The Song is You (2009)

by Arthur Phillips

  Great music, his father used to lecture him, was often made by wretched people. The wise fan carefully avoided learning anything about the creators of any music that mattered, shut his eyes to biographies of martinet jazz drummers or anti-Semitic composers, and surely avoided lunching with tediously still-living pop stars of his overly impressionable romantic youth. What would his father have said about falling in love with a girl on her way up the charts?

  “There were some big names at the gallery the other night, friends of mine. Did you recognize anyone? Yeah, the usual downtown suspects.” Alec dropped names, and Julian let them land.

  “I recognized that singer there,” he said after the parade. “Cait O’Dwyer? Is that her name?” But Stamford turned away and snapped at a man at a neighboring table, “Do you mind?” though Julian had missed whatever offense had been committed.

  “What?” said the accused.

  “I’m sitting here,” the painter argued.

  “Do I mind that you’re sitting there?”

  “Christ,” Stamford spat, turning his back on his newborn nemesis. “I get migraines, these just awful, awful migraines from people like that, you know? There are times you’re treated badly because you’ve got a recognizable face.”

  “Tell me what you’re working on now,” Julian prompted.

  In fact, Cait was almost certainly quite the same, in some way, as this patent-leather-spatted fool tipping the second bottle until its curling tongue of wine drooped. They were all, unfortunately, just people, these sorcerors and sorceresses. His treasured feeling that Cait understood him—was in some way singing to him—was not only an illusion but a commonplace one, like a belief in lucky numbers, and not only that but a manufactured and manipulated illusion, hacked together by a performer with ambitions (deathless ones, like Stamford’s), with handlers and market advisers and career plans.

  The only real ones, the pure ones, were the dead ones. A recording made by a dead singer is different not only because of the lesser (and thus more emotionally trustworthy) technology but because of the purity that remains on the tape after the merely human is discarded. Sing movingly of heartbreak once, on tape, and that’s art; do it night after night in front of paying customers, sing of adolescent emotions when you are in your fifties, sixties, seventies, ironically laugh at your pain over and over again, and that’s artifice, no more “important” than what Julian did for money, perhaps even less. And Cait wanted some fuel from him? To prove himself, not give up, inspire her? To feed her insatiable appetite for fresh emotion and experience? Like this man across a plate of plantain and lemongrass describing how some incident of heartache and conflict—likely utterly avoidable, pointless, and childish—was transmuted nevertheless into a “work.”

  “There’s a, uh, uh, bon mot in there somewhere, if I can find it,” Stamford said, almost apologetically, a little deflated now since the beginning of the meal. “You, uh, your,” he began, but after two bottles and an hour of talking about himself, the transition was rough. That he spoke incessantly about Alec Stamford was no surprise, but that he so aggressively defended his right to do so finished off Julian’s hope for work, for the meal, for musicians.

  Julian attempted, “I did a shoot last year for a diamond company a lot of lasery, intense but very well-aimed light, an intimate look, fine detail, maybe something we could apply to—” He mistakenly still thought his credentials were up for discussion.

  “I have never been able to tolerate diamonds or pearls, and I’ll tell you why,” Stamford replied, a broad smile on his face implying a fine and relevant anecdote to come. Instead, his monologue roamed from diamonds to computers to cars to driving the Cote d’Azur to lavender fields in Provence to lavender as a perfume to lavender as a color on his palette for a new series of paintings to his friendship with Mick Jagger to a dog he once trained to pee whenever Stamford whistled a major sixth, and then he brought the dog to a friend’s house, and the friend put on “All Blues” by Miles Davis, and before Stamford, in a panic, could reach the CD player—long details here about him trying to push past guests, waiters, named celebrities, furnishings—the dog just soaked the entire place. Any effort to distract Stamford from his past, his projects, his plans, was muscularly overpowered. If there was a job to be won here, Julian would have to wait very patiently and care far more than he did. He stayed at the table only in the hope he would hear some new insight about Cait or some sun-flare of detail from her private life, but he also feared he would hear something that painted her a Stamfordite lavender. “You, uh, what about you?” the painter said over coffee, but the question required obvious exertion, rehearsed but garbled at delivery. “Send your reel to my gallery. I’ll take a look,” he said at the door, and disappeared into the traffic and crowds.

