Dead Air

The lobby of the Ardmore Theatre smelled like lilies, old carpet, and money that had been in the family long enough to stop announcing itself. April had come in hot that week and the pollen had come with it; every car on Peachtree wore a yellow-green skin of it, and the caterers had propped the street doors open so that the smell of warm asphalt drifted in under the lilies and lost.

Delphine Fontenot stood with her back to the brass rail of the mezzanine stair and let a man in a seersucker jacket tell her, at length, that he listened to her every night.

He didn't. People said it the way they said we should get lunch. Del smiled anyway — the wide one, the one that showed teeth — and said, "Then you're the reason I still have a job," and he laughed too loudly, and she touched his forearm for exactly as long as it took to release him back into the room.

That was the work. Not the show. The show was easy. The show was four hours in a lit box with the mic three inches off her mouth and nobody's face to read, and if she was honest — and she was honest for a living, professionally, in a controlled and beautifully modulated way — the show was the only place all week she got to stop performing. Half a million people in this city could reach her between midnight and four. Not one of them could touch her. She had built that arrangement herself, brick by brick, over six years, and most nights she was proud of it.

She was thirty-five years old and built the way the women in her family got built — wide through the shoulders, heavy up top, soft in the middle, deep brown skin that the lobby's amber light liked a great deal more than it liked anybody else's — and she was standing in a good green dress and shoes that had been a mistake since seven o'clock.

Tonight she was on the wrong side of the glass and everybody could reach her.

"Two minutes." Kendra came sideways through a knot of donors like a woman who had been getting through crowds since birth, headphones around her neck, hoodie under a blazer she'd clearly been made to wear. "Board's seated. Prather's here."

"Who?"

"Nobody. Woman in the flat shoes by the coat check." Kendra's eyes cut left, then back. "Marlon's been orbiting her for twenty minutes like a moon."

Del looked. Grey suit, no drink, the specific stillness of somebody being paid to watch. "Huh," she said, and filed it, because that was what you did with a thing you couldn't do anything about yet.

The station had built the remote out along the north wall of the lobby, under the good chandelier: a draped table, the After Hours banner, and two mic stands that did not belong to this decade. Somebody in marketing had decided the literacy fund's fiftieth wanted a period feel. So instead of the beat-up little Shure Del could have operated with her elbows, there were two chrome ribbon mics the size and shape of showerheads, gleaming under the chandelier like something out of a black-and-white broadcast, and beside them, on a folding chair, a man she hadn't met.

He had a canvas roll of small tools open across his knees. Screwdrivers, an alligator lead, a spool of solder, and — she noticed it because she noticed everything, it was the whole job — a dull silver disc no bigger than a thumbnail, sitting in the tray with the picks and the spare set screws. A single line of black stone across it. Not a coin. Not any logo she knew.

"You're the gear," she said.

"I'm the gear." He stood. Tall, lean, more forearm than shoulder, dark hair going grey early at the temples, and fair enough that the lobby's warm light couldn't do anything for him at all. Freckles scattered across the backs of his hands. He was wearing glasses and he took them off as he looked at her, folded them, put them in his shirt pocket. "August Rhodes. Your station rented the mics from me. I came with them."

"Do you always?"

"With these, yes." He said it without a flicker of apology. "They're seventy-one years old and people put water glasses next to them."

Del laughed — the real one, short, surprised out of her — and then took her seat at the draped table, and August Rhodes reached past her shoulder and re-seated the ribbon mic on its stand without asking, a quarter turn and a half-inch down, so that it sat level with her mouth instead of her chin.

He did not touch her doing it. He did not explain what he was doing, or narrate it, or ask if that was better. He just fixed the thing and stepped back and sat down again with his tools across his knees.

She sat there for a second with her heart doing something faintly ridiculous.

"Sixty seconds," Kendra said in her ear.

Ernestine Lyles was seventy-four years old, had run the reading room at the Adamsville branch for twenty-six of them, and was so nervous that her hands shook on the table. Del reached over and put her own hand down next to them — not on them, next to them — and said, off-mic, "Ms. Lyles. In four minutes you and I are going to have a conversation and everybody else in this room is going to have to be quiet and listen to it. When has that ever happened to you before?"

Ms. Lyles's mouth twitched. "Never."

"Then let's enjoy it."

They went live at eight-oh-six. Del did the intro low and easy, the voice she'd been told once was like being handed a blanket, and brought Ms. Lyles in gently, and by the second question the woman had forgotten about the room entirely, and by the fourth she said something Del had not expected — that she'd learned to read at nine, late, from a Sears catalogue, because her mother wouldn't have anybody in the house knowing she couldn't.

And Del did the thing she did. She said nothing.

Half a second. That was all it ever was. The dead air that made people finish the true sentence instead of the safe one, the half-beat where a caller at three in the morning heard the silence and stepped into it and told her about the divorce, the diagnosis, the son who didn't call. It was the only technique she had and it worked on everybody.

Ms. Lyles's chin came up. "So I taught myself," she said, "and then I taught four thousand other people, and my mother never did learn, and I read to her till she died. That's the whole story. That's the fund."

The lobby went quiet in the particular way a room does when it has been ambushed by something real.

