The Song is You (2009)

  “Seriously, I want you to listen to me, Cannonball. It’s important.”

  “In a minute.”

  But Cait had given him the hotel list—”April in Paris”—in exchange for the loss, had written a new chapter for them as fast as the old one had erased itself. He turned the TV back on for Aidan, walked to his bedroom, and went online. The hotels matched cities of her European conquest, in order, and he booked flights and reserved rooms in her hotels, even in the city where he and Rachel had honeymooned. Fickle Paris’s allegiances wavered.

  “I’m going to Europe for a few weeks,” he said, returning to Aidan and a glass of wine.

  “For the deception industry or for a new Boleyn? Never mind: same thing.”

  “Funny.”

  “Listen, really. I think that’s a mistake. Really. The world, life, sometimes—”

  Julian interrupted. “What was it about quicker heart surgeries that would lead to incivility?”

  Aidan laughed triumphantly, fell for the diversion. “Ha! I was getting scared you’d never ask. Well, think about it for a minute.” He sniffed his wine with the force of a Hoover factory and sighed. “When you go into the hospital for a risky surgery, you have to face the Big Nothing. They crack you open, and you can read the writing on the walls of your arteries. A slow recovery, big scar up your chest, short of breath, no energy—you can’t help but think. You’re warmed up by death’s proximity, softened up. You rewrite your will, amend for your mistakes. You call your kids to gather round, you tell people the important stuff, you appreciate the very little things, like urinating. But now—pfff. No risk, no fuss, one afternoon, in and out, and your heart condition is all better, and back you scurry to play golf and yell at the valet and expect your children to apologize first. Total up all the love produced by invasive surgery and subtract all the love prevented by speedy laser surgeries. That’s love lost. Now, seriously. Humor me. I’m a little slow. What’s in Europe?”

  14

  JULIAN PACKED to Cait on the speakers, as loud as the demo could roar without buzzing into pieces.

  Rachel rang the bell downstairs, warned by a flustered Aidan (whom she’d had to calm down) that today was Julian’s departure for a long date, but Julian didn’t hear the bell, even as Rachel (and everyone else on the street) could hear “Coward, Coward” and the old bassist puffing against the window glass like an asthmatic giant blowing out his birthday candles. She called his cell, but he didn’t hear that either, and he didn’t hear her voice mail until he was in a taxi to JFK:

  “J, can you hear this?” She must have held her phone up and pointed it at his noise, because while Julian’s cab crawled into Queens, on the voice mail Cait now sang “Coward, Coward” through that thin speaker until Rachel’s voice took the lead again and Cait was demoted to backup vocals. “You’re like a teenager, J! Listen to you, rocking out. Well, I stopped by to wish you bon voyage. Aidan told me you have a business trip to Paris and points beyond. Say hi to all our favorite places for me, okay? Have a great trip. I’ll be thinking of you over there. Remember that park with the man completely covered in pigeons? Definitely send him my best.” She paused and the distant, crackling song continued in the interval, like slightly musical traffic noises, or as if Rachel were at a club, like a call from his parents to say good night, sweet dreams: “Okay, get to bed now, Jules. And mind your brother.” “But wait, Dad, is the band cooking tonight?” “It is, little man, it is.” Rachel went on: “Speaking of Paris, did you ever get my postcard? That little couple just spoke to me. They reminded me of—I don’t know—not us, exactly, of course, but, maybe us if we’d been French? And old? And different? See you, J. Have a wonderful trip.”

  He listened to the voice mail eight times on the way to JFK. He’d lost another piece of his story with Cait, again to Rachel, even as Cait sang in the background. Even as he packed to her voice, for their beginning, Rachel was saying, No, not so fast.

  He tried to make himself dizzy from the possibilities of Cait again, to reignite that chain of fantasies—happiness, sex, marriage, children. He inhaled deeply in the neutral space of the airport, a hundred gates to a hundred fates, leaving Carlton and Rachel outside. He deleted the voice mail and put Cait on the iPod; she would be the soundtrack to this crucial day. He yielded her to security but left her on as she passed through the X-ray machine and reattached her before he put his shoes back on. He’d flown out of this terminal with Rachel on their honeymoon, but it had been remodeled since then, so he could march bravely on and know he would startle no ghosts in the food court, at the gate. In the men’s room, he hopped vainly, trying to flush the motion-detecting toilet, then flapped his soapy hands up and down under the tap, able to coax only a drop or two of water at a time from the motion-detecting sink.

