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Authors: Arthur Phillips

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The Song is You (2009) (3 page)

BOOK: The Song is You (2009)
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The muscle-clumped bonsai barman jerked his chin toward the back of the room, where peeling blue painter’s tape on the floor and an array of monitor speakers defined a trapezoidal stage, held by instruments but no humans. A woman’s scream rang out, twice and then a third time until a girl opened her phone. “I’m at the Rat!” she shouted into it. “Where are you? I
know
it’s snowing!” Easily the oldest in the room by a decade or two, Julian turned down the hall next to the stage. Under a single bulb and a reproduced poster for a Hendrix concert he was old enough to have attended as an infant, someone had written on the wall a long passage in Greek, and then some sharpie had added in English, “That’s not funny, Stavros. I’m gonna kick your Sparta-loving ass.”

Across from the phone were two doors, plainly the facilities, but the first bore the fussily hand-painted words in gold
D. MELANOGASTER
under a picture of some sort of fly, washing/soiling its forelegs, but offering no evidence of gender. The second door boasted the same delicate script,
C. SORDELLII
, and an illustration of, maybe, a nest of worms, even less gender-specific, if possible. Julian opted for the worms, only to be charged by the reflection of a young woman exiting a neon-pink stall and closing the flaps of her jeans. The sight of her hands on the silver buttons filled his vision, and then she was yelling over his downcast, retreating apology, “Can’t you bloody read?”

On the wall over the urinal was posted the Rat Calendar of upcoming acts. He didn’t know
any
bands anymore: 12 Angry Mental Patients, the Youthful Mouthful, the Hungarian Veterinarians, Dystotheque, Lisping Picts, Spermicidal Tendencies, Imaginary Wife, the Long Purples, Home School Class Slut, the Deranged Curates, Girl Urologist, Weepy Fag.

He paid his toiletry debt with a drink at the end of the bar farthest from the stage. He examined the home-burned demo CDs for sale in a yellow cardboard wine box: Cait O’Dwyer,
Your Very Own Blithering Idiot
. He intended to leave after the beer, anticipated taking a sentimental walk with his iPod. The club kept filling. He grew older with each arrival. He had accepted that he was older than baseball players (even knuckleballers), older than astronauts, older than
Playboy
models, older than rock stars and Oscar-winning directors, but now he was reminded that he was older than people who went to nightclubs to hear live music, as his parents used to do. He calculated to be sure: yes, he was older than his father had been in those memories of his parents going out on the town. He wrestled with his coat, and then a band was taking the stage at the far end of the room. Julian recognized her jeans from the pink stall.

The rules of this game had not changed in the years since Julian used to club. The band enacted the archetypal tuning ritual: the fuzz of a guitar plug tickling its metal hole, about to be clicked home; the drummer adjusting his snare, testing his work with iambic 1-
2
—pause—1-
2
‘s; the excessively hilarious in-jokes between bassist and drummer; the strained chumminess distinguishing those on one side of the tape from those on the other. But then no shadow of artificiality darkened the girl singer’s face when she stepped across the boundary, the last of the four, touched with the tip of her leather boot the set list taped to the floor by a monitor speaker prostrate before her, and cooed to her guitarist, “Play well, please, you shit.”

She was, that first night, still local. She led a local band in a local gig at a local bar. She was of the neighborhood, despite her obvious foreignness: in her Irish accent she made a joke about a health-code-cracking restaurant up the street. Nearly half her set was covers, but the crowd knew her originals well enough to shout along with the choruses. She sang with her eyes closed, and her dark red hair fell over her face until she pushed it away with both hands. Julian stood at the back, near the door, vaguely suspicious (at least to himself) because of his innumerable, rimy years, and she sang, a coincidence,

“You stood in the back
You didn’t know why
I could have reached out
I should have reached out.”

All these kids paid her a tribute in attention they would not have paid some debutante desperate for their love. They craved
her
attention; Julian could see it on the boys’ faces, and the girls’. Her star was rising, and confused resentment mingled with the crowd’s desire for her. There were grumblings of complaint. Two boys next to him could be heard briefly between songs: “She used to be so righteous. I saw her last year. She just
did
not care what you thought,” griped one, studying her despite himself, his artisanal pilsener, ironically named, pinched between two knuckles at groin level. Julian had cast boys like this to advertise beer like that.

