The Song is You (2009)

by Arthur Phillips

  “Oh, my God, this is not coming out how I meant. I meant to say that you’re better than this. Than ads, I guess I mean.”

  “You think you’d like Hollywood people better than ad people?”

  “I know, everyone’s selling something. But movie people are at least also trying to make something, right? I sound naive to you, don’t I?”

  “A little.”

  “Well, that reflects badly on you, then, doesn’t it?” she said, with sauce.

  There was an answer to Maile’s kiss-up compliment disguised as smart-ass challenge, her flirtatious treatment of her boss as an underachieving child lacking only an inspiring woman. The answer, though, was not likely to impress a temporarily semi-infatuated production assistant.

  He’d been embarrassed, years earlier, in front of film-school friends who’d done well enough in Hollywood, that his “talent” or “vision” hadn’t been strong enough to resist the offer of his first television commercial, and then, even more, when his talent was too weak to overcome the inertia of continued offers. He couldn’t even claim he’d failed to make a great film, as he had never tried. He remembered wanting to make one. He wished he still did, but he didn’t. He wished he were an artist, a great artist, but sometimes he also wished he was an astronaut. He even wished he could tell Maile he had a vision for a film that he was unable to make, for fear of failure, a subject of some regret… but that would have been a bone-deep lie.

  The childish belief that he would someday direct great films had been replaced by a prickly adult wonder that such a goal had ever boasted its moral superiority, and he tried, jokingly, to explain this to the lovely girl sharing Heaven’s Pig and Enraged Life Crab with him. Why, he pressed her, was it better to direct a film? His work, stories told with haiku efficiency, provoked real emotion, too, but then they also produced—the ultimate tangible proof of invisible emotion—action, thousands of times over: purchases, votes, donations, changes in fashion. What Hitchcock film had such empirical evidence of its auteur’s prowess? Some people were scared to shower for a day or two? “If the true measure of an artist’s greatness is his influence, then I’m a genius.”

  “I don’t think you mean that,” said Maile. She watched him as she slowly laid a water chestnut in her mouth and delicately crunched it with her lips apart. “You might think you mean it, but you don’t.” That matronizing sentiment—one Rachel used to flash from time to time—combined with the slow insertion of food into red mouth, was a hardwired tactic of the human female. They would offer themselves sexually at the same moment they insisted they understood their potential mate better than he understood himself. The praying mantis just bites her male’s head off, and only after the fun; the human insists upon dissolving her mate’s personality before the pleasure. Maile would improve him. She promised. And if he agreed to the procedure, he could have her, for a while, until the day when, aghast, she would realize she’d been swindled despite her best efforts, and he would stand before her, erect and unimproved.

  “Let’s say you had all the money in the world,” Maile pushed. “What sort of film would you make?”

  He asked her—as she plainly wanted him to—what her favorite films were and looked duly impressed when she cataloged dead maestros from cinema’s storied past. The whole game was one he’d played too many times, too long ago. Maile stood on the far side of a rushing river, in another country, waving her arms frantically, but the rapids drowned her voice, and Julian smiled and nodded. Later, Maile would render their conversation as:

  MARIE

  You think I’m naive. That doesn’t reflect very well on you, now does it?

  HUGH moves to kiss her, but she closes the cab door and smiles at him through the window.

  HUGH

  Well. It seems it’s time I became a better man.

  MARIE

  (slyly) So it would seem. (to the cabbie) Onward, Mr. Singh, onward. The evening is young.

  He had the studio for another nine hours, though there was no reason to stay. But the disarray at the end of a day’s shoot still attracted him, after years, one of life’s butterfly moments that left him pleasantly near-satisfied, a much better feeling than the dull, guilty bloat of fully satisfied.

  “I’ll close up, Maile. Thank you for everything today.”

