2

THE LYRICS TO “Key’s Under the Mat” had come to Cait in pieces. The phrase about the mermaid swooning in the fountain was first, and though swooning had recently swum back up to the skimmable surface of her vocabulary courtesy of the swooning ghouls of the coasters, she wasn’t thinking of her sleepy Cupid, not consciously, not yet. The lyric arrived in pieces over several days, words and images and rhymes, and only very close to the end did she realize what she’d produced: an invitation to someone to break into her apartment (though it wasn’t yet addressed to anyone in particular). It was a lunatic document, and she nearly threw it away.

Then she changed her mind, decided simply to remove the more identifying details, but then she stopped again and called herself a coward. If this was what she’d been given, then she refused to allow fear to censor her, to spoil a gift like this. The hidden source that gave her these gifts was daring her to put something real on the line. She would sing it, as soon as Ian crafted the right setting for it.

And she would address it. The last two words that she wrote of the lyric were “Cartoon Boy.” The rhythm was nice, the hard c felt good at the start of a line, produced a sort of sneer and snarl to it, the sound of a challenge. Those last two words came to her late at night, walking home from the telethon, and it was obvious. He deserved a song like that. He’d certainly amused her enough to earn it, and he might even notice it. That’s the element that most appealed: the idea of him noticing in detail what she had made in detail.

He never responded, though, a week after she posted the rough take, two weeks, three: not an email, not a coaster or a report that he’d turned up at a gig, though she’d lately taken to asking bartenders to flag her if a guy answering Mick’s description of Coaster Man turned up, in the back all by himself. She had lost him somewhere, revealed something somehow repellent to him, after he’d taken those lovely photos. Pity He filled a niche, to say the least. She missed his attention, more than she liked to admit, missed his criticism and his ear and his eyes on her, sometimes sang imagining he was watching her, unseen.

3

“WHO WAS SHE TALKING ABOUT in that Times suck-up? The one who’s a remarkable adviser?”

“I thought it was you,” said New Bass, Cait having executed, like a grumpy Tudor, his predecessor, posthumously redubbed First Bass.

“It’s the guy with those cartoons,” Drums murmured, his speech very slow, and no one, as was very often the case when he was high, totally understood what he was talking about. “Ask Mick. He showed me these coasters.” He paused, then said very methodically, “Say to him, to Mick, I mean, say, ‘Drums told me to tell you to tell me about the cartoons you told Drums about that one time, because I want to know, and Drums couldn’t provide me with that information, and so you can see my predicament, with Drums … not being … a totally reliable source of… ‘” Drums fell back as if his death sentence had just been commuted.

Ian nodded, as if paying no attention, a man already forgetting what he had asked only in polite passing. But he stopped in, alone, at the Rat that same night, a Wednesday, and again on Thursday, late, but Mick wasn’t working the bar either night. Cait then had two nights for them in Jersey (during which he’d first noticed the phrase “Cartoon Boy” in the lyric for “Key” and became truly pissed off), and the Rat didn’t cater to Sunday drinkers, so he couldn’t try again until Monday, and then it was only to discover that, the Saturday before, when Ian was playing that frat party at Rutgers, Mick had quit the Rat to show more commitment to the Lay Brothers. Ian couldn’t conceivably pass off as accidental a visit to Mick’s apartment, and so his interest in “the guy with those cartoons” faded by necessity, until two weeks later when Cait came over to work.

She dropped her droopy spangled gypsy bag on the floor and pulled a cardboard tube from it, tossed it to him, walked to his fridge, said, “For the poster.”

The shaken tube surrendered a mock-up of the tour ad. It was mostly the headliner’s, but the bottom fifth was theirs. Cait had the lips to choose a photo only of herself, rather than one of the band shots they’d had taken, at some joint expense, last winter. Fine, Ian thought, the nature of the world and their future clear enough for those with brains, and those shots had First Bass in them anyhow. “Who took it? It’s not bad of you,” to say the least.

“Oh, long story,” she said. “But I want your approval for it before I tell their management to print it.”

“Thanks.” He regretted that. She had worded it just so: “I want your approval” was the compliment of an employer, not the necessity of a partner, and “Thanks” was the flattered chirp of an employee. It was a hell of a photo: her eyes were closed, she was outside, in front of her own building, stretching not as if she were posing, like a supposed candid, but like she walked around all the time with a very funny secret. “Why are you wearing a Lay Brothers shirt?”

“I love those monks.”

“Hm. Yeah, I’d go to this girl’s show. Who took it?”

“This, ah, this …” She leaned farther into the fridge, as if tracking a regal, fleet-footed beer, and Ian understood the tremendous sensation just then tickling his spine and face: he’d never before seen her embarrassed. He only had her voice and ass to judge from, but he was sure, and a spectacular detonation flared in one corner of his universe. She finally emerged, wily beer captured. “Where have you stashed the bottle opener, you criminal?”

“You have to give a photo credit on the poster.”

Her smile as she stood there—beer bottle in one hand, opener in the other—said that she knew everything he was thinking, and he amused her, but now for the good of everyone he should stop. “I suppose we do. We are very fortunate that you read law.”

“Who took the photo?” He tried to make it sound funny, but it was just so plainly one repetition too many. He would have given a great deal to go back and not ask again.

She knew that, too. That mock-stern voice of hers would close the topic, and he could never broach it again without triggering a full-blown hurriCait. Sure enough: “Do you feel like working today? Or shall we sit around and bleat at each other like rabid sheep?”

