The Song is You (2009)

by Arthur Phillips

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  “I think you know that what you do is temporary. Cheap. It’s for kids. I understand—a person’s got to make a living. I don’t think less of you for doing that to pay your rent. But it’s not the most interesting part of you, by a mile.”

  “And you can see the most interesting part?”

  “If your job was dressing up as a rabbit in a theme park, would you want me to come visit you and pretend you were a real rabbit? I hope you’re laughing because you see how right-on the comparison is. You go sing; I’d worry if you really thought it was a big deal. Now, matter at hand, you want to hear the best part of your friend’s arrest?”

  “Without rival, the most peculiar question I’ve ever been asked.”

  “I won’t tell you unless you ask nicely miss.”

  “Yes, please, Detective. Please tell me the best part of my friend’s arrest.”

  “You admit you’re curious? You want me to tell you what only I know?”

  “Yes.”

  “You would feel let down if I didn’t share my secret knowledge?”

  “Yes.”

  “Once more, please.”

  “Please, Detective, I really want to hear this.”

  “Well, all right, since you’re begging. First, Mr. Stamford had hired a gentleman as well as the three ladies he intended to employ. Mildly interesting. Second, the undercover officer and one of the two real prostitutes were redheads; the other was a brunette, but he had a red wig for her, ready to go. He also asked if any of them could do an Irish accent. I do have your attention, don’t I? Hard to tell behind those sunglasses. And, best of all, he told them, as a condition of their employment, that they were all to answer to a particular name.”

  “All three of them?”

  “All three. All three of them were to respond to this same name. Would you like to guess what it was? You do have that knack for deductions.”

  “I don’t think I will, but I appreciate the offer.”

  “My pleasure, Miss O’Dwyer.”

  “I can see that, Inspector.”

  He looked at his phone. “I have to go. But if you’d like, I’d be happy to take you for a late dinner when you finish your concert. There’s a place I enjoy, I can about guarantee you won’t be recognized.”

  “Sinatra on the sound system?”

  “If you can bear it.” He stood to go, shook her hand.

  “I think I’ll pass,” Cait said. “But thank you for the offer, and especially the smoke. I’m going away for several weeks, so I expect I’ll be safe from any dirtbags, but perhaps—”

  “When you get back you’ll reconsider.”

  She laughed outright. “No, no, no. I was going to say that perhaps, in the interval, you could buy my new CD.”

  “Oh, boy. I hate to tell you this, but it’s never going to happen, me and your music. I’m sorry.”

  The policeman strode away, with each step becoming smaller and more distorted in her mirrored lenses. He’d followed her here, she knew, and she doubted that he even believed there was any stalker to protect her from, though what Ian was playing at was now quite beyond her.

  The detective’s scorn for her music: people who didn’t like her voice certainly existed, that was only logical, but she rarely met such people. He had no interest in listening to her sing but was asking her to supper nevertheless. To want to be with her but not with her voice: it was a strange division.

  And oh, but Alec, poor Alec. Poor Alec. Jesus in a paisley sweater vest, poor Alec.

  Meanwhile, Julian was the very opposite of that, was cooking dinners for her because of her voice, maybe only that, was reading Yeats, she hoped, because of her voice. What else of her could he be reacting to? And the other night, when she’d had a relatively minor attack—much more mild than previous attacks she’d weathered without anyone’s help—she’d called him in the middle of the night, like a frightened child. How bizarre and pitiful. She should have been able to push through without anyone’s help. But talking to him had so quickly soothed her. Unless that was giving him too much credit. Considering how easily he’d helped her, she probably hadn’t really needed the help. She’d probably called prematurely, out of fear that the attack was going to worsen, and it didn’t, and he was coincidentally on the phone with her when it passed. He was likely gloating over it now, thinking she was his little fool, like the day he’d sat silent when she asked him to meet for a drink, as if she’d proposed something childish. She wished somebody appealing, like Julian, would say what the little policeman had said: “not the most interesting part of you, by a mile.” She wished Julian would get himself arrested for her, like poor Alec. She wished he’d at least come the next night to make risotto, when she’d be home.

  “Lars, my love, shall we go?”