  Outside, Julian dialed Reflex up on his iPod, Lost in the Funhouse, just to confirm how badly its power had faded. The lyrics were puerile, the music hackneyed, even the instruments had become tinkly and creaky, and Julian tagged the album for deletion, then shut his iPod down, for fear of a broader contamination, as if an airborne musicidal virus were loose.

  His cell rang as he headed back to his office, but it was Alec, so Julian let him go straight to voice mail. “Oh, oh, oh,” the painter sang when Julian finally listened an hour later on the toilet. “You are wicked, boy. I’m watching you from across the street, and you just screened me! That’s no way to start a working relationship. All right, so you know, that reminds me. There’s something I forgot to ask you. Why didn’t you ring her bell? I watched you stand there for minutes, and you never rang her bell. She’s a nice girl. Spinning in circles, muttering to yourself like a crazy man. Why not pay a call?”

  9

  IT DIDN’T REALLY CHANGE ANYTHING, of course, Julian told himself, but still, something was spoiled now. He sat at his desk, closed his eyes against the sun and screens, tried to sort out the story he’d been telling himself for weeks, their floundering founding myth. She hadn’t looked down from her window and challenged him to be more original, hadn’t started all this. Alec, of all people, had teased him, and that is how he and Cait had begun. They were never a secret, organic and original, sprouted from nothing but the combination of each other. Alec had watched them, pushed them together. They were the product of that second-rater’s mind.

  Of course it didn’t matter, not one bit. Though she hadn’t started this, hadn’t mysteriously learned who he was, she later had sent him to her key, spoke to him on the telethon, asked him for drinks. Julian started scribbling notes, trying to sort out who had done what and when and therefore why, how they’d found each other, even if the end result, today, was the same. But a note of ordinary tedium had started to drone.

  As their story unraveled on the page before him—as he could no longer remember whose phone call or email or video had been caused by whom or had meant what—he felt himself finding reasons not to want her anymore, finding solace in thinking she was like Stamford, that Stamford was her future self. He knew this was childish even as he felt it, his feelings unraveling like their story. And he knew, too, that this was that flaw Rachel used to find in him, his retreat from feeling when it suited him, his pride at not being caught flat-footed by some strong emotion. If it was all Stamford’s doing, Julian could go back to his comfortable solitude, if he hadn’t already wrecked it in his reckless pursuit of this child star.

  And it happened, and he watched it happen: laughing drily at Stamford’s secret, oafish hand in it all, and at his own adolescent fantasy that he’d been involved in something unique, he now wandered away from Cait, not to other women but to a trial run of permanent elderly iciness, drifting out to his end on a meringue floe, the trip he had begun—pushed out to sea by Rachel and Carlton—when Cait had distracted him and he had stupidly cuddled up to her music and her image, his last effort to avoid the only fate he was really suited for. And for the next three weeks a stream of cold air poured into him, and he felt his little adventure gliding into the vast and ove
rpopulated past.

  She was biological, he could finally see, just like the others. He could discern her microscopic unimportance. She made sounds—imaginary things, just nibbling gigabytes—that brushed and made tremble, say, two million sets of eardrum membranes. Of those, perhaps half a million recognized them as her sounds. Two hundred thousand liked those sounds enough to sing along at the chorus. Fifty thousand people would love her music as he did, would listen to it, as he had, gazing at a sunset and letting their minds wander across pasts and futures. A full thousand could conceivably spend time fantasizing about her. And in case of an outbreak of plague, she and they and he would all swell up with pustules and vomit and bleed from the ears and lose control of their spasming, perforating bowels and cry out to a deaf deity, and her digital recordings would be less permanent on a depopulated planet than a condominium or a car or a car commercial. Humans would evolve and adapt. None would credit her music for the species’ survival.

