The Song is You (2009) (26 page)

She was biological, he could finally see, just like the others. He could discern her microscopic unimportance. She made sounds—imaginary things, just nibbling gigabytes—that brushed and made tremble, say, two million sets of eardrum membranes. Of those, perhaps half a million recognized them as her sounds. Two hundred thousand liked those sounds enough to sing along at the chorus. Fifty thousand people would love her music as he did, would listen to it, as he had, gazing at a sunset and letting their minds wander across pasts and futures. A full thousand could conceivably spend time fantasizing about her. And in case of an outbreak of plague, she and they and he would all swell up with pustules and vomit and bleed from the ears and lose control of their spasming, perforating bowels and cry out to a deaf deity, and her digital recordings would be less permanent on a depopulated planet than a condominium or a car or a car commercial. Humans would evolve and adapt. None would credit her music for the species’ survival.

And in his silence, as if she felt him fleeing, she pursued him. A movie set occupied his street for three days and duly covered the hot July sidewalk with a blanket of plastic snow, and more plastic snow drifted down from a cable-suspended stainless-steel trough onto the heads of two lovers weeping and shivering for the giant camera. Two doors farther up the street, a plastic cafeteria tray of snow was waiting on his doorstep. Written on its surface in a yellow too dark and bright to be natural (and of which a whiff proved to be a lemon wood polish) were the words “Always wanted to be boy. Am [illegible] U R” before space ran out.

Days later, rainy, unseasonably cold, and the condensation on his downstairs window, when lit from inside, revealed faint inverted letters. He held a mirror to them: “Will you fly with me?” or perhaps “All too fluvial, ned.” Or a profile of a skinny man on a skinny horse, hugging a flimsy lance.

He received a call from a bookstore he’d never visited: his special order had arrived. At the store was a sealed envelope with his name and the words “For when I’m on the road,” as well as the collected Yeats and a history of Irish music. It was the frisky romantic acrobatics of a very young woman, an undergrad, unfinished. She was half his age and now seemed eager to prove it. He had the Yeats already, a gift from Rachel, but he bought both books anyhow and walked in sunlight, past the florist’s shop where the manager mopped rose water, each stroke of the mop across the threshold ringing her store’s visitor chime again and again, and he reached a little park near his home, a garden and a minor playground Carlton had tentatively explored, a ring of benches tucked between a mews alley and a curtain of millionaires’ brownstones. Under the fragrant branches, he opened the envelope and found in it a bookmark, a painted panorama of Irish countryside. He examined her gift, the books and bookmark, looked up at the short yellow slide Carlton had braved. Rachel had restrained Julian, held his arm so he would let Carlton stand up on his own when the little guy had tripped right there and Julian was about to rush to him. Rachel squeezed his arm, wouldn’t let him interfere. “Baby, you have to let him fall.
He’ll
be all right, but you …” She laughed at the pain on Julian’s face.

He looked away from the excruciating memory, opened the Yeats, closed it again.

Reconstituting a goddess from a striving girl could not be wished for, or awaited. Julian sincerely floated out to an arctic sea, a little mournful, unpleasantly wiser, past puzzled polar bears. For a couple of weeks he avoided Cait’s music, her newspaper mentions, her Web existence (difficult because an award show’s nominations were announced, and she was in all the chatter).

And then came the postcard. Its picture was of Paris: an old man and woman are walking down the sidewalk, arm in arm. He wears a beret and with his outside hand covers hers, presumably his wife of sixty-some years. Their heads angle in toward each other; whispered comfort is implied. Across the street, two German soldiers walk in the opposite direction, rifles slung, suspicion and fear on their faces. On the back of the card, next to the stylized calligraphy of his name and address, was only a single large question mark. He sat and looked at the picture for long minutes, almost put her music on, wondered if she could really see as far into the future as that. And if she could? She could see a life after her stardom extinguished? With him?

That night he opened a book he’d been reading halfheartedly—an account of a World War Two rescue operation—and noticed the bookmark, the Irish fields. It was the gift, for a dollar or two, of quiet intimate suggestion. Here was an item she knew he would handle only when alone, when his concentration was heightened. He held it lightly by the edges to examine under lamplight the details of the trees and falling mists. He turned it over as the book gathered speed, then leapt from his lap, and he read on its reverse the name of the painter and its plain title:
View of Co. Wicklow in Autumn Rain, 1909
. He looked at the postcard and bookmark next to each other.

