Chapter One
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.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Song Is You
by Arthur Phillips
Copyright © 2009 by Arthur Phillips.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Random House
Copyright © 2009
Arthur Phillips
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6646-9
