Tremolo

I never thought the worst day of my professional life would involve watching a woman sing one song one time, but that's exactly what happened at Brickwall Audio on a Tuesday in October. I'm Fay, I'm thirty-three, and I play guitar for a band called the Parallax Kids, which sounds more impressive than it is because we're still at the stage where the van is a rental and the rider is beer and sandwiches. Three months ago my boyfriend Jerry packed his basses and his amps and his stupid vintage shoes out of the apartment we'd shared for seven years, and not long after that I found out the reason had a name and a degree in music production and a smile that made everyone in a room feel like they'd been handed a drink.

The name was Carlotta. She's twenty-nine and she does session work, and when our label said our vocals needed help and our regular budget wouldn't cover a name, somebody in management had the bright idea to hire her. Nobody asked me. I found out when she walked into the live room with her headphones around her neck like a scarf and said hi to everyone by name except me, which I actually respected, because at least she wasn't pretending.

So there I was, sitting on an amp case with my guitar across my knees, watching through the glass while she stood at the mic and did the hardest bridge on the hardest song on our EP in one take. One take. I'd watched our old singer need eleven takes for that part, and two of those were arguments with himself. Carlotta sang it clean, with this little crack at the end of the phrase that wasn't a mistake, it was a choice, and I hated how good a choice it was.

Jerry was in the control room with the rest of us, and he had this smile on. I know that smile. I wore that smile for years, watching him play, standing there with my arms crossed and my heart thumping like a drum machine set to stupid. He didn't even look at me. He was too busy being proud.

"You want another one for safety?" Galen asked into the talkback, and Carlotta laughed and said no thanks, she'd rather save her voice for the second song, and everyone chuckled like that was a charming thing to say, which, worst part, it kind of was.

Galen owns Brickwall. He's thirty-eight, built like someone who used to load trucks and now just drinks too much coffee, and he produces records in this cramped little control room with a leather couch that squeaks if you breathe near it. He'd been hired to produce the EP and he'd been doing a decent job of pretending not to notice that half the band was walking on eggshells around the other half. I noticed him noticing me. I noticed my own fingers squeezing the neck of my guitar the way you squeeze a neck you'd like to put around somebody.

"You're denting the maple," he said, quiet, just to me, eyes still on the console.

I let go. I hadn't even realized. "Sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Just don't wreck a two-thousand-dollar guitar over a guy who wears shoes like that."

I snorted, which was probably the first honest sound I'd made all day, and he went back to the board like he hadn't said anything, which I decided to be grateful for.

***

The session that day went sideways around four in the afternoon, when our drummer decided the tempo on the second track was a comment on his manhood and left in a huff to get tacos, and he didn't come back that day, and our other guitarist developed a mysterious cramp in his picking hand that only existed when things got tense. By seven the room was me and Galen and the engineer, Frank, who is a saint and gets paid accordingly. Galen played back my rhythm parts and made a face.

"They're stiff," he said. "No blame, everybody plays stiff when the room's like this. But I'd like to redo them, and I can't ask the whole band to stay, so I'm asking you. Two hours, maybe three. I'll order food."

"I just played them."

"You played them fine. Fine is the problem. This record needs better than fine, and I think you've got better in you, but not right this second, so eat a sandwich and go again."

"Maybe I don't want to go again," I said, and it came out with more teeth than I planned. "Maybe I'm tired of being the one who goes again. Carlotta walks in and does it in one take and gets applause, and I'm the housework, is that it, I'm the one who does the dishes until midnight while everybody tells her how great she is."

The room got very quiet. Frank suddenly needed to reorganize a drawer. Galen turned his chair around to face me all the way, which he hadn't done once in three weeks of sessions, and I wished he hadn't, because he looked like he was actually going to answer.

"Sit down, Fay," he said, and I sat, because my legs decided before I did.

"Look," he said. "You can be mad at me, that's fine, that's free. But I know what today is. I watched you watch her, and I watched Jerry watch her, and I've done this job long enough to know that what's happening in this room isn't about a vocal take."

"You don't know anything about it."

"I know what it's like to be replaced," he said, and he said it plain, no drama, the way you say a thing you've had time to make peace with. "I was with a singer for three years, thirty to thirty-three, we were going to make records together, and then a label in Berlin offered her what I couldn't, and she took it, and she was right to take it, and it still felt like getting fired from my own life. So when I say I know, I'm not guessing."

I didn't say anything for a while. The couch squeaked when I shifted, because of course it did.

"Seven years," I said finally. "We were together from twenty-six to thirty-three. We built the band together. He learned bass parts I wrote in our kitchen. And she just, she walks in and everyone's charmed, and I'm sitting here being the difficult one, and I hate that I'm the difficult one, I hate that I've become the person people brace for."

"You're not difficult. You're hurting in a room with good acoustics. It carries."

That got a laugh out of me, an ugly half laugh, but a real one. "Is that in your producer notes somewhere."

