The Song is You (2009) Page 13

  The paintings were titled only with date and time, printed in mournful wreaths of golden script: 11:17 pm, January 18, 2009, for example. Each was sexually explicit without being slightly sexually arousing. The works depicted people in states of emotional and physical nakedness in the moments immediately following the evaporation of humid desire. A chill had just settled over the subjects, as if sweat or other clinging moisture was fast distilling into component salts. In couples or alone, lovers hunched in bed or leaned over to turn on baths, their bellies released to sag, or they looked at their bodies in harshly lit bathroom mirrors, stared at closing doors, lay back-to-untouched-back, or—in the case of two muscled men—turned away from each other to stare at their own flexed reflections in their own infinitely cross-reflecting, full-length mirrors, their biceps and quads and traps and glutes like agglomerations of dinner rolls, as if to reassure themselves that what they had just engaged in hadn’t deflated their hard-won physiques.

  One canvas only was not aggressively despondent: a woman lay on her back, her legs supported straight up in the air with the help of a man who, holding high her ankles with one hand, studied his wrist-watch, the only item he wore. Her face was blocked by the head-on perspective of her lifted legs, buttocks, and the explicitly depicted swollen center of all attention. And one’s eye inevitably traveled to it—Stamford’s perspective and composition were strong enough to achieve that, even if the subject weren’t so magnetic and its detail so photo-realistically rendered—but one couldn’t view it solely sexually, as an entrancing entrance, because just exactly then, tilted back by a potential father for a crucial three to six minutes, its essential nature was possibly reversing, transforming it into an existential exit. Stamford acknowledged the debt to Courbet’s Origin of the World and neatly repaid it by borrowing in turn from Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait: over the bed, just visible above the woman’s upraised feet, hung a round convex mirror, reflecting that very Courbet picture, as if it were hanging across the room from her, where you were observing this scene unnoticed, as if you were peeking out of that nineteenth-century vulva in your examination of the twenty-first-century vulva before you, with all the queasy oscillation between sexual desire and procreative realities, matrimony yielding to maternity, lust only boiling to force labor.

  “Please don’t let her call me a roly-poly tonight. I don’t think I can bear it,” an immense Rachel had said on the way to their final Lamaze class.

  “You? She’s been commenting on my gut.”

  A month later the Lamaze teacher called the hospital room. “Are joo holding God’s precious gift?” she asked.

  “I am. I really am,” teary Julian had said.

  “And jore queen is sleeping?”

  “She is.”

  “And is she very bootiful?”

  “She really is.”

  “Joo better tell her dat, okay? And joo tell her joo love her.”

  “I did, Mrs. Santana. And I will.”

  “Hello! I thought I recognized you,” a voice behind Julian in the booth interrupted. A formerly young woman stood next to him before the impregnation painting, a girl who once held Maile’s job, and with whom he had once or twice gone to bed, and who now worked in another art gallery, and who had aged unconscionably. “What do you think of the genius?” She slid her arm through Julian’s and pecked his cheek. “He’s really dreadful, isn’t he? Pictorially, I mean.” Her hand was on his biceps still, an offer or a declaration of being over the past. “Let’s have a drink, J-Do.”

  They slipped out between the curtains, and then Cait O’Dwyer said, “Well, congratulations to you,” her back a few feet from him. Thanks to the small population of media-industry New York, he was at a social event with her. His body reacted to her spoken voice as if she’d snuck up from behind and whispered something warm and improbable into his ear. He bit his lip and watched as she stood on tiptoe to kiss the painter’s lowered cheek and hold his hand for a long moment.

  Julian slid free of the former employee’s grasp and, wiping his sweating hands on a balled-up cocktail napkin, retreated to the men’s room (the door painted with a very accurate penis sliced lengthwise like a sundae-dressed banana, each of its internal tunnels labeled in excellent Latin but in a reversed-R childish scrawl). His face mirror-composed, he came out, unsure if this was how he and Cait should meet but certain that they should. He hadn’t seen her in weeks, since she’d sung “Bleaker and Obliquer” and he had known it was best not to meet her, but her effect on him had been incubating ever since, and the decision to approach her now felt natural and necessary.

