Page 58 of That Weekend in Paris
He looks up at me then, meets my gaze and holds it directly. “I’m not interested in any of those women, though,” Klein says.
We look at each other for several long moments, and I can feel my heart thudding against the wall of my chest, realize too that my cheeks have heated up again.
We finish our lunch and consider seeing more of the town but decide to get back on the road so that we can reach the château by dinner. An awkwardness has settled over us, and we drive for a bit without actual conversation beyond what is necessary to stay on top of our directions. At some point, I decide it might be a good idea to get things away from the personal and more on the reason behind the two of us setting out on this trip together.
I reach into the backpack at my feet and pull out a notepad and a pen. “Why don’t we work on some song ideas?”
“Okay,” he agrees. And I think that’s relief I hear in his voice. I’m guessing the awkwardness between us was starting to bother him, too. So I decide to tackle that head-on. “I realize that the two of us, we’re just, we’re friends. And I’m not thinking this is about anything other than exactly what we agreed to. The two of us taking a little time to see the sights and write some songs. I know things got a little personal back there in the restaurant, and I don’t want you to feel like—”
“Dillon.” He says my name, and I stop. “I’m not thinking anything other than the fact that the last few days with you have been some of the best I’ve had in a long time. Whatever happens between us—” He hesitates and then, “I don’t have any expectations. I just would kind of like to go on doing what we’ve been doing, enjoying life as we’re living it right now in this moment. Nothing more, nothing less. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Klein
“But how could you live and have no story to tell?”
?Fyodor Dostoevsky,White Nights
THE LAST THREE hours of the drive go by in a blink. I didn’t know it would be possible to drive and write a song at the same time, but all Dillon has required of me is to think out loud. I seem to be able to do that and drive at the same time. We’ve ended up with some pretty incredible lyrics and have honed out a melody for most of the song except the final bridge.
“You’re a productive person, aren’t you?” I say, glancing at her as she taps out the melody with her fingers on the dashboard.
She shrugs a little. “I like to make use of my time. I also don’t like to be bored. My brain prefers to be occupied.”
“Mine, too, actually,” I say. “I guess maybe that’s the creative in us.”
“When I’m in Nashville,” she says, “and I have any amount of drive time, I use a recorder on my phone to dictate ideas and lyrics. It actually turns dead time into really productive time.”
“That’s admirable,” I say. “No wonder you got songwriter of the year.”
“I’ve written as much bad stuff as I have good,” she says. “But I like to think that if you sift through the sand often enough, you’ll find a gold nugget here and there.”
“How many songs have you written?”
“Hmm, hundreds, I would say.”
“And how many do you consider great?”
“We all like to think our creations are perfect, but I know better. A very small percentage of those songs are really good. An even smaller percentage would I call great.”
“That’s honest. I learned early on that just because I created something, it didn’t mean that anyone else would find it worthwhile. It was only when I started looking outside myself to the way other people saw the world and tried to sync that with my own experience that I started to write things that might endure.”
“When I first started performing, I didn’t really care what a song had to say as long as it made people dance or raise their beers when I came on stage. Somewhere along the way, though, I realized it was kind of like I was throwing cotton candy at the crowd, and while they loved it in the moment, it wasn’t anything that was going to stick with them very long or make them tell another person about the message in the song. I began to want to write and perform songs that would make them tell another person about it.”
“Yeah, I get that,” Dillon says. “I was kind of the same way in the beginning, looking at what other people were doing to try to figure out how to make it. But eventually, I figured out that the only story I can truly tell is my own story, bits and pieces of it, anyway, that resonate with other people and their stories. You have your own story that is unique to you, but there’s so much of it that your fans are sure to identify with. It’s finding those pieces of yourself that you would rather not show to the world and then realizing that other people feel the same about the things they believe are their flaws and weaknesses. We all have them. I think the reason people love music and books is because when a writer makes himself, herself vulnerable, the people listening to or reading that story understand that they’re not alone, that they’re not unique in their shortcomings.”
I consider this for a moment. “That’s true. It’s just early on, it’s hard to believe that people really want to see the ugly parts of you. I have a feeling,” I say, glancing at her, “that you’re going to make me open a vein and bleed whenever we write together.”
“I won’t consider this a success unless you do,” she says, smiling.
The GPS announces our exit as upcoming. We put our attention on the road and not missing the turnoff to the château. Off the Autoroute, we drive a few miles south and then come to the château’s massive stone column entrance. It has a gate we received the code for through a welcoming email.
Once we drive through, it’s as if we’ve entered a movie set in the French countryside. To either side of us, beautiful green fields lie behind white-painted wood fencing. The pastures are dotted with grazing horses, a couple of which stand beneath trees along the edges of the fields. Others nap in the waning sunlight, tails swishing lazily. The road serving as the entrance goes on for at least half a mile. We round a turn. The château is there before us, an enormous stone monument to centuries past that has been lovingly maintained and cared for. Large boxwoods line the front of the house.
“They must be hundreds of years old,” Dillon says. “They’re huge.”
To the right of the house, we can see the corner of a huge barn, white fencing that matches that along the driveway coming in.
