The Song is You (2009)

by Arthur Phillips

  So Julian took the stairs down to his own room to pack, charge his iPod, start trying not to think any more about any of it. His key opened his door but only an inch, until the interior chain caught.

  Cait had hooked it just in time and now hid behind the door, half dressed and annoyed at being trapped. The voice mail she’d just left him was wrong. She didn’t want to be convinced. She was done, and she knew it right then. She didn’t want him, didn’t want any more of any of it, not his scraps of a life lived without her, before her, his children and previous wives, all this bulky past to stuff somewhere, or to hold over her, to compare her to, old sadnesses bending him over when he should have been with her, all his little triggers she’d have to be wary of. “Look, can you do me a favor?” she called.

  “Anything, anything at all, I’m just so—”

  “I need to leave now, and I’d like to make a graceful getaway.”

  “No! No, no … We, we …”

  “I do.”

  “Please no. Please don’t. Please.” She was silent. He waited and waited and she was silent and the chain drooped there. “Are you sure?” he asked, squeezing his eyes shut, compressing everything into a single moment.

  “I am. Can you—”

  “Yeah.”

  He turned back to the stairs, felt the tears prickling against his face, kept going down until he ran out of steps, opened a door to the lobby and then another to the street, and he walked up the hill behind the hotel and watched the flats of Pest brighten across the river, like the houselights coming up at the end of a play.

  When he went back to his room, she’d ransacked it, taken all his relics of her, left him only the pieces that didn’t include her. The little photo album lay on his pillow next to Rachel’s postcard of the old Parisian couple. He picked up his shirt, held it to his face, breathed in Cait. He smelled her in his bed, too, the traces of the night they’d just spent together.

  The number one I hope to reap

  Depends upon the tears you weep, so cry!

  —the Beautiful South, “Song for Whoever”

  1

  ON THE LONG FLIGHT HOME, Cait’s scent on his shirt like the very last two curled leaves trembling on an autumn-chilled branch, Julian slept until Europe crumbled into the sea. When he awoke, his iPod suggested Billie Holiday’s Chicago Radio Broadcast, 1959, and Julian listened several times to his mother’s voice and Billie’s and the best of those piano solos until the music gave out with a plaintive flashing icon over Greenland.

  The pianist Dean Villerman’s name only appears in a few comprehensive jazz encyclopedias as genealogically compulsive as the Book of Numbers and on half a dozen sporadically live websites devoted to other players, but even obscure-footnote sidemen are often someone’s pet favorites, and so it was with Villerman. He came up through white dance bands in the South, before the Second World War, a little white cat educated as a physicist, and some jazz-trivia buffs insist to this day that he played a minor role in the Manhattan Project. True or not, there is a photograph of a celebration at Los Alamos after the first successful test detonation, and in it Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves toast each other with glasses of something, and they stand in front of an upright piano played by a hunched-over figure who could certainly have been the younger version of the man Julian met forty-three years later at his last public performance.

  Atomic or not, in 1941 and 1942 Dean Villerman was in Manhattan, not New Mexico, and was hanging around Minton’s, Clark Monroe’s, and similar after-hours joints, listening and watching as bebop’s structural engineers hammered out its musical foundations. Unknowns like Villerman would wait patiently, hoping but not guaranteed to sit in, watching Monk’s hands as he figured out what it meant to play bop piano. Aspirants were willing to abase themselves, go into a back room and play “Rhythm” in all twelve keys, changing up a fifth every chorus, just to earn the right to go back and wait some more, sitting and smoking as long as necessary to take the dreaded and coveted chance, invited up well past three o’clock in the morning, Monk standing to the side, looking at the ceiling, while Villerman, for example—plaid cardigan, thick glasses, suspenders—played something that Bird dismissed after eight bars as “corny.” But bebop wasn’t Mandarin Chinese or even particle physics, and Villerman was a serious musician, so eventually he figured it out, could sit in for a few tunes with Dizzy and Bird and not feel a fool, though there were always going to be some front-row and backstage murmurs that—as a white boy—he could imitate it, but he couldn’t in some deep, nameless way be it or advance it.

