Cole waited for me after my show, nervously chewing off his chipped black nail polish with his face hiding behind the glow of his phone. He knew that I would approach him. And the second I did, he looked up from his phone with a dry smile.
“You know what you are?” he asked, fully prepared to tell me. “You’re like a manic pixie dream-girl version of Fiona Apple. And I’m going to change your life.”
He said it, and I believed him, wholly.
Over the next few months, Cole’s enthusiasm for me only grew stronger, which made me feel like the most talented woman alive. What followed were writing sessions, incessant text messages, and FaceTiming at all hours of the night—his nervous gusto, 5-Hour Energy drinks, microdosing on shrooms, and Adderall consumption keeping him and me up while the rest of the world slept. Cole inspired me to leave a little bit of my softer folksy side behind and lean into heavier sounds that I had previously shied away from. He inspired me to experiment with my sound. I would spend nights in front of my computer, layering my demos with a grungy edge, bringing angry instruments into the once-quieter spaces of my favorite tracks. He came to watch me play at my usual dive bar, sitting in a corner while eyes floated toward him. He would react with his hands in the air—a “you CAN’T be real” sort of exclamation—as I played every song I’d ever been proud of. There was a safeness that I felt with him. Cole was married to his gorgeous high school sweetheart, so the knowledge that a man simply appreciated a woman for her talent allowed me to drop my guard. I had roamed through the music world without a mentor, and finding one this late in the game was like being rescued after nearly thirty years on a desert island.
After a few months of being emboldened by Cole’s guidance, he let me know that I would record his favorite song, “Let’s Lie,” in his studio, and then another two tracks in the weeks to come—so we could get my EP out into the world as soon as possible. There was even a cherry on top of this life-changing news: I would open for Cole Wyan on his North American tour. Gone were the days of playing half-empty dive bars. This was the birth of Maggie Vine, the professional singer-songwriter.
We recorded “Let’s Lie” in a real studio a few weeks before my thirtieth birthday. A stupid smile stayed on my face as my guitar was mic’ed separately from my mouth in the vocal isolation booth. There wasn’t pantyhose tugged onto the mic’s windscreen. My body wasn’t hunched inside my apartment’s tiny closet in an attempt to get a semiprofessional sound. This was the real deal. This was Making It. Cole was making the real thing happen the way it was meant to. When other producers would pop their heads in to say hi, Cole would tell them that he had just discovered the Next Big Thing, pointing to me.
But he said it in a way that put no attention on me, and all the attention on himself. I started to see another side of him, and I started to see him as human. His imposter syndrome was the amalgamation of an insecure kid who became the most powerful person in a room.
After his sound engineer stepped out of the studio to go on break for lunch, I sat with my bony knees pointed inward as he played back “Let’s Lie.” Cole sat across from me on a black stool in front of the mixing board, his eyes shining at me as the pre-chorus to “Let’s Lie” swelled. I tugged at a loose thread on the tufted couch below me, a mixture of self-consciousness swirling with thrilling pride—I had never heard myself professionally produced. This was the one song that I didn’t layer with a heavier sound—it was delicate in all the right places, with the quiet swelling of acoustic guitar and tambourine, using reverb to give the song a dreamy, thickening air of romance. It was perfect.
Cole leaned back, pinching his eyebrows together. He energetically toggled with the sound effects on the board in front of him.
“What if we try this?”
Inside the chorus, there was now a gunshot in a space where a sparkling tambourine had once sounded.
I shook my head no, emphatically.
“Really? I think it gives the sound some mystery. Brings Mazzy Star into a gunfight.”
“I don’t want mystery here. I want hope. This song has to sound like a dream, and a gun cuts through it—it’s like a pointing a middle finger and saying, ‘This dream will never come true.’”
“Let’s Lie” was a song about Garrett, and darkening it for public consumption felt like stabbing myself in the chest. I didn’t want to add a grimness to the very hope that I was desperately clinging to. I was consumed by the fact that in two weeks I would be seeing Garrett, on my thirtieth birthday, in person for the first time since we slept together. I needed to roll around in hope so that I could take matters into my own hands and finally tell Garrett my feelings—tell him I was in love with him, tell him I wanted us to start right fucking now.
After a few minutes of back and forth on the song and the gunshot, Cole shook his head and smiled.
“You’re a pistol, you know that? I love that you believe in your music. Point, Maggie,” he said as he removed the weapon from my song. I looked down at my buzzing phone, silencing a call from Summer.
“You should be proud of this,” I heard Cole say.
I exhaled and smiled, as I found his face just inches from my face, and his hand on my knee. My heart raced furiously, and I held my breath. Instead of arching back, I froze with every muscle in my body squeezing inside itself. Suddenly, Cole’s sweaty palm was on the back of my head, and his mouth was on my neck.
I had not gone thirty years without being touched against my will. I was a woman in New York City who dared to ride the subway. Having a stranger purposefully grope my breast or my ass before he slipped out at his next stop had happened more than once. And those moments had fueled an anger inside me. I was tired of feeling like self-control was slipping through my body just because I needed basic transportation. This led me to take self-defense classes at the 92nd Street Y, hell-bent on the possibilities of publicly annihilating a groper in front of half of Manhattan. I wanted to hurt my assailant so badly that it would land me inside the “Everyday Heroes” pages of People magazine. I would no longer be a casualty of men offhandedly taking what they wanted from me in public.
But in private? In private, I had been lucky. A man had never touched me against my will behind a closed door. I knew this fact was good fortune and nothing more. I had gone nearly thirty years.
A supercut of the last couple months cascaded behind my eyes, which were the size of saucers. Had I given this man the green light to touch me in a place he absolutely needed permission to touch? And how could I politely say “thanks but no thanks” to a man who could make or break my dream? He was handing me something that had taken me too long to get, and I wasn’t sure if I could brush Cole Wyan off my body without ruining my career.
I slowly backed my body up on the couch, inching my neck away from his lips and his hands. He leaned back with wide eyes, as if he was shocked that I didn’t want his hands and his lips on my skin. He tilted his head to one side with a smile.
“C’mon,” he said. “I know what you’re afraid of…but we can still have a working relationship.”
He did not know what I was afraid of. Or he knew and couldn’t care less.