The demo CDs were gone; the label had insisted Cait stop selling them, although with the knowledge that this ban would only stoke the simmering oils of her coming anointment. She was flying off to a studio with a big producer and a big budget, and when she came out again she would be transformed by the pressure and the altitude, and already, Julian judged, she was slightly more herself tonight, more unified, more suited for a stage and less for a bar. He sensed the composite effect of his offhand advice.
She wore her hair pulled loosely back from her face; her eyes shone. If he had not been searching for it, he might not have noticed the lightest touch of cosmetics. He wouldn’t have expected her restraint in this un-rock-girl art, but she wore exactly the touch he would have ordered Makeup to achieve if he’d cast her in a spot.
She sang. She she was able to produce and display emotion on demand in contoured, glistening miniature, without acting or emoting, without “putting over the song.” She sang of heartbreak, for example, like this: she recalled heartbreak, and then sang a distillation of the recollection, so that Julian (and a hundred and some other men and women) wished to help her by punishing the cause of her pain or—in some cases—wished to be the cause of that pain. And then they recalled their own heartbreaks. Cait could make them feel what she had felt and what they didn’t know they felt, too. A man who foolishly stammers with indecision when a real woman says, “It’s now or never,” will nod decisively and repeat “It’s now, it’s now” when a strange woman sings it with her eyes closed. “It’s now or never /I can’t wait for good sense.”
She did “Once I Loved”—bringing it back to life as an unnatural but darkly beautiful hybrid of bossa and punk, imperfect and struggling to survive, its seams and bolts still red—and she meant, “Once I loved, and it still hurts,” and Julian—who would have said of himself, “Once I loved, but that was decades ago, when I referred to a different person”—now felt the illusion of its recent sting. She was better tonight. Whatever she did, she was growing stronger at it.
His slightly drunken thoughts trip. Even as he looks down on the dazzled boys around him, he, like dozens of them, considers kissing Cait O’Dwyer, rescuing Cait O’Dwyer, making Cait O’Dwyer laugh, touching her bare back, cleaning up Cait O’Dwyer, scrubbing off the smell of bar and studio. Peering into a bulb-framed mirror, she tips back her head to extend for the mascara brush the curve of her top lashes, revealing the rarely seen capstone of white above her Irish-green iris, and he, watching her reflection, lifts her hair to his face while music plays, and they go out on the town, where he leans against a bar next to Cait, his thumb exploring her upper arm’s puckered vaccination moon, or stands with her under a moon illuminating Irish cliffs in high wind, or sits in windy Seine-side cafes facing the lowering sun, lighting all the riverfront trees on one side only, warming and gilding her closed eyes.
And another song ended. And a too-sweet, tobaccoish residue lingered in Julian from his unchecked fantasies, and he laughed at himself (so like his father wrapping a fur stole around Billie Holiday’s shoulders), and he laughed at Cait O’Dwyer’s sorcery, and he wondered if, in her real life, she required a steady diet of recent heartbreak in order to manufacture fresh emotion for her consumers. She must crave and court pain as a matter of economic necessity. Two months ago, she was raw and unblended; tonight she was reasonably effective; someday very soon she would be in danger of marbling over into a slick cast impression of herself. The target was only microns wide, and history’s great singers may simply have been those who happened to make a record in the brief time between learning and forgetting how to manage their power.
He saw her clearly again, with the reopened eyes of a director. She faced a dilemma: she and her emotions must ring true, must make the crowd fall literally and briefly in love with her if she were to succeed; her living depended upon just such a primal, unconscious event. But most men would see how she did it, would know it was a lie, and as soon as the artifice was clear, the music would fail. And so to make a man find her desirable even after he became conscious of her trickery, she must also imply in her performance that she would extinguish that same public display of emotion a moment later. She must hint that she always stepped off the stage and sealed herself up into a private person again, so that if you were a man in the audience imagining yourself her lover, you could imagine there was still something she was not sharing (even with you for the time being). The displayed emotion must carry within it the promise that it was only a drop of something rarer held in reserve.