  Once he had it, though, he didn’t do much with it. He didn’t record as a leader or as a sideman. After the war he taught at a boarding school in New Hampshire—theory, private lessons, classical appreciation, a little jazz technique for the talented kids—now and then taking the Yankee Flyer down to the city to play a night or two of quiet standards at a restaurant.

  Julian, however, knew Villerman’s name—implying a very, very deep jazz aficionado’s knowledge—because of a single radio date Villerman played with Billie Holiday in May of 1959, one of her very last public appearances, and literally her last sung notes to survive as a recording. You can’t buy it. Julian’s father made it, live in Ohio, by setting up a black Magenta-Sonic reel-to-reel, purchased at great cost for the event, in front of his white-and-gold, two-speaker Fidelio hi-fi. Over the years, Julian transferred his father’s tape to cassette, CD, then his computer and iPod, and he never found any other recording of it, not on Billie fan sites or as a commercial reissue or in the terabytes of the world’s uploaded audio and video. Julian owned, in this one case, the only recording on earth of something important.

  His father had loved the tape, not because of Billie—she sounded hoarse and dazed, and she dragged behind the beat like a plow—but because of the piano: chords that combined joy and sorrow in countless and mysterious proportions, that carved a sculpture of the singer’s whole life as a tribute during solos and wove a support under her when she sang and stumbled, like a hand under her arm, or a blanket over her knees. Even Julian could hear, as a young boy, that something rare, almost celestial, happened that night on the piano. Something happened that night. Something descended and touched the piano player, and the music echoed on and on, outward and stronger, “live from the Skyline Lounge, on the thirty-eighth floor, high atop Chicago’s Excelsior Hotel.”

  “Dean”—the fan speaks of players by first name when analyzing their work—”Dean was touching that piano like he knew she was waiting to die, and he was giving her his blessing, like he knew this one counted, and he was saying it was going to be okay,” Julian’s father liked to say of the recording.

  Julian loved that piano work nearly as much as his father did, but he cherished the recording for another reason. Listen to it carefully: in the middle of “Don’t Explain,” when you’ve adjusted your sonic expectations down, down, to 1959 live-in-a-bar-to-radio-to-propped-up-reel-to-reel standards, and you can almost ignore the hissing from three generations of transfers, the rushing ions of 1978, 1988, and 2003, when you close your eyes and leap the treacherous abyss of inches between the Paleolithic tape recorder and the Neolithic hi-fi, strengthen with your will the feeble and faltering radio signal wheezing across the Great Lakes, overlook the quality of the microphones in the Chicago hotel, the clatter of dishes, the chatter—oh, yes, though the zoot-suited and wolf-whistling nostalgists will deny it when they snarlingly hush you tonight in a jazz club, there was chatter in jazz’s golden age, even in one of the very last moments of a goddess—the chatter of diners who didn’t think there was anything meriting their respectful attention in the background music to what was, after all, their night out, their pricey meal, their first or last date, their view of the Chicago River, their dramatic conversation about their private lives to which this dying singer was only light accompaniment—if you can hear past all of that and seat yourself at the front table and listen to Billie Holiday and her band, then you will also have the shock
of hearing Julian’s French mother walk into her living room and say, “Will, where did you put my book? What? Oh, oh, oh,” quieter on each “oh,” whispering after the third, “Sorry, my heart.”

  Sorry, my heart! Whispered! In that accent! When she was young and healthy! Julian never lived in that house, never saw that room except in photos, and could barely remember her before she got sick. Aidan reported that there had been a red leather-sided bar cart that lit up when it was opened, which he’d considered one of the great inventions of modern man. Dad would sit before it, preparing obscure cocktails from a recipe book (a red cover and the single title, in black, Standish’s) propped on the bar’s fake-black-marble shelf. “Sorry, my heart”: each time he heard that faint whisper in front of Billie croaking “You’re all my joy and pain” Julian could imagine his father’s wide-eyed plea for silence to save the recording, and Billie Holiday yet again wrestling with his mother for his father’s attention, his mother knowing she could retreat and win, again, every time, old Billie defeated with a whispered and victorious “Sorry, my heart.”

