All the Love in the Universe

Six. Spotlight Burns-Marie

The pencil snapped on the napkin, then shredded it all over the table.

I was standing amidst a gaggle of fans and ready staff in a Nashville hotel.

"Don't worry," I assured the little girl, whose eyes were wide with impending panic. "I'll do it again."

"Thank you," the mother beamed, stroking her daughter's long brunette hair. "She's been looking forward to this all year." Then, lower, and making eye contact with me, "It's been quite a year."

I'd long since learned the ropes with fan meet-and-greets: keep your decorum, listen with compassion, never empathy, and smile, smile, smile.

I was in a long-distance relationship with tens of thousands of men, women, and children. Many of them had problems. Deep problems. Serious problems. Mysterious problems.

I was not responsible for those problems or the fixing of those problems; I was responsible for holding up my end of those relationships. That meant showing up when I said I would, responding to fans as much as possible, taking care of myself so I could keep showing up, and creating content they could find comfort or challenge in.

I didn't know what struggles this girl and her mother had endured over the past year—I didn't have to. What I did know was that my art and confidence, that image I flashed to the world on record and screen, meant something beyond myself. The fans did their part by buying, promoting, investing, sharing. Shoot, they did their part just by caring.

I wanted to carry my own weight for as long as I could.

The year hadn't been exactly easy for me either. Although the money had started to cascade in from the tours and records, the pressures and breaks in my routine sparked a fizz in my brain. Sometimes it felt like the electric excitement that sparkles in the air before a storm.

But when salted by the stress of Alec, my body imploded.

Aymi, my manager, resented the entire crisis. It delayed progress in a very detailed business plan she'd laid out for us and followed with exactitude. Alec wasn't anywhere on the spreadsheet. He was a nuisance at best and a catastrophic liability at worst. Either way, he was a "coin-guzzler", as Aymi labeled him. Every moment expended on him drained our accounts.

So the story went. Aymi would knock back mimosas and gesture wildly in the air as she painted vibrant pictures in the air of my career trajectory. Her Savannah, Georgia accent gave her an erudite charm mingled with no-nonsense authenticity. You could send her into vibrations of laughter with an off-color joke, but play with her money acumen and you were dead. Tenacious and just a little too serious to truly own the word "sassy", Aymi sashayed in a middle-aged air of confidence.

She was currently going through a divorce with a man she'd previously married and divorced twice.

Nikolai and she would enjoy fiery spats on interminable text logs, punctuated by equally intense lovemaking sessions Marie could often overhear through hotel walls.

So. Maybe Aymi was a little impartial in her romantic judgement.

But her dislike of the whole "Alec situation" was unabated. All she could see when Alec would cause trouble was money going down the drain in thick wads of crumbled cash.

I wasn't convinced. I knew with all my heart that, even strictly financially-speaking, Alec and I together spelled gold.

"If y'all could STAY together," Aymi would fret, an omnipresent pen in hand poised over some document or other, "it'd be Hollywood history. Are y'all GONNA stay together? No. Ergo, the situation."