The Song is You (2009) (4 page)

Two weeks later, he was on set for a hair conditioner, watching the product’s brand manager rise from his canvas chair and march with dainty urgency across the colored floor. “I really, I must.” His accent, his unshakable formality, his resemblance to a dapper mole, and his fevered love for his product were already mimicked by laughing art guys from the agency. “You cannot, Monsieur Donahue, pardon my insistence, you cannot light the Product like that.” He went down on one knee beside the dollops of hair conditioner on the glass pedestal. “You cast it in this excess of blue, and you blanch it of its essential identifying hues.” He let his other knee touch the ground and cupped his hands around the conditioner to demonstrate how its color changed in shadow.

Julian, Maile (his production assistant for the last four months), and Vlada (the director of photography) consulted, stifling laughter, avoiding eye contact. The afternoon crept away as Maile, on her knees before the glass pedestal, sprayed food coloring and Vlada handed gel after gel up ladders to grips while Mr. Rousselet sat next to Julian and stared at the video feed, and the two professional beauties in bathrobes who would soon lather their manes on camera sat in the far back under a
NO SMOKING
sign and ignited each new slender cigarette off the orange tail of the last.

Julian plugged his iPod into the studio’s sound system and felt a physical relief as the day’s silliness was replaced with a sense of purpose. The soundtrack effect, as he had learned decades before: music could inject the quotidian with significance, lyricism, uniqueness. The third song, a female voice:
“‘I’d sooner die,’ she said, she said, and she almost believed it, her little drama.”
The music swept through the cubical black room: the embarrassing idea of believing too much in one’s own little drama penetrated everything, here quickly like solar wind, there slowly but relentlessly as a line of ants. It affected how Mr. Rousselet leaned in to peer at the video assist, then squatted before the mauve mammarial domes of the Product and spritzed color himself. The music changed how the two models moved, surreptitiously touching each other’s fingertips in their shadowed cloud, how Vlada looked sadly through his viewfinder, his Serbian manner making everything around him tragic and unimportant at once.

Julian hadn’t loaded or downloaded any new pop music in months and could not at first understand the song’s unfamiliarity. No, yes, he had loaded a CD, the demo from that Irish girl at the Rat, loaded it two weeks ago and never listened since. It caught him by surprise, that afternoon in the studio and then later, the gloaming settling over the Manhattan skyline like colored mist over hair conditioner, as he walked with time to kill before dinner with a film-school friend in town for the weekend, a man who had risen fast in Hollywood to second-unit director but then stopped, happy to do well-paid crowd scenes and cutaways indefinitely, when in school he’d always insisted—nearly shouted—that a true auteur could only work outside the studios and would write, shoot, direct, and edit everything himself.

The demo CD had a little hiss, and the levels were too low here and there, and the bass was too hot on three tracks, buzzing his ears: the gritty authenticity of the rough-mix demo that had secured the deal that would produce a new CD with cleaner versions of these same songs. The guitar even screwed up its solo introduction on the very first track. The music stopped, and a male voice said, “Whoops.” There was male and female laughter, and they started the song again; they left the mistake there, a daring way to open a disc meant to wow dim, deaf record executives, and when the musician played it right the next time, Julian felt a humming in his neck and in his kidneys.

The next day, shooting was delayed almost immediately; Maile presented him with a model, and Julian studied her face slowly, a face he’d hired from a photo, before shaking his head and her hand: “Thank you, but not today. Maile, sign her papers with my apologies.” This was somewhat for the client’s marketing managers visiting the set—corporate sleepwalkers for whom a day amidst cameras and lights watching a director’s offhand dismissal of high-rent beauties, damn the expense, was one of the job’s titillating perks, a whiff of diva glamour.