“Whatever. Pull up a chair, diva.” Fair weather restored, he played a pattern he’d thought of just before falling asleep the night before, that he’d crossed the room to record with his eyes still shut. She said, very sincerely, “Mmm. I like that.” Those words, delivered in that tone of voice, composed one of his greatest joys, one that would still excite him long after her departure. It was, he imagined, like waking in new sunlight to the waking face of your beloved.

4

THEY BOOKED six summer-session colleges in the Northeast as the top of a three-band slate. The money bumped up nicely, and every night they’d sit in a back room or outside on an upstairs deck overlooking a parking lot while the Trouser Dilemma and then the Lay Brothers played for growing crowds of increasingly drunk college kids, many of whom knew especially who Cait was. They moved a lot of merchandise.

Before going on, Ian would read or make calls or strum an unplugged guitar. New Bass and Drums would wander off to smoke this or that. But Cait would just grow more and more energetic as her time approached. She might try to nap, or have something to eat, but neither sleep nor food had any effect on the change that came over her as they waited. By the time they took the stage, Cait would have been sitting out of sight for a couple of hours, and her attention would be distilled to a highly concentrated serum that animated her limbs and face just beyond normal. Ian could watch its level climb behind her eyes.

And she glowed for them, these college drunks—Ian had to admit it. Maybe, in a long hot summer, it was just this fleeting precise difference in age between them and her, between nineteen and twenty-two: she was older, but barely; she knew things but had not yet forgotten things; she had already started what they were nervous to begin.

At the tour’s end, in Storrs, Connecticut, they finished the last tune, waved good night, and marched upstairs to a cramped office to decide if there would be an encore—the silliest of rock rituals made sillier still by the complete horror of their backstage: no one wanted to be up there; applause would hardly be necessary to draw anyone out of it. Still, they huddled up in the little loft, waiting for Cait to judge the volume and sincerity of the stomping and shouts below. When she deemed the request sufficiently credible, submissive, and ecstatic, they descended, and the applause broke from rhythmic request into free, relieved thanks.

Ian knelt to adjust a pedal, and Mick from the Lay Brothers called over Ian’s bent back to Cait, “We’ve got a Coaster Man visual at the end of the bar, lassie,” but Cait didn’t hear him. She had turned away as Mick started to speak, and as he didn’t want to look like someone standing at the side of a stage trying to win a hot singer’s attention, he just acted as if she had heard him and turned to go outside. Ian managed not to gawk at the bar. “Mick, do me a favor?” he called after him, his eyes on the settings of his pedals. He pulled his phone from his jeans pocket and with his back to Cait tossed it to Mick. “Get me some discreet video of Coaster Man, would you? Long story.”

“Ian?” Cait’s voice behind him. “Hate to interrupt, but can I trouble you to play your guitar for a bit?”

They did a two-song encore, the Stones’ “Monkey Man”—one or two little boys almost sure to go briefly clinically insane (and Ian himself still vulnerable to a certain parallel set of electric-blue chills up the outsides of his arms) when on the crescendo of the out vamp she sang again and again, “I’m a monkey” but replaced Jagger’s original choking-chimpanzee death rattle with a moan unique to her, each moan more intensely suggestive than the moan four bars earlier—and then “Bleaker and Obliquer,” which had lately been slapping the cakes with surprising power, all credit to Ian’s own crystal hooks for it, because to this day he still had no idea what the hell her lyric was supposed to be about. Even after he’d looked up the word in an online dictionary.

He was, later, sort of proud of the superagent coolness with which he’d played Cait’s game. He hadn’t faked it; he really did forget to watch Mick’s path in the crowd, forget to look for the troublesome Cartoon Man, right up until the applause for “Bleaker” was shattering the room, and Cait was pretending not to hear the offers for drinks, marriage, and sex rising from the up-front boys up front. The stereo went on, the lights changed, and while Ian and the others packed their gear, she went out the back door to wait for them in the van (usually to sleep or eat or, as Ian once discovered to his confusion and her rage, cry). Only then did Ian remember his man, and he couldn’t prevent himself from looking everywhere for his rival and for his spy, but Mick didn’t turn up with the phone, and a visit to the bar—to see if the University of Connecticut at Storrs would be providing him further entertainment—proved fruitless, no Mick, no Cartoon Man, no appealing offers of company.

They drove back to the city, each band in their own van, Mick and the other Lay Brothers apparently having driven off with Ian’s phone while Cait was still moaning “Monkey Man.” He couldn’t borrow a phone to call Mick in front of Cait, and so, back in Williamsburg well after four in the morning, he tried Mick’s cell and his own but reached voice-mail boxes. At the unfortunate hour of eight the next morning, Mick called to say that the bartender the night before was a jackass, because Mick had left the phone with him to give to Ian when Mick had been summoned on a moment’s notice to an impromptu sorority party. Yes, he’d surreptitiously filmed Cartoon Guy: “Relax, dude. And what was that all about? Cait dispatches you to do her surveillance? Does no part of you rebel at your pussyhood?” But the phone was still in Storrs, and bleary Mick was already on a skull-crushingly loud train back to the city.

Ian debated taking a train himself back north, but, worried he’d arrive to a closed bar or a bartender on his night off, he repeatedly called instead, starting at six that night, until, twenty-four hours later, he spoke to the jackass and received the happy news that the phone (and the jackass’s apologies) had already been winging their way down to Brooklyn via overnight express since the day before. Ian should already have received it.

