The Song is You (2009) Page 28

  Villerman didn’t recall any radio gig with Billie Holiday. He laughed at the idea that he had ever achieved such heights. “I’m more of an amateur, Henry,” he told Julian after he woke up, his eyes still tipsily cheerful through the soundproof panes of his glasses. Julian smiled fondly at the jokey modesty and asked if he’d played often with Holiday. Villerman blinked, though the top lids (above the bifocal bifurcation) and the bottom lids (below it) had to cover vast, magnified distances to meet. “I’m telling you, kid, I never played with Billie Holiday. I never played with any big stars like that.”

  Julian had the newly transferred CD and his day-old portable CD player with him, and he plugged the furry, floppy G clefs of Villerman’s ears. Villerman instantly became just a disoriented old drunk baffled by space-age technology, but eventually he listened, semi-awake, to the piano playing that Julian’s father (and Julian) held in esteem above all other jazz piano playing in history, above Peterson or Tatum or Monk or Hancock or Frishberg or Strazzeri. “Who’s on piano?” Villerman asked, pulling the cords out of his head after a minute or two. “Do you have any coffee, dear? Or gin?” he asked the waitress.

  “It’s you,” Julian insisted.

  “No, I couldn’t ever play like that. That’s Jimmy Rowles.”

  Julian put the disc on the last track and, almost pushing the old man back on the couch, gently batting away his resisting hands, he shoved the earphones back in place. “Just listen.” And Julian watched the old face as, he knew, the man heard Billie Holiday introduce the band, concluding with, “And our friend, Mr. Dean Viller—ahem— on the piano.” She didn’t say his name quite right back in ‘59; he had probably been a last-minute sub she’d had no choice but to accept because Mal Waldron or Hank Jones or, yes, Jimmy Rowles was sick, but the sound of her flubbing his name, in 1988, sufficed to jar something loose from the mucky banks of Villerman’s silted memory. His mouth opened, and he looked up, slumped on the couch, and his face contorted, the muscles of his lower lip fighting each other. “She,” he said. “Is this a record?” he shouted, adjusting his volume for the music only he could hear. Julian removed the headphones and asked, “Were you living in Chicago in 1959?”

  “I suppose I must have been,” he replied. “May I listen to the whole thing again?” With his eyes closed, but awake (he’d occasionally yell something), Dean Villerman listened to an entirely forgotten hour of his life from thirty years before. Julian’s sexual exploit for the morning was postponed indefinitely, as the waitress fell asleep at the far end of the couch from her elderly guest, and Julian sat on the only chair—stolen from the Quaver but camouflaged with a leopard-skin cushion—watching Dean’s face react to the music. “Who said, ‘Sorry, my heart’?” he inevitably shouted, “Or did I just dream that?”

  Later that same day, the waitress’s sleepy, amused kiss at her door still a palpable, edible memory, Julian recounted his adventure that morning, walking the great pianist himself to his train before taking a taxi to La Guardia and the flight to his father’s hospital bed. He tucked the same headphones into his father’s ears, attached to a head that was rapidly losing its shape.

  His father—reduced, reducing—took out one plug, achieving a skeletal Secret Service effect. “That was just yesterday.” He smiled, then turned away and vomited violently. “Sorry.”

  “That’s all right. You can keep the headphones.”

  “I won’t need them where I’m going. I have it on good advice the sound system is exquisite. Tell me about Dean. Can you tell by looking at him? Does he seem like the guy who played like that?”

  “Not even to himself,” Julian said. “There wasn’t much left of him.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “You used to say Dean was playing like he was giving Billie his blessing, saying it was going to be okay.”

  “Yeah.” His father closed his eyes and listened, might have been asleep until he asked, “Can you believe your mother? She just stomped around the house for half the broadcast.”

  “It will be, you know, Dad,” Julian said, choking a little. “Okay, I mean.”

  “I know. You, too. Things are mostly okay, most of the time.”

