The Song is You (2009)

by Arthur Phillips

  Cait flew from her front door, at the end of a leash binding her wrist, straining to remain attached to the spiked-collar-immune neck of a Great Dane the color of rain-pregnant evening clouds. The beast shook Cait in slapstick jolts up Henry Street. Through the windows of the Bangladeshi deli across from her building, the silenced picture gave the impression of a silent-film comedy.

  The monstrous hound towed her to a dog park on the other side of Brooklyn Heights. White pear, pink cherry, and the hallucinatory purple of the redbud blossoms lined the streets, but the enclosed park nestled up against a tendril of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and the wind mingled truck exhaust and a blizzard of cherry blossoms onto the dogs at play.

  She opened the gate, and at once her dog ran free of her into the park. “Lars! Stay!” Cait yelled at her Danish chum as he bounded off, shaking the ground, propelled by his rocket-booster genitals, to sniff the puckered back-roses of whimpering Labradoodles and Lhasapuggles, rotthuahuas, cocksunds, schnorkies, and shiht-boxes. “Well, then. Good dog,” she added and walked down the hill toward one of the seats provided to human escorts, rubbing her leash shoulder as she went. At this early hour—monastically early, considering her profession—she was one of six people watching eight dogs. She sat by herself on a bench built around a fat and ancient oak, and Julian could tell from where he was watching that she was down there singing with closed eyes to whatever her headphones were feeding her.

  As he walked down the hill, he could almost hear her over the traffic, the sustained car-horns that resembled bossa nova trumpet and flute chords, the dogs barking, the jackhammers and shouted Spanish, the tires squealing like lazy fingers on guitar strings. He came closer, watched her over the fence. She was like any other introverted headphone junkie releasing a slim stream of extroversion, emoting to no audience, like teenagers all over the world, Miami girls swatting invisible crash cymbals, Mumbai boys playing feverish air sitar.

  Julian entered the park through a gate behind her bench. His arrival—blocked from her by the tree and her own iPod—was noteworthy, as he had no dog, and he therefore resembled the peculiar childless gentlemen who savor an afternoon in playgrounds. He sat on the same circular bench orbiting her oak but exactly opposite her, as the planet Antichthon once vainly pursued Earth around its orbit.

  With his back to their tree, he switched on his handheld memo-corder, placed it behind him and to the right. She was singing to the Smiths’ “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side.” She was, even in these circumstances, a moving vocalist, harmonizing to a tune she’d likely been listening to since she was a girl. This slow circling of each other—perhaps not unrelated to the scent inspection Lars was just then performing on a newly arrived, quivering black beagle rolled on its back—implied endlessness, no fatigue, no despair, perpetual surprise, the end of past loves’ predictive or delimiting power. This was what she wanted from him, why she asked him not to pay a call yet.

  He’d never done this—sat unnoticed and painlessly extracted a sample of a woman’s privacy, like a drop of blood pricked from a sleeping fingertip, to return to her later as a gift, cut and faceted and mounted, endowed with new and complex meanings.

  And, because he had never done this, he felt briefly the illusion of being cut free of his past. It was as if he had never been married and separated, never survived Carlton, never fished out and threw back bedmates, never dated girls in high school, never been in hopeless love as a boy, never found others’ declarations of deep affection for him to be suspect, pathological, annoying.

  She breathed music even when alone, alchemized the sounds of her iPod into something new. She made something out of sitting on a park bench, and somehow she lived with that enormous beast she could hardly control. Julian closed his eyes, soaked in the stolen moments of her singing to no one but him.

  He opened his eyes and recognized her guitarist, sandpaper-bearded, Mandarin-tattooed, ear-ringed, brow-pierced, swallowing a belch as he entered the park ten feet in front of Julian. He shuffled straight toward him, scratching his head with both hands—an assault on a dermatological condition or a statement on the unholy earliness of the hour to a musician. The guitarist passed him blindly, two feet away, saying, as soon as he had circled to the far side of the tree, “Yo. Yo. Yo!” She stopped singing, and Julian missed it at once. He pocketed his recorder. “Vicious woman, it’s the crack of dawn,” said the boy.