  She didn’t hear, or pretended not to. She killed Bach and put her own CD on the system, turned it too loud for easy conversation. The first track was “Piccadilly” by Squeeze, and Julian laughed. It hadn’t shuffled up on his own iPod in months. The opening piano took him by surprise every time; he recalled (his body recalled) how he (it) had felt at age sixteen hearing this song, overwhelmed by the reference to a young woman putting on a brassiere: “She hooks up her cupcakes and puts on her jumper.” He had to yell from where he was sitting: “How do you know this song?” He sounded like a ninety-year-old impressed by a precocious toddler. Maile only smiled, turned away, busied herself with the work from which he’d excused her, played a little discreet one-handed air guitar.

  The next song—an old shameful pleasure of his, only enjoyable if all social context, fashion, and history were suspended, though Maile was too young to be aware of this—lifted him out of his chair. He stepped toward her. She was still all the way across the square black floor, nearly to the far wall. She turned; she must have seen him stand in a reflection or a layered shadow. “Will you ever use that grip again? I couldn’t believe he—” She stopped when she caught his eye.

  “You don’t have to stay, you know.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  She playfully climbed up a stack of canvas sandbags meant to stabilize light stands, and he saw all that would happen next. He would go to her and dance with her for a minute before touching her, and then this instant right now would be the last moment of mystery between them: lips, laugh, Heaven’s Pig on the breath (erotic tonight, off-putting and inconsiderate eight months from now), his fingertips on the black lace at the top of her bra, hey, you have a tattoo, the climax (or, more likely, the droopy return of his inability), and quickly on to What does this mean? Who is this in the photo? and This isn’t working, is it?

  She stood atop the little hill of sandbags and smiled at him. “Do you want to keep the breakfast meeting with Burgess tomorrow? He’s going to offer you another dames’ dam, I think.” And she slowly lifted one leg and brought her foot up to rest against her thigh, a yoga pose. “So what do you say, Julian Donahue?”

  “You ask tough questions.”

  And the next song on the CD was Cait O’Dwyer:

  You’ve reduced me down to the dregs

  You won’t seduce me, though I stand here and beg

  I’m blithering, you’re dithering, I’m your slithering fool.

  If Maile had sneaked a look at Julian’s iPod, gone home and cannily burnt a CD while consulting Cosmo and The Art of War, each slot of the playlist carefully chosen to provoke a scheduled moment of desire, then here, batting cleanup, was the confessional song. But, oh, how badly chosen. She must have seen it on his face. She stepped down off the bags. “I’ll call his office first thing in the morning, tell them you were shooting late.”

  This was not my best hope for me, not what I meant to become,

  Lurking at your window, breathing my name on your pane.

  But I won’t let you have her if you won’t have me.

  Why can’t I think?

  Oh, ignore me, I’m blithering, I’m dithering,

  I’ve had too much to drink.

  He imagined Cait attached by suction cups to the outside wall of this loft space in Chelsea, tracking his movements with infrared sensors, listening to him with parabolic microphones. And, having said a mutually smiling I’m-not-sure-just-what-you’re-thinking-but-I-suspect-I-do-and-I-deny-everything farewell to his pretty employee at the yellow door of her taxi waiting to ferry her home to her screen-writing software, he turned away, fumbled for his iPod, and quickly spun it to “Blithering”: “You’ve reduced me to
dithering, your coldness is withering, / This can’t be what you want me to be.” She sang what he couldn’t say, and he knew it was largely a coincidence, but the coincidences had become so richly absurd that his own employee was trying to seduce him with a song about Cait watching some other woman trying to seduce her remarkable fellow.

  He wanted to tell her all of this and more, but if he could perfectly express himself to her, it would sound like one of her own songs. He’d have to send her a CD of herself. Better yet, she should stand alone in a room and just sing to herself until she understood him.

  15

  AT FIRST, RACHEL had thought she was making a rational choice, even if the moment of choice floated into view only atop an undercurrent of revenge and hate. She chose: since her natural, unconscious behavior had made her miserable, she consciously tried to be like Julian instead, to act like him in hopes of tasting some of his old happiness, to roam like him, take pleasure like him, coolly, content with small doses and short exposures, light fun, strangers in parks or bars, making eyes on subway trains, chatting and drinking, going home with or without them, as the event unrolled. A charming indifference—we can lie here, I can go home, you can scramble eggs, but I will be happy and will hope for nothing more than a small plate of scrambled happiness.

