The Song is You (2009)

by Arthur Phillips

  She dropped her droopy spangled gypsy bag on the floor and pulled a cardboard tube from it, tossed it to him, walked to his fridge, said, “For the poster.”

  The shaken tube surrendered a mock-up of the tour ad. It was mostly the headliner’s, but the bottom fifth was theirs. Cait had the lips to choose a photo only of herself, rather than one of the band shots they’d had taken, at some joint expense, last winter. Fine, Ian thought, the nature of the world and their future clear enough for those with brains, and those shots had First Bass in them anyhow. “Who took it? It’s not bad of you,” to say the least.

  “Oh, long story,” she said. “But I want your approval for it before I tell their management to print it.”

  “Thanks.” He regretted that. She had worded it just so: “I want your approval” was the compliment of an employer, not the necessity of a partner, and “Thanks” was the flattered chirp of an employee. It was a hell of a photo: her eyes were closed, she was outside, in front of her own building, stretching not as if she were posing, like a supposed candid, but like she walked around all the time with a very funny secret. “Why are you wearing a Lay Brothers shirt?”

  “I love those monks.”

  “Hm. Yeah, I’d go to this girl’s show. Who took it?”

  “This, ah, this …” She leaned farther into the fridge, as if tracking a regal, fleet-footed beer, and Ian understood the tremendous sensation just then tickling his spine and face: he’d never before seen her embarrassed. He only had her voice and ass to judge from, but he was sure, and a spectacular detonation flared in one corner of his universe. She finally emerged, wily beer captured. “Where have you stashed the bottle opener, you criminal?”

  “You have to give a photo credit on the poster.”

  Her smile as she stood there—beer bottle in one hand, opener in the other—said that she knew everything he was thinking, and he amused her, but now for the good of everyone he should stop. “I suppose we do. We are very fortunate that you read law.”

  “Who took the photo?” He tried to make it sound funny, but it was just so plainly one repetition too many. He would have given a great deal to go back and not ask again.

  She knew that, too. That mock-stern voice of hers would close the topic, and he could never broach it again without triggering a full-blown hurriCait. Sure enough: “Do you feel like working today? Or shall we sit around and bleat at each other like rabid sheep?”

  “Whatever. Pull up a chair, diva.” Fair weather restored, he played a pattern he’d thought of just before falling asleep the night before, that he’d crossed the room to record with his eyes still shut. She said, very sincerely, “Mmm. I like that.” Those words, delivered in that tone of voice, composed one of his greatest joys, one that would still excite him long after her departure. It was, he imagined, like waking in new sunlight to the waking face of your beloved.

  4

  THEY BOOKED six summer-session colleges in the Northeast as the top of a three-band slate. The money bumped up nicely, and every night they’d sit in a back room or outside on an upstairs deck overlooking a parking lot while the Trouser Dilemma and then the Lay Brothers played for growing crowds of increasingly drunk college kids, many of whom knew especially who Cait was. They moved a lot of merchandise.

  Before going on, Ian would read or make calls or strum an unplugged guitar. New Bass and Drums would wander off to smoke this or that. But Cait would just grow more and more energetic as her time approached. She might try to nap, or have something to eat, but neither sleep nor food had any effect on the change that came over her as they waited. By the time they took the stage, Cait would have been sitting out of sight for a couple of hours, and her attention would be distilled to a highly concentrated serum that animated her limbs and face just beyond normal. Ian could watch its level climb behind her eyes.

  And she glowed for them, these college drunks—Ian had to admit it. Maybe, in a long hot summer, it was just this fleeting precise difference in age between them and her, between nineteen and twenty-two: she was older, but barely; she knew things but had not yet forgotten things; she had already started what they were nervous to begin.

  At the tour’s end, in Storrs, Connecticut, they finished the last tune, waved good night, and marched upstairs to a cramped office to decide if there would be an encore—the silliest of rock rituals made sillier still by the complete horror of their backstage: no one wanted to be up there; applause would hardly be necessary to draw anyone out of it. Still, they huddled up in the little loft, waiting for Cait to judge the volume and sincerity of the stomping and shouts below. When she deemed the request sufficiently credible, submissive, and ecstatic, they descended, and the applause broke from rhythmic request into free, relieved thanks.

