Tuning Forks

Maddy was forty-two years old and she had never once thrown a guitar in her life, which is probably why the sound of it hitting the amp case was so shocking to everyone in the room, including her.

The live room of the Copper Spoon used to be the vault floor of an actual bank, back in the 1920s, and the marble down there still had gold veins running through it like somebody had tried to bribe the building itself. It was past one in the morning in Portland and the eighth take of "Bone Dry" had just died the same way the previous seven had died, which was Jan rolling a fill on the tom that came in a half beat late and dragged the whole back end of the song sideways like a shopping cart with a bad wheel.

Maddy pulled the strap over her head and set the guitar down. Okay, technically she dropped it from about four inches, but in her head it was a slam, and everybody heard it as a slam, and that was the part that mattered.

"Same fill," she said. "Every single take, the same fill."

Jan didn't even look up from the kit at first. He was forty-four and had been playing drums since before she met him, and one of the many things she both loved and hated about him was that he never rushed to defend himself. He counted something off on his fingers, silently, the way he did when he was checking his own hands against his memory.

"It's not late," he said finally. "It's behind the click because the click is wrong. You pushed the bridge."

"The bridge is supposed to push. That's the whole point of the bridge."

"Then the fill pushes with it, and it sounds late, and you come in angry about it every time, and then I get to hear about it for an hour."

That was about the shape of their whole marriage, honestly, and Maddy knew it, and knowing it did not help even a little. Eighteen years. They had gotten married when she was twenty-four and he was twenty-six, back when the band was a weekend thing and neither of them had ever heard the word royalties spoken seriously. Somewhere in those eighteen years the argument had stopped being about the fill and started being about everything else, about the nineteen year olds with sample packs and ring lights who got playlisted overnight while Maddy's label sat on their comeback album for eleven months, about the fact that Jan had spent fifteen years arranging other people's parts and never once wanted the mic pointed at himself, about the way he coached the youth soccer team on Saturdays with more patience than he had ever shown her bridge tempo in her entire life.

Louis, who was forty-one and had been their engineer and road manager for four years now, watched all of this from behind the glass with the flat expression of a man who had recorded maybe three hundred bands and never seen two of them keep a marriage and a record deal alive at the same time. He leaned into the talkback.

"Take eight," he said. "Close, honestly. Maddy, your vocal was the best of the night."

"Oh great, so it's my fault," Jan said.

"I didn't say that," Louis said. "I said her vocal was good. Those are different sentences."

Maddy laughed before she could stop herself, a short ugly laugh, the kind that makes things worse. She knew it was making things worse and she did it anyway, and Jan threw a drumstick.

He didn't throw it at her, exactly. He threw it low and flat, and it skipped off the top of her pedalboard with a plastic clatter and spun to a stop against the rug. But it was still a drumstick thrown across a live room at his wife, and the room went very quiet, the way rooms do when everyone present suddenly realizes the fight is no longer about music.

"Okay," Louis said, and cut the talkback, and then came back on. "Okay. Both of you, out of the booth. Not out of the building, I'm not paying for that room again, just. Settle it outside the glass. Levi and I will keep the drums warm."

Levi, thirty-five, bassist, the closest thing the band had to an adult besides Louis, had been sitting on a road case in the corner eating vending machine peanuts through all eight takes, and he raised one hand like a student with a question.

"Before they go," he said. "Can we talk about the stand?"

Nobody wanted to talk about the stand. Everyone always ended up talking about the stand.

The Copper Spoon's second floor live room had one piece of gear that predated the studio, predated the renovation, maybe predated several of the people using it, which was an antique microphone stand bolted near the old teller wall. It hummed. Not mechanically. When the room was empty and the lights were down and nobody stood within six feet of it, it made a low tone that nobody had ever been able to record, which Louis had tried to do eleven separate times with eleven separate microphones and gotten eleven separate files of nothing.

Most engineers would have put it in storage. Louis would have put it in storage. Levi had put his foot down about it the first week.

"The shimmer stays," Levi said now, getting up off the road case. "Take eight had it. Take three didn't, and take three sounded like us on our worst day in 2019. Whatever that thing does to the low end, it's the only reason 'Bone Dry' sounds like anything."

"It's a mic stand, Levi," Jan said. "It's a rusty pole."

"It's a rusty pole with a subsonic shimmer, and I will die on this hill, and I already told the label it's on the record, so."

He crossed the marble to the stand while he talked, because arguing about the stand always ended with Levi touching the stand, adjusting the ribbon mic clipped into its ancient clip, tilting it a degree or two toward the drum kit like a man tuning an instrument nobody else could hear. He did it the same way every time. Two fingers on the yoke, small careful turn, head cocked toward the kit.

Maddy felt it before she understood it.

It started in her sternum. Not sound exactly, more like pressure, like the low note of a church organ played through a wall, except it was inside her ribs and it had a texture to it, a slow push and pull, in and out, in and out. She put her hand flat on her chest without deciding to.

"You feel that?" she said.

Levi stepped back from the stand and looked at her, and then at the stand, and then at her again, and he had been in this band seven years and he had never once looked alarmed, and he looked mildly alarmed now.

