The Song is You (2009) (16 page)

He mentioned to Cait a music festival he was in negotiations to produce. “It may not pan out, but might fit you, if you want to send a CD of your stuff to my office.” He slid a card from a leather case. “Also I have a gallery show going up soon.” Standing beside her, he could feel himself absorb some of her luxurious potency. It flowed into him, and as in a dream in which one recalls how to do something impossible, simply by relaxing and doing it (flying, running sixty miles an hour, auto-fellatio), his muscles remembered how to possess potency, to contain and express it. Other people watched
him
when he spoke to her. He could hold on to her effect even when she was across the room, but the next day it was gone.

Each time he logged on to bulletin boards about her, he told himself he would most likely never do it again; he was just curious to see how she fit into the universe, and so he never wrote down the log-in passwords (or the false email accounts). He had therefore to create a new identity each time his refreshed curiosity required him to lurk and study the nature of her attraction by studying those who were attracted to her. Over a few months, he called himself caitfan and then caitfan01 and caitfan02 up to and including caitfan 16, though someone else had snagged caitfan11 when Alec was otherwise distracted with the possibility of a Reflex reunion concert.

“MAIL(E) CALL
,” Maile flirted, dropping books and letters on Julian’s desk, but he had his iPod on, and the pass was incomplete. Embedded among seasonal modeling-agency books, video-resume reels, the bills, and the invitations to conferences and production company summer parties was a thick cardboard disk printed red on black:
POST COITUM OMNE ANIMAL TRISTE EST
. On the reverse, the name Alec Stamford, a date and time,
OPENING, INVITED GUESTS ONLY
, and the address of a Lower East Side gallery, the owner of which had been in Julian and Rachel’s inadvertently hilarious Lamaze class (taught by an old Dominican lady with uniquely inflected English who called the mothers-to-be “rr-r-r-oly-polies” as in “now joo gonna push dat baby out, rr-r-r-oly-poly,” but spoke of the one lesbian couple in the class only ever in the squeamish third person while looking at the other teams: “Dose two ladies over dere are gonna wanna study da breath patterns a little better”).

For those without Latin, the show’s title was translated on one side of the cocktail napkins, so that one cradled one’s glansy-pink prawn or vaguely vaginal anchovy tartlet in the red-and-black words:
FOLLOWING THE ACT OF LOVE, ALL CREATURES GRIEVE
. The waitstaff who distributed the delicacies were recruited for physical appeal rather than catering prowess, near models nearly dressed in black and scarlet. The gallery was garlanded in black crepe, resembling a brothel hosting a funeral for one of its own. The soundtrack, piped from speakers concealed in weeping, armless Venuses and sleeping, harmless fauns, alternated between bump-and-grind and funerary violin: “Violate Me Right Now” by the Repulsion and “The Sombre Coquetry of Death” by Hieronymous Gratchenfleiss, “Compulsive Fucker” by the Schoolyard Weasels, then a mournful bagpipe.

Julian recognized friends and nameless faces, smiled and nodded through camouflaged pleas for employment, but took regular advantage of the gallery’s strange configuration to win long stretches of solitude, taking plastic flutes of prosecco into the booths. Stamford’s pictures were all small, and each hung in its own confined viewing booth with space enough only for one or two people, hunched close. At any one time, most of the two hundred or so guests were milling about the main gallery floor, eating and talking but with no pictures to look at, while twenty or thirty were sliding in and out of overlapping black and crimson curtains, as if penetrating a bedroom, or further. The effect was like a busy Sunday morning, sinners slipping from one confessional to another, eager to confess again and again, take on more and more penance.

The painter himself, recognizable from the catalog, was leaning over a young woman with a notebook, his six-foot-five frame swaying a little from drink and the paunch belted to him, worn almost ironically, his teeth so thoroughly whitened that they called to mind not the youth he’d been hoping to restore but the matching so-white skull to which they still clung, the moralizing whiteness of a cattle head sun-dried on a desert floor. “I mean to provoke a clarity, but a clear-sighted view of mystery. The illusion of transfiguring and terrifying honesty Think about this: a nice ass looks like twinned, fused cherries, you know? Nature’s repertoire is actually surprisingly finite.”

The young woman, from a minor newspaper, despite the gallery’s efforts to open this show on a night of competitive inactivity, provoked back: “What do you say to those who call your paintings mere provocations?”

Alec exposed to the light his barium teeth. “I’m reminded of an old joke. A little old lady from Minneapolis visits Paris, her first trip there since she was a young girl, and at the restaurant she orders her dessert ‘
a la mode.’
She’s very proud of her French. Well, the waiter comes back with her
tarte tatin
, but instead of a scoop of ice cream, there’s a lump of dog shit on it, shaped like a swan.
‘Mais qu’est-ce que c’est que ca?
‘ the lady cries. ‘I ordered it
a la mode
!’ And the waiter says,
‘Oui, madame
, but fashions change.’”

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?”