The Song is You (2009)

by Arthur Phillips

  He especially loved how she handled the songs originally sung by men, how she either sang the lyric straight (singer wants girl) and then gleefully, evilly put it over as a blood-red lipstick-lesbian tune, or reversed the pronouns (singer wants boy) and then she could vary it, do it as neurotic girl or raging girl or seductive girl or funny girl. The best, though, was when she kept a man’s lyric the same but then somehow turned its meaning around, kept it in his words but put the whole thing in quotation marks, as if she were singing what a man had once sung to her and now she was only recalling it. Elvis Costello’s “Alison,” a jealous ex-lover’s unhinged ballad, became in her mouth Alison’s defense and grudging admission of shared guilt: “I heard you let that little friend of mine / take off your party dress” became as much about the girl’s remorse as the man’s jealousy.

  “This is something I’ve been fooling around with, if anything comes to mind,” he said and played a chord pattern, and in minutes she found some words and a melody that he desperately wished he’d written and then knew he never could have, not with infinite time or infinite musical training or infinite therapy. He suggested “Infinite Monkeys” as a title. She wisely disagreed.

  Two years had puffed away since that first afternoon in Williams-burg. They wrote all the band’s songs together. He contributed almost equally to all band decisions (almost— it was her increasingly magnetic name that drew all shiny good fortune to them). And he had adjusted his personality around the pointlessness of his feelings for her, molded himself around their absence. As if he were constantly carrying a heavy box down steep stairs, his posture had come to reflect his predicament; he curved, slouched, withdrew even when standing. He ground his teeth when he thought about it, stood naked in front of the mirror in the bathroom, looked at the pale slump and scrawn and dangle of the case he’d been issued. There was nothing to be done. A gym-designed coat of mannerist muscles would not add anything important; what he lacked was unacquirable.

  When they played he stood up a little straighter, watched her for cues, for the reflection of his music on her face. Something awoke and rustled between them onstage, sometimes from the first note, and that current—even when her back was to him and he was looking down at his hands or pedals—powered part of the band’s appeal. Men liked her, but women—in audiences, at the record label—saw how Cait looked at him and understood the underlying balance, and they found Ian more attractive as a result of her attention, as if she brought the best of him out to where everyone could see it. He pictured her when he slept with some of those girls after gigs. He suspected she knew that.

  Offstage, she fixed him in place with compliments and ironic bossiness, and he tended not to look at her at all when they spoke. He was the only one in the band she called by name, implying a permanence to his position that was professionally reassuring but personally debilitating. When they wrote together, or when one presented the other with something prepared in private, with no audience to absorb the excess, he felt the room crowding with their other selves, lives unled and correspondences unwritten, happinesses opted against, and he could not believe she did not see it, too. He sweated to ornament her fears and tall tales and fake self-portraits, and with the remnants of his energy he hid the rest of himself from her. The best of him was a child’s drawing of her on an off day.

  He had no illusion that this was bittersweet or somehow necessary to make art. It just burned. Anyone who felt this would take their hand off the stove at once, but he was locked in position, inches from the source of his pain, for as far into the future as he could see, because if he was going to be a musician, if he was going to protect the one profound and real thing about himself, the one thing he loved besides her (but which only she made appear at its strongest), then he would be a fool to leave a singer who so obviously was going to go all the way.

  And her? Cait didn’t notice that Ian was in pain, or, if she did, the knowledge came only in flashes, which she denied at once, joked away. She reminded herself (in the voice of a childhood priest) not to have so much vanity that she cast everyone around her as extras in her drama. More determining, two years of success had led her to an impenetrable and unfalsifiable superstition that their situation—whatever it was—worked, and to change it, perhaps even to think about it, would put at risk all they had gained. Whatever percentage of their professional good fortune depended upon a mutually felt but unspoken tension, it was critical enough that only a psychopath would tamper with it. And so she was never so controlled and business-minded as when they were alone during their collaborative sessions in Ian’s latest apartment (never in hers).