And then Gordon Teasley, who chaired the station's board and who had been standing at Del's shoulder with a bourbon since the top of the segment, leaned into her mic and said, "And that, folks, is exactly why the Ardmore Fund has raised over two million dollars—"

He was not a bad man. He was a man with a number he had been waiting all night to say.

Del did not let one syllable of what she felt reach her face, because there were four hundred people watching her face and half a million more who would hear only the audio. She turned her head a fraction, gave the room the warm chuckle, and said, "Two-point-one, Gordon, don't sell yourself short," which got the laugh — and then, in the same breath, in the same unhurried register, "Ms. Lyles, before he takes the credit: what was the catalogue page? Do you remember it?"

"Girls' coats," said Ms. Lyles.

"Girls' coats," Del repeated, and let it sit, and closed the segment on it.

Kendra's fist came up behind the crowd, low, at her hip, where only Del could see it.

Del smiled at Gordon Teasley. Gordon Teasley squeezed her shoulder and said she was a pro, and went to find another bourbon.

Between segments, the house music came up and the room went back to being a party.

Del sat where she was for a moment with her ears ringing faintly, the way they did, and watched August Rhodes come around the end of the table, kneel down beside the leg of it, and pull a cable out of the loom by feel.

"What are you doing?"

"You've got a hum." He didn't look up. He ran the cable out along the baseboard, away from a black lighting box on the floor, and coiled the slack. "Dimmer pack. It's been in the mics since the top of the hour. It got worse when they brought the chandelier down for your intro."

She stared at him. "Nobody heard a hum."

"Kendra heard something." He rose, brushed his knee, and put his glasses back on. "She was riding the gain for it and couldn't find it, because it wasn't in the board."

"You could hear it. Over four hundred people."

"It's sixty cycles," August said. "It's the note the room is already making. You stop noticing it and start noticing where it isn't." He said this without any weight at all, the way another man might say it looked like rain. Then he sat back down with his tools.

Del had spent six years being the most competent person in every room she entered, and had not, in some time, met a man who fixed a thing in her vicinity without also delivering a small lecture about having fixed it.

She discovered that she was annoyed. Then that she wasn't. Then that whatever she was, it had gone somewhere low in her body and settled in.

Marlon Jarrett found her at the drinks table at nine-forty, put a hand between her shoulder blades, and said, in the voice he used for good news he wanted credit for, "You see the woman in the grey?"

"Kendra clocked her at seven-fifty."

"Corinne Prather. Meridian." He let that hang, delighted. "She flew in for this, Delphine. She flew in to hear you hold a room."

"And?"

"And you held it." He beamed at her, genuinely, the way he had beamed at her when she was twenty-four and doing weekend traffic. "That thing with Gordon. She wrote something down."

Del drank her seltzer and said, "That's nice, Marlon," and felt the floor of the evening quietly move about two feet to the left.

Somewhere before ten a young man with a Meridian lanyard and a beer he was not drinking planted himself in front of her at the end of the drinks table and asked, with the earnestness of a person who has been sent to gather colour, how she got people to say things like that on the air.

"It's not a gift," Del told him, warm, delighted with herself, the room at her back and her shoes killing her. "It's an instrument. You keep it oiled and you point it at people."

He wrote it down. She watched him do it and felt nothing at all but pleased.

They struck the remote at ten-fifteen. August unclipped the ribbon mics himself, one at a time, and laid them in a wooden case lined with grey foam cut to their shape.

Del leaned a hip against the table and watched him do it, and because it was the end of a long night in which she had been charming at a great many people, she said, "You didn't say a word to me all evening that wasn't about equipment."

"No."

"Most men who bring me a chair want something."

"I brought you a microphone."

"Mr. Rhodes." She let the low one out, then. The one she used in hour three. The one that had, in her experience, never once failed to make a man lean in and start telling her about himself. "Come on. Give me something. It's been a long night and I have been listening to strangers since seven."

August closed the case. He did the latches, one, then the other, and then he looked up at her, and he did not lean in.

"You've been talking to strangers since seven," he said. "It's not the same thing. You did it beautifully."

That was all. He didn't soften it, didn't ask her a question, didn't hold the look a beat longer than it needed. He picked up his canvas roll, and the little silver disc went into his pocket with the screwdrivers, and he shouldered the case.

Del stood there in her good dress with four hundred dollars of the station's hair appointment in her coils and absolutely nothing to say, which had happened to her perhaps twice since 2009.

"I have you at midnight, most nights," he said. "You're better after two."

"Everyone's better after two."

"No," said August Rhodes. "They're not."

He set something on the drape beside her hand. Then he carried seventy-one-year-old microphones out through the propped street doors into the pollen and the warm dark, and did not look back to see whether she picked it up.

It was a card. Heavy stock, cream, no logo, no title, no company. A phone number, printed in a small, patient hand, and nothing else at all.

Del turned it over twice looking for the pitch. There wasn't one.

In the parking deck at a quarter to eleven, with the engine running and the vents blowing warm dust at her, she found she had been holding the card against the wheel with her thumb for some minutes without deciding anything, and that her heart was going the way it did at the top of the hour, right before the mic opened — that little lift, that half-second of falling — and that for the first time in a very long while she wanted a thing she could not smooth, or fill, or talk her way out of.

She put the card in her bag. She told herself she would think about it tomorrow.

She thought about it all the way home.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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