  “Be an angel, Ian, won’t you? Bend over just here and let Lars have a relieving go with you? Otherwise, he’s likely to hook himself onto that slow-moving Chihuahua and split the poor thing in half.”

  “You could just neuter him.”

  “I would, but as it is my collection’s already too large for my apartment.”

  “There’s something I need to say,” Ian continued after a long silence, and Julian, now afraid to learn they were lovers, stayed because he wanted to know if she was funny and smart, and he wanted to know immediately, and he wanted to know without having to present himself at all.

  “Oh, dear, shouldn’t you be on one knee? Or wait for me to scoop up Lars’s mountainous output?”

  “Funny. No, listen. I think we need a little more Hitler from you, missy,” he said as, across the park, her dog steamrolled a smaller creature into the mud, then cantered off to spray its urine far up a tree, intent on shooting down a squirrel. “Shulman is going to make us sound like every other record he’s ever made if you don’t stop him. You can’t just sing well enough. Yesterday you were like, I don’t know, afraid to hit a wrong note in front of him or something. I can’t stop him, you know. You’re the boss, and this is it. We don’t get another go-round if you let him tie-dye us. Well, I do, but you don’t.”

  “Mmmm. Quite manly this morning.”

  “I’m not kidding, Cait. Now is not the time for you to become polite and agreeable all the sudden.”

  “The implication in that being—”

  “Seriously.”

  “Would it make you feel better if I tell you I mean to fire Bass?”

  “At least I’d recognize you.”

  A woman with a blue-blinking cell spike jutting from her ear stood before them and said to Cait in an aggrieved tone, “Hey, you, your dog is mounting my dog.” She pointed to far across the field where Lars was walking away from an apparently untraumatized German shepherd.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry. Did he hurt her?” Cait asked.

  “It’s making my dog uncomfortable, so you have to restrain your dog now.”

  “Ah, I see. Uncomfortable. Well, perhaps short of that, I could, instead, explain things to your dog? Perhaps she just needs to hear from someone who has herself been mounted in the last few years?”

  The woman sighed expressively and stomped away through the urine-absorbent wood chips.

  “Do you have any friends?” Ian asked.

  “I have imaginary friends. When they don’t cross me.”

  “You have Lars, of course.”

  “That I do. Do you suppose you could teach him to play bass?” She called the dog to her, fed it treats, leashed it up. “One of my students asked me how I knew I was ready to do this, the record and all. And I couldn’t answer. ‘I just know,’ I told her. But I think I might have been lying. There are days, like yesterday with Shulman, when I feel like I’m just a tape recorder playing some very old shite.” They walked up the hill, and from behind the tree Julian watched them go, the dog pulling her, the guitarist jogging to keep up.

  Julian waited, then, taking the long way home, saw, as if coming upon a triceratops, a rare and untraceable pay phone, a relic of another millennium. 411: her number was listed, a second minor miracle in succession. He dialed. “I’m listening,” was the extent of it, Cait giving the lie to the term “outgoing message,” then the beep, and Julian simply held his memo-corder to the receiver and played Cait’s a cappella performance of the Smiths into her own voice mail.

  5

  JULIAN WAITED. A week later the lyrics to “Bleaker and Obli
quer” appeared on her website. If this was her answer to him, it proved that she desired at the same pace and depth as he, an element of investigation, of originality, recalling him to youthful aspirations. She also desired his distance or, more accurately, his escargotically slow approach, the longest possible suspension of the future, for the future hurtles insanely fast. She must be very wise, he thought, to know that at her age.

  LYRIX

  If you’ve got a question for me, here’s the only answer:

  Listen close to your speaker, bleaker and obliquer.

  If you want my go-ahead, then go ahead,

  But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  I’ve had my fill of swooning ghouls, but that’s not you.

  I’d offer you my shadows, but that’s not you.

  You can share my limelight. No, that’s not true.