  And he, as co-conspirator, would prepare the room for her arrival with the attention paid by a criminal to his fiber evidence, leaving no sign of any other person in his life, without implying there was any inviting space for her. If someone had spent the night, all trace of her was gone or closeted before Cait arrived. Photos were drawered, gifts were stowed, and his cell was off, not just muted; he didn’t want to look at the screen with her watching (besides, if he took a call during their work, she would cluck like a CEO and tap an imaginary watch on her wrist). He carefully turned off the volume of his landline’s antique answering machine, which might otherwise broadcast through-out the room his life’s entanglements. When they were writing, she would only nod after a successful experiment, or after a misstep, she would shake her head and laugh and say in a posh English accent, “I’m afraid that’s shit, that is.” And he would beg in his best Dickensian moppet voice, “Please, mum, can we try again, please?”

  He considered her ruthless, in his moments of pain, but also in moments of happiness, experienced mere feet from her but bound right wrist to left ankle by her rules: nothing could evolve, nothing could be consummated, nothing repressed could surface, nothing previously accepted could be ignored. One must not speak of it, in case one could no longer sing of it. Instead, she only kept directing his attention to the wondrously charged air they could tame and make dance between them.

  6

  THE TAIL END of a damp morning’s jog, pushing through icy clouds of his own visible breath. As if to tease him in his months-old mood, like a banderillero with a worthless bull, Julian’s iPod suggested his old no-fail song, and he had to laugh in the cold air: that song of eight thousand categorized possibilities. His own iPod felt free to mock him. When he was in high school, he had discovered the no-fail song’s magnetic field only by chance: if it played unexpectedly on the radio or a mix tape, then the night ahead would provide effortless adventure, Zen promiscuity. If, however, Julian ever intentionally used the song to inflate sagging confidence, it had no effect; its potency was only accidentally available.

  The song had once flung him from victory to coincidence to miracle across a single day. The memory of that day came back to him in pieces now, as he jogged, and the first piece to arrive was not one of the women’s faces, or a perfume, not even the season or weather the day his triple crown had been awarded. No, the first recollection was the sensation against his ear of an old-model headset’s padded disc. It was orange (the next memory), which meant it was connected to his silver-blue cassette Walkman, which fixed that extraordinary day prior to reliable portable CD players, so probably 1988; he had been twenty-three. And only then, after that calculation, did the whole day return, the Manhattan October. He had even—the next day, not sure he still lived on the same planet as everyone else—suggested to a bartender friend that there should be a drink called an October Manhattan, and he pledged to finance the research and patent if his friend could reproduce in a glass the experience Julian had had over the previous nineteen hours, the feeling that his well-being and the well-being of the whole world were connected through his headphones, and that the recognition of that connection would always lead inevitably to his meeting and sleeping with some stranger.

  Or, on that day, three strangers in succession. If such a thing were a matter of some statistical improbability, then two-a-days should have happen
ed 50 percent more often, but they never had. No, something impossible occurred that day, a meteor landing at his feet with a steaming whimper, a jowly basset hound wishing him a brisk “Good day,” a broken bottle reconstituting itself. And any man should have looked back across those two decades, with the same song in his ears, and felt warmly nostalgic.

  Except nostalgia like that requires some identification between the recalled and the recalling selves, and as Julian couldn’t imagine even talking up a stranger now, could hardly remember sexual arousal, he didn’t feel anything besides amusement at the boy who had done that so many eons ago. He remembered him but could not hear what he was thinking from this distance.

  He jogged down Atlantic Avenue, past the unmarked door of the Rat, its melted snow refreezing into silver seascapes, recalled, for a moment, Cait O’Dwyer’s voice and laid it over the song he was actually hearing. Two girls in their twenties were on the sidewalk, but instead of the no-fail song stoking a longing for the girls, the girls’ proximity somehow damaged his iPod’s electronics, and all the potency seeped out of the music, and the girls disintegrated as soon as he looked carefully, and he thought irresistibly of his estimated taxes.