  He watched her from across the gallery. She didn’t blend into the crowd but stood outlined and masterfully lit even when models and model-waitresses swayed and scowled around her. The painter brought her a drink himself, in a glass, while everyone else cracked empty plastic flutes. He spread his hand across the white back of her sleeveless top, moved it in slow, possessive circles, and Julian’s disappointment felt like a sidewalk assailant swinging a bat into his stomach.

  It had never occurred to him that she might be with someone. It hadn’t been relevant to his fantasies, until now, as the painter leaned down to whisper into Cait’s ear and caught Julian’s eye across the floor, held it as he whispered until Julian finally gained enough control to pretend to be looking past them. Now it mattered; it mattered terribly, more than Rachel flying away the other morning in tears, more than the former employee who was back now, handing him a drink, taking his arm again, walking him away.

  “What’s new in TV land? Are you providing your current staff as complete a grounding in the ways of the world as I received?” She led him to a couch where he could turn his back on Cait and the artist. “Do you want to meet him?” she asked. “I saw you looking. He is rather magnetic. Little secret: our gallery passed on him a couple years ago. I’m convinced we made the right decision.” Lighter pop songs now peeked through from between the death and sex music, and Julian recognized a tune from his own collection. “He’s very driven. I’ll give him that.”

  Reflex was shuffled somewhere inside his iPod, an album Julian had been forced to buy three different times as the music industry shoved him from format to format, and only now did he recall the band’s lead singer’s name as being the same as the painter’s. The sickening truth: Cait could very well have been with Alec Stamford, the musician. Julian had been quite taken by Reflex in film school, had studied sleeve photos and lyrics, when he spent his free hours doing that and little else, had detected a profundity in Reflex songs, references obscure but reminiscent of some shared experience, and he recalled a feeling of mutual understanding, lying on a bunk, looking up at the back of an LP: “Lyrics—Stamford, Music—Vincent.” He looked back over his shoulder; the artist was there, but Cait O’Dwyer was gone.

  “Julian, I feel like I conjured you tonight,” said the former employee. “I was just thinking about you. Hello? All right, come on, let’s introduce you. You’re gawking.” She waved the artist over. He kissed her cheeks and held her hands and helpfully reminded Julian of her name. “Alec Stamford,” Heather said, “this is Julian Donahue, one of your myriad admirers, and the renowned artist behind several of your favorite shampoo commercials.”

  “I am actually a fan of Reflex,” Julian said, pointing to the air, which carried a song he’d once truly loved, “Last One In, First One Out.” “Are you possibly the same Alec Stamford?”

  “I think I am. Some days more, some days less.” The larger man shook Julian’s hand and kneaded his shoulder, tipped his head back to consider him down his nose. “This song was a favorite of Springsteen’s actually,” Stamford said. The bass and drums dropped out, and the vocals floated, whispered, over sustained keyboard chords, “Walk to your car, I’m going back to the bar / Just say good night, ‘cause we both know this don’t feel right.” The former employee laughed, rubbed Julian’s neck, excused herself for just a minute.

  Stamford pulled two passing drinks out of the air,
but Julian, turning toward the gallery’s huge front window, saw Cait O’Dwyer on the sidewalk, buttoning her coat. Knowing he no longer had the stamina to court another man’s girlfriend, he decided she was leaving too early to be involved with the artist. He declined the drink with apologies, said congratul—

  “You really have to run?”

  “I do. I’m sorry.”

  Stamford looked at the girl in the picture window. “You know Cait?”

  “Kate? No.”

  “Oh, ah, okay, but so, ah, commercial direction, Heather said? I may have a need for someone in your line of work. Flip me your card before you split. I’ll have the gallery hook us up.”

  Julian left as casually as he could, Heather Zivkovic still in the bathroom, but by the time he reached the street, there was no sign of Cait, just crowds from bars and galleries, and his teeth chattered in the April air as he swallowed his hopes.

  At home, he found Aidan asleep on the couch, and he reread Cait’s Times profile online, blue light on his face, remarkable fellow, remarkable fellow. He sorted through Google’s sightings of her in the cybermurk, now more than a thousand, though some of them were mere rumors, her name struggling to break out of Japanese text or the thrice-daily essays of the housebound furious and the cubicled despairing. He printed out a glamour photo of her laughing through blue backlit smoke, the granddaughter of some 1950s Claxton-photographed jazz-club beauty, the great-granddaughter of a daring fast girl with her bare knees tucked up to her chin on the hot sand of the Cote d’Azur. He discovered the newly launched www.caitodwyer.com, scoured it for clues.

