The Song is You (2009) (11 page)

Promised the italics at the bottom of the page:
Cait O’Dwyer plays the Romping Rat in Brooklyn, this Saturday at 10 pm
.

Saturday at 10
P.M
., a folding chalkboard straddled the sand and gum and ice-water puddles of the leonine March night:
Cait. Last chance. You’ll tell your grandkids
.

“Coaster Man!” The bartender, in the same T-shirt advertising his band, recognized Julian. “The lady requested I point you out if you came in tonight.”

“Did she?” It
had
been him in the article. She wanted to see his face. Julian couldn’t remember if he’d thought he was leaving the coasters for her, if he’d been joking, if he’d meant to meet her, wasn’t sure the barman wasn’t joking now. “Well, let’s keep mum, okay? I tip heavily for anonymity.”

His surprise and confusion yielded to pleasure, of course: he had impressed her. And once, that would have led to meeting her; he might have tossed the same glib crack to the bartender but then introduced himself to her, talked her up with the same buffed banter that had on infinite other occasions gotten him lushly paid or plushly laid. Now, though, the glib crack was honest: he didn’t want to meet her. To his relief, the crowd lived up to all the hype Milton Chi and his species could froth, and Julian, taking shelter amid the elbows and plaid hunting caps and down vests, sank onto a dying couch. In another life, in another life …

But in this life, after everything, assuming she really was what he hoped, this was plenty: he had told her how much he loved her music, and she had thanked him, had even taken his suggestions seriously. For a man with his history and limited resources, he told himself, this was miraculous. Sitting on that couch, listening to the bassist tune up, he imagined how he would feel the next time he heard her on his iPod, when he would know that she was, in some small measure, singing to him. He breathed deeply: he was going to hear her sing again, in just a minute. He was going to watch her from within a crowd, and she would be thinking of him but wouldn’t know where he was. He would be a ghost, in her thoughts, invisible but close. The role suited him perfectly, he thought. (A moment later, though, he swallowed down a gurgle of green panic: What if he had nothing else to offer her, no more advice she could use? If he had given everything away on a few pieces of recycled cardboard, he would lose his job as whispering phantom before he’d even realized it was his calling.)

The demo CDs were gone; the label had insisted Cait stop selling them, although with the knowledge that this ban would only stoke the simmering oils of her coming anointment. She was flying off to a studio with a big producer and a big budget, and when she came out again she would be transformed by the pressure and the altitude, and already, Julian judged, she was slightly more herself tonight, more unified, more suited for a stage and less for a bar. He sensed the composite effect of his offhand advice.

She wore her hair pulled loosely back from her face; her eyes shone. If he had not been searching for it, he might not have noticed the lightest touch of cosmetics. He wouldn’t have expected her restraint in this un-rock-girl art, but she wore exactly the touch he would have ordered Makeup to achieve if he’d cast her in a spot.

She sang. She she was able to produce and display emotion on demand in contoured, glistening miniature, without acting or emoting, without “putting over the song.” She sang of heartbreak, for example, like this: she recalled heartbreak, and then sang a distillation of the recollection, so that Julian (and a hundred and some other men and women) wished to help her by punishing the cause of her pain or—in some cases—wished to
be
the cause of that pain. And then they recalled their own heartbreaks. Cait could make them feel what she had felt and what they didn’t know they felt, too. A man who foolishly stammers with indecision when a real woman says, “It’s now or never,” will nod decisively and repeat “It’s now, it’s now” when a strange woman sings it with her eyes closed.
“It’s now or never /I can’t wait for good sense.”

She did “Once I Loved”—bringing it back to life as an unnatural but darkly beautiful hybrid of bossa and punk, imperfect and struggling to survive, its seams and bolts still red—and she meant, “Once I loved, and it still hurts,” and Julian—who would have said of himself, “Once I loved, but that was decades ago, when
I
referred to a different person”—now felt the illusion of its recent sting. She was better tonight. Whatever she did, she was growing stronger at it.

