The Song is You (2009)

by Arthur Phillips

  “I don’t miss that,” he tried.

  Rachel said, “I had the strangest thing the other day. I wonder if you’ve had this. A total stranger said to me in the grocery store, when I’m looking at cream cheese, and I don’t think I’m thinking about anything except cream cheese, not about him, and she said, ‘Are you all right?’ A stranger. ‘It’ll be okay’ this other old lady said to me in the street. Do they see it in you, too? If it’s just me, then maybe I’m fooling myself in all sorts of ways.”

  “I don’t know. I do get pity from people still. But, I really, I try, I guess, very hard—I don’t want it anymore. I want to be free from all that.”

  “Are you insane? Of course you want to be free of it—you’re human.” He suddenly looked like he was going to break. She should have shut up right there—she had him. “Do you think I’m saying I want to be like this? I like being the most maudlin bitch on earth? But Julian, it’s in the blood now. It’s a permanent condition. We’re not like everyone else anymore. We’re out of their club forever. Did you really think you were going to get over it? You don’t think that, not really, do you?”

  “No, of course not, but isn’t there some middle ground …” He stopped talking, waited as if she had an answer, and she waited as if he might still figure out what was left to say.

  “If you find it,” she said, “tell me, okay? Because I can’t find it alone.”

  His face closed up again, and he wasn’t going to say anything, and she should have turned to lighter matters, she supposed, but she was crying. “I’m sorry.” She fumbled in her purse for a tissue. She stood up; he didn’t. She waited one second longer then fled into the wind and sun and raised a gloved hand to her eye, but wiped her contact lens clear off its floating tear and into the wind, and half-blind she walked and sometimes ran back to her apartment, sorting through fragmentary memories of his face and conversation, to save and file any proof that she was not alone in this.

  And I keep hoping you are the same as me.

  And I’ll send you letters …

  —the Sundays, “My Finest Hour”

  1

  SPRING WAS LATE but some child’s birthday was not, and the balloons lashed to the park’s fence shriveled in the cold air, a bouquet of colorful prunes above the lips stained Popsicle blue and the clatter of juggling pins dropped by a shivering clown. On the sidewalk, looking through the fence, stood a man, whom none of the children knew, though he felt the parents should have.

  Like an arrogant government minister forced by revolution into faraway exile where he can only find work as a cabdriver and who then assumes that all his fares despise him as completely as he would have despised immigrant cabdrivers in his home country back when he was a man of power, so it now was with the former lead singer of Reflex.

  Reflex had a song on a film soundtrack back in 1991, the pinnacle of a twelve-year run as a band with underground and college success but never arena stardom. That film and their title song for it, “Sugar Girl,” were both moderate hits (the band’s largest by far), but that didn’t, as its management had continually promised, “bump them up to the next level.” Then a child was born, and the drummer retired to become a school music teacher. Another child was born, launching the bassist into a sinecure in his father’s restaurant-supply company. One more child was born, and the keyboardist-composer—musically essential for the band but so fat and ugly that he always played far in the back and was edited out of videos—retired to score for local theater. Babies promenaded along Venice Beach strapped into their fathers’ chest harnesses—worn ironically, custom made with black leather and band logos and metal studs—and Reflex was no more.

  Soon after the neonatal conspiracy to destroy his career and de stabilize his life, Alec Stamford, the guitarist and lead singer, certain where the band’s appeal had always laid, moved to New York and released a solo album, Still Standing, produced at great expense by a no-fail Grammy-winning hit maker, but no one is perfect. The album could still be found in seventy-five-cent bins outside Brooklyn bodegas, its mouse-thin spine straining for attention.

