The Song is You (2009) (9 page)

And then he remembered Elis Regina laughing, almost manically, near the end of
Waters of March
in 1974. Here it was, 3:11 into the song, and he had the Irish girl’s trail again: she was there in the MGM Studios, Los Angeles, thirteen years before she was born. He was right; he knew he was right. He listened to the whole song twice, imagined her doing the same. He could tell what she had listened to, what she had taken in and taken on. And when he fell asleep, on his couch, just past three in the morning, it was to Cait O’Dwyer singing.

The window was open a drafty inch, and Julian smelled an early ion of spring, so he rolled to his side to find, next to him on the park’s grass, Carlton, grabbing his toes and laughing while Julian stroked his head and fell in and out of dozing, as relaxed as a yogi willing to let a fly walk across his face. He closed his eyes, opened them again, the scents of spring in his nose, Carlton’s soft hair under his hand, the squirrels coming close to the diaper bag smelling of milk and nuts, the Cait O’Dwyer demo still playing—no. No, he hadn’t known this music then, so this was not the park, there was no grass, no more grabbing of toes.

OFFERINGS MADE TO CAIT O’DWYER
between January and March 2009, abridged:

They played a club in Poughkeepsie, and they were granted a private space upstairs, something less than dressing rooms but more than a reserved table. On a long buffet, covered by a stained and fraying paper tablecloth, a few plastic-wrapped sandwiches and bottles of beer were laid out by an old man in a filthy Brooklyn Dodgers cap.

They played well that night, and the club was full, and the crowd responded like fans. This felt like kind of a big deal, and also an omen, a nicely legible, freshly slit goose’s entrails: they had followers waiting in places they’d never toured. Cait wanted to celebrate with Ian, but when they were done, and Prince, on the stereo, rattled the wooden stairs that led up to their loft, he wasn’t there. Still sweating, she lay on a stuffing-spitting green couch and clawed at the hide of a navel orange. “Where’s Ian?”

Drums drew a purple velvet pouch from his jacket pocket, and Cait threw orange peel at his face. “Don’t be a git. Go outside with that.” Drummers were so congenitally moronic, but still she felt her anger rising at Ian.

Drums complained but repocketed his crop. “I’ll smoke on the ride home.”

“Genius. Where’s Ian gone?” She hated how she sounded.

“He’s still down at the bar,” Bass answered. “He’s meeting someone.”

This did not mean, Cait soon learned, that he was downstairs trolling the shoals of the bar for a perquisite due a man in his position. No, according to Bass, he had
arranged
to meet someone. Ian, at that moment when he should have been drinking with Cait upstairs or fishing for easy pleasure belowdecks, was instead intertwining clammy fingers with his “girlfriend,” whose existence Bass and Drums had known of for some days, maybe weeks, while Ian had been treating Cait like … like … “What’s her name?” she asked, allowing the weight of her boots dropping to the floor to pull her up to sitting. Drums brought her a beer. “Cheers,” she said.

“Man, tonight
blistered”
Bass tried, reading the boss’s mood. “Did you see the boys’ faces during ‘Blithering,’ Cait? I think you caused some cardiac infarctions.”

“Infractions,” said Drums.

“Does she have a job?” She did better that time keeping her tone casual but was surprised how much effort it took. Ian was obviously free to intubate every young lady he saw, and Cait would never harbor the flimsiest dinghy of a grievance. But
this
, this secret girlfriend, was different: reckless and therefore hidden and therefore hostile. And she hadn’t done anything to deserve it. They all knew the risks of starting serious relationships at this stage. It was almost self-sabotage, so he’d better have found a tremendous woman if he was going to gamble his future and Cait’s on her. “Why aren’t
you
fellows down there spattering your seed all about?”

The wooden stairs creaked, and the couple sprouted headfirst from below. “This is Chase,” Ian said, holding her hand above his head, announcing her victory in a heavyweight bout. Then he dropped her arm and mumbled introductions: “Chase, Cait, Tim, Zig, Chase.” The men tilted their heads back until noncommittal “Hey”s emerged, to which Chase murmured “Hey” and “Hey” in turn. Ian had a sensation in his stomach he associated with compulsory childhood guitar performances for his parents’ friends. He could still just say, “See you guys tomorrow” and escape with something, but instead he stood there, as he had at crucial moments in the past, so everything that followed was his own stupid fault.

“Sit with us, please,” Cait said, and patted the couch on either side of her. She pointed at Drums and Bass and said to Chase, “These two vultures are bleeding the life out of me. I’m gasping for proper conversation.” Chase—prim in jeans and blouse, as if she’d tried but failed to dress down for the occasion—accepted the space to her right, and Ian—jackass! loser!—could not resist simply doing whatever Cait instructed, stepped over her boots to take his assigned seat. “You’re quite a sport to come all this way to watch your man play” Cait took her guitarist’s hand in her own. “Will you come fetch him every time? It gives us more room in the van. Oh, you have the
most
beautiful eyes. They’re
violet.”

“Oh, my God,
thank
you. I love—I don’t know if Ian told you—you must get tired of hearing it—but you have, your voice is just, really, it’s spectacular.”

