CHAPTER 18
ROMY
The Luminary Gala is one of those industry nights that sounds made up and isn’t: three labels, one arena, every famous person you’ve ever heard of crammed into a backstage the size of a shoebox.
After the Frogtown break-in, the security terms are explicit and lawyered.
Samantha Saint and I are never to share a corridor, a green room level, or an unescorted moment.
Her label signed it. My lawyer signed it. The venue signed it.
I’m here because Marisol is performing. She’s nominated for nothing yet and better than everything, and when she asked if I’d come, I said yes before she’d finished the sentence, because fear doesn’t get my calendar.
The venue gives me an escort, a broad, calm man named Bo who walks me everywhere and stands at doors with the patience of furniture.
The separation plan has maps. My north wing, her south wing, neutral zones marked like a custody agreement, which I suppose it is.
Marisol thinks it’s all hilarious and glamorous.
“It’s like being in a divorce between two Cold Wars,” she says, and then covers her mouth and apologizes for a solid minute.
“Don’t,” I tell her. “Gallows humor is how crew survive. You’re crew now.”
She destroys her three-song slot. I want it in writing somewhere that before anything else happened that night, a nineteen-year-old from Reno made an arena of jaded industry people stop talking to the bar and listen.
I watch from the monitor with my arms folded and my heart full, and I think: I made the frame for this.
Whatever else this year took, it didn’t take that.
The plan works for four hours. I’m in the north wing with my artist, Samantha is in the south, the show runs smooth, Marisol destroys the room in the good way, and I’m crying happy tears at the monitor when a stage manager taps my shoulder.
“Missus— Romy. Dressing room three needs you. Something about the audio feed for the replays.”
It’s a normal request. It’s my exact job description. I go. At the door of dressing room three, Bo takes up his post outside, standard position, and I wave him toward the monitor station down the hall, because the replay feed issue is in the room and I’ll be ninety seconds.
It’s the one time all night I send him anywhere. I’ll think about that later. We’ll all think about that later.
Dressing room three is at the end of a service corridor, and the corridor is empty, and the door is open, and inside is Samantha.
I know within two steps that there is no audio feed. It’s instantly clear, a wrong note of a corridor. She engineered this, or waited for it, and the separation plan is forty pages of paper and she’s a person.
“Walk away,” I say. Loud, level, for the corridor cameras. “Right now. You walk away and this never happened.”
“You ruined it.” She’s between me and the door.
Her makeup is stage-perfect and her eyes are wrecked, and she has a glass awards-decor bottle in her hand, some heavy ornamental thing, and she’s holding it low, not raised, not yet.
“The film’s shelved. Did you know that? Shelved.
My label’s lawyers talk to his lawyers around me.
Over me. He won’t take a meeting. A year of my life, and he won’t take a meeting. ”
“That’s called consequences.”
“That’s called YOU.” Her voice cracks up the register. “You decided he wasn’t allowed to want something new. You’ve had him since he was nobody and to you he’s a house you inherited, and the second somebody showed him what a real creative partnership is, you set out to destroy me for it.”
I try the other exit, the connecting door to dressing room two. She’s faster. She’s between me and that door too, and now we’re moving, and moving is bad, and I put my hands up, palms out, and say it one more time.
“Move, Samantha.”
“Or what?” She’s crying now, furious and crying. “You’ll break something of mine? You took him. Tell me what we are. You know what we are, you saw it, you watched every minute of it—”
She grabs my wrist.
Hard. Both hands, wrenching, and the year goes out of me, the lawyers and the corridors and the careful explanations, and I do what she should’ve known I’d do, what she’d know if she’d researched me instead of my wardrobe: I twist out of the hold the way Ellis’s bouncer friends taught me in the club days, thumb-side, sharp, and she stumbles.
Then she shoves me, both hands, and I go backward into the dressing table and the mirror cracks in a star behind my shoulder blades.
After that it’s not a scene anymore. It’s a fight.
I come off the table and drive her back into the wall, and she grabs my hair, a full fist of it, and pain whites out the room for a second, and I get my elbow up and drive it into her ribs until the fist lets go.
She’s screaming things that aren’t words.
The bottle swings past my head — not a feint, a real throw, point blank and missed — and it explodes on the doorframe, and I don’t wait for a second one.
I go low and take her down, both of us crashing between the vanity and the couch, and I get her shoulders to the floor and my knee across them and I pin her, and she thrashes and screams, and I hold her there.
That’s how security finds us. Twenty seconds that last a year, and then the corridor fills with bodies and radios, and hands lift us apart, and Marisol’s voice is somewhere saying my name over and over.
And then Knox is in the doorway.
He’s still in his stage clothes, breathing hard, having run from wherever the show had him, and he takes in the room: the cracked mirror, the glass, the two of us held apart by security, my hair half down, her mascara in ruins.
“Tell her!” Samantha shrieks it. The whole corridor hears. “Tell her!”
“Tell her what?” Knox says.