  I’m waiting for I don’t know what, please don’t say that’s not you.

  So what is you, my bored Cupid, my hiding hero?

  If you get stronger, must I get weaker, bleaker and obliquer?

  All these little boys, the bolder and the meeker

  Rendered mute but still so cute.

  Bleaker and obliquer, oh, bleaker and obliquer.

  Do you have an old love’s stitches, running and sore?

  Or a lapful of bitches all gunning for more?

  Loathed and broke, I’m yours.

  Is it better that we never spoke? I’m yours.

  I’m yours, but you gotta take me as is, bleaker and obliquer.

  The website also blared her projected participation in a telethon on local-access cable, raising money to foil real estate developers plotting to scatter skyscraping condominiums along the Brooklyn waterfront. He cleared his schedule, told Aidan he was contagiously sick, locked the doors, shut off his cell. He was on his couch an hour early, TiVo remote in hand, whiled away the interval watching sea lions protect their beachfront harems. And then she sang the House-martins’ heart-wrenching antidevelopment ballad “Build,” dedicating it to the notorious real-estate Caligula in charge of the expected monstrosities, and a campy duet of Blondie’s “Call Me” with Alec Stamford. His intrusion irritated Julian, but Alec was cruelly rendered by television and her proximity as particularly paunchy and middle-aged (though he was only a few years older than Julian). A brief interview followed, and then she sat at one of the plain tables under a banner that read DON’T LET THEM STEAL YOUR WATERFRONT, and manned a black telephone, a rotary phone, as if to prove the cause’s low overhead and high sincerity. Julian watched on his seventy-one-inch plasma, lying on his couch. It would have been very creepy to call her, he knew, but still he dialed whenever the panning camera revealed her waiting by her unused phone. After he’d hung up on six different voices, he finally heard her recite, “Thanks for calling, can we count on your help?”

  He paused, but the desire to hear her talk directly to him crushed all contradictory impulses. “Miss O’Dwyer?” The camera stalled on an ancient, bespectacled nun on another black phone, expressively conversing with some waterfront savior.

  “Yes, hello there, thank you for helping us beat these bastards.” “Glad to reach you. I didn’t much feel like talking to that nun.” “Do you know, she tried to make a pass at me?” said Cait. “That’s certainly been my experience with elderly nuns. What about that guy you sang with?”

  “Have you called to pledge something, love?” she prompted. “I suppose so.”

  “The cause is a noble one. Dig deep. My pencil’s at the ready.” “I know. The camera’s on you right now. Did you know that?” “Of course. I can feel it. One does have some talents, you know.” He put her on speakerphone and leaned toward his muted screen. She sat in the middle of a long table between the nun and Stamford. She was looking down, spinning a pencil from knuckle to knuckle, leaning her head to pinch the receiver against her shoulder. “Look up for a second,” Julian said. Unperturbed, she slowly complied, and he paused his TiVo just as her eyes met his from beneath lowered lids, and the hint of an unexpected smile was offered. “Excellent. Thank you. You don’t look so bored now.”

  She laughed. “Thank you. I’m not, but I have to take a pledge here, you know, or suspicions will rise about my commitment to the waterfront.”

  “Of course. Sorry. How much do you usually—” She read out the costs for the pledge levels: associate, friend, patron, gold-level donor, champion …

  “Let’s go with, um—there’s nothing between friend and patron?” “Not that I can see.”

  “How about I pledge to buy your album when it comes out?” “Ooh, hold on a mo, I’m trying to tot that up for the ‘Cash Value’ blank.”

  “I pledge that when you sing,” he continued, slowing down as he belatedly realized how inarguably villainous he sounded, “something very strange happens to me, even when you’re just singing alone in the dog park.”

  “Oh my.”

  “And I think that’s where those coasters came from as well.”

  Her breathy laughter steaming from the phone speaker on his table was victorious. She filled his room, kindly released him from feeling like a stalker. “Ah, yes, now I’m seeing. Hello, you. Here’s a unique way to ring up a girl.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m very glad to hear from you, J.D. I assume we’ve passed the bored Cupid stage then? That rather irritated.”

