And with a bang, the blue-faced artist, his eyes wet, was reaching forward and down to grab Julian’s head by the cheeks. “I have been trying so hard to warn you,” he said. Julian stumbled backward, but Stamford had him by the back of the head, and he fell at the painter’s feet. “Oh. All right then. Thank you,” Stamford whimpered, wiping his face. “I am just—am just really—just glad to know that’s all you were. Ugly music, my lad. Just a grubby little, a dirty old fan. I had higher hopes for you.” He ground the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Cait would say about you, ‘Just some fan.’ I tried to tell her you were different, but she had your deli ticket, Pascal.”
Julian crab-walked backward until he had enough distance to stand, flee the sobbing man, push into the crowd, though he was not pursued. The crowd melted in front of him and sealed itself tight behind him again, and under blue fireworks Cait sang,
“All the blue, blue men, clamoring for me, stammering at me, their swallowed cries hammering at me.
‘Play that song again,’ they yammer at me. ‘The one that helps me see.’”
He pushed, was pushed back, faced aggression here, laughter there, and his shirt was soon wet with alcohol, and the ecstatic delirium of the event rushed into him, into the space jarred open by Stamford. He swam forward until he could see her face above him, pushed to the front as far as he could, nearly to bouncers and metal rails, and he was slammed and slugged by children. He stopped, open to her, presented himself for her inspection, that girl up onstage above him, craned his neck for her.
The tour has obviously tired Ian more than the other boys, Cait was thinking. He may not be cut out for this over the long haul. That would be a grave disappointment. So much of her success was his doing. She couldn’t imagine doing without him, but she needed rather more vim than he was displaying tonight. “Wake up, you wanker,” she shouted. That started his heart a bit, but not enough, so she pressed herself against his back while he played his solo on “Blue Men.” She put her mouth against his ear and whispered, “That’s better now, my love, that’s the way,” and the effect was undeniable; she could hear it. She played him playing the guitar. She could see on the faces down there that something was happening because of her. She could make her music through him, her breasts against his back, her breath on his neck, her fingers pulling his beltless loops. The charging force of his solo, that was hers. New Bass’s response to him, that was hers. The boiling hi-hat, the crowd, this mounting agitation and elusive whiff of the approaching mass loss of control—these all came from inside her. “Do you want me, Ian?” she whispered, and her effect spread from the skin on Ian’s neck to the tension in his hand on the guitar’s neck, through the cable to the amps, to his foot stomping on one of his pedals, and the guitar clanged, and the air changed, and the crowd surged toward her again, drawn to her by her breath blown into Ian’s ear, and she looked out over the sea of faces and bodies and did not distinguish between them, or wish to, any more than an explorer of distant lands would care to distinguish among the waves that carried him through the velvet night to the next spiced port.
But then the applause and shouts quieted, and Cait O’Dwyer drifted downward and caught Julian Donahue’s eye on a September night in Budapest, and she smiled at him with amazement and then sly satisfaction.
He felt relief push across his face and chest because this was how she wanted him to proceed, perhaps she’d always wanted it like this, while he’d cowered in the back. As soon as he stepped to the front of a crowd and admitted that he was just one of them, she smiled down upon him and accepted him. She had been waiting for this gift: he was a fan. He would go to her, backstage, in the lobby, in her room, it didn’t matter how or where; whatever they did would be unique enough. He would give her his youth, the last drops of it still to squeeze and all of it gone before. He would deed his past over to her, repurposed like a warehouse conversion: the years before he knew her would be hers now, a pre-verse refrain, his marriage redefined as the marriage that was wrong because it wasn’t with her. His child was the pain that could only be brought inside him with her help, a story for him to tell her and her to tell right back to him, explained and beautiful, and that would thin this syrupy grief that had been replacing the blood in his veins.