  (At his desk the next day, Stan listened to her on borrowed headphones. One of the songs was growing on him slightly. If you could screen out that noisy rock ‘n’ roll excess—Ian’s static and crash, and her occasional shriek—under that, she did do something that worked on you, in a way.)

  12

  THE WORDING HERE is very difficult, and Rachel herself was never sure of it. She did not “stage a suicide attempt to hold Aidan’s attention or win Julian’s.” That would have been unnecessary; she had Aidan’s, and a botched suicide would only drive Julian away. And really, neither did she exactly “attempt suicide” at all. She did, definitely, invite Aidan to come for dinner and that afternoon did, also, leave out wine and prescription sleeping pills on a counter, after she’d swallowed plenty of each. But she’d forgotten Aidan was coming over when she did it; it hadn’t been to show him. And she hadn’t taken enough to hurt herself, she didn’t think, hard to be sure, as she no longer measured the pills out one at a time—that was futile, since just a few didn’t do anything when she was in pain, so she tended to treat them like mints until she could feel them. And she was sometimes sloppy about putting the lid back on the brown bottle because who cared? A child might find them?

  She’d had a rough afternoon. It had caught her by surprise. She came home early from work because she suddenly had the feeling that if she didn’t leave her office at once, it might explode. The day felt as if terrorists were afoot in the city, and they had targeted her building. The illogic of it—the sheer stupid hysterical crap of it—was clear before she’d stepped from the elevator into the lobby of giant fountains and two Starbucks, but she went home anyhow because she knew that this stupid early fear was only a tremor of the biblical cataclysm to come, and she’d be tearing her hair out and thinking of Carlton for two days straight if she didn’t reach her bed and sleep before it grew worse. Then she could wake up early and only feel a little not unreasonably sad, stay late tomorrow and make up the work.

  And so she gobbled some pills and washed them down with a nice balloon of zin—a child’s storybook phrase, hoisting you up and away, and so they leapt into the Balloon of Zin— and she lay down on the funky chaise she’d bought on the street a week after she’d moved into this apartment, and she felt a perfect sleep coming, like an embrace and a kiss of forgetfulness, when Aidan was banging on her door, typical Aidan, banging louder and louder, the only possible explanation for him being locked out being her doped semiconsciousness, not his having the day wrong or her just not wanting to have a guest tonight after all, and so she stumbled toward the pounding door, fell twice, cut her hand on a stray piece of her wineglass, and with much trouble drew the stubborn chain and lucked into the correct combination of all those opposite-dialing dead bolts.

  “What did you do?” he asked, peering at the label on the empty bottle. “Oh, you dumb, dumb woman. Do you even know what a milligram is?”

  Aidan set about tasks for which he was unqualified: feeding her emetics, bandaging her hand, then, interrupted, holding her hair and wiping her forehead while she bowed to the toilet bowl for nearly an hour; drawing a bath and adding salts and bubbles in quantities that he soon saw were excessive as
lacy Andes rose over the rim of the tub, and he batted them and sheared off their tops to carry to the sink; selecting clean and suitable pajamas from a drawer knotted full of nerve-racking and aromatic strings; sitting across from her and listening, replying that of course he loved her (in a practiced tone of fraternal affection, tinted with pity for “her loss”) and that Julian did, too, for heaven’s sake. He nodded placidly when she insisted she hadn’t been trying to hurt herself. At times, Aidan’s eyes would mist, and he feared he would have one of his “lachrymose onslaughts,” but they spared him, and he excused himself as just surprised or angry or stressed (drawing the bubble bath particularly affected him), but the truth was clear even to him, late that night, when she had gone apologetically to sleep in her own bed, and he was lying sleeplessly on her couch, and he thought of this woman dying if he hadn’t come just then. He thought of her being so hopeless, of her leaving him in the world without her to think about or protect or admire or love, and he muffled his tears with his forearm until his sweater was soaked and attached to his nose and mouth and beard by countless trembling cables.

