The Song is You (2009)

by Arthur Phillips

  In Julian’s childhood living room, his past actions and his father’s history awaited the next sounds from two black boxes on the floor, waited to receive their newest meaning, perhaps their final meaning. If Julian’s behavior was ever forgivable, not irrevocably cruel, then this moment would determine it. If music can ever restore a lost past, then this was the moment. Redemption! We do crave it. But music is different: we tolerate songs without redemption. Will the one I love be coming back to me?

  Ground control to Major Tom:

  Commencing countdown, engines on.

  —Lincoln-Mercury ad

  1

  JULIAN DONAHUE’S GENERATION were the pioneers of portable headphone music, and he began carrying with him everywhere the soundtrack to his days when he was fifteen. When he was twenty-three and new to the city, he roamed the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, claimed it as his discovery, colonized it with his hours and his Walkman. He fell in love with Manhattan’s skyline, like a first-time brothel guest falling for a seasoned professional. He mused over her reflections in the black East River at dusk, dawn, or darkest night, and each haloed light—in a tower or strung along the jeweled and sprawling spider legs of the Brooklyn Bridge’s spans—hinted at some meaning, which could be understood only when made audible by music and encoded in lyrics. Play on, Walkman, on, rewind and give me excess of it.

  Late in the evening of the day he completed his first job directing a television commercial, Julian sat in the fall air and listened to Dean Villerman on his Walkman, stared at Manhattan, and inhaled as if he’d just surfaced from a deep dive, and he had the sensation that he might never be so happy again as long as he lived. This quake of joy, inspiring and crippling, was longing, but longing for what? True love? A wife? Wealth? Music was not so specific as that. “Love” was in most of these potent songs, of course, but they—the music, the light, the season—implied more than this, because, treacherously, Julian was swelling only with longing for longing. He felt his nerves open and turn to the world like sunflowers on the beat, but this desire could not achieve release; his body strained forward, but independent of any goal, though he did not know it for many years to come, until he proved it.

  Because years later, when he had captured all that—love, wife, home, success, child—still he longed, just the same, when he listened to those same songs, now on a portable CD player, easily repeated without the moodicidal interruption of rewinding (turning spindles wheezing as batteries failed). He felt it all again. He pressed Play and longed still.

  When he was first married, Julian worried how he would feel about particular songs if his marriage should expire prematurely, in Rachel’s death or her infidelity (yes, he had imagined it before he knew it, perhaps imagined it so vividly that he caused it). And he prepared himself to lose music for Rachel, as the price of love, the ticket torn at admission: he assumed that, whether the marriage worked or not, he would never really find his way back to the music, that old songs would be sucked dry of promise or too clogged with memory.

  But no, music lasted longer than anything it inspired. After LPs, cassettes, and CDs, when matrimony was about to decay into its component elements—alimony and acrimony—the songs startled him and regained all their previous, pre-Rachel meanings, as if they had not only conjured her but then dismissed her, as if she had been entirely their illusion. He listened to the old songs again, years later on that same dark promenade, when every CD he had ever owned sat nestled in that greatest of all human inventions, the iPod, dialed up and yielding to his fingertip’s tap. The songs now offered him, in exchange for all he had lost, the sensation that there was something still to long for, still, something still approaching, and all that had gone before was merely prologue to an unimaginably profound love yet to seize him. If there was any difference now, it was only that his hunger for music had become more urgent, less a daily pleasure than a daily craving.

  Julian Donahue married in optimistic confusion, separated in pessimistic confusion, and now was wandering toward a mistrustful divorcistan, a coolly celibate land. He understood little of what had transpired between the day he said he could not live without this woman and the day when the last of her belongings (and many of his) left their home. If he forced himself to recall, he would revisit particular arguments, understand they were scaffolded by interlocking causes and built upon the unstable ruins of previous arguments. He saw that old arguments had been only partially dismantled either to mutual satisfaction or to no one’s, or to her satisfaction (perhaps feigned) and his relief, or to his satisfaction and her mounting resentment, to which he had been blind. Perhaps all of this swayed upon some swampland of preexisting incompatibility, despite mutual feelings of affection and lust all signatories probably felt back at the start. Obviously he would not downplay the role of Carlton, though it was wiser not to think about that, and he had become skilled at cutting off those fractal thoughts before they could blossom.

