The Song is You (2009) Read online

  The three of them enjoyed their private stories and their private platform until it slowly filled again. Another guy, walking briskly to the far end, was snared like a landing jet by an aircraft carrier’s strap, by the sight of Rachel wrapped in the music. He turned from her to the violinist and back again, shifted his briefcase from hand to hand. “Is he good?” he asked her.

  “Just listen,” Rachel said, and looked forward to seeing how her benched admirer would clear this hurdle.

  “Okay. Are you good?” the new guy asked the violinist. “Your fan won’t tell me.”

  The musician opened his eyes, kept playing, smiled modestly, wished the guy would leave him his waking dream, the highlight of a year’s subway work.

  “And I’m supposed to give him money for this?” he asked Rachel.

  She just shook her head in annoyance, and the guy pulled his wallet from his suit jacket. “So how about, ah, ten bucks? Is that fair?” Rachel still wouldn’t look at him, and the violinist fiddled with one eye open. “I guess ten bucks is too little.” He balled up the bill and tossed it onto the subway track, down amidst the mysterious puddles and electrical risks. Rats condensed out of the air to examine the money for edibility. “Twenty bucks, then?” he said, taking it from his wallet. The violinist opened both eyes in time to see what would have been his largest payment ever sailing down into the valley of the tracks. “I have a fifty here, sweetie. Just tell me if you think he’s worth fifty. You’ll be doing him a favor, and all you have to do is say please.” Rachel sucked her top lip, couldn’t believe Bench Boy wasn’t leaping up to prove himself. The musician’s eyes closed as the fifty floated down and away. “Just one word. You’ll get him paid if you just tell me what he’s worth. Look at this: that Ben Franklin was one handsome man.”

  The PA system cleared its throat. The station chief’s voice accompanied the violin with a rich, actorly basso, black but with traces of England: “Esteemed patrons, a Brooklyn-bound F train is now departing Broadway-Lafayette and is expected to alight here, on your platform, for your transportational delectation in, let us speculate, three minutes. The establishment acknowledges your extraordinary patience and gentillesse.”

  “Not even a look in my direction to give your boy a C-note? You wouldn’t be a dyke? That would be such a waste of that nice mouth.” The bill glided back and forth down to a puddle.

  And with that, Rachel dropped and vaulted down to the tracks, brown liquid splashing her boots. She picked up the hundred and the fifty. The twenty draped over the third rail, and while she looked for the balled-up ten, the tunnel began to change color, as if a heat lamp were quickly warming it. Julian stood up but didn’t know what to do, and Rachel started to climb back onto the platform only when the noise of the coming train drowned out the music and the rats had all vanished. She was standing again when the first car passed, a long ten seconds after she’d pulled her trailing leg clear. She laid $160 in the violinist’s case. “You’re great,” she said to the boy.

  His hands and instrument hung at his side, and he tried to stand straighter. “Holy crap, that was unbelievable.”

  “It really was, wasn’t it?” She looked back at the banker boarding the train. She stayed behind again and finally, finally, the man from the bench said (squashing the violinist’s briefly ascending hopes), “That was extraordinary. Please, please, let me buy you a drink or an egg roll or a Frisbee.”

  Later, over falafel, she admitted, “I jumped down there because I knew you were watching. I felt like it was your idea and you wanted to see if I’d actually do it. I liked how you looked as I slipped down there. You jumped up to save me, too. Are you naturally the heroic type?”

  “Are you making fun of me? You were the hero.”

  “Oh, no.” She smiled. “I was just playing to get a rise out of you.”

  She used to have all that in her, she remembered, arranging things to her own ends, making everyone else think they were doing it themselves. She used to have a manic end of her personality, for that matter.

  7

  AN ALT WEEKLY REVIEWED a Cait concert in L.A. Google cache-marked the pertinent passages in blue, and the printed pages thickened slightly the growing Cait file on Julian’s desk as coarse hail chattered at his office window.