  The site included the usual propaganda to sell Cait and her music to the universe, with its short attention span and surfeit of stimuli: email lists, tour dates, About the Band, Cait’s blog. The Guest Book hosted fans far from New York, in Los Angeles, fair enough, but also mythological hamlets like Wichita and Albuquerque. “Cait! I saw your show at the Mad Dog last October and I never forgot it. !Keep rockin’! Stu.” “I think your a poet. And I loVe you. Beth P.” “Tell Ian he ROXXX!!! Mags and Michelle. Tell him those were our favorite shirts. He’ll get it! Ian! Call us next time you’re in the Triangle!” “1st Ave gig was awesome, and you won a fan for life in me, Cait. T-bone.” However necessary such marketing may have been, this outpouring of adoration from children must have embarrassed her, if she was the woman he hoped she was. “I bought your demo at the Vingt-Deux, and I listen to it all day, all the time. I want you to know how great I think you are. I wish there was a better way to tell you. I wish I knew how I could know that you knew it. I want you to feel it. Unless you can’t be it and feel it at the same time??? GG.”

  Downloadable Gallery: Cait, lit from the side, smoking at a dark bar, wearing some sort of one-piece, nineteenth-century, Toulouse-Lautrecky, netted crimson-and-silver courtesan’s underwear, flanked by her band; Ian onstage, leaping in front of an amp, his legs spread as his left hand splays into a chord and the right arm, bent, has just slashed the strings, identical to thousands of album covers since 1964, like a yoga posture to be mastered; Cait lying in a garden, photographed from above, her eyes meeting the camera, her face and red hair surrounded by countless still-closed and patient tulips, a field of green stems and pursed pregnant leaves to the very edge of the frame, but in this germinating color, two o’clock to Cait’s face, one solitary open bloom, purple and veined white, like a cut of raw beef; Cait onstage, facing front but her eyes looking to the side, the barest minimum of exertion around her mouth to count as a smile; Cait and the guitarist in the studio, tumorous headphones around necks, the two discussing something with an older man in a hooded sweatshirt, the three artists caught unaware in a moment of creative consultation; the drummer in action, face inexpressive behind his sticks, blurred into Oriental fans; the bassist, posing in front of a disused Coney Island amusement park ride, his arms crossed to prop his biceps up and out; Cait and her three men in a wintertime park of spindly bare trees: the men are lying facedown on a concrete path, dressed only in their tighty-whitey underpants, stacked like cordwood, sleeping drummer under grouchy bassist (biceps accentuated) under acquiescent Ian, and Cait atop this flesh-bench in fur-trimmed and hooded jacket, scarf, gloves, boots, and acutely angled beret over her red hair, her breath a cumulus the size of a peach.

  What They’re Saying (and Who Are They?) “Cait O’Dwyer’s voice is a wake-up call to a dormant, stupid, smug music biz.” “If you only go to one live show this year, this century, this eon, then this is the show.” “Music so pure and true you’ll sob. If you don’t, get therapy.” “She was Irish, but she’s ours now. This is the future of real American music.” Click here to download a .pdf of the Flambe profile of Cait, “Bleaker and Obliquer: A Simple Ghoul from Erin.”

  The Flambe article mentioned that she lived in Brooklyn over a tea shop, from which she bought purple boxes of an imported brand of breakfast tea she had known in her childhood, “where ghosts were a daily reality but sex was a legend or a nightmare never to be discussed.”

  3

  AND SO THE NEXT DAY Julian stood on Henry Street, less than a quarter mile from his apartment, in front of the building he had known at once from the puff piece’s breathy indiscretions, its ground-floor storefront filled with tea paraphernalia. Next to the window, its door buzzers were labeled plainly enough: 1- TEAPUTZ OFFICE, 2-M&R INC, 3-HARRIS, and floating atop them all, 4- CO’D. He listened to her demo on his iPod: “Come, come, come, come find me, no matter what I say.” A good line, implying a tormenting, irresistible woman, unsure of her own mind but accelerating in her fall for you, O listener at your computer, debating yourself as to whether she’s worth the dollar-download click, as Julian stood, facing her doorbell but still not touching it.