  His father was consuming a death squad of painkillers with ferocious reputations, but he dismissed them as “ambitious but ineffective.” They did, however, succeed in shutting down his digestion, except, after several days of concrete inaction, a sound-and-smell show that entertained him and defied anyone present not to comment. “Impossible noises for a human,” he boasted, and Julian heard enough in the last week of his father’s life to agree: jet engines, a sobbing child’s repetitive stuttering cry, a distant trill of machine-gun fire several towns away, the wheeze of a dying bird. “I’m turning into a faulty inflatable,” his father said. “And one of those Japanese sleepers. You remember them?” By then his voice was scarcely audible, far less than his other noises, and he was falling asleep often, and for longer, less troubled naps.

  The smells he produced were equally improbable and even funnier to him as he tried to find just the right names to make his crying son laugh: burnt scrambled eggs, fermented vanilla extract, cordite, hay-fever tears. “Do you smell this?” he asked. “Can you smell this? Am I insane or is that…”

  “Moldy raspberries?” Julian ventured, laughing and crying.

  “Exactly How can a human who doesn’t eat anything produce that? I wonder if I can just think them and then shoot them out my ass. Amazing, this process,” he said, honestly marveling at his comic death, before falling asleep, the living fulfillment of that bedtime story he’d invented in another hospital.

  Julian wandered the grounds, watched the divide widen between the sick and the well. Those seven days watching his father die (Aidan there for the last two), with the Ohio fall varnishing the trees, Julian would flip open his Discman and rotate through the twenty CDs he’d brought with him, always coming back to Billie Holiday and Dean Villerman and “Sorry, my heart,” wringing out his tears so he could present his dying father with the dry cheeks he was certain the old man preferred.

  “I’m sorry about all that” were his father’s last words.

  “All what?” Julian asked.

  2

  BACK HOME IN BROOKLYN he put Chicago Radio Broadcast, 1959, on the speakers and unpacked, tried to stay awake, to recalibrate himself. He tried to tell himself the final version of his and Cait’s story again, but he had nothing to show for it all, was furious at Cait for all she’d taken from him, furious that he wouldn’t have his own son at his side when he would lie in a hospital bed, furious at Carlton for betraying him.

  He fell asleep at seven that night, and Cait came to him again. Her hands, those long hands he’d noticed months before as evidence of her certain specificity, touched his face, traced old and new lines in his skin, the drapery of his flesh over its hollow frame, and she kissed his eyelids and groaned, “I’ve been waiting in your bed all night.” Her own eyelashes were wet, and he was so grateful to her for coming to say good-bye in the hospital, to see him off. “The sound system will be very good,” she said. She brushed the hair off his face and placed her lips so lightly on his that he could hear the air compressing between them. “All the women you have ever known,” she said, but her Irish accent was gone, and he replied, “I know.” They lay beside each other, his hand gliding over the guitar swell of her hip, her flames glowing red, heating his face. “Sorry, my heart,” she said, and his face warmed, warmed.

  He opened his eyes to face the warming September sun peering around the side of the window frame, the branches not tall enough to protect his muddled sleep any longer. He opened his eyes and felt a happiness that had existed forever, waking to her touch, and he loved this space in the day, this dollhouse window, this last inhalation of breath before the small sound like a popping bubble that would end the silence and prod the unmoving moment, when those first quizzical gurgles would rise from Carlton’s crib.

  3

  HE COULDN’T STOP
HIMSELF. He spent longer and darker hours in her dog park, in case Lars required a morning, evening, midnight visit. At first he considered his dignity and offered dog-walking services to his neighbors, claimed he was considering the jump to ownership, and so spent several early-autumn days watching, until well after dark, the immobility of two fat spaniels, the motorboat-buzz assaults of a Pomeranian with a mean streak, and a black Lab supposedly training to become a Seeing Eye dog but who threw herself on her back for tummy rubs so promiscuously for any passing pedestrian that her unlucky eventual blind man would be daily spun to the ground like a volunteer in a judo class.

