The Song is You (2009)

by Arthur Phillips

  “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.

  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.

  10

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

  Copy of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, from an amorous and resistible A&R assistant at the label. Forgotten, unopened and unmourned, on the B-61 bus back from Fairway.

  39 invitations for drinks during set breaks at gigs, deflected with varying degrees of charm and irritation.

  Drawings, tapes of origina
l songs, and framed photos, from piano students, as good-bye and thank-you gifts.

  Homemade muffins and cookies, from three mothers of students.

  Rides home ending with wishes of good luck, warm embraces, overlong handshakes, and one outright lunge lip-ward, from fathers of students.

  Invitation, left anonymously, to Bible-study group, citing Jesus’ love for Cait.

  Invitation, delivered in person, to film premiere by famous English film star who lived part of the year in Brooklyn, across the street from his ex-wife. Declined, with implied willingness to hear further invitations.

  Eleven coasters with cartoons and insightful advice implying someone only half impressed with her, at most, someone described by Mick the barman as “moneyed-up, oldish, dignified in his cups, arrogant.” Kept and reconsidered, coming as they did soon after an email from her mother warning her again of the fate of semi-successful musicians (“loathed or broke”) and an evening’s insecurity thinking she was less than the sum of her too-obvious influences and had no one to tell her anymore when she sucked.

  2 demos from aspiring singer-songwriters, tough-waif division.

  Flowers, flowers, flowers.

  Offer from Martine and Rico on the second floor to set her up with a guy, a really good guy, a Web-designer friend, a sweet, sweet guy.

  Wine, from uncle who had taken it upon himself to convert her from beer.

  Tea samples.

  A twelfth coaster, implying, half-convincingly, an indifference to actually meeting her, maybe more than half-convincing, considering Mick’s story about being bribed …

  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.