“Where’d you get my address?”

“It was on the contracts.”

Except that that was Cait’s address. Several hours earlier in her living room, she had opened the box addressed to the Cait O’Dwyer Band, tossed Lars the cardboard to process for nutritional fiber, and read the two Post-its, one on top of the other: “Sorry, dude. My bad. Vince” and “Here’s your video, chief. Tell Cait Coaster Man’s 95 years old, but she’s welcome. Also! Check out the girls at the end. If I go missing, have the police break into their dorm. Mick.” She used her own charger to resuscitate the gasping phone and watched two minutes of strange footage, then transferred it to her computer. On that bigger screen, digitally abstract and lit as if by prison-lighting designers, it made for weirdly compelling television:

To the distant, distorted accompaniment of her “Monkey Man,” there were the alternating images of Mick’s face and then the floor, then the swirling, tornado-coverage chaos of the phone being swung around the room: blurred ceiling lights, kabuki faces, scarecrow Cait far away on a spot-yellowed stage. The phone stopped moving, looking out across the room to the wooden bar and a man sitting at the very end, though he was difficult to see. He was listening to Cait, nodding to the music. He applauded at the end of “Monkey Man.” When Cait could be heard saying “Bleaker,” he stood up, counted some bills onto the bar, and pressed himself against the far back wall, his arms crossed, his head down, his collar up, and then a female voice said, “Oh, my God, you were so awesome up there,” and the camera skittered around to the right, and two slightly glazed college girls gazed toward where off-camera Mick said, “I was. And I was hoping you’d notice, and a good thing because—” and the video stopped, frozen on the girls, midblink.

Cait had long ago asked Mick to point out her coaster artist, to no avail, but now Mick was telling her what, exactly, by sending this to some other “chief”? Coaster Man, sleepycupid, Cartoon Boy, J.D., JD7201965@yahoo.com: he now had a face, which was nice, and a certain style and an age, which was amazing, setting him even farther apart from everyone else in her suffocating world. She replayed the video. “Bleaker and Obliquer,” she said off-camera, and her friend stood and counted money onto the bar and pressed himself against the wall. Cait watched again, paused at its best portrait of him, reeled back time, frame by frame. He was disappointed, maybe. A frame later it wasn’t disappointment but the slightest laughter. She tried to remember if she’d done something disappointing or foolish. But he had a face now, her sleepycupid, a very nice face, a man of the world’s face, a certain confident power in it and in his posture.

She called Ian and was only mildly surprised to see the mysterious visiting cell phone suffer a little epileptic fit on her table. She smiled. “Oh you little bastard.”

“Bleaker and Obliquer,” said the voice on Julian’s computer, rising from the video emailed to JD7201965@yahoo.com. He watched himself lean against a wall in Connecticut. The resolution didn’t reveal the exhilaration on his face when she sang their song. The footage began about five minutes after Cait’s fired bassist had finished talking to Julian at the end of the bar, a marathon harangue that had stupefied and annoyed Julian as he awaited the encore: “A lot of people tell me, you know, that she should pay me for the whole thing.” The young man extended his fingers in front of him, studied the backs of his hands. “They’re all, like, ‘She needs strife and is using you for strife,’ and I’m like, ‘I just want to make music, you know.’ But I get a lot of people and they’re all, ‘She used you. She washed her face in your sink, and now you’re watermarked. You’re Pete Bested, dude. It’s like voodoo, and you’re walking dead. You have to reclaim yourself somehow, or you’ll walk forever like this: among the living but not one of them. Nobody will touch you.’ And I’m like, ‘That’s just talk, and stupid,’ but, you know, I see something there. I do. I do feel like she broke something that didn’t belong to her, and you can’t do that. Nobody calls her on anything. She just sings and looks pretty and thinks she can do whatever she wants. She can’t, can she?”

The boy had left before the encore, and Julian watched him through the window as he threw up on the street and stumbled off. “Thank you very much, you nice people. So, all right, we’ll do a couple more. Here’s a good one for the not so nice among you,” and the new bassist started the two-note intro to “Monkey Man.” He replayed it, tried to imagine what she was thinking when she watched this video, wondered who she’d sent to surveil him. Maybe she was saying now was the time to meet, or maybe she was saying he dressed old or should dye his hair or look how obvious you’ve become for an invisible muse or give me some space.

“I’m a monkey!” Ian watched his recovered phone as soon as she was out of view. “No letter, no note, just your phone in a box,” she’d said, and thank God. “What little harlot swiped it off you? Or did you use it as payment in kind?” And now this then was Cartoon Guy. Ian had seen him before at gigs. He was hard not to notice because he was old, at least forty, maybe fifty, maybe more. He was also, and not merely because of his age, vaguely oily: the cartoons, the uncredited photo on the poster, the bouquets of flowers and cases of wine and whispered phone calls she took to far corners or outside, the baked goods Ian ate without ever telling her they’d been delivered for her, who knew what else. Well, if Chase and Wendy had to go, then Cartoon Man had to go. There was one good shot of the guy in profile, dropping money on the bar in a nasty, possessive manner. He was so old that the idea of him with Cait was reassuringly unlikely or, less reassuring: if it was likely, it didn’t say much for Ian’s chances, at least for another few decades until his hair thinned and his sex drive grew distinguished and unreliable.

