No End Date

The thing nobody understood about Clémence Prudhomme's job was that it had almost nothing to do with the questions.

She had asked Rémy Achille eleven versions of the same question over four days in this room, and he had answered every one of them beautifully. That was the problem. He was eighty-one years old and he had been telling stories for a living since he was fourteen, and a man like that could hold a room the way other men held a door — easily, absently, for as long as he wanted, and the whole time you were grateful.

"Go on," she said.

"So Sylvester takes the second chair." Rémy shifted on the stool, and the lavalier clipped to his shirt gave a soft brush of fabric that Marisol would clean out later. "And I'm looking at him. And I know what he's doing. Because it's my chair, understand, everybody in that room knows it's my chair —"

Clémence let him go. She sat six feet away, out of frame, elbows on her knees, hands loose, her face doing the one thing she had trained it to do, which was almost nothing. The cutting room was the front half of the second floor on Walker Street: exposed brick they'd never had the budget to cover, blackout drapes hung on a curtain track, two hundred feet of cable taped down the middle of the floor, and a slab of March daylight coming through the gap where the drape had slipped off the last clip. Dust turning in it. The radiator knocked twice and went quiet. Second Line Pictures, painted on the door downstairs in gold leaf that Marisol had paid a man in Sunset Park to do properly, because if you were going to be a two-woman company you might as well look like an institution.

"— and I let him have it," Rémy said. "I let him have the chair. Because a man who takes a chair, that's a man telling you what he's afraid of."

It was a good line. It was such a good line that Clémence had it on tape three times already, from three different days, in three different keys.

"Nineteen seventy-four," she said.

"Mm."

"You came off the road in June."

"July."

"July." She let the correction sit, because corrections were free and they cost him a little every time. "You came off the road in July and you didn't play a room in this country again for the better part of a decade."

"That's about right."

"Why?"

Rémy Achille smiled at her. He had a wide, unhurried smile with a gold tooth in the top left of it, and he wore a grey flat cap indoors and a cardigan the colour of wet brick, and his hands on the horn in his lap were enormous and scarred across the knuckles. He was, without any competition, the most charming human being Clémence had ever put in front of a lens.

"Because the music went a different way," he said, "and I wasn't going with it."

There it was. Take eleven.

She'd known it was coming the way you know a bar is coming; she had heard the intake of breath a half-second before he made it, the small shift of weight onto his left hip that he did every single time he was about to hand her the answer instead of the truth. It was as legible as a lip-sync mark. In four days she had learned Rémy Achille's flinch better than she'd learned some men's whole faces.

Marisol, behind the monitor, did not look up.

Clémence said, "Rémy."

"Baby."

"The music went a different way in sixty-nine. You went with it then. You went with it in seventy-two, you told me about the Fender Rhodes and you said, and I'm going to get this wrong —" she didn't get it wrong, she never got it wrong, "— you said, anything that lets me play louder, I'm for it. So it isn't the music."

He looked at the drape. The daylight had crawled another two inches up the brick.

"You left New Orleans in July of seventy-four," she said, "and you have told me eleven times why you left, and you've given me eleven answers, and not one of them is the same one."

"Now that's not fair."

"It's a little bit fair."

Rémy laughed, and the laugh was real — that was the other thing about him, he was never false, he was only ever generous in the wrong direction. He turned the trumpet over in his lap, thumb going along the third valve slide like a man checking a fence post.

"You want to hear about the woman," he said.

The whole room went a degree quieter. Marisol's hand moved on the desk, one deliberate finger, marking the timecode.

"I want to hear whatever you want to tell me," Clémence said, which was not a lie and was not the truth either, and was the sentence she had made a living out of.

"She had a laugh come out of her like a door opening," he said. "I'll tell you that."

"Tell me that."

"That's what I'm telling you."

"Did you say goodbye to her?"

He lifted the horn. Not to his mouth — just up, off his knee, into both hands, the way you pick up a sleeping child, and Clémence felt the whole interview go out from under her like sand pulling back off her heels.

"Let me play you something," Rémy said, "and then we'll be done for today."

And he played. Sixteen bars, no accompaniment, unmiked except by whatever the room gave the boom, and it was so good that Clémence's arms went to gooseflesh under her sleeves and she did not move a muscle in her face. It was a ballad. It was obviously, unbearably about a person. And it was, from a story-structure standpoint, absolutely worthless, because you could not cut a feature around a horn solo where the sentence ought to be.

He finished. He set the horn down.

"Thank you, Rémy," Clémence said. "That was beautiful."

"You're a hard woman."

