The Song is You (2009) (33 page)

“All the blue, blue men, clamoring for me, stammering at me, their swallowed cries hammering at me
.

‘Play that song again,’ they yammer at me. ‘The one that helps me see.’”

He pushed, was pushed back, faced aggression here, laughter there, and his shirt was soon wet with alcohol, and the ecstatic delirium of the event rushed into him, into the space jarred open by Stamford. He swam forward until he could see her face above him, pushed to the front as far as he could, nearly to bouncers and metal rails, and he was slammed and slugged by children. He stopped, open to her, presented himself for her inspection, that girl up onstage above him, craned his neck for her.

The tour has obviously tired Ian more than the other boys, Cait was thinking. He may not be cut out for this over the long haul. That would be a grave disappointment. So much of her success was his doing. She couldn’t imagine doing without him, but she needed rather more vim than he was displaying tonight. “Wake up, you wanker,” she shouted. That started his heart a bit, but not enough, so she pressed herself against his back while he played his solo on “Blue Men.” She put her mouth against his ear and whispered, “That’s better now, my love, that’s the way,” and the effect was undeniable; she could hear it. She played him playing the guitar. She could see on the faces down there that something was happening because of her. She could make her music through him, her breasts against his back, her breath on his neck, her fingers pulling his beltless loops. The charging force of his solo, that was hers. New Bass’s response to him, that was hers. The boiling hi-hat, the crowd, this mounting agitation and elusive whiff of the approaching mass loss of control—these all came from inside her. “Do you want me, Ian?” she whispered, and her effect spread from the skin on Ian’s neck to the tension in his hand on the guitar’s neck, through the cable to the amps, to his foot stomping on one of his pedals, and the guitar clanged, and the air changed, and the crowd surged toward her again, drawn to her by her breath blown into Ian’s ear, and she looked out over the sea of faces and bodies and did not distinguish between them, or wish to, any more than an explorer of distant lands would care to distinguish among the waves that carried him through the velvet night to the next spiced port.

But then the applause and shouts quieted, and Cait O’Dwyer drifted downward and caught Julian Donahue’s eye on a September night in Budapest, and she smiled at him with amazement and then sly satisfaction.

He felt relief push across his face and chest because this was how she wanted him to proceed, perhaps she’d always wanted it like this, while he’d cowered in the back. As soon as he stepped to the front of a crowd and admitted that he was just one of them, she smiled down upon him and accepted him. She had been waiting for this gift: he was a fan. He would go to her, backstage, in the lobby, in her room, it didn’t matter how or where; whatever they did would be unique enough. He would give her his youth, the last drops of it still to squeeze and all of it gone before. He would deed his past over to her, repurposed like a warehouse conversion: the years before he knew her would be hers now, a pre-verse refrain, his marriage redefined as the marriage that was wrong because it wasn’t with her. His child was the pain that could only be brought inside him with her help, a story for him to tell her and her to tell right back to him, explained and beautiful, and that would thin this syrupy grief that had been replacing the blood in his veins.

She was smiling at him now, in this green and black field in Hungary, and agreed that the rest would be easy. She laughed when he was jostled and splashed. She held him down there with her eyes and her smile, and she spoke into the mike, and he accepted her latest gift: “Here’s a new one. Hope you like it. What do we say about it? Let’s, uh, let’s say it’s a trepidatious love song. It’s called ‘My Kind of Boy’” Hungarians translated and mistranslated “trepidatious,” and she sang to him, her eyes wide open:

HE WALKED
, then ran to her then, short of younger breath, walked again, along crowded streets, along riverfront traffic for a mile, until their hotel moved in and out of view from behind a hill with a winged statue perched on its front like a sconce. He drank in the lobby bar and waited, watched the hazing lobby through glass doors for nearly two hours until the band entered noisily with multinational handlers and hangers-on, Cait in the center, holding hands with the drummer. An albino with flashy clothes and neon-pink shoes asked her something in German, and she said,
“Nein
, baby,” and everyone laughed too loud. She told her crowd she was done for the night. She shook off their arguments until only congratulations remained, which she gathered up like a tired lady in the garden. “Do you want to drink awhile? Scheme about the future?” Ian asked her.

“Tomorrow,” she said wearily. “Tomorrow, love.” She spun her overweighted key on two fingers and summoned an elevator. “You played so well this whole tour, Ian. I’d be nowhere without you, you know,” she said as the door began to close. “Thank you. For everything.” Ian just nodded, made a sour face at himself in the closed brass door, turned away.

Julian made himself wait two more minutes, slid out to the lobby as her band and crowd occupied the bar. He wasn’t going to wait for her to fall asleep after all; even two minutes was too much to ask. His watch’s second hand snagged in the hairs on his arm, and he thumped the Up button. But the elevator refused to come, opening only when he turned toward the stairs, then it grudgingly lifted him but only slightly, hesitating wherever possible, opening its nearly shut door because it thought it heard someone coming from down the hall. It loitered at every single floor, longing for more passengers while Julian drove his knuckles into the Close Door button until he imprinted its braille translation into his skin, making dominos of his fingers, and the elevator unhappily rose a bit with a hydraulic sigh. On her floor the door stuttered slightly open, then, as Julian began to move, at once reclosed, and he was dragged cursing back down until he was able to pry his way out, despite the elevator’s clingy efforts to embrace him. He took the stairs, hurdling.

He held his key, her key, their key, and stood at her door until his hand steadied. He was certain: he didn’t have the strength to calculate the next orbit, and he was certain: she didn’t want him to. Julian put his key in her lock and entered Cait’s room, closed Cait’s door, waited still and silent until his eyes adjusted to Cait’s lights and darks.

