The Song is You (2009)

by Arthur Phillips

  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?”

  She began at ruthlessness; ruthlessness was the starting point of her every action; her every word could be traced back to her ruthlessness, like a river system rushing across a whole country, powering mills and irrigating farms and drowning little children in blue overalls. He couldn’t hope to be as ruthless as she, but he could play along. So he mustered relish and a dash of smug frat-boy hilarity, but it didn’t really suit him. He could only fight feebly and from the shadows, like a sickly ninja. He didn’t expect to scare off her suitors in person. So, when Drums reported that Cait had been asked to dinner by a famous English actor who’d seen them play at the Rat, Ian, overwhelmed with cardiac evidence of his desperate courage, printed out Web pages detailing the man’s sexual antics, the divorce-court testimony of his drunken racism and adulterous excesses, and the item that in the end did offend Cait’s otherwise tolerant sensibilities: his TV commercial in Japan for a fishery that Greenpeace said slaughtered dolphin. Ian left this indictment anonymously for Cait at the Rat.

  She of course smelled Ian’s complicit air. If he thought he was being sly, she was willing to let him have his moment, as toddlers require a certain sense of growing self-sufficiency or their development will stunt. And she was shriven of any sin for Chase.

  And she rejoiced. The end had come at last—thank sweet Saint Cecilia, who protects pious girls and their bands—of backstage sweethearts who thought it acceptable to call Ian’s cell two minutes before stage time and demand that he whisper anxiously into his cupped hand for fifteen minutes until he would close his phone with a mumbled curse and an apology to Cait and shuffle onstage to play guitar as if he was sight-reading from a book of show tunes for a geriatric orgy.

  No, huzzah, Ian was conducting himself appropriately again, providing a scratching post for the nails of roaming club felines before leaving them on the roadside, tied in a sack. In Raleigh-Durham the evidence suggested he had serviced a pair of them at once, though he was chivalrously silent the next day when he arrived in Greensboro, a cheeky six minutes before soundcheck.

  “You still stink of them, baby,” she whispered in his ear as he played his solo on “Blithering” that night, and she saw the hair on his neck hunch and stagger, and all was well. She could put a name, only now, to the feeling that was pouring out and away from her like ebbing tidewater contaminated with sewage: it was departing fear, and hanging over the fear, like fumes over that sewage, was shame that she of all people had been afraid without even knowing it, and now she felt light fearlessness returning. If she were not onstage, in the middle of a song she had discovered in that space that manifested itself—like some state of quantum physics—only when she and Ian stood a certain distance from each other and concentrated on their own questions, she would have wanted to punish someone for her fear and shame. But she was onstage, and he was playing her music, and it was sounding like she’d dreamt, in literal dreams of music she’d had for nearly twenty years, since that morning when she was almost four and woke sobbing, beyond any parental consolation for nearly an hour, because the music she’d heard when she was sleeping wasn’t playing when she woke, and she couldn’t make it come back. (“Where is it?” she insisted to her smiling and uncomprehending parents. “Where’s the music gone? Why won’t you play it again?” She slapped her father’s legs and fell weeping into her mother’s lap. “Please, play it, please.”)

  11

  AFTER THE INCIDENT, the edges of Aidan’s personality softened, became porous, as they had after their mother’s death (but not their father’s). He became vulnerable to doubts about his reality or past. And then the borders sealed up again, and Aidan resolidified. When Rachel gently asked him to move out, after seven weeks’ rest stay, it was because she saw him regaining his shape.

  After dinner one night he said, “Thank you, Rachel, for everything,” and she patted his hand and answered, “Please, you’re welcome, but I haven’t done anything you wouldn’t do for me.”

  And he nodded but then started—unavoidably and visibly—to think. “Do you think it could’ve happened to you?” he asked.

  “Aidan, you’re just much smarter than I am, so I don’t know how I would’ve ever been in a position to make that mistake. I could never be on a game show, you know.”

  “I know,” he snapped, then recovered. The driblet of dopamine at being called smarter, the evaporation of it at the word mistake, his inability, despite maneuvering, to make her spontaneously recite the soothing formula “Yes, it could have happened to anyone (of a certain incalculably rare intelligence)”: Rachel recognized these signs of his vigorous health, and she smiled at her work, which annoyed him. “Stop grinning like a chimp. If you were on a show like that, it could’ve happened to you, too.”

  “That’s hard to say, Aidan.” She was teasing now, happy to see him back to his old self. “You have a very special mind, you know. I can’t even imagine how you hold all that information in your—”

  “Yes, yes, yes.” He’d heard that twitty compliment (the awe one feels for a freak) all his life. “But if you were, or could, just put yourself in my shoes and imagine, you could have done the same thing I did, right?”

  “I don’t know, Aidan,” Rachel said in measured tones.

