The Song is You (2009) (17 page)

“Kate? No.”

“Oh, ah, okay, but so, ah, commercial direction, Heather said? I may have a need for someone in your line of work. Flip me your card before you split. I’ll have the gallery hook us up.”

Julian left as casually as he could, Heather Zivkovic still in the bathroom, but by the time he reached the street, there was no sign of Cait, just crowds from bars and galleries, and his teeth chattered in the April air as he swallowed his hopes.

At home, he found Aidan asleep on the couch, and he reread Cait’s
Times
profile online, blue light on his face, remarkable fellow, remarkable fellow. He sorted through Google’s sightings of her in the cybermurk, now more than a thousand, though some of them were mere rumors, her name struggling to break out of Japanese text or the thrice-daily essays of the housebound furious and the cubicled despairing. He printed out a glamour photo of her laughing through blue backlit smoke, the granddaughter of some 1950s Claxton-photographed jazz-club beauty, the great-granddaughter of a daring fast girl with her bare knees tucked up to her chin on the hot sand of the Cote d’Azur. He discovered the newly launched
www.caitodwyer.com
, scoured it for clues.

The site included the usual propaganda to sell Cait and her music to the universe, with its short attention span and surfeit of stimuli: email lists, tour dates,
About the Band
, Cait’s
blog
. The
Guest Book
hosted fans far from New York, in Los Angeles, fair enough, but also mythological hamlets like Wichita and Albuquerque. “Cait! I saw your show at the Mad Dog last October and I never forgot it. !Keep rockin’! Stu.” “I think your a poet. And I loVe you. Beth P.” “Tell Ian he ROXXX!!! Mags and Michelle. Tell him those were our favorite shirts. He’ll get it! Ian! Call us next time you’re in the Triangle!” “1st Ave gig was awesome, and you won a fan for life in me, Cait. T-bone.” However necessary such marketing may have been, this outpouring of adoration from children must have embarrassed her, if she was the woman he hoped she was. “I bought your demo at the Vingt-Deux, and I listen to it all day, all the time. I want you to know how great I think you are. I wish there was a better way to tell you. I wish I knew how I could know that you knew it. I want you to feel it. Unless you can’t be it and feel it at the same time??? GG.”

Downloadable
Gallery:
Cait, lit from the side, smoking at a dark bar, wearing some sort of one-piece, nineteenth-century, Toulouse-Lautrecky, netted crimson-and-silver courtesan’s underwear, flanked by her band; Ian onstage, leaping in front of an amp, his legs spread as his left hand splays into a chord and the right arm, bent, has just slashed the strings, identical to thousands of album covers since 1964, like a yoga posture to be mastered; Cait lying in a garden, photographed from above, her eyes meeting the camera, her face and red hair surrounded by countless still-closed and patient tulips, a field of green stems and pursed pregnant leaves to the very edge of the frame, but in this germinating color, two o’clock to Cait’s face, one solitary open bloom, purple and veined white, like a cut of raw beef; Cait onstage, facing front but her eyes looking to the side, the barest minimum of exertion around her mouth to count as a smile; Cait and the guitarist in the studio, tumorous headphones around necks, the two discussing something with an older man in a hooded sweatshirt, the three artists caught unaware in a moment of creative consultation; the drummer in action, face inexpressive behind his sticks, blurred into Oriental fans; the bassist, posing in front of a disused Coney Island amusement park ride, his arms crossed to prop his biceps up and out; Cait and her three men in a wintertime park of spindly bare trees: the men are lying facedown on a concrete path, dressed only in their tighty-whitey underpants, stacked like cordwood, sleeping drummer under grouchy bassist (biceps accentuated) under acquiescent Ian, and Cait atop this flesh-bench in fur-trimmed and hooded jacket, scarf, gloves, boots, and acutely angled beret over her red hair, her breath a cumulus the size of a peach.

What They’re Saying (and Who
Are
They?)
“Cait O’Dwyer’s voice is a wake-up call to a dormant, stupid, smug music biz.” “If you only go to one live show this year, this century, this eon, then this is the show.” “Music so pure and true you’ll sob. If you don’t, get therapy.” “She
was
Irish, but she’s ours now. This is the future of real American music.” Click here to download a .pdf of the
Flambe
profile of Cait, “Bleaker and Obliquer: A Simple Ghoul from Erin.”