  “I think we have, but I don’t know what comes after that.”

  “Something between friend and patron. Still checking your qualifications, I suppose. And may I ask, where exactly were you in the park? I’d thought it was my guitarist made that tape.”

  “No, you may not ask. I have to preserve some mystery about me.”

  “Oh, you’re not having any trouble there. What do you look like?”

  “What do you pledge to me?” he asked instead.

  “That wasn’t included in our training this afternoon, but I’ll take requests. Any pledge in particular you’d like me to make?”

  He pushed Play. She continued to lift her eyes to the camera (a minute earlier) and smiled very slightly before looking away and writing intently on her clipboard. The camera moved on. Identical clipboards sat in front of various semifamous Brooklyn faces—movie stars, activists, chefs, Stamford gazing drowsily at Cait, MC Esher from Shoo Bombaz—as well as dog walkers, park planners, Greens.

  “Pledge not to make an ill-advised jump to movie acting if your album hits. The history of singers on film is a short, violent one, written by angry fans.”

  “Duly noted and so pledged.”

  “Pledge not to play Vegas.”

  “Not my decision, but I take your point.”

  “Pledge not to make an album called Cait O’Nine Tails with a mild S&M theme on the cover.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  “Pledge to surprise me. Some more.”

  “Consider it done.”

  He reversed TiVo and froze it again with her smiling at him. “Pledge to eat dinner with me, but only when you’re certain it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “I so pledge.”

  Julian lay on the leather couch, his head next to the speakerphone, and closed his eyes. She sat across from him, on the chair just there. “You played up the colorful Irish youth pretty heavily in that Flambe interview. Any of it true?”

  “You’ve hardly heard any of my colorful Irish nonsense. I can do better. The phones aren’t exactly full, I expect there’s no harm in a story. Listening?”

  “I am almost entirely ears.”

  “Very well. My daideo was the only one of fourteen children to survive to his eighth year. Then my da was one of eight children, but all of them survived, so he grew up with nothing. When my older brother was born, Da named him Septimus, even though he was the first, and told him, as he was growing up, about all the dead siblings which came before. Long, detailed stories of Fergus, died in a famine, and Mary and Connor, attacked by sheep. No, you mustn’t laugh: when Sep and I were small, we were both
terrified of sheep. I kicked a boy on a farm who tried to make me pet one. But none of it true, of course, just my da’s humor, and his fear, I suppose, and a little superstition. I was twelve, I think, before my mum told me we’d been just the two of us all along. Sep never really saw the joke. He and Da don’t speak much anymore.”

  “But you do. You saw the joke.”

  “I hope you do as well.” He wondered where she’d stand and how her face might change at this moment. He liked her leaning against his windowsill, a silhouette against the distant sprays of light, testing him in little ways, making sure he was paying close attention.

  “I understand your father’s approach. A splash of tragedy with your childhood lends a proper tone to the rest of your life, calibrates expectations. There are no more miserable, persistently disappointed adults than the ones with perfect childhoods.”

  “And will I get to hear of yours someday?”

  “I do so pledge.” He paused. “I like our song. Very much. Can I call it our song?”

  “Yes. But I won’t share royalties, you know.” “Agreed. Maybe now we should call it a night, Cait.” “Fair enough. Mustn’t be gluttons. Good night, J.D.” Messages left on her website’s guest book were, obviously, open to others. He tried to register as caitfan, but it, and caitfan01 through caitfan38, were all taken, and slouching in her admirers’ line as cait-fan39 didn’t much appeal, so he became instead sleepycupid. For several days he couldn’t bring himself to write anything, unwilling to mingle among these multiplying caitfans, sad people posting their photos and “artwork inspired by Cait,” uploading videos of themselves singing her songs back to her or just confessing their feelings, hoping she would acknowledge their existence. sleepycupid finally managed, “Excellent telethon. The development of your powers is occurring at high speeds now. Even a curmudgeonly old man has to admit it. Beware of the sheep.”