This time Ian had an idea that was worthy of her. He landed in his laughable second cousin’s voice mail, bounced by the main switchboard. He left a message, invoked family connections, had a favor to ask, not an emergency, but he’d feel better once he knew it was in his cousin’s hands, gimme a call on this number when you get the chance. Ian didn’t need to muster much false feeling, since his cousin couldn’t feel any more warmth about their relations than he.

But he was wrong: Stan wouldn’t settle things over the phone, insisted they dine at a little Italian joint chosen for its cinematic-criminal lore, and Ian had to put up with two courses before he could force the topic off shared family history, for which Stan had a bottomless appetite. All of Ian’s recollections of his older cousin were clouded by family scorn: Ian’s father thought Stan’s father a clown of operatic dimension and likely corrupt. Ian’s mother puffed out air and grew nonverbal and ticcy at the mention of Stan’s mother, unable to find words for the depravity of some event from years before Ian’s birth. But now at dinner Stan spoke of Ian’s parents with unfeigned affection, describing family events in a mist of nostalgia.

Stan had shed some of his more mockery-magnetic youthful affectations—the self-promotional, bulging sock holster, the harsher old-school Brooklyn accent that always reminded Ian of Bugs Bunny, the use of “old-school” as high praise. But he had developed a more thoroughly in-the-bone coppishness, and Ian still judged him—maybe unfairly—a caricature.

He wore a black suit, with a faint pattern in an infinitesimally glossier black, visible only at certain angles, when a sudden click of houndstooth momentarily distracted suspects and witnesses from what they were saying, and Stan could observe the unguarded face, the micro-expressions he’d learned to read from a CD-ROM training tool. The tie and the pocket triangle were of the same scarlet silk, a dandified touch for a working man who had constructed himself from television detectives and his father’s rougher police colleagues and from an undertaker in the neighborhood whom he had observed, when he was a boy accompanying his mourning parents on three occasions, reading his customers and selling them up the ladder of casket costs, tonguing their guilt and vanity to gild the mahogany paneling. His phone, card case, watch—silver wafers all—glinted high-polish monograms. He was not, for all this, a joke to other cops, or at least not a nasty joke, and he didn’t mind the occasional remark about his style as long as it diverted some attention from his height, an insult he never fully forgave, though he stood only slightly below average, a margin unremarkable to most.

He in turn convicted his young cousin of being a child in a man’s body. He dressed and spoke like a child, he made children’s music, he led a childish life, and, as with this story he was reporting over knockout balsamic veal, he stumbled through the world, dumbfounded by grown-up problems. Some perv was squirming a little too close to the kid’s boss, and rather than doing what Stan would have done—handled it himself, face-to-face, explaining the realities to the creep—Ian went running to the most grown-up grown-up he could think of. Stan helped people all day long, every day, who couldn’t cope with the world, and he rarely felt any scorn for them, but there was something about seeing men in his family come crying. “She’ll fire me if she finds out it came from me. You can’t tell her.” Even this: Ian begged for help but was scared of the girl he was protecting.

“Job insecurity? I thought—who was it?—Aunt Kelly said you were the greatest guitar player since Bruce Springsteen?” And here we go, thought Ian: Stan surely knew how little Ian and Kelly liked each other, and so was making a point of this crapliment. This was not going how Ian had imagined. Stan was the same overcompensating bastard who used to bully Ian at family events, calling him a longhaired queer, even in front of adults. The fun was already gone from this, and Ian had no one to blame but himself. Cait’s fault.

“We’re all worried. She’s playing brave, but she’s worried, too. She won’t admit it, but she is, and she should be.” Ian stopped to think, careful to say nothing that could land himself in any real trouble. He considered his cousin’s crimes and Cait’s ruthlessness, hiding her latest flame in the lyrics of a song she made Ian write. “You may not think much of what she and I do, but—”

“Why would you say I don’t think much of—”

“—but after a while you get a good eye for the dangerous ones.”

“Wow: a hunch.”

“I called you because you’re family.” Ian recalled a wedding party in a restaurant when he was about eleven, so his cousin must have been twenty or twenty-five. Stan called the police when he smelled pot in a bathroom stall, and a groomsman was nearly arrested but for the intervention of Stan’s father, a cop, who had to lecture his son—after talking off the uniformed guys with some cake and wine—about perspective, context, and us versus them. And now Ian regretted the whole prank: to send Stan off to harass Cartoon Guy would have been supremely fantastic, but to lure the imbecile into Cait’s life bristled as unnecessarily mean, even to her, and since he couldn’t pull off one without the other, he decided at this late hour to call it off, apologize for wasting Stan’s time, say it had been nice to catch up. “Listen, you know, the more I talk about this with you, maybe I’ve over—”

“Hold on.” Stan raised an eyebrow at the screen of his phone. “I need to take this.”

Ian took the opportunity to check his own messages, and they both made calls as the sauce on their plates congealed like drying, darkening blood.

“Did you pull the jacket?” Stan asked his phone.

“Ian, it’s me,” voice-mailed Cait said in Ian’s ear, as if she’d just caught him in his dumb gag, beat him again. “I want… I need … I’m sorry to be so inarticulate. I had meant to say this to your face, but somehow I’m too … God, I feel such a fool. I’ll just say it, throw caution to the wind, right? Okay, I… I… I, oh, Jaysus, Cait, just say it. Fine, here goes: Ian, I think that you and I should move rehearsal to three o’clock. Can you call the boys and make it happen? Thanks, love.”

