Cold Storage

I want to start with the boots, because everybody always asks about the boots. Maya walked into that cold room wearing one red boot and one black boot, and I stared like an idiot, and Felix said what the hell, and she just shrugged and said her apartment had flooded and those were the only two that stayed dry. The first impression consisted of one red boot and one black boot, and I already knew I was going to like her.

The university had offered us their cold room because the acoustics were stupid good, a little windowless concrete box kept at exactly 4 degrees Celsius, the kind of dead, dry sound you normally pay a fortune to fake. The artist wanted a cold sound, literally cold, and Felix, my boss, who is twenty-eight and has been running me around for three years, thought it was genius. So there we were on a Monday, hauling mic stands and cables down a hallway that smelled like chlorine and old paper, and Felix kept rubbing his hands together and saying the click track is going to love this room, which is the kind of thing Felix says.

The singer was twenty-two, her name was Maya, and the agency file said session experience, some choir work, no album credits. I expected somebody nervous. What I got was a woman in mismatched boots who shook my hand hard and said, "You're the sound guy? Good. If the headphones are as cold as this room I'm going to cry, fair warning."

Felix laughed and I didn't, because I was busy being twenty-four and married and noticing that she was pretty in a way I had no business noticing. I need to say that up front so you understand where my head was at, badly, from the first hour. Alisa and I had been married almost two years by then, together longer than that, we met at a music tech fair when I was twenty and she was twenty, and things were fine, fine in the way a sensible shoe is fine.

We spent that Monday getting levels and tuning the room, taping cables, arguing about polar patterns, and Maya just sat on a folding chair in her parka with her hands around a paper cup of coffee and told us about the flood, about standing in six inches of water at two in the morning holding her cat over her head like the guy in that fire photo. She had moved to town a year ago for the lifeguard job at the university pool, she sings at night when she can get the work, and she talked the way some people sing, easy and unhurried, like she had nowhere better to be.

First actual recording night was Tuesday. Felix set his clocks and left us to it, him in the hallway on a laptop, me behind the board inside the cold room because the monitor mix needed eyes on her. And here is the part I keep coming back to. The room is lit with those ugly fluorescent tubes, everything pale and flat, your breath hangs in the air like you're smoking, and Maya stepped up to the mic in her parka and sang one take of a verse that wasn't even the hard part of the song, and I forgot my clipboard existed. Her voice in that room was raw in a way the room didn't smooth out, there was nothing between it and my ears, no reverb to hide in, and I sat there with my hand off the fader just listening.

She caught me. That's the part that matters. I was staring, plain staring, no professional excuse, and instead of looking away she held it. One second, two, my heart doing something I don't write in notes, and then she turned back to the mic like nothing happened and said, "Again, or was that one?"

"That one's the one," I said, and my voice came out rougher than I meant it to.

"Good," she said, and smiled at the mic, and I spent the rest of the session looking at meters.

I drove home that night with the heat blasting and told Alisa it went fine, the room's weird but the singer's good. She was tired from the dental clinic, she'd picked up a shift she didn't want, and she said that's nice, babe, can you check the mail tomorrow, and the conversation ended there. I'm not casting her as the villain here, she had her reasons and most of them were me, but that night I lay awake next to her doing the arithmetic every married man does when he's in trouble and hasn't done anything yet, which is none of it counts until you touch, right, right?

Wednesday Felix had a mastering job he couldn't move, so it was just me and Maya in the cold room, four hours, just the two of us and a mic and a room that could hear a pin drop. She brought me a coffee from the machine down the hall without me asking, which I noted and filed under things I should not note. She'd changed boots, still one red and one black, apparently that was just her life now until payday, and she told me about the pool, the kids she fishes out of the shallow end, the old man who swims every day at noon and refuses to learn the crawl. I told her about the studio, the fish plant it used to be, how the sea still gets into everything. Regular talk. Nothing in it. That's what I told myself.

Then about two hours in she steps back from the mic and squints at it and says, "Gideon, this thing's too high, I've been singing up at it like I'm talking to a tall person. Can you fix it?"

So I go around the board and step over to her, and the room is maybe four meters by five, there's not a lot of anywhere to be, and I loosen the clutch and drop the stand maybe ten centimeters and she says that's better and sings a line to test it, right into the mic, right beside me, and when I step back her bare arm comes up, she was pushing her sleeve to reach the pop filter, and it brushes across my chest. Just that. Skin on my jacket zipper, knuckles maybe, a brush, a nothing, one second of contact you couldn't prove in court.

