The Song is You (2009)

by Arthur Phillips

  Julian listened to the street, the setting of the jewel that would be her voice greeting him apres la foule, their first words in person. The summer heat pried open third-story shutters, released arguments and laughter that fell to the arch-patterned bricks and cobblestones. A prostitute whose 1 A.M. offer he’d smilingly rejected now returned and stood next to him anyhow: “I am bored and do not feel the work, but I must appear busy.” She accompanied him for a few circuits of his patrol and translated the best of the street’s voices for him, the two o’clock shrieks and moans and threats and jokes. She smelled of a perfume he recalled from a film-school girlfriend, fashions having floated downriver to Paris’s Turkish prostitutes, unless the budgets of students and street women had always been comparable. “He says she is a liar. She says he deserves nothing so good?” she narrated, then asked, “You don’t want me or you don’t want no one?” but she was no longer narrating. Noticing the weakness that had crept into her voice, she added, “I have friends maybe you like better.” Scooters purred and circled.

  Cait could have been delayed by fans or press, and he decided to keep waiting, but there would come an hour when she would no longer bother to turn up because she would assume he’d already left. And with that thought he saw her at the far south, by his obituary and the sex club. He jogged, then sprinted past the old Chinese man on the step; past the broken neon offering a buzzing and enigmatic GA; past the Turkish girls’ mackerel, a Swede or a German, shaven close and inked with a map of the sixteenth-century world across his bare back, collecting from his strolling employees; past the shuttered bars and blacked-out, papered-over doors; and it wasn’t Cait at all, just another of the street’s itinerant entertainers misreading his eager approach. She swore at his sudden halt and change of expression, and she spit at his feet and gestured her feelings intricately at him. Above her head, at one of the street’s eastern openings, the sky’s color underwent its first changes. He had given five hours in tribute to Cait, unnoticed and unimpressive, and there in the light was Cait’s face flaking like dried skin, low on the fluted post of a hesitantly extinguishing street lamp.

  Back at the hotel, he asked the Etoile Cachee’s night reception man to ring her room. Hair slicked back, pencil mustache, head turned to examine his guest with only one eye, he smiled his condolences. “She has disembarked, sir, with her entourage and my great regret.”

  “And mine, and mine,” he said with his father’s weary worldly wisdom and a shaking that overtook his hands and then all his limbs, and by the time he’d scraped his key into the door and had reached the WC, he was quaking with fever, asleep, it felt, even as he was sick in that toilet stall wallpapered with illustrations from a seventeenth-century fencing manual. Hours later that same morning, when his fever climbed daringly high, some of the chevaliers cocked their eyebrows at him as they slowly drew on and immediately peeled back off their deerskin gloves, only to slowly pull them back on again.

  17

  SHE KEPT TELLING HERSELF she should have seen it coming. For several minutes that was the extent of the attack: she should have seen “it” coming, she kept thinking, even though there was no “it” other than the stinging blame that she should have seen it coming. She was in the bathroom stall an hour before stage time, and she was still there five minutes before stage time, and she was there ten minutes after stage time. Ian sent in the French girl from the coat check: gentle knuckles on the stall’s wooden door and “Miss? You need a thing?” She rebuilt a facsimile of herself at the mirror, told herself that, though she should’ve seen it coming, she had no choice now but to pretend it hadn’t happened.

  Ian was waiting outside and she saw how she looked reflected in his eyes, his pity, his coddling offer of some more time, and she loathed what she saw and loathed him for showing it to her. “Don’t. Don’t touch me. Let’s just go. I said stop. Don’t touch me.” Worse was yet to come; she should’ve seen this coming, too: she sang hideously, possibly the worst performance of seventeen years singing in public. She wanted to die, escape, change her name, claw her face beyond recognition. But even worse still—and she should’ve seen this coming as well—no one acted any differently. The crowds jumped. The boys tried to get on with her. The girls danced. Her band celebrated their conquest of France. Ian smiled like a child-molesting clown after the show and said, “See? You were great. They loved you.” They couldn’t tell the difference between her at her best and her at her worst, after she’d humiliated herself for them, swallowed the burning and bitter panic that had her stuck in the squat-hole stall, staring at the patterns of the barely pulped wood in the paper roll—the sneering faces and fantastical weapons and withered flowers—only to find that at the other end no one was even paying attention. She wanted only to go back to the hotel, to sleep until she could escape this awful city. She couldn’t go to the rue Quincampoix, not now. If he was at the gig tonight, he alone would have heard what happened, and he would run away from her, wouldn’t turn up, even if she could pull herself together. He, most of all, would have fled from what she had revealed. She’d lost him, lost her one chance for something valuable and lasting.