“Anything usable or did the EMTs muck it up? Great.” He closed his phone. “Sorry about that, cousin—homicide still takes priority over scared musicians, but with time, that’ll change. Oh, don’t be sore, I’m just playing. You were getting to the point.”

Fine: she deserves a little dose of Stan for a while. “She’s being stalked.”

“Do you know his name?”

“No.”

“What’s he actually done? A little window peeping? Heavy breathing on the phone? Rat in the mail?”

“Yeah, yeah, all that. And more. A ton more.”

“I’ll have someone come by and talk to her. Rest everyone easy.”

“I’d rather it was you is the thing. I trust you to keep me out of it. And Cait’ll trust you—she needs someone with your confidence.” Ian looked down for something to cover his mouth. He chugged Chianti.

“I’m going to need a name or at least a description. Maybe you can point him out to me at one of your little concerts, if I can bear it.”

“I have a video of him. I’ll email it to you.”

“I’m a monkey!” screamed a voice off-camera, rotten music, while a Caucasian male in a black leather jacket, light brown hair, average height, medium build, approximately forty-five years of age, kept his head low and out of the light, as if accustomed to ducking attention, but he eventually slipped up, as they usually do, and Stan froze the video, a bar light hitting the face of a man far too old to be in a room like that. Stan captured the image, emailed it as a JPEG to Records.

5

NEW BASS WAS ILL AGAIN, or still ill, and Cait asked him if he’d seriously considered the rigors of a professional musician’s existence or if she should hire a tubercular old woman instead. New Bass—a midsize refrigerator with hands like coffeepots and a fleecy set of mutton chops—laughed and apologized while projectile sweating like an adult-comic-book pervert, then stiffly withdrew to the club’s bathroom, from which the explosive horror of his thundering distress was in no way lessened by Cait pushing Ian in after him with a live microphone. New Bass emerged, some minutes later, the color of clay, but not at all embarrassed by the loop Ian now played over the club’s sound system of his recent percussive solo, while the barman arranged his shelves for the evening ahead. “Ready for soundcheck, are we, my delicate flower?” Cait asked.

“Miss O’Dwyer?” The voice of movie previews and safety bulletins resonated from the dark end of the room. “I’m sorry to interrupt your—what is this we’re listening to?” A man in a black suit and black silk tie pointed to the ceiling speakers. “This is your music?”

“Oh, yes, quite.” She held her instant distaste for him and his attitude at a simmer. “Ambient indigestion is my thing.”

He nodded officiously and dealt her a business card from a silver case, saying, “I’m looking into a possible criminal situation, and I understand you may be able to be of some assistance to me in that.” Ian and New Bass crouched facing each other and tuned to an electric box between them, willing its guide lights into place. “Is there somewhere private you and I could speak for a few minutes?” The occasional charge in being the arriving protector was always heightened when the victim was this attractive.

Cait laughed outright at this unlikely approach, her distrust of policemen exacerbated by this one’s clumsy air of official mystery. “Yes, we must protect these young fellows from adult matters.” Ian fiddled with his pedals and plugs, Drums tapped his sticks on his thigh, and New Bass groaned and wiped his forehead with the front of his Weepy Fag T-shirt.

“So you’re a rock star, huh? Madonna and all that?” he asked as they sat at a table near the door.

“Madonna? I see. And you are, let me speculate, not a fan of all this dreadful noise. I suppose you still put up with Tony Bennett, in a pinch, Inspector, but music history ended with Sinatra’s death.”

He smiled. “Wow. That’s very good. You could be in my line of work. I’m always amazed by people who have a natural knack for reading faces.”

“People often say I’m very inspectory.”

“No, really. A lot of guys I know have to work very hard to do what you just did. That’s just a remarkable gift you have, miss. And you’re absolutely dead-on: I am a Sinatra man. So what is your music like?”

“Like? It’s like something you wouldn’t like, I think.”

“And that annoys you?”

“No, Inspector.”

“That means something else in this country. I’m just a detective. You can call me Detective, or Stan.”

He was to burning up their soundcheck time with his fake friendliness, refused to arrive at his dreary business, likely a matter of Drums and drugs that would screw up schedules and recording and everything else for weeks to come. “Very well, Detective. What brings you here today? Oooh—I’ve never had the chance to say that before.”

“Oh, I doubt that. No troubles with the constabulary back in the old country, Miss O’Dwyer? No surprises for me if I call the Wicklow garda?”

“Very well done. Excellent footwork. Yes, I’m wanted for a serial killing.”

“You really don’t like Sinatra? Honestly? Isn’t he the—don’t people like you know he’s the source of all pop singing?”

“People like me? That’s an exceedingly narrow category, Inspector. I won’t speak for myself, but I will say that people like me think he wasn’t any good as a jazz singer—he couldn’t swing. And he wasn’t any good as a pop singer—he couldn’t arouse. He was a court minstrel for thugs. He could scarcely carry a tune. A visual artist, not a singer.”

“The provocative Miss O’Dwyer.”

“And my provocations are the reason you’ve come to interrogate me? Arrest me?”

“Arrest you? I owe you an apology. I wasn’t clear. Let me begin again.” The detective opened his black-leather briefcase and withdrew a blue folder with a white NYPD seal. He turned toward her a stilled-video image of a man, in profile, putting money on a bar in Connecticut, and she could hear rising from the photo the sound of her own voice singing “I’m a monkey.”