  And in his silence, as if she felt him fleeing, she pursued him. A movie set occupied his street for three days and duly covered the hot July sidewalk with a blanket of plastic snow, and more plastic snow drifted down from a cable-suspended stainless-steel trough onto the heads of two lovers weeping and shivering for the giant camera. Two doors farther up the street, a plastic cafeteria tray of snow was waiting on his doorstep. Written on its surface in a yellow too dark and bright to be natural (and of which a whiff proved to be a lemon wood polish) were the words “Always wanted to be boy. Am [illegible] U R” before space ran out.

  Days later, rainy, unseasonably cold, and the condensation on his downstairs window, when lit from inside, revealed faint inverted letters. He held a mirror to them: “Will you fly with me?” or perhaps “All too fluvial, ned.” Or a profile of a skinny man on a skinny horse, hugging a flimsy lance.

  He received a call from a bookstore he’d never visited: his special order had arrived. At the store was a sealed envelope with his name and the words “For when I’m on the road,” as well as the collected Yeats and a history of Irish music. It was the frisky romantic acrobatics of a very young woman, an undergrad, unfinished. She was half his age and now seemed eager to prove it. He had the Yeats already, a gift from Rachel, but he bought both books anyhow and walked in sunlight, past the florist’s shop where the manager mopped rose water, each stroke of the mop across the threshold ringing her store’s visitor chime again and again, and he reached a little park near his home, a garden and a minor playground Carlton had tentatively explored, a ring of benches tucked between a mews alley and a curtain of millionaires’ brownstones. Under the fragrant branches, he opened the envelope and found in it a bookmark, a painted panorama of Irish countryside. He examined her gift, the books and bookmark, looked up at the short yellow slide Carlton had braved. Rachel had restrained Julian, held his arm so he would let Carlton stand up on his own when the little guy had tripped right there and Julian was about to rush to him. Rachel squeezed his arm, wouldn’t let him interfere. “Baby, you have to let him fall. He’ll be all right, but you …” She laughed at the pain on Julian’s face.

  He looked away from the excruciating memory, opened the Yeats, closed it again.

  Reconstituting a goddess from a striving girl could not be wished for, or awaited. Julian sincerely floated out to an arctic sea, a little mournful, unpleasantly wiser, past puzzled polar bears. For a couple of weeks he avoided Cait’s music, her newspaper mentions, her Web existence (difficult because an award show’s nominations were announced, and she was in all the chatter).

  And then came the postcard. Its picture was of Paris: an old man and woman are walking down the sidewalk, arm in arm. He wears a beret and with his outside hand covers hers, presumably his wife of sixty-some years. Their heads angle in toward each other; whispered comfort is implied. Across the street, two German soldiers walk in the opposite direction, rifles slung, suspicion and fear on their faces. On the back of the card, next to the stylized calligraphy of his name and address, was only a single large question mark. He sat and looked at the picture for long minutes, almost put her music on, wondered if she could really see as far into the future as that. And if she could? She could see a life after her stardom extinguished? With him?

  That night he opened a book he’d been reading halfheartedly—an account of a World War Two rescue operation—and noticed the bookmark, the Irish fields. It was the gift, for a dollar or two, of quiet intimate suggestion. Here was an item she knew he would handle only when alone, when his concentration was heightened. He held it lightly by the edges to examine under lamplight the details of the trees and falling mists. He turned it over as the book gathered speed, then leapt from his lap, and he read on its reverse the name of the painter and its plain title: View of Co. Wicklow in Autumn Rain, 1909. He looked at the postcard and bookmark next to each other.