"The shimmer?" he said. "It does that sometimes. To me it's more of a, I don't know, a warmth. In the hands."

"It's not warmth. It's like it's breathing."

Louis had come out of the booth by then, headphones around his neck, and he was standing near the door with his arms crossed in the way he stood when he was deciding whether something was worth logging in the session notes. The hum was not on his meters. He glanced at his meters anyway, out of four years of habit.

Jan had come around the kit, and he stopped maybe two steps from Maddy, and whether the hum got louder or she just got more aware of it, she couldn't have told you. It pushed in her chest on a slow rhythm, patient, and it felt less like a noise and more like an opinion. Like the room itself had been listening to eight takes of two people sniping at each other about a fill and had decided it liked that, had decided it wanted more of that, had leaned in.

"Take nine in ten," Louis said, quiet. "Or take a walk first. Genuinely, either one."

Maddy looked at Jan. He looked back, and for the first time all night he didn't have a counterargument loaded, and the hum pushed against her ribs again, in and out, warm and awful and steady, and she thought, wildly, that she was either about to fight her husband or something else entirely, and that the stand did not care which.

"We should walk," she said.

"Yeah," Jan said. "We should."

Neither of them moved.

They did walk, eventually, or they said they did, which amounted to the same thing for about ninety seconds. Jan grabbed his jacket off the road case. Maddy grabbed her water bottle. Louis announced he was going downstairs to get coffee from the place on the corner that stayed open late, which was a lie, because that place closed at eleven, and everyone knew it, and nobody called it, because what Louis was actually doing was giving them the room.

"Take ten when I'm back," he said from the door. "Or don't. I'll leave the board on either way."

Then the door clicked and it was just the two of them in the control room, Levi out on his road case in the live room with his peanuts, and the hum behind the glass.

The control room at the Copper Spoon was small. It had been the bank's manager's office once, back when the building was new, and somebody had kept the wainscoting and added foam panels that looked like they'd been stapled up by a raccoon with a staple gun. Maddy sat in the producer's chair and spun it slowly with one foot, which was a habit, and Jan leaned against the console with his arms folded, which was also a habit, and for a while neither of them said anything at all, which was the most practiced habit of the three.

The hum came through the glass the way bass comes through a wall. She felt it in her breastbone even sitting down. In and out.

"Eighteen years," Jan said finally, to the meters.

"Here we go."

"I'm just saying the number out loud. Eighteen years, and you still don't hear me."

"I hear you fine," Maddy said. "I hear you every time you count off a song like I'm a twelve year old who forgot where one is."

"That's tempo. That's my whole job."

"Your whole job." She spun the chair once more and stopped it with her heel. "You know what your whole job has been for fifteen years? Arranging other people's parts. That's what you told me yourself. Fifteen years of writing around whoever's name is on the marquee, and for the last fifteen of those years the name on the marquee has been mine, and you have hated it, and you have never once said so out loud, so I'm saying it for you."

"That's not fair."

"Nothing is fair. It's past one in the morning and we're arguing about a drum fill."

Jan pushed off the console and paced to the window, and Maddy watched him look at the live room instead of at her, which was the whole argument, really, the entire marriage in one gesture. He looked at everything else. The kit, the stand, the gold-veined marble going dark under the dimmed lights.

"You never look at me," she said, and her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to. "On stage. You know that? Eighteen years, and I can count the times you've actually looked at me during a set."

"I look at the drums. I'm a drummer. Looking at the drums is how drumming works."

"You look at the drums like they're the only thing in the room worth looking at. You used to look at me like that."

He turned around then. He had that expression she knew from Saturdays, from the soccer field, the one he wore for eleven year olds who'd just missed an open net, patient and distant and a little sad, and she hated it more than she would have hated shouting.

"You want to talk about looking," he said. "Fine. Let's talk about looking. Who do you look at, Maddy? Because from the kit, it looks like you look at everybody. Front row, second row, the bartender, the guy with the phone. You hand the whole show to the crowd and you leave me the parts you don't want."

"That's performing."

"That's flirting."

"It is not."

"You sing the second verse of 'Bone Dry' straight at some stranger in the third row like you're trying to make him leave with you. Every night. In front of your husband. You do it in front of your husband on purpose."

Maddy stood up. The chair rolled back and knocked the rack case and she didn't care. "You know what that is? That's you telling me a forty two year old woman isn't allowed to be looked at. You count the takes, you count the years, you count everything, and the number you always land on is too old, past it, should be grateful, and I am so tired of being grateful."

"I never said too old."

"You didn't have to say it. The label sat on this album for eleven months because they want a younger face and you never once told them to go to hell. You just kept arranging."

"That was a business decision."

"It was a surrender."

The hum pushed against her sternum, hard, once, like something overheard them and agreed. She put her hand on her chest and Jan saw her do it and his face changed, softened, and she almost forgave him right there, because he did love her, she knew that, the problem was that knowing it and feeling it had gotten to be two different countries and neither of them had a passport.

"We should go home," he said quietly. "Sleep. Come back tomorrow."