  Irish pop-enomenon it-girl of the instant Cait O’Dwyer played Tarzan’s Closet Thursday to an overflowing crowd. The hype! The horror! The humanity! Before Thursday I would’ve said that if I heard one more friggin’ word about this girl’s prospects I was gonna shoot someone. Today, I’m putting my gun down, and you should, too. I’ll get to her voice and her taste in a minute, but let’s start with her silences. The moments between songs, or during the competent-to-excellent guitar solos of Ian Richmond, where the study of the pretty singer’s face revealed depths to match those carved by her awesome voice, you could feel power and brains whipping and a heart pounding in her. And when she danced—in a Bundeswehr wife-beater and damn little besides—there was so much grace in her, like a ballerina I once saw whose back muscles seemed to mean and say something important just beyond my range of understanding, like I was a monkey at a poetry reading…

  Julian read enough of these—Cait’s cyber tracks across the country, trekking from WROK to KROQ—that he could usually tell within a few lines if the reviewer was male or female and, in either case, whether the writer was attracted to Cait the woman as much as Cait the singer. This writer in L.A. was initials only, BMR, but Julian guessed a Barb or Becky, one not usually drawn to women and a little surprised herself.

  The dissenting voices annoyed him out of all proportion, the comments on this paper’s website from the active keyboard of doubt-fulguest, for example: “Lies and lies with little lies sprinkled on top. ‘The hype!’? You are the hype! Don’t encourage the Cait O’Dwyer machine. It’s all a lie, built just for you. She sounds like a dozen other mediocre singers. Listen to you! ‘She’s pretty!’ You like her T-shirt and her dancing and she makes you feel like a monkey. STOP!”

  Julian was about to comment in her defense, but three days after doubtfulguest had struck, it was unlikely the villain would return to read Julian’s scolding, and then his email chimed, not Yahoo! but his business account, mail from [email protected], subject: Are You Up There?

  He looked out his office window, down eight stories, across the street, into the front window of Kopy Kween.

  5:02 PM Hav eyou ever done any of this before with any other singer? I should not like that at all.

  5:04 No. El hav never done this before. Hav eyou?

  5:06 Funny—so I can’t type. But people have noticed you. Not me, of course, but people. I would hate to be one of many, you know. So tell me now and I may forgive still. A long history of briefly favored singers? Love affairs from a distance with Emmylou Harris? Caught in Alanis Morissette’s hedges?

  5:09 If you were one of many, I would never have drawn a single coaster. And, may I ask, what it is about college performances that makes you less confident? You overcompensate. They’re young, but they aren’t stupid. They don’t need the garish coloring. You sang down to them. Trust the good children to understand without the help, and don’t worry about the others. They’ll follow the smart ones, or go outside and vomit. Either way, you’re clean.

  5:12 Oh, Jesus. I forgot you were there for those. And yes, you’re right. I knew it after. I’ve been bothered by something, and I couldn’t put my finger on it, and you saw it. You may be too clever for my own good. I’m embarrassed. If that’s how you spell that. I can’t find the spell-check button.

  5:15 Don’t be emb’d. They loved you anyhow. Is it any wonder? Maybe it’s better they saw only a clouded version of you. The real thing would have blinded them, left them dazed and hopeless.

  5:16 Are you?

  5:18 At times, yes.

  5:19 Would you like to meet me for a drink?

  And he sat facing that blinking cursor, lifting his hands toward the keyboard, but then they passed it to rub his face and s
mooth back his hair. He walked to the window, tried to see her, but the angle and hail conspired. She may have known best, or she was only impatient. He started to type, backspaced frantically before it just sent itself. And if it was too soon—the spent fuel, the abandoned muse—he wasn’t ready to lose all this. Would he lose her by saying no or lose her by having a drink too soon? Maybe it was a test.

  5:32 I think so.

  5:32 Your message could not be delivered. This is a temporary address generated by PhreeMail for the use of customers of Kopy Kween and is not currently active.

  She had wandered off while he dithered. He soothed his embarrassment with the hope that she mistook his dithering for strength. He decided to wait a day and then call her. He’d take credit for strength but dither no more.

