“Dear sleepycupid,” came the reply five long hours later from a nondescriptive Yahoo! email address to the nondescriptive Yahoo! email address he had opened for the purpose of the guest book and her email list, “Your elderly and curmudgeonly appreciation is warmly valued, far above the callow bleating. So, in your centuries of experience, what’s a girl to think of this?” This was a link to an essay on a blog outpost manned by some lonely kid who opined on politics and music and video games with jaded sophistication. Judging from the empty comment pages, he was blogging to no one: “Don’t have enough bland pop in your life? Wish you could hang with the super-cool and chitchat about the latest oversold media-ocrity? Then have I got a stupid Irish girl for you …”
She couldn’t really care about this. Could artistic flesh feel a sting even from this baby bee? She’d gone Google-trolling for this (no friend would have sent it to her), read it all the way to the bitter end, and was so unable to banish it from her mind that she was sharing it with him, to somehow dilute it. She’s looking for someone whose excess growths protect her excess weaknesses, he thought, and she’s testing if it’s me.
There were other dissenters, now and again, and she even let them onto her own site. Why didn’t she just ban, for example, doubtfulguest, who abused her openly in her own guest book? “Not without charms, I suppose, this kind of sound wallpaper, but honestly, why, Cait O’Dwyer—who I am sure runs this website for herself—why do you keep a page like this where people praise you? Don’t you feel stupid, vain, pathetic?”
A week later, “doubtfulguest is back because I heard from a friend how great your new song was—Bleaker— and I should listen right away and all my opinions would change. Well, I listened. Sad effort. You should just stop for a few years, if your ego can stand it, and listen to real music. Maybe you’ll grow.”
Julian, enraged by the dismissal of their song, as if taking the insult onto himself could somehow help her, replied to her numerical Yahoo! address: “You have no end of people telling you, I’m sure, ‘Ignore that guy! You’re great!’ but for some reason that doesn’t make you feel better: you can’t ignore him. All those other people are wrong: you shouldn’t ignore that guy, and he isn’t ‘wrong’ in any way that should make you feel better. For whatever reason, you need to hear some child in Topeka say you’re no good. So be it. Listen to that child, feel the burn of his insights, and then go back to what you were doing. If you want someone to find all the dissenting voices for you, I can do that. If you want them silenced, I’ll gladly crush whoever makes it difficult for you to be you. On the other hand, if you want a mix tape of people calling you incompetent, I can have one professionally engineered and piped through dedicated speakers hidden in your home, so that you shower and eat and shave your legs and fall asleep to disquieting abuse and then awaken to laughter and caitcalls.”
6
DESPITE THE MUTUAL DISCLOSURES, the illusion of second-date intimacy, even his role as muse for a song that was winning plaudits, he couldn’t meet her because he wasn’t her equal. Though he dreamt of her, she had no shortage of equally awe-crippled fans. And as a spinning fan, his appeal was near zero: a middle-aged fan is not a prize, any more than a three-year-old fan. The Rolling Stones—senior citizens—could hardly enthuse that a nation of toddlers now complained that they couldn’t get no satisfaction. She would get none herself from meeting him, at least not yet.
She was—as he had once intended to become—a machine: fuel in, art out. She required regular infusions of something rare: feelings she could process in whatever artistic blender she carried within her, to extrude as art. And, he thought with mounting excitement, if longing and anticipation were materials from which she could forge her music, then he could provide her something of value. He could feed her fire; she could sing about fire; he would understand his own fires in turn; she would see in him a man of alluring fire; a chain reaction might ignite, maybe not extinguishing for years, if he didn’t present her with a mere man too soon.
The too-bold eyes in the burka
I’m the one in the mask
The fencer, the cop behind one-way glass
Looking at you, looking at you.