In short, Julian saw all the way through her. He saw how the trick was done, saw the strings and mirrors. His brief flare of childish wonder was snuffed out, and that was probably as it should be, he thought.
“Here’s a new song,” Cait O’Dwyer said. “We’re still smoothing it out, so if it’s vile, try not to hurl things at us, please. Oh, yes, it’s called ‘Bleaker and Obliquer.’ Bass here had to look that last word up, by the way.”
Julian knew that nonsense phrase. He leaned against a wall, overwhelmed for long seconds, untangling himself from his fantasies of loving her from afar, or seeing through her. Well, she’s young, was his first thought, but it didn’t stick. He had accidentally inspired her to write a song, and it thrilled him.
She wrote a song for him. No, she wrote a song from him, extracted it from him before he’d known it was in him. The words hadn’t meant anything when he wrote them on that coaster, but she made them mean something.
He slipped out after her last encore, leaving behind him with the lead guitarist for the Lay Brothers the promised mega-tip for anonymity and a twelfth coaster, a self-portrait:
The tired old cowboy (stubble, bags under his eyes) with the J.D. on his sheriff’s badge, departing astride a broken-down old nag with a folded copy of the Times in his saddlebag, looks back and touches the brim of his sagging ten-gallon hat to Cait O’Dwyer, who, floating above the ground, is singing “Bleaker and Obliquer” to a group of cross-legged fans in gas-station shirts and truck-company hats. Around the drawing revolves the caption: “Leaving her in well-deserved limelight, he rode off into the sunset.”
And he went home—eighteen years old and eighty years old in flickering alternation—and put on her demo. Its mix placed Cait primarily near his front window, as if she were watching from the radiator and he from the floor as the penguins sailed through the Antarctic water like real birds through air. “To a young fish, there is no more horrifying, nightmarish vision of death than an approaching penguin,” said the Australian voice in the slim silence between tracks of her CD. “Without Time” came next. She’d done that tune the first snowy night and again tonight, that line sung over only a melodic bass: “Either beat me, mistreat me, or leave me in peace.” On the demo, she starts the phrase by accelerating from a whisper to a scream. By the middle of the line her voice has smoothed into the delicate vibrato of a choir girl, sweetly clear, but then she sounds as if she sobs, almost chokes, on peace. He remembered exactly that from the first night: she’d sung it with exactly that same ploy, just a trick of the uvula.
But tonight she’d done something else, though he only realized it now: tonight she laughed on that line. Her smile had started to curl before she reached “beat me,” and she sang through the laughter, holding the melody like an egg, her voice straining pleasantly, her smile broadening, her breathing heavier than in the demo’s thinner version. That had been a coaster: Laugh when others think you should cry. And that had been Elis Regina, “The Waters of March,” 1974, 3:11.
Laughter was incongruous, and the stunned bassist (Julian saw now as he reconsidered the event from his living room floor) had hated her change, for a moment, since he was left holding all the stale pathos while she pursued a fresher scent. The crowd cheered then; they recognized that Cait had found another splinter of heartbreak by laughing at her own slightly cloying, beer-battered-girl plea to her abusive lover, and then—only then, unlike the first night, unlike on the demo–Julian believed her: s
he really had once felt that, and she felt it tonight on cue. The bass player floundered, confused. She would fire him before she went much further, Julian thought.
In the silence: “The male penguin must protect the egg through a long and brutal winter. The offspring’s life is in the father’s care, and the slightest mistake is lethal to the unhatched chick.”
Carlton died two weeks after his second birthday, an ear infection caught too late, not a problem in itself but a symptom of another spiky bacterium boiling his blood then flying upstream to his brain, inflaming grief and disbelief for long months of heat and cold.
Like a planet struck by a meteor, Rachel and Julian’s marriage wobbled, then righted itself in a bizarre new orbit, spinning counter to its old rotation.