  Within a week, Julian didn’t bother with the beards anymore, just sat, sometimes with a book, always with his iPod, and to the notice of the dog people who found dogless observers unnatural. He replayed what he would say if she came, how she would explain her weeks of silence, how he had misunderstood her final act. But she didn’t come, and he sat through the cooling season, his errors and illusions clarifying in the clear air.

  October, as usual, produced more offers from production companies than he could field. He adjusted his price accordingly. He socialized, with friends and for professional purposes, drinking with clients and agencies as necessary. Maile tendered her resignation with a certain tender look on her face, said she’d stay and help interview replacement candidates, stood there after he’d thanked her and said he quite understood her need to move on and up. She stood there; he was supposed to say something more, but he didn’t feel the slightest desire to figure out what it was. He hired a twenty-three-year-old boy to fill her spot.

  He couldn’t sit still in the office when there was nothing to do, and he and his iPod would take the train back to Brooklyn, get off a few stops early, and go to the dog park. Cait wasn’t ever there, and sometimes he didn’t mind, and once he didn’t even notice she hadn’t been there until he was leaving.

  One November dawn, Julian came upon a basset hound sitting on a bench on the Promenade, staring out at Manhattan. A few joggers in winter caps and Lycra pants bounded by, but no one seemed to be with the long dog and his heavy ears. It sat on the bench and watched the sky lighten across the East River, watched the city awaken to the day. At some signal that escaped Julian, the hound began to bay at the towers, calling New York to order. This struck Julian as quite exactly how he behaved as well: thinking his voice mattered, content to imagine himself ruling the world around him, never noticing that the world would tick along with or without his howling. He had become, at some point, a ridiculous person, though he couldn’t say just when it happened.

  He’d had his own version of “Sorry, my heart,” he realized as he sat next to the singing basset hound and looked at Manhattan turning on its lights at the dog’s call. Rachel had left him that voice mail: “You’re like a teenager, J,” with Cait singing in the background. Unlike his father, Julian had lost it, deleted it, that only recording on earth of something important, while he was using his two legs to run after impossibilities. His father would have been ashamed of him. “Cannonball, being broken is a bore for everyone around you. Try to remember that. I hope you’ll remember me as having enough legs not to be a bore.”

  4

  JULIAN SAT on the wooden bench that circled the oak, where he’d once sat and recorded Cait as she sang to herself. She wasn’t there, again, or anywhere else, except online (where her site announced a new guitarist, and a celebrity magazine had a photo of her dining with a man captioned, improbably, as a New York City police detective). It didn’t matter: the search for her had emptied something out of him. He re-flexively noticed she wasn’t there, but he wasn’t coming to the dog park for her anymore, no longer even looked up when the gate opened in the corner of his eye. He set his iPod to shuffle, and so he rarely heard her, though the one time “Coward, Coward” played, he reflexively expected to hear Rachel’s voice making gentle fun of him.

  He knew some of the dogs by name now, the owners’ personalities as well. This evening a young woman who had for some days been looking miserable complained bitterly that other dogs were taking her pit bull’s squeaky crocodile toy, and when other owners laughed at her gripe, she sat down and burst into tears. Julian comforted her, introduced himself, scratched the timid pit under its chin, fetched its toy for her. “It’ll be okay,” he said, probably the right thing to say no matter what was troubling her.

  He looked forward to the dogs at the end of every workday as his best entertainment, tried not to schedule late meetings because, especially as the days shrunk, the park emptied earlier each night. Tonight Lyle the priapic Chihuahua buried himself in dead leaves and sexually assaulted passing female dogs, bursting out in an explosion of brown crunch, yipping like a car alarm, leaping to grab a leg, against which he would gyrate and grunt, his glistening red member suddenly half the length of his body, like a giantess’s fully extended lipstick. The lady hounds, indifferent to his advances, either shook him free or stood imperturbable while he pleasured himself against their ankles, his tongue an oval strip of smoked salmon falling from his mouth. Lyle’s owner, a peacoated, trilbied hipster who owned a local bar, laughed as each female’s priggish owner shouted, “Get off!” and he would add, “You heard her, Ly Get off, boy!”

