The Song is You (2009) (13 page)

He imagined Cait attached by suction cups to the outside wall of this loft space in Chelsea, tracking his movements with infrared sensors, listening to him with parabolic microphones. And, having said a mutually smiling I’m-not-sure-just-what-you’re-thinking-but-I-suspect-I-do-and-I-deny-everything farewell to his pretty employee at the yellow door of her taxi waiting to ferry her home to her screen-writing software, he turned away, fumbled for his iPod, and quickly spun it to “Blithering”:
“You’ve reduced me to dithering, your coldness is withering, / This can’t be what you want me to be
.” She sang what he couldn’t say, and he knew it was largely a coincidence, but the coincidences had become so richly absurd that his own employee was trying to seduce him with a song about Cait watching some other woman trying to seduce her remarkable fellow.

He wanted to tell her all of this and more, but if he could perfectly express himself to her, it would sound like one of her own songs. He’d have to send her a CD of herself. Better yet, she should stand alone in a room and just sing to herself until she understood him.

AT FIRST, RACHEL
had thought she was making a rational choice, even if the moment of choice floated into view only atop an undercurrent of revenge and hate. She chose: since her natural, unconscious behavior had made her miserable, she consciously tried to be like Julian instead, to act like him in hopes of tasting some of his old happiness, to roam like him, take pleasure like him, coolly, content with small doses and short exposures, light fun, strangers in parks or bars, making eyes on subway trains, chatting and drinking, going home with or without them, as the event unrolled. A charming
indifference
—we can lie here, I can go home, you can scramble eggs, but I
will
be happy and will hope for nothing more than a small plate of scrambled happiness.

But then, after she left him, this, with just a little therapy, was what she realized she’d obviously “actually” been up to: she had been trying to find someone who could distract her from the endless alter nation of fire and balm, thinking of Carlton in pain and then inappropriate joy and then numbness, and on and on.

Finally, months later, having drunk a bit, lying alone in her apartment, she decided she had really all along been trying, and failing, to stop being
her
, the woman who got married, got cheated, got pregnant to fix things, had a taste of happiness, and then let her child die. She had a thirst for oblivion that a hundred men’s bodies could not quench.

She exhausted herself in flight. That phrase leapt at Rachel from the page of a dull book:
she exhausted herself in flight
. The idea was covered with burrs. She slowed down to examine it, kept turning the pages back, after absorbing nothing since, turned the words to the light, fit them to herself. In the biography, the words referred to a Nazi war criminal’s refugee wife, but they took root in Rachel, wafted spores everywhere. She had exhausted herself in flight, and she often thought now of a garden. She saw herself looking out a kitchen window and seeing overflowing vines and beds of tulips, things to prune and lay out for the coming season. Julian was in this house, and photos of Carlton, and the garden, and that was all she could see.

How could both of these be true: that she could see a path to a certain limited serenity, and that she had twice (perhaps three times, depending on how you looked at certain acts) come very close to killing herself, without having given it any thought? She was not
“in
despair;” despair had taken residence in
her
as a boarder who came and left according to his own whims, rather than the posted hours the landlady respectfully requested.

She could sit alone in the dark with an open bottle of wine and not cry, looking at the huge photo on her wall, lit by streetlights, of her much younger self with a husband and a velvet-cheeked baby wearing a blue baseball cap with the words
TOUGH GUY
on the front. She could walk to her bedroom that night making plans for the next day, thinking she might very well find a small dose of happiness at work, or in reading. And at the very same time, she could keep eating sleeping pills, one after the other, until her finger was tracing through the dusty residue at the bottom of the orange-brown plastic bottle, and still she was thinking of where tomorrow’s happiness might hide itself: in an extravagant dessert, in serving a client with surprising brilliance, on a run in Prospect Park.