  She had, after the Incident, “been there for him,” in the dull language of these things. He had lived in close proximity to her and her clothing and smells. She was the woman to whom he’d been literally closest, physically, since the death of his mother. And so he loved her—not quite platonically, or fraternally, but as close as he could hold himself to those ideals. He would never admit to more, not to Julian, not even decades from now. Besides, he could see things clearly enough to know that Rachel was not “over” Julian, could never be, no matter how Julian behaved. “Why are you doing this to yourself?” he asked her that night as she ate the sandwich he’d painstakingly made for her, and her stubbled calves wandered free of her white bathrobe until she tucked them under her, and the room smelled of bath salts and her other scents. “Why don’t you just stop and let yourself be?”

  He understood that Carlton’s death resulted in sorrow. He, too, had felt sad, when it happened, and at the terrible funeral with the tiny coffin and Rachel so beyond anyone’s reach and Julian unable to do anything to help her and Aidan feeling saddest, perhaps, for Julian, so obviously incapacitated, unadult again. With all of his oyster slickness fallen away, he was hardly more than a child himself, and Aidan felt like the only adult present, his sorrow contained and appropriate, a part of him rather than him a part of sorrow, as he judged every other case. But now it had to stop: that a child’s death would produce sorrow lasting longer than the child’s actual life, which had produced some happiness (and not every day! Aidan could remember the scenes of resistant parenthood even if neither parent would admit it now): that was a problem caused only by human stubbornness. To be two forever—surely Carlton was by now as much a source of joy as of misery. “When you think of everything that could’ve happened to him over a long, long life, all the pain he could’ve suffered, all the difficulties he could’ve caused, all the personalities or people he might’ve become, don’t you stop for a second and smile? I mean, he’s just only that sweet little guy, and that’s all, forever.” She was ignoring him in the way people did when they gave up on his ability to understand something.

  She said, “The strangest thing. I came to the end of other people so quickly. Each new person was like a glass of water, and at the beginning I was parched, but then each glass tasted a little worse, the water was grittier, and by the end even the first sip was enough to make me gag, you know?”

  “Yes,” he said, not at all clear what she meant.

  “He …” She took her nearly-ex brother-in-law’s hand, coated with that thick fur, and at first he didn’t know whom she meant. “Julian is …”

  “A jackass.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you really in love with him still?” Aidan asked, and she felt a maternal warmth for that bearded child with the less than acceptable breath and the oily imprints of his eyebrows at the tops of his lenses.

  “I think it would be best to be with him again. To be old with him. Sad with him. I keep trying, little things, to jar him open again.”

  Aidan nodded, like a tourist working to translate a difficult foreign phrase while not wanting to look like a rube in front of the foreigner. “You have to promise me,” he said, “those pills—you can’t do that to me. It’s cruel. You’re not a cruel person. Promise me.”

  “I’m so tired, Aidan.”

  “Promise me.” But she was asleep again. He had some months ago recklessly promised to deliver Julian to her, but he didn’t really have any practical idea of how to do it. And so she was punishing him, threatening him for his failure. Though he was a devoted Cupid, his quiver was empty, and a life of abstinence and isolation and trivia had trained him for nothing, now that he had a purpose in life, now that matchmaking was a matter of his own deepest happiness.

  13

  HER TRAJECTORY FOLLOWED the heptilateral calculus equations laboriously worked out by her label: the download and CD and merchandise figures, site hits, YouTube uploads and Google ad click-through, satellite and broadcast and video rotation, acceleration of adoption rates by adult-oriented and alt rock. She was appealing down to U-18s and up to 35-45s.

  With European gigs booked, publicity cogs caught and turned one another. The label’s European offices and the distributor’s subagents postered and stocked and sent press kits to music journalists who gave the enclosed CDs to ambitious assistants who in turn sampled Cait in their second jobs as DJs in Rome, Prague, and Biarritz or, more often, just handed the discs off to girls, gifts to demonstrate the assistants’ perches far ahead of the curve of knowable fashion, like seabirds offering prime clifftop nesting sites.

