Accidental Star

I've been with Terri three years now, and in all that time I'd never once been to her studio. She works out of a converted auto body shop over on Fenwick Street, in that strip of buildings between the tire place and the plumbing supply. I'd dropped her off there a hundred times. I'd picked her up. But I never went in.

Part of that was her rule, not mine. She says the studio is her office and she doesn't mix her two lives. Fair enough. I'm a waitress and I don't want people from the restaurant showing up at my kitchen table at ten at night either. But mostly I just never had a reason to go.

Last Friday I had a reason. Her shift ran late, a demo session with a band she's been engineering for, and I got off at nine from my own job with a bag of tacos still warm from the place on Delmore. I figured I'd sit in the parking lot, text her, and hand her dinner through the door like a hostage exchange. That was the entire plan. Tacos, a kiss on the cheek, drive home.

Except I remembered the door code. She gave it to me months ago when I picked up her laptop charger, and I'd never used it. It sat in my phone like an invitation.

So I drove over there. I was forty-three that night, Terri's forty-nine, and I would claim I walked in calm and sensible but that's not true. My hands were a little sweaty on the wheel. I was excited like someone sneaking into a place she'd only heard described.

Here's the part I've never told her. Maybe never told anybody, really.

When I was twenty-one I did a thing at the Saddle Rack, that dive on Route 9 that burned down years ago. I was drinking with a guy I'd been flirting with and on some kind of dare I made up in my own head, I went to the bathroom and took my shirt and bra off. Just stood there in front of the mirror, topless, in a bar bathroom, listening to the noise through the wall. Then I opened the door a few inches and let a stranger, some middle-aged fella at the jukebox, get a look at me before I shut it again and locked myself in a stall with my heart pounding.

Nothing else happened. He didn't bang on the door, nobody chased me, I got dressed and went home and never did anything like it again, not really. But I thought about it for twenty-two years. Not the guy, I couldn't pick him out of a lineup. The feeling. Standing there half naked with the door cracked, knowing someone could look. It stayed hot in my head like a coal that never went all the way out.

There was one other time, a few years after that, where I sat in a bar bathroom with my top off just to see if anybody would knock. Nobody did. I sat there maybe five minutes feeling silly and put my shirt back on and ordered another beer. I've carried that one around too, the same way. A test I set up and then didn't want the answer to.

So when I pulled into that gravel lot behind the auto body shop at ten fifteen on a Friday, tacos in a paper bag, I wasn't thinking about any of that. I want that understood. I was thinking about tacos.

* * *

The code worked like she said it would, four numbers and a heavy door that stuck a little before it gave. Inside it was dim. There's a hallway that runs past some storage shelves full of road cases and cables and then opens into the front of the building where the actual studio is. I could hear drums, muffled, coming through a wall somewhere, and a bass thumping along under it like a heartbeat in the next room.

I figured I'd wait. There's a little couch area by the front door, the kind of thing that used to be a customer waiting bench, and I sat there for a minute with the tacos on my lap listening to the band through the wall. They were good, whatever they were. Tight. The drummer hit hard and the bass stayed right under him like they'd rehearsed it until it wasn't fun anymore.

That's when the two large iced teas I'd had on my last break got to voting. I needed to pee, and I needed to pee soon, and sitting on a bench in a strange building listening to somebody else's rhythm section was not going to help.

So I went down the hallway looking for a bathroom. It's dim back there, one of those hallways where somebody hung a single bulb at the far end and never thought about it again. Storage shelves on the left, road cases, a stack of carpet squares. Doors on the right. The first one was locked or just stuck, wouldn't budge. The second one, near the end of the hall, had a plain door and a light switch next to it and nothing else to tell you anything about it.

I opened it.

It was not the bathroom.

I stepped through, because I was mid-stride and full of iced tea, and I was suddenly standing in a big bright room. Exposed bulbs overhead. Black acoustic stuff on the walls. Rugs on the concrete floor, amps, mic stands. A drum kit right in front of me, and behind it a guy my age with sticks in his hands, and to his left a bass player, and behind a wall of glass on the far side, Terri, sitting at a console, looking at me over her glasses with her mouth open.

They'd been mid-take. I know that now. The red light was on, the whole room was live, and the drummer was looking directly at me because I'd walked straight into his eyeline like I was on a stage cue.

The paper bag crinkled in my hand. That's the detail that stuck with me. Tacos.

"Sorry," I said. "Wrong door."

Nobody moved. The drummer still had his sticks up. The bass player leaned back against his amp and grinned at me like I was the best thing that had happened all night.

Terri's voice came through the talkback, tinny. "Bea? Honey, what are you doing here?"