This was cheating, like intentionally invoking the no-fail song just before a party, but still he poked his iPod until it spit out Cait’s “Burka,” set it on a loop, and with his camera he walked upper Court Street and Atlantic Avenue and Flatbush, past the storefronts of Arab Brooklyn, fragrant oils and Yemeni travel agencies, translators and notary publics and spice men. He tried to catch the eyes of the women walking hand in hand in veils and gowns. The purring notion that behind one black curtain was an Irish pop singer on her daily anonymous hunt for him: he knew this was cheating. He photographed the covered women from across roads and surprised one on a quiet side street where, in the heat and under the low leaves of a cherry tree, she had unwrapped her face to wipe her brow. He thought he was shooting only when the Arabesses looked away, but later, on his computer, they looked directly at him, and one’s eyes were a shocking green.
He photographed her building, the sidewalk dramas, the exiting customers of the tea shop. He framed her door from the Bangladeshi deli across the street. He captured one couple’s argument, another couple’s kiss; the accusing look of the stumbling pedestrian whose first instinct after recovering his balance was to spin and confront the malicious sidewalk; the homeless man threatening a ghostly assailant, his fists up like a nineteenth-century prize pugilist; the weekend athlete couple in full Tour de France regalia, his belly threatening to escape the black spandex, her post-prime buttocks shimmying under sea-blue stretch shorts, like a chart of seabed mountain ranges; and then Cait herself, stepping from her front door, her top and bottom halves far away from each other until Julian could turn the lens, reconstitute her, capture her going into and out of first a Pilates studio then a hipster hair-haus called Whimpering Bangs.
She left the salon walking very slowly, like a parading Lipizzaner, and when she sipped at her water bottle as she walked, she looked to the side, as if the refreshment brought to mind an episode better forgotten, and she seemed to Julian even then to be capable of uncommon depth and empathy. His photos of her, however, failed to catch any of that, and as dull image after dull image of a merely pretty girl holding a bottle of water lit up his computer, he spat insults at himself, groaned at the wasted opportunity, the beauty he had spoiled with his commerce-barnacled incompetence.
The next day he slid four tolerable shots into a manila envelope with her name on it and waited at the Bangladeshis’ for a sign. It arrived: silver cane, dark glasses. Julian asked the blind man to deliver the envelope to the owner of Tea Putz. Four shots: Cait stepping from her front door, stretching her arms over her head so that her Lay Brothers T-shirt crept slightly above the tropic of her navel; Cait chatting with the hot-dog vendor at the corner of Atlantic and Hicks, somehow able to draw a laugh from the mute, crooked-faced old Syrian with the leather skin and the mustacheless silver beard; Cait reading a rain-faded poster stuck to a streetlight, pleading for help finding a missing ancient, wandered off from his keepers in the nursing home; Cait, her back to the camera, descending into the mouth of the F-train station, while a stone-faced man ascends with, under each arm, limbless, busty silver mannequins. Julian waited for her dismissive reply or—and it was almost funny to him how unreasonably frightening this seemed—her silence.
7
HE PUSHED THE STORYBOARDS away and stretched, stroked for luck the balding spine of the photo album on his way to the desktop to replay the song and hear his father again: “‘Waterfront!’ ‘I Cover the Waterfront’!” He checked email: Alec Stamford, lurching, transmission-grinding between friendliness and self-promotion: “Pleasure 2 meet U at thGAller. Y. Hope U dug it. Got some good notices. Saw some famous faces. Full page profile in the Times coming soon I here. Nice. Glad 2B not dead yet :). lUnch SOmetime/? Or … I have some work for sale on the gallery site—link below. Or lunch? Discuss some work toget
her? Pay a call. Peace out. AS. Sent from my BlackBerry(r) wireless handheld.”
Far more personal was the letter from
[email protected]. A finger twitch, a new window, and she spoke to him (and some thousand others on her email list).
We’re back in the studio working with legendary producer Vince Shulman, but in the meantime, here’s a new tune we’re working up on the side. So, if you’re a fan, yawning or otherwise, click here to download something new. Don’t cheat, please. We can tell if you’re not a fan. We have terribly fancy computers here in our top-secret band headquarters, and if a non-fan tries to listen, it will melt your hard-drives and mount your ram. We’ll give you this one for free, and you can spot us a drink next time.