  He sailed on the terminal’s long conveyor belts, past a lounge where a businessman shrieked obscenities at a video game. At the end of the moving sidewalk, two little boys ran in place against the direction of the tread. The gap closed, their exertions and Julian’s stillness drawing the three of them together until the older boy signaled his little brother, and they stepped to opposite sides of the infinite path, still jogging against the tide, and Julian passed between them under a herald’s voice, “The sidewalk is coming to an end. Please step cautiously.”

  Unable to sit still—off-balance from the loss of the postcard and the scenes he’d constructed around it, composing the latest revision of their love story, hungry to see Cait’s face but worried he would meet her in the wrong atmosphere—oh, yes, hi, well, this is the band, and this is Julian, my, well, he draws coasters— he examined a boutique of useless gifts, mannequins with alert nipples under Statue of Liberty T-shirts. He turned away, back to the huge window overlooking the tarmac. A distant plane swallowed a more distant plane, passed it out its rear, and then Cait O’Dwyer and her band were standing at his departure gate.

  Nervous indignities assaulted him—palms and gut and mouth—as if he were now forced to feel the aggregate anxiety he’d been spared for every girl and woman he’d ever spoken to since he was fourteen years old. He had always assumed his natural resistance to these symptoms lay in a moral fitness that others lacked, but now he melted into the boutique to acquire a Yankees cap, housefly sunglasses, and a hooded NEW YORK LOVES LOVERS sweatshirt, then skulked behind the aroused mannequins, watching her and her band’s progress from counter to padded chairs—as unlike a remarkable fellow as it was possible to become—and he considered going home.

  First class was called, and she didn’t enter, so Julian remained hooded amidst chocolate and toy Checker cabs, squeezing his damp and wrinkled first-class ticket.

  Hers was one of the last rows to board, and when he’d given her sufficient time to find her way down the tunnel to Ireland, he emerged from his post, as an amplified voice began to call the names of tardy passengers, his first, and he proceeded, head down. The pilot, fiddling with knobs behind his folding door, was younger than Julian by nearly a whole grown-up.

  He slumped, neighborless, by the window. A ladybug had managed to wedge itself between the two plastic panes. As rain began to fall, it opened its cherry-red body and beat its wings and searched the oval perimeter for a path out of this darkening mess, the raindrops pounding like explosions.

  Just before the attendant closed the front door a young black man entered, breathless and covering his mouth. He lowered himself into the last empty seat, at Julian’s right. He was fashionably scruffy but still suitable for first-class upgrade, an actor perhaps, but his cool was belied by how desperately he ordered a glass of water before he’d even sat down, requested it again a few minutes later, while around him other first classers sipped mimosas from plastic, and he began fidgeting with a tube of precautionary, dissolving anticold vitamins, “specially designed for the frequent flyer.” Unable to risk imminent infection while the stewardess dallied with his water, he gave up and placed one of the pale green disks directly into his mouth, where it began to sizzle. He
mumbled a “Thanks much” for the cup that came a few seconds later, and pale green bubbles foamed at the corners of his lips.

  The plane taxied, and a bird flew alongside, mocking the stiff metal giant. The ladybug suddenly stopped moving as the first-class cabin left the ground, still weighted down by coach, and the panicked raindrops leapt clear of the plane, and the ladybug, resigned and contemplative, faded from red to green. With a deft manipulation of his magic stick, the pilot turned everything on earth into toys, then drew a blanket of gray across his work, and Julian leaned back, closing his eyes, waiting for the butt stuttering of failing engines.

  “You want one?” His neighbor offered him dissolving immunity. “Sure? You’re in a petri dish, even in first.” Julian declined, and the younger man turned his chair into a bed. Julian considered how he would save his iPod in the unlikely event of a water landing.

