He stepped back into the silent white street, bought the toilet paper, returned home, where his brother, an uninvited guest again, was lying on his couch watching a Jeopardy! rerun. “I opened some wine,” Aidan said, then shouted at the TV with cold disgust, “Who are the Picts?”
3
“SO OKAY. We’re done, and you are coming along great. I want you to remember what it felt like when you played without looking at your hands. It felt great, no? Oh, I have a present for you.” Cait fished a CD from her bag and gave it to the girl. “In my opinion, these are some of the best rock songs with piano. And the very best one is a girl playing, you’ll notice. They all learned, just like you, scales and chords and etudes first. Pick your favorite of these and try to play what you hear, without reading anything, as part of your drills, okay?”
“Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Boo.”
“Boo who?”
“Why are you crying?”
“Oh, very funny. So amusing. You could be on television. If they had a show about stupid jokes. Say, do you want to play me the piece you wrote?”
The girl shook her head very slightly but very fast, like a hummingbird with a bad attitude.
“Please, oh please?” Cait poked her. “Pretty please? Really? Well, okay.” Cait put her own hands on the keys, played just in the range she could reach without crossing in front of her pupil. “This is a very old Irish song that my da used to play me. Do you want to hear the words? It’s not a very happy song.”
“The good ones never are, are they?” the little girl asked in all seriousness, and when Cait laughed, she looked hurt and asked, “What’s funny?”
“You are. I know what you mean, but you’re wrong. There’s loads of great happy songs. Listen to that CD. You’ll see.”
“Why do you have to quit?”
“Oh, baby, now you are going to make me boo-hoo. I’m going to be traveling too much, that’s all. Wouldn’t be fair to you or my other tinklers. I’ll still see you. And Sarah’s a mate—she’s a really good teacher. You’ll love her.”
“Will she sing with me?”
“No. In fact, that reminds me. I have to warn you. Don’t, under any circumstances, let her sing. She’s got a dreadful voice. But she can play like an angel any music you hope to hear. All of that, all of your Johnny Bach book, and all your precious Elton, too. But promise me something.”
“I promise.”
“You haven’t heard it yet.”
“I still promise. That’s the way I am.”
“Oh, good, then I won’t tell you what it was, and I can always say you promised, no matter what I ask you to do.”
“Who tells you what to do?”
“Do?”
“Who says when you’re not practicing hard enough?”
“That’s a good question. I suppose my bandmates.”
“What if nobody buys your record?”
“Wow. Well, ah, then I’ll be putting poison in Sarah’s tea in a flash and coming to see if you’ll have me back.”
“Are you nervous? How do you know you don’t need lessons anymore?”
“Quite a day for good questions. Well, I don’t play piano in the band. I don’t know. I suppose I probably do need lessons still, but a day comes when you just feel ready, you know? Oh, oh, oh, now quit that, please. If you get all teary, then I really am going to slobber on you. Here, sing this with me instead.”
4
SOME WEEKS EARLIER, Julian Donahue had noticed that “What’s Left”—a pop song that had used to haunt his solitude and that had been playing on his stereo the cherry-blossom morning he proposed to Rachel—was, but for one consonant, perfectly composed for an approaching job. “You left so fast, you didn’t stay to watch me cry” required only a single alphabetical step to reach “You left so fast, you didn’t stay to watch me dry,” and then very nicely described a new oven cleaner, which toiled selflessly while its people, according to the storyboard sent over by the agency, frolicked in a park and drove along a Pacific cliff-side highway.
And so Julian spent Saturday, the day after his snowy discovery of the Rat, in a recording studio in Queens, though the rapids of melting slush delayed the engineer by two hours and the singer by three. (The band, fortunately, existed only as a computer file.) Standing in the control booth, Julian pushed a button, and his voice drifted through the glass partition into the gray, dimpled studio, carrying disembodied suggestions to an eight-hundred-dollar-an-hour vocal chameleon with the face of a zealous nun and the body of a self-indulgent monk as to how she could achieve the same tone of pained loss from the original lyric while still punching the selling word dry, so that any woman who purchased Spray-Go would feel the liberating pleasure of the traditionally male role, the colder heart, the one who could stalk out without regret, indifferent to the pain of whomever she left behind (her husband, her oven cleaner).