  Ian knelt to adjust a pedal, and Mick from the Lay Brothers called over Ian’s bent back to Cait, “We’ve got a Coaster Man visual at the end of the bar, lassie,” but Cait didn’t hear him. She had turned away as Mick started to speak, and as he didn’t want to look like someone standing at the side of a stage trying to win a hot singer’s attention, he just acted as if she had heard him and turned to go outside. Ian managed not to gawk at the bar. “Mick, do me a favor?” he called after him, his eyes on the settings of his pedals. He pulled his phone from his jeans pocket and with his back to Cait tossed it to Mick. “Get me some discreet video of Coaster Man, would you? Long story.”

  “Ian?” Cait’s voice behind him. “Hate to interrupt, but can I trouble you to play your guitar for a bit?”

  They did a two-song encore, the Stones’ “Monkey Man”—one or two little boys almost sure to go briefly clinically insane (and Ian himself still vulnerable to a certain parallel set of electric-blue chills up the outsides of his arms) when on the crescendo of the out vamp she sang again and again, “I’m a monkey” but replaced Jagger’s original choking-chimpanzee death rattle with a moan unique to her, each moan more intensely suggestive than the moan four bars earlier—and then “Bleaker and Obliquer,” which had lately been slapping the cakes with surprising power, all credit to Ian’s own crystal hooks for it, because to this day he still had no idea what the hell her lyric was supposed to be about. Even after he’d looked up the word in an online dictionary.

  He was, later, sort of proud of the superagent coolness with which he’d played Cait’s game. He hadn’t faked it; he really did forget to watch Mick’s path in the crowd, forget to look for the troublesome Cartoon Man, right up until the applause for “Bleaker” was shattering the room, and Cait was pretending not to hear the offers for drinks, marriage, and sex rising from the up-front boys up front. The stereo went on, the lights changed, and while Ian and the others packed their gear, she went out the back door to wait for them in the van (usually to sleep or eat or, as Ian once discovered to his confusion and her rage, cry). Only then did Ian remember his man, and he couldn’t prevent himself from looking everywhere for his rival and for his spy, but Mick didn’t turn up with the phone, and a visit to the bar—to see if the University of Connecticut at Storrs would be providing him further entertainment—proved fruitless, no Mick, no Cartoon Man, no appealing offers of company.

  They drove back to the city, each band in their own van, Mick and the other Lay Brothers apparently having driven off with Ian’s phone while Cait was still moaning “Monkey Man.” He couldn’t borrow a phone to call Mick in front of Cait, and so, back in Williamsburg well after four in the morning, he tried Mick’s cell and his own but reached voice-mail boxes. At the unfortunate hour of eight the next morning, Mick called to say that the bartender the night before was a jackass, because Mick had left the phone with him to give to Ian when Mick had been summoned on a moment’s notice to an impromptu sorority party. Yes, he’d surreptitiously filmed Cartoon Guy: “Relax, dude. And what was that all about? Cait dispatches you to do her surveillance? Does no part of you rebel at your pussyhood?” But the phone was still in Storrs, and bleary Mick was already on a skull-crushingly loud train back to the city.

/>   Ian debated taking a train himself back north, but, worried he’d arrive to a closed bar or a bartender on his night off, he repeatedly called instead, starting at six that night, until, twenty-four hours later, he spoke to the jackass and received the happy news that the phone (and the jackass’s apologies) had already been winging their way down to Brooklyn via overnight express since the day before. Ian should already have received it.

  “Where’d you get my address?”

  “It was on the contracts.”