Some weeks after the thunder and betrayal of Carlton’s death had receded before a tide of gray sorrow, Julian tried music in the hope that it would restore some part of himself, some ability to desire someone or something. He hoped that music might, at least, seep into cuts, smooth over a surface, be useful, pay him back for all his years of commitment to it. And music succeeded, a little, or was the coincidental soundtrack to some recovery that would have occurred in any case: Julian did, now and again, regain that sense of pleasant unfulfillment. He replaced, for a few minutes at a time, his agony with a benign pop-music ache, admittedly adolescent but now oddly specific: he longed for Rachel, for his own wife, in a way he had never longed for her before, even when they had first met and she was not yet his.
This longing was not for her as she had been when younger, nor was it for her as she actually was, then, when they were uncomfortably and quietly together at home after work, trying to see how long they could go without mentioning him, or out with friends, putting on a pair of alternately brave faces, or just pausing and breathing in forgetfulness, briefly, and only ever one at a time. Rather, he longed for the Rachel he had discovered in the bathroom, glowing from that pink-plus-sign annunciation of his boy inside her. He longed for her to restore him, replenish him in the same way she had made him in that bathroom, had conceived and delivered Julian there.
For all of that longing, though, he, for the first time in his life, failed physically. His body would not follow his heart. He abased himself to chemical intervention, both antidepressant and antiflaccidulent, but still could not undam the blood flow required in either direction. He would have been willing to sleep with other women, as a pump-priming effort, as an act almost of loyalty (squint and you can see it), but he felt no desire for anyone.
He couldn’t say when he became certain Rachel was having affairs. He couldn’t even say with certainty that she’d begun only after Carl-ton’s death, or only when he’d proven himself sexually useless, but her flight from him and his sexless adoration of her fed each other. She took comfort from and was able to comfort in turn the whole male world except for him, and in the months unrolling toward her departure, Rachel and Julian circled and veered from each other like identically charged particles. “I want to play you something. I was thinking about Carlton and thought of this song and it reminded me of when you and I met, and …”
Tuesday would be Carlton’s half-birthday He would have been three and a half. Julian started Cait’s demo again, set it to shuffle, lay on the living room floor.
In the course of his days, Julian still dutifully looked at all the parts displayed for him, the gratis glimpses from a city of sexual saleswomen: the thin cardigan worn over reactive skin; the groove along the outside of a seated and high-skirted thigh, toned and tanned; the coming spring’s fashion for high shirts and low waists, a landscape of abdomen and crevice. But nothing ever happened to him anymore, aged and wounded past surprise. “Look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me, please.”
Until now, well after midnight, in a darkened room, when Cait O’Dwyer’s voice, or just the sound of her breath, caressed him, and he lay on his floor primally swollen like a howling teenager, for the first time in more than a year.
13
RACHEL WAS HAVING the same dreams as always. The spacious-house dream, for example, was always a blessing. It usually prophesied a positive change in her life. In its simplest form, Rachel would rise from her bed and walk through whatever home she happened to occupy at the time—a dorm, a studio, her apartment with Julian—and be pleasantly surprised to find that there were many, many more rooms than she had realized. Each new floor, wing, or tower fulfilled some unnamed need. The tour of the new space ended as she lay back into bed—the bed she was actually in—and she would fall asleep in her dream.
But now her dreams were narrated, not lived, and she woke more tired than she’d gone to bed. Carlton would stand and speak to her, as before a stage set. She would have no particular feeling for him. He would say, “Okay, the spacious-house dream. Let’s see, you’re walking around here, and over there, behind that door”—he would point to a locked door—”is a bunch of rooms.” Tonight Carlton, bored, stepped up and said, “The spacious-house dream.” And that was it. “The can’t-wake-up dream, then the Julian-with-the-models dream, then the mice-circling-the-dying-vulture dream.” He recited most of her repertoire. “The kindly-mullahs-offering-brownies dream.” He shook his head condescendingly at her disappointment, as Julian used to do when he thought she was being ridiculous. It hurt much more to see Carlton do it. “The endless-love dream,” he said with a hint of Julian’s sneer, but on her baby’s face with that tone in his mouth of all mouths, it left her desolate when she awoke to gray light.