To explain all this to another person took so much effort because she only ever felt it alone, and she didn’t like to talk about how she
usually
felt but didn’t feel just then. And to explain it all to Aidan required still more artifice. She had invited him to dinner fresh from those scouring dreams of Carlton, but it was unlikely she would be feeling anything of significance about Julian tonight by the time they sat down to a meal. And clear signals were surely necessary to inspire Aidan to action, if there was anything he could even do.

So she made a play of her misery for him, knowing he couldn’t read grayer shades. He was not emotionally color-blind, but the more garish colors certainly registered with him more easily. Where others would cringe at melodrama, Aidan was only just barely sensing un-happiness.

She knew he was in love with her, and knew, too, that he was devoted to her happiness, as far as he could see it, and that he would serve her selflessly, and she had no compunction taking advantage of that service. The stakes were too high. She did consider whether this was cruel, but the word didn’t approach relevance. This determination may have been made by some engine inside her brain that would grind on, taking no heed of such niceties, too protective of her to step clear of “Aidan’s feelings.”

“Who wrote this, Aidan? You’ll know.” And she recited from the side of the box of hippie tea:
“The moon believes that the love around which it spins is a star of great magnitude, but it is only a minor, rocky planet. And that planet in turn orbits some distant sun, which is unaware of its rotating admirer in its own eagerness to revolve around the galaxy’s bright center. The universe’s wheels whiz, powered by unrequital and vain hopes
.”

He knew the answer, obviously, before she’d finished, and she could see his effort to hold his tongue until the end, saw the affection his restraint implied. He answered correctly, then asked, “Do you believe that?”

JULIAN HAD DECIDED
not to sleep with his assistant because a CD told him not to. This, obviously,
meant something else;
his own brief therapy had succeeded at least that far. And so began a thawing season of music clubs, much as he had passed through icy seasons of German-film revivals and hot seasons of fund-raisers and rainy seasons of fashion shows. He told himself that the oddly affecting experience with Cait O’Dwyer
really
meant that he had a hunger not for the singer but, like his father always had, for live music, and what a wonder it was, a privilege, to live in this city of sound.

His strongest memories of his father and mother together were the nights he would be left in Aidan’s care as they, dressed like film stars—his mom with a violet in her furs, his dad’s shiny pant leg pinned up—said they were “off to hear some music.” This would have been 1969 or 1970, so they must have been doing very old-fashioned things, seeing very old-fashioned acts; they certainly weren’t going to Woodstock or Haight-Ashbury in furs and suits. Five-year-old Julian would fall asleep imagining them even further back in time, in movies or TV shows he’d seen, nodded off while they applauded in palm-lined nightclubs, smoked with men in tuxedos while gangsters pushed crying songstresses out into the spotlight.

It had been years since Julian himself had frequented clubs, with the exception of the Rat. Now he sought out famous and unknown names alike, though the singers were always women. He dragged Aidan to see traditional Irish bands reeling in Celtic pubs, a hardship for his elder brother, considering Aidan’s feelings about music and his policy never to use public bathrooms. One lovely, red-haired, green-eyed woman sang beautifully and fiddled well and joked between songs and introduced her bandmates with gentle teasing, and the pub crowd loved her, and Julian found her entertaining, and he never thought of her again the second his foot touched the sidewalk.

Through the last gasps of winter, he studied the stage presence of spike-scalped ululating harpies clutching their phantom penises, Javanese pixies with expressive hands and inexpressive faces, Alabaman protest folkies so terribly disappointed, soul queens backlit to display broccoli-stalk silhouettes, a 1950s pop singer enjoying a very brief and vaguely ironic revival in a skyscraper’s rotating rooftop cabaret (a performance derided by Aidan as “the slurpy crooning of the dentured elderly”), evening-gowned jazz divas going through the motions in front of whispering divorced surgeons with nurse-dates sipping triple-priced drinks, uneasy to be wearing anything but scrubs and clogs.

Not one of them sang to him even when they looked right at him, and he remained hungry for Cait’s voice. He stepped from the shower, and his blood reprioritized at the sound of her. She sang to him on his train, and he wished his father could hear her sing or, better yet, come with him to a gig. “The thing is, Cannonball, if you’re ever lucky enough to see one of the truly great ones perform, you don’t walk out the door the same man that walked in.”