He leaned against the back wall of the booth and watched this fiendishly proficient singer twiddle the knobs of some internal control panel until she produced a perfect impression of the song’s original voice, a two-hit pop star from twenty years earlier, just inside the target market’s musical nostalgia range. A song could be neutered as easily as this. “What’s Left,” which had long exercised a matador’s power in Julian’s headphones, could be sung by an identical voice, over a computerized but identical band, and, with the change of a single letter, be shown up as mere spattered notes and jerky rhythm, no more hypnotic than any other one-calorie jingle. “Nice, Louise. You nailed that one.”
Two weeks later, he was on set for a hair conditioner, watching the product’s brand manager rise from his canvas chair and march with dainty urgency across the colored floor. “I really, I must.” His accent, his unshakable formality, his resemblance to a dapper mole, and his fevered love for his product were already mimicked by laughing art guys from the agency. “You cannot, Monsieur Donahue, pardon my insistence, you cannot light the Product like that.” He went down on one knee beside the dollops of hair conditioner on the glass pedestal. “You cast it in this excess of blue, and you blanch it of its essential identifying hues.” He let his other knee touch the ground and cupped his hands around the conditioner to demonstrate how its color changed in shadow.
Julian, Maile (his production assistant for the last four months), and Vlada (the director of photography) consulted, stifling laughter, avoiding eye contact. The afternoon crept away as Maile, on her knees before the glass pedestal, sprayed food coloring and Vlada handed gel after gel up ladders to grips while Mr. Rousselet sat next to Julian and stared at the video feed, and the two professional beauties in bathrobes who would soon lather their manes on camera sat in the far back under a NO SMOKING sign and ignited each new slender cigarette off the orange tail of the last.
Julian plugged his iPod into the studio’s sound system and felt a physical relief as the day’s silliness was replaced with a sense of purpose. The soundtrack effect, as he had learned decades before: music could inject the quotidian with significance, lyricism, uniqueness. The third song, a female voice: “‘I’d sooner die,’ she said, she said, and she almost believed it, her little drama.” The music swept through the cubical black room: the embarrassing idea of believing too much in one’s own little drama penetrated everything, here quickly like solar wind, there slowly but relentlessly as a line of ants. It affected how Mr. Rousselet leaned in to peer at the video assist, then squatted before the mauve mammarial domes of the Product and spritzed color himself. The music changed how the two models moved, surreptitiously touching each other’s fingertips in their shadowed cloud, how Vlada looked sadly through his viewfinder, his Serbian manner making everything around him tragic and unimportant at once.
Julian hadn’t loaded or downloaded any new pop music in months and could not at first understand the song’s unfamiliarity. No, yes, he had loaded a CD, the demo from that Irish girl at the Rat, loaded it two weeks ago and never listened since. It caugh
t him by surprise, that afternoon in the studio and then later, the gloaming settling over the Manhattan skyline like colored mist over hair conditioner, as he walked with time to kill before dinner with a film-school friend in town for the weekend, a man who had risen fast in Hollywood to second-unit director but then stopped, happy to do well-paid crowd scenes and cutaways indefinitely, when in school he’d always insisted—nearly shouted—that a true auteur could only work outside the studios and would write, shoot, direct, and edit everything himself.
The demo CD had a little hiss, and the levels were too low here and there, and the bass was too hot on three tracks, buzzing his ears: the gritty authenticity of the rough-mix demo that had secured the deal that would produce a new CD with cleaner versions of these same songs. The guitar even screwed up its solo introduction on the very first track. The music stopped, and a male voice said, “Whoops.” There was male and female laughter, and they started the song again; they left the mistake there, a daring way to open a disc meant to wow dim, deaf record executives, and when the musician played it right the next time, Julian felt a humming in his neck and in his kidneys.