  So she was taken to a party where Ian wouldn’t let her alone. She kept batting his hands off her arms, but he was like an insect, his skinny denim legs bending, his adhesive fingers on her, his foaming fluids on offer: “Cait, you have to meet this guy, Cait, you have to see this view from the back window, you can see the Eiffel Tower, Cait, this is Pierre, get this: he was Piaf’s husband’s cut man!”

  “You digging the glory?” Alec Stamford asked, so out of context that at first he resembled a low-budget movie’s shabby special effect. “‘You’re the toast of Paree, Marie.’ You know that old song?” She didn’t, and so he crooned an old novelty song in his straw boater. “You’re the toast of Paree, Marie. You’re the talk of la ville. / You were once all for me, Marie, but now, ah, c’est la vie.” He’d needed a vacation, he said, after his recent bout of adult publicity. “I don’t know if you heard, I had a run-in with the law. A misunderstanding, as it was later determined, and I was sent on my way with the constabulary’s apologies, but of course that doesn’t make the papers. I’m thinking you understand, of everyone in this room. You’re entering the looking glass now, blue Alice. I’ve done my time over here. I’m starting to think I’m going to be your hookah-smoking caterpillar, you know?” He placed his hand on the back of her head, as if petting a child or a poodle, and said, “Your guitarist is quite good,” as though his hand should be wandering in her hair for this very reason. If he hadn’t also said, as his face began to swoop down toward hers, “You sang beautifully tonight,” maybe she would have deflected his charge with more grace, or even let him kiss her for a second, just because who cared—after all, he’d tried to hire three hardworking girls to simulate her. As it was, though, he did say that, and she turned her head and stepped aside swearing, called him talentless and useless, fraudulent, repellent, hollow, noisily detailed the real circumstances of his arrest. He didn’t deserve all that, but she was in no mood to admit it until she flooded all memory of him and the gig and the end of the party and the rue Quincampoix with a tsunami of black Guinness, and then she was on an early-morning train to Madrid, her head on Ian’s lap, when it wasn’t bent over the metal toilet seat with the view inside it of passing railway ties below.

  18

  UNCOMMON CONSONANTS, undervoweled and speckled with sharp accent marks, whizzed excitedly by on airport welcome signs, quizzically yowled from storefront windows, a world jiggled off its axis.

  After his lost days and lost weight in Paris, the doctor coming to his room, the filth and dreams, Julian caught up with her tour. He was determined to finish this and suffering from strange symptoms. He couldn’t listen to his iPod: none of the music—not even hers—charmed him. He couldn’t sleep from thoughts of her eyes and breasts and jeans and lips and throat, but also could no longer conceive what a meeting would be like, nor understand what had happened in Paris. He thought
of Carlton, the gift she had made him by inviting the boy’s memory back into his life, but he also had periods of paralyzing grief when he didn’t think of her at all and then wanted nothing further to do with her, when he hated her for having started something in him he couldn’t control.

  He knew he couldn’t go on like this, roaming this limbo of his own design (sharing the space with a dead baby, just like the real limbo), spiraling toward her without arriving. He told himself he was waiting for the perfection she deserved, but in fact he was no longer doing anything but hiding, city after city, and when he glimpsed her walking toward him, alone, in the shadowed hall of the Vanatoarea in Bucharest, he vaulted into a closet next to a cracked sink with a splintered mop standing up in it, closed the door behind him, and found another man already there. He was pale and thin and unhappy-looking, also hiding from her, biting his lip and driving his knuckles into his temples, holding his breath and praying she didn’t see him like this, leaning against Julian’s face on the other side of the mirror.