Julian clicked thekeysunderthemat.mp3, and like a nymph or a memory Cait streamed from a blinking server in an air-conditioned room in a humanless building on the Hudson through blue and silver cables to his apartment, and she swam into his iPod, docked and waiting, tethered, blinking its persistent warning: Wait. Wait. Do not disconnect. Do not disconnect.
8
JULIAN DRANK A COFFEE in the Bangladeshi deli and listened to his new download, “Key’s Under the Mat,” a voice and guitar rough mix, a little hurried, a little undercooked. That day in early June, he was one of the few people on earth who had heard it. He guessed it would be a hit; the song had that certain confidence about it, though it was far from his favorite of her work. Musically he judged it a little unoriginal, but lyrically it reached its intended audience of one:
A sword in a stone, a tablet on a mountain
A lonely piazza mermaid swooning in a fountain
Cartoon Boy, the key’s under the mat
So what do you think about that?
Her website’s guest book already sheltered a few eager comments: “Cait, I’ve had my fair share of ‘cartoon boys,’ so I totally get that song. Thank you!”
She left her building, noticeably without Lars, but his iPod insisted: “Show a little nerve, show a little insight / And don’t worry, baby, he don’t bite.” She hadn’t returned in a few minutes, so he paid for his coffee, but it took more than an hour before the building’s front door opened again, and he was able to cross the street while a spherical blond man in round wire-frame glasses and a T-shirt that read FINNISH GUYS LAST NICE held it ajar and read the sky for signs of rain, debated, debated (Julian crossing, trying to set his pace against the likely speed of the white door’s closure), debated, Julian now across the street (would it look more natural for a legitimate visitor to use the buzzer anyhow, or to jog the last few steps and grab the closing door?), Finnish endurance champ letting it go, turning up the street without even noticing Julian, whose hand leapt around the white door’s edge and cut itself against the tarnished brass lock fitting inside. If she wanted proof of his interest, there it was, written in his blood on her lock.
So vain, he really didn’t doubt the song said what he thought it said, even as she was making him imitate a crazed fan, even as, of course, he did hungrily want to see her home, her surroundings, her things, her frame, to find some hint there that would help him either have her or forget her.
He rubbed his skinless knuckles, passed the tea shop’s inside office door, and took the stairs as silently as he could, but his body—Sasquatch footsteps, asthmatic breath, artillery heart—rattled the building (as no real stalker’s body would, he told himself). The stairwell’s wallpaper was green and raised, a crushed velvet, stained with the ghosts of framed pictures and the bygone splatter of some murder or dessert. One apartment per floor, each landing was more brightly lit as he rose. He passed M&R, INC, a sign taped to a door in front of which a stroller and shoes of all sizes implied a less-than-corporate interior. On the third floor, a shadow moved behind the peephole. He heard the door open as he turned to the final flight. “Hello, Mrs. Harris,” he guessed aloud as he climbed to the fourth floor and savored an old lady’s hmph behind him.
And then he was there, in her vestry, on the landing under the brightness filtered by the dirty roof-access panel, her door marked only with a black metal 4 in a vaguely Celtic script. This annex was hers, a de facto private space, and though he would go no farther today, he had penetrated this far, she had drawn him this small step closer, and she had arranged her props to present new clues for him to weigh, catalog, and preserve: a unicycle leaning against the wall under a set of pegs off of which dangled gear required for either Great Dane care or a busy schedule in domination: a leather collar spiked on both sides and branded black with the words LARS MY LOVE, a braided leather leash as thick as a Russian coachman’s knout, and an institutional-sized dispenser box of latex gloves. Enough for now, time to leave. What sort of girl was this, what clues to her real heart were there in this song, practically begging him to become her freakish felon?
The shadow of a snout moved at the gap between floor and door, side to side, frenetic clicking claws and snuffling, a Great Danish border inspection, still undecided between hostility and welcome. A bold “Good boy, Lars!” produced an inquisitive sound and several moist exclamation points darkening the wood floor directly in front of the door’s gap. They pointed to the item of the moment: a doormat, which, when Cait was someday domesticated and fattened into someone’s red housewife, might bear a homey WELCOME or GOD BLESS THIS HOME or WIPE YER DAMN FEET but for now only boasted in sole-abrasive fake grass the practical MAT.