  They would go out for coffee and flex their overdeveloped charms. He would be cast in the role of suitor, if not the revolting and unholy hybrid of fan-suitor, a crest-flaunting lizard, and she the unimpressed, dozy-eyed lizardette. They would or would not be dazzled by each other’s personalities, each other’s memories, collected solely to display to others, thus winning new experiences and yet more memories. Perhaps they would be startled by the easy flow, scarcely able to pay for the coffee before dashing up her stairs, to shove each other into her apartment, to devour each other.

  Or with crevasses of cappuccino foam still wintry pert, they might shake hands, express mutual gladness at having met, thanks for the advice, good luck with your career. Or he might long to touch her cheek but then see her boredom with his time-dulled surfaces, with this interminable coffee coursing deep under insurmountable cappuccino Alps. Or she might make a fatal error, say something lame, dispel the thickening illusion that she was not half his age, and he would, limp as ever, smile wanly at the pretty little girl not worth even a cheap pass.

  “It’s cold outside, so come find me,” she persisted, but it wasn’t quite true; the weather was warming, and that was enough to break the spell. He’d imagined it. It was just pop music, not any real woman on earth.

  He turned away from her door and went to his office, embarrassed at having lurked and ogled. He spent the ride laughing at himself to avoid pitying himself. And by the time he’d arrived at his desk, he forgot all that shame and wisdom as his computer came to life with an email that asked, “Why didn’t you press the bell? Why not pay a call?”

  That first uncanny moment, coming to see he’d been observed, was enough to replenish everything he’d meant to outgrow on the subway. She must have watched him from her high window. He replayed the event now with its fuller meanings: not him brought to his senses but her showing herself to be the more confident and intriguing of them. She had watched for him, shadows and glare delicately shrouding her while he dithered and, after laughing at his shy retreat, she must have sat right down and written her anonymous taunt on his flashy website: “Contact Julian Donahue”: “Why didn’t you press the bell? Why not pay a call?” He sat back at his desk. She had somehow learned his name, his website, his work? She had
toiled like a private detective or a crystal-ball-tickling step-witch? What giant footprints and fingerprints had he left behind on coasters, on a gallery guest list? Where else? His fingers shook so he could barely dial his iPod, and he tapped for her voice to match the sight of her pixellated bursting arrival into his world.

  No return email address, no signature, nowhere to reply, only pixels beautifully and originally arranged, her voice in his head, the song “Crass Porpoises” (or so her robust accent led him to believe until he reread the song list). But Julian wasn’t shaking from a desire to dash to her. She asked the question but knew the answer as well as he: he hadn’t rung the bell because that would have been a bore, to them both, and her anonymous taunt proved it, proved her, confirmed his best suspicions of her.

  He listened to his iPod and sketched storyboards of how they could meet, but because he was a hack, all his ideas were recycled from TV and movies and his own ads. Every approach he could imagine played itself out as quickly as his impulse to ring her doorbell, and she would laugh at him as loudly as she had today. He could use one of her songs in a commercial. Paired with certain images of love and renewal, “Coward, Coward” would be quite effective. And it would certainly be a gift to her, better than bouquets. She’d be paid hefty licensing. And mainstream hits were sometimes made thanks to tasteful use in the right commercial. Have Maile contact the label, insist Miss O’Dwyer meet the director herself: “I thought this a better call to make.”

  No, even that only rearranged the frames of a tolerable romantic comedy he’d sat through because Rachel liked the lead actor. She would just shake her head, as if he were one of those little boys at the club, complimenting themselves on their courage as they lost to her in cards.

  4

  HE WRESTLED THE QUESTION for several days, then decided the problem was not in how to meet but when, and maybe even why. Why not pay a call? Because they didn’t know enough yet. There were pleasures of investigation and discovery still to be enjoyed that he’d almost squandered. She was laughing at his impatience. Something original could still occur, something neither of them had ever known, and he had nearly destroyed it. And so he made himself sit still, and he watched.