The Song is You (2009) (31 page)

Some long time after her carnival entered two mirrored elevators and vanished, he, official and keyed, pushed 15 and stepped to the back. It stopped on 12. He knew enough to look down at once, his cap’s Yankees logo floating backward in the murk. She stepped in, white terrycloth robe turned up to her ears, hotel-cresty slippers at the ends of smooth legs. The mirror-black marble floor reflected her up to the knees before the view melted into cloudy warm suggestion. She touched the oblong
SPA
button and didn’t face the swaying man but toyed with her key behind her back, its black-diamond plastic with gold numbers dancing from hand to hand, back and forth, knuckle to knuckle, upside down and right side up, a digit here, inverted there.

At 13 a little American boy in a Boston Red Sox cap entered with his father. The boy stared relentlessly at Julian’s head until he couldn’t keep it in any longer: “The Yankees
suck.”
His father hushed him, tried to smile at the New York fan stubbornly facing the floor. At 15 the doors opened, and Julian could not move, and she didn’t look behind her but only touched
SPA
again. An unlit indicator circle read
REMAIN CALM. HELP IS ON THE WAY
. But it didn’t light up, and Julian feared he would shout for her or bite through his cheeks or melt backward into the black mirror, leaving a vaporized Hiroshima shadow as the only evidence he’d ever existed. The father and son exited at 18. Now, now, now, now’s the time. His lips would no longer function. They knew, if he did not, that his touch would corrupt; she would, with his fingerprints steaming on her, erode. Any beginning would begin the end, even to steal a ticklish touch of that terrycloth would start killing them, a murder even if the cameras in the high corners didn’t notice. She floated off into the clatter of weight machines and clouds of eucalyptus-scented steam, and the doors closed, and Julian dropped all the way back to the lobby before he could rebound again to 15, his rolling suitcase handle dripping.

He scolded himself in his room, slapped his own cheeks: How much of life could he spend aching? Aching is not a stable condition; it must resolve into something. The time had long since come to remove the poison thorn from his groin, wriggle free of the constricting past by scraping against new landscapes. He sat in 1529, thirty feet above her London home, and pictured himself rappeling from curtain to balustrade along knotted sheets, cutting his legs on the glass of her balcony door as he burst through, sputtering blood, unraveling DNA, fiber evidence, the shreds of his heart… and, never mind, she’s not there, have to take the elevator back upstairs, bleeding, call a nurse. Time zones swept back and forth across him. He struggled first to stay awake and then to stay asleep, like a Japanese butcher.

How much of life can be spent aching? He woke, went out, wandered for a place to eat and get a little drunk and find a new way to charm, amuse, inspire, tempt O’Dwyer. He passed a playground. Its giant wooden ship—beached in sand halfway up its hull, its cannons able to shoot tennis balls in short arcs just past the bow,
HMS WHIMSY
on its side—was almost completely unmanned in the sporadic rain. On the swing suspended from the bowsprit, a too old girl, fifteen, was listlessly drifting, trying to recapture something she’d last seen here.

He watched Cait sing that night at Liquide, a bigger place, a bigger crowd, bigger noise, London in the rain duly ready for her and, despite some of her fears, taking her as its own, not Dublin’s or New York’s, and London’s fearsomely bored critics purred and sighed, offered their tummies to her for rubbing. She’d never sung so beautifully. She amazed him, again, and he vowed to give her what she needed and wanted, to be who she wanted, and to begin whatever came next, melt himself down for that voice, that woman.

IN PARIS
, he still hadn’t thought of how best to proceed, though he’d decided it couldn’t happen in Paris, when the concierge at l’Etoile Cachee handed him an envelope:

Even with a dictionary and his high school French he still needed an online translation, and then he learned that she had decided for them: the rue Quincampoix, tonight. She decided. She had to, and he wouldn’t resist. He sat in the hotel lobby walking his finger along the map.

He followed his map to the rue Quincampoix, a crooked medieval lane stuffy with neon and art galleries and smut and irritability. He walked it from end to end in the afternoon heat so he would know where to stand at midnight when she would slip away from her band and admirers at le Nid d’Araignee and come to the place she had chosen. At the top of the road their poem was mounted on the wall in relieved bronze.