“Cartoon Boy, the key’s under the mat / So what do you think about that?” The references to King Arthur and Moses were quite to the point: if, in fact, there was a key under that mat, it was only meant for one male hand to lift, and Julian envisioned his skin melting against iron if he was not the chosen. He decided to leave. He knocked on the door, even though he’d seen her go, and he saw that there was something disordered in the action: knocking for someone who wasn’t there, as if a movie or time were running in reverse. Then he raised the mat, and there, in a recession in the center wood beam of the floor, lay a small silver key. He decided to leave it there and ask her out after her next gig. “Lars,” Julian said as the key slid into its lock, turned, and then renestled itself under the mat, “I’m told you don’t bite.” He would send her flowers with a note to call him. It was time to leave and go home. He pushed open her door.
He had badly underremembered the scale of the beast standing in wait. “Who’s a good boy?” he asked the pony, not at all sure of the answer. Lars sat before him as high as Julian’s chest. “Are you a good boy, Lars? I brought you a Bangladeshi dog-cookie.” Lars poked the intruder in the stomach with his square black face and was impressed by the resulting treat, allowed the burglar to scratch his chin, though he would prod him forcefully in the groin to regain his distractible attention.
Julian stood swaying in her living room, horrified for her that some maniac could do this, too, and he wondered if he should somehow warn her. To the right were two windows looking down over Henry Street, the lacy tops of green trees fringing her sill. He had seen those windows from below the day he approached her building but backed away. Across the room, a computer was on, and stacks of CDs on the floor skylined the front of a sway-bellied couch next to a flea market sailor’s chest with candlesticks and, high on a non-WFP mantel out of Great Dane range, sat a plastic bowl of graying M&M’s. The room’s entire left wall, from floor to ceiling, was a single mirror reflecting the whole space, the windows and computer and CDs and Cait herself. Cait herself. Cait hers—
No, not a mirror but a painting of a mirror, complete with the mirror’s frame, and only a few inaccuracies: the painted trees at the windows were white with last month’s blossoms; the painted table was bare; the computer was off in the painting, but in the room an out-of-date (too angularly pixellated) version of the Windows logo roamed the black screen in restless sleep; and Cait herself, her hand on Lars’s head, stood leaning against the wall between the two windows, where Julian now stood, patting Lars and considering her reflection of him.
She was not on the street belo
w. He was giddy, as unsure of himself as a sixteen-year-old boy, astonished by fortune and possibilities that he couldn’t clearly imagine but that promised life-shifting tectonics. He also wondered why she wanted him to do this, what test was here, what details she had thought relevant. He walked to the computer, Lars matching his gait, starting and stopping with him, as if the dog were leading him or mocking him. Julian pressed the space bar with his thumb, rolled it side to side to leave as clear a print as possible, should she care to dust for him. The screen came to life with programs running, Windows open to let in a bracing breeze: her iTunes library, paused midsong, thirty-one seconds into something called “Love Theme from Dog Park.” The Play button produced her, singing that Smiths song with a few dogs in the background. When they barked, Lars whined at Julian’s feet, and he imagined her foreseeing his every step and discovery and so drugging the animal to allow him a leisurely inspection of her home. The music was strangely haunting in the previous silence. It animated the objects in the room, the photographs and desktop sculptures of Irish saints and Incan fertility goddesses, the pink-and-green Play-Doh bestiary. He turned off the song.
He expanded her email. She had been writing a message, still un-addressed and unsent: “I wanted to know the minute you took the plunge,” she had begun to the unnamed recipient. “You’ve waited so long, so did you find what you were looking for? Don’t think—just answer.” He added his business website to her Internet Favorites, labeled it Remarkable Fellow, set it ahead of the Irish Times and the hourly updated European soccer standings and the site for Glentoran in the Irish Premier League, a link opening directly to the bio, statistics, and uncanny photo of midfielder Septimus O’Dwyer.