She had tried everything, and still she was sinking, buoyant only for that brief period when she nursed Aidan. Before and since, she gulped antidepressants without shame (though her father had raised her to believe in self and choice, still clucked at society’s collapse into “psychopharmacoddling”). The pills never helped much, nor did grief therapy groups or individual therapy with an unmarried, childless woman ten years younger, who furrowed her brow and nodded gravely whenever Rachel talked about the bubbling pain in her gut.
Her hopes for Julian were very limited. She had not one romantic illusion, she told herself with a quiet, mature pride her father would have approved of. She had burned through a fair sampling of manhood trying to find someone, not to make her “happy”—that wasn’t the point—but to cauterize her relentlessly dripping wounds. Julian—for all his flaws, his crimes and omissions—was not only hers but to a degree was her, as if only with a transfusion of him could her own system function. He looked like Carlton, of course, and Carlton was alive to the extent that she saw him in Julian’s eyes. He was alive, too, if the family he’d been part of survived. Better a reduced family that mourns together, rather than each of them wandering alone, abandoning all the spaces where Carlton had existed, denying Carlton the places that had been his.
Beyond that, Julian was her history, her young wifehood, her motherhood, her as a victim and her as a slut. Her life’s joy was from now on sharply limited, but if there was joy to be had, Julian was the only man left who might remind her what it looked like. Julian would provide the rest, too, the vast majority of life that wasn’t even close to joy.
“At the funeral,” she told her nodding shrink, “I loved Julian so much. I watched him drowning, and I knew we were together. But after, really soon after, he was thinking it might pass, you know?”
“I do.”
“He was still in pain, obvious, but I could see he thought he might someday get over it. And that felt like he wanted to shake me off so he could get over it. And then, another couple months, he wasn’t really any better, he just got better at pretending, left me alone while he acted like he was on his way. And then—”
“Mm-hm.”
“—the worst was when he started to act like he’d passed through something, and now he could help me. Like, having finished, he was now ready to be my strong support. Like he had a plan.”
“I see.”
She remembered her sorrow and anger disguised as boredom, at the end, just before she lef
t. She remembered watching him, blurry and faceless through the misted, dimpled toilet glass of the shower door, sawing his buttocks apart with a new brick of green soap, and she remembered feeling at that instant that she was allowed to do anything she wanted with anyone on earth so she wouldn’t have to feel one more second of that. So she’d been wrong.
“How were you wrong?”
“I want him. I want him to be a strong support. I can’t walk around like this. He’d show me how to fake it better, how to pretend to forget now and then.”
“You want to go back?” asked the therapist in Rachel’s head, whom she hadn’t gone to see in weeks.
“No. Just to go on. I’m done.”
She lay in bed, Carlton’s dream and the therapist’s voice fading. She reached for the phone and dialed Aidan’s cell from memory.
14
THE END OF A SHOOT. The cubical studio was empty but for him and Maile, cross-legged on the floor, Bach Cello Suites on the speakers, and shiny orange Chinese food in white, tin-handled boxes on cherry-red Chinese-zodiac place mats, greasy from the spots on the floor where the daily beauty’s red hair had been combed out thirty-eight times, conditioned strands plopping dollops of the Product onto the black wood, sounds partially masked by the Rolling Stones played loud over the speakers to give the client and agency people the pleasant sensation of a day not only out of the office but shot free of corporate life entirely (thus encouraging future business with Julian Donahue).
“Can I say, today you seemed like a real director?” Maile said.
Julian laughed. “I am a real director.”
“I know, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that, I meant a film director. No offense.”
“None taken. ‘Real,’ unlike my entire existence and your salary.”
The Song is You (2009) Page 9