“She’s changed?” he prodded the kids.

The boy explained before the guitar drowned his voice: “Signed.”

Her implicit mercantile sluttishness: Julian heard it already, that first snowy night, autopsied by a flanneled adolescent Julian had helped create, all because this Irish girl singing to fifty people (happy to come out in the world-erasing snow for her) had been signed to make a CD that would likely sell 118 copies.

Julian Donahue was a director, and he watched, like a director, to see what people liked now and why, silently edited her performance. The outside edges of her hands were pronounced and long. They gave her gestures an extra grace and expressivity. The intricately inked forearm and the white T-shirt worn with no bra so that the occasional implication of her breasts skimming the unseen surface of the cotton (probably lit like the inside of a tent on a summer day) carried the force of a whispered obscenity. She held the mike with both hands and bent her body to the left, a rock-girl standby since Janis Joplin at least. Julian knew she meant for men to imagine she was singing to them but kept her eyes closed or stared just over their heads so she could deny responsibility.

He hadn’t been to a show like this in years, but they were still the same. The Vegas lounge singer looks each supper clubber in the eye, flirts with a front-row gentleman while the rest of the audience laughs, and no one is fooled, no one is hurt, nothing is at risk behind the sequins. The rock girl, though, is at risk, and so is the flanneled fool who wishes she’d open her eyes and look at him. These boys were going to be absorbed, soon, into larger crowds of other boys harboring the same fantasies, nauseous with desires indistinguishable from their own, and they resented it.

It was nearly impossible for Julian to form a judgment of the actual music under these conditions—a first exposure to the songs, distorted through backfeeding amps, clattering glasses and bottles, people shouting at the barman for attention—and so he bought the demo CD because she was pretty and to try to keep up, a little, for work. Maybe she was someone he should have heard of. He’d ask Maile.

The singer covered the mike and yelled something at her bass player, chastising him for some musical misstep. He took a step back, looking down and off to the side. “By any chance, does anyone here know how to play the bass?” she asked the crowd after that song. “It would be a great help to us up here.” Even her bassist laughed, then closed his eyes, nodding.

When she was a little out of breath, her T-shirt swelled with every inhalation. Julian wasn’t immune to a beautiful young woman inflating like a bellows before an orange fire, but his reflex after attraction was to look for the biological meaning in the attraction, encoded but only temporarily mysterious. Some canny evolutionist could explain: The display of expansive lung capacity implies an ability to carry offspring to term? Expanding the chest is a sign that the female is seasonably warm? Even an actress drawing a deep breath to settle herself before a take extolling shower cleanser could have the same effect on Julian as this songstress, charging through her torn-jeans maneuvers, back-to-back with her guitarist/likely boyfriend. There had been a moment, a day or two before, when a coffee-shop counter girl suddenly jerked herself back and expanded in a prelude to an enormous yawn, and Julian had had the impulse to spread his hands over the opening accordion of her ribs, and he’d understood, a little, what promised delights those scarlet-throated frogs on TV all discerned in one another’s erotic balloonery.

The singer’s eyes were now half-closed, hooded with sleepy availability. He had been distracted briefly by lung capacity but soon saw the obvious: singers’ breasts heave; they perspire; songbirds throw back their heads and writhe, howl, shut their eyes. Certain mystifications drift around singers, but they are merely people of a certain talent, one being the evocation of sexual desire through methods most of us cannot duplicate: crank mating calls, evolutionary teasing for the price of the cover and a two-drink minimum.

He stepped back into the silent white street, bought the toilet paper, returned home, where his brother, an uninvited guest again, was lying on his couch watching a
Jeopardy!
rerun. “I opened some wine,” Aidan said, then shouted at the TV with cold disgust, “Who are the Picts?”

3

“SO OKAY
. We’re done, and you are coming along
great
. I want you to remember what it felt like when you played without looking at your hands. It felt great, no? Oh, I have a present for you.” Cait fished a CD from her bag and gave it to the girl. “In my opinion, these are some of the best rock songs with piano. And the very best one is a girl playing, you’ll notice. They all learned, just like you, scales and chords and etudes first. Pick your favorite of these and try to play what you hear, without reading anything, as part of your drills, okay?”

“Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Boo.”

“Boo who?”

“Why are you crying?”

“Oh,
very
funny.
So
amusing. You could be on television. If they had a show about
stupid
jokes. Say, do you want to play me the piece you wrote?”

The girl shook her head very slightly but very fast, like a hummingbird with a bad attitude.

“Please, oh please?” Cait poked her. “Pretty please? Really? Well, okay.” Cait put her own hands on the keys, played just in the range she could reach without crossing in front of her pupil. “This is a very old Irish song that my da used to play me. Do you want to hear the words? It’s not a very happy song.”

“The good ones never are, are they?” the little girl asked in all seriousness, and when Cait laughed, she looked hurt and asked, “What’s funny?”

“You are. I know what you mean, but you’re
wrong
. There’s loads of great happy songs. Listen to that CD. You’ll see.”

“Why do you have to quit?”

“Oh, baby, now you
are
going to make me boo-hoo. I’m going to be traveling too much, that’s all. Wouldn’t be fair to you or my other tinklers. I’ll still
see
you. And Sarah’s a mate—she’s a really good teacher. You’ll love her.”

“Will she sing with me?”

“No. In fact, that reminds me. I have to warn you. Don’t, under any circumstances, let her sing. She’s got a dreadful voice. But she can play like an angel any music you hope to hear. All of that, all of your Johnny Bach book, and all your precious Elton, too. But promise me something.”

“I promise.”

“You haven’t heard it yet.”

“I still promise. That’s the way I am.”

“Oh, good, then I won’t tell you what it was, and I can always say you promised, no matter what I ask you to do.”

“Who tells
you
what to do?”

“Do?”

“Who says when you’re not practicing hard enough?”

“That’s a good question. I suppose my bandmates.”

“What if nobody buys your record?”

“Wow. Well, ah, then I’ll be putting poison in Sarah’s tea in a flash and coming to see if you’ll have me back.”

“Are you nervous? How do you know you don’t need lessons anymore?”

“Quite a day for good questions. Well, I don’t play piano in the band. I don’t know. I suppose I probably
do
need lessons still, but a day comes when you just feel ready, you know? Oh, oh, oh, now quit that, please. If you get all teary, then I really am going to slobber on you. Here, sing this with me instead.”

4

SOME WEEKS EARLIER
, Julian Donahue had noticed that “What’s Left”—a pop song that had used to haunt his solitude and that had been playing on his stereo the cherry-blossom morning he proposed to Rachel—was, but for one consonant, perfectly composed for an approaching job.
“You left so fast, you didn’t stay to watch me cry”
required only a single alphabetical step to reach
“You left so fast, you didn’t stay to
watch me dry
,” and then very nicely described a new oven cleaner, which toiled selflessly while its people, according to the storyboard sent over by the agency, frolicked in a park and drove along a Pacific cliff-side highway.

And so Julian spent Saturday, the day after his snowy discovery of the Rat, in a recording studio in Queens, though the rapids of melting slush delayed the engineer by two hours and the singer by three. (The band, fortunately, existed only as a computer file.) Standing in the control booth, Julian pushed a button, and his voice drifted through the glass partition into the gray, dimpled studio, carrying disembodied suggestions to an eight-hundred-dollar-an-hour vocal chameleon with the face of a zealous nun and the body of a self-indulgent monk as to how she could achieve the same tone of pained loss from the original lyric while still punching the selling word
dry
, so that any woman who purchased Spray-Go would feel the liberating pleasure of the traditionally male role, the colder heart, the one who could stalk out without regret, indifferent to the pain of whomever she left behind (her husband, her oven cleaner).

He leaned against the back wall of the booth and watched this fiendishly proficient singer twiddle the knobs of some internal control panel until she produced a perfect impression of the song’s original voice, a two-hit pop star from twenty years earlier, just inside the target market’s musical nostalgia range. A song could be neutered as easily as this. “What’s Left,” which had long exercised a matador’s power in Julian’s headphones, could be sung by an identical voice, over a computerized but identical band, and, with the change of a single letter, be shown up as mere spattered notes and jerky rhythm, no more hypnotic than any other one-calorie jingle. “Nice, Louise. You nailed that one.”

BOOK: The Song is You (2009)
8.58Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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