  Like Lyle, Julian had had a full life of women, though none came to mind but a wife he had failed, and an Irish singer made of steam. He had success in a field for which he felt no passion but didn’t suffer from the lack. His greatest and purest love had survived for only the blink of an eye and ended in—he stopped but then finished his thought, supposed that raggedy word was in Carlton’s case legitimate—tragedy. And soon something would change, and something else would occur that he would later view as significant to his perpetually rewritten life story. And he would amass more events and people and memories, and he would clarify old thoughts and rearrange details to highlight new significances and explain to himself what had happened, and on and on. All of this was meaningless, he thought, but that raggedy word was not, it turned out, so bitter on the tongue. One could do worse than meaninglessness like this.

  A beagle dropped a ball at his feet but grabbed it and backed out of reach as soon as Julian bent down for it. Julian sat up and the beagle dropped the ball for him again—too slow, sucker! Julian spun through his 8,146 songs, up and down, to find the audible echo of this sensation—the smell of leaves, the randy Chihuahua, the teasing beagle, acceptable meaninglessness—and the best his iPod could offer was an old Reflex song he’d forgotten to delete, “I Could Sure Do Without This,” but it didn’t sound the same as he remembered. It was a twenty-five-year-old’s frightened idea of middle age and didn’t hold together as music or philosophy, here on the other side of all that. He pulled the plugs out of the holes in his head.

  The predominant sound that spiraled into the draining void was the expressway that formed one of the park’s borders. Under that was an occasional bark, of course, people shouting for their pets. Under that was a bird or two, the species of which he couldn’t begin to guess, a nervous squirrel far above, a leaf or twig underfoot, the muttering of the bench and of his own body, the creaky rubber-band whine of a knee, the muffled click of a jaw, a stomach grumbling. But under even that drifted something wispy and still more difficult to catch. It wasn’t in his head, nor was it some symptom like tinnitis; he couldn’t hear it better by blocking his ears. It came from outside himself, barely perceptible. When he closed his eyes, he heard it more clearly; it rushed and quietly roared and then was gone, and he turned his head slowly from side to side in pursuit of it as if he were the rabbit ears of an ancient television, until he found it again, the diagonal domino tumbling of moonlit surf, or atoms crashing over one another like dice thrown by an anxious gambler, his own name whispered and slurred but in a tone of something less than affection, the echo but not the original of some terrible expanding shock, the sourceless approaching moans of a frightening childhood night when sleeplessness and nightmare blur.

  And then it was gone
, and he couldn’t find it again. He opened his eyes, and the last dog had been led from the park, and the last of the light was gone, and he was alone in the cold and mist, the orange digital clock high on the Jehovah’s Witnesses building surprising him with its advanced hour, and he imagined what another life with Rachel might feel like, in the mornings, or on a Sunday, or when they both left for work, or when he left the office knowing he was going home to her, and he wondered whether he would fail her again.

  5

  THEY FOUND A HOUSE farther from Manhattan, another mile down Henry Street, with a real yard in the back, and Rachel learned to garden, though not that well. When she washed dishes she enjoyed the vines sneaking over the window, like eyelashes across narrowed eyes.

  She sets the table for the regular Wednesday dinner guest—Aidan, smug and hungry, bent over soup. The last light from the window. The candles. The black dachshund, rescued from the pound (Rachel’s suggestion for a third date), snoring on its blue mat. The new photo album on the shelf with the reunified collection. The framed picture on the wall of their former family, Carlton in his TOUGH GUY cap. The postcard she had sent him of occupied Paris up on the bulletin board in the kitchen. The materials from the adoption agency pinned up there as well. Julian pouring wine and turning down the cello music with the remote in his other hand.