He worked late, storyboards spread before him on the bed, and he sketched out the beauty shots of an ordinary coupe whose price was scheduled to fall just after Labor Day. Across the room, an old documentary about Billie Holiday filled the dead hours of an entertainment-news channel. The camera panned over still photos of her, and they had a few grainy interviews he hadn’t seen, her in furs talking to grainy men with 1950s hair and voices, leaning forward to push the microphone toward her. “Well, we’re going to be making another record with the Ray Ellis Orchestra next year,” she said quietly, her voice rough and slow, but the narrator corrected her, “It was not to be. Holiday was admitted to New York Metropolitan Hospital with kidney trouble four days later, and her last breaths were only weeks away.” There was footage of her funeral, some talk of her lasting influence, and then a transition to Jim Morrison, dead too young, skanky Pere-Lachaise pilgrims. Julian fell asleep. The TV flicked blue onto the photo on the wall of the tango singer Tino Rossi’s funeral in Paris, the elderly Frenchwoman weeping, excess mascara carried down her face like soil in floodwater.

The caller ID read
BLOCKED
. The clock insisted it was three in the morning. He could have slept through it.

“Did you by any chance watch the piece about Billie Holiday tonight?” Cait asked.

“I did. What time is it? Where are you?”

“I watched very carefully, but there’s something I can’t find out about her that I want to know.”

“I happen to have a family connection to her. I’ll tell you someday.”

“Do you think she was afraid she’d lose her talent?”

“She never did lose it, in my opinion. I prefer the late recordings.”

“I agree. But my question is, did she
fear
losing it? Did she take steps to protect it, or did she just hope, wake up every morning relieved she still had it?”

“The drugs may have been an expression of fear.”

“I doubt it. But listen: If she was frightened, does that prove that she was strong, because she overcame fear? Or does fear mean that some honest part of you knows you’re weak and basically false, and a true talent like hers would never feel fear?”

“Are you all right?”

“Please try to answer. Please.”

“Okay, okay.” Tino Rossi’s weeping fan. Old Parisian couple in love, occupied despite Nazis. View of County Wicklow, 1909. Red velour photo album, its spine worn white.

“Please. The truth.”

“The truth. The truth is, anyone who puts so much of herself and her life into art as you do must naturally fear any failure in that art as a potential threat to your life. And so you protect your art more than you protect your health or the common forms of happiness the rest of us have. And you probably have this in common with every artist you admire, including her.”

“Oh.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’ve missed you, Julian. Are you still around or no?”

“I am. Just a little confused, I think.”

“That can happen. Should we stay away from each other still? Seems a little daft now. No, wait, don’t answer that. I’m only in town for a minute, and then I’ll be far away for a bit. That should suit you, eh? Don’t answer that either. Good night.”

“Listen: please be careful with yourself during all this,” he said, more like a father than a lover.

“That’s a pledge.”

He allowed himself a 3:30
A.M
. glimpse of her world, read the latest news on her site, came upon the vile doubtfulguest: “All the trappings of your relentless will to power, Cait O’Dwyer, nauseate me. What are you so afraid of? That we won’t listen to you if you don’t put up photos of yourself in underpants? We
all
wear underpants, honey. The 95 reviews you so religiously post? You have a little talent, I won’t deny it. But you must be one very frightened little girl to bet all of this on it.” She must have read that tonight and called him.

He went back to sleep, his father and Billie Holiday very quietly on the speakers. He dreamt of Cait, no surprise, but of Carlton, too. Cait was encouraging Carlton to be brave, to step forward and shake his father’s hand. “Go ahead now, little man, go on.”

Rachel and Julian had thrown a large party for Carlton’s second birthday, really a party for adults, a good party, unless Rachel had already been sleeping with one of the guests. That, too, hardly mattered now. Two weeks later Carlton was in a hospital, dying from that microscopic attacker in his blood, unnoticed until then by parents and pediatrician alike, all distracted by a different microscopic attacker in his ear, distracted just two days too long, and by then they were in a hospital with wooden trains with faces and chipped paint, which fit on tracks that could be hooked together in four or five combinations, none of which interested Carlton, pale and half-asleep, though Julian built him railroad after railroad in as many shapes as he could; one of them had to be the one to win Carlton’s winning giggle, and Julian held the locomotive in his wet palm, and bright blue flakes of paint came off on his skin, and Rachel sat beside the bed and stroked the tiny hand, out of which grew the red tube and the white tube and the mushrooms of tape.

