The Song is You (2009) (8 page)

Julian steps aside to let off a well-dressed, blond-braided Scandinavian giantess who silently bumps her fist against the sweaty fist of the black man entering, and the Irish girl sings,
“‘Will you leave no trace at all?’ she asked him. / ‘Will you leave no trace at all?’”
Rachel in a fight once: “Is this all there is of you? You’re barely here. I can put my hand right through you,” her fists thudding against his back in no way disproving her point. The Irish girl sings, over a low guitar and that braided bass and hi-hat,
“She wasn’t asking him for a favor.”
This time Julian can’t see the singer, doesn’t bring her physical body to mind, so there are no bellows, no heaving breasts or writhing. This is only sound, how the blind hear music. The experience is detached not only from any rational cause—Swedish fist? Curled rodent extension? Hoo-hoo-hoo?—but from the source of the music as well: the Irish girl’s body is nowhere accounted for in this blackboard-blanching equation. The disembodied voice filters all feeling and also causes it. The dense terrine of feeling in Julian—regret, hope, sorrow, faltering ambition, longing—startles him. It could not be produced in such concentration and quantity without the voice, and so, after this moment on the train platform, he comes to crave the voice because it reveals the feelings he could not find in silence.

And after that first shock of love comes trepidation. A younger Julian would have reset the needle, rewound the tape, replayed the track again and again, sucked the song down to its marrow until it held nothing but thick nostalgia, accessible only years later. But, older now, aware of how rare this experience was, he rationed “Coward, Coward.” If it showed any signs of weakening, of becoming merely catchy, he skipped it, set his iPod back to shuffle and hoped the song would recharge, surprise him.

And the singer did. She wielded that bodyless, faceless, lipless, lungless, breastless voice, animating a different cluster of meaningless material each time. Two weeks later, in the silence after a Beethoven sonata finishes: the ornate pediment of a high-story window he’d never noticed before on a block he daily walked; a homeless man licking the inside of a jam jar with a thin and pointed tongue; Aidan’s old story about how the sound of an unnecessary MRI reminded him of their late mother, Pamela (the machine’s relentless magnetic-robotic chant
of pam!pam!pam!pam!pam!pam!)
, as he lay in the heavenly white training coffin; the mist from a sidewalk fruit vendor’s hose sprayed through his berries, sprinkling Julian’s face, carrying their scent (triggering in turn the recollected aroma of a strawberry tea Julian had years ago been offered by a potential client in an interview for a Czech beer commercial), mixing with a sourceless breeze of free-range New York City garbage; and the silence after Beethoven ends, and the Irish girl sings,
“When its all just flavor, and you’ve got none left to try
.” She was telling him that she
knew
, she actually
understood
and could explain all of that—window, jam,
pam
, mother, fear, death, garbage, tea, work—could fit it all together in a pattern he didn’t even know he’d been seeking.

He was not insane. He did not think it was anything but coincidence and crackling brain function. He did not believe she literally understood or wished to help
him
, but when the song was working—collecting and filtering and compressing sensation and offering it back to him—there was a wondrous bonus notion that the headphones were a unique two-way connection between his mind and that voice, which must therefore be aware of him.

THE IRISH GIRL
performed that night. The crowd was larger, challenging the bar’s legal capacity, and Julian thought she had changed in the last weeks, maybe even developed. She was slightly more coherent as a performer, as a projector of an idea and an image. The previous gig, something had distracted and dislocated her, as when color newsprint is misaligned and an unholy yellow aura floats a fractioned inch above the bright red body of a funny-pages dog. It had been perhaps the bass player’s mistakes or, if the hipster snob was to be credited, the seductively whispering approach of success. No matter: she was clearer tonight, even if he could still see her strive, from one song to the next, for an array of effects: the casually ironic urban girl, the junkie on the make, the desperate Irish lass whose love was lost to the Troubles, the degenerate schoolgirl, the lover by the fire with skin as velvet succulent as rose-petal flesh. These shifting roles hung unevenly on her, a matter of youth, nervousness, or, most fatally, inauthenticity (whatever
that
is, which makes one hundred singers merely entertainers while the next is a transmitter of truth).

He tried to reconcile what he saw onstage with the effect her music had on him when she was not there. The gap was not unbridgeable, but it was an engineering problem, and he was disappointed with her for not living up to his headphone experiences, and disappointed with himself for having let music again lead him into fantasy when he certainly should have known better by now. Still, his professional reflexes set to work: if he’d been directing her in a music video, for example, he would have told her to let all her old ideas of singers go, all the women she’d wished to become when she was a girl, to forget all the voices she’d imitated and all the praise lavished on her, and simply to think instead about the lyrics, to imagine no one was listening or ever would, to sing despite herself, as if she meant to keep quiet but the songs kept breaking through. “Don’t even think about whether
I
like it,” he imagined himself having to remind her.

