do the whole set and nobody in that crowd knows anything, and there’s a minute in the third song where I’m standing in the follow spot with eighteen thousand people singing, and I think about Romy standing in the wing all those years, holding the whole show together from the dark while I ran toward the light. I did that for twenty years. I let her.
I don’t sing After Midnight. It’s on the setlist, printed, third encore slot, the slot it’s held for twenty years, and the crowd is already chanting for it by the second break. I know the chant. I built my life on the chant.
I look at the setlist, and I think about Romy handing her credential to a kid and walking into November in a red dress, and I call the audible into the talk-back: we close with Mercury Rain.
Dean looks at me across the stage. He doesn’t nod the way a man agrees with a set change.
He nods slow, a man watching his brother finally put down something heavy, and then we play the hell out of Mercury Rain, and eighteen thousand people go home having missed the big song, and a few of them will complain online, and I will live.
Backstage afterward, a local journalist asks Miranda about the omission, and Miranda, magnificent, says, “The set list is the artist’s.
” Nobody gets more. That’s the new rule, and I made it in one second in front of eighteen thousand people, and it’s the first boundary on this tour that I drew before somebody crossed it.
After the show, the dressing room empties out, and I take the notebook from my bag.
It’s getting fat now. Crossed-out lines, arrows, whole pages with one good sentence and a graveyard around it.
Tonight’s page has a verse about the Denver corridor, about watching a face change when it finally said true things at full volume.
I keep circling one line: a year of harmony and not one true note.
I don’t know yet if it stays. Most lines don’t.
That’s what the graveyard pages are for.
I don’t show it to anyone. It’s not ready, and more than that, it’s mine, the first thing in years that’s only mine and the page.
Dean comes in with two beers, sees the notebook, and tips his chin at it.
“That the thing you’ve been writing?”
“Yeah.”
He opens both beers and hands me one, and settles into the couch, and says, easy as anything, “Want a second set of ears? I could—”
“No.”
He raises his eyebrows. In twenty-five years I have never once said no to Dean’s ears. Dean’s ears are how this band exists.
“Not because of you,” I say. “Every song I’ve ever written, somebody helped.
Romy heard everything first. You fixed my bridges.
The band, the producers, everybody. And I sat in her house a month ago and she told me I had to figure out what I meant without being told.
” I close the notebook. “So this one, nobody touches. Not even you. Especially not you. If it’s bad, it’s bad, and it’s mine. ”
Dean studies me, and then he raises his beer an inch, a toast to nothing, and says, “Took you long enough.”
“What did?”
“You ever hear yourself say ‘Romy heard everything first’ and wonder what it cost her to always be first and never be asked?” He drinks.
“She produced half your life and got thanked in liner notes. You want to know why the song matters? It’s not the song.
It’s that you gave the job of explaining you to the woman who was already doing the rest of the work.
Drink your beer, little brother. Write your song. ”
He falls asleep on my couch an hour later, boots on, beer half-finished, the way he has since the van days.
I cover him with the venue blanket and sit back down with the notebook, and the bus hums, and somewhere out there my wife is making a record in a little house she bought with her own work and never mentioned, and I’m only now asking what else she quietly kept, and the mountains keep coming.
The bus leaves at midnight for Salt Lake. I ride it awake most of the way, notebook on my knee, watching the mountains go black past the window, and the whole time, my phone sits in my pocket, and I don’t text her.
She told me to figure out why she had to keep teaching me.
I’m figuring.
It’s the hardest tour I’ve ever done, and nobody in the crowd can tell.
Well. One person could tell. She’s in a canyon with an upright piano, not watching, and that’s the point of all of it now: the work continues whether or not Romy Wildstone is standing in the wing.
Everything continues. That’s what she was always trying to tell me. I just never believed the everything included her leaving.