The Clint Ruby concert was in a basketball arena named after a bank, and even with our VIP passes, my wife and I had to clear a brisk checkpoint. A group of men yapped behind us—engines and rates and stats.
The bouncer fastened a paper bracelet around my wrist. “Are you going to be drinking on the floor tonight?”
“Depends on how loose I’m feeling,” I said. “I always start out standing up.” I imagined that debauched release, which already felt out of the question in this environment. There was a tight self-awareness here, a sturdiness to posture and gait.
“Enjoy the evening,” my wife told the bouncer, delivering her bid with a practiced lilt.
Risa and I were voice artists, recording bits for commercials and the occasional feature film. Sometimes we worked as extras, and Risa’s latest gig hadn’t involved her voice at all—a non-speaking role in a music video, playing the mother of Clint Ruby, a country singer neither of us had heard of until Risa got the part.
We hadn’t realized Clint Ruby’s fame until we watched the music video on YouTube last week. The video had nearly a million hits. The song, a tribute to Clint Ruby’s parents, played over shots of the singer and my wife drinking iced tea on a porch. Risa’s hair was luminous white; she was symmetrical and frankly gorgeous, and in tucked flannel she could convince. There she was, rolling up her sleeve to display an eagle tattoo on her forearm.
“That’s not his father either.” The man cast as my wife’s husband was silver and stoic, rugged in greased jeans. I could have played that part. Now Risa was serving chicken to a table of men.
“My boys,” said Risa. “Three sons.” The singer was smaller than the men who flanked him, who were blond and virile, more blatantly handsome.
My pops is an American man, went the chorus. My mama is a darn right gal.
“It’s weird,” I said. That week we’d noticed the song in the drugstore, at the post office.
“You’d do it too, Danny,” Risa said. And she was right. Work had slowed down for both of us. We’d been together for four years–my second marriage, Risa’s third–and that was enough time to see things change. Fewer bookings–we were mostly pigeonholed now. Senior vitamins, home alerts. Transferring your savings into trust.
Risa and I hadn’t had the easiest time that spring. She’d been accused of something I found hard to believe. Two months ago, a man in our church congregation, a jacked dad who sat in our pew, said that during the sign of peace, that moment when the priest paused the service and told parishioners to greet each other with a friendly scripted exchange, Risa had hugged for a little too long, too close. The man was twenty-five years younger than us, a sometime tenor in the choir. Though Risa carried herself with strong awareness of the power of her body—lipstick, skirts, heels—she wasn’t a predator. I’d never suspected her to cheat. In our professional lives, confidence was our currency, you want this the subtext of all our commercial lines. But early on we’d agreed to leave that manipulation at the office. It was Risa’s private voice, her vulnerable and quiet one, that I found most seductive.
We’d started going to church when we moved out of the city last year. Life was cheaper in that small town, but it was lonely, too, and the church helped us meet people, gave structure to our week. Risa had grown up Catholic and the nostalgia pleased her. Though neither of us were committed to actual faith—we’d discussed our agnostic questions over beer on Sunday nights—we liked the communal ritual, the smoke and chanting, the service’s arc and release.
Risa denied the accusation. An unremarkable embrace, she said—she’d hugged everyone at church the same way, and she demonstrated on me, arms so quick they barely registered. I’d never experienced her chaste hugs before. We’d first met at an audition for a public service announcement, and when I asked her to coffee afterward, it was her words and eyes that touched me, her gratifying laugh. Our first hug didn’t come until days later, after I’d already kissed her and we’d been cast.
He must have been imagining things, Risa said. But the man was prominent in the congregation; with all the gossip, it eventually got too uncomfortable for us to go to services. I’d never noticed what Risa was doing during the sign of peace, my own back turned as I greeted my neighbors. But I believed her. I told her that.
Backstage, Clint Ruby was short and wiry, his jaws working a wad of gum.
“I watched the video,” I told him. “It’s a beautiful song.”
He widened his unusual eyes—whites visible all around the irises, a proportion common to cult leaders and politicians. “You’re just a friend being kind,” he said. A woman with a headset and a clipboard whispered in his ear.
Risa and I moved to a table laid with snacks. The sons from the music video were housing the hummus. They muttered to each other in a throaty language, a convoluted, Teutonic version of English.
“Hey buds,” my wife said. The guys were gingery, hugely tall. Bart and Wim, and they looked unlike both Risa and Clint Ruby.
We opened beers and chatted. Their accents left certain letters smudged. Wim said that his parents ran a hotel. He’d grown up there, just outside of Bruges.
“My family liked games,” Wim said. “Our restaurant had a wine cellar. We’d bring up bottles and cover our eyes.” He mimed a blindfold, made a guttural sound. “We’d guess.”
There was something soothing in his husky cadences. “Your childhood sounds different than mine,” I said.
“Did your family live in the hotel rooms?” Risa asked.
“Everyone wants to know this question,” Wim said.
Clint Ruby’s handler was beside us, frowning with her clipboard. “When you’re out on the floor, let’s keep the talking to a minimum.”
Bart said something to Wim in low Flemish. Wim didn’t tell us any more.