“What we are.” And it’s not a scream anymore. It’s the most terrible thing in the whole night: it’s intimate. A woman asking for her song back. “Tell her what we are. You know. You’ve always known.”
Knox looks at her. Later he’ll tell me it was like looking at a stranger wearing a friend’s face, that he searched it for anything he’d ever recognized and came up empty.
“Nothing,” he says.
“You know that’s not true—”
“It has never been true.” His voice is level and loud and final, a voice built to carry over crowds, and it carries. “There has never been anything. There was a record. I am sorry you believed there was more, and I am telling you now, in front of everyone: there was never anything.”
She lunges. Even held by two security officers, she lunges at me with everything she has, and they wrap her up and take her out, still screaming, and the corridor swallows her, and then it’s over.
Silence. Glass. Marisol crying in the hallway. My own heartbeat in my ears.
Knox takes one step toward me and stops. Dead stop, three feet away, his hands down at his sides, held still by main force. The room is watching. The whole corridor is watching, and he keeps those three feet between us. A wall.
“Can I touch you?” he asks.
Not are you okay. Not let me see. Can I touch you. A year of boundaries handed back to me in one question, asked by a man who used to cross every room to me without thinking, who is thinking now.
I’m shaking. I’m furious. I’m alive, and my hands hurt, and the adrenaline is singing its ugly song, and I look at my husband standing behind his three feet of new religion, and I nod.
Only then does he come to me.
He doesn’t grab. He holds me, gentle, one arm around my shoulders, his hand flat between my shoulder blades, and I put my forehead against his collarbone for one second, one second only, because my marriage is still broken and my ribs are bruised and Samantha Saint is being driven somewhere in handcuffs-adjacent circumstances, and nothing is fixed.
“Are you hurt?” His voice is in my hair.
“Banged up. She swings like a songwriter.”
He laughs, a single cracked bark of it, wet with everything he’s not saying, and I feel him shake too, both of us shaking, the only two people in the world who understand the joke.
Behind us, security is photographing the mirror. Marisol is being walked to her dressing room by her brother, throwing looks back at me until I wave her on: go, be nineteen, be famous, I’ll be fine.
Knox lets go first. Correctly. He steps back to his three feet, and his face is wrecked, and he says, “They’ll want statements. Yours, mine, the venue’s. I’ll keep mine to facts and I’ll clear nothing about you with anyone but you.”
“Okay.”
“Romy.” He waits until I look at him. “I know tonight doesn’t earn me anything. I’m not asking.”
“Good,” I say. “There’s nothing to spend it on anyway.”
It’s cruel, and it’s true, and he takes it standing, and nods, and watches me walk away down the corridor under my own power.
The paramedic in the medical room is kind and quick and finds nothing worse than bruises, a scalp that’ll ache for days, and a scratch from the mirror glass.
Ellis gets there before the paperwork’s done, still in the jacket he left the studio in, and he doesn’t hug me or fuss; he sits down next to me and says, “Your girl won the room,” and we sit there and watch Marisol’s performance on someone’s phone, and for four minutes everything is only music.
The statements take two hours. Facts only. She grabbed, I freed myself, she shoved, I defended. The venue’s separation plan, signed by three parties, sits on the table between us all, an indictment of everyone who thought paper could do a locked door’s job.
My lawyer calls at 1 a.m. with the shape of it: her label is “cooperating,” the tour insurers are involved, and the phrase “indefinite professional hiatus” is being drafted into somebody’s statement.
The machine she rode for a year is very good at closing ranks, and tonight the ranks closed around everyone but her.
Marisol calls from her hotel, still buzzing, then suddenly crying, then mad at herself for crying when I’m the one who got in a fight. I talk her down the way I’d talk anyone down from a stage fall: you did your job, the room loved you, sleep, water, call me tomorrow.
“I’m crew now,” she says, shaky. “Crew doesn’t leave crew.”
“No,” I say. “We don’t.”
Dean calls while I’m still in the parking structure, voice rough, halfway through booking a flight he can’t afford. “I’m getting on a plane.”
“You’re getting into bed,” I say. “I’m fine. I’m in my car. Ellis made me drink a juice box.”
He doesn’t laugh, but he breathes, and we stay on the phone until he does laugh, a short ugly one, and then he says the thing I needed without knowing I needed it: “You don’t have to tell me twice to be proud of you, Rom.”
Tessa drives my car home with me in the passenger seat, because my hands won’t quite stop shaking and I’m not too proud to know what that’s for.
The night’s already on the internet. There’s video of the corridor, no audio, because the walls in this business are made of phones.
Just bodies and uniforms and a broken doorframe, and a hundred million strangers about to write their own captions.
I drive home to my lit little house and I leave every light on, all of them, all night, and I don’t examine why too closely.
The hallway stays bright. Nobody’s coming up those stairs but me, and the light isn’t waiting for anyone. It’s just on because I want it on.
That’s allowed to be the whole reason now.