But the last-minute firing of models was becoming increasingly common, and Julian was lately frustrating modeling agencies with his sharpening standards and his refusal to explain them. Early in his career, he’d realized that the final test before engaging a model had to be the search for premonitions of aging. Not symptoms: premonitions. Julian could—often at a glance—see how and where most women’s faces were only temporary versions of their older selves. He could spot the shame even in some of the modelinas of nineteen or twenty; he could see their old-womanhood lurking, while the ideal faces (and that Irish singer’s, come to think of it) gave no hint, showed no vulnerability. Others would hire those same women, obviously; he had no exclusive claim on them. But he would never book the esteemed ubermodel whose dark secret he had glimpsed. Despite advances in CGI, even the best retouching guys couldn’t reliably erase the truth, and so Julian maintained his standard, his trade secret, and all of his ads—from the prosaic floor cleaner sold by a magnificently beautiful “housewife” identifiable by her rolled-sleeve oxford to the exalted mascara shot close enough to show pores—produced in the client the same paradoxical sensations of danger and safety, lust and exaltation. He was, for several years running, the single most rehired director in the city, though it was a very rare marketing person who could have explained why.

The problem, however, had arisen in the last eight to ten months: there were fewer women whose future elderliness (even elderly beauty) was imperceptible. He was hiring slightly younger than he used to, but the bottom limit loomed as large as the top. He couldn’t explain this to frustrated model-house reps, because he didn’t want to disclose his tricks, but the truth was plain: more and more women looked merely temporarily beautiful. He knew this was likely a result of Carlton and Rachel; certain events were going to permanently affect one’s vision. Still, he was saddened to see the effect, the growing endangerment of one species of beauty.

He pointed to six possible replacements in the binders, gave Maile time to call to check availability, authorized her to pay rush penalties, and left the set with an air of purpose, but only to ride the F train and listen to his iPod.

And now Julian sits on the F train in a nearly empty car. At the far end, wired to a slender iPod full of hip-hop, a young black man dressed for corporate life bobs and mutters to himself like a Talmudic scholar. Julian is slightly affected by the dismissed model’s face and disappointment. She smelled of breath mints not quite eradicating the evidence of a recent noisy purge, and now from the banking train’s orange plastic seat he examines the reasonably but not impossibly pretty girl across from him. Hers is a kind of prettiness he appreciates all the more, considering his daily routine shaping and, frame by frame, preserving ludicrous beauty, and in his headphones a love song plays, a different girl singing, an Irish girl, and she sings of the vast golden fields of possibility that stretch out before him, there for him to wander through, the sun will never finish setting. It is physically impossible—with the right song—for a certain sort of man not to feel (before he remembers how to think) that the girl across the subway aisle hears and feels something, too, that she will be his co-star in this romance-glazed landscape. She’s looking up now, a smile approaches, but no, she’s listening to her own music on her own iPod, maybe a dirge about the fate of a doomed sea voyage, and Julian closes his eyes and the lyrics to the Cait O’Dwyer song begin to lodge in his memory.

He climbed back to the surface of Manhattan at Twenty-third Street, right where he started. Something snowy was falling out of a clear blue sky. He returned to the studio, where Maile had conjured one of his requested girls. He watched the makeup artist add moisture to this Italian model’s lips. Each sweep of the brush added to the girl’s ripe succulence. A precise amount of visible humidity was necessary to evoke sex without bringing to mind dull biology and oral hygiene. “Wait.” He stopped Makeup when she would have moved on to the Italian girl’s eyes. “More to the lips. Again. More. Again. Once again. Done—thank you.”

BACK IN 2006
, Ian Richfield and Cait O’Dwyer were put in touch by a mutual friend who knew they had both recently fled crap bands. They arranged by email to meet at Ian’s apartment. He offered her a beer, they exchanged war stories, tested for shared acquaintances, and then she said, “Well, let’s give it a go,” not very hopefully.

And up until that moment, Ian often recalled, anything was still possible. He imagined subsequently that when she said, “Well, let’s give it a go,” he said nothing, simply grabbed her, any part of her he could reach and hold on to, took her on the floor, ran his hands over and under her oversized sweater, seized the back of her head and pushed her face into his, fell to his knees, pressed his cheek against her crotch.