  But then, after she left him, this, with just a little therapy, was what she realized she’d obviously “actually” been up to: she had been trying to find someone who could distract her from the endless alter nation of fire and balm, thinking of Carlton in pain and then inappropriate joy and then numbness, and on and on.

  Finally, months later, having drunk a bit, lying alone in her apartment, she decided she had really all along been trying, and failing, to stop being her, the woman who got married, got cheated, got pregnant to fix things, had a taste of happiness, and then let her child die. She had a thirst for oblivion that a hundred men’s bodies could not quench.

  She exhausted herself in flight. That phrase leapt at Rachel from the page of a dull book: she exhausted herself in flight. The idea was covered with burrs. She slowed down to examine it, kept turning the pages back, after absorbing nothing since, turned the words to the light, fit them to herself. In the biography, the words referred to a Nazi war criminal’s refugee wife, but they took root in Rachel, wafted spores everywhere. She had exhausted herself in flight, and she often thought now of a garden. She saw herself looking out a kitchen window and seeing overflowing vines and beds of tulips, things to prune and lay out for the coming season. Julian was in this house, and photos of Carlton, and the garden, and that was all she could see.

  How could both of these be true: that she could see a path to a certain limited serenity, and that she had twice (perhaps three times, depending on how you looked at certain acts) come very close to killing herself, without having given it any thought? She was not “in despair;” despair had taken residence in her as a boarder who came and left according to his own whims, rather than the posted hours the landlady respectfully requested.

  She could sit alone in the dark with an open bottle of wine and not cry, looking at the huge photo on her wall, lit by streetlights, of her much younger self with a husband and a velvet-cheeked baby wearing a blue baseball cap with the words TOUGH GUY on the front. She could walk to her bedroom that night making plans for the next day, thinking she might very well find a small dose of happiness at work, or in reading. And at the very same time, she could keep eating sleeping pills, one after the other, until her finger was tracing through the dusty residue at the bottom of the orange-brown plastic bottle, and still she was thinking of where tomorrow’s happiness might hide itself: in an extravagant dessert, in serving a client with surprising brilliance, on a run in Prospect Park.

  To explain all this to another person took so much effort because she only ever felt it alone, and she didn’t like to talk about how she usually felt but didn’t feel just then. And to explain it all to Aidan required still more artifice. She had invited him to dinner fresh from those scouring dreams of Carlton, but it was unlikely she would be feeling anything of significance about Julian tonight by the time they sat down to a meal. And clear signals were surely necessary to inspire Aidan to action, if there was anything he could even do.

  So she made a play of her misery for him, knowing he couldn’t read grayer shades. He was not emotionally color-blind, but the more garish colors certainly registered with him more easily. Where others would cringe at melodrama, Aidan was only just barely sensing un-happiness.

  She knew he was in love with her, and knew, too, that he was devoted to her happiness, as far as he could see it, and that he would serve her selflessly, and she had no compunction taking advantage of that service. The stakes were too high. She did consider whether this was cruel, but the word didn’t approach relevance. This determination may have been made by some engine inside her brain that would grind on, taking no heed of such niceties, too protective of her to step clear of “Aidan’s feelings.”

  “Who wrote this, Aidan? You’ll know.” And she recited from the side of the box of hippie tea: “The moon believes that the love around which it spins is a star of great magnitude, but it is only a minor, rocky planet. And that planet in turn orbits some distant sun, which is unaware of its rotating admirer in its own eagerness to revolve around the galaxy’s bright center. The universe’s wheels whiz, powered by unrequital and vain hopes.”

  He knew the answer, obviously, before she’d finished, and she could see his effort to hold his tongue until the end, saw the affection his restraint implied. He answered correctly, then asked, “Do you believe that?”