  A day later, though, as he called and hung up on her answering machine again and again, she was back in L.A., and then Cait O’Dwyer’s first single from her upcoming album, Servicing All the Blue Men, was available for download from her site and her label’s, as well as the Big 4 download sites for ninety-six hours at no charge before being repriced. During and after that free period, supported by the previous weeks of early-morning radio-station interviews and acoustic performances across the country and a video that ran in maddening rotation on both the main video channels, and chart-charming gigs on all four of the influencing late-night talk shows (while Julian was strong or dithering), “Without Time”—rerecorded, remixed, remastered—became, briefly, the number three song in the country, an accomplishment for which Julian’s wise counsel and coy musery could claim no credit. “You are about to discover Cait O’Dwyer,” prophesied the synchronized full-page ad in eight large-market newspapers, “and you will never forget the day you met.” “Have you heard?” politely inquired the oblong subway posters, twenty in a row, with no other ads to interrupt when Julian raised his eyes on the F. “with opening act cait o’dwyer, courtesy of pulpy lemonhead records,” discreetly murmured the small print at the bottom of the larger posters outside, announcing the coming U.S. and European tour of a more firmly established band. Her photo was in the corner: stretching her arms over her head so that her T-shirt (for the Lay Brothers) rose slightly above the tropic of her navel. The photo was credited to R. Fellow. The posters covered a full block of the plywood barriers shielding a construction site near Julian’s office, the bottom half of the stenciled words POST NO BILLS just legible below the peeling paper. Even though they’d been pasted on by crack urban-marketing commandos within the last twenty-four hours, they already looked quaintly out-of-date, like posters advertising Billie Holiday, Edith Piaf, Caruso, an evening of jigs celebrating General Washington’s inauguration. Two were already super-adhered by Aidan’s face.

  Maile was in already. “Hey, listen to this,” she said with an early fan’s obvious proprietary pride, and she played “Without Time” on her computer, claiming ownership of Cait.

  “That’s catchy,” Julian said. “Who is it?”

  “You know what just kills me?” Maile asked. “She’s younger than me. Can you bear it? And she’s already that. I’m old. You’re a bad influence.”

  Julian had two versions of the song now: the demo, where she and the previous bassist played up the anguish, and this finished product, which, with a much more fluid bassist, captured the ironic, heart-bruising laughter he’d witnessed her discover that night at the Rat. The recorded laughter was perhaps a hair less authentic than her first discovery of it onstage, but one would need the memory of that perfomance to know it, Elis Regina’s example discreetly consulted for inspiration and technique, take after take.

  The publicly available part of her was now indiscriminately scattered to the fickle world, and he was undeniably sad. He felt her floating off to a country where he could only trail feebly after her, yelping to remind her that he was special. He picked up the phone and put it down.

  And she agreed. Another anonymous email: “You were right. Not time yet, is it? Sorry, sorry. You’re right—don’t come near me, please! Don’t give up on me, please. And, lo! It’s a different world today, no? In case you are feeling the need to keep tabs on me from your cool distance …” and a blue-bottomed link to a site where celebrity spot-tings around New York were texted in by subscribers and then redistributed instantaneously to the site’s membership, addresses and maps dispatched to cell-phone screens for efficient ogling. A sidebar on the home page listed hourly updated Newly Exploding Novas, and number four on that list: Cait O’Dwyer, Singer. Julian subscribed, fed credit-card digits to his screen, imaginary money to track his imaginary love. He was allowed ten Stars for the price of his basic membership but selected only her. The site informed him that he was one of 4,886 who followed her movements, a number up by 400 since the day before. On second thought, he added Alec Stamford, hoping they would never be reported geo-chrono-synchronously He was one of 32 watching Stamford move through space, a figure holding steady, but his phone began informing him of the painter’s position almost immediately: ASTRONOMICAL UPDATE FROM THE OBSERVATORY.com. STAR SPOTTED, 7:19 pm: ALEC STAMFORD BUYING FOOD FROM 67th ST. ‘WICH-WAY TEXT *88 FOR MAP.

  If she was joking, it was a good joke. She didn’t take fame any more seriously than this. But, beyond that, she was acknowledging and asking him to acknowledge her expanding fame’s potential to blur his appeal. And maybe hers, too. If he meant to continue, he should know that others would be watching her as well, keening for her attentions. Continue to be different from all of them, she was politely requesting, and threatening. Prove yourself.