She was smiling at him now, in this green and black field in Hungary, and agreed that the rest would be easy. She laughed when he was jostled and splashed. She held him down there with her eyes and her smile, and she spoke into the mike, and he accepted her latest gift: “Here’s a new one. Hope you like it. What do we say about it? Let’s, uh, let’s say it’s a trepidatious love song. It’s called ‘My Kind of Boy’” Hungarians translated and mistranslated “trepidatious,” and she sang to him, her eyes wide open:
“Leave it all behind, all the half steps and losses.
Leave them all behind, all your burdens and your crosses.
Come out to meet me, let’s try you and me alone.
Or maybe, maybe not, maybe let’s keep it to the phone.
Stand outside my door, wait ‘til I’m insane.
Make me wait, make me beg, leave me standing in the rain.
Write your name in the fog with your finger.
Tell me how you’ll never ever trust a singer.
What am I to do?
What am I to you?
What am I to do with you?
My kind of boy.
Closer now, but keep your distance,
Let them all talk, just don’t leave a witness.
Come here, stay, roll over, play.
My kind of boy, my kind of boy.”
20
HE WALKED, then ran to her then, short of younger breath, walked again, along crowded streets, along riverfront traffic for a mile, until their hotel moved in and out of view from behind a hill with a winged statue perched on its front like a sconce. He drank in the lobby bar and waited, watched the hazing lobby through glass doors for nearly two hours until the band entered noisily with multinational handlers and hangers-on, Cait in the center, holding hands with the drummer. An albino with flashy clothes and neon-pink shoes asked her something in German, and she said, “Nein, baby,” and everyone laughed too loud. She told her crowd she was done for the night. She shook off their arguments until only congratulations remained, which she gathered up like a tired lady in the garden. “Do you want to drink awhile? Scheme about the future?” Ian asked her.
“Tomorrow,” she said wearily. “Tomorrow, love.” She spun her overweighted key on two fingers and summoned an elevator. “You played so well this whole tour, Ian. I’d be nowhere without you, you know,” she said as the door began to close. “Thank you. For everything.” Ian just nodded, made a sour face at himself in the closed brass door, turned away.
Julian made himself wait two more minutes, slid out to the lobby as her band and crowd occupied the bar. He wasn’t going to wait for her to fall asleep after all; even two minutes was too much to ask. His watch’s second hand snagged in the hairs on his arm, and he thumped the Up button. But the elevator refused to come, opening only when he turned toward the stairs, then it grudgingly lifted him but only slightly, hesitating wherever possible, opening its nearly shut door because it thought it heard someone coming from down the hall. It loitered at every single floor, longing for more passengers while Julian drove his knuckles into the Close Door button until he imprinted its braille translation into his skin, making dominos of his fingers, and the elevator unhappily rose a bit with a hydraulic sigh. On her floor the door stuttered slightly open, then, as Julian began to move, at once reclosed, and he was dragged cursing back down until he was able to pry his way out, despite the elevator’s clingy efforts to embrace him. He took the stairs, hurdling.
He held his key, her key, their key, and stood at her door until his hand steadied. He was certain: he didn’t have the strength to calculate the next orbit, and he was certain: she didn’t want him to. Julian put his key in her lock and entered Cait’s room, closed Cait’s door, waited st
ill and silent until his eyes adjusted to Cait’s lights and darks.
Her balcony windows were open; his eyes finally read that tall rectangle of gray and yellow, and the thin lace drapes swung into and out of the room like flirty ghosts. The lights on the embankment seeped into the room, but she was not on the balcony, nor in the sitting room, not in the bathroom, not in the bedroom. She had discovered yet another knight’s move, checked him again, her smile onstage signifying something he had mistranslated from the Caitish. She could see farther ahead than he, and he was tiring, blind, old. The green iron bridge that seemed to begin at her balcony had provided her a skipping freedom across the Danube.
