The Song is You (2009) Page 21

  Three-year-old Carlton was not as clear a character as the twelve-or twenty-year-olds. Carlton’s sporting prowess, his unique friendship and secret chats with his uncle Aidan, his first commonplace photography, his discomfiting and heartbreaking questions about girls: these Julian had foreseen. But Carlton at three—like the child holding his mother’s hand next to Julian the next evening on the Twenty-third Street platform—was an animal he couldn’t quite imagine. “Daddy!” the boy yelled as a man stepped off the arriving train but just laughed and kept walking. “No, Daddy’s at the office,” said the child’s mother as they boarded. Julian sat down again on the bench, let the F train roar away without him, and rummaged through his iPod’s memories. He ran his fingers through eight thousand songs until Cait arrived in his ears and sang to him about how he felt about Carlton as a three-year-old. He replayed the song again and again, now on the next train, turning up the volume to counteract the rails and the screech and the boom box on the floor, not obviously anyone’s, playing a Puccini aria. A passing A train startled and glowed, one track over, the old-cinema flicker of two trains going nearly, but not exactly, the same speed, faces six feet away, inspectable but silent, an inaccessible, parallel world, unreal in the flip-book frames: the Hasidim reading a pocket-size Pentateuch, the would-be model with her portfolio artfully ignoring male attention, the thirty-year-old still dressed like a college kid, the pregnant girl hand in hand with her mother, a bald man in horizontal-striped sailor’s shirt and vertical-striped clown’s pants, Carlton in a stroller laughing, Rachel looking over her thin black rectangular glasses at a file, Cait staring at him as their trains clicked good-bye, and Julian continued on alone into the girdered darkness.

  Back on a Brooklyn sidewalk, he replayed the song again and heard for the first time, in the background of the lyric, a sample of distant thunder, a haunting effect he could scarcely believe he’d never noticed before. He pulled the song back a few seconds but couldn’t find the sound again before his iPod’s screen flashed a sketch of a dying battery, then went blank. The sky opened up and released a torrent of hot rain. Julian sprinted the last two blocks home, up his stairs and, still dripping, sat his iPod on its projection throne and played the song again. It had lost—Cait had lost—none of her power for the dozen repetitions. She had only been tightening her grip on him when he’d thought himself drifting away from her reach. He dropped onto the floor in a spreading pool of rainwater and gathered in his limbs, and felt he might throw up, but then sobbed instead.

  He pulled the red velour album off the shelf but did not open it, only rocked and wept and wiped rain off its cover and wished he could hold his son. Despair—despair beyond the ability of music to convert into art—shook him so hard that he could not breathe, and when he finally gasped for air, his first thought was the wish that Cait could see him, be with him right then, see how well she understood him and how well he understood her, how he looked at this moment that they had created together, as if her beauty and youth could kill the pain that her music had unleashed in him.

  He watched her on the telethon. Her chest swelled, and her eyes closed, and he opened the album.

  Photographs of joy: a bear, a balloon, a bottle, a baby, a new family. This was doubly an illusion: raindrops of parental happiness had sprinkled over seas of murky sleeplessness, cyclonic frustration, snipping at each other, dark jokes about catching Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and these carefully selected photos—propaganda for happiness—portrayed almost the opposite of what a yearlong film would have revealed, and Julian hated himself for everything he had missed, for the unforgivable crimes of inattention and self-absorption and the end of that boy. The album was a lie, too, because Carlton was, of course, not, and Julian was not a father, and corny missing-limb parallels occurred to him, and he grunted at them as his fingers glided over Carlton’s plastic-coated faces, and Cait sang, “Leave it out in the rain and let time surprise you” and the picture of Carlton at four months trying out an early smile was not the stab in the eye that Julian had long feared, nor the opium self-delusion, effective for only a second’s high, that his son was still alive. It was something else: Carlton was still gone, but the pictures made Julian happy nevertheless. The necessary catalyst was Cait. That woman, as a whole person—the breath, the voice, the body, the spirit and soul—made him feel this way, and could, perhaps, always make him feel that Carlton was a present joy in his life, not a semisweet torture from his past or a future stolen from him. He could believe, with Cait in his life, that he could be free and tethered, young and old, joyful and mourning, forgiven. The applauding thunder—outside, real—was near enough to shake the windows.

  10

  HIS POCKET SHOOK, and the Observatory reported Cait’s presence at a Starbucks two blocks away. He calmly asked Maile if she wanted a coffee, walked slowly to the elevator, and, upon hitting the street, sprinted, stumbling into the coffee shop out of breath.

  She wasn’t there, and he could see the joke: now he had to see her, today, this instant.

  “Mr. Donahue, all ablaze,” came the voice from the scarlet Seussian wing chair against the side wall. “You about took that door down, Jelly Bean.”

  “Hello, Alec.”

  “Guess who I just had coffee with?”

  “No idea.”

  “Come on, give it a guess.”

  “Huge hurry, Alec. Have to get back to people waiting for me.”

  “She talked my ear off about you.”

  “Who did?” Julian asked, buying his coffee to go.