The
Flambe
article mentioned that she lived in Brooklyn over a tea shop, from which she bought purple boxes of an imported brand of breakfast tea she had known in her childhood, “where ghosts were a daily reality but sex was a legend or a nightmare never to be discussed.”

AND SO THE NEXT DAY
Julian stood on Henry Street, less than a quarter mile from his apartment, in front of the building he had known at once from the puff piece’s breathy indiscretions, its ground-floor storefront filled with tea paraphernalia. Next to the window, its door buzzers were labeled plainly enough:
1- TEAPUTZ OFFICE, 2-M&R INC, 3
-
HARRIS
, and floating atop them all, 4-
CO’D
. He listened to her demo on his iPod:
“Come, come, come, come find me, no matter what I say.”
A good line, implying a tormenting, irresistible woman, unsure of her own mind but accelerating in her fall for you, O listener at your computer, debating yourself as to whether she’s worth the dollar-download click, as Julian stood, facing her doorbell but still not touching it.

They would go out for coffee and flex their overdeveloped charms. He would be cast in the role of suitor, if not the revolting and unholy hybrid of fan-suitor, a crest-flaunting lizard, and she the unimpressed, dozy-eyed lizardette. They would or would not be dazzled by each other’s personalities, each other’s memories, collected solely to display to others, thus winning new experiences and yet more memories. Perhaps they would be startled by the easy flow, scarcely able to pay for the coffee before dashing up her stairs, to shove each other into her apartment, to devour each other.

Or with crevasses of cappuccino foam still wintry pert, they might shake hands, express mutual gladness at having met, thanks for the advice, good luck with your career. Or he might long to touch her cheek but then see her boredom with his time-dulled surfaces, with this interminable coffee coursing deep under insurmountable cappuccino Alps. Or she might make a fatal error, say something lame, dispel the thickening illusion that she was not half his age, and he would, limp as ever, smile wanly at the pretty little girl not worth even a cheap pass.

“It’s cold outside, so come find me
,” she persisted, but it wasn’t quite true; the weather was warming, and that was enough to break the spell. He’d imagined it. It was just pop music, not any real woman on earth.

He turned away from her door and went to his office, embarrassed at having lurked and ogled. He spent the ride laughing at himself to avoid pitying himself. And by the time he’d arrived at his desk, he forgot all that shame and wisdom as his computer came to life with an email that asked, “Why didn’t you press the bell? Why not pay a call?”

That first uncanny moment, coming to see he’d been observed, was enough to replenish everything he’d meant to outgrow on the subway. She must have watched him from her high window. He replayed the event now with its fuller meanings: not him brought to his senses but her showing herself to be the more confident and intriguing of them. She had watched for him, shadows and glare delicately shrouding her while he dithered and, after laughing at his shy retreat, she must have sat right down and written her anonymous taunt on his flashy website: “Contact Julian Donahue”: “Why didn’t you press the bell? Why not pay a call?” He sat back at his desk. She had somehow learned his name, his website, his work? She had toiled like a private detective or a crystal-ball-tickling step-witch? What giant footprints and fingerprints had he left behind on coasters, on a gallery guest list? Where else? His fingers shook so he could barely dial his iPod, and he tapped for her voice to match the sight of her pixellated bursting arrival into his world.

No return email address, no signature, nowhere to reply, only pixels beautifully and originally arranged, her voice in his head, the song “Crass Porpoises” (or so her robust accent led him to believe until he reread the song list). But Julian wasn’t shaking from a desire to dash to her. She asked the question but knew the answer as well as he: he hadn’t rung the bell because that would have been a bore, to them both, and her anonymous taunt proved it, proved
her
, confirmed his best suspicions of her.