The next day, shooting was delayed almost immediately; Maile presented him with a model, and Julian studied her face slowly, a face he’d hired from a photo, before shaking his head and her hand: “Thank you, but not today. Maile, sign her papers with my apologies.” This was somewhat for the client’s marketing managers visiting the set—corporate sleepwalkers for whom a day amidst cameras and lights watching a director’s offhand dismissal of high-rent beauties, damn the expense, was one of the job’s titillating perks, a whiff of diva glamour.
But the last-minute firing of models was becoming increasingly common, and Julian was lately frustrating modeling agencies with his sharpening standards and his refusal to explain them. Early in his career, he’d realized that the final test before engaging a model had to be the search for premonitions of aging. Not symptoms: premonitions. Julian could—often at a glance—see how and where most women’s faces were only temporary versions of their older selves. He could spot the shame even in some of the modelinas of nineteen or twenty; he could see their old-womanhood lurking, while the ideal faces (and that Irish singer’s, come to think of it) gave no hint, showed no vulnerability. Others would hire those same women, obviously; he had no exclusive claim on them. But he would never book the esteemed ubermodel whose dark secret he had glimpsed. Despite advances in CGI, even the best retouching guys couldn’t reliably erase the truth, and so Julian maintained his standard, his trade secret, and all of his ads—from the prosaic floor cleaner sold by a magnificently beautiful “housewife” identifiable by her rolled-sleeve oxford to the exalted mascara shot close enough to show pores—produced in the client the same paradoxical sensations of danger and safety, lust and exaltation. He was, for several years running, the single most rehired director in the city, though it was a very rare marketing person who could have explained why.
The problem, however, had arisen in the last eight to ten months: there were fewer women whose future elderliness (even elderly beauty) was imperceptible. He was hiring slightly younger than he used to, but the bottom limit loomed as large as the top. He couldn’t explain this to frustrated model-house reps, because he didn’t want to disclose his tricks, but the truth was plain: more and more women looked merely temporarily beautiful. He knew this was likely a result of Carlton and Rachel; certain events were going to permanently affect one’s vision. Still, he was saddened to see the effect, the growing endangerment of one species of beauty.
He pointed to six possible replacements in the binders, gave Maile time to call to check availability, authorized her to pay rush penalties, and left the set with an air of purpose, but only to ride the F train and listen to his iPod.
And now Julian sits on the F train in a nearly empty car. At the far end, wired to a slender iPod full of hip-hop, a young black man dressed for corporate life bobs and mutters to himself like a Talmudic scholar. Julian is slightly affected by the dismissed model’s face and disappointment. She smelled of breath mints not quite eradicating the evidence of a recent noisy purge, and now from the banking train’s orange plastic seat he examines the reasonably but not impossibly pretty girl across from him. Hers is a kind of prettiness he appreciates all the more, considering his daily routine shaping and, frame by frame, preserving ludicrous beauty, and in his headphones a love song plays, a different girl singing, an Irish girl, and she sings of the vast golden fields of possibility that stretch out before him, there for him to wander through, the sun will never finish setting. It is physically impossible—with the right song—for a certain sort of man not to feel (before he remembers how to think) that the girl across the subway aisle hears and feels something, too, that she will be his co-star in this romance-glazed landscape. She’s looking up now, a smile approaches, but no, she’s listening to her own music on her own iPod, maybe a dirge about the fate of a doomed sea voyage, and Julian closes his eyes and the lyrics to the Cait O’Dwyer song begin to lodge in his memory.