  (She had, in fact, struggled over the text of that email, his silent rejection of her drink offer leaving her unsure of how—even if—to proceed.)

  “Do you want lunch with Alec Stamford next week?” Maile called through his open door, an invitation negotiated through assistants, like courtiers arranging a royal wedding. The gallery slave who called on Stamford’s behalf said the agenda was a business proposal, Maile reported, maybe two weeks work. Maile had never heard of Reflex but spoke up in favor of a music video as a step forward for Julian. “I’m going to see you recognized as a director if it kills me,” she said. But Julian accepted the lunch because he wanted to see someone else who knew her, and to study someone who had lived through what was awaiting her.

  8

  BY THE MORNING of his lunch date, he’d been notified at least daily of the painter’s whereabouts. The reports were not slowed by the arrival that morning of the long-awaited Times “profile” on Stamford, Milton Chi eager from the first word to hone the razor edge of his glinting critical teeth:

  Some artists defy description, and I don’t mean that nicely. Alec Stamford, vaguely familiar from your older brother’s record collection, is, like so many criminally foolish pop stars before him—Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Ringo Starr—making us look at his paintings. It should come as no surprise that they are dreadful. They throw out ropes of allegory, but Mr. Stamford is not nearly a strong enough artist for the ropes to reach all the way to us, to deliver clear meaning, nor is he magician enough to make them light, allusive, to let his ideas float effortlessly, just out of reach of our comprehension, to lure us off an aesthetic cliff. The work is just repellent, which, come to think of it, his music was, too.

  They met at a new Haitian-Thai fusion, which the gallery assistant had suggested, and which Maile had accepted only to tease her boss. Julian arrived first, was seated, and a minute later his contemplation of the menu was interrupted by his quaking phone. ASTRONOMICAL UPDATE FROM THE OBSERVATORY.com. STAR SPOTTED, 12:38 pm: ALEC STAMFORD, HAI-THAI RESTAURANT, 28th STREET, TEXT *88 FOR MAP. Julian looked around. Alec was nowhere to be seen, but also nobody was putting their phone away, fresh from reporting a pop star from two decades earlier. No fans of an art provocateur had their noses pressed against the restaurant’s front window, waiting to see him lunch under the mural of Papa Doc Duvalier and Yul Brynner.

  Stamford came out of the bathroom, loudly apologizing for the shoddy service at the
restaurant as he walked past waiters and diners, then, sitting down, immediately brought up the Times assault as a “victory.” He then fluttered vague professional possibilities at Julian. There was interest at an entertainment channel in a documentary about Stamford’s career, “the transition from music to canvas and all that, the consistency in the ideas even as the medium has shifted.” Despite or because of Milton Chi’s hard work, the gallery wanted a salesy film about the process of the painting, Stamford staring at the blank canvas, the brush suddenly flying, snippets of dialogue about art and influence. “Your name has come up in all the discussions, it goes without saying,” he said anyhow.

  None of this was impossible, though it was unlikely. It was uncomfortably likely, however, that Alec Stamford had gone into the bathroom and reported his own presence at the restaurant to a fan-tracking website. And now—as he spoke of his art career and the renewed and simmering appreciation of his old music, as he read the menu through his pince-nez, as he sent wine back with “Oh, now really, this won’t do, will it?” after insisting the poet-waiter taste it and agree that it was swill—the gap between the man and the music was painful to Julian, because those old Reflex songs had meant something to him and did so still. (After booking the lunch meeting, Maile downloaded “Sugar Girl” and kept playing it on her computer into the evening, and Julian had to resist the urge to put his hands on her shoulders.) But now the songs eroded in the presence of the singer. Julian imagined this self-promoter doing those old tunes—the great ones that struck a balance between cynicism and hopefulness, that cast hopefulness as the underdog that everyone wanted to win but probably wouldn’t—and it was grotesque. Julian feared the music would be lost entirely if Stamford proved himself more of an ass at this meal. And he was Cait’s friend? Cait was now entering the same tunnel of self-love that produced this man?