  The pilot offered the passengers the romance of a banking turn, spreading the yellow-orange light across the cabin, from first class to coach. She was back there, and the change of light promised further change to come, over there. The ladybug turned light gray.

  Julian opened the mystery novel he’d bought for camouflage at the airport boutique. Bhunji Zsemko, Mongolian-Montenegrin detective, found himself in Paris, infiltrating the Grand Mosque in search of Frinz Tishpa, the kidnapped daughter of an Albanian mafia bigwig. (The writer, Homer Weindark, had spun his reluctant dyslexic gumshoe into thirteen novels so far, each set in a European capital, exploiting the American readership’s weakness for a platz, an arrondissement, a corrida.) Zsemko reached for his gun but too late. The blow caught him behind the ear, and he fell against the gold-veined Philip-Augustus bidet, Weindark always expert in both European luxury and underworld terminology, Black Bitch heroin ideally weighed out at a leaded cinquecento window opening onto the Grand Canal.

  A dim purple light still clung to the sky, the last hint of yesterday, as they flew over storms beneath which the Atlantic prowled. Cait was mere rows behind him. That thought was warming now, cozy, and Julian looked up from his book in time to see a transparent shell the shape of a ladybug vaporize. Far below, another winking plane slit a diagonal wake in the sea of clouds, a shark’s fin off in the immeasurable, dreamy distance.

  “Coffee?” said a lilting Irish accent, and Julian watched the black window’s reflection to be sure it was a stewardess.

  “Please,” said Julian’s neighbor.

  “How do you take it?” she duly recited.

  “The color of my skin,” the black man said with a smile, posing, and the flight attendant enjoyed herself for the first time that evening. She added a few drops of milk, examined her model’s face, dripped a tad more, swirled, scrutinized her handiwork. “Enjoy,” she purred.

  “You’ve used that one before,” said Julian, and his seatmate smiled with the jaguar’s sexual calm Julian used to feel. “I’d steal it, but I’d end up drinking a lot of milk.”

  The lights went out after dinner, and below the plane, below the Debussy moon and stars hurried onstage for this abridged night, a dozen hollow silver pillars of cloud lit up like pinball bumpers, burned blue and gold for alternating instants, and Julian felt he could put his hand right through them. “You are hardly here. I can put my hand right through you.” Rachel’s words in their terminal weeks, only important in retrospect, in seat 1A on a night flight to Dublin chasing a fantasy, but back then just one of many things she said. “Removed from any risk at all. I watch you, you know, deciding, ‘I’ll never make this mistake. I’ll never make that mistake. I’ll never look stupid this way. I’ll never give offense like that or go too far like him or hurt anyone’s feelings or make myself or anyone else ridiculous. You can’t take that seriously or this, that’s just people.’ But don’t you remember what you were before? You existed before you removed yourself from everything. I remember you before. I do.” How certain Rachel had been, and how willing he was to believe her: this, then, was the essential problem, not Carlton’s death or her behavior. The problem was that he was in some sense removed from life and risk, so blanketed in politeness or fear that he was making it impossible for her to be happy. He may even have vowed to change this about himself, he couldn’t remember now. Later, in a pendular swing of indecision, she retracted every word, expunged the intricate indictment from her permanent transcript of him. But now he vowed again to change. He would take everything seriously, commit himself, throw himself into life, starting with Cait.

  1B murmured, “In France it’s allowed, in France,” then awoke with a spastic, electrified kick. He levered himself up and out of his conch shell. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened one slightly at his watch, swore and produced his tube of vitamins. He rang the call button, yellow schematic of a stewardess producing a living one.

  “You woke up for your vitamin?” Julian asked as the man gulped his boiling green potion from a plastic cup, like a witch at a child’s birthday party.

  “How old are you?” 1B asked in reply. “Really? I would have said older. Either way, you’re in the zone for spinal stenosis and your first jumps of cholesterol. You cleared the first testicular cancer window, but another one’s still coming. You’re almost free and clear for MS, but pay close attention to any tingling in your extremities for a couple more years. You got to keep dodging bullets. But one of them will find you.” He switched off his light and re-reclined, fell asleep with such speed that Julian thought of his father’s story of the Japanese sleepers.

