The Song is You (2009) (21 page)

And now Cait O’Dwyer had touched his marriage-bed-become
-separe’s-bed
. His merely useful piece of furniture now slightly vibrated again, flickered awake like a dubious fluorescent lightbulb. The time had come to call her, to proceed somewhere. And the rest of his world stuttered with that same hesitant light. He felt her circling him, though he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t imagining it. The new front-desk Ukrainian guarding the lobby of Julian’s office building twice reported, “A lady come to see you, Mr. Donahue.” “Message?” “No.” “Foreign?” “Difficult to say,” since anyone whose name did not end in
k
was foreign. “Red hair? Angelic face? Aura of demonic power?” Julian didn’t ask, preferring not to hear Mr. Polchuk’s confirmation or denial. His mailbox was open when he’d left it closed, his closet was closed when he’d left it open, and his jacket pocket flaps were flipped back though he was always obsessive about folding them down, and her scent would appear faintly, out of nowhere, like a crippled ghost.

He could just call. He certainly wanted her. He could even believe that he was physically capable, since her voice on a CD was more potent than any prescription at rousing him from his old torpor. But with each day that he didn’t just call her, he could hardly understand his resistance to the obvious next step. Scared of rejection, like some teenager? There was no point, as with Maile, no ending worth the trouble? No, and no. And still he did not call. It was embarrassing, the combination of immobility and ignorance of its cause.

He listened to “Burka,” applied it to their unique case, although the song dated from before their dance had begun:

In September 2001 she would have been fourteen and living in Ireland, but still he could imagine a photo that showed her appropriate response to the season.

When he decided he was being watched, the evidence could be gaudy: after a drink or two, her gaze caromed off windows and puddles. She filled gaps in his life like tar in a sidewalk. He imagined they shared the same space, just never at the same time, and he loved it. She left her tumbler of melting ice behind her, next to his bottle of Scotch, left his DVD paused at the moment the narrator says of a certain lizard, “In ten million years, perhaps humans will be just the same: self-sustaining without any males at all.”

If he wasn’t telling himself all this to feel less cowardly, she was stepping only slowly closer, not yet ready to meet, and revealing in her diagonal approach a paradoxical but irresistible need for both closeness and delay as strong and persistent as Julian’s own.

He could explain
her
hesitation, if not his. It was her fearful need for artistic inspiration, he knew. She was superstitious, he had quickly read, and she had reason to worry that her luck might not hold forever. Alec Stamford was walking proof. Cait’s Irish granny’s wailing banshees no longer haunted her, but that sort of belief still prevailed in her. Her stardom was new and fragile, her artistry still crystallizing, and Julian had provoked a song and had given advice that she kept in her candy dish. She likely felt she needed to do whatever was necessary to keep her lucky charm around, at least for now.

Being her muse was plenty, for now, but it wouldn’t last forever, he warned himself. Picasso’s muses were discarded with yesterday’s dried paint, and the next one was waiting right there, stepping over her predecessor’s crumpled form. The fuel the artist needed could not be perpetually drilled from a single human. The longer Julian could last without meeting her, the longer he would serve her needs, and she his. But he would have to leap, eventually.

All probably true, but also, he could hear his father’s voice, “cowardly and self-pitying.”

“How’d you tell her?” Julian was perhaps fourteen when he asked his father how he had broken it to the French girl he’d met at the Billie Holiday concert that he was no longer the man he used to be, might not even be the sort of man she’d want anymore. “How’d you tell her? It must have—you must have worried you were, you know…”

“Too one-legged for her? Yeah, that did occur to me.”

“And so you called? Or wrote? Or just turned up in Paris?”

“No, no, no. I was far too self-pitying for any of that. Much smarter plan: I just decided never to talk to her again, to slink back to Ohio—oh, for her own good, you see, very noble of me, nobility and self-sacrifice always a convenient self-delusion, of course—slink back to Ohio to maybe bravely kill myself or at least start drinking like a street wino.”

“What? Why?”

