The Purple Chime
The first time Prince called Susanna Hoffs, she thought it was a prank.
It was late. Too late for managers, too late for polite industry business, too late for anyone normal. The phone rang in her apartment with that hard little electric bell that made the whole room seem guilty.
“Hello?”
A pause.
Then a voice, low and amused.
“Is this the girl from the video?”
Susanna sat up in bed, one hand pushing her dark hair from her face. Outside, Los Angeles glowed in strips and dots — liquor store signs, headlights, apartment windows, all the restless constellations of people trying to become famous or trying to survive being famous.
“Which video?” she asked, because she already knew.
“The one where you look like you know something nobody else knows.”
She smiled despite herself.
“Who is this?”
Another pause, theatrical enough to be annoying, charming enough that she waited.
“It’s Prince.”
She laughed once, not because it was funny, but because reality had briefly lost its balance.
“Sure it is.”
“I can prove it.”
“How?”
“I’ll write you a song.”
That should have ended it. It should have been ridiculous. It should have been one of those bizarre Los Angeles stories you tell in kitchens at two in the morning: one time someone pretending to be Prince called me. But before she could respond, he hummed a melody into the receiver.
Not a song exactly. Not yet. Just a line — bright, melancholy, circular. A little like waking from a dream and finding the dream had followed you to the office.
Susanna went quiet.
Prince heard it.
“There,” he said softly. “Now you know.”
Then he hung up.
For three days she told no one.
Not Vicki. Not Debbi. Not Michael. Not even her closest friends, because the second she said it aloud, it would either become stupid or enormous, and she did not yet know which she wanted less.
Then came the show.
The Bangles were playing to a crowd that seemed to press forward like one organism: hairspray, leather jackets, eyeliner, college boys, girls with thrift-store boots, industry men trying to look casual near the bar. Susanna was still learning how to be looked at. She liked performing. She loved the music. But the gaze — that was different. The gaze could flatten you if you let it.
Halfway through the set, she saw him.
Not backstage. Not in some VIP corner.
Near the side of the stage, almost hidden in shadow, stood Prince.
Small, still, incandescent.
He was wearing purple, of course. Not because the world expected it yet, but because the world was slowly learning that some people did not wear colors. They possessed them.
Susanna missed half a lyric.
Vicki shot her a look: What?
Susanna gave the tiniest tilt of her head.
Vicki looked.
Vicki missed a chord.
After the show, he was gone.
Or seemed gone.
Then, in the narrow hallway behind the dressing room, there he was, leaning against the wall as if he had been painted there.
“You play like you’re all in one dream,” he said.
Debbi folded her arms. “Is that good?”
Prince smiled. “Depends on the dream.”
Susanna said, “You called me.”
“I did.”
“You hung up.”
“I do that.”
“That’s rude.”
“That’s mysterious.”
“No,” she said. “It’s rude.”
He looked at her for a long moment.
Then he laughed — delighted, sharp, almost boyish.
That was the beginning.
Not the public beginning. Not the version anyone could prove. The real beginning.
Prince began appearing where he should not have been. At rehearsal rooms. At clubs. Once, somehow, at the end of a hallway in a studio where The Bangles were working, holding two cups of coffee and offering one to Susanna without explanation.
“I don’t drink coffee at night,” she said.
“You do now.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Good,” he said, and drank both.
He was maddening. He was funny. He said things that sounded like riddles but sometimes turned out to be jokes. He could become suddenly shy, then suddenly imperial. He called her “Miss Hoffs” when he wanted to tease her and “Susanna” when he wanted to disarm her.
And she disarmed him too, though it took her time to notice.
Prince was used to fascination. He was used to people arranging themselves around his silence, waiting for it to become prophecy. Susanna did not do that. She listened, yes. She admired him, yes. How could she not? But she also interrupted him. She told him when a line was too clever. She made him explain himself. She refused to treat mystery as a substitute for kindness.
One night, he brought her to a studio in Los Angeles after midnight. The place smelled like tape, dust, warm circuitry, and someone’s abandoned takeout. A keyboard waited under a lamp. A guitar rested in a chair like a sleeping animal.
Prince handed her a cassette.
“What’s this?”
“A Monday.”
“A what?”
He reached past her, pressed play.
The room filled with that melody.
Fully dressed now. Completed. Strange and familiar. It had a little sway in it, a little ache, a little wink. It sounded like a woman trying to get to work while her mind was still in bed with a dream.
Susanna stood very still.
He watched her instead of the tape deck.
“You wrote this?”
“For you.”
Her eyes flicked to him.
He looked away first.
That was when she understood something important: Prince could perform arrogance like a virtuoso, but giving away a song made him nervous.
“You don’t even know my voice that well,” she said gently.
“I know enough.”
“And what do you think you know?”
He looked back at her.
“That you can sing bright without sounding happy.”
It was the most accurate thing anyone had said to her in months.
She took the cassette home.
The Bangles made the song their own.
That mattered.
Prince had expected, maybe, that they would sing over his version, step inside his architecture, live in rooms he had already furnished. Instead, they opened the windows. They brought in guitars, harmonies, California morning light. They made “Manic Monday” less like a Prince song handed to women and more like a Bangles song haunted by Prince.
When he heard their version, he said nothing for a long while.
Susanna waited, arms crossed, pretending not to care.
Finally he said, “You changed the walls.”
“Did we ruin it?”
“No.”
“Are you mad?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
He smiled.
“Now it’s yours.”