  Stamford lived for occasional royalty checks from ASCAP—briefly plumper when the movie Sugar Girl evolved to DVD and then again when the song “Sugar Girl” was rerecorded with a female singer and new lyrics for a commercial for Sugar Swirl Donuts. Stamford rerecorded “Ten Minutes to Midnight” himself for an ad for the Chevy Syncope. The ad guys could have used the original album recording, but that would have required Stamford to split the licensing fees with the label. Instead, by rerecording the song to duplicate the original as closely as possible, with session musicians paid by the hour rather than his old bandmates, he was able to eat the cake in its entirety. The price was the definitive loss of the belief that a great performance of pop music could never be duplicated, that there was something snowflake-unique in pop that could not be imprisoned behind the bars of staff paper. The commercial version of “Ten Minutes to Midnight” caused the original label to sue Stamford and Chevrolet, only dropping the action after both versions were compared and found different by a team of court-appointed audio technicians.

  Subsequent efforts to write pop music battered him. Too old and slow to catch the crests of musical fashion, not confident enough to ignore them, never sure if he was “advancing,” imitating or parodying himself, he finally quit and, in self-punishment, hit clubs to check out new bands, then Googled them after the shows, then, inevitably, auto-Googled, too.

  His rare appearance in celebrity magazines, like a faint echo of the big bang just perceptible on the far edge of the universe, warmed him for weeks. His appetite, like that of a former fat man, had slowly accustomed itself to the less certain nourishment of scarce fame but never stopped nattering at him. Reminding himself that most people survived without any fame at all, he attempted to behave like them, famelessly, as if he were just a cabdriver after all and not the former prime minister of the Republic of Reflex.

  How would a fameless person respond? he asked himself at moments of great self-awareness, and he would peer at the faces of people speaking to him with the close attention of an illegal-immigrant waiter desperate to catch a mumbled order. His resulting impression was uneven, as if he had learned simple conversation as a diligent but not terribly gifted autodidact, pinching his cheeks to stay awake while puzzling by candlelight over a book of antique engravings: Taking an Interest, Putting the Other First, A Prompt Apology Pleases Both Parties.

  Stamford’s assembled eccentricities, necessarily budget dependent, consoled for lost fame and labeled him a person of interest, evidence that fame was still dormant in him. He wore a pince-nez, for example, clipped on for reading small type, and bracelets to match his outfits, but plastic, stylish only for the causes they championed, as randomly strewn about the political spectrum as the colors of the bracelets themselves: he was opposed to testicular cancer (yellow) but in favor of Israeli settlements in the West Bank (orange). His hair, a willowing mane, required various emollients, for brands of which he had a Pashtun tribesman’s loyalty, but he had his hair cut at the Uzbek barbershop on the corner, calling out blade numbers, criticizing scissor technique.

  Back in the old country, a failed or failing rock star would have been burned to death under a blast of the most withering, ideologically pure disdain, nothing personal. That Alec had become the creature his youth required him to detest left him with no good option. To discard his own past as youthful intolerance would have been unpalatable, even self-destructive; his past was the best of him. His need to regain his old status meant accepting his younger standards. Renewed success would win him absolution, from everyone, from himself. In the meantime, he saw his reflection in the eyes of others and flinched.

  After his solo career failed, his desperate rediscovery of his talent as a painter offered a middle path between drudging anonymity and unbecoming musical ambition. He felt when painting that he must be an artist, not merely an expired confection of the musical-industrial complex. He s
old work, and critics discussed his work, so Reflex was retroactively recast as a previous incarnation of a restless creative force in merely the first of many media. His legitimate skills and reputation sufficed to win him second-tier New York gallery representation, so his previous career also cast its authenticating light forward; he must be a real artist now, since he had once been a successful musician. The sniffing boredom of art critics beat gulping down the gritty indigestible sludge of global indifference. He envisioned a work about the World Trade Center that would say something painful but true.