  Julian would have told Carlton the same fairy tale, an heirloom by then. Carlton at six or seven would have liked it. Julian had liked it, hurried up to bed for the improvised fantasias, his father’s profile against the gray window, still some light behind him in summertime, the smell of liniments and beer, an inflatable brontosaurus on Julian’s dresser, and then a chapter of a favorite story, the endless stories his father just breathed: the good and bad kings of the chickens, the war for boys’ hearts, the abcoyotes of Defghijklistan, and the long serial about the sleepers of Japan, who sent Julian off to sleep every motherless night for more than a year.

  In a secluded town nestled up against the Fugu Mountains, a peculiar history had led to an acquired condition, and then natural selection had cemented it into a population’s genetic code: the people of this village all slept for thirty seconds every ninety seconds, day and night, to the second. Individuals varied: everyone slept and woke according to his own unchangeable schedule, and so a perfect match was rare. But if a young man met a young woman who fell asleep when he did, they could spend far more time together—”three quarters of their life, better than we do here,” Julian’s father said, only some months after his wife’s death—and he would always wish to marry her. And yet parents always forbade such engagements: if the couple slept together, who would care for the children, likely to sleep on a different schedule? Who would protect them from bears?

  “No, never, never,” grumbled one girl’s father to her suitor, come to ask for his blessing. The father twirled his long gray beard between his fingers and fell asleep just as his old wife awoke beside him. “What did my husband say to your proposal, child?” she asked.

  The young suitor, Toshiro, was heartbroken and could not resist the dishonorable opportunity life had presented him. He replied, “Mrs. Yakamoto, your husband sees how much I love your daughter, how good a husband I will make. He has given his blessing.” Mrs. Yakamoto smiled and whisked the tea for a celebratory cup.

  Soon, Mr. Yakamoto snapped awake, refreshed, to see tea being poured. Toshiro, his eyelids fluttering, said, “Esteemed he-elder, your wife is happy for us, and has blessed our union. She wishes you to be happy for us as well.” And he fell asleep.

  He awoke to Mr. Yakamoto, his wife asleep. “Boy you have forsaken your honor. Never will you wed our daughter, and I shall tell all the elders of your wickedness. Leave at once,” he said in a low voice, and fell fast asleep. Toshiro rose, bowed to the sleeping man, and walked out of the house. In the garden, h
e looked up to the second-story window where, behind the lace curtains, he saw his beloved, her eyelids beginning to droop, and he sat down on the stone path and fell asleep.

  “Will he find a way to marry her?” Julian had asked his father, and later imagined Carlton asking him.

  “There’s no reason to think so,” his father replied, for Julian’s own good. Julian had always intended to answer Carlton just so, with the same tone of weary wisdom. “More tomorrow, little man. You’ve had a busy day.”

  In later episodes, banished Toshiro made his way out of the hamlet (haltingly) and wandered the Japanese countryside, being wickedly abused by the regular-sleeping people of the rest of Japan. He was beaten, robbed, stripped naked, tied to trees and covered with honey; he woke to endless predicaments he needed to escape in ninety seconds. Julian’s father was willing to torture his creation, to use him to prove life’s enduring and unquestionable awfulness—that was Aidan’s view of the matter. “He used to tell you this when you were a motherless child” Aidan later marveled. “Not a nice man.”

  The exiled lover was taken in by a monk in a conical hat and blue rabbit-fur slippers, who taught him the secrets of his order, which allowed Toshiro to shift and consolidate his sleep until, after years of study, he was able to sleep like a normal Japanese. When, for the first time, he slept for eight hours and worked the monk’s fields for sixteen, the monk told him he must leave, there was nothing more for him to learn. “But I have at last forgotten my sorrow,” protested Toshiro. “That is always the time happiness must end,” said the monk. “But master, I am happy here,” Toshiro insisted. “No, you have only learned to hide your unhappiness and form dreams from it instead.”