  The day Rachel announced her indistractible thirst for his absence, Julian was consulting his music collection, hunting for the song that would explain to him, even obliquely, the bleak atmosphere in his home, the two magnetized black boxes circling each other, attracting and repelling each other from room to room.

  “I want to play you something,” he said, kneeling in front of his CD shelves when Rachel entered behind him. “I was thinking about Carlton, and …”

  He must have been present for something. He recognized his dumb urge never to think about her again even as he failed to stop thinking about her, perhaps because of the energy required to stop those other thoughts. Photography still in his apartment claimed there had been Eiffel Tower kisses and golden beach sunsets; he hadn’t thrown those out yet. He had drawn her portrait a hundred times and shot eight-millimeter video of her and sometimes still watched it when he was home alone and in the mood to mope. When there were animal shows on cable, he would put on the CD of Summer Holiday and mute the TV, switching back and forth with the remote, hitting Video Input over and over: Rachel sleeps on her side, her hair fanned out behind her and her arms pushing in front of her, as if she were soaring through the sky; the polar bear rears back and with both fists double-punches straight down through the ice to reach the seal; Rachel bats a dream pest away from her face; the seal is consumed in eight bites; “—I cover the waterfront…”

  Lately he watched the animals more and Rachel less and sometimes felt as if all human affairs—but especially his own—could be sufficiently explained by the wily, competing coyotes and babysitting, gnu-gnawing lionesses and fascistic ants. After he was separated from Rachel and returned to the wild, he watched animal channels for hours at a time because they helped him fall asleep. Later, when he was sandbagging the new structures of mind necessary to keep pain from splashing over all his daily activity, when he could consider those years and still go to work, the animals remained. When he was able to think about his past, to consider and not just feel his pain, to calculate how thoroughly Rachel had broken and discarded him, how comprehensively they had misimagined each other, the baboons and orcas offered a certain stabilizing hope for the years ahead, and soon everything seemed explicable by animal behavior. Aggressive Teamsters on a commercial set were expressing threatened alpha status; gallery openings served to tighten group bonds for the protection of like genes. One had to be less heartbroken, since our cousin primates died from emotional trauma or recovered from it quickly. Litters in the wild of almost every species included a certain number of unfeasible offspring, starved by the mother and siblings, or just eaten by them.

  Urges that had once driven Julian—to pursue and capture shampoo models, for example—were explained and defused by animal shows. That old behavior was just what countless cheetahs did, spreading seed. More and more of life dripped down beneath him, reduced by the immutable laws and relaxed habits of the animal kingdom. Entire species went extinct; ours would, too, someday, or evolve into something unrecognizable, a higher species that would pay no more attention to our
obsessively cataloged feelings than we do to the despairs of Australopithecus, and all of this vain heartbreak that we cling to as important or tragic would one day be revealed—by TV scientists—for what it is: just behavior.

  2

  IT WAS SNOWING, and so Julian would have stayed in, but he needed toilet paper.

  He would have hit the bodega on the corner for it, but it was snowing hard, and silence was accumulating quickly, and so he just wandered instead toward Atlantic Avenue, into the silent night, forgetting his errand. Behind the snow, the air was green, as if a cinematographer had lowered a heavy grad over a camera’s lens. A locked bicycle sprouted a teetering white heart from its saddle. Thuggish street-side garbage bags dressed themselves as jolly snowmen. Two beagles, set leashless for their evening walk, called to the city like merry muezzins, plunged in and out of cresting snowbanks, closely read the road’s white expanses and highlighted areas of interest.