His slightly drunken thoughts trip. Even as he looks down on the dazzled boys around him, he, like dozens of them, considers kissing Cait O’Dwyer, rescuing Cait O’Dwyer, making Cait O’Dwyer laugh, touching her bare back, cleaning up Cait O’Dwyer, scrubbing off the smell of bar and studio. Peering into a bulb-framed mirror, she tips back her head to extend for the mascara brush the curve of her top lashes, revealing the rarely seen capstone of white above her Irish-green iris, and he, watching her reflection, lifts her hair to his face while music plays, and they go out on the town, where he leans against a bar next to Cait, his thumb exploring her upper arm’s puckered vaccination moon, or stands with her under a moon illuminating Irish cliffs in high wind, or sits in windy Seine-side cafes facing the lowering sun, lighting all the riverfront trees on one side only, warming and gilding her closed eyes.

And another song ended. And a too-sweet, tobaccoish residue lingered in Julian from his unchecked fantasies, and he laughed at himself (so like his father wrapping a fur stole around Billie Holiday’s shoulders), and he laughed at Cait O’Dwyer’s sorcery, and he wondered if, in her real life, she required a steady diet of recent heartbreak in order to manufacture fresh emotion for her consumers. She must crave and court pain as a matter of economic necessity. Two months ago, she was raw and unblended; tonight she was reasonably effective; someday very soon she would be in danger of marbling over into a slick cast impression of herself. The target was only microns wide, and history’s great singers may simply have been those who happened to make a record in the brief time between learning and forgetting how to manage their power.

He saw her clearly again, with the reopened eyes of a director. She faced a dilemma: she and her emotions must ring true, must make the crowd fall literally and briefly in love with her if she were to succeed; her living depended upon just such a primal, unconscious event. But most men would see how she did it, would know it was a lie, and as soon as the artifice was clear, the music would fail. And so to make a man find her desirable even after he became conscious of her trickery, she must also imply
in her performance
that she would extinguish that same public display of emotion a moment later. She must hint that she always stepped off the stage and sealed herself up into a private person again, so that if you were a man in the audience imagining yourself her lover, you could imagine there was still something she was
not
sharing (even with you for the time being). The displayed emotion must carry within it the promise that it was only a drop of something rarer held in reserve.

In short, Julian saw all the way through her. He saw how the trick was done, saw the strings and mirrors. His brief flare of childish wonder was snuffed out, and that was probably as it should be, he thought.

“Here’s a new song,” Cait O’Dwyer said. “We’re still smoothing it out, so if it’s vile, try not to hurl things at us, please. Oh, yes, it’s called ‘Bleaker and Obliquer.’ Bass here had to look that last word up, by the way.”

Julian knew that nonsense phrase. He leaned against a wall, overwhelmed for long seconds, untangling himself from his fantasies of loving her from afar, or seeing through her. Well, she’s young, was his first thought, but it didn’t stick. He had accidentally inspired her to write a song, and it thrilled him.

She wrote a song for him. No, she wrote a
song from
him, extracted it from him before he’d known it was in him. The words hadn’t meant anything when he wrote them on that coaster, but she made them mean something.

He slipped out after her last encore, leaving behind him with the lead guitarist for the Lay Brothers the promised mega-tip for anonymity and a twelfth coaster, a self-portrait:

The tired old cowboy (stubble, bags under his eyes) with the
J.D
. on his sheriff’s badge, departing astride a broken-down old nag with a folded copy of the
Times
in his saddlebag, looks back and touches the brim of his sagging ten-gallon hat to Cait O’Dwyer, who, floating above the ground, is singing “Bleaker and Obliquer” to a group of cross-legged fans in gas-station shirts and truck-company hats. Around the drawing revolves the caption: “Leaving her in well-deserved limelight, he rode off into the sunset.”