At the bottom of the road he noticed a second plaque—blue enamel with white letters. The coincidence was uncanny, unnerving, dream material:

His French was good enough. He stood, blinking, his hand half-lifted to touch the dust-dulled words she had discovered for him. At which end of the street did she expect him? She sent him to the poem, their fitting moment? Or she sent him the poem to guide him here, to learn of a namesake’s murder?

He would not hear her sing tonight, wouldn’t even listen to her on the iPod but would await her without music, his ears as hungry for her as the rest of him. He ate alone and walked a spiral spun out from the top of the rue Quincampoix, walked past the building where his mother grew up, rode a boat up and down the black Seine while Cait was serenading her conquered city. The tour boat’s spotlights lit the river’s brick embankments, and the shadows of the skinny trees on the riverside walkway were projected against the walls of the higher promenades, and the swaying, branching shadows wandered down the walls as the boat pulled its lights down the river; the trees watched a film about trees that could move.

The path he walked through Paris had not been entirely random. He had avoided the small hotel where he and Rachel had slept late for a week. He had turned his back when the boat passed the Eiffel Tower, and he had conjugated verbs out loud to mask the prerecorded narration in four languages of any site they’d shared. Paris had to be large enough to contain two separate, nonoverlapping love stories.

Ideally, they should have selected somewhere he had no history at all, and he did consider skipping the appointment, somehow leaving word for her to find him in unknown Bucharest, unclaimed Berlin, wherever there were no competitive memories, but he didn’t have the energy or courage. The thought of touching her was now fixed like a window screen over everything he saw and did and bought and read and heard and tasted.

The two women—one a figment of his past, the other a figment of his future—did battle for Paris. When the boat described something new to him—Napoleon’s battles, Richelieu’s manipulations, rash responses to a plague, the palace burnt by long-dried grievances set aflame by a rhetorical spark—he listened and tried to absorb it as part of his and Cait’s history. When the lights carried his eye too quickly to a spindly bridge where he’d kissed his new wife, or the department store’s awning shadows where they’d stolen shelter from another drizzle, he stuffed his ears with headphones like one of Odysseus’s sailors and turned his mind instead to the street Cait had chosen, the poem in bronze.

He returned early to the rue Quincampoix; she was probably still onstage. The street faded out below him at an obtuse angle, cut twice by other narrow roads. Too tight for modern life, still it blinked its reactions to the expanding world:
GALERIE D’ART, DISQUES VINYLES, 24/24 SEXE
. He touched the bottom edge of their plaque, another era’s rendezvous after music and crowds.

He walked the length of the street a dozen times, imagining it gray and shadowed sixty years before, imagined an old film of himself meeting a long-pursued love in those days, the cool of her hand, the warmth of her breath so overwhelming after the world and its monsters.

He prepared for all her approaches, from the north, by the poem, him caught unawares as she came straight from the club and her latest triumph, swimming to him from pool of light to pool of light. Or at the middle intersection, the terrace doors unfolding now, the shouting in Arabic, a bright bar open to the street, lined with hookah hoses. Or from the south, the dark end nearer the river, the peep-show club at the crossroad, him walking down to her, meeting at that eerie postcard from an unknown ancestor, sent to arrive at the most crucial moment of his life, as a warning or a blessing. He worried over spending too long at either end, missing her arrival, her thinking he’d rejected her, her departure.

He compromised, sat at the hookah bar, smoked through a woven hose the dried fruit and tobacco, watching toward both hidden ends of the street while the bulky Arab owner who smelled of cumin-scented sweat warmly welcomed him and asked about New York, shared with Julian the secret that all the Jews who worked in the World Trade Center had stayed home that fateful morning, warned by their central authority.