“Have you seen this man?” the detective asked. He watched her face as she examined the picture, her eye-movement vectors, the involuntary micro-muscular reactions at the zygomas, the forehead, the corners of the eyes and lips, the dilation of her pupils when she looked up and said, “I have.” She seemed confused: “Well, sure. That actor, the one in the spy film.” He couldn’t tell if she was lying or joking or serious, and he began to cover his confusion with a laugh, then stopped himself and watched her more closely. “Is he in some sort of trouble?” she asked, a smile wiping away the traces of what he’d hoped to read. “Do the police need my help saving him? Is it Irish trouble?”

She was openly laughing at him, and that hid the truth just as well. He couldn’t tell if she recognized the picture or not, and the first window for seeing her clearly had clearly shut. “I’m glad I could bring a little amusement to your day, miss.”

“Oh, don’t be a big girl’s pillow, Inspector. Tell all, please.”

“If you’ve truly never seen that man, then that’s outstanding—”

“Outstanding.” What nonsense game was this? She heard Ian’s guitar onstage behind her.

“—since it means I’m here in plenty of time, or you’re in no danger at all.” He saw her making fun of him, but instead of her abuse beading up and blowing right off him, he was feeling uncomfortably aware of himself, his failures of projection. “But I have reason to think you may have seen him. I’m sorry, but I do. And I have to wonder why you’d lie about it.” He smiled with these last words.

The interview—the general path of which he’d known before he left the precinct that afternoon—now meandered into places he couldn’t understand. She didn’t know the dirtbag’s face? Then his homosexual cousin was lying or goofing on police time, but lying to a cop would have given Ian sunburn. So she did know the dirtbag’s face but was denying it? She was so frightened or brave or hated the police or thought she could handle the whole thing herself without publicity?

“What we have here is a predator, a dirtbag who gets his kicks scaring famous women. He’s done this before, plenty, so we’re trying to warn you.”

“Well, I’m safe then, as I’m not terribly famous.”

He considered her, nodding slowly. “Are you very brave, Miss O’Dwyer? Can take care of yourself just fine? Very admirable.”

“Not at all, Inspector. But let’s say I’m easily terrified. Still, why do you think he’s any threat to me? I’ve never seen him. What brought you to me, saying I should worry about this man, of whom you have only one blurry photo? And, if this dirtbag is as dangerous as all that, Inspector, why don’t you have a better photo of him? One of those nice front-and-profile portrait sets with the numbers at the bottom?”

She was laughing at his fool’s errand, laughing at him lying to protect his dim cousin’s folly of a job, laughing at him by refusing to turn off that recording of flatulence that still rattled over their heads, but Ian’s reedy anonymity stood in his way, so he just kept lying, each time more weakly than the last. “We’ve had complaints, from female singers, and so now we watch him pretty closely.”

“What singers?”

“Look, miss, you have me at a disadvantage. I was given the file and your name. I understand that a standard protective surveillance list had led us to watch him, and we’ve seen him watching you—that’s where this surveillance photo is from. We have an undercover team called Team Cyclops that is tasked with exactly this nature of problem. They shot this footage, and that’s when I was given the file, and so, just to advise you as to how the NYPD views matters of this nature, we’re not passive, not absolute beginners. Learned some hard lessons. Old days, used to wait around saying, ‘Oh, until he acts, there’s no problem.’ But that’s—if you’ll allow me, I’ll tell you some dark truths about how these things go.” His verbiage embarrassed him, fit him like a boy in his father’s letter sweater, and still he couldn’t do the simplest, most basic thing in the world: shut up.

“Mmmm,” she moaned. “Does it all end in blood? And you, standing over the body, despite all your warnings, ignored, she ignored you, and the brass—that is the term, isn’t it?—the brass ignored you, and now, tsk tsk tsk, there it all is, quite as bloody as you foresaw, and it makes you sick, but you look anyhow because you have to. Am I close?”

He couldn’t stop laughing. “Those little boys over there must think you’re just the niftiest girl they’ve ever met. Okay fair enough. Miss O’Dwyer, you have my card. If you feel the need to talk to a grown-up about this, you call me. I truly hope you don’t need to make that call.”

“Don’t be offended, please, Inspector. I can be a little off-putting, I know. I really apologize. Tell me, truly: How does the NYPD view such matters?”

He drew a breath to illustrate limited patience. “Do you know this man?”

“I don’t.”

“Never noticed him around?”

“Not once.”

He still couldn’t tell, and now he was laughing just to cover his annoyance at her opacity.

“Did he kill anyone?” she asked.

“Not that we know of, no. But he’s been questioned about some threatening behavior, trespassing, harassment, deviancy, issues of that nature.”

“But if he didn’t commit homicide, why are you here in Brooklyn, with that very impressive business card saying you are a detective in a homicide unit in a precinct in Manhattan?”

“We are occasionally cross-disciplinary, miss,” he said as if to a bright and praiseworthy child. “Don’t kid yourself. You find yourself in a bad situation.”

“Fair enough. I appreciate your coming to warn me. I’ll keep my eyes peeled. Can I only ask in return that you deploy Team Cyclops to send me a list of the other singers he’s pursued? I may know some, and I would very much like to know in what company I find myself, whether I should feel a little pride or no.” She stood and offered her hand, which he took. She squeezed his and covered it with her other hand and asked, “What’s the hooligan’s name?”