“Your boy’s guitar helps.” Cait squeezed his knee. “But thank you.”

Cait complimented Chase’s clothes and hair, laughed at her mild jokes. She gave the potentially band-killing intruder her cell number, unasked, and Chase thumbed it into her high-end phone with obvious delight. She was so clearly the sort of girl who was going to start asking her boyfriend if he
really
had to go to band practice because tonight is our two-month anniversary and is that gig
really
one you have to take because my sister’s coming to town and I so want you to meet, and oh my God, Cait called yesterday, I’m so sorry I forgot to tell you, I hope it wasn’t important. “We should have a girls’ night back in the city,” said Cait, still holding Chase’s boyfriend’s hand.

Ian decided to ram his head through the wall but instead meekly asked his boss’s permission to play pool: “I think I’ll play some pool.” He waited for his hand to be released.

Chase was flattered to receive the focused attention of the beautiful rising star her boyfriend only spoke of in the vaguest professional language, and whom he now ignored even as she held his hand, which was only natural, not threatening, considering their long-standing friendship and work. Chase had seen it tonight when they performed. There was no reason Ian should deny it, but he was trying so hard to deny it, and in the meantime the singer was being so sweet to her, in a European sort of way: “Of course he’s with you—a real, natural beauty. He is, you must know, awash in rather unhygienic offerings every night. A dim sum cart, but decidedly unappetizing.”

“I’m playing pool now,” he insisted. Cait smiled at him, waited, waited, waited, and then released his hand.

“Are you a pool player, Chase?” she asked as Ian counted the balls and swore, then descended to hunt the missing number six under chairs and behind the ancient mini-refrigerator. “Really? Never? But you must keep up with him. When he tires of being a rock-and-roll idol, his next career will be a pool-hall hustler. Although he can’t beat me, which infuriates him, you know. Unless he’s pretending to lose because I’m his boss.”

Ian lay on his stomach and swept an arm under the tablecloth, standing with his prey and a dozen aroused dust bunnies. “You have never beaten me. When I’m sober.”

Cait’s phone shook and hummed, and she peered at the screen. “Ech, I think this is an arse I have to kiss,” she said, leaning in to share with Chase this secret of the music business, the necessity for occasional insincerity. “Please don’t go yet, this will just take a minute.”

And Ian, ever the model of inertia and momentum, played pool in silence and abandoned his date to the rhythm section. He didn’t mean to make her feel unwelcome or unimportant, as she later accused. He was just paralyzed (in the form of a pool player), and therefore taking his cues from Cait. Chase could sense some of this. A less proficient reader of human nature than Chase would have seen that Ian did what Cait told him to do. That alone would have been troubling enough to a new girlfriend, comparing the pool player with the sweet and cool guy who had, three weeks ago, seen her in an Arab grocery, made a funny comment about chickpeas, taken her to a museum for a Danish movie and then a bar where they played
petanque
indoors.

“How’s Chase?” Cait asked him a week later, feeling guilty, trying to atone for her performance, though, read the transcript, she had only been
nice
, and not sure she wouldn’t have been justified in being much worse, if only to make him see what was at stake. “I like her.”

“Yeah, she liked you, too.”

“Do you guys—”

“What do you want to work on?” he asked.

After Chase broke up with Ian (during which protracted negotiations he actually said, in a pathetic moment, for which he would have injected any narcotic directly into his throbbing neck to erase from his memory, “But I’m practically a rock star”), he met another girl. This time he determined that Cait would never know, and the new girl would never see Cait. But this new girl, a gypsy dressed as a real-estate agent, alarmingly intuitive and proud of it, just kept guessing correctly. She was drawn to gaps in his stories like cigarette smoke sliding in between the fibers of his gig shirts, and as soon as her glance caressed a weak joint, his life cracked and tender secrets spilled out. “My man is a mean man,” she purred when she left for the last time.

Cait was like Ian’s older brother, able to rig water balloons to closet doors, willing to be far away at the moment of triumph, not even needing to see the splashed and vanquished little foe, happy even if, over dinner that night, Ian didn’t mention it, wouldn’t admit to the disgrace, and so his brother’s polite request for the potatoes would carry in it a war whoop and the icy restatement of his everlasting superiority, like a conqueror’s edict pasted to every lamppost in a broken and occupied city.

Ian lay on his floor with his feet up on his amp and tried to learn new chords out of a book, his fingers sprawling to sound a flat 9 and a sharp 11, straining to hear why jazz guys bothered with them. He built a wobbly
whacked at it over and over again. The phone sang, almost in tune, and Cait murmured from the answering machine: “Hello, darling, dazzling rock star.” Ian stopped thrashing the miserable chord. “I am thinking of you just now.” He sat up, and with effort did not pick up the receiver. “And my mum always said you must tell people when you’re thinking of them, in case they’re run over by a bus, and you later regret missing the opportunity.” He laughed despite himself. “And so, today, having said that, this would now be your day to step in front of a bus, if you must. Not saying you
should
. Up to you, of course, only that I would have a clearer heart. Failing that, I rather feel like a brainstorm. Do you have any nice new music for me, genius? Can I come over?”