  That same evening, as he stepped off the F train back in Brooklyn, his phone shivered with another blue alert: STAR SPOTTED, 5:47 pm: CAIT O’DWYER and the address of his own office building back in Manhattan.

  And so he bought a few things at the Bangladeshis’ and entered her building through the tea shop, took his key from under the mat, handed Lars a few cookies from the jar on top of the fridge, and prepped a pretty good risotto for two. He timed her arrival, cooked, delayed, finished the work, and then sat before the meal, lowered lights, open windows, mismatched silverware and chipped plates, grated cheese, steaming creamy rice, his pricey purple wine in her old green glasses, and he waited, scratching their dog behind the ears. He lit some of her candles, and he waited. He practiced welcoming her without startling her: “Hey, I’m in the kitchen.” And he waited. He practiced talking to her over the meal, describing Alec Stamford’s request to tour Julian’s office and his invitation to a film premiere, “which I turned down in favor of this idea, so you’d better like the food.” He waited, thought of the very last time he and Rachel had eaten together at home, could count on one hand all the words spoken, Rachel’s insistence she was literally to blame for Carlton’s death, although all she’d said was “What sort of mother.”

  He went to Cait’s computer to put some music on and there found her own website guest book open to an entry form, still only half-composed. Blinking, mid-insult, was the venomous doubtfulguest: “You sad little girl, you’re so pathetic, why don’t you look at yourself sometime and” and then she had lost steam. She did this to herself. Of course. He felt an overwhelming sympathy in the form of an urge to pull her hands off the keyboard, to fold her against his chest, to calm her, tell her she had to forgive herself and just go on, with him now instead.

  He fell asleep on her bed, woke to a slamming door, but there was no one. He took Lars down to moisten the hydrant, returned to the Pompeian meal and last of the wine, which he drank looking out her window. A minute later everything shifted, and he had to flee before she returned.

  11

  TECHNICALLY, STAN SHOULD STOP right there, with the one visit to the bar, his offer to her of a phone number. Technically, the singer was correct: this wasn’t his job by a long shot. Technically, if she was going to claim never to have seen the creep, there was nothing to do. His favor to his family was complete. His cousin could always call him if something real happened, if it wasn’t all a crank.

  He sat on
a bench at his boxing gym, a UU of sweat spreading under him, his gloves at his feet, his elbows slicking off his knees. He had come early and sparred four guys in succession—all above his weight and reach—but held his own. Now with his back to the ring, he watched the homeless guy the owner allowed in, asleep on the lat pull-down, his arms draped over the bar, the resistance pinned just to where it supported him, so that he rose and fell very slightly with each long, cluttered breath. The windows had brightened from black since Stan arrived, but still the bum floated up and down, hanging from his armpits. A pit bull puppy watched from inside a cardboard box.

  The thing about inarguably beautiful women was that they were warped beyond repair by the time they were fifteen. They knew they were always being watched, and they heard the identical salivary subtext of every conversation, and so they were suspicious of any talk at all. The most brutal men, the ones who wore their lusts on their foreheads, appealed to them just because they passed for minimally honest, and so women like that invariably ended up with thugs. As they aged, as the subtext gave way under one conversation after another, and makeup could no longer spackle down the truth, they grew needy to be treated as special, and so became the most neurotic of middle-aged women, the most cloying of old ladies. The singer would be no exception.

  She was surrounded by people telling her she was a genius, a goddess, so important, and so she probably longed for a little normal life, a little meat in her diet of air and lettuce, and if you were looking for a reason why she wouldn’t complain about the creep, well, you might not be off in thinking (a) she liked it, just because it was different, and (b) she thought she could control it. Long after anyone whose vision hadn’t been permanently blurred by the view from inside her aquarium would have seen a cross-eyed loony with one hand on a knife and the other in his pants, she’d still be thinking everything was for her amusement. She probably thought she could dispatch her dirty old-timer off to the cold, dry world beyond the glass whenever she wanted.

  But ignoring this whole thing, taking her at her word—well, if his little cousin was right, if the creep was trouble, and something did happen, then Stan would have to live with having known ahead of time and not done anything to stop it. And, really, this was about family. Despite how silly a person little Ian Richfield had become—and, really, who hadn’t seen that coming, given Bill and Teresa Richfield and, really, the entire barren expanse of the Richfield side—Teresa was still a diCanio. Ian’s fears (and his pretty employer’s) were a legitimate call on Stan’s time. If Ian didn’t get around to mentioning the favor, Stan would when he dropped a line to Teresa.

  He poked around the Web, found photos and chat groups, snippets of her awful music, which he shut off. He read a review that called her a genius, the voice of her generation, and he listened again in true bafflement to the very ordinary noise with the singing that—very occasionally—was almost musical (less power than Rosemary Clooney, less nuance than Nancy, less passion than Connie Francis), before it collapsed again into that derivative screaming kids liked. He wondered what he was missing, and that pissed him off. He spilled his coffee across the printout of the creep and swore.