He climbed back to the surface of Manhattan at Twenty-third Street, right where he started. Something snowy was falling out of a clear blue sky. He returned to the studio, where Maile had conjured one of his requested girls. He watched the makeup artist add moisture to this Italian model’s lips. Each sweep of the brush added to the girl’s ripe succulence. A precise amount of visible humidity was necessary to evoke sex without bringing to mind dull biology and oral hygiene. “Wait.” He stopped Makeup when she would have moved on to the Italian girl’s eyes. “More to the lips. Again. More. Again. Once again. Done—thank you.”
5
BACK IN 2006, Ian Richfield and Cait O’Dwyer were put in touch by a mutual friend who knew they had both recently fled crap bands. They arranged by email to meet at Ian’s apartment. He offered her a beer, they exchanged war stories, tested for shared acquaintances, and then she said, “Well, let’s give it a go,” not very hopefully.
And up until that moment, Ian often recalled, anything was still possible. He imagined subsequently that when she said, “Well, let’s give it a go,” he said nothing, simply grabbed her, any part of her he could reach and hold on to, took her on the floor, ran his hands over and under her oversized sweater, seized the back of her head and pushed her face into his, fell to his knees, pressed his cheek against her crotch.
No. He had laughed and said, “Wow, listen to you. All right, chief, let’s do, let’s give it a go.” And partially because it was his hands’ first reflex whenever he picked up his guitar to practice alone and partially to see if the cute Irish girl knew anything about music, he started the Cure’s intro of Hendrix’s “Foxey Lady.” She nodded like a surgeon and told him to take it up a third. He clipped his capo, and she was right there, no errors, no lost words, even quoted the ad-lib from the record—“This is a good intro”—but something more: she played off of him, filled in the spaces he left for her, offered him ideas. She sat on the speckled stepladder he had stolen from one of his house-painting jobs, but then stood up halfway through the song and turned up both her volume and his. “I won’t do you no harm. You’ve got to be all mine, all mine.” He played this song—which he had studied from an old CD of his uncle’s the very day his parents had bought him an electric guitar—with a ferocity he’d always assumed was only granted to a musician in front of an attentive crowd. He took twice the solo space, keeping the rhythm moving without bass or drums and without interrupting the flow of his ideas. As the fuzz of his last chord was still drifting down to the floor of his loft, he could still have changed things, and in recent self-abusive musings, he swung his guitar off his shoulder, tipped over his brown folding metal chair, attached his mouth to her ear, and his hands corrugated her breasts before the amp was done buzzing.
No. He didn’t. There was this moment. This one moment had come and waited for him, and when he stood still, it had gone on its way forever. That very first song ended, and they both knew: the sound h
ad been a multiple of them both. And they knew. They sat in a long silence as the sound they had made traveled down the street, out to sea, up to distant stars. Only the low hum of his amp persisted, and he was afraid (as she looked at him and he considered leaping at her) that the pickup from his guitar would pick up his heartbeat and play it for her. He pressed his tongue against his upper lip and rolled his black pick with its clean whorled thumbprint over and under his knuckles. She reached for the cigarettes she no longer had in her bag, having quit a week earlier, and he walked to the fridge for two more beers. They chose.
The choice was mutual but they had opposite reasons: he was a coward, she was ruthless. In his defense, he hadn’t known the choice was going to be inscribed eternally as grave marble law. That was her will, enforced from that moment on with flinchless discipline. If he’d known, he told himself, he would have chosen her over the music, over anything. He would have.
“How about ‘London Calling’?” she suggested. He played everything she asked. Their vast vocabularies and listening histories—their long educations for this moment—overlapped almost without overhang. He called more and more obscure favorites (Cramps, Creeps, Crito’s Apology, Crooked Bastards, Crud), and she almost never pleaded ignorance, rarely even hesitated, just requested different keys until he started to compensate for her range automatically. He had never known anyone to keep up with him at calling tunes, let alone force an admission that he was weak in the canonical Irish bands. She couldn’t really play guitar but she could sing him through his part of a Pogues song, “Na-na naa rhythm and then up to the five and back down and then break for two bars of unintelligible slurring.”