“Let’s all have a drink then, all right?” she said, willing to cut short her whistles and applause. “And then we’ll play more music. And then have another drink. And so forth.” Even this implication of a churning Celtic thirst for booze seemed a put-on, though the younger men, hunched in troops or paired with briefly outshined dates, found the notion aromatic. He watched her move off the stage.

The band had not yet risen to the altitude of dressing rooms and backstage demands, so they occupied the end of the bar near the stage, far from Julian’s shadowed post by the door. Some flannel yielded space to her. The rest of the band barricaded her, sliding stools across the floor. The bassist she’d scolded was pale and spotty, his thick, wavy hair gelled toward a central ridge, likely in the second month of filling in the flanks of a misguided mohawk He wore a black velvet blazer built up at the shoulders: Bowie ‘83, Ferry ‘85. On her other side swayed the guitarist: gas-station shirt, truck-company cap, pale hiking boots: pure, uncompromising Seattle ‘92. The drummer: a Goliath with a shiny tan head and a neatly shaped soul patch, a statement that he could also play jazz or batter the fans of an enemy soccer team.

She dealt some card game Julian didn’t recognize, and soon the four of them were slapping the bar and dropping coins and accusing one another of cheating. She had many roles to play, offstage but still swept by the public eye. She had to be one of the guys, albeit the one who was a girl. She had to be their boss and their foil, and she had to listen to their boasting and evasions, and to their thousand deniable kisses blown under their breath, for with a label in the future, the drummer and the bassist especially must have known how fungible they were. Rhythm sections must ingratiate on a steady beat, unless they are brilliant musicians (which these two were not), or her song-writing partner (the guitarist comfortably carried that aura), or her lover, which, Julian would now have bet, watching her offstage, none of them was. “That’s
so
unfortunate, lads,” she clucked, dragging the pot to her.

The crowd was almost entirely what Julian’s world called “self-denying consumers,” who vainly believe themselves unaffected by advertising. They weren’t the sort to ask her to sign a napkin or pose for a phone photo, which left the young men milling about with no excuse to approach her. Still they milled. Even those with dates kept an eye on her at the bar, and she tolerated the cacophony of those buzzing male gazes with ivory nerves while Julian watched the calculations and consequences skim over the boys’ faces: her time sitting semi-accessibly, unescorted, at any bar these fellows could afford was now countable in months if not weeks.

“Miss O’Dwyer?” opened the wisest boy, avoiding the others’ informal “Cait?” “Miss O’Dwyer, may I buy you a drink, or should I just fuck off straightaway?”

There was much to be said for this line of attack, and she did reply: “Very kind. Mine’s still full, but you can top up Bass’s glass, and if you don’t mind losing at cards, you can pull up a chair.”

The bassist glowered at the male intruder and snarled, “Yeah, top me up.”

“Oh, be polite, Bass,” Cait scolded. “We can’t all be bassists.”

At the other end, the bartender dealt Julian another round recycled-cardboard coaster off a pillar of them. “Same again? Say, you came to hear her before, right? You like?”

“It’s all right.”

“Come on,” he said, pulling Julian’s beer.

“It’s all right.”

“But it’s not Glenn Miller, I hear you. Oh, no, wait…” The barman turned to the Irish beauty playing cards and back again. “You know her? Label guy? Lawyer? No? Dr. Feelgood? Oh, Captain, my Captain, are you her dad? No? The guy who checks in for the family and manages the trust fund and is desperate as donuts to bang her? No, no—
no! Fffffff
, I
knew
it: she swings gray. That hurts, won’t deny it. And you can’t deal with all this awful noise so you sit in the back and collect her discreetly at the end and squire her back to your mansion where you have sad sex in front of a dying fireplace while your butler watches through a hole in the wall. Awful. Oh, man, cut her loose. Ehhhh, but wait, you dress kind of gay. All right, I’m stumped.” His biceps strained against the sleeves of his T-shirt, and his pectorals distorted its image of two suggestive Dominican monks kissing their fingertips under the calligraphic words:
THE LAY BROTHERS
. “You’re not going to tell me, fair enough. But you really don’t think she’s flawless? And you’re not gay or stupid? Must be generational.”