  Her tour schedule went up on caitodwyer.com and blasted out to her list at nine in the morning. Julian, waiting out her silence since their one-sided dinner date, suspecting he had been too eagerly middle-aged and domestic, found the email waiting for him at his office: dates and clubs moving east from Dublin to Budapest. He was unsure what she wanted him to do, but then the second email came ten minutes before he left for lunch: “Ella Fitzgerald” sent him an mp3 of Ella Fitzgerald singing “April in Paris.” And that evening an envelope addressed to “The Solitary Chef” crept through his mail slot and onto the rug, holding a single typed sheet: Charm, amuse, inspire, tempt, overwhelm, dazzle. Will you earn reward? Then the touristic porn: a list of hotels sprinkled across Europe: Morgan le Fay. Lonsom Mews. L’Etoile Cachee. Santa Diabla. La Torretta della Virgine Bianca. U Sarky. Vanatoarea. Gellert. That settled it.

  He stood in the hall, smelled the paper, summoned her scent from that crucifix-jingling dresser drawer. His mind flew ahead to the hotel room where she was waiting for him, undressing for him, the Romanian inn where they became lovers, the Czech nightclub where he proved himself by giving her the only direction she needed, children, her singing to their children, a marriage. Only when he saw through his open living room door that the TV was on—a single tilting, squinting boxer with a blue-padded glove attached to his ear—did he let the fantasy flutter away. When he opened the door, Aidan threw a dinner roll at his head and lowered himself over a miner’s pan of syruped bricks of tofu and a half-drawn crossword.

  “I don’t much like your Scotch,” Aidan said. “That’s an imaginary tartan on the label, clanless and therefore classless. Can you think of a four-letter word with q as the third letter? I’d rather not use an acronym or Arabic.” Julian walked out of range of his brother’s babble, and he could smell her. Aidan had surprised her here, and she was hiding somewhere in the apartment. The bathroom sink’s tap burbled. He pulled the shower curtain aside, pressed its hundred Rioja wine labels against the burgundy tiles. He opened closets large enough to hide her and cabinets for which she would have had to shed limbs like a harried chameleon. She’d left her scent in his bed, and a long hair draped across his pillow, a giant’s fishhook to snare him while he slept. His ears ringing, he turned and ran for the fire escape in his bathroom, humm
ing “Without Time” just loudly enough to hear through his own skull. Aidan called from across a vast desert, “Hey, have you been in touch with Rachel at all? Any sparks?” The window was unlatched. He looked onto the empty escape, looked skyward in case she’d scrambled up the side of the building.

  “I let her in, you know,” Aidan said, his eyes on the boxing, when Julian returned to the living room.

  Julian flicked the remote. “You let her in?” He sat down across from Aidan. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously? I was watching that. Yeah, she wanted to leave you something. Listen, she’s amazing.”

  “And you let her in? What did she leave? You serious?”

  “Yeah. Relax. I let her in. With my key. I wanted to talk to you about this. It’s important. You know, she is still your wife. You have a role, a resp—”

  “Oh.” Julian fell back into the chair, stared at the ceiling. He started to laugh. “What did she leave?”

  “Listen to you!” Aidan attempted the accent of a yenta. “You’re very eager. So, maybe the old spark, huh? Very interesting. That reminds me, the Incans—”

  “What did she leave, A?”

  “How should I know? If you didn’t find anything, call her and ask, right? I thought you already knew, or I wouldn’t have squealed. You know, she and you—I wish I had the knack for explaining obvious things to stupid people.” Aidan walked into the kitchen. “Is this all there is?” he called. “You’ve let your wine cabinet go to the dogs. More evidence that bachelorhood doesn’t suit you.”

  “Open whatever’s there. Pour for me, too.”

  “Anyhow, the Incans—”

  “When was she here?”

  “A few times, actually. I don’t know. Okay, you got me, I gave her a key. But, listen, the Incans …”

  So Rachel had left something for him, something he’d credited to Cait. The poem, of course. It hadn’t made any sense at all when he thought it was Cait’s. He’d knotted his thoughts into lanyards to make the poem hers, to continue their story from it, when it was of course Rachel’s, plainly and rightly so: “Where is the love that once I called mine?” she asked him, left the question on his bed, their bed, bought together in another life. Cait hadn’t crept into his house; he’d crept into hers. And another corner of their woven story frayed.