He was caught looking down at her hands—pale, young, soft—folded over his like tulip petals, the last two fingers of her left hand reaching all the way to his linked cuff, nestling between shirt and jacket, and when he looked up, all he could find to say was, “I can’t release that to you. If he’s no bother to you, then we’re not in the business of blackening names.”

She smiled. They were the same height. “I wonder, Inspector,” she said, “if we’ve had a totally candid chat?”

She enjoyed soundcheck enormously after his departure. “What are you smirking about?” Ian asked with hot nonchalance, worried the dolt had already spoiled the joke and hung him out for her to hose down with mockery.

“I just love soundcheck. I love it love it love it.” She flared and glowed, the warm yellow center of a solar system planeted by these concentric eccentrics. Ian was showing at least enough spine to have hired that actor, had gone to the expense of the police business cards. That was a tribute, and rather nice. She would play along, let him feel he’d fooled her, had thrown a wrench, though his feeble semi-competence at wrench tossing fell somewhere between amusing and appalling. The actor, too, had entertained, the comic bluster and posing, the efforts at improvisation that became more spastic as she blew him into increasingly well-painted corners. And the cause of all this fun: her musing cartoonist, her distinguished adviser, and the best photographer she’d ever had, who, unlike every other suitor rubbing himself against her as soon as possible, had been trying not to let her see his handsome face or learn his name and who, she would discover that very same night, had responded to “Key’s Under the Mat,” hadn’t grown tired of her at all but had found his way into her apartment and left the most subtle clues for her. After the actor-policeman and sound-check and the gig that night, she went home to let Lars out (and mop up his oceanic errors), and, in a robe and slippers, she checked to see if Glentoran had bought a feasible striker yet for next season. And only then did she see Remarkable Fellow waiting for her in her Web bookmarks, and then all at once his face (delivered with Mick’s blessing to Ian) and his voice (from the telethon) and his charm (from the emails) and his eye (from the photos) and his wit and wisdom (from the coasters) now had a nice name and a funny job, and she drank some wine and watched clips of his work on his website, shampoo and makeup and tampons, draped in all that useless beauty.

6

RACHEL HAD PICKED HIM UP, though she let him think he’d picked her up, all while she was deflecting two other men’s advances, one crude, one boyish. She used to have that effect.

Late, a Saturday night, coming home buoyant (maybe even a little near the manic end of her personality, she could admit now), she had left her friends after a party, come downstairs to the Second Avenue F-train station, been overwhelmed by the beauty of a violinist’s music (yes, definitely toward the manic end). She stood and listened and after a little while noticed the man on the platform bench watching her listen. What had first attracted her to Julian? His attraction to her, certainly, and the amusement on his face, his resemblance to—none of that mattered now. She pretended not to see him watching, reabsorbed herself in the puppyish bow pulling the busker’s arm up and down. At his feet, a few coins and crumpled bills blemished the fluffy maroon interior of his violin case. Rachel, her back to the tracks and the few people who ignored the live music in favor of headphones, nodded to the piece—Vivaldi—and gently laid a five-dollar bill in his case, its largest denomination by 400 percent. She was aware of the man on the bench who stayed while she listened long enough and well enough that she (and he) let a train come and leave behind her without ever turning her head to look at it. The violinist opened his eyes now and again, each time obviously more pleased to find the same woman enjoying his music, and he played with increased commitment for her. She liked that, of course, and felt her attractions flowing out of her in all directions (definitely manic) and knew that the man on the bench would come to her without her having to do a thing.

The three of them enjoyed their private stories and their private platform until it slowly filled again. Another guy, walking briskly to the far end, was snared like a landing jet by an aircraft carrier’s strap, by the sight of Rachel wrapped in the music. He turned from her to the violinist and back again, shifted his briefcase from hand to hand. “Is he good?” he asked her.

“Just listen,” Rachel said, and looked forward to seeing how her benched admirer would clear this hurdle.

“Okay. Are you good?” the new guy asked the violinist. “Your fan won’t tell me.”

The musician opened his eyes, kept playing, smiled modestly, wished the guy would leave him his waking dream, the highlight of a year’s subway work.

“And I’m supposed to give him money for this?” he asked Rachel.

She just shook her head in annoyance, and the guy pulled his wallet from his suit jacket. “So how about, ah, ten bucks? Is that fair?” Rachel still wouldn’t look at him, and the violinist fiddled with one eye open. “I guess ten bucks is too little.” He balled up the bill and tossed it onto the subway track, down amidst the mysterious puddles and electrical risks. Rats condensed out of the air to examine the money for edibility. “Twenty bucks, then?” he said, taking it from his wallet. The violinist opened both eyes in time to see what would have been his largest payment ever sailing down into the valley of the tracks. “I have a fifty here, sweetie. Just tell me if you think he’s worth fifty. You’ll be doing him a favor, and all you have to do is say please.” Rachel sucked her top lip, couldn’t believe Bench Boy wasn’t leaping up to prove himself. The musician’s eyes closed as the fifty floated down and away. “Just one word. You’ll get him paid if you just tell me what he’s worth. Look at this: that Ben Franklin was one handsome man.”

The PA system cleared its throat. The station chief’s voice accompanied the violin with a rich, actorly basso, black but with traces of England: “Esteemed patrons, a Brooklyn-bound F train is now departing Broadway-Lafayette and is expected to alight here, on your platform, for your transportational delectation in, let us speculate, three minutes. The establishment acknowledges your extraordinary patience and gentillesse.”