  “Never Gonna Love Anyone (but You)” shuffled up next, the first time in ages. He used to play it for Rachel, early in their engagement, as a promise. He’d stood on the new bed, straddling her as she awoke to him singing along with the CD, demanding she join him on the chorus. He also sang it as a reminder to himself, a little jingling spur to the heart, when he found, to his disappointment, that even an engagement had not transformed him into a monogamist.

  Before and after his wedding, Julian still indulged in the perquisite struggling actresses and relaxing models his work delivered him. He sampled here and there a tasty intern. Once it had been provocative. But by the time he was engaged, it was only evocative, recalling previous negotiations and love songs. Romance and sex became not joyless—not at all—but a pleasant exercise in recalling previous joy, an infinite regression with infinitely diminishing returns. He had still laughed through drinks and kisses with all his parts alert and his sense of destiny and romance sharp, and his mind never wandered, he didn’t check his watch mid-grope, he savored their bodies and the atmospheric vicinity, the ice cubes in the water resembling dental X-rays, her clear-polished nail running lightly over the pale pink grooves of her adman lips, the dual, peelable scallops of bronzed calf joining under the muscular H at the back of her knee as she walked from table to coat check, while a not-at-all-bad piano player laced together “All of Me,” “All of You,” “All the Things You Are,” and “All the Way.”

  He’d also tasted enough by then to know that it was, at least, not what all those songs of longing had been hinting at after all. But that wisdom never prevented the next liaison.

  He had always intended to be monogamous. He embraced the idea of it, in principle and for him personally, and especially with his girlfriend-become-fiancee-become-wife. But metamorphosing from polygamous to monogamous was not the simple molt that pop music had long promised him. In fact, opportunities for seducing other women only increased upon his engagement, multiplied even more fruitfully after his wedding. Propaganda songs for true love alternated with contrarian pop music that kept promising some unknown, almost unknowable blurry bliss in that one’s eyes (no, wait, that one’s), and both types of song seemed credible but seemed also to refer to experiences that he hadn’t yet had; he was not yet living the life described by music, and (the music implied) this was his fault. For all that he loved his wife, adored her company, expected their union to last a lifetime, he was never for long free of the old sensation of longing, longing for something that had turned out, to his puzzlement, not to be her either.

  His brother, Aidan, aware of his infidelities in those days, viewed Julian as a pig. “This carnal gluttony is beneath you,” he scolded, but Julian argued that his sin wasn’t quite gluttony.

  “Then it’s a failure of your imagination,” Aidan filed new charges, and that accusation hurt, though it came from a man who had likely never touched a female. It stung Julian because he still viewed himself in those days as a man of vast imagination, an artist no matter the literally commercial nature of his work. But Aidan was inexcusably right: Julian could not imagine—even with Rachel—how such an arrangement would exist as they aged, how aging would affect sex and romance, what familiarity might breed (whether contempt or something less easily imaginable). And, in the light of Aidan’s scorn, Julian’s next few exemptions to the marital contract were spoiled, not art but failure, the gutless repetition of previously praised work.

  Toward the very end of his polygamous life, he wandered (not for the first time) down a dim, fetishistic alley to see where it led him (complimenting himself for his imagination as he roamed). This last game began by him saying, “Tell me what you’re doing to me,” demanding from his partner a play-by-play narration. Then it became: “Tell me about a time you’ve done this to someone else,” as it was done to him. Later: “Tell me about someone walking in on us, walking toward the building, going about her day while you do this.” Later still, in its most rococo formulation, the girl he was holding, a struggling and eventually failed playwright, narrated a long history eight removes from Julian himself: (1) a woman in a restaurant sitting alone recalling a night she once spent in the arms of (2) a rough man (a kick-boxing champ), who in turn had later watched in anguish through binoculars as (3) a woman in the apartment across the street from his stood naked and spoke on the phone to (4) a former lover, who, at that very moment, was doing to (5) another woman what the woman on the phone was describing to him, and then, afterward, that other woman left his apartment and told of her adventure to (6) a close girl-friend, who later indiscreetly repeated it in the steam room of a health club to several barely loinclothed women, one of whom (7) had an obsessive attraction to (8) another listener in the sauna, who was the very woman just then placing her hands on Julian.