He said it looking straight at her, taking his time over it, the unhurried once-over of a man who had spent sixty years deciding in a moment whether he liked a face. She let him have it. Five foot ten in flat shoes, deep brown skin, flat twists pinned back off a high forehead and not one of them out of line on the fourth day of a four-day shoot, gold in her ears, and a mouth she had trained out of every expression except the two she used for work.

"I'm a producer."

"Same thing." He winked at her, and she loved him, honestly and completely, and she wanted to shake him until the truth fell out of his cardigan.

She walked him down herself. She always did. The stairwell smelled of cold plaster and somebody's cigarette from the floor below, and she took his elbow on the last four steps without making anything of it, and she put him in the car with his horn case across his knees and told him Thursday, ten o'clock, and he said Thursday, baby, and the car pulled out onto Walker Street into the blue end of the afternoon.

Upstairs, Marisol Ferrer had put the drape back on its clip and was standing with her arms folded, chewing the inside of her cheek, watching Rémy's face frozen on the monitor at the moment just before the horn came up.

"We have him for four more days," Marisol said. "Then he goes to his granddaughter's in Baton Rouge until June, and we owe Larkspur a locked cut on the twelfth of April."

"I know when we owe the cut."

"I'm not saying it because you don't know." Marisol was thirty-four, built low and solid, with a habit of taking her glasses off to be blunt, which she now did. "I'm saying it out loud so it's in the room."

Clémence went and stood behind her own chair with both hands on the back of it, looking at the old man's paused face. Eleven takes. Eleven perfectly good, perfectly useless takes, from a man who would give her his childhood, his father's belt, his first horn, the night in Copenhagen he thought he was dying, his exact weekly rent in 1971 — anything, all of it, laid down for her like a table set for company.

"He'll say all of it," Marisol said, putting her glasses back on. "He can say all of it, chica, except the part that costs him something."

Clémence didn't answer that.

Marisol left at seven. The building went through its evening noises — the freight elevator, the gate, the Chinese place on the corner running its extractor — and then it was just the hum of the drives and the little green constellation of standby lights, and Clémence sat down at the bench with her back to the monitor, because she did not want to be looked at, not even by a paused face.

She took the envelope out of her bag.

It was plain, heavy, cream, no logo, no return address, and it had been sitting under the false bottom of that bag for eleven days. A young woman in a plain coat had put it into her hands in the lobby downstairs at four in the afternoon and had not said the name of anything at all. Inside: forty-one pages of thick paper, printed one side only, the questions set in a face somebody had chosen carefully, with acres of white left after each one. The wire had cleared the week before that — an intake fee the size of somebody's second car, and a very much larger number sitting behind it that only ever came due if the house put a name in front of you.

She took her hoops out first. She wasn't sure why she did that. She put them on the bench in the little dish where the lens caps went, and she uncapped her pen.

What would you agree to?

She had answered that one on the first of five evenings — two hours to get down the first eleven pages, always in this room, always after everybody had gone — and the thirty pages behind it across the three evenings after that, all of it in a small upright hand, the way she wrote shot logs, the way she had been taught to write anything that might one day be read out in a room she wasn't in. Protocol: yes. Instruction, correction, a schedule, a standard she could be held to. Kneeling: yes, in private, and there she had written a sentence and a half about the difference between being made to and being permitted to, and she had been pleased with it, and being pleased with it should have told her something. Exclusivity: yes, if offered. Overnight: at the holder's discretion. Travel: subject to delivery schedule.

What would you never agree to?

Nothing that survived the term. Nothing on paper past the end date. No contact after release.

What do you want?

She wrote for two hours that night — the last two of the six the thing had cost her — and came at the end of them to that, the only question left and the last page in the envelope. The white space under it ran nearly the whole page. She looked at it for a long time, and then she wrote: To be useful to somebody exacting, for a fixed period, at a standard I can be told I have met.

It was, she thought, an extremely good answer.

And she knew, distantly, the way you know a sound is coming from inside your own building, that she had written it before. She got up. She went to the flat file where she kept things that were not the film, and she took out a manila folder with nothing on the tab, and she opened it on the bench and put the photocopy beside the fresh page, three years apart, and read the two of them across each other.

Line for line. Not similar. The same. Same clauses volunteered, same limits, same conditional voice, the same careful pricing of every single thing she was prepared to give so that no part of it could ever be called in later.

Clémence sat with her hands flat on the bench and her hoops in the lens-cap dish and the drives humming behind her, and she did not change one word of it.

Then she wrote Friday, 11 a.m. on the back of her hand, put the forty-one pages back in the envelope, and turned the lights off in the room where the horn was still, in some sense, playing.

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

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