  His gallery exhibits supported his sense of existing separate from other people or even inanimate objects. (Once, soon after the sibilant, whispering-wind failure of Still Standing, he had the impression, lasting almost a full minute and returning over weeks, that the box of unsold CDs on the floor of his TriBeCa loft were him, not metaphorically but actually.) When confident in his reality, he allowed his study of those archaic forms of human interaction (friendship, the notion of other people with their own internal lives) to lapse, and he released himself from alliances with civilians forged during fame famines. Then, in spells of lowered self-esteem, he reestablished those ties, sheepishly but not without real charm. He would become again a paragon of false immodesty, boasting that he was “a beloved figure in the entertainment field, you know,” with a tone conveying his smiling acceptance that he was no longer any such thing, and that humble assurance, he hoped, would let people know he was amused by his fate and confident that he was suffering merely a temporary power outage.

  Alec Stamford met Cait O’Dwyer twice. The second occasion was a CD-release party for another band on her label, an event where she was simultaneously talked up as the next big thing and treated as a mere aspirant. Alec watched her and, nervous that she remembered their first introduction, was led over to her with some pomp by the Anglophilic head of A&R: “Cait, here’s a grand old man of our game you’d be wise to emulate.” When she said, “Oh, very nice to meet you. I quite like Reflex,” the wiser tactic was to say, “Thank you,” rather than remind her that he had watched her perform two months earlier and then walked up to her at the bar and paid his compliments, had even said, “I sang for a band called Reflex, but that’s probably ancient histor—” just as she turned her head to accept praise from some other admirer, and Alec had stood there a few moments too long before he saw how pathetic he was and fled to another bar around the corner, where he drank heavily and had to pinch his own palm until he raised a blood blister to prevent himself from playing one of the two Reflex songs on the jukebox, though that was one of the reasons he loved that bar, hanging there and waiting to see if anyone else put one of them on and then examining people’s faces as it played.

  But this second, more appropriate meeting, at Pulpy Lemonhead Records’ party for Leering Queer, led to a long conversation, the first part of which Alec wasted trying to gauge if she remembered him. Finally, when he implied that he hadn’t heard of her, she didn’t contradict him, so, very slowly, he relaxed his internal clench and permitted himself to press his personality outward until it met hers as an equal.

  He was not immune to her beauty but saw too that she attracted with more: she had it unconsciously germinating in her with no flaws. She was only just beginning to sense the effects of her growing, growling fame or charisma or whatever its name was. It could not accurately be called fame, since people of either limited or decreasing fame often had it in spades and people of more objective fame (such as himself) could, one day, suddenly, very plainly, lose it entirely. Nor could it be called charm or charisma, because he knew people with it who positively repelled onlookers to a distance of about twenty-five feet but then held them there, in an unbreakable orbit, like a fly hovering immobile, trying to escape the effect of a vacuum cleaner nozzle held just so. He settled, those years ago, on the word potency, had even tried to write a song about it, but one of his very few joys in that period had been the process of destroying his aborted songs, a distraction so rare that he stretched it out over days, overseeing the eradication of all computer files, paper printouts, tentative four-track recordings.

  He mentioned to Cait a music festival he was in negotiations to produce. “It may not pan out, but might fit you, if you want to send a CD of your stuff to my office.” He slid a card from a leather case. “Also I have a gallery show going up soon.” Standing beside her, he could feel himself absorb some of her luxurious potency. It flowed into him, and as in a dream in which one recalls how to do something impossible, simply by relaxing and doing it (flying, running sixty miles an hour, auto-fellatio), his muscles remembered how to possess potency, to contain and express it. Other people watched him when he spoke to her. He could hold on to her effect even when she was across the room, but the next day it was gone.

  Each time he logged on to bulletin boards about her, he told himself he would most likely never do it again; he was just curious to see how she fit into the universe, and so he never wrote down the log-in passwords (or the false email accounts). He had therefore to create a new identity each time his refreshed curiosity required him to lurk and study the nature of her attraction by studying those who were attracted to her. Over a few months, he called himself caitfan and then caitfan01 and caitfan02 up to and including caitfan 16, though someone else had snagged caitfan11 when Alec was otherwise distracted with the possibility of a Reflex reunion concert.