  There had to be a last one; that was the last one. And then he became different. As is often the hope but rarely the case, the stimulus to change that Julian required was his wife’s pregnancy, and then the effect was photon fast, a microwave conversion from boy to man, dog to human, unimaginative to imaginative, as he knelt on the bathroom floor and pressed his ear to Rachel’s belly. The change that had been promised but not produced by their courtship, engagement, wedding, honeymoon, homemaking, even by his beloved brother’s disappointment in him, had occurred at last. With this new growth, Julian’s fingers swelled until his wedding ring could no longer be slipped off.

  As if purging old toxins, his unconscious mind then spit up acidic dreams of jealousy. He would dream Rachel was ferociously promiscuous, and he would, restrained by invisible wires, watch her betrayals, or learn of them from casual friends or passing thugs or his own snickering parents. The dreams scorched him. He writhed, bound his hands in damp sheets, stripped the covers from Rachel until she swatted him, and he would awaken, nightmare-pounding and amazed. He had never felt jealousy in waking life, at least never at these temperatures, and never once, not a pale red ember, over his wife.

  Otherwise, the end of other women’s appeal was neither painful nor, considering how much energy he had spent over the previous twenty years pursuing and avoiding them, particularly disturbing. Rather it was like he had finally developed antibodies strong enough to keep his system clear of infection. He had never expected to be an elderly philanderer. He had always thought loyalty would win out, and when it did, with a small black-and-silver ultrasound photo (knees hiked to the chin, the sea-horse spine, the string-of-pearls vertebrae, the tiny fist of greeting), Julian looked at passing women with a feeling of gratitude and a fond, regretless farewell. It was a feeling, he later told Aidan, much closer to love than when he had longed to buy them food, walk them through parks, touch their cheeks. He saw them and he would hurry home to his wife, so eager was he to make love or stroke her hair or simply watch her maneuver that im
possible abdominal luggage around the room. Even when he discovered, to his laughing astonishment, that pushing a stroller or wearing a Baby Bjorn was even more appealing to single women than a wedding ring or (according to one friend) walking beagle puppies, the women held no power over him, and his laughter was colored by relief.

  During Rachel’s pregnancy and for two more years, he was permitted to live in a gated garden with walls of flowering vines, long promised but never accurately described by music, and he felt, these thirty-three months (sleepless nights, sexless weeks, lingering fat thighs notwithstanding), that he was earth’s most fortunate man. He longed—no matter the music around him—for nothing but slower days and endless evenings.

  “‘Waterfront’! ‘I Cover the Waterfront’!” Julian had found Rachel pressing his headphones against the striped armor of her belly. “That’s your grandpa on lead vocals,” she said, her chin on her chest, and Julian choked with love for her.

  The question had occurred to him, then and later: If there had been no child, could he ever have become a real husband? He wondered if Rachel asked herself the same thing, though he believed back then that she never knew of his delayed arrival in the marriage. Either way, he did become a real husband. He loved how she was pregnant, then loved how she was as a mother, but he loved, too, how she was when they were alone, as if he were seeing her clearly only then, whether the child had clarified her or cleared up his blurry vision, sharpened his hearing to the tones of her voice. “What are you looking at?” she had asked, turning away from the enormous movie screen propped against the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, to face him, floating on their blanket in the sea of people in the August dusk, lit in occasional flashes by the fires of the Civil War rolling toward Tara. He was staring at her, at this face he suddenly realized he’d never seen in detail before. “You are so …” He shook his head and took her hand. “True enough,” she said.