The Song is You (2009)

  The slightly open door to the right of the painting invited him into her bedroom. He stopped and considered whether she wanted him to do this and what sort of pledge level between friend and patron she was creating for him, and he walked through.

  She lived in a one-bedroom, like so many people. How strange the silence (except for the manual typewriter of Lars’s nails on the pine floor), how odd that here, of all the planet, music was not flowing into him, cooking up longing or regret or possibility. Her bed demanded most of the small room. Even pressed against the wall under the one window, it barely allowed for a dresser and the closet door’s swinging requirements. Posters: Leonard Cohen as a young man, the iconic images of James Joyce (bespectacled, mustached, fedora’d) and Samuel Beckett (carved tree-bark skin between black turtleneck and thorny crown of silver hair). Dresser-top doodads: a tiny Irish flag claiming dominion over a pot of African violet, a diptych frame next to a Diptyque scented candle, three-quarters used. It was the same brand and fragrance Julian’s mother used to have sent from Paris, the smell of when he was five years old. Here, of all the places in the universe, smelled of his own childhood, of the first woman he had ever loved, as if Cait had wanted him to discover her while he was fully aware of every stage of his life before her, to contradict his cautious male impulse to hide pieces of himself. He lifted the candle to his nose and in his mother’s favorite fig scent any thought of tactics fell away.

  In the diptych frame: Cait’s parents or grandparents, infinitely far from each other in their respective gold-painted rectangles. He looked for her in their faces but could tease out no resemblance, took that as further evidence of her self-invention. A cut-glass candy dish heaped with chains and rings and a dozen cartoons—pen and ink on coaster—illustrating her step-by-step development into a goddess of song. A crucifix on a chain hanging from a dresser-drawer knob, and everywhere candles: heights and girths planted on every surface, fresh and melted, pillars and tapers, spears and spirals, on the dresser, the sill, the floor. The bed was unmade, two pillows, but only one indented. The other was perpendicular to the first, set lengthwise along the bed’s middle; she had held it to her while she slept alone. And so he placed it beside hers and made in it the impression of another head while Lars tilted his own.

  The fig candle predominated, but beneath it drifted subordinate scents: the smell of high-story spring, the trees above traffic. There was another, though, something else, stronger in her closet, hiding in the hanging dresses and blouses, stronger still in the foaming dresser drawers.

  A ringing froze Julian in place, bent over. “I’m listening,” Cait said, as if awaiting an implausible explanation. “Cait! Alec! I’m in the ‘hood. Right outside, actually, thought I’d see if you were about. Call when you get a minute. Something pretty groovy just came up, might float your boat. Peace out, girlfriend.”

  Down on the sidewalk, beyond the greenery, peeked at from a flattened-spy wall embrace, Alec Stamford—pest, rival, or cautionary symbol—was pocketing his phone and walking into the Bangladeshi deli. As his foreshortened form vanished, Julian, shoved prematurely out of his hyperaware walking-dream ecstasy and back into the mortal world of qualms, ramifications, and appearances, suddenly hearing the window for his safe departure beginning to scrape shut, looked up and saw, straight across the tops of the trees, a little girl watching him from the highest apartment above the Bangladeshis’. She wore a black baseball cap with a white x on it and a red T-shirt with the top half of Che Guevara’s face, below which she turned into red brick. She waved at Julian as if they were old friends up here, or as if she often waved to the person at this window. He waved back, a little uneasy, his powers of invisibility flickering in and out of control.