  He worked late, storyboards spread before him on the bed, and he sketched out the beauty shots of an ordinary coupe whose price was scheduled to fall just after Labor Day. Across the room, an old documentary about Billie Holiday filled the dead hours of an entertainment-news channel. The camera panned over still photos of her, and they had a few grainy interviews he hadn’t seen, her in furs talking to grainy men with 1950s hair and voices, leaning forward to push the microphone toward her. “Well, we’re going to be making another record with the Ray Ellis Orchestra next year,” she said quietly, her voice rough and slow, but the narrator corrected her, “It was not to be. Holiday was admitted to New York Metropolitan Hospital with kidney trouble four days later, and her last breaths were only weeks away.” There was footage of her funeral, some talk of her lasting influence, and then a transition to Jim Morrison, dead too young, skanky Pere-Lachaise pilgrims. Julian fell asleep. The TV flicked blue onto the photo on the wall of the tango singer Tino Rossi’s funeral in Paris, the elderly Frenchwoman weeping, excess mascara carried down her face like soil in floodwater.

  The caller ID read BLOCKED. The clock insisted it was three in the morning. He could have slept through it.

  “Did you by any chance watch the piece about Billie Holiday tonight?” Cait asked.

  “I did. What time is it? Where are you?”

  “I watched very carefully, but there’s something I can’t find out about her that I want to know.”

  “I happen to have a family connection to her. I’ll tell you someday.”

  “Do you think she was afraid she’d lose her talent?”

  “She never did lose it, in my opinion. I prefer the late recordings.”

  “I agree. But my question is, did she fear losing it? Did she take steps to protect it, or did she just hope, wake up every morning relieved she still had it?”

  “The drugs may have been an expression of fear.”

  “I doubt it. But listen: If she was frightened, does that prove that she was strong, because she overcame fear? Or does fear mean that some honest part of you knows you’re weak and basically false, and a true talent like hers would never feel fear?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Please try to answer. Please.”

  “Okay, okay.” Tino Rossi’s weeping fan. Old Parisian couple in love, occupied despite Nazis. View of County Wicklow, 1909. Red velour photo album, its spine worn white.

  “Please. The truth.”

  “The truth. The truth is, anyone who puts so much of herself and her life into art as you do must naturally fear any failure in that art as a potential threat to your life. And so you protect your art more than you protect your health or the common forms of happiness the rest of us have. And you probably have this in common with every artist you admire, including her.”

  “Oh.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’ve missed you, Julian. Are you still around or no?”

  “I am. Just a little confused, I think.”

  “That can happen. Should we stay away from each other still? Seems a little daft now. No, wait, don’t answer that. I’m only in town for a m
inute, and then I’ll be far away for a bit. That should suit you, eh? Don’t answer that either. Good night.”

  “Listen: please be careful with yourself during all this,” he said, more like a father than a lover.

  “That’s a pledge.”

  He allowed himself a 3:30 A.M. glimpse of her world, read the latest news on her site, came upon the vile doubtfulguest: “All the trappings of your relentless will to power, Cait O’Dwyer, nauseate me. What are you so afraid of? That we won’t listen to you if you don’t put up photos of yourself in underpants? We all wear underpants, honey. The 95 reviews you so religiously post? You have a little talent, I won’t deny it. But you must be one very frightened little girl to bet all of this on it.” She must have read that tonight and called him.

  He went back to sleep, his father and Billie Holiday very quietly on the speakers. He dreamt of Cait, no surprise, but of Carlton, too. Cait was encouraging Carlton to be brave, to step forward and shake his father’s hand. “Go ahead now, little man, go on.”

  Rachel and Julian had thrown a large party for Carlton’s second birthday, really a party for adults, a good party, unless Rachel had already been sleeping with one of the guests. That, too, hardly mattered now. Two weeks later Carlton was in a hospital, dying from that microscopic attacker in his blood, unnoticed until then by parents and pediatrician alike, all distracted by a different microscopic attacker in his ear, distracted just two days too long, and by then they were in a hospital with wooden trains with faces and chipped paint, which fit on tracks that could be hooked together in four or five combinations, none of which interested Carlton, pale and half-asleep, though Julian built him railroad after railroad in as many shapes as he could; one of them had to be the one to win Carlton’s winning giggle, and Julian held the locomotive in his wet palm, and bright blue flakes of paint came off on his skin, and Rachel sat beside the bed and stroked the tiny hand, out of which grew the red tube and the white tube and the mushrooms of tape.