Their relationship became serious quietly, which was almost impossible given who he was.
There were no announcements. No red-carpet declarations. No magazine spread with them posed in coordinated glamour. It lived in fragments: Susanna asleep on a studio couch while Prince worked at three in the morning; Prince sitting cross-legged on the floor of her apartment, listening to old records; the two of them driving through Los Angeles in unnecessary silence because both of them liked the way the city looked when no one was asking them to explain themselves.
He sent flowers once.
She hated them.
Not the flowers, exactly — lilies, extravagant and ghostly — but the gesture. Too grand, too impersonal, too much like something a man sent when he wanted the world to know he could.
So the next time, he sent her one lemon.
No note.
She called him.
“A lemon?”
“You didn’t like the flowers.”
“So you sent fruit?”
“It has more personality.”
She laughed so hard she had to sit down.
After that, lemons appeared everywhere. On amplifiers. In coat pockets. Once, inside her guitar case before a show in Chicago. She opened it, found the lemon nestled against the strings, and had to turn away from the band because she was smiling too much.
But seriousness brought trouble.
Prince lived like music was a kingdom and he was its sleepless ruler. Susanna lived inside a band, and a band was not a kingdom. It was a democracy, a family, a pressure cooker, a four-headed creature with everyone’s feelings plugged into the same amp.
The bigger “Manic Monday” became, the more people wanted to make the story simple.
Prince wrote it because he wanted Susanna.
Prince made The Bangles.
Susanna got the song because Prince liked her eyes.
The gossip infuriated her.
One night after an interview, she came back to the hotel room where Prince was waiting, barefoot, with a guitar in his lap.
“You look ready to break something,” he said.
“They keep acting like we’re accessories in your story.”
His hand stilled on the strings.
“I didn’t say that.”
“No. But you don’t have to. Everyone else says it for you.”
He looked wounded, then defensive, then something more difficult.
“I gave you a song because I believed you could make it live.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. But belief from you becomes ownership in everyone else’s mouth.”
That landed.
For once, Prince had no immediate answer.
Susanna softened. She sat beside him.
“I love what you gave us,” she said. “But I need to know you love what we did with it.”
“I do.”
“Not because it reflects you.”
He looked at her then.
“Because it reflects you.”
The fight ended there, but not the problem.
That was the shape of their love: magnetism and collision. He wanted secrecy, control, intensity, devotion. She wanted tenderness, room, humor, and the right to remain herself. He could give all of those things, but rarely all at once.
When they were happy, they were absurdly happy.
They wrote little nonsense songs in the kitchen. He made her dance when she was annoyed. She taught him Bangles harmonies and corrected him when he got too fancy.
“No,” she’d say. “Blend.”
“I am blending.”
“You are soloing inside the blend.”
“That’s called excellence.”
“That’s called not blending.”
He would narrow his eyes.
Then blend perfectly.
And there was the famous night, the one that would become myth among those who were there: after a Bangles show in Los Angeles, Prince gathered the whole band into a rehearsal space. No photographers. No entourage worth remembering. Just instruments, bad lighting, and that post-show electricity where nobody wants to go home because ordinary life would feel like falling off a roof.
They played Bangles songs first.
Prince knew more of them than he admitted.
He shredded through one, then pulled back when Vicki raised an eyebrow. Debbi drove the room from the drums. Michael watched with half-amusement, half-wonder. Susanna sang until her voice went soft around the edges.
At two in the morning, Prince moved to piano.
At three, he and Susanna were singing something neither of them had written before.
A slow thing. Unfinished. Too private to record.
The room changed. Everyone felt it. The song was not about Monday or fame or desire as performance. It was about two people trying to meet somewhere neither could rule.
When it ended, nobody clapped.
Prince looked at Susanna.
Susanna looked back.
For a few seconds, all the mythology fell away. No purple empire. No MTV face. No gossip. Just two musicians recognizing the rarest thing: someone else had found the same hidden room.
Later, as dawn began bruising the sky, he vanished.
But this time he left a note.
Not a riddle. Not a symbol. Not a flourish.
Just:
Stay yourself. I’ll try to deserve it.
That note, Susanna kept.
Years would make the story complicated. They would separate and return, separate and return. They were too bright together to be easy, too proud to be simple, too devoted to music to ever belong entirely to each other. There would be arguments over songs, over absence, over the way Prince could disappear into work and expect love to wait like a parked car.
But in this version of the story, they chose each other more than once.
Not as a perfect couple. Perfect would have bored them both.
They became something rarer: a private chord running underneath two public lives.
Sometimes, after concerts, when the crowd was gone and the dressing room smelled of hairspray and sweat and roses, Susanna would find a lemon waiting somewhere impossible.
On a chair.
Inside a boot.
Balanced on a microphone stand.
And she would know: he had been there.
Sometimes Prince, alone in a studio long after midnight, would play the opening figure of “Manic Monday” and hear not the hit, not the chart position, not the industry miracle, but Susanna’s voice turning his melody into daylight.
He had given her a song.
She had given it a life.
And somewhere between the gift and the life, they had found each other — not in the clean way legends prefer, but in the shimmering, stubborn, inconvenient way real love arrives when two artists realize that admiration is easy, desire is dazzling, but being known is the dangerous part.
And Prince, who could disappear from almost anyone, found that Susanna Hoffs was one of the few people he wanted to come back to.
Not because she chased him.
Because she didn’t.
She simply kept singing.
And eventually, even Prince had to follow the sound.