Julian and Aidan’s father had made his living designing, building, and installing inflatables. This was not the glamour of the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, the pinnacle of a crowded, low-margin industry. Rather, Will Donahue rented out bouncy castles for children’s parties and pumped up twenty-foot-tall rats for unions picketing at scabby building sites. He oversaw the manufacture of toys for circus and museum gift shops. (He could also, calling himself a “pneumatic zoologist,” twist for the boys’ birthday parties an impressive line of balloon animals, including bald eagles, meerkats, piranhas, box jellyfish, and plankton, magnified.) He created custom-builts for business parties and raffles: miniature inflatable jumbo jets, jumbo inflatable chocolate bars, life-size inflatable nuclear-missile components recognizable only to the engineers at the party. He also manufactured—a profitable but small portion of the business—”personal comfort inflatables,” available only by private mail order:
Air-dorables, Floating Venus, Weightless Tess, Pump ‘n’ Hump
, and
Silent Nights
, the last in a package emblazoned with the Elvis Presley lyrics,
“A little less conversation, a little more action
.” This element of the business never entered the house, where the kids happily examined their father’s drawings of inflatable reindeer. Aidan’s doubts about their father, however, were already beginning when he visited the company’s dingy offices, came upon an Air-dorable, and returned home convinced that Dad was making inflatable, naked Moms. Literally: “They look just like her,” he insisted to Julian, age nine. “You don’t remember her, but I do.”

“Yes, I
do.”

Julian returned to his apartment from a night alone listening to a Malian singer to find Aidan watching a
Jeopardy!
rerun. Julian was, of course, not allowed to speak until the show was over and Aidan had added up his own (winning) score. “I was thinking tonight of this story Dad told me about the hospital in Tokyo,” Julian said, bringing beer and chips to the living room. “He was recovering, but still feeling sorry for himself, and—”

“So he said,” Aidan scoffed. “That was a classic of his methods. The more he could fault himself for self-pity, the less tolerable it was for anyone else ever to feel bad. The more cowardly he described himself, the more courageous he was. One day I summoned up the nerve and called him on it, and then I never had to hear any more of his war stories. I was freed from the catechism of his courage.”

So Julian kept the story to himself. Their father was in the hospital looking at his leg and crying when they wheeled a guy into his room, still unconscious after surgery, and they parked him a few feet away. Their father studied this guy’s half an arm before he woke up. He felt good looking at someone else with a stump, weighed whether an arm was worse than a leg. “So, the guy comes out of it, Jules, and he’s a big guy, a Marine, and he opens his eyes and looks down at his arm, cut off above the elbow, and then he looks up at me and says, ‘Oh, well, there goes my sex life.’ I laughed so hard, Julian, I almost felt fine. I wanted to measure up to this guy’s grace, so I said, pointing to my leg, ‘I’m going to have to kick from the left now or the Packers are going to drop me.’ Proudest I ever was of myself.”

Aidan started to speak, stopped, started again with a kinder voice, but it required effort: “I don’t think much about him, Cannonball. You and he had a
very
different experience, you know,” he said, brightening, “thanks to his earlier efforts at parenthood. You were much more to his taste in every regard. He found me, oh, a puzzle, and he didn’t do puzzles. Did he ever tell you this piece of advice? ‘We enter this world alone, screaming, son. We exit the world alone, maybe screaming again, and ideally with some of our wits still about us. In between you decide who to marry, who to obey, who to invest with, who to hate, all on your own. Good luck to you.’ That’s what I heard a lot of as a kid.”

Over the years, their father collected amputee jokes (“And the Italian scientist says, ‘Frog-a with-a no legs deaf!’”). This proved either that their father was brave and kind, determined to make others comfortable (Julian’s position), or that he was bullying others with his false stoicism, denying anyone close to him the right to feel pain over anything less than losing a leg (Aidan’s position).