I returned to room a, unlocked it, and went inside. Marie sat against the wall, the blanket covering her feet.
“Feeling any warmer?” I asked.
She looked up at me and shrugged.
“Mind if I sit down?”
She shook her head.
I sat across from her, not too close. “We thought you might be hungry, so we ordered you a pizza. Everything on it. The works.”
“Oh,” she said.
“What?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Tell me. Please.”
“I’m a vegetarian.”
So simple a task, and I’d messed it up. “We’ll get you another—”
“Forget it.” She scratched her neck. “I’m not really very hungry.”
“I’m happy to order another one.”
“It’s okay. I’ll just pick off the meat. Picking off the meat isn’t such a big deal, all things considered.”
Sitting this close, I could tell she was a smoker, and I was glad to learn this fact about her. It made her seem a little older, a little less fragile—a little less like we had irrevocably tarnished something that’d been flawless.
“So, what did you think your day was going to be like when you got up this morning?” I asked.
She looked around the room, at the microphone stand, the monitor, the headphones lying on the floor. “I guess pretty much like this.”
She didn’t smile, but I felt grateful for this small joke.
Normally, when nobody is speaking, there are plenty of sounds all around us, the ongoing accompaniment to our lives. We might pay them no mind, but they’re always present: a clock’s ticking, a refrigerator’s humming, cars passing by, leaves blowing down a sidewalk, a plane high overhead. We don’t know real silence until we’re exposed to it. Here in this small recording room, sheets of thick foam covered the walls. Carpet covered the floor. Even the rain, audible in the control room, couldn’t penetrate the thick ceiling insulation in this part of the studio. The only thing to hear was our own breathing and our blood pulsing past our ears.
I credited this unnatural quiet with helping me to forge fast connections with the musicians who came here to record. Without that connection, you can’t ever hope to see the project you’re working on together with a singular vision. A lot of the recording process is talk. What are we going to do in this next take? What are we trying to achieve? And the studio itself helps us with these conversations. With the background noise gone, we hear one another with greater precision. Timbre, inflection, intensity—these are the raw elements that first the ear, and then the brain and the gut, transform into feeling and understanding.
I hoped that the studio would come to my aid now, and that Marie would hear in my words the full spectrum of regret that I was feeling.
“We’ve got another friend coming,” I said.
She didn’t react for a moment, and I got to hear my blood some more.
“He’s a lawyer,” I continued. “We’re hoping he’ll be able to help us straighten all this out.”
More silence. Then: “And you’re telling me this because …”
“It means this is going to drag on a little longer. At least another hour or two, until he gets here.”
“Oh.” She had been joking with me a minute ago, but now her eyes got wet and she wouldn’t look at me. “I was supposed to go straight home when my shift ended at eight.”
“Your grandmother is probably getting worried.”
She shook her head. “No, I’ll bet she’s isn’t. She’s probably glad I’m not home.”
“I see,” I said, not seeing at all.
“She’s been on my case to take the SATs. This morning we had a pretty bad fight about it.”
“Is that such a bad idea?”
“Yeah, it is. I don’t want to go to college. I want to move to New York and be an actress.”
I nodded. “Acting’s a really hard business.” In the midst of all this, I could give advice. Sure I could.
“I’ve had leading roles in my high school musical the past two years.”
“Are you a triple threat?”
“What’s that?”
“Singing, acting, and dancing. If you can do all three, you’re called a triple threat.”
“I can’t dance too well. I’m a good singer, though. Really good. People tell me all the time. Even today, I’d just started my shift at noon and was sort of singing to myself, I don’t even remember what it was, but I was singing and didn’t know there were any customers in the store, but there was this lady who came out of the restroom and she was like, ‘You know, you should be on Broadway.’ And I could tell she meant it. It wasn’t just some dumb compliment. So, yeah, I can sing.” Her eyes weren’t watery anymore. “Is this where you work?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a recording studio, isn’t it?”
I told her it was. “And a record company.” I said it to see whether I still believed it.
“Has anybody famous ever recorded here?”
I told her I had no idea.