It stayed on my skin for the rest of the session. I'm not exaggerating for effect, I ran the rest of those takes with a cold room and a warm stripe across my chest and I could not tell you one thing we recorded after that, not one note, I was watching the meters and thinking about the two seconds where she could have pulled back and didn't. She didn't say anything about it either. She just kept singing, and once, in the middle of a long held note, she looked over at me again, that same held look, and I let her have it this time, I didn't pretend to be checking a level.

When we packed up she stood in the doorway with her coffee cup and said, "Same time Thursday?"

"Thursday," I said.

"Good," she said, and walked off down the hall with her mismatched boots squeaking on the tile, and I stood there in the doorway of a room at four degrees Celsius feeling warmer than I had any right to feel, and I knew, I knew that night, exactly what Thursday was going to be about if I let it, and I drove home anyway, and I kissed my wife, and I said nothing, and the boots squeaked all the way down the hallway in my head.

Thursday I lied to my wife. I want that out here plain, because I've read a hundred stories where the guy slides into it like it happens to him, and mine didn't. I stood in my own kitchen at six in the evening with my jacket already on and told Alisa there was a problem with the mix, a hum on one track, Felix wanted it fixed tonight. She was peeling potatoes at the sink and she didn't even turn around. "Again? You just did a whole session."

"Felix is picky," I said. "It's his record." She shrugged with her shoulders, the kind of shrug that says fine but also says I've stopped keeping score, and she said, "There's leftovers. Don't be out past eleven, you know how you get when you skip dinner." And I said I'd grab something, and I kissed the top of her head, and I walked out to the car with a lie sitting in my stomach, a heavy stone I had swallowed.

There was no hum. There was no fix. Felix was home eating with somebody, and the cold room key was in my pocket because I'd signed it out at the desk, a man planning a crime and then filling out the paperwork for it anyway. The drive over took eleven minutes and I remember every one of them, the wipers going, the harbor lights, me at every light asking myself if I wanted to turn around, and the honest answer, the answer I'd have given under oath, was no.

The hallway outside the lab was dark except for the exit sign, and the door was shut, and for one second I thought I'd misread everything, that she'd gone home, that Thursday meant Thursday morning, as any normal human being would think. Then I pulled the door and the latch gave with that heavy clunk, and the light inside was on, and Maya was sitting on the floor against the concrete wall with her arms around her knees, in her coat, one red boot and one black boot, her breath fogging in front of her face. She looked up at me and she didn't look surprised at all.

"I knew you'd come back," she said.

"You did, huh." I let the door swing shut behind me and the latch caught and we were sealed in, four by five meters of concrete and cold and the mic standing there in the middle like a witness.

"Wednesday night. You looked at the door three times before you left." She unfolded her legs and stood up, and she was wearing her coat indoors because of course she was, it's four degrees in there, and she said, "I bet myself a coffee you'd show up tonight without a session on the books. I win."

"You bet yourself your own coffee."

"I bet myself against me. It was a very safe bet." She grinned, and then the grin settled into something steadier, and she looked at me the way she'd looked at me over the mic, no pretending, and she said, "So. Why are you here, Gideon?"

And that was the question, wasn't it, and I could have given the coward's answer, could have said something about checking a level, testing a hum, and she'd have let me, I think, she'd have let me hide if I needed to. But I was twenty-four years old and married and standing in a meat locker with a woman who sang like that, and I was tired of the arithmetic. "You know why," I said. "I've known since Wednesday, since the arm thing, since before. I've been a mess all week."

"Good," she said. "Because I'd hate to be in this alone."

I crossed the little room to her, two steps, and stopped close enough that I could see the fog of her breath and the cold sitting pink on her cheeks, and I said, "I need to say some things before anything happens. I'm married. Alisa. Almost two years. I'm not proud of what I'm doing right now and I'm not going to pretend I am, and if you want me to walk out that door, say it now and I'll walk, and we'll finish the album like professionals and I'll never mention this. Nothing about this touches the record or your pay either way."

She didn't say walk. She reached out and put her hand flat on my chest, right on the spot where her arm had brushed me Wednesday, like she was checking