The show was sold out, and we were ushered right to the front of the standing crowd. On stage, Clint Ruby used smooth banter to link his songs—rousing anthems, backed by pedal steel and a robust drummer. “Thanks for being here,” Clint Ruby said. “It’d be awfully strange without you.”
Risa was dancing, nodding to the beat. The silver husband from the music video hadn’t come to the concert. I wasn’t sure what role that left me.
Near the end of the set Clint looked down at us. “My mom’s here tonight.” A spotlight clicked onto Risa, and the audience cheered. “Mama, I just want to thank you for giving me my first guitar.”
Risa stepped away from me and took the stairs to the stage. Clint Ruby put his arm around her shoulder, and I watched her smile and wave at the crowd as the Belgians bounded up too. Risa was held in the light, captured in that moment of untruth. Warm and maternal but still charismatic, beaming a vital appeal.
In our church, full of social-justice types who wore jeans to mass, no one had stopped me from participating in communion even though I was a non-Catholic who hadn’t earned the privilege. My first time up, I snatched the wafer from the priest after an awkward stalemate at the altar.
“Let him put it in your open palm,” Risa whispered when I returned to the pew. “You’re supposed to be repentant.”
Some people simply shook hands during the sign of peace, but many embraced. A misunderstanding wasn’t out of the question. Maybe Risa’s accuser had mistaken her platonic enthusiasm. Or maybe an innocuous hand over the man’s back had felt like actual caressing. If she hadn’t actually caressed. She’d insisted on her innocence—she’d seemed sincerely upset, consumed by the accusation for weeks—and that had convinced me. Now, watching Risa mouth the words of the chorus along with Clint Ruby—my pops is an American man—I could see how easy it was for her to step into a lie.
We’d liked going to church because together we didn’t quite believe—we’d found that space of not knowing interesting to consider as an intellectual practice. But now I was alone as Risa soaked up admiration. This uncertainty was something new.
When the concert ended, we walked to the train station, Risa fielding smiles and thumbs up along the way. Our train was still twenty minutes off, and in the station store, I picked out a can of seltzer. A rack of phone cards leaned against the refrigerator. Dial the Globe, the cards offered, advertising the flags of many nations. Phone Home.
Bart and Wim were in there, shopping for candy.
“Oh my god,” the cashier said. “You all must love seeing Clint perform.”
“It’s always a treat,” Risa said. Bart and Wim nodded, smiled.
“Where’s your husband tonight?” the cashier asked Risa.
How was Risa going to respond? My family liked games, Wim had said.
“He’s not feeling well, unfortunately,” Risa said.
I sipped the seltzer, let out a light burp. I put a phone card in my pocket, and I picked up other things, too—a roll of lifesavers, a can of chili, a keychain in the shape of a dog.
Risa was paying for pretzels. I moved down the aisle and joined her by the register, drifted my hand over her back. The cashier watched with interest.
“You all have a blessed evening,” he said.
Risa and I went through the door to join the Belgians outside. Wim gave me a slice of his Kit-Kat. I unwrapped my mints, and put one in Wim’s outstretched hand. I wanted the cashier to see what I’d taken. I needed Risa to defend me, to travel in a lie we could share. I twirled the keychain around my finger, scrutinized the label on the chili’s can.
It worked—the cashier came out from behind the counter and joined us on the sidewalk.
“Sir, I think you forgot to pay for those,” he said.
I knew how to tip into a friendly octave and play the goofy gramps. Whoopsie, it slipped my head. But I didn’t choose to do that.
Risa came to me, creased with concern. She asked if I needed cash. I couldn’t mistake the timbre of real feeling cracking through. And in her face, I saw it: we were married, we shared an account. I found my own crumpled bills, and told the cashier to keep the change.
Dozens of people were streaming from the concert now. Hi mama, they called. Hi Larry and Troy. In the hubbub, the cashier went back inside—people were storming the register with chips.
“Sweetie,” my wife said to me. “Don’t you think we should go?”
I wrapped my fingers around the phone card in my pocket, felt the numbers that would let me dial in. A crowd had formed. They wanted Risa to sign things, to pose with Bart and Wim. Yes, it was thrilling to touch a stranger. To get close to something you didn’t know.
“Would you like one of these?” I asked Bart, offering him the phone card. “You might like to check in with your family.”
“My family is here,” Bart said quietly. His accent was wrong, but the earthy conviction convinced. I could imagine it. Neither Risa nor I had children, but if we’d gotten together earlier, at a time when we were promoting station wagons and deck seal, these boys could have been our sons.
I put my hands on Risa’s shoulders. She leaned back against me, the top of her head just under my chin. Muscle memory, the way that together, we fit. A church used its rituals to foster communal faith, and though Risa and I weren’t quite believers, the priest had made room for us.
“Did you know that Clint was going to dedicate that song?” a woman asked.
Another leaned close to Risa. “Where’s your husband?”
I went to the platform. I didn’t need to hear an answer I already knew. The train would be arriving in three minutes, a recorded announcer claimed. Well-enunciated, just urgent enough. Along the track’s edge, people were waiting to get on, ready with their tote bags and gripped phones. All of them would be going with us. Pushing across the platform and through the open doors. They’d ride with us as we left the city, ticking through a string of dark towns until we got back to the station where we’d parked the car.