  He waited out Stamford from the tea shop’s shadows, wiping his brow, browsing the cosies, cozying up to the owner, owning up to a lifelong fascination with Irish teas, teasing the blazing blazer pocket full of furious lace he’d borrowed as a souvenir. When Stamford finally abandoned his post, not two minutes before Cait turned the corner to fetch her dog for a walk and old Mrs. Harris told her she’d had a visitor, Julian left Tea Putz with five boxes of Irish breakfast. The building behind him, Lars mute at the door, the magic key’s glow seeping around the edges of dour Mat, Julian sat exhausted and damp, as after vigorous exercise, on the Promenade and stared at the jigsaw puzzle of Manhattan across the river. Cait was still in his nose, barely. He struggled to retain her smells and to comb out his knotted feelings: beauty implies genetic suitability implies wise evolutionary choices, he thought, a little desperately. Beauty imparts status on the male who possesses it; what more need be said of shampoo models? But he wasn’t convinced those old ideas applied here. The comparison that next struck him in his enervated state, that made undeniable tingling sense, was not biological: he had risen high, to an altar in the sky, accompanied by an animal incarnation, and there he’d been granted a glimpse into the mysterious cult of a unique goddess. He’d been surrounded by her incense and icons and hymns, none of which had much to do with the televised, explicable apes and CGI dinosaurs that had for so long soothed his despair and buttressed his crumbling apathies.

  This was how life could feel now, again or for the first time. Some part of him insisted upon it: he’d been pardoned up there, readmitted to a world from which he’d been brutally exiled. When he’d blithely lived in that world, he’d been too young to know what life could do to you. Now he’d been given the chance to start again, wiser but not paralyzed by wisdom or pain. Now he desired, deeply, and therefore deserved another chance.

  He tapped at his iPod, feeling within a note or two whether each random offering could provide what he was craving. Funk, punk, mope, pop, bop, hip-hop, swing, cool, acid, house, Madchester, Seattle, Belleville, New Orleans, Minneapolis white, Minneapolis black, Ivory Coast, Blue Note groove, neo-baroque soundtrack, jam band, impressionism, hard-core, cowboy crooner, rai, gypsy, tango, foxtrot, skip, skip, skip, his temper rising, and then he felt it, just the opening chords, before he could have identified the musician or said that this was what he needed. He stopped punching his iPod’s face, and he leaned back on the bench and wondered, marveled, felt the world slowly reopening to him.

  I touched you at the soundcheck …

  In my heart I begged, “Take me with you.”

  —the Smiths, “Paint a Vulgar Picture”

  1

  A SINGLE PAGE on Julian’s pillow—nice calligraphy, pulpy artisanal paper:

  Your arms did not that way embrace, I recall your eyes a color somewhat clearer. Can Eros be bound to terms eternal When lovers find new pleasures dearer?

  If I were to plead lost passion, What court would judge me now disloyal? Fidelity’s hardly more than fashion, But you still cherish love’s dull toil.

  The scribblings of scholars are kindling in winter, The daubings of masters, pawned to buy wine. A season of folly was all that I needed: Where is the love that once I called mine?

  —William Caldwell, 1924

  He sniffed the page: traces of her, maybe. Cait had discovered his home and the mountain-range profile of his key, was looking for clues about him, too. And what had she concluded? He struggled to understand why she picked this poem: She feared that she would mistreat him? Was warning him of the regret he would suffer if he mistreated her? The forced interpretations trickled away, and he clung instead to the excitement: she’d been in his room, sniffed his life, touched his bed.

  His and Rachel’s bed. “It matters,” Rachel had said the day she moved in, turning her back on his previous bed. She jerked her thumb at it, behind her. “That one goes and takes all its moaning memories with it,” she declared. “Today, fiance, today.” They went shopping that same afternoon. He was eager to comply, certain this action would capture and imprison his elusive monogamy. He had—he recalled now as he traced his finger across Cait’s handwriting of the puzzling poem—loved the idea of bed shopping with his last woman, his death-do-us-part woman, his only woman. They
bounced across a department store of mattresses and springy boxes, sank into Swedish foam, stared up together hand in hand through starry canopies, rode carved sleighs through Russian snows, settled at last on her first choice.