“Because there was nothing I could do or say or write or ask her that would be fair to ask of anyone, no way to release her without making her feel guilty, nothing to offer her in exchange for not being one of those fellows with the standard number of legs. And I was a coward. Afraid she’d say no and afraid she’d say yes but I’d never know if she did it out of pity.”

“And?”

“And your mother came to the hospital in San Diego on her own, walked in like we’d never missed a day, like we’d written, like I’d thanked her for the record, like she knew it all already. Which she usually did, your mother. But that’s the French for you.”

And so, like his father whimpering in a hospital bed, Julian didn’t call, didn’t do anything but listen to Cait’s demo, schemed how he could inspire her from a distance, waited for her to walk in with all the answers, all the future.

THE LYRICS TO
“Key’s Under the Mat” had come to Cait in pieces. The phrase about the mermaid swooning in the fountain was first, and though
swooning
had recently swum back up to the skimmable surface of her vocabulary courtesy of the swooning ghouls of the coasters, she wasn’t thinking of her sleepy Cupid, not consciously, not yet. The lyric arrived in pieces over several days, words and images and rhymes, and only very close to the end did she realize what she’d produced: an invitation to someone to break into her apartment (though it wasn’t yet addressed to anyone in particular). It was a lunatic document, and she nearly threw it away.

Then she changed her mind, decided simply to remove the more identifying details, but then she stopped again and called herself a coward. If this was what she’d been given, then she refused to allow fear to censor her, to spoil a gift like this. The hidden source that gave her these gifts was
daring
her to put something real on the line. She would sing it, as soon as Ian crafted the right setting for it.

And she would address it. The last two words that she wrote of the lyric were “Cartoon Boy.” The rhythm was nice, the hard
c
felt good at the start of a line, produced a sort of sneer and snarl to it, the sound of a challenge. Those last two words came to her late at night, walking home from the telethon, and it was obvious. He deserved a song like that. He’d certainly amused her enough to earn it, and he might even notice it. That’s the element that most appealed: the idea of him noticing in detail what she had made in detail.

He never responded, though, a week after she posted the rough take, two weeks, three: not an email, not a coaster or a report that he’d turned up at a gig, though she’d lately taken to asking bartenders to flag her if a guy answering Mick’s description of Coaster Man turned up, in the back all by himself. She had lost him somewhere, revealed something somehow repellent to him, after he’d taken those lovely photos. Pity He filled a niche, to say the least. She missed his attention, more than she liked to admit, missed his criticism and his ear and his eyes on her, sometimes sang imagining he was watching her, unseen.

“WHO WAS SHE TALKING ABOUT
in that
Times
suck-up? The one who’s a remarkable adviser?”

“I thought it was you,” said New Bass, Cait having executed, like a grumpy Tudor, his predecessor, posthumously redubbed First Bass.

“It’s the guy with those cartoons,” Drums murmured, his speech very slow, and no one, as was very often the case when he was high, totally understood what he was talking about. “Ask Mick. He showed me these coasters.” He paused, then said very methodically, “Say to him, to Mick, I mean, say, ‘Drums told me to tell you to tell me about the cartoons you told Drums about that one time, because I want to know, and Drums couldn’t provide me with that information, and so you can see my predicament, with Drums … not being … a totally reliable source of… ‘” Drums fell back as if his death sentence had just been commuted.

Ian nodded, as if paying no attention, a man already forgetting what he had asked only in polite passing. But he stopped in, alone, at the Rat that same night, a Wednesday, and again on Thursday, late, but Mick wasn’t working the bar either night. Cait then had two nights for them in Jersey (during which he’d first noticed the phrase “Cartoon Boy” in the lyric for “Key” and became truly pissed off), and the Rat didn’t cater to Sunday drinkers, so he couldn’t try again until Monday, and then it was only to discover that, the Saturday before, when Ian was playing that frat party at Rutgers, Mick had quit the Rat to show more commitment to the Lay Brothers. Ian couldn’t conceivably pass off as accidental a visit to Mick’s apartment, and so his interest in “the guy with those cartoons” faded by necessity, until two weeks later when Cait came over to work.

