Page 101 of Levi

“You can be mad at me, Tex,” I say. “You’d have a right to be. I brought him in here. I sat him at your bar. I’m sorry.”

He stops with a piece of wood halfway to the box.

“Why on earth would I be mad, Dante? What are you going on about this early in the morning?”

“He lied to all of you. He sat right there and let everybody be kind to him. He let you claim him. You claimed a man who wasn’t real. And I vouched for him to you.”

Tex sets the wood down on Bertha’s shelf and leans the rake against her.

“You know how Stormy came to me.”

“Tex—”

“He wouldn’t give me his name. Wouldn’t say where he came from, or what he was running from. Got in my truck and didn’t say six words. Didn’t say any words. I brought him home and I didn’t ask, because the asking wasn’t mine to do. He told me the story when he was ready and not an hour before, and that was his to decide.” He looks at me. “I never once called that lying, Dante. Never.”

“That’s not the same, Tex. He didn’t tell you anything. Levi made you believe a thing that wasn’t true. That’s a lie. Levi lied to me, to everyone.”

Tex crosses his arms and settles in. “Did he now? You sure about that? How exactly did he lie to you? Tell me the lie. The actual words out of his mouth. What’d he say that wasn’t true? Talk to me about that.”

I open my mouth to give it to him. The words aren’t there.

I set the wood back on the pile.

Tex looks sorry, more than satisfied. “From where you’re standing, holding something back and lying feels like the same animal. Both leave you holding a picture that turns out wrong. But they don’t come from the same place. One’s a man getting something over on you. The other’s a man too scared to say the truth out loud, hoping you’ll like him long enough that it won’t cost him you when it comes out.” He shuts the firebox door and spins the damper open. “I’ve known which one your singer is since the first night he walked in and sat down. So’s Sheila. The only one it’s taking a while with is you. That’s alright. You got hit harder than we did.”

He strikes a match on Bertha’s side and drops it in through the vent, and stands there watching until the draw catches and the first smoke comes up thin and white.

“I like Levi,” Tex says. “I claimed him as welcome here. I don’t take it back, and I don’t care what his famous name is.” He picks the rake back up and tips his chin at the loft windows, where a light’s been on the entire time. “Benji’s been up there running around all morning. Mickey told me he’d been at that computer half the night. Go on up.”

Benji and Mickey’s loft is up the back stairs. One long room, bed in the corner, kitchen down the wall, windows over the water. He’s at the table in a robe, reading glasses on, an open laptop. He spins it to face me before I’m through the door.

“Hurry and sit down. I know, you have a showing — you told me twice yesterday, both times in the closing voice, and I let it go because one crisis at a time. Sit down anyway. I couldn’t sleep. You know me, I can’t leave anything alone. I did a little more digging.”

“Benji, I have a—”

“A showing, yes, you’re a very busy and important man, sit the fuck down.” He pulls the glasses off, points them at me. “I’m not going over the song numbers again. Once was plenty. I found more interesting stuff and I’ve been up here since four putting them in order, because a couple of them sting and I wanted the stinging ones to land gently. Get comfortable. We’re going in order. Mine.”

I look at the screen.

Benji shows me the women first. A parade of them. Tabloid pages. A young movie star on his arm at an awards show, an actress on a beach, a model. Lee’s New Flame. Country’s Hottest Couple. Is This the One? He clicks through fast, then stops.

“Look at the photos,” he says, “and then tell me what’s missing.”

Beaches. Premieres. A different woman every season. “What?”

“The breakups. There aren’t any. Six women in eight years and not one breakup — no drama, no crying interview, no source close to the couple, nobody throws his records off a balcony. Every one of them arrives the same way. One outlet, exclusive photos, golden hour on a beach a PR person scouted in advance, and then a season later she’s gone without a sound and the next one arrives on the same schedule.

“Dante, rollouts are my job. Venue, timing, photographer, one outlet gets the exclusive — I could build you that campaign by Thursday. Someone booked those beaches. Someone told her what to wear and when to smile. People falling in love don’t do it on a quarterly calendar.”

Six women in eight years and not one of them real. I understand now what they’re for. A man who reaches across a dark kitchen for another man doesn’t headline stadiums in Nashville. They manufactured him girlfriends so no one would ever think to ask the question.

Last night I stood in that kitchen and demanded to know who he was, as if the answer were free. The answer is the one thing all of this was built to keep him from saying.

“Now the bad-boy file,” Benji says, gentler. He pulls it up. DUIs. Bar fights. ‘Troubled.’ ‘Sources say he’s spiraling.’ A lot of it. “Some of it’s manufactured, I’d bet the business on that — outlaw sells, and I know manufactured when I see it. But the DUIs are court records. Those happened. And I sat here at five this morning trying to find the angle that makes it funny, because that’s what I do, I find the angle, and there isn’t one. That’s a man drinking himself off the road in front of the country, more than once, and the people who were paid to look after him wrote it up as image. I know a little something about building a face so nobody asks questions. I started at sixteen with drugstore eyeliner, and that was me doing it to myself, on purpose, because my face is mine. He’s got a payroll doing it to him.”

“And then,” Benji says, and the play drops out of his voice, which is an alarm, “the last one. The first one, really. Before all of it. I found it at six this morning and I’ve watched it four times, and I almost decided you didn’t need to see it. Then I realized that deciding what you get to see is exactly what they do to him. Watch.”

He hits play.