  “Why not? How can you not know? You have all the empathy that God gave to humankind. You got all of it. I obviously got none. So answer me,” he demanded, desperate to hear Rachel admit that she could have accidentally slandered an entire religion in the middle of a game show. “I mean, you’ve said the wrong thing in your life, haven’t you?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Suppose? Term of avoidance. Have you never done anything without being able to stop yourself?”

  “Of course I have,” she said softly, and Aidan regretted at once having pushed her to think of all that. But still he couldn’t stop himself from marking his Pyrrhic victory: “So it could have happened to you. Thank you.”

  He moved back home the next day, just in time. He had come to love Rachel, not surprisingly, even as he desperately wanted her to return to his brother. The strength of that second desire surprised him more. He had fallen in love, over seven weeks, with the idea of her returning to Julian. He missed their Wednesday-night dinners, how he relaxed in their company, the only people on earth around whom he could relax. He missed keeping autistic count of the glancing touches and touching glances between them, missed the way Julian acted toward him when Rachel was around, missed how she made Julian laugh in a way Aidan could not. Obviously these recollections dated from before Carlton, but still.

  And when he moved out, he expressed his gra
titude in those terms. He bent forward to hug her, their bodies meeting at the shoulders, forming in profile a rickety inverted V. He said, “I’ll do anything to help you two come back to each other.” His beard draped over her shoulder, and he smelled something spicy in her hair. He forced himself upright to stare at the ceiling through his off-kilter glasses, and he blinked rapidly, trying to smell something else. “He’s a cretin if he won’t beg you to come back.” And then she was crying, and Aidan recklessly promised, “I can bring him to you, whenever you want him back.”

  Rachel’s adoption of Aidan had not been a sacrifice for her. He cleaned her apartment obsessively and could make her laugh, to his great satisfaction (and that pleased her most of all: she satisfied Aidan, without ever even touching him). More to her benefit, she had eagerly watched his improvement and won—from constantly strategizing how best to handle and help him—some much-needed distraction. She liked solving the puzzle of other people, comparable to Aidan’s love of crosswords. Before she first called him after the Incident, she spent a happy hour calculating how best to approach him, and when she concluded that she must show no sympathy, must hide her deep pity for him, it was a triumphant deduction. She had a suspicion he was holed up in his little apartment with self-hatred, watching his Google hit count rocket, reading the blogs and boards that misunderstood and mocked him, no one noticing the simple fact that he’d been awfully good at that game before his slip of the tongue, no one out there who knew that Aidan coming to dinner every Wednesday had made her husband happy, even in mourning. She was the only one to guess that he was contributing to Web bulletin boards under false names, defending himself, not against the nonsense charges of anti-Semitism but against the brutal charges of stupidity.

  She realized, too, after the first few days, that he was now half in love with her, and all those Wednesdays took on new retrospective colors as a result. She could trace the odd shape of his love, its unlikely contours and limitations.

  12

  THE SUNDAY TIMES ran a long profile of Cait O’Dwyer, “Singer on the Verge,” which Julian read and reread with the absorption of a monk illuminating a manuscript.

  The piece, by Milton Chi, fawned, but in the ironic tone of a celebrity journalist pretending to be above fawning, a profile in which the interviewer steps in to play an intrusive starring role, making insightful comments to his subject, hinting that the interview has become the record of a sparkling, flirtatious affair that carries on far into the shimmering night while the subscriber is left at home bunching in jealous fists his inky pages. The love-daffy Mr. Chi left the consummation of his interview in a gentlemanly haze of implication but also revealed a fan’s fear of insignificance: “She’s happy, or so she’ll let you think. She doesn’t mind. She admits to no heartbreak or regret. The world is endlessly exciting to her, she says, and brushes off questions about sadnesses overcome. ‘No, I’m having more fun than should be allowed.’ She’s tough, because that’s how they are back in County Wicklow, seat of rebels. She’ll tell you she’s kin to Michael O’Dwyer, terror and scourge of the English militias in 1798, and she’ll say ‘You can’t trust a Wickla woman,’ and then laugh at you or with you, and now you don’t mind. She’s ‘our Cait’ still, as they say at the Rat, but she wasn’t always, and we can’t hope she always will be, can we?”

  The photos (more available online) included two of her performing at the Rat, and Julian recognized the very moments; he must have been within a few feet of the Times photographer, and of this poodly writer as well. One shot had Cait onstage looking demure, as if she’d just been complimented squarely on a point of pride; the other, one hand on the black mike, enraged, in full howl, her eyes shut. “Her charms and her talent are sui generis,” read the swollen text pulled into a box floating in the middle of the article. The details of her (major) label’s vast plans for her (bland background: the industry in perpetual crisis, digital erosion of profits, hundreds of eggs pyramid-balanced in Cait’s basket), the A&R man’s oily praise and acrobatic hopes, the life story—artfully burnished here and tarnished there—of her Irish girlhood, the village twenty miles from Wicklow Town where her maimeo still talked of banshees and will-o’-the-wisps while young, willowy Cait had to drag the boys into manhood, so ready was she for life, and the Big Move across the sea when she was eighteen, with some Immigration issues, now more or less settled to all parties’ legal satisfaction, and the exhilarating dive into the Village and Loisaida and Harlem and Brooklyn, the experiments with jazz and soul, the late-night jam sessions and compositions and heroes and influences (a list matching almost to the album—but for some newer names he’d never heard of–Julian’s late-night speculations), and then this, the detail that caused Julian to reread and reread and reread:

  Part of the joy in watching Ms. O’Dwyer perform is to see and hear her varied influences on shameless display, to notice how she draws on, and then makes her own, her godmothers, as varied as Sinead O’Connor, Janis Joplin, even Billie Holiday. When I tell her this, citing as an example her vocal work on “Blithering,” Ms. O’Dwyer fidgets with her silver Claddagh ring and several times starts to speak, but stops herself, as if unsure of the wisdom of revelation. When I press, she yields only this: “That’s funny you say it. Much on my mind lately. I know a remarkable fellow who would debate you on that.” “Someone important to you?” I pursue. “Something of an adviser who spots all my flaws. You reach a point in this game where people start getting afraid to offer helpful criticism. Anyhow, he says influences are to be hidden away, that they distract, become competition to the ear.” And that’s all she’ll give on the topic of her mysterious Svengali. Ms. O’Dwyer is nothing if not enigmatic and, unusually for a young woman whose approaching stardom is so widely predicted, her discretion comes easily and not without an appeal of its own, as if this one, at least, had her head screwed on properly back in Ireland. She smiles and looks down, an effect overpowering, more so for its air of unpracticed sincere shyness, unexpected and disarming.

  Julian calculated that she had given the interview since he saw her sing and drew those drunken coaster cartoons filled with impromptu advice, and he tried to recall exactly what he’d advised. There had been something about hiding influences, he thought. No, yes, he was sure of it, though that obviously didn’t mean that this was him in the article. He reread the passage, wished he’d made copies of his coaster-borne advice. And the bartender gave them to her? Had Julian meant him to? And she read them, absorbed them, and now they absorbed her, Claddagh-fidgeting, hesitating to mention the remarkable fellow whose advice she treasured?

  It was an enchanting fantasy, that he’d somehow given her something, made real that two-way exchange he felt when she sang directly into his ears. It was just possible.

  For all Milton Chi’s intimations of intimacy, the journalist had some obvious trouble, three hundred million words later, specifying the one unique thing about this woman, though he sweated text in his manifest certainty that there was unquestionably at least one. Julian marveled that the article so undersold the power of the actual music, rambled about personality and celebrity instead of describing the songs and their objective power.

  Promised the italics at the bottom of the page: Cait O’Dwyer plays the Romping Rat in Brooklyn, this Saturday at 10 pm.

  Saturday at 10 P.M., a folding chalkboard straddled the sand and gum and ice-water puddles of the leonine March night: Cait. Last chance. You’ll tell your grandkids.

  “Coaster Man!” The bartender, in the same T-shirt advertising his band, recognized Julian. “The lady requested I point you out if you came in tonight.”

  “Did she?” It had been him in the article. She wanted to see his face. Julian couldn’t remember if he’d thought he was leaving the coasters for her, if he’d been joking, if he’d meant to meet her, wasn’t sure the barman wasn’t joking now. “Well, let’s keep mum, okay? I tip heavily for anonymity.”

  His surprise and confusion yielded to pleasure, of course: he had im
pressed her. And once, that would have led to meeting her; he might have tossed the same glib crack to the bartender but then introduced himself to her, talked her up with the same buffed banter that had on infinite other occasions gotten him lushly paid or plushly laid. Now, though, the glib crack was honest: he didn’t want to meet her. To his relief, the crowd lived up to all the hype Milton Chi and his species could froth, and Julian, taking shelter amid the elbows and plaid hunting caps and down vests, sank onto a dying couch. In another life, in another life …

  But in this life, after everything, assuming she really was what he hoped, this was plenty: he had told her how much he loved her music, and she had thanked him, had even taken his suggestions seriously. For a man with his history and limited resources, he told himself, this was miraculous. Sitting on that couch, listening to the bassist tune up, he imagined how he would feel the next time he heard her on his iPod, when he would know that she was, in some small measure, singing to him. He breathed deeply: he was going to hear her sing again, in just a minute. He was going to watch her from within a crowd, and she would be thinking of him but wouldn’t know where he was. He would be a ghost, in her thoughts, invisible but close. The role suited him perfectly, he thought. (A moment later, though, he swallowed down a gurgle of green panic: What if he had nothing else to offer her, no more advice she could use? If he had given everything away on a few pieces of recycled cardboard, he would lose his job as whispering phantom before he’d even realized it was his calling.)