  2

  “MAIL(E) CALL,” Maile flirted, dropping books and letters on Julian’s desk, but he had his iPod on, and the pass was incomplete. Embedded among seasonal modeling-agency books, video-resume reels, the bills, and the invitations to conferences and production company summer parties was a thick cardboard disk printed red on black: POST COITUM OMNE ANIMAL TRISTE EST. On the reverse, the name Alec Stamford, a date and time, OPENING, INVITED GUESTS ONLY, and the address of a Lower East Side gallery, the owner of which had been in Julian and Rachel’s inadvertently hilarious Lamaze class (taught by an old Dominican lady with uniquely inflected English who called the mothers-to-be “rr-r-r-oly-polies” as in “now joo gonna push dat baby out, rr-r-r-oly-poly,” but spoke of the one lesbian couple in the class only ever in the squeamish third person while looking at the other teams: “Dose two ladies over dere are gonna wanna study da breath patterns a little better”).

  For those without Latin, the show’s title was translated on one side of the cocktail napkins, so that one cradled one’s glansy-pink prawn or vaguely vaginal anchovy tartlet in the red-and-black words: FOLLOWING THE ACT OF LOVE, ALL CREATURES GRIEVE. The waitstaff who distributed the delicacies were recruited for physical appeal rather than catering prowess, near models nearly dressed in black and scarlet. The gallery was garlanded in black crepe, resembling a brothel hosting a funeral for one of its own. The soundtrack, piped from speakers concealed in weeping, armless Venuses and sleeping, harmless fauns, alternated between bump-and-grind and funerary violin: “Violate Me Right Now” by the Repulsion and “The Sombre Coquetry of Death” by Hieronymous Gratchenfleiss, “Compulsive Fucker” by the Schoolyard Weasels, then a mournful bagpipe.

  Julian recognized friends and nameless faces, smiled and nodded through camouflaged pleas for employment, but took regular advantage of the gallery’s strange configuration to win long stretches of solitude, taking plastic flutes of prosecco into the booths. Stamford’s pictures were all small, and each hung in its own confined viewing booth with space enough only for one or two people, hunched close. At any one time, most of the two hundred or so guests were milling about the main gallery floor, eating and talking but with no pictures to look at, while twenty or thirty were sliding in and out of overlapping black and crimson curtains, as if penetrating a bedroom, or further. The effect was like a busy Sunday morning, sinners slipping from one confessional to another, eager to confess again and again, take on more and more penance.

  The painter himself, recognizable from the catalog, was leaning over a young woman with a notebook, his six-foot-five frame swaying a li
ttle from drink and the paunch belted to him, worn almost ironically, his teeth so thoroughly whitened that they called to mind not the youth he’d been hoping to restore but the matching so-white skull to which they still clung, the moralizing whiteness of a cattle head sun-dried on a desert floor. “I mean to provoke a clarity, but a clear-sighted view of mystery. The illusion of transfiguring and terrifying honesty Think about this: a nice ass looks like twinned, fused cherries, you know? Nature’s repertoire is actually surprisingly finite.”

  The young woman, from a minor newspaper, despite the gallery’s efforts to open this show on a night of competitive inactivity, provoked back: “What do you say to those who call your paintings mere provocations?”

  Alec exposed to the light his barium teeth. “I’m reminded of an old joke. A little old lady from Minneapolis visits Paris, her first trip there since she was a young girl, and at the restaurant she orders her dessert ‘ a la mode.’ She’s very proud of her French. Well, the waiter comes back with her tarte tatin, but instead of a scoop of ice cream, there’s a lump of dog shit on it, shaped like a swan. ‘Mais qu’est-ce que c’est que ca?‘ the lady cries. ‘I ordered it a la mode!’ And the waiter says, ‘Oui, madame, but fashions change.’”