  The tour chugged into its terminus in Budapest. At noon the day of her last concert, he lay in his bed in the very odd hotel room with the cabin-wood paneling, the sparse and unmatched furniture, but the elegant chandelier and touches of belle epoque plush mingled with KGB interrogation-chamber style and a thin spray of modern business traveler reduced-expectation perquisites—laptop outlets, skimpily stocked mini-fridge, pay-per-wank cable menu. Perfection existed, he insisted; she would settle for nothing but perfection; perfection was the only way into their future, the only way to meet her needs, to be a father again—a father to the memory of Carlton and father to Cait, in a way—the only way to earn her love, to really live again. There was—he was perfectly certain—a perfect solution, a perfect ending and a perfect beginning, some event perfectly untested with previous women, perfectly free of Rachel, perfectly suited to his and Cait’s chemical bonds.

  Unless he couldn’t have both. Unless there was no solution to the mathematical problem of Cait and Carlton, no geometry that could contain them both. Stung, he leapt from the bed to reset his mind, to look at anything that could shift his thoughts onto a new track. There was only one reproduction on the walls of his bafflingly decorated room, Rembrandt’s Danae: Zeus came to her when she slept, woke her as a shower of gold. And then Julian knew the answer. Perfection demanded not that they leap from where they stood, stalled, but to break the journey into gentle steps: the future could be created only by dreaming of it first. Only one of them could afford to be awake at that first moment. Sleep must still cradle one of them, dream filaments stretched across the instant to form a bridge. He would go to her when she slept tonight. She would wake in his arms, but only slightly, wake again after he was gone, unsure if it had happened at all, and that would set the scene for New York. Might there not be a chemical to facilitate the event—producing not unconsciousness but perhaps a little factual soft focus? A fuming handkerchief, a mousy mickey, a powdered velvet blindfold, a shower of gold …

  She would be unconscious, at least at the start. It would have been nice to have enough Hungarian to bribe a pharmacist and ask for a phial of something that would encourage poor memory but not complete oblivion. Since he didn’t have a word of it, he decided to wait in her closet until she fell asleep.

  Even then, the acquisition of her room key—the easy matter of spy novels and French farce—loomed insurmountable. Long poles with twisted coat hangers at the end would require a trip to Hungarian specialty stores and an experienced handyman’s vocabulary: duct tape, pliers, you-never-saw-me-here. Or a Fosbury flop over the con cierge’s counter. A stolen red uniform. A steamy self-sacrifice to the ancient, bristle-lipped chambermaid, lifting her master key from beneath her stained and tattered dirndl as he kneaded her rump, called her his dumpling. In the end, he sat in the lobby, reading a newspaper next to a urinating cherub until the concierges changed over, and the priest-eyed young one, plainly aware of Cait’s celebrity and keen to protect her from threats, left matters in the capable hands of a deaf nonagenarian with shaking fingers and a wet and perpetually moving mouth. Julian’s voice was steady when he said, “Five-zero-six” and raised his eyebrows high, as if he were accustomed to looking at the top row of keys.

  He strode out to a cab. He pointed to locksmith in his English-Hungarian dictionary, and the driver nodded and began speaking German while Julian hunched over and wrenched the enormous key off its identifying bowling pin. Arriving, Julian pointed to wait.