  Urgently recalled to his original mission, Julian stopped at the first opportunity, an unmarked wooden door where smooth lanes of snow collided into slush, gray with boot prints. He stepped through a hole in the night, into noise and heat and light. “Bathroom?”

  The muscle-clumped bonsai barman jerked his chin toward the back of the room, where peeling blue painter’s tape on the floor and an array of monitor speakers defined a trapezoidal stage, held by instruments but no humans. A woman’s scream rang out, twice and then a third time until a girl opened her phone. “I’m at the Rat!” she shouted into it. “Where are you? I know it’s snowing!” Easily the oldest in the room by a decade or two, Julian turned down the hall next to the stage. Under a single bulb and a reproduced poster for a Hendrix concert he was old enough to have attended as an infant, someone had written on the wall a long passage in Greek, and then some sharpie had added in English, “That’s not funny, Stavros. I’m gonna kick your Sparta-loving ass.”

  Across from the phone were two doors, plainly the facilities, but the first bore the fussily hand-painted words in gold D. MELANOGASTER under a picture of some sort of fly, washing/soiling its forelegs, but offering no evidence of gender. The second door boasted the same delicate script, C. SORDELLII, and an illustration of, maybe, a nest of worms, even less gender-specific, if possible. Julian opted for the worms, only to be charged by the reflection of a young woman exiting a neon-pink stall and closing the flaps of her jeans. The sight of her hands on the silver buttons filled his vision, and then she was yelling over his downcast, retreating apology, “Can’t you bloody read?”

  On the wall over the urinal was posted the Rat Calendar of upcoming acts. He didn’t know any bands anymore: 12 Angry Mental Patients, the Youthful Mouthful, the Hungarian Veterinarians, Dystotheque, Lisping Picts, Spermicidal Tendencies, Imaginary Wife, the Long Purples, Home School Class Slut, the Deranged Curates, Girl Urologist, Weepy Fag.

  He paid his toiletry debt with a drink at the end of the bar farthest from the stage. He examined the home-burned demo CDs for sale in a yellow cardboard wine box: Cait O’Dwyer, Your Very Own Blithering Idiot. He intended to leave after the beer, anticipated taking a sentimental walk with his iPod. The club kept filling. He grew older with each arrival. He had accepted that he was older than baseball players (even knuckleballers), older than astronauts, older than Playboy models, older than rock stars and Oscar-winning directors, but now he was reminded that he was older than people who went to nightclubs to hear live music, as his parents used to do. He calculated to be sure: yes, he was older than his father had been in those memories of his parents going out on the town. He wrestled with his coat, and then a band was taking the stage at the far end of the room. Julian recognized her jeans from the pink stall.

  The rules of this game had not changed in the years since Julian used to club. The band enacted the archetypal tuning ritual: the fuzz of a guitar plug tickling its metal hole, about to be clicked home; the drummer adjusting his snare, testing his work with iambic 1-2—pause—1-2‘s; the excessively hilarious in-jokes between bassist and drummer; the strained chumminess distinguishing those on one side of the tape from those on the other. But then no shadow of artificiality darkened the girl singer’s face when she stepped across the boundary, the last of the four, touched with the tip of her leather boot the set list taped to the floor by a monitor speaker prostrate before her, and cooed to her guitarist, “Play well, please, you shit.”

  She was, that first night, still local. She led a local band in a local gig at a local bar. She was of the neighborhood, despite her obvious foreignness: in her Irish accent she made a joke about a health-code-cracking restaurant up the street. Nearly half her set was covers, but the crowd knew her originals well enough to shout along with the choruses. She sang with her eyes closed, and her dark red hair fell over her face until she pushed it away with both hands. Julian stood at the back, near the door, vaguely suspicious (at least to himself) because of his innumerable, rimy years, and she sang, a coincidence,

  “You stood in the back

  You didn’t know why

  I could have reached out

  I should have reached out.”