Julian listened to the street, the setting of the jewel that would be her voice greeting him
apres la foule
, their first words in person. The summer heat pried open third-story shutters, released arguments and laughter that fell to the arch-patterned bricks and cobblestones. A prostitute whose 1
A.M
. offer he’d smilingly rejected now returned and stood next to him anyhow: “I am bored and do not feel the work, but I must appear busy.” She accompanied him for a few circuits of his patrol and translated the best of the street’s voices for him, the two o’clock shrieks and moans and threats and jokes. She smelled of a perfume he recalled from a film-school girlfriend, fashions having floated downriver to Paris’s Turkish prostitutes, unless the budgets of students and street women had always been comparable. “He says she is a liar. She says he deserves nothing so good?” she narrated, then asked, “You don’t want me or you don’t want no one?” but she was no longer narrating. Noticing the weakness that had crept into her voice, she added, “I have friends maybe you like better.” Scooters purred and circled.

Cait could have been delayed by fans or press, and he decided to keep waiting, but there would come an hour when she would no longer bother to turn up because she would assume he’d already left. And with that thought he saw her at the far south, by his obituary and the sex club. He jogged, then sprinted past the old Chinese man on the step; past the broken neon offering a buzzing and enigmatic
GA;
past the Turkish girls’ mackerel, a Swede or a German, shaven close and inked with a map of the sixteenth-century world across his bare back, collecting from his strolling employees; past the shuttered bars and blacked-out, papered-over doors; and it wasn’t Cait at all, just another of the street’s itinerant entertainers misreading his eager approach. She swore at his sudden halt and change of expression, and she spit at his feet and gestured her feelings intricately at him. Above her head, at one of the street’s eastern openings, the sky’s color underwent its first changes. He had given five hours in tribute to Cait, unnoticed and unimpressive, and there in the light was Cait’s face flaking like dried skin, low on the fluted post of a hesitantly extinguishing street lamp.

Back at the hotel, he asked the Etoile Cachee’s night reception man to ring her room. Hair slicked back, pencil mustache, head turned to examine his guest with only one eye, he smiled his condolences. “She has disembarked, sir, with her entourage and my great regret.”

“And mine, and mine,” he said with his father’s weary worldly wisdom and a shaking that overtook his hands and then all his limbs, and by the time he’d scraped his key into the door and had reached the WC, he was quaking with fever, asleep, it felt, even as he was sick in that toilet stall wallpapered with illustrations from a seventeenth-century fencing manual. Hours later that same morning, when his fever climbed daringly high, some of the chevaliers cocked their eyebrows at him as they slowly drew on and immediately peeled back off their deerskin gloves, only to slowly pull them back on again.

SHE KEPT TELLING HERSELF
she should have seen it coming. For several minutes
that
was the extent of the attack: she should have seen “it” coming, she kept thinking, even though there was no “it” other than the stinging blame that she should have seen it coming. She was in the bathroom stall an hour before stage time, and she was still there five minutes before stage time, and she was there ten minutes after stage time. Ian sent in the French girl from the coat check: gentle knuckles on the stall’s wooden door and “Miss? You need a thing?” She rebuilt a facsimile of herself at the mirror, told herself that, though she should’ve seen it coming, she had no choice now but to pretend it hadn’t happened.

Ian was waiting outside and she saw how she looked reflected in his eyes, his pity, his coddling offer of some more time, and she loathed what she saw and loathed him for showing it to her. “Don’t. Don’t touch me. Let’s just go. I said
stop
. Don’t
touch
me.” Worse was yet to come; she should’ve seen
this
coming, too: she sang hideously, possibly the worst performance of seventeen years singing in public. She wanted to die, escape, change her name, claw her face beyond recognition. But even worse still—and she should’ve seen
this
coming as well—no one acted any differently. The crowds jumped. The boys tried to get on with her. The girls danced. Her band celebrated their conquest of France. Ian smiled like a child-molesting clown after the show and said, “See? You were great. They loved you.” They couldn’t tell the difference between her at her best and her at her worst, after she’d humiliated herself for them, swallowed the burning and bitter panic that had her stuck in the squat-hole stall, staring at the patterns of the barely pulped wood in the paper roll—the sneering faces and fantastical weapons and withered flowers—only to find that at the other end no one was even paying attention. She wanted only to go back to the hotel, to sleep until she could escape this awful city. She couldn’t go to the rue Quincampoix, not now. If he was at the gig tonight, he alone would have heard what happened, and he would run away from her, wouldn’t turn up, even if she could pull herself together. He, most of all, would have fled from what she had revealed. She’d lost him, lost her one chance for something valuable and lasting.