Her balcony windows were open; his eyes finally read that tall rectangle of gray and yellow, and the thin lace drapes swung into and out of the room like flirty ghosts. The lights on the embankment seeped into the room, but she was not on the balcony, nor in the sitting room, not in the bathroom, not in the bedroom. She had discovered yet another knight’s move, checked him again, her smile onstage signifying something he had mistranslated from the Caitish. She could see farther ahead than he, and he was tiring, blind, old. The green iron bridge that seemed to begin at her balcony had provided her a skipping freedom across the Danube.

On her bed was an open hanging bag, a coffin for a flat corpse. He touched her pillow. He took off his shoes and socks, spun his iPod until her picture was on its screen. He moved her suitcase to the floor, caught the smell of her, pulled back the covers from the bed, caught the smell of her again, stronger. He pulled off his shirt, to clear a path to his nose for her, to sweep away the aromatic litter of booze. His pants and shorts fell off him, too, and he lay between the sheets that smelled of her, her digital likeness faintly blue on the pillow.

CAIT LAY NAKED
in his bed, downstairs. She would say when he came to her, “I thought after Paris that you were done with me. I don’t have any tricks left, you know.” Or she would say when he found her there: “It’s a big night for you and singers, Julian Donahue.” She also prepared arguments for him to destroy, planned to quiz him, and he would have to answer before anything else happened: If I get laryngitis, if I have to become a veterinarian, what will we talk about, and will you still want me? or, If I become famous, will you complain if I pretend to the world that I’m available, or would you make me wear a ring and stand next to me for photographs and make me thank you on CD boxes? and If we sleep together now, will you still give me advice or will you sabotage me, will you be jealous of rehearsals and flirty chat-show hosts and me grabbing Ian’s arse onstage, will you come to award shows in a penguin suit or will you pout at home and drink? Now, quick, without mentioning music at all, tell me why you pursued me, tell me what depths you’ve seen in me, but don’t mention music. There are some things I should probably explain about myself right away, things you probably won’t like—or do we have all the time in the world?

She sat up, pulled her knees into her chest, arranged the sheets around herself, heaped her hair in a particular tried and trusted tousle. She listened for steps in the hall, but the third time that steps quieted without becoming a key in the door she lay down and began to suspect that he meant to put her off again, whether from fear or cruelty or indecision. He was saying no, still, not yet, commanding her to be patient again, postponing again, until—what? She begged him in public? Made a plea from onstage? Called him up to sing a little duet, the arrogant man? He hadn’t given up on her after Paris, so why now? He saw that she’d performed to the very end of her repertoire, and the answer was no, not good enough, he didn’t see some mythical “most interesting part” of her that wasn’t music, and the music was not enough. “My Kind of Boy” was an awful song, and she hadn’t realized it until now.

She lay there, aware of noises and the band’s nasty early-morning departure for press and radio and vacation in Vienna. She found a shirt of his in the closet, put it on like a robe along with hotel slippers. She stood on his balcony, watched the lights in the black river, the occasional cars, the row of cabdrivers smoking next to a fountain. She could do with a cigarette. Disappointed, angry, she was small and young and boring and predictable to men like him.

She stepped back inside, switched on a light, opened his laptop and suitcase and briefcase. She read his iTunes library with an expert eye, but it didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know or suspect, except perhaps a little too much of what Ian derided as “the rock of aging.” His email was all work, and his computer photo album was empty. He had the Yeats she’d sent him, the bookmark with the view of Wicklow her great-grandfather had painted, and a second bookmark at a different page—a postcard of an old couple in wartime Paris with just a question mark for its text. So someone else was asking something of him, too, someone with a New York postmark.

His briefcase had a file folder full of her: reviews, profiles, Web pages, printouts of her emails to him, the Quincampoix poem, her invitation and list of hotels, photos of her he’d taken and photos of her he’d found. It was sweet but it was also—what was the word? She imagined collecting all of this stuff about someone else, and she imagined him collecting more and more of it about her, because no matter how much he gathered, something would still be missing. Maybe the more he’d gathered, the more he’d seen she wasn’t turning out to be what he’d hoped.

And then she found what had been missing from
her
picture of
him
, the hole she had sensed, a little leather case in a side pocket, all by itself in there, a little four-by-six photo album. It smelled of new leather and had no scuffs. It was stamped on the back with the name of a leather worker and the word
FIRENZE
. They’d been in Florence ten days ago. It held only four photos, six cellophane slots still empty. The first was old, the sunny blur of the 1960s or 1970s, a man almost certainly Julian’s father next to a beautiful woman in furs, her hair in a beehive. All the rest were of a little child, first as a laughing baby flying just out of reach of grasping disembodied hands. Then he was fatter, wearing a little blue cap. Finally he was being kissed on one cheek by Julian and on the other by a woman, black hair pushed behind her ear, diamond-ringed fingers tickling the laughing baby’s double chin.

Her first instinct was to make it part of their game, to take one of the pictures of herself from his folder, cut it to fit, and slide it into his album for him to discover back home, her announcement of where she’d spent this night, if he didn’t already know. But then she stopped. The finished product would have been—what was the word? Out of tune. It was a chord progression that made no sense at all: parents, baby, older baby, older baby, Cait. Tonight, onstage, she had felt herself perched on top of all creation, and now she felt as if she was spoiling something merely by looking at it.

She dialed his apartment in New York.