“Even by your standards,” Julian answered, “I can prove she’s not flawless. I can think of ten things she could do to make her more what she wants to be, what
you
and all these others want her to be. She’s an inefficient machine.”

The band retook the stage, the music started again, the barman serviced other thirsts. And Julian proved his case and amused himself by illustrating the blank backs of eleven coasters, hiding his usual storyboard
J.D
. signature in various details, cartoons numbered 0-10, 0 being Cait O’Dwyer as she appeared tonight (under a yawning, bored Cupid holding a drooping banner labeled
A FAIR BEGINNING)
, then each successive drawing, captioned with his directorial advice, showing her with augmented power and allure until number 10: a glowing and levitating archangel of destruction spewing flames from her mouth, combusting saucer-eyed young men in flannel shirts, while a fellow with a clipboard and an embroidered
J.D
. on his lab coat’s lapel nods approvingly, though still not impressed, perhaps a little tired. Each numbered, gnomic caption encircled its illustration: #1: Indulge no one’s taste but your own. #2: Never fear being loathed and broke. #3: Repeat only what is essential; discard mercilessly. #4: Sing only what you can feel, or less. #5: Hate us without trepidation. #6: All advice is wrong, even this: a little makeup would not go astray. #7: Never admit to your influences, not dear Mum or Da, nor the Virgin Mary (competition). #8: Laugh when others think you should cry—we will gladly connect the dots. #9: Even now, cooing, swooning ghouls of goodwill scheme to destroy you. #10: Oh! Bleaker and obliquer. (Julian had by then, after eleven pretty good cartoons and several drinks, earned the right to make no sense at all.) “You can keep those,” he said, pushing the coasters to the barman. “I suspect they apply to the Lay Brothers as well,” and the barman-Lay Brother laughed his confession.

She’d probably see them, Julian thought, before throwing them away, or the bartender might take credit for them, casting Julian in the appropriate role of Cyrano. And then the hi-hat began “Coward, Coward,” and he gave her his full attention, the effect of the music nearly as strong in person as it had been on the F train.

When she finished, he left at once, before anything could spoil. He went straight home, relieved to find an Aidanless apartment. He took a beer into his living room, and with his appetite for music sharpened by what he’d heard and felt at the Rat, he was soon caroming through his CDs, engrossed in a pointless musical idyll rare since the leisure of school days. He swung through his collection with what he felt was random compulsion, one song paused and blinking its consumed time after less than a minute because a chord or a voice or the liner notes reminded him of another song. This singer had something in common with that one, this guitarist with that, and he sprinted through his library, uncovering connections and evidence of relations—a shared session player, a common lyricist—like a drunken genealogist. Julian held this CD case, and the artist who filled it with music had once held
that
case. He pushed Play to prove it.

It took some more beer and listening to the Sundays before the illusion of randomness melted away: this gundog pursuit was of the Irish girl’s influences. All the beloved songs he’d been driven to sample, they led to her, the genome of her talent, the roots of that increasingly potent demo. And now he burned through his discs even faster, confirming suspicions within seconds, spotting the Irish girl lurking in the undergrowth: a chord, a vocal trick, a way of singing over or against an instrument, a breath of phrasing: Billie, Ella, Janis, Alanis, Sinead, Patti Smith, Edie Brickell, Annie Lennox. She’d likely deny Madonna and Stevie Nicks and Belinda Carlisle, but that didn’t change the facts. He paused—almost panicked—when he realized he didn’t own any music made since she was ten years old, but then he calmed down, decided that, whatever he was missing, she’d studied his favorites as classic texts, and he continued to draw conclusions: Nico, the Pogues, the Pixies, the Sugarcubes, the Sundays, PJ Harvey, Siouxsie, Courtney, the Cranberries, the Jam and the Clash and the Sex Pistols, Paul Westerberg, definitely Elvis and maybe Elvis, Iggy Pop, a U2 flyby, a sliver of Bowie, and Mick and Keith, of course, and Ray and Dave, of course, less John and Paul than Shaun and Paul, Moz and Johnny, and … Astrud and Joao? No, not Astrud, someone less restrained. Juliette Greco? No, but nearly that. He chased the Irish girl through rainforests of Brazilian music, shoving aside melancholy bossa queens and feather-headed samba heroines, dipping into French imitators, Shirley Bassey remixes, Norwegian club DJs with bossa overtones, losing sight of his prey, losing faith he’d heard what he thought he’d heard, feeling foolish, drinking too much, and building teetering towers of CDs on the rug.