  All these kids paid her a tribute in attention they would not have paid some debutante desperate for their love. They craved her attention; Julian could see it on the boys’ faces, and the girls’. Her star was rising, and confused resentment mingled with the crowd’s desire for her. There were grumblings of complaint. Two boys next to him could be heard briefly between songs: “She used to be so righteous. I saw her last year. She just did not care what you thought,” griped one, studying her despite himself, his artisanal pilsener, ironically named, pinched between two knuckles at groin level. Julian had cast boys like this to advertise beer like that.

  “She’s changed?” he prodded the kids.

  The boy explained before the guitar drowned his voice: “Signed.”

  Her implicit mercantile sluttishness: Julian heard it already, that first snowy night, autopsied by a flanneled adolescent Julian had helped create, all because this Irish girl singing to fifty people (happy to come out in the world-erasing snow for her) had been signed to make a CD that would likely sell 118 copies.

  Julian Donahue was a director, and he watched, like a director, to see what people liked now and why, silently edited her performance. The outside edges of her hands were pronounced and long. They gave her gestures an extra grace and expressivity. The intricately inked forearm and the white T-shirt worn with no bra so that the occasional implication of her breasts skimming the unseen surface of the cotton (probably lit like the inside of a tent on a summer day) carried the force of a whispered obscenity. She held the mike with both hands and bent her body to the left, a rock-girl standby since Janis Joplin at least. Julian knew she meant for men to imagine she was singing to them but kept her eyes closed or stared just over their heads so she could deny responsibility.

  He hadn’t been to a show like this in years, but they were still the same. The Vegas lounge singer looks each supper clubber in the eye, flirts with a front-row gentleman while the rest of the audience laughs, and no one is fooled, no one is hurt, nothing is at risk behind the sequins. The rock girl, though, is at risk, and so is the flanneled fool who wishes she’d open her eyes and look at him. These boys were going to be absorbed, soon, into larger crowds of other boys harboring the same fantasies, nauseous with desires indistinguishable from their own, and they resented it.

  It was nearly impossible for Julian to form a judgment of the actual music under these conditions—a first exposure to the songs, distorted through backfeeding amps, clattering glasses and bottles, people shouting at the barman for attention—and so he bought the demo CD because she was pretty and to try to keep up, a little, for work. Maybe she was someone he should have heard of. He’d ask Maile.

  The singer covered the mike and yelled something at her bass player, chastising him for some musical misstep. He took a step back, looking down and off to the side. “By any chance, does anyone here know how to play the b
ass?” she asked the crowd after that song. “It would be a great help to us up here.” Even her bassist laughed, then closed his eyes, nodding.

  When she was a little out of breath, her T-shirt swelled with every inhalation. Julian wasn’t immune to a beautiful young woman inflating like a bellows before an orange fire, but his reflex after attraction was to look for the biological meaning in the attraction, encoded but only temporarily mysterious. Some canny evolutionist could explain: The display of expansive lung capacity implies an ability to carry offspring to term? Expanding the chest is a sign that the female is seasonably warm? Even an actress drawing a deep breath to settle herself before a take extolling shower cleanser could have the same effect on Julian as this songstress, charging through her torn-jeans maneuvers, back-to-back with her guitarist/likely boyfriend. There had been a moment, a day or two before, when a coffee-shop counter girl suddenly jerked herself back and expanded in a prelude to an enormous yawn, and Julian had had the impulse to spread his hands over the opening accordion of her ribs, and he’d understood, a little, what promised delights those scarlet-throated frogs on TV all discerned in one another’s erotic balloonery.

  The singer’s eyes were now half-closed, hooded with sleepy availability. He had been distracted briefly by lung capacity but soon saw the obvious: singers’ breasts heave; they perspire; songbirds throw back their heads and writhe, howl, shut their eyes. Certain mystifications drift around singers, but they are merely people of a certain talent, one being the evocation of sexual desire through methods most of us cannot duplicate: crank mating calls, evolutionary teasing for the price of the cover and a two-drink minimum.