  And now Cait O’Dwyer had touched his marriage-bed-become-separe’s-bed. His merely useful piece of furniture now slightly vibrated again, flickered awake like a dubious fluorescent lightbulb. The time had come to call her, to proceed somewhere. And the rest of his world stuttered with that same hesitant light. He felt her circling him, though he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t imagining it. The new front-desk Ukrainian guarding the lobby of Julian’s office building twice reported, “A lady come to see you, Mr. Donahue.” “Message?” “No.” “Foreign?” “Difficult to say,” since anyone whose name did not end in k was foreign. “Red hair? Angelic face? Aura of demonic power?” Julian didn’t ask, preferring not to hear Mr. Polchuk’s confirmation or denial. His mailbox was open when he’d left it closed, his closet was closed when he’d left it open, and his jacket pocket flaps were flipped back though he was always obsessive about folding them down, and her scent would appear faintly, out of nowhere, like a crippled ghost.

  He could just call. He certainly wanted her. He could even believe that he was physically capable, since her voice on a CD was more potent than any prescription at rousing him from his old torpor. But with each day that he didn’t just call her, he could hardly understand his resistance to the obvious next step. Scared of rejection, like some teenager? There was no point, as with Maile, no ending worth the trouble? No, and no. And still he did not call. It was embarrassing, the combination of immobility and ignorance of its cause.

  He listened to “Burka,” applied it to their unique case, although the song dated from before their dance had begun:

  That’s me in the burka,

  That’s me at Le Cirque,

  That’s me in your rearview,

  And me breathing on your bathroom mirror.

  That’s me in the burka,

  And yeah that photo’s of me circa

  Fall, 2001,

  Back in that heady season of fear.

  You’re not the only one who’s starting to feel a bit queer.

  In September 2001 she would have been fourteen and living in Ireland, but still he could imagine a photo that showed her appropriate response to the season.

  When he decided he was being watched, the evidence could be gaudy: after a drink or two, her gaze caromed off windows and puddles. She filled gaps in his life like tar in a sidewalk. He imagined they shared the same space, just never at the same time, and he loved it. She left her tumbler of melting ice behind her, next to his bottle of Scotch, left his DVD paused at the moment the narrator says of a certain lizard, “In ten million years, perhaps humans will be just the same: self-sustaining without any males at all.”

  If he wasn’t telling himself all this to feel less cowardly, she was stepping only slowly closer, not yet ready to meet, and revealing in her diagonal approach a paradoxical but irresistible need for both closeness and delay as strong and persistent as Julian’s own.

  He could explain her hesitation, if not his. It was her fearful need for artistic inspiration, he knew. She was superstitious, he had quickly read, and she had reason to worry that her luck might not hold forever. Alec Stamford was walking proof. Cait’s Irish granny’s wailing banshees no longer haunted her, but that sort of belief still prevailed in her. Her stardom was new and fragile, her artistry still crystallizing, and Julian had provoked a song and had given advice that she kept in her candy dish. She likely felt she needed to do whatever was necessary to keep her lucky charm around, at least for now.

  Being her muse was plenty, for now, but it wouldn’t last forever, he warned himself. Picasso’s muses were discarded with yesterday’s dried paint, and the next one was waiting right there, stepping over her predecessor’s crumpled form. The fuel the artist needed could not be perpetually drilled from a single human. The longer Julian could last without meeting her, the longer he would serve her needs, and she his. But he would have to leap, eventually.

  All probably true, but also, he could hear his father’s voice, “cowardly and self-pitying.”

  “How’d you tell her?” Julian was perhaps fourteen when he asked his father how he had broken it to the French girl he’d met at the Billie Holiday concert that he was no longer the man he used to be, might not even be the sort of man she’d want anymore. “How’d you tell her? It must have—you must have worried you were, you know…”

  “Too one-legged for her? Yeah, that did occur to me.”

  “And so you called? Or wrote? Or just turned up in Paris?”

  “No, no, no. I was far too self-pitying for any of that. Much smarter plan: I just decided never to talk to her again, to slink back to Ohio—oh, for her own good, you see, very noble of me, nobility and self-sacrifice always a convenient self-delusion, of course—slink back to Ohio to maybe bravely kill myself or at least start drinking like a street wino.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because there was nothing I could do or say or write or ask her that would be fair to ask of anyone, no way to release her without making her feel guilty, nothing to offer her in exchange for not being one of those fellows with the standard number of legs. And I was a coward. Afraid she’d say no and afraid she’d say yes but I’d never know if she did it out of pity.”