"It's in the studio handbook. Page one." He pushed the sandwich bag across the console at me. "Eat. Then we'll do your parts, and I promise you by the end of tonight you'll have something on this record that's yours, that nobody can walk in and do in one take, because nobody else has your hands."

It was a corny thing to say and it worked anyway, which made me trust him more, not less. People who know they're being corny are usually telling the truth.

We ordered food, Frank came back from his drawer, and we started again around eight. The first couple of passes were still tight, my shoulders up around my ears, and Galen kept saying small useless helpful things like relax your forearm and breathe at the turn, and I kept wanting to throw a pick at him. Then somewhere around the fourth or fifth take, with the lights low and the freight elevator rumbling across the alley and the smell of sesame chicken getting into everything, something loosened. I stopped playing at the glass and started playing at the track, and my hands remembered why I'd picked this stupid life in the first place.

Galen let the last take run out and didn't talk over the tail of it. Then he hit the talkback and said, "That's the one," and for the first time all day I believed a good thing about myself.

"Same time tomorrow," I said, unwrapping the guitar cable from around my boot, and then, because he'd given me something and it felt rude not to give something back, "sorry about earlier. The dish thing."

"Forget it. For what it's worth, I don't think Jerry's the one who should worry about your hands."

I looked at him and he was already turned back to the board, fiddling with a fader that didn't need fiddling, and I didn't know what to do with that, so I packed my guitar and thought about it the whole drive home, which I'm ashamed to say took less time than the take had.

The next morning I woke up at six for no good reason, lay there staring at the ceiling of an apartment that still had a bass-shaped absence in the corner, and finally got up and made eggs I didn't eat and drove to Brickwall two hours before anyone was supposed to be there. I told myself it was about getting a jump on my parts, which was about forty percent true, and the other sixty percent I didn't examine too closely.

Galen was already there, because of course he was, sitting in the control room with his coffee and his hair sticking up, going through yesterday's takes with his eyes half closed like he was listening to them in his sleep. He didn't act surprised to see me. He just kicked the second chair out with his foot and said, "There's a spare mug in the cabinet above the sink, the clean ones are on the left," and that was it, that was the entire welcome, and somehow it was better than being fussed over.

* * *

After that I kept showing up early. Tuesday, then Thursday, then the Saturday the band had off and I showed up anyway with a bag of bagels, and Galen looked at the bagels, then at me, and shrugged and made room on the console. I got so I knew his routine, the first coffee at seven, the second around ten, the way he'd bounce one foot against the chair leg when a take had something in it and stop bouncing when it didn't. I learned that he kept his guitar strings in a drawer labeled MISC CABLES, which drove Frank crazy, and that he talked to the compressor when he soloed it, quietly, like it was an old acquaintance he was checking in on.

"You talk to it," I said one morning, catching him at it.

"It talks back if you listen right."

"That's insane."

"That's why it sounds good. Sanity compresses flat." He turned a knob a degree, which I would not have been able to see, and frowned at the meter, and I sat there on the squeaky couch drinking my coffee and watching him work and thinking, with a feeling I couldn't name, that I had spent seven years watching Jerry practice in our kitchen and this was not the same feeling at all, not even close, and I should probably not think about that.

I started asking questions instead of thinking about it. Real ones, about his stuff, since it was easier than mine. He'd had the studio eight years, built out of a print shop that had sat empty so long the city was practically paying people to take it, and he knew every pipe in the ceiling by name. He grew up in a trucking family outside of Dayton and there was a photo of a loading dock taped inside one of the rack doors, and one day I asked about that too.

"That's the dock I used to load," he said. "My uncle's outfit. I did it summers all through school and two years after."

"You went from trucks to records?"

"I went from trucks to a four-track, to a community college recording program, to a room exactly this size in a worse neighborhood, to this room." He shrugged. "Nobody in my family understands any of it. My mother still tells people I fix stereos."

"Does it bother you?"

"Nah. She's eighty-one and she came to every show my old band played in a fifty-mile radius. You let people love you wrong if that's how they know how."

I didn't have anything to say to that, so I drank my coffee, and he went back to the meters, and the room hummed.

It was one of those early mornings, maybe the fourth week, when I finally asked about her. I'd been circling it for days and I just went straight at it the way I do everything, which is a flaw. "The singer. The Berlin one. Do you ever hear from her?"

His hand stopped on the fader for a second and then kept going. "Sometimes. Christmas, mostly. She's got a kid now, a boy. She sends pictures."

"Do you miss her?"

"I miss the version of my life that had her in it," he said, and he said it the way he'd said the other thing, plain, like it was a fact on a spec sheet. "But I got over her a long time before I got over being left. Those are two different recoveries and nobody warns you."

"Yeah," I said, because I didn't have anything better, and he let the silence sit there without filling it up, which I was starting to understand was one of the better things about