  16

  JULIAN HAD DECIDED not to sleep with his assistant because a CD told him not to. This, obviously, meant something else; his own brief therapy had succeeded at least that far. And so began a thawing season of music clubs, much as he had passed through icy seasons of German-film revivals and hot seasons of fund-raisers and rainy seasons of fashion shows. He told himself that the oddly affecting experience with Cait O’Dwyer really meant that he had a hunger not for the singer but, like his father always had, for live music, and what a wonder it was, a privilege, to live in this city of sound.

  His strongest memories of his father and mother together were the nights he would be left in Aidan’s care as they, dressed like film stars—his mom with a violet in her furs, his dad’s shiny pant leg pinned up—said they were “off to hear some music.” This would have been 1969 or 1970, so they must have been doing very old-fashioned things, seeing very old-fashioned acts; they certainly weren’t going to Woodstock or Haight-Ashbury in furs and suits. Five-year-old Julian would fall asleep imagining them even further back in time, in movies or TV shows he’d seen, nodded off while they applauded in palm-lined nightclubs, smoked with men in tuxedos while gangsters pushed crying songstresses out into the spotlight.

  It had been years since Julian himself had frequented clubs, with the exception of the Rat. Now he sought out famous and unknown names alike, though the singers were always women. He dragged Aidan to see traditional Irish bands reeling in Celtic pubs, a hardship for his elder brother, considering Aidan’s feelings about music and his policy never to use public bathrooms. One lovely, red-haired, green-eyed woman sang beautifully and fiddled well and joked between songs and introduced her bandmates with gentle teasing, and the pub crowd loved her, and Julian found her entertaining, and he never thought of her again the second his foot touched the sidewalk.

  Through the last gasps of winter, he studied the stage presence of spike-scalped ululating harpies clutching their phantom penises, Javanese pixies with expressive hands and inexpressive faces, Alabaman protest folkies so terribly disappointed, soul queens backlit to display broccoli-stalk silhouettes, a 1950s pop singer enjoying a very brief and vaguely ironic revival in a skyscraper’s rotating rooftop cabaret (a performance derided by Aidan as “the slurpy crooning of the dentured elderly”), evening-gowned jazz divas going through the motions in front of whispering divorced
surgeons with nurse-dates sipping triple-priced drinks, uneasy to be wearing anything but scrubs and clogs.

  Not one of them sang to him even when they looked right at him, and he remained hungry for Cait’s voice. He stepped from the shower, and his blood reprioritized at the sound of her. She sang to him on his train, and he wished his father could hear her sing or, better yet, come with him to a gig. “The thing is, Cannonball, if you’re ever lucky enough to see one of the truly great ones perform, you don’t walk out the door the same man that walked in.”

  Julian and Aidan’s father had made his living designing, building, and installing inflatables. This was not the glamour of the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, the pinnacle of a crowded, low-margin industry. Rather, Will Donahue rented out bouncy castles for children’s parties and pumped up twenty-foot-tall rats for unions picketing at scabby building sites. He oversaw the manufacture of toys for circus and museum gift shops. (He could also, calling himself a “pneumatic zoologist,” twist for the boys’ birthday parties an impressive line of balloon animals, including bald eagles, meerkats, piranhas, box jellyfish, and plankton, magnified.) He created custom-builts for business parties and raffles: miniature inflatable jumbo jets, jumbo inflatable chocolate bars, life-size inflatable nuclear-missile components recognizable only to the engineers at the party. He also manufactured—a profitable but small portion of the business—”personal comfort inflatables,” available only by private mail order: Air-dorables, Floating Venus, Weightless Tess, Pump ‘n’ Hump, and Silent Nights, the last in a package emblazoned with the Elvis Presley lyrics, “A little less conversation, a little more action.” This element of the business never entered the house, where the kids happily examined their father’s drawings of inflatable reindeer. Aidan’s doubts about their father, however, were already beginning when he visited the company’s dingy offices, came upon an Air-dorable, and returned home convinced that Dad was making inflatable, naked Moms. Literally: “They look just like her,” he insisted to Julian, age nine. “You don’t remember her, but I do.”