  Except that that was Cait’s address. Several hours earlier in her living room, she had opened the box addressed to the Cait O’Dwyer Band, tossed Lars the cardboard to process for nutritional fiber, and read the two Post-its, one on top of the other: “Sorry, dude. My bad. Vince” and “Here’s your video, chief. Tell Cait Coaster Man’s 95 years old, but she’s welcome. Also! Check out the girls at the end. If I go missing, have the police break into their dorm. Mick.” She used her own charger to resuscitate the gasping phone and watched two minutes of strange footage, then transferred it to her computer. On that bigger screen, digitally abstract and lit as if by prison-lighting designers, it made for weirdly compelling television:

  To the distant, distorted accompaniment of her “Monkey Man,” there were the alternating images of Mick’s face and then the floor, then the swirling, tornado-coverage chaos of the phone being swung around the room: blurred ceiling lights, kabuki faces, scarecrow Cait far away on a spot-yellowed stage. The phone stopped moving, looking out across the room to the wooden bar and a man sitting at the very end, though he was difficult to see. He was listening to Cait, nodding to the music. He applauded at the end of “Monkey Man.” When Cait could be heard saying “Bleaker,” he stood up, counted some bills onto the bar, and pressed himself against the far back wall, his arms crossed, his head down, his collar up, and then a female voice said, “Oh, my God, you were so awesome up there,” and the camera skittered around to the right, and two slightly glazed college girls gazed toward where off-camera Mick said, “I was. And I was hoping you’d notice, and a good thing because—” and the video stopped, frozen on the girls, midblink.

  Cait had long ago asked Mick to point out her coaster artist, to no avail, but now Mick was telling her what, exactly, by sending this to some other “chief”? Coaster Man, sleepycupid, Cartoon Boy, J.D., JD7201965@yahoo.com: he now had a face, which was nice, and a certain style and an age, which was amazing, setting him even farther apart from everyone else in her suffocating world. She replayed the video. “Bleaker and Obliquer,” she said off-camera, and her friend stood and counted money onto the bar and pressed himself against the wall. Cait watched again, paused at its best portrait of him, reeled back time, frame by frame. He was disappointed, maybe. A frame later it wasn’t disappointment but the slightest laughter. She tried to remember if she’d done something disappointing or foolish. But he had a face now, her sleepycupid, a very nice face, a man of the world’s face, a certain confident power in it and in his posture.

  She called Ian and was only mildly surprised to see the mysterious visiting cell phone suffer a little epileptic fit on her table. She smiled. “Oh you little bastard.”

  “Bleaker and Obliquer,” said the voice on Julian’s computer, rising from the video emailed to JD7201965@yahoo.com. He watched himself lean against a wall in Connecticut. The resolution didn’t reveal the exhilaration on his face when she sang their song. The footage began about five minutes after Cait’s fired bassist had finished talking to Julian at the end of the bar, a marathon harangue that had stupefied and annoyed Julian as he awaited the encore: “A lot of people tell me, you know, that she should pay me for the whole thing.” The young man extended his fingers in front of him, studied the backs of his hands. “They’re all, like, ‘She needs strife and is using you for strife,’ and I’m like, ‘I just want to make music, you know.’ But I get a lot of people and they’re all, ‘She used you. She washed her face in your sink, and now you’re watermarked. You’re Pete Bested, dude. It’s like voodoo, and you’re walking dead. You have to reclaim yourself somehow, or you’ll walk forever like this: among the living but not one of them. Nobody will touch you.’ And I’m like, ‘That’s just talk, and stupid,’ but, you know, I see something there. I do. I do feel like she broke something that didn’t belong to her, and you can’t do that. Nobody calls her on anything. She just sings and looks pretty and thinks she can do whatever she wants. She can’t, can she?”

  The boy had left before the encore, and Julian watched him through the window as he threw up on the street and stumbled off. “Thank you very much, you nice people. So, all right, we’ll do a couple more. Here’s a good one for the not so nice among you,” and the new bassist started the two-note intro to “Monkey Man.” He replayed it, tried to imagine what she was thinking when she watched this video, wondered who she’d sent to surveil him. Maybe she was saying now was the time to meet, or maybe she was saying he dressed old or should dye his hair or look how obvious you’ve become for an invisible muse or give me some space.