And he went home—eighteen years old and eighty years old in flickering alternation—and put on her demo. Its mix placed Cait primarily near his front window, as if she were watching from the radiator and he from the floor as the penguins sailed through the Antarctic water like real birds through air. “To a young fish, there is no more horrifying, nightmarish vision of death than an approaching penguin,” said the Australian voice in the slim silence between tracks of her CD. “Without Time” came next. She’d done that tune the first snowy night and again tonight, that line sung over only a melodic bass:
“Either beat me, mistreat me, or leave me in peace.”
On the demo, she starts the phrase by accelerating from a whisper to a scream. By the middle of the line her voice has smoothed into the delicate vibrato of a choir girl, sweetly clear, but then she sounds as if she sobs, almost chokes, on
peace
. He remembered exactly that from the first night: she’d sung it with exactly that same ploy, just a trick of the uvula.

But tonight she’d done something else, though he only realized it now: tonight she laughed on that line. Her smile had started to curl before she reached
“beat me
,” and she sang
through
the laughter, holding the melody like an
egg
, her voice straining pleasantly, her smile broadening, her breathing heavier than in the demo’s thinner version. That had been a coaster: Laugh when others think you should cry. And that had been Elis Regina, “The Waters of March,” 1974, 3:11.

Laughter was incongruous, and the stunned bassist (Julian saw now as he reconsidered the event from his living room floor) had hated her change, for a moment, since he was left holding all the stale pathos while she pursued a fresher scent. The crowd cheered then; they recognized that Cait had found another splinter of heartbreak by laughing at her own slightly cloying, beer-battered-girl plea to her abusive lover, and then—only then, unlike the first night, unlike on the demo–Julian
believed
her: she really had once felt that, and she felt it tonight on cue. The bass player floundered, confused. She would fire him before she went much further, Julian thought.

In the silence: “The male penguin must protect the
egg
through a long and brutal winter. The offspring’s life is in the father’s care, and the slightest mistake is lethal to the unhatched chick.”

Carlton died two weeks after his second birthday, an ear infection caught too late, not a problem in itself but a symptom of another spiky bacterium boiling his blood then flying upstream to his brain, inflaming grief and disbelief for long months of heat and cold.

Like a planet struck by a meteor, Rachel and Julian’s marriage wobbled, then righted itself in a bizarre new orbit, spinning counter to its old rotation.

Some weeks after the thunder and betrayal of Carlton’s death had receded before a tide of gray sorrow, Julian tried music in the hope that it would restore some part of himself, some ability to desire someone or something. He hoped that music might, at least, seep into cuts, smooth over a surface, be useful, pay him back for all his years of commitment to it. And music succeeded, a little, or was the coincidental soundtrack to some recovery that would have occurred in any case: Julian did, now and again, regain that sense of pleasant unfulfillment. He replaced, for a few minutes at a time, his agony with a benign pop-music ache, admittedly adolescent but now oddly specific: he longed for
Rachel
, for his own wife, in a way he had never longed for her before, even when they had first met and she was not yet his.

This longing was not for her as she had been when younger, nor was it for her as she actually
was
, then, when they were uncomfortably and quietly together at home after work, trying to see how long they could go without mentioning him, or out with friends, putting on a pair of alternately brave faces, or just pausing and breathing in forgetfulness, briefly, and only ever one at a time. Rather, he longed for the Rachel he had discovered in the bathroom, glowing from that pink-plus-sign annunciation of his boy inside her. He longed for her to restore him, replenish him in the same way she had made
him
in that bathroom, had conceived and delivered Julian there.

For all of that longing, though, he, for the first time in his life, failed physically. His body would not follow his heart. He abased himself to chemical intervention, both antidepressant and antiflaccidulent, but still could not undam the blood flow required in either direction. He would have been willing to sleep with other women, as a pump-priming effort, as an act almost of loyalty (squint and you can see it), but he felt no desire for anyone.

He couldn’t say when he became certain Rachel was having affairs. He couldn’t even say with certainty that she’d begun only after Carl-ton’s death, or only when he’d proven himself sexually useless, but her flight from him and his sexless adoration of her fed each other. She took comfort from and was able to comfort in turn the whole male world except for him, and in the months unrolling toward her departure, Rachel and Julian circled and veered from each other like identically charged particles. “I want to play you something. I was thinking about Carlton and thought of this song and it reminded me of when you and I met, and …”