  The phone was ringing when he dashed into his own room, her key’s clone searing his thigh, the original returned to its high hook. He sat on the edge of the bed, the flaming key now in his hands. He couldn’t answer, couldn’t afford to speak to her now, to give her the chance to divert or confuse him any further. It stopped. A minute later it began again, and he snatched it up before the first bell faded: “Did you read this thing in the new Neuroscience?” Aidan asked from across oceans. “I suppose not. Why would you read anything at all? You have all your screens. Well, go online, Cannonball. Today. It’s just up today. No Wi-Fi? Why would you go somewhere like that? You should be home now, especially when you hear this. Okay, listen. As I’m sure you know, forgiveness was long ago figured out, evolution-wise—what it’s for, what it wins us, how a certain amount in the group leads to genetic success, but how too much or too little leads to extinction, all that. Well, if you would get online now, you’d read how they mapped the brain circuitry responsible for forgiveness. If you’d thought about it, you’d have known they’d nail it down soon enough in the frontal-limbic circuits, but it uses the posterior cingulate gyrus, the orbitofrontal gyrus, the left superior frontal gyrus, and the precuneus! As you can guess, the sizes of all these stations vary among individuals. Our passion for moralizing is shown up yet again to be just a fetish for the size of certain small areas of certain people’s brain tissue. But this forgiveness path, Jules—they mapped it so elegantly. They hook you up to the sensors and electrodes, tell you they’re looking for relaxation patterns or something, but then, when you’re all settled in, they start to make little mistakes. They get your name wrong. They step on your toe. They bump you or spill coffee on you. And the tester says, ‘Oh, whoops, I’m so sorry.’ And then you can see it on the scans: two thirty-sevenths of a second before the subject says, ‘No big deal,’ or ‘Water off a duck’s back’—if he says it—a little flash goes down that line, gyrus to gyrus, like lanterns over ancient hills signaling the all-clear. Amazing, huh? It shouldn’t be long before you can get an injection of a hormone right into those spots, make them grow a little bit, and—bingo!—you’re the forgiving type. Julian, are you listening to me? In theory—Julian, listen—with a sufficiently enhanced forgiveness pathway, you know—are you listening?—there would be no such thing as an unforgivable act. When you coming home, brother? People here need you.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “All right, I’ll argue the other side for you, since you’re too lazy. There would still be an unforgivable act. Permanent ones. If somebody needed you, would die without you, and you refused to help, wouldn’t that still be unforgivable?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “It’s time to come home now, no more games. You’re too old for games,” Aidan said.

  Julian exploded: “You of all people say that? You get to be a child forever and—”

  “It’s time to come home, J. Where you’re necessary.”

  19

  UNDER A DARK BLUE SKY with unmoving blue-gray cloud-islands, like a faded antique map of the Aegean, Cait performed on a stage in a meadow on Margaret Island, the second-to-last night of a weeklong music festival and the finale of her European tour. Fireworks wept over trees and spas and Parliament across the river. “This is called ‘Servicing All the Blue Men,’” she said. Julian, as he had done the first night he saw her in Brooklyn, stood at the far back of the crowd, on the edge of a little wood that here and there bordered the field, but tonight her key was in his fist, and he w
ould come to her while she slept, give her the first taste of them in a dream.

  “She sounds good tonight.” A voice from the dark woods behind him, lit briefly blue and orange by melting fireworks filtered through full trees, then in the dark again, just an afterimage on the back of Julian’s eyelids, a paler version of someone he knew. “I knew you were quite a fan, of course.”

  “Alec? Alec? What are you—”

  “The thing about fans, though, Julian—” He tipped, then caught himself against a tree branch, which bent under his weight, and his knees buckled one at a time. His cowboy boots were splattered with something. “—and take this from me, I’ve had my share, there is this line, fine and dandy. Cait and me, we know things about fans that maybe someone like you wouldn’t get, TV commercials and all that iced latte.” The sky burst open and bled red, lending Alec a parody of a demonic glow, his swollen eyes half shut. He was unshaven, his arms outstretched like a hungover Frankenstein’s monster as he turned his back on the show to face the shorter man, to push between Julian and Cait. “You love the fan you don’t know, you see.” He put his hands on Julian’s shoulders. “You loathe the one who introduces himself. Like a chlorine jelly bean, baby. A rule—” clap!clap! went his hands right in front of Julian’s face. “Unbreakable rule, a law of waterfalls. You were in London, yeah? I saw you down in the pit. You think she’s digging your scene? The crowds that went to every Grateful Dead show, trailed the smoky carnival in dippy vans—you think the Dead liked them? They took their money for the hardship of playing for them. Word to the wise.”

  Alec tried sitting on the wet grass but stood up right away, slapping at the backs of his thighs. “You were a Reflex fan. Probably followed me around like this. I mean, I see Cait’s appeal. I do. But I watch you, and I just can’t figure—I mean, all you do is make commercials, sweet Bolivia, just so sad a Christmas card, bells on soiled bobtails.”