  “I’m a monkey!” Ian watched his recovered phone as soon as she was out of view. “No letter, no note, just your phone in a box,” she’d said, and thank God. “What little harlot swiped it off you? Or did you use it as payment in kind?” And now this then was Cartoon Guy. Ian had seen him before at gigs. He was hard not to notice because he was old, at least forty, maybe fifty, maybe more. He was also, and not merely because of his age, vaguely oily: the cartoons, the uncredited photo on the poster, the bouquets of flowers and cases of wine and whispered phone calls she took to far corners or outside, the baked goods Ian ate without ever telling her they’d been delivered for her, who knew what else. Well, if Chase and Wendy had to go, then Cartoon Man had to go. There was one good shot of the guy in profile, dropping money on the bar in a nasty, possessive manner. He was so old that the idea of him with Cait was reassuringly unlikely or, less reassuring: if it was likely, it didn’t say much for Ian’s chances, at least for another few decades until his hair thinned and his sex drive grew distinguished and unreliable.

  This time Ian had an idea that was worthy of her. He landed in his laughable second cousin’s voice mail, bounced by the main switchboard. He left a message, invoked family connections, had a favor to ask, not an emergency, but he’d feel better once he knew it was in his cousin’s hands, gimme a call on this number when you get the chance. Ian didn’t need to muster much false feeling, since his cousin couldn’t feel any more warmth about their relations than he.

  But he was wrong: Stan wouldn’t settle things over the phone, insisted they dine at a little Italian joint chosen for its cinematic-criminal lore, and Ian had to put up with two courses before he could force the topic off shared family history, for which Stan had a bottomless appetite. All of Ian’s recollections of his older cousin were clouded by family scorn: Ian’s father thought Stan’s father a clown of operatic dimension and likely corrupt. Ian’s mother puffed out air and grew nonverbal and ticcy at the mention of Stan’s mother, unable to find words for the depravity of some event from years before Ian’s birth. But now at dinner Stan spoke of Ian’s parents with unfeigned affection, describing family events in a mist of nostalgia.

  Stan had shed some of his more mockery-magnetic youthful affectations—the self-promotional, bulging sock holster, the harsher old-school Brooklyn accent that always reminded Ian of Bugs Bunny, the use of “old-school” as high praise. But he had developed a more thoroughly in-the-bone coppishness, and Ian still judged him—maybe unfairly—a caricature.

  He wore a black suit, with a faint pattern in an infinitesimally glossier black, visible only at certain angles, when a sudden click of houndstooth momentarily distracted suspects and witnesses from what they were saying, and Stan could observe the unguarded face, the micro-expressions he’d learned to read from a CD-ROM training tool. The tie and the pocket triangle were of the same scarlet silk, a dandified touch for a working man who had constructed himself from televi
sion detectives and his father’s rougher police colleagues and from an undertaker in the neighborhood whom he had observed, when he was a boy accompanying his mourning parents on three occasions, reading his customers and selling them up the ladder of casket costs, tonguing their guilt and vanity to gild the mahogany paneling. His phone, card case, watch—silver wafers all—glinted high-polish monograms. He was not, for all this, a joke to other cops, or at least not a nasty joke, and he didn’t mind the occasional remark about his style as long as it diverted some attention from his height, an insult he never fully forgave, though he stood only slightly below average, a margin unremarkable to most.

  He in turn convicted his young cousin of being a child in a man’s body. He dressed and spoke like a child, he made children’s music, he led a childish life, and, as with this story he was reporting over knockout balsamic veal, he stumbled through the world, dumbfounded by grown-up problems. Some perv was squirming a little too close to the kid’s boss, and rather than doing what Stan would have done—handled it himself, face-to-face, explaining the realities to the creep—Ian went running to the most grown-up grown-up he could think of. Stan helped people all day long, every day, who couldn’t cope with the world, and he rarely felt any scorn for them, but there was something about seeing men in his family come crying. “She’ll fire me if she finds out it came from me. You can’t tell her.” Even this: Ian begged for help but was scared of the girl he was protecting.

  “Job insecurity? I thought—who was it?—Aunt Kelly said you were the greatest guitar player since Bruce Springsteen?” And here we go, thought Ian: Stan surely knew how little Ian and Kelly liked each other, and so was making a point of this crapliment. This was not going how Ian had imagined. Stan was the same overcompensating bastard who used to bully Ian at family events, calling him a longhaired queer, even in front of adults. The fun was already gone from this, and Ian had no one to blame but himself. Cait’s fault.