  For Julian, who never learned the names of all those sharps and flats, merely felt them as emotional levers, Villerman’s music carried the very idea of a skyline, of a singer in lame dying within weeks, of a crippled man in front of his hi-fi, his French wife and their four-year-old prodigy child and the smell of late-spring air inside a little red house littered with inflatable toys and union rat designs, a lit-up bar cart, all of Julian’s family’s life, just without Julian.

  Dean Villerman’s piano that night in Chicago accompanied Julian’s mother padding from room to room in her stockings, and there was no way to tell if any one clinking glass belonged to his mother, a diner in the Skyline Lounge, or Lady Day herself. There was no way to tell whose drink it was on his iPod, nor on Julian’s living room speakers attached to his computer, whenever he clinked the ice into his own glass, under photos of his mother and father on the wall, and of Holiday, and the photo of an Irish girl going down into the subway with a man rising with mannequins and, tucked into the frame’s corner, the postcard of the old Parisian couple. But for all that, there was this piano miracle: that distant and incomparable piano work, decades old, sonically veiled and only sometimes clear, like a glimpse of unimaginable beauty across a four-lane highway at night.

  And in 1988, less than a week after Julian moved to New York to take his first commercial job, by glittering coincidence (warm October day walking with Aidan through Central Park, jazz public radio rising from a spread blanket, calendar of events read in baritone monotone, “tonight at the Quaver,” name miswritten or misread as “Dan Villerman”), he learned of the pianist’s continued existence. Aidan declined without hesitation: “I have urgent personal business.” So Julian went alone.

  The Quaver was a small club, soon to close its doors permanently in the latest resettling of jazz at the sandy bottom of the nightlife economy, and that night, when Julian arrived, the room was nearly empty. Villerman was already playing, though at first and fourth glance he could have been some dignified bum or migrant piano tuner. But the sound was unmistakable, that same magical transformation of the piano—in this case a battered old upright—into a whirling alchemist’s device of memory, lighting, even incense. Villerman played without looking up from the keyboard, without acknowledging the three tables at the front, which held real, listening fans. Boarding-school students? Long-memoried fanatics? Family?

  Villerman played without stopping, strung song after song into garlands. Sometimes Julian had the impression he was just playing chords and scales, old exercises, but with such feeling that Julian hardly knew where to look or what to do with his hands, felt the waitress’s questions about drinks were heretically intrusive, disrespectful to a solar eclipse or a doomed tribe’s last and futile war council. Villerman was mythologically old—so old, small and slight—but with a distended belly straining the lower buttons of a plaid shirt. He curved forward, as if he were pulled over by his frayed black suspenders with silver clips attached to his woolly (and belted) trousers, or the weight of his old-man bifocals, thick in their old-man frames, refracting insanely anything Julian occasionally glimpsed through them when Villerman’s head came up and turned slightly to the left. It was a cold October night, and when the door opened, Julian heard, then felt the wind and smelled the dying season, but the old man didn’t react to the blasts of air or the pebbles-against-a-window applause, which soon stopped in relief at his obvious indifference. He only stopped playing—and only with his right hand—at just the right moments, executed as if they were composed and rehearsed far in advance, leaving dark chords or walking bass lines in command of the room while he drank, from the highball kept full at his side, clear liquid supplied by the sole waitress from a stained steel shaker, dented, with half the logo of an old gin, not made for decades.

  Villerman was a particular species of steady-state drunk, well into the sixth full decade of his habit and manner. He had reduced himself to an equation: an intake of alcohol and an output of piano music. He was playing when Julian entered, and he was playing three hours later, when Julian was literally the only customer remaining in the room. He took no breaks, evoking the possibility of a jazz catheter or a perfect wasteless system.

