The Song is You (2009) (20 page)

“Cartoon Boy, the key’s under the mat / So what do you think about that?”
The references to King Arthur and Moses were quite to the point: if, in fact, there was a key under that mat, it was only meant for one male hand to lift, and Julian envisioned his skin melting against iron if he was not the chosen. He decided to leave. He knocked on the door, even though he’d seen her go, and he saw that there was something disordered in the action: knocking for someone who wasn’t there, as if a movie or time were running in reverse. Then he raised the mat, and there, in a recession in the center wood beam of the floor, lay a small silver key. He decided to leave it there and ask her out after her next gig. “Lars,” Julian said as the key slid into its lock, turned, and then renestled itself under the mat, “I’m told you don’t bite.” He would send her flowers with a note to call him. It was time to leave and go home. He pushed open her door.

He had badly underremembered the scale of the beast standing in wait. “Who’s a good boy?” he asked the pony, not at all sure of the answer. Lars sat before him as high as Julian’s chest. “Are you a good boy, Lars? I brought you a Bangladeshi dog-cookie.” Lars poked the intruder in the stomach with his square black face and was impressed by the resulting treat, allowed the burglar to scratch his chin, though he would prod him forcefully in the groin to regain his distractible attention.

Julian stood swaying in her living room, horrified for her that some maniac could do this, too, and he wondered if he should somehow warn her. To the right were two windows looking down over Henry Street, the lacy tops of green trees fringing her sill. He had seen those windows from below the day he approached her building but backed away. Across the room, a computer was on, and stacks of CDs on the floor skylined the front of a sway-bellied couch next to a flea market sailor’s chest with candlesticks and, high on a non-WFP mantel out of Great Dane range, sat a plastic bowl of graying M&M’s. The room’s entire left wall, from floor to ceiling, was a single mirror reflecting the whole space, the windows and computer and CDs and Cait herself. Cait herself. Cait hers—

No, not a mirror but a painting of a mirror, complete with the mirror’s frame, and only a few inaccuracies: the painted trees at the windows were white with last month’s blossoms; the painted table was bare; the computer was off in the painting, but in the room an out-of-date (too angularly pixellated) version of the Windows logo roamed the black screen in restless sleep; and Cait herself, her hand on Lars’s head, stood leaning against the wall between the two windows, where Julian now stood, patting Lars and considering her reflection of him.

She was not on the street below. He was giddy, as unsure of himself as a sixteen-year-old boy, astonished by fortune and possibilities that he couldn’t clearly imagine but that promised life-shifting tectonics. He also wondered why she wanted him to do this, what test was here, what details she had thought relevant. He walked to the computer, Lars matching his gait, starting and stopping with him, as if the dog were leading him or mocking him. Julian pressed the space bar with his thumb, rolled it side to side to leave as clear a print as possible, should she care to dust for him. The screen came to life with programs running, Windows open to let in a bracing breeze: her iTunes library, paused midsong, thirty-one seconds into something called “Love Theme from Dog Park.” The Play button produced her, singing that Smiths song with a few dogs in the background. When they barked, Lars whined at Julian’s feet, and he imagined her foreseeing his every step and discovery and so drugging the animal to allow him a leisurely inspection of her home. The music was strangely haunting in the previous silence. It animated the objects in the room, the photographs and desktop sculptures of Irish saints and Incan fertility goddesses, the pink-and-green Play-Doh bestiary. He turned off the song.

He expanded her email. She had been writing a message, still un-addressed and unsent: “I wanted to know the minute you took the plunge,” she had begun to the unnamed recipient. “You’ve waited so long, so did you find what you were looking for? Don’t think—just answer.” He added his business website to her Internet Favorites, labeled it Remarkable Fellow, set it ahead of the
Irish Times
and the hourly updated European soccer standings and the site for Glentoran in the Irish Premier League, a link opening directly to the bio, statistics, and uncanny photo of midfielder Septimus O’Dwyer.

The slightly open door to the right of the painting invited him into her bedroom. He stopped and considered whether she wanted him to do this and what sort of pledge level between friend and patron she was creating for him, and he walked through.

She lived in a one-bedroom, like so many people. How strange the silence (except for the manual typewriter of Lars’s nails on the pine floor), how odd that here, of all the planet, music was not flowing into him, cooking up longing or regret or possibility. Her bed demanded most of the small room. Even pressed against the wall under the one window, it barely allowed for a dresser and the closet door’s swinging requirements. Posters: Leonard Cohen as a young man, the iconic images of James Joyce (bespectacled, mustached, fedora’d) and Samuel Beckett (carved tree-bark skin between black turtleneck and thorny crown of silver hair). Dresser-top doodads: a tiny Irish flag claiming dominion over a pot of African violet, a diptych frame next to a Diptyque scented candle, three-quarters used. It was the same brand and fragrance Julian’s mother used to have sent from Paris, the smell of when he was five years old. Here, of all the places in the universe, smelled of his own childhood, of the first woman he had ever loved, as if Cait had wanted him to discover her while he was fully aware of every stage of his life before her, to contradict his cautious male impulse to hide pieces of himself. He lifted the candle to his nose and in his mother’s favorite fig scent any thought of tactics fell away.