On her bed was an open hanging bag, a coffin for a flat corpse. He touched her pillow. He took off his shoes and socks, spun his iPod until her picture was on its screen. He moved her suitcase to the floor, caught the smell of her, pulled back the covers from the bed, caught the smell of her again, stronger. He pulled off his shirt, to clear a path to his nose for her, to sweep away the aromatic litter of booze. His pants and shorts fell off him, too, and he lay between the sheets that smelled of her, her digital likeness faintly blue on the pillow.
21
CAIT LAY NAKED in his bed, downstairs. She would say when he came to her, “I thought after Paris that you were done with me. I don’t have any tricks left, you know.” Or she would say when he found her there: “It’s a big night for you and singers, Julian Donahue.” She also prepared arguments for him to destroy, planned to quiz him, and he would have to answer before anything else happened: If I get laryngitis, if I have to become a veterinarian, what will we talk about, and will you still want me? or, If I become famous, will you complain if I pretend to the world that I’m available, or would you make me wear a ring and stand next to me for photographs and make me thank you on CD boxes? and If we sleep together now, will you still give me advice or will you sabotage me, will you be jealous of rehearsals and flirty chat-show hosts and me grabbing Ian’s arse onstage, will you come to award shows in a penguin suit or will you pout at home and drink? Now, quick, without mentioning music at all, tell me why you pursued me, tell me what depths you’ve seen in me, but don’t mention music. There are some things I should probably explain about myself right away, things you probably won’t like—or do we have all the time in the world?
She sat up, pulled her knees into her chest, arranged the sheets around herself, heaped her hair in a particular tried and trusted tousle. She listened for steps in the hall, but the third time that steps quieted without becoming a key in the door she lay down and began to suspect that he meant to put her off again, whether from fear or cruelty or indecision. He was saying no, still, not yet, commanding her to be patient again, postponing again, until—what? She begged him in public? Made a plea from onstage? Called him up to sing a little duet, the arrogant man? He hadn’t given up on her after Paris, so why now? He saw that she’d performed to the very end of her repertoire, and the answer was no, not good enough, he didn’t see some mythical “most interesting part” of her that wasn’t music, and the music was not enough. “My Kind of Boy” was an awful song, and she hadn’t realized it until now.
She lay there, aware of noises and the band’s nasty early-morning departure for press and radio and vacation in Vienna. She found a shirt of his in the closet, put it on like a robe along with hotel slippers. She stood on his balcony, watched the lights in the black river, the occasional cars, the row of cabdrivers smoking next to a fountain. She could do with a cigarette. Disappointed, angry, she was small and young and boring and predictable to men like him.
She stepped back inside, switched on a light, opened his laptop and suitcase and briefcase. She read his iTunes library with an expert eye, but it didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know or suspect, except perhaps a little too much of what Ian derided as “the rock of aging.” His email was all work, and his computer photo album was empty. He had the Yeats she’d sent him, the bookmark with the view of Wicklow her great-grandfather had painted, and a second bookmark at a different page—a postcard of an old couple in wartime Paris with just a question mark for its text. So someone else was asking something of him, too, someone with a New York postmark.
His briefcase had a file folder full of her: reviews, profiles, Web pages, printouts of her emails to him, the Quincampoix poem, her invitation and list of hotels, photos of her he’d taken and photos of her he’d found. It was sweet but it was also—what was the word? She imagined collecting all of this stuff about someone else, and she imagined him collecting more and more of it about her, because no matter how much he gathered, something would still be missing. Maybe the more he’d gathered, the more he’d seen she wasn’t turning out to be what he’d hoped.
And then she found what had been missing from her picture of him, the hole she had sensed, a little leather case in a side pocket, all by itself in there, a little four-by-six photo album. It smelled of new leather and had no scuffs. It was stamped on the back with the name of a leather worker and the word FIRENZE. They’d been in Florence ten days ago. It held only four photos, six cellophane slots still empty. The first was old, the sunny blur of the 1960s or 1970s, a man almost certainly Julian’s father next to a beautiful woman in furs, her hair in a beehive. All the rest were of a little child, first as a laughing baby flying just out of reach of grasping disembodied hands. Then he was fatter, wearing a little blue cap. Finally he was being kissed on one cheek by Julian and on the other by a woman, black hair pushed behind her ear, diamond-ringed fingers tickling the laughing baby’s double chin.