Three-year-old Carlton was not as clear a character as the twelve-or twenty-year-olds. Carlton’s sporting prowess, his unique friendship and secret chats with his uncle Aidan, his first commonplace photography, his discomfiting and heartbreaking questions about girls: these Julian had foreseen. But Carlton at three—like the child holding his mother’s hand next to Julian the next evening on the Twenty-third Street platform—was an animal he couldn’t quite imagine. “Daddy!” the boy yelled as a man stepped off the arriving train but just laughed and kept walking. “No, Daddy’s at the office,” said the child’s mother as they boarded. Julian sat down again on the bench, let the F train roar away without him, and rummaged through his iPod’s memories. He ran his fingers through eight thousand songs until Cait arrived in his ears and sang to him about how he felt about Carlton as a three-year-old. He replayed the song again and again, now on the next train, turning up the volume to counteract the rails and the screech and the boom box on the floor, not obviously anyone’s, playing a Puccini aria. A passing A train startled and glowed, one track over, the old-cinema flicker of two trains going nearly, but not exactly, the same speed, faces six feet away, inspectable but silent, an inaccessible, parallel world, unreal in the flip-book frames: the Hasidim reading a pocket-size Pentateuch, the would-be model with her portfolio artfully ignoring male attention, the thirty-year-old still dressed like a college kid, the pregnant girl hand in hand with her mother, a bald man in horizontal-striped sailor’s shirt and vertical-striped clown’s pants, Carlton in a stroller laughing, Rachel looking over her thin black rectangular glasses at a file, Cait staring at him as their trains clicked good-bye, and Julian continued on alone into the girdered darkness.

Back on a Brooklyn sidewalk, he replayed the song again and heard for the first time, in the background of the lyric, a sample of distant thunder, a haunting effect he could scarcely believe he’d never noticed before. He pulled the song back a few seconds but couldn’t find the sound again before his iPod’s screen flashed a sketch of a dying battery, then went blank. The sky opened up and released a torrent of hot rain. Julian sprinted the last two blocks home, up his stairs and, still dripping, sat his iPod on its projection throne and played the song again. It had lost—Cait had lost—none of her power for the dozen repetitions. She had only been tightening her grip on him when he’d thought himself drifting away from her reach. He dropped onto the floor in a spreading pool of rainwater and gathered in his limbs, and felt he might throw up, but then sobbed instead.

He pulled the red velour album off the shelf but did not open it, only rocked and wept and wiped rain off its cover and wished he could hold his son. Despair—despair beyond the ability of music to convert into art—shook him so hard that he could not breathe, and when he finally gasped for air, his first thought was the wish that Cait could see him, be with him right then, see how well she understood him and how well he understood her, how he looked at this moment that they had created together, as if her beauty and youth could kill the pain that her music had unleashed in him.

He watched her on the telethon. Her chest swelled, and her eyes closed, and he opened the album.

Photographs of joy: a bear, a balloon, a bottle, a baby, a new family. This was doubly an illusion: raindrops of parental happiness had sprinkled over seas of murky sleeplessness, cyclonic frustration, snipping at each other, dark jokes about catching Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and these carefully selected photos—propaganda for happiness—portrayed almost the opposite of what a yearlong film would have revealed, and Julian hated himself for everything he had missed, for the unforgivable crimes of inattention and self-absorption and the end of that boy. The album was a lie, too, because Carlton was, of course, not, and Julian was not a father, and corny missing-limb parallels occurred to him, and he grunted at them as his fingers glided over Carlton’s plastic-coated faces, and Cait sang,
“Leave it out in the rain and let time surprise you”
and the picture of Carlton at four months trying out an early smile was not the stab in the eye that Julian had long feared, nor the opium self-delusion, effective for only a second’s high, that his son was still alive. It was something else: Carlton was still gone, but the pictures made Julian happy nevertheless. The necessary catalyst was Cait. That woman, as a whole person—the breath, the voice, the body, the spirit and soul—made him feel this way, and could, perhaps, always make him feel that Carlton was a present joy in his life, not a semisweet torture from his past or a future stolen from him. He could believe, with Cait in his life, that he could be free and tethered, young and old, joyful and mourning, forgiven. The applauding thunder—outside, real—was near enough to shake the windows.