Chapter Text
The CBS Records boardroom on the thirty-fifth floor held the late afternoon light through the windows that faced the city. The long mahogany table ran the length of the room. Around it sat six men. Walter Yetnikoff at the head. Larkin Arnold to his right. Frank DiLeo across from Larkin. Two label vice presidents Michael recognized from previous meetings but had never spoken to directly. Michael took the chair at the foot of the table. Yetnikoff was already speaking before Michael had fully settled.
"November eight, Michael. We're past the point where we can keep moving this. The retail commitments are locked. The pressing plants are scheduled. Quincy says you're still mixing." Yetnikoff leaned forward, planting his forearms on the mahogany. Michael set his hands flat against the wood. "The album ships on November eight or we are in real trouble with the chain stores." Michael did not answer as he looked at Yetnikoff.
"Michael. Are you hearing me," Yetnikoff said, exasperated. Michael held the silence while removing his hands from the table. Larkin Arnold cleared his throat to Yetnikoff's right, and his eyes shifted to him.
"What Walter is saying, Michael, is that we have a window. And the window is closing. We need to know we have an album by November eight." The silence stretch past the point where it was polite. Past the point where it was uncomfortable.
"This is the part where you tell us when the album is going to be ready, Michael," Yetnikoff said, the patience gone from his voice. "I have invested. CBS has invested. We have given you everything you have asked for on this record. We gave you Quincy. We gave you Westlake for as long as you wanted Westlake. We gave you the budget you asked for and then the budget over the budget. There is a point at which the goodwill we have extended has to be returned in the form of a finished album that we can sell. That point is November eight."
The two unnamed men looked at each other. DiLeo's chair creaked. Larkin reached for the carafe and poured himself a glass he did not drink from. "Michael. For the love of God. Say something," Yetnikoff said, his voice tightening.
The room was completely still. Under the table, Michael's hands were trembling so violently he had to press them flat against his thighs to hide it. His heart hammered in his throat, a frantic, rabbit-fast rhythm. The physical urge to cave, to give them a date just to make the pressure stop, was suffocating. Michael forced his eyes to soften as he kept his face entirely still.
"I'm going to give you this album when I'm ready."
***
"And then I left," Michael said. "I walked out. I didn't slam the door." The woman across from him nodded. The small nod she gave when she wanted him to keep going. "It felt like relief. Walking out. Like I hadn't given them anything."
"If you didn't give them anything today, what did you keep for yourself," she asked. The question landed somewhere Michael had not expected. He turned it over.
"My reaction," Michael said. "They were pushing and I didn't push back. I just sat there and let them keep talking until they ran out of things to say."
"Who taught you to do that."
The pull in his chest was immediate. Simone in the kitchen of her apartment in San Jose. The phone on speaker. Her hand doing something else while her brother's voice climbed through the room without finding anything to grip. Her face entirely still. She had a name for the tactic. Michael could almost hear her saying it. Something small. Two words maybe. The shape of a stone in his memory. The word itself gone. The name was forty four years away from this room. "Someone I knew," Michael said. "Who was good at it."
"Someone you trusted."
"Yes."
She nodded. She did not press for the name. Michael felt his shoulders come down by a small amount. Every interviewer, every reporter, every well-meaning person who heard him say a friend or someone I knew immediately wanted the name. She only needed to know the person had existed.
"My father would have hated what I did today," Michael said.
"What do you think he would have said," she asked.
The word landed in his chest. Michael felt the tightness there. The place where his father usually lived in his body. "He would have said I disrespected those men. That I was being difficult. That I was always being difficult. That those men were the reason I had anything at all and I should have stayed and listened."
"And what does the meeting look like through his eyes when you say all that back to yourself."
Michael blinked. He had not expected her to ask him to look at the meeting through his father's eyes. The redirect was small but it shifted something. He was looking at the meeting from the outside instead of from inside his own defense of it. "It looks like I was disrespectful," Michael said. "Through his eyes."
"And through yours."
"Through mine it looks like I held my ground." A silence settled.
"I don't believe any of what he would have said anymore," he said.
She nodded slowly. "That's new."
"It is."
A clock somewhere in the room moved through another minute. Michael kept his hands flat on his thighs, his muscles locked, waiting for the pivot. He waited for her to tell him about industry obligations, or the cost of the CBS studio time, or what he owed the men at that table. She didn't. She just sat back in her chair and let him breathe. Slowly, the muscles in his shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch.
"How long has it been new."
Michael thought about the legal pad in the back of his closet. The white shirt and the dark jeans behind it. "A few weeks," he said.
"Knowing it's a lie and not feeling the fear are two different things, Michael," she said. "Which one are you doing right now."
The question stopped him. "I'm fighting it," Michael said.
"How long have you been fighting it."
"The same. A few weeks."
A clock somewhere in the room moved through another minute. "I can't look in the mirror anymore," Michael said after a while.
"What happens when you look?" she asked.
The question caught him. He had never admitted it out loud. Not to a doctor, not to a friend. "It's falling apart," he said quietly. "My face. I look at it, and I can't breathe because it looks wrong. The shape of it, the skin... it's changing, and I can't stop it."
"And when you see that change, what does the voice in your head say?"
Michael swallowed the dryness in his throat. "It says I'm defective. It says I'm ugly."
"Whose voice is it, Michael?" He didn't answer. Michael felt the tightness in his chest, the place where his father usually lived in his body. He looked down at the carpet, the silence drawing out heavy and suffocating until it filled the whole room. She didn't push him to say the name out loud.
"...We have a few minutes," she said. "What do you want to do with them."
Michael looked at the side table beside her chair where her notebook sat. "Can I have a piece of paper and a pen," Michael asked.
She took a clean sheet of paper from her notebook and a pen from the side table and handed both to him across the small open space between them. Her hand briefly touched his when she passed them. "Sure. Take what you need."
Michael's eyes went to the nameplate on her desk as he took the pen. He had read it every Thursday for weeks now. He still had not used the first name out loud. He set the paper on the arm of the chair. He took the cap off the pen. He thought about what he wanted to say first. The words came to him already shaped, as if they had been waiting for him to pick up the pen. He started to write.
The clock moved another minute. He filled half the page, stopped, capped the pen, and handed it back. He folded the paper once and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket. "I'll see you next week, Dr. Francis," Michael said.
"Next week, Michael."