Besides the Collection, my creative outlet was simply John, the two of us working at each other like puzzles, not sure if we were putting each other together or breaking us apart. We went to Sony’s Grammy afterparty together, and I was so happy he posed for pictures with me, because Grammy night is like the prom in our industry. He was nominated for five awards and won two that night. He broke up with me that night at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. I can’t even recall why. I just remember knocking on his hotel room door and begging until he finally took me back in the middle of the night.
From there I joined him on the road, Minneapolis and then Madison. That Wisconsin stop was Valentine’s Day, but he told me he didn’t believe in that stuff. Not for cool people. I watched him sing “I Don’t Trust Myself (With Loving You),” a song about winning a lover’s trust just so you can break her heart, and then do it all over again. It was his MO set to a gorgeous rhythm, as irresistible as him. I sighed, but I told myself being with him was enough.
The next day we were back on the bus, heading south to a February 16 show in Kentucky. Somewhere in Illinois John had an idea, and started calling around on his phone, talking quietly. He told the driver he needed to make a pit stop. He jumped out, yelling for me to come along. He took me to a Tiffany & Co. store. We went inside and he picked out a diamond necklace.
“I’ve always wanted the first diamond I gave a girl to be from Tiffany,” he said, putting it around my neck.
I told myself this was our Valentine’s Day. The following month he took me to Rome. We had a private tour of the Sistine Chapel, and as I looked up at God and Adam reaching for each other, I thought of how much Sarah would have loved this.
Afterward, we visited another church. Fendi. Oh, I’m just kidding, but we did go, and it did feel like a miracle, because when we walked in he said, “Pick anything you want.” The extravagant gestures continued, and made my anxiety kick in. The higher he lifted me, the longer the fall would be when I disappointed him, and I knew I would. I was still self-medicating with drinking but doing it less so now that we were spending more time together.
I went along on his tour of Australia the following month. When he saw me start to drink, he stopped me.
“Don’t drink,” he said. “Try this pill. Just take this and it will take the edge off.” It was a Xanax, and he was right. It softened the edges of my fear and anxiety enough that I could be normal and present. But it frightened me into the realization that I clearly had a problem. Not with drinking, but with whatever I was covering with the drinking. This Xanax was a quick fix, but for what? I didn’t know, and I wasn’t ready to face it.
In Adelaide, a girl working the concert leaned over to me and asked if I wanted a water. She was sweet, my height and age, with brown hair.
“When are we going to hear you sing again?” she said with that Australian accent.
I smiled. “Oh, soon,” I lied, turning my face back to watch John onstage.
JOHN COLLECTED GUITARS AND HAD SO MANY THAT THERE WAS ALWAYS one in reach, the way an average person would be with a cell phone. Each had a story, like it was Eric Clapton’s and, by the way, it was the one he used for “Layla.” He would idly pick one up, play some gorgeous melody, and then look at me to join in. I would give a closemouthed smile. We did not have that spark to make music together, or maybe I resisted it. I know I had moved on from my ex-husband, but I still grieved singing with him. We were great together, where we were at our best. I wasn’t ready to share that with another man, even one I was in love with.
And John knew. He hated that I couldn’t let that part of Nick go. So, he presented me with an idea. He was obsessed with a song I wrote for A Public Affair called “Walkin’ ’Round in a Circle.” I’d used a sample of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” and that familiar tight rhythm allowed me to be a little looser with how I structured the song. I wrote it about the patterns I fall into, and how fear often keeps me stuck walking in a circle, where I can’t tell the beginning from the end. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis produced the song, and John’s idea was to redo it, make it less breathy and more direct, like my “With You” or his own music. As an artist, I knew he was right. It would be better that way.
“The song’s a hit,” he said. “I’ll produce it. I’ll release it.”
“No,” I told him. “I don’t want people to be like, ‘Oh, she’s using John Mayer to better her career.’ ”
He told me I needed to stop caring so much about what people thought. I don’t remember if he mentioned the idea to my father or if I did, but dad was cheering it on. “Yes, oh my God, he would be the best thing ever for your career.”
But I didn’t want my career to be about my relationship anymore. I had already broken my own heart with that approach.
John didn’t listen to me, or maybe he mistook my growing resignation as a yes. He went ahead and booked a recording studio for the next time we were in New York City. Chad Franscoviak, his sound engineer and roommate, was there, always calm around the storm of John’s energy and talking. Anybody would have taken advantage of this moment, and I didn’t. So, I sabotaged myself. There was Pinot Grigio, and I began downing it.
“You don’t need a drink,” he said. “Just be yourself.”
“You make me nervous,” I said. “I have to get comfortable.”
“Why do you need to drink to be comfortable?”
I busied myself with stalling tactics—lengthening my vocal exercises, “centering” myself, pouring another—until I had to get in front of the mic. The windowless studio seemed tighter, more like a prison cell than a place to create. John was on guitar. I don’t know if the plan was for him to do backing vocals later or if it would be a duet. I just knew he had a vision for how I should sound, and I worried I wouldn’t live up to that.
We started in. “Life is a curve ball, thrown with the wild arm, and if I’m gonna swing in, I must get motivated—”
I stopped, and said, “Sorry.”
He said something encouraging, but all I heard was the critique, which is what a producer is supposed to do. He wasn’t being out of line. But it brought back Nick producing for me in the studio. We started again, and we went on like that for a long time. If you told me it was thirty minutes or three hours, I would believe you either way.
“Just stuck in a dream, where the answer’s clear,” I sang. I’d written that song as a promise to myself to change my habits. Now it felt like I was narrating my current life with John. Caught in this cycle of make up-to-breakup and back again, no longer growing into myself. I got too in my head, wondering if this was God putting me in a position to sing the truth of my life. Or John. It occurred to me that I had always done well when I worked to be worthy of God’s gifts, and I had spent a year trying to be worthy of John’s love. Finally, it was as if my vocal cords became frozen. I couldn’t sing.
“Why are you doing this to me?” I asked John. “I hate it.”
“I’m trying to share this with you,” he said.
“I can’t share this with you,” I said. “Singing together was what I did with Nick.”