He listened to his iPod and sketched storyboards of how they could meet, but because he was a hack, all his ideas were recycled from TV and movies and his own ads. Every approach he could imagine played itself out as quickly as his impulse to ring her doorbell, and she would laugh at him as loudly as she had today. He could use one of her songs in a commercial. Paired with certain images of love and renewal, “Coward, Coward” would be quite effective. And it would certainly be a gift to her, better than bouquets. She’d be paid hefty licensing. And mainstream hits were sometimes made thanks to tasteful use in the right commercial. Have Maile contact the label, insist Miss O’Dwyer meet the director herself: “I thought this a better call to make.”

No, even that only rearranged the frames of a tolerable romantic comedy he’d sat through because Rachel liked the lead actor. She would just shake her head, as if he were one of those little boys at the club, complimenting themselves on their courage as they lost to her in cards.

HE WRESTLED THE QUESTION
for several days, then decided the problem was not in how to meet but when, and maybe even why. Why not pay a call? Because they didn’t know enough yet. There were pleasures of investigation and discovery still to be enjoyed that he’d almost squandered. She was laughing at his impatience. Something original could still occur, something neither of them had ever known, and he had nearly destroyed it. And so he made himself sit still, and he watched.

Cait flew from her front door, at the end of a leash binding her wrist, straining to remain attached to the spiked-collar-immune neck of a Great Dane the color of rain-pregnant evening clouds. The beast shook Cait in slapstick jolts up Henry Street. Through the windows of the Bangladeshi deli across from her building, the silenced picture gave the impression of a silent-film comedy.

The monstrous hound towed her to a dog park on the other side of Brooklyn Heights. White pear, pink cherry, and the hallucinatory purple of the redbud blossoms lined the streets, but the enclosed park nestled up against a tendril of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and the wind mingled truck exhaust and a blizzard of cherry blossoms onto the dogs at play.

She opened the gate, and at once her dog ran free of her into the park. “Lars! Stay!” Cait yelled at her Danish chum as he bounded off, shaking the ground, propelled by his rocket-booster genitals, to sniff the puckered back-roses of whimpering Labradoodles and Lhasapuggles, rotthuahuas, cocksunds, schnorkies, and shiht-boxes. “Well, then. Good dog,” she added and walked down the hill toward one of the seats provided to human escorts, rubbing her leash shoulder as she went. At this early hour—monastically early, considering her profession—she was one of six people watching eight dogs. She sat by herself on a bench built around a fat and ancient oak, and Julian could tell from where he was watching that she was down there singing with closed eyes to whatever her headphones were feeding her.

As he walked down the hill, he could almost hear her over the traffic, the sustained car-horns that resembled bossa nova trumpet and flute chords, the dogs barking, the jackhammers and shouted Spanish, the tires squealing like lazy fingers on guitar strings. He came closer, watched her over the fence. She was like any other introverted headphone junkie releasing a slim stream of extroversion, emoting to no audience, like teenagers all over the world, Miami girls swatting invisible crash cymbals, Mumbai boys playing feverish air sitar.

Julian entered the park through a gate behind her bench. His arrival—blocked from her by the tree and her own iPod—was noteworthy, as he had no dog, and he therefore resembled the peculiar childless gentlemen who savor an afternoon in playgrounds. He sat on the same circular bench orbiting her oak but exactly opposite her, as the planet Antichthon once vainly pursued Earth around its orbit.

With his back to their tree, he switched on his handheld memo-corder, placed it behind him and to the right. She was singing to the Smiths’ “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side.” She was, even in these circumstances, a moving vocalist, harmonizing to a tune she’d likely been listening to since she was a girl. This slow circling of each other—perhaps not unrelated to the scent inspection Lars was just then performing on a newly arrived, quivering black beagle rolled on its back—implied endlessness, no fatigue, no despair, perpetual surprise, the end of past loves’ predictive or delimiting power. This was what she wanted from him, why she asked him not to pay a call yet.

He’d never done this—sat unnoticed and painlessly extracted a sample of a woman’s privacy, like a drop of blood pricked from a sleeping fingertip, to return to her later as a gift, cut and faceted and mounted, endowed with new and complex meanings.

And, because he had never done this, he felt briefly the illusion of being cut free of his past. It was as if he had never been married and separated, never survived Carlton, never fished out and threw back bedmates, never dated girls in high school, never been in hopeless love as a boy, never found others’ declarations of deep affection for him to be suspect, pathological, annoying.