  The pianist, sideways to the room, seemed to withdraw from all directions, his eyes down, bending forward into the piano but also leaning away from the tables, drawing in his legs. The farther he buried himself in the piano, the sweeter the noise, as though he were slowly feeding himself to, and placating, a singing lion. He didn’t speak to the audience, or acknowledge those three tables emptying of his last earthly fans, nor did he look at anyone other than the waitress. “Thank you, dear,” he overenunciated each time she refilled his nearly empty glass, and another serenely lovely tune would flow from his hands and wrap itself around Julian in the shadows by the exposed brick wall under the cloudy mirror with the chipping golden logo for that same extinct gin, “Sorry, my heart” whispering its siren’s accompaniment to the perpetual river of music, as Villerman stayed drunk and Julian got drunk and the waitress—destined for a golden and symbolic anonymity and permanent youth in this story—accepted Julian’s invitation to sit down with him and get drunk, too, though she didn’t “really like jazzy stuff, to be honest, kind of prefer regular music.”

  Hunched, contorted, retreating within ever-reducing limitations, the old man played until four in the morning. He only stopped then because the barman called a halt. Two or three people had come and gone between one and four, but at four, only Julian and the staff remained. “That’s it, baby,” the bartender called to the stage, and at once, in the middle of a measure, Dean’s hands fell from the piano and burrowed under his thighs. He sat, nodding at the keyboard, as if agreeing with it. “Real nice playing,” said the barman. Villerman stood and, not surprisingly, wavered a little; he’d been sitting on a wooden bench getting drunk for seven hours. Instinctively, trained by a childhood with a tippy man, Julian stepped forward and caught the pianist as he tumbled over. “Ah, yes, thank you,” he murmured politely, still not looking up, as Julian propped him in a seat by the door. “Very kind of you. Fall sometimes.”

  Villerman’s pay for the gig—minus his drinks at the performer’s discount—left him with a tab of twenty-seven dollars. He reached for his wallet, attached to him by a thin chain. Julian stopped him and reached for his own money, flush after his first job and desperate to repay the man for his service to his family. “Oh, this is too depressing,” grunted the bartender with his ponytail and croquet-wicket mustache. “I’ll cover it. Please, just—good night, bye-bye.”

  Villerman was somehow smaller when standing than when seated.

  “Thank you, thank you, very kind of you,” he said with the extreme politeness of certain drunks as Julian and his waitress accompanied him outside, not having discussed it but with everything clear.

  When Julian’s father was diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him with vulgar haste
, Aidan responded with a flood of his own symptoms, some convincing enough that he found himself slid into MRI coffins and orbited by CT donuts. He had running sores that didn’t respond to treatments and a shortness of temper that didn’t respond to criticism. His trials ended suddenly, before their father’s death, in the MRI tube as the machine’s banging magnets cried out their mother’s name, and Aidan wept at the mystical epiphany of it, in the tight white enclosure, as pam was shouted at him, and sobs shook him from the inside while a disembodied Russian voice kept repeating, “You must remain still, sir. You must remain still, sir, or your results will be tainted.” After this, Aidan was cured of his ailments by a self-described “ambulance-chasing psychologist” who left his card with ERs and internists, even waited outside doctors’ offices looking for a particular sort of disappointed expression on the faces of departing patients.

  Julian, by contrast, though much closer to their father, had been relatively unaffected by the news of his illness. He just kept telling himself it was all part of life, part and parcel of his own emigration to New York (which he had made with his father’s valedictory reminder that “we enter this world alone, screaming, and we exit alone”). Sad, yes, obviously very sad, he loved his father, but as Aidan was traveling through the terminal stages of his disorder, and their father was entering his own terminal stages, Julian, four in the morning, five hours before he was meant to fly to Ohio to visit him, was walking down lower Broadway with a waitress-treat, each of them supporting one arm of a shuffling, elderly jazz musician, childlike in Julian’s black peacoat, as Villerman claimed to have forgotten his own coat in New Hampshire. The pianist also shyly admitted that he had nowhere to stay before his 11 A.M. train back north to school. He had played so ceaselessly, in part, to fill up the time until the train, figuring that if he didn’t stop playing, they wouldn’t kick him out. With the little man swallowed by the outsize coat, killing time before going back “to school,” one arm in Julian’s and one in the waitress’s, they made a distorted picture of a young family, even more so when they all ended up at the waitress’s studio apartment watching the pianist fight off sleep, sitting up on her sofa bed as the day arrived, not with the sun rising but as a change in the color of the shadows cast on the brick wall a few feet in front of her only window.