Her first instinct was to make it part of their game, to take one of the pictures of herself from his folder, cut it to fit, and slide it into his album for him to discover back home, her announcement of where she’d spent this night, if he didn’t already know. But then she stopped. The finished product would have been—what was the word? Out of tune. It was a chord progression that made no sense at all: parents, baby, older baby, older baby, Cait. Tonight, onstage, she had felt herself perched on top of all creation, and now she felt as if she was spoiling something merely by looking at it.
She dialed his apartment in New York.
“Well, it’s about five in the morning, I think, and I don’t know where you are, but you’ll get this eventually. I’m in your hotel room in Budapest, and I’m looking around and maybe seeing things, ah, a little clearer. I don’t—we haven’t seemed able to find just how to do this, half a Smiths song, half a dinner date, half a wild night in a Gellert hotel room, half a this and half a that, eh? Not quite adding up right, and I’m wondering if that’s maybe for the best. I’m not sure about that. I’m wavering as I say it. I could be convinced, Julian. Do you feel up for convincing me?” She stood on the balcony in his shirt, looked at the sky beginning to pale, maybe just a trick of the bridge lights. “But if here’s where the story ends, that would still be a pretty good story, wouldn’t it? I’m a lot of possible things, you know. I think I am. I sort of take some pride in that, in not limiting that, not being scared of finding out. But I’m not, probably, able to be absolutely anything at all, if you take my meaning? There are—are we really going to go to the movies and things, and meet each other’s … friends? You’ve a child, I think, and that’s not for me. Am I being boring? Maybe, maybe it is for me, how do I know? Maybe I’d be Auntie Cait or something, and you’d have to explain my presence to him or cancel meeting me because the little thing had the mumps or some such. I’m just tired. I don’t know. And I don’t know where the pretty woman with the black hair is in all this? I think you might have—no, I don’t know what I think you might have. You make me feel very clumsy, my friend, and a little young and stupid. We’re off to Vienna for a few days. I wouldn’t be surprised not to hear from you again. Nor vice versa, I suppose. Nor the opposite. If I know anything, it’s you’ve got plenty more tricks and surprises than I have. You’re endlessly creative, I suspect, Julian. So what are we to be, then? I think we’d best sort it soon. I
can’t take any more nights like tonight.”
Aidan had happily house-sat while his brother was in Europe and now was simply trying to leave everything in better condition than when the owner left. He had just finished sanitizing the hazmat fridge and bathroom with some very high-end scouring powder he’d paid for himself, and now he sat on the couch listening to this call, knew what would be best for everyone, deleted it.
22
JULIAN’S EYES OPENED to the room, brown with near daylight, the morning of his flight home to New York. His iPod was blank. He washed his face, tried to blink away the coming hangovers, physical and otherwise. He dressed, gathered his things, replaced her suitcase, left her room as he’d found it, didn’t want to leave anything of himself behind this time, because the picture would have been of a fool, for the first time, an old fool, impotently stalking and pleading for something she wouldn’t give him, because what, after all of this, did he have to offer her, he demanded of himself, knowing the sad answer. He was, after a lifelong spree, broke, outside a shop window, with nothing to spend but a little cry of desire—”But I want”—as if that had cash or artistic value. And she knew it didn’t.
When he opened her door, a weight rolled into her room toward him, landed next to his feet with a thump, and then unfolded and stood to become Ian Richfield, waking and confused and still steaming alcohol out of his skin. “Jesus Christ,” he said, looking at Julian. “You have got to be kidding me.” He stumbled back down the hall, pounded on the elevator button, and rested his head against the wall, rather hard.