  “And?”

  “And your mother came to the hospital in San Diego on her own, walked in like we’d never missed a day, like we’d written, like I’d thanked her for the record, like she knew it all already. Which she usually did, your mother. But that’s the French for you.”

  And so, like his father whimpering in a hospital bed, Julian didn’t call, didn’t do anything but listen to Cait’s demo, schemed how he could inspire her from a distance, waited for her to walk in with all the answers, all the future.

  2

  THE LYRICS TO “Key’s Under the Mat” had come to Cait in pieces. The phrase about the mermaid swooning in the fountain was first, and though swooning had recently swum back up to the skimmable surface of her vocabulary courtesy of the swooning ghouls of the coasters, she wasn’t thinking of her sleepy Cupid, not consciously, not yet. The lyric arrived in pieces over several days, words and images and rhymes, and only very close to the end did she realize what she’d produced: an invitation to someone to break into her apartment (though it wasn’t yet addressed to anyone in particular). It was a lunatic document, and she nearly threw it away.

  Then she changed her mind, decided simply to remove the more identifying details, but then she stopped again and called herself a coward. If this was what she’d been given, then she refused to allow fear to censor her, to spoil a gift like this. The hidden source that gave her these gifts was daring her to put something real on the line. She would sing it, as soon as Ian crafted the right setting for it.

  And she would address it. The last two words that she wrote of the lyric were “Cartoon Boy.” The rhythm was nice, the hard c felt good at the start of a line, produced a sort of sneer and snarl to it, the sound of a challenge. Those last two words came to her late at night, walking home from the telethon, and it was obvious. He deserved a song like that. He’d certainly amused her enough to earn it, and he might even notice it. That’s the element that most appealed: the idea of him noticing in detail what she had made in detail.

  He never responded, though, a week after she posted the rough take, two weeks, three: not an email, not a coaster or a report that he’d turned up at a gig, though she’d lately taken to asking bartenders to flag her if a guy answering Mick’s description of Coaster Man turned up, in the back all by himself. She had lost him somewhere, revealed something somehow repellent to him, after he’d taken those lovely photos. Pity He filled a niche, to say the least. She missed his attention, more than she liked to admit, missed his criticism and his ear and his eyes on her, sometimes sang imagining he was watching her, unseen.


  3

  “WHO WAS SHE TALKING ABOUT in that Times suck-up? The one who’s a remarkable adviser?”

  “I thought it was you,” said New Bass, Cait having executed, like a grumpy Tudor, his predecessor, posthumously redubbed First Bass.

  “It’s the guy with those cartoons,” Drums murmured, his speech very slow, and no one, as was very often the case when he was high, totally understood what he was talking about. “Ask Mick. He showed me these coasters.” He paused, then said very methodically, “Say to him, to Mick, I mean, say, ‘Drums told me to tell you to tell me about the cartoons you told Drums about that one time, because I want to know, and Drums couldn’t provide me with that information, and so you can see my predicament, with Drums … not being … a totally reliable source of… ‘” Drums fell back as if his death sentence had just been commuted.

  Ian nodded, as if paying no attention, a man already forgetting what he had asked only in polite passing. But he stopped in, alone, at the Rat that same night, a Wednesday, and again on Thursday, late, but Mick wasn’t working the bar either night. Cait then had two nights for them in Jersey (during which he’d first noticed the phrase “Cartoon Boy” in the lyric for “Key” and became truly pissed off), and the Rat didn’t cater to Sunday drinkers, so he couldn’t try again until Monday, and then it was only to discover that, the Saturday before, when Ian was playing that frat party at Rutgers, Mick had quit the Rat to show more commitment to the Lay Brothers. Ian couldn’t conceivably pass off as accidental a visit to Mick’s apartment, and so his interest in “the guy with those cartoons” faded by necessity, until two weeks later when Cait came over to work.