"Tacos," I said, and held the bag up like evidence. "I brought dinner."

She was already getting up out of her chair. Through the glass I could see her shaking her head, half laughing. "There's a bathroom down the hall."

"I found that out," I said. "After."

The bass player laughed out loud at that, a real laugh, not polite. "She came in hot," he said to the drummer. "Ten seconds and I'd have had the take."

"You did not have the take," the drummer said. He set his sticks down on the snare. He sounded tired but not angry, the way a man sounds when he's played the same eight bars forty times. "Nobody has the take. Roy, don't start."

"I had it in my body, Cade. It was in my body."

"Shut up, Roy."

Terri came through the big door from the control room and took the bag from me, and kissed me, quick, in front of everybody, which she never does at my work so I guess her rule about mixing lives had a taco exception. "You couldn't have texted?"

"It was supposed to be a drive-by. Sit in the lot, hand you food, go home." I looked around the room. It was warmer than I expected, and it smelled like coffee and dust and hot electronics. "I didn't know it was going to be a whole audience."

The drummer, Cade, was checking his phone by the drum riser. The bass player, Roy, was rolling a cigarette behind his ear like a pencil, which tells you something about a man before he says a word. Terri introduced everybody and everybody said the right polite things, and the whole time I was standing there in the brightest light I'd stood in in twenty years, thinking about a bathroom at the Saddle Rack and a door I'd opened four inches on purpose.

Because here is what my body figured out before my brain did. That drummer had looked at me. Not a long look, not a leer. Two seconds of a man's attention landing on me from behind a kit, right at the moment I came through a door where I didn't belong. And the old coal in my head, the one from when I was twenty-one, had flared up so fast I felt it in my face.

I did not run back down the hallway. I should have. Any sensible woman would have gotten her tacos back and waited in the car.

Instead I heard myself say, "Do you need a few minutes, or should I just sit somewhere out of the way?"

"Sit," Terri said, already herding me toward the door to the booth. "There's a chair in the control room. We've got maybe three more passes on this track and then we're done, and then you can tell me about the iced teas, because I know there were iced teas."

"There were two."

"Mm hm."

Roy held the control room door for me. "Careful, she's a tyrant after midnight," he said. "Two years I've worked with her, she's never once said take sounded fine when it didn't."

"It didn't sound fine," Cade called after us. "The fill in the back half is garbage."

"We'll get it," Roy said, easy, like that was already decided.

I sat down in a rolling chair in the little control room while Terri pulled her chair back up to the console. The glass in front of us looked out on the whole live room, the amps and the rugs and the drum kit sitting under the lights like an island. Cade got back on his throne. Roy plugged back in. Terri counted them off through the talkback and the room lit up with sound.

And I sat there in the dark, watching my girlfriend work, feeling the bass in the floor under my feet, and let myself think the thought I'd been refusing to think for twenty years.

The thought was this. Twenty-two years ago I flashed a stranger in a bar bathroom on purpose and it was the most alive I have ever felt, and I have never really done it again, and some part of me has been waiting to do it again ever since. That's the confession. Floor tom, kick, snare, that's the rhythm it lives on.

I didn't say it out loud. I just sat there in the rolling chair while Terri leaned into her console, and Cade counted off another pass, and the same eight bars came through the monitors for the fifth time since I'd sat down. It was good. I don't know music, but I know repetition when I hear it, and this was repetition.

By pass four I had a new problem, which was that the two iced teas and the large fountain Coke I'd bought for the drive were now sitting in my bladder with opinions. The bathroom was down that dim hallway. The hallway with the two identical doors, one of which was the bathroom and one of which was the live room where I had already made a fool of myself once tonight.

"I'll be right back," I whispered.

Terri had her hand up over the talkback button, mid-note to Cade about the fill. She gave me a thumbs up without looking. Great. Supportive.

The hallway was dim like I remembered, all that industrial strip lighting, half the tubes dead. Storage shelves on one side, boxes of cable, a mop bucket. I picked a door and put my hand on it. This time I checked. I swear I checked, and I still could not have told you which one was the stuck one. There was no sign on either door, nothing with a little stick figure, and from this angle both doors looked exactly the same, and I was in a hurry because my body had started doing that thing where it counts down for you.

I opened it and stepped through and the door swung shut behind me and I heard the latch click.

The lights hit me like a wall.

Wrong door. Again. Same wrong door. And this time the latch didn't just click, it caught, because that big soundproofed door has one of those heavy self-latching closers, and I stood there in the live room mid-take with Cade's sticks already down and rolling and Roy's fingers already walking, and there was absolutely no way out without making it worse.

Cade stopped playing first. Just set the groove down like a man putting down a heavy box, and looked at me over his