She dropped her droopy spangled gypsy bag on the floor and pulled a cardboard tube from it, tossed it to him, walked to his fridge, said, “For the poster.”

The shaken tube surrendered a mock-up of the tour ad. It was mostly the headliner’s, but the bottom fifth was theirs. Cait had the lips to choose a photo only of herself, rather than one of the band shots they’d had taken, at some joint expense, last winter. Fine, Ian thought, the nature of the world and their future clear enough for those with brains, and those shots had First Bass in them anyhow. “Who took it? It’s not bad of you,” to say the least.

“Oh, long story,” she said. “But I want your approval for it before I tell their management to print it.”

“Thanks.” He regretted that. She had worded it just so: “I want your approval” was the compliment of an employer, not the necessity of a partner, and “Thanks” was the flattered chirp of an employee. It was a hell of a photo: her eyes were closed, she was outside, in front of her own building, stretching not as if she were posing, like a supposed candid, but like she walked around all the time with a very funny secret. “Why are you wearing a Lay Brothers shirt?”

“I love those monks.”

“Hm. Yeah, I’d go to this girl’s show. Who took it?”

“This, ah, this …” She leaned farther into the fridge, as if tracking a regal, fleet-footed beer, and Ian understood the tremendous sensation just then tickling his spine and face: he’d never before seen her embarrassed. He only had her voice and ass to judge from, but he was sure, and a spectacular detonation flared in one corner of his universe. She finally emerged, wily beer captured. “Where have you stashed the bottle opener, you criminal?”

“You have to give a photo credit on the poster.”

Her smile as she stood there—beer bottle in one hand, opener in the other—said that she knew everything he was thinking, and he amused her, but now for the good of everyone he should stop. “I suppose we do. We are very fortunate that you read law.”

“Who took the photo?” He tried to make it sound funny, but it was just so plainly one repetition too many. He would have given a great deal to go back and not ask again.

She knew that, too. That mock-stern voice of hers would close the topic, and he could never broach it again without triggering a full-blown hurriCait. Sure enough: “Do you feel like working today? Or shall we sit around and bleat at each other like rabid sheep?”

“Whatever. Pull up a chair, diva.” Fair weather restored, he played a pattern he’d thought of just before falling asleep the night before, that he’d crossed the room to record with his eyes still shut. She said, very sincerely, “Mmm. I like that.” Those words, delivered in that tone of voice, composed one of his greatest joys, one that would still excite him long after her departure. It was, he imagined, like waking in new sunlight to the waking face of your beloved.

THEY BOOKED
six summer-session colleges in the Northeast as the top of a three-band slate. The money bumped up nicely, and every night they’d sit in a back room or outside on an upstairs deck overlooking a parking lot while the Trouser Dilemma and then the Lay Brothers played for growing crowds of increasingly drunk college kids, many of whom knew especially who Cait was. They moved a lot of merchandise.

Before going on, Ian would read or make calls or strum an unplugged guitar. New Bass and Drums would wander off to smoke this or that. But Cait would just grow more and more energetic as her time approached. She might try to nap, or have something to eat, but neither sleep nor food had any effect on the change that came over her as they waited. By the time they took the stage, Cait would have been sitting out of sight for a couple of hours, and her attention would be distilled to a highly concentrated serum that animated her limbs and face just beyond normal. Ian could watch its level climb behind her eyes.

And she glowed for them, these college drunks—Ian had to admit it. Maybe, in a long hot summer, it was just this fleeting precise difference in age between them and her, between nineteen and twenty-two: she was older, but barely; she knew things but had not yet forgotten things; she had already started what they were nervous to begin.

At the tour’s end, in Storrs, Connecticut, they finished the last tune, waved good night, and marched upstairs to a cramped office to decide if there would be an encore—the silliest of rock rituals made sillier still by the complete horror of their backstage: no one wanted to be up there; applause would hardly be necessary to draw anyone out of it. Still, they huddled up in the little loft, waiting for Cait to judge the volume and sincerity of the stomping and shouts below. When she deemed the request sufficiently credible, submissive, and ecstatic, they descended, and the applause broke from rhythmic request into free, relieved thanks.