No. He had laughed and said, “Wow, listen to you. All right, chief, let’s
do
, let’s give it a go.” And partially because it was his hands’ first reflex whenever he picked up his guitar to practice alone and partially to see if the cute Irish girl knew anything about music, he started the Cure’s intro of Hendrix’s “Foxey Lady.” She nodded like a surgeon and told him to take it up a third. He clipped his capo, and she was right there, no errors, no lost words, even quoted the ad-lib from the record—
“This is a good intro”
—but something more: she played off of him, filled in the spaces he left for her, offered him ideas. She sat on the speckled stepladder he had stolen from one of his house-painting jobs, but then stood up halfway through the song and turned up both her volume and his.
“I won’t do you no harm. You’ve got to be all mine, all mine.”
He played this song—which he had studied from an old CD of his uncle’s the very day his parents had bought him an electric guitar—with a ferocity he’d always assumed was only granted to a musician in front of an attentive crowd. He took twice the solo space, keeping the rhythm moving without bass or drums and without interrupting the flow of his ideas. As the fuzz of his last chord was still drifting down to the floor of his loft, he could
still
have changed things, and in recent self-abusive musings, he swung his guitar off his shoulder, tipped over his brown folding metal chair, attached his mouth to her ear, and his hands corrugated her breasts before the amp was done buzzing.

No. He didn’t. There was this moment. This one moment had come and waited for him, and when he stood still, it had gone on its way forever. That very first song ended, and they both knew: the sound had been a multiple of them both. And they knew. They sat in a long silence as the sound they had made traveled down the street, out to sea, up to distant stars. Only the low hum of his amp persisted, and he was afraid (as she looked at him and he considered leaping at her) that the pickup from his guitar would pick up his heartbeat and play it for her. He pressed his tongue against his upper lip and rolled his black pick with its clean whorled thumbprint over and under his knuckles. She reached for the cigarettes she no longer had in her bag, having quit a week earlier, and he walked to the fridge for two more beers. They chose.

The choice was mutual but they had opposite reasons: he was a coward, she was ruthless. In his defense, he hadn’t known the choice was going to be inscribed eternally as grave marble law. That was
her
will, enforced from that moment on with flinchless discipline. If he’d known, he told himself, he would have chosen her over the music, over anything. He would have.

“How about ‘London Calling’?” she suggested. He played everything she asked. Their vast vocabularies and listening histories—their long educations for this moment—overlapped almost without overhang. He called more and more obscure favorites (Cramps, Creeps, Crito’s Apology, Crooked Bastards, Crud), and she almost never pleaded ignorance, rarely even hesitated, just requested different keys until he started to compensate for her range automatically. He had never known anyone to keep up with him at calling tunes, let alone force an admission that he was weak in the canonical Irish bands. She couldn’t really play guitar but she could sing him through his part of a Pogues song, “Na-na naa rhythm and then up to the five and back down and then break for two bars of unintelligible slurring.”

He especially loved how she handled the songs originally sung by men, how she either sang the lyric straight (singer wants girl) and then gleefully, evilly put it over as a blood-red lipstick-lesbian tune, or reversed the pronouns (singer wants boy) and then she could vary it, do it as neurotic girl or raging girl or seductive girl or funny girl. The best, though, was when she kept a man’s lyric the same but then somehow turned its meaning around, kept it in his words but put the whole thing in quotation marks, as if she were singing what a man had once sung to her and now she was only recalling it. Elvis Costello’s “Alison,” a jealous ex-lover’s unhinged ballad, became in her mouth Alison’s defense and grudging admission of shared guilt:
“I heard you let that little friend of mine / take off your party dress”
became as much about the girl’s remorse as the man’s jealousy.

“This is something I’ve been fooling around with, if anything comes to mind,” he said and played a chord pattern, and in minutes she found some words and a melody that he desperately wished he’d written and then knew he never could have, not with infinite time or infinite musical training or infinite therapy. He suggested “Infinite Monkeys” as a title. She wisely disagreed.

Two years had puffed away since that first afternoon in Williams-burg. They wrote all the band’s songs together. He contributed almost equally to all band decisions
(almost—
it was her increasingly magnetic name that drew all shiny good fortune to them). And he had adjusted his personality around the pointlessness of his feelings for her, molded himself around their absence. As if he were constantly carrying a heavy box down steep stairs, his posture had come to reflect his predicament; he curved, slouched, withdrew even when standing. He ground his teeth when he thought about it, stood naked in front of the mirror in the bathroom, looked at the pale slump and scrawn and dangle of the case he’d been issued. There was nothing to be done. A gym-designed coat of mannerist muscles would not add anything important; what he lacked was unacquirable.