In the diptych frame: Cait’s parents or grandparents, infinitely far from each other in their respective gold-painted rectangles. He looked for her in their faces but could tease out no resemblance, took that as further evidence of her self-invention. A cut-glass candy dish heaped with chains and rings and a dozen cartoons—pen and ink on coaster—illustrating her step-by-step development into a goddess of song. A crucifix on a chain hanging from a dresser-drawer knob, and everywhere candles: heights and girths planted on every surface, fresh and melted, pillars and tapers, spears and spirals, on the dresser, the sill, the floor. The bed was unmade, two pillows, but only one indented. The other was perpendicular to the first, set lengthwise along the bed’s middle; she had held it to her while she slept alone. And so he placed it beside hers and made in it the impression of another head while Lars tilted his own.

The fig candle predominated, but beneath it drifted subordinate scents: the smell of high-story spring, the trees above traffic. There was another, though, something else, stronger in her closet, hiding in the hanging dresses and blouses, stronger still in the foaming dresser drawers.

A ringing froze Julian in place, bent over. “I’m listening,” Cait said, as if awaiting an implausible explanation. “Cait! Alec! I’m in the ‘hood. Right outside, actually, thought I’d see if you were about. Call when you get a minute. Something pretty groovy just came up, might float your boat. Peace out, girlfriend.”

Down on the sidewalk, beyond the greenery, peeked at from a flattened-spy wall embrace, Alec Stamford—pest, rival, or cautionary symbol—was pocketing his phone and walking into the Bangladeshi deli. As his foreshortened form vanished, Julian, shoved prematurely out of his hyperaware walking-dream ecstasy and back into the mortal world of qualms, ramifications, and appearances, suddenly hearing the window for his safe departure beginning to scrape shut, looked up and saw, straight across the tops of the trees, a little girl watching him from the highest apartment above the Bangladeshis’. She wore a black baseball cap with a white x on it and a red T-shirt with the top half of Che Guevara’s face, below which she turned into red brick. She waved at Julian as if they were old friends up here, or as if she often waved to the person at this window. He waved back, a little uneasy, his powers of invisibility flickering in and out of control.

He waited out Stamford from the tea shop’s shadows, wiping his brow, browsing the cosies, cozying up to the owner, owning up to a lifelong fascination with Irish teas, teasing the blazing blazer pocket full of furious lace he’d borrowed as a souvenir. When Stamford finally abandoned his post, not two minutes before Cait turned the corner to fetch her dog for a walk and old Mrs. Harris told her she’d had a visitor, Julian left Tea Putz with five boxes of Irish breakfast. The building behind him, Lars mute at the door, the magic key’s glow seeping around the edges of dour Mat, Julian sat exhausted and damp, as after vigorous exercise, on the Promenade and stared at the jigsaw puzzle of Manhattan across the river. Cait was still in his nose, barely. He struggled to retain her smells and to comb out his knotted feelings: beauty implies genetic suitability implies wise evolutionary choices, he thought, a little desperately. Beauty imparts status on the male who possesses it; what more need be said of shampoo models? But he wasn’t convinced those old ideas applied here. The comparison that next struck him in his enervated state, that made undeniable tingling sense, was not biological: he had risen high, to an altar in the sky, accompanied by an animal incarnation, and there he’d been granted a glimpse into the mysterious cult of a unique goddess. He’d been surrounded by her incense and icons and hymns, none of which had much to do with the televised, explicable apes and CGI dinosaurs that had for so long soothed his despair and buttressed his crumbling apathies.

This was how life could feel now, again or for the first time. Some part of him insisted upon it: he’d been pardoned up there, readmitted to a world from which he’d been brutally exiled. When he’d blithely lived in that world, he’d been too young to know what life could do to you. Now he’d been given the chance to start again, wiser but not paralyzed by wisdom or pain. Now he desired, deeply, and therefore deserved another chance.

He tapped at his iPod, feeling within a note or two whether each random offering could provide what he was craving. Funk, punk, mope, pop, bop, hip-hop, swing, cool, acid, house, Madchester, Seattle, Belleville, New Orleans, Minneapolis white, Minneapolis black, Ivory Coast, Blue Note groove, neo-baroque soundtrack, jam band, impressionism, hard-core, cowboy crooner, rai, gypsy, tango, foxtrot, skip, skip, skip, his temper rising, and then he felt it, just the opening chords, before he could have identified the musician or said that this was what he needed. He stopped punching his iPod’s face, and he leaned back on the bench and wondered, marveled, felt the world slowly reopening to him.

A SINGLE PAGE
on Julian’s pillow—nice calligraphy, pulpy artisanal paper:

He sniffed the page: traces of her, maybe. Cait had discovered his home and the mountain-range profile of his key, was looking for clues about him, too. And what had she concluded? He struggled to understand why she picked this poem: She feared that she would mistreat him? Was warning him of the regret
he
would suffer if he mistreated her? The forced interpretations trickled away, and he clung instead to the excitement: she’d been in
his
room, sniffed
his
life, touched
his
bed.

His and Rachel’s bed. “It matters,” Rachel had said the day she moved in, turning her back on his previous bed. She jerked her thumb at it, behind her. “That one goes and takes all its moaning memories with it,” she declared. “Today, fiance, today.” They went shopping that same afternoon. He was eager to comply, certain this action would capture and imprison his elusive monogamy. He had—he recalled now as he traced his finger across Cait’s handwriting of the puzzling poem—loved the idea of
bed shopping
with his last woman, his death-do-us-part woman, his only woman. They bounced across a department store of mattresses and springy boxes, sank into Swedish foam, stared up together hand in hand through starry canopies, rode carved sleighs through Russian snows, settled at last on her first choice.