  Two of the younger guys had heard of her. Bringing it up was probably a mistake, because soon enough a certain amount of trash was talked—from more guys than just the original pair of jokers—about Stan’s “punk-rock girlfriend,” and whether Stan had gone soft, skipped out on homicide for celebrity babysitting.

  Stan even went to the trouble of talking to the department’s shrink about the standard profile in this sort of case. Either it was one-time-only or a regular fetish, she explained. The dangerous ones were the one-time-onlys. The regulars tended to limit themselves to serial shrubbery whacking, but the guys who heard private messages in the songs, who broke into the house, took prisoners for romantic weekends, drew the gun for the loving two-step, they were usually on their first and only celeb.

  He found Miss O’Dwyer’s building, looked around the outside, made sure it had good locks and bars on the windows. He showed the perv’s portrait to bar owners and shopkeepers within a small radius. Turned out, creep was a sticky fixture at the deli directly across the street from the victim’s residence. The sweet old Bangladeshi couple who ran it agreed to repurpose one of their security cameras as a gesture of cooperation with the department, and Stan rolled up his sleeves, scaled their stepladder, and adjusted the focus of the front-door cam himself, checked the screen in the back until it framed all activity across the street. He bought them a pack of new DVD-RWs for the system and gave them a decal for the front window bluffing that the premises were regularly monitored by plainclothes officers.

  But that was about all he could do. He drove across the river a few times to check the DVD at the Bangladeli, but the Iqbals hadn’t seen the perp again, and there was nothing on camera. Stan could, he supposed, just check in with the singer—Everything okay with you? And one morning he was given a good excuse. He came into Brooklyn, reset the Iqbals’ system, and then walked outside to smoke in the sun, readied himself to ring her doorbell when she came out of her building walking a huge beast, jogged right past Stan without noticing, and led him a few blocks to a little dog run on State Street.

  “Funny to bump into you here,” he called, having given her a few minutes’ head start. He stopped on the sand as the Great Dane approached him, sniffed his shoes, and lifted his leg. The policeman, conditioned by years of rousting squirting drunks from doorways, stepped lightly aside and continued to the bench, where Cait watched his arrival through silvered shades.

  “You avoided that quite gracefully, Inspector. Very Fred Astaire.”

  “I’m highly trained for just that sort of eventuality.”

  “Holy hell! Is that an actual gun under your jacket?”

  “You mean, or am I just happy to see you?”

  “No, seriously. You’re an actual policeman?”

  “He’s a fine-looking animal.” Stan sat beside her on the bench. “Urinary habits notwithstanding. Which reminds me, a friend of yours got himself arrested last night.”

  She turned to examine him through her mirrors. “The fellow in that photo you showed me?”

  “No, not him. Is he a friend of yours?”

  “I see. And you just happened to wander into Brooklyn, notice me here, and decide to stop in and share the happy news with me of a friend’s arrest?”

  “That’s the size of it. I have a sister lives near here. She and I are very close. The fellow you sang with on TV? For the waterfront hippies? The big fellow, seems kind of gay? You should watch the company you keep.”

  “You sound like a priest.”

  “He was arrested last night, your friend.”

  “Who? Alec?”

  “It’ll be in the papers tomorrow. Seems he propositioned some professional ladies, three of them, in fact, but the third one was a colleague of mine. His bad luck.”

  “Surely you’re not such a prude as to think we should hang him for the indulgence of that occasional, quite human practice.”

  “Yeah, I’m a law-and-order man myself, but I hear you. Certain acts are to be discouraged but not judged too harshly. I’m happy not to labor in vice, professionally speaking. But the interesting part, the part I happen to know because this was a colleague of mine, this is the part I think you’ll enjoy.”

  “I’m all atwitter, Inspector. The criminal acts of people I know only slightly are of the utmost interest to me.”

  He turned, considered the reflection of himself in her glasses. “I like how you do that: tell the truth but pretend you’re lying. You know, I’ve been keeping up with this case for you, the guy in that photo. And I’ve been thinking about you. You’re a nice girl. Obviously above average. But you must grow tired of everyone treating you like a queen or a prophet.”

  “Tremendously insightful. I’m just a little girl inside, frightened, waiting for someone who can see right through me.”

  “There you go again. Full-time job
, I bet, protecting you from weirdos.”

  “You give the impression of a hopeful applicant for the post. Are you truly a policeman? I admit the first time we met I rather doubted it.”

  Stan smiled and lit a cigarette.

  “Jesus, that smells good,” Cait said. “I wish I still smoked.”

  “I read somewhere it’s bad for you,” he replied, and offered her one.

  “Cheers.”

  With effort he kept silent as she lit up, and then she spoke first, as the guilty did when given space: “I’m performing on Thursday night. Do you think I’ll be in danger from that dirtbag?”

  “Difficult to say. I’m not a psychic. But if you’re inviting me to the show, I think I’ll pass.”

  She nodded twice—he finally landed a jab after all her swings—but she quickly laughed. “I wasn’t. You have to work late, solving a nice murder?”

  “No. No excuse. I just don’t necessarily think I’ll see the best of you under those circumstances. Pop music, you know.”