“Not even a look in my direction to give your boy a C-note? You wouldn’t be a dyke? That would be such a waste of that nice mouth.” The bill glided back and forth down to a puddle.

And with that, Rachel dropped and vaulted down to the tracks, brown liquid splashing her boots. She picked up the hundred and the fifty. The twenty draped over the third rail, and while she looked for the balled-up ten, the tunnel began to change color, as if a heat lamp were quickly warming it. Julian stood up but didn’t know what to do, and Rachel started to climb back onto the platform only when the noise of the coming train drowned out the music and the rats had all vanished. She was standing again when the first car passed, a long ten seconds after she’d pulled her trailing leg clear. She laid $160 in the violinist’s case. “You’re great,” she said to the boy.

His hands and instrument hung at his side, and he tried to stand straighter. “Holy crap, that was unbelievable.”

“It really was, wasn’t it?” She looked back at the banker boarding the train. She stayed behind again and finally, finally, the man from the bench said (squashing the violinist’s briefly ascending hopes), “That was extraordinary. Please, please, let me buy you a drink or an egg roll or a Frisbee.”

Later, over falafel, she admitted, “I jumped down there because I knew you were watching. I felt like it was your idea and you wanted to see if I’d actually do it. I liked how you looked as I slipped down there. You jumped up to save me, too. Are you naturally the heroic type?”

“Are you making fun of me? You were the hero.”

“Oh, no.” She smiled. “I was just playing to get a rise out of you.”

She used to have all that in her, she remembered, arranging things to her own ends, making everyone else think they were doing it themselves. She used to have a manic end of her personality, for that matter.

7

AN ALT WEEKLY REVIEWED a Cait concert in L.A. Google cache-marked the pertinent passages in blue, and the printed pages thickened slightly the growing Cait file on Julian’s desk as coarse hail chattered at his office window.

Julian read enough of these—Cait’s cyber tracks across the country, trekking from WROK to KROQ—that he could usually tell within a few lines if the reviewer was male or female and, in either case, whether the writer was attracted to Cait the woman as much as Cait the singer. This writer in L.A. was initials only, BMR, but Julian guessed a Barb or Becky, one not usually drawn to women and a little surprised herself.

The dissenting voices annoyed him out of all proportion, the comments on this paper’s website from the active keyboard of doubt-fulguest, for example: “Lies and lies with little lies sprinkled on top. ‘The hype!’? You are the hype! Don’t encourage the Cait O’Dwyer machine. It’s all a lie, built just for you. She sounds like a dozen other mediocre singers. Listen to you! ‘She’s pretty!’ You like her T-shirt and her dancing and she makes you feel like a monkey. STOP!”

Julian was about to comment in her defense, but three days after doubtfulguest had struck, it was unlikely the villain would return to read Julian’s scolding, and then his email chimed, not Yahoo! but his business account, mail from kiosk11@kopykween.com, subject: Are You Up There?

He looked out his office window, down eight stories, across the street, into the front window of Kopy Kween.

5:02 PM Hav eyou ever done any of this before with any other singer? I should not like that at all.

5:04 No. El hav never done this before. Hav eyou?

5:06 Funny—so I can’t type. But people have noticed you. Not me, of course, but people. I would hate to be one of many, you know. So tell me now and I may forgive still. A long history of briefly favored singers? Love affairs from a distance with Emmylou Harris? Caught in Alanis Morissette’s hedges?

5:09 If you were one of many, I would never have drawn a single coaster. And, may I ask, what it is about college performances that makes you less confident? You overcompensate. They’re young, but they aren’t stupid. They don’t need the garish coloring. You sang down to them. Trust the good children to understand without the help, and don’t worry about the others. They’ll follow the smart ones, or go outside and vomit. Either way, you’re clean.

5:12 Oh, Jesus. I forgot you were there for those. And yes, you’re right. I knew it after. I’ve been bothered by something, and I couldn’t put my finger on it, and you saw it. You may be too clever for my own good. I’m embarrassed. If that’s how you spell that. I can’t find the spell-check button.

5:15 Don’t be emb’d. They loved you anyhow. Is it any wonder? Maybe it’s better they saw only a clouded version of you. The real thing would have blinded them, left them dazed and hopeless.

5:16 Are you?

5:18 At times, yes.

5:19 Would you like to meet me for a drink?

And he sat facing that blinking cursor, lifting his hands toward the keyboard, but then they passed it to rub his face and smooth back his hair. He walked to the window, tried to see her, but the angle and hail conspired. She may have known best, or she was only impatient. He started to type, backspaced frantically before it just sent itself. And if it was too soon—the spent fuel, the abandoned muse—he wasn’t ready to lose all this. Would he lose her by saying no or lose her by having a drink too soon? Maybe it was a test.

5:32 I think so.

5:32 Your message could not be delivered. This is a temporary address generated by PhreeMail for the use of customers of Kopy Kween and is not currently active.

She had wandered off while he dithered. He soothed his embarrassment with the hope that she mistook his dithering for strength. He decided to wait a day and then call her. He’d take credit for strength but dither no more.

A day later, though, as he called and hung up on her answering machine again and again, she was back in L.A., and then Cait O’Dwyer’s first single from her upcoming album, Servicing All the Blue Men, was available for download from her site and her label’s, as well as the Big 4 download sites for ninety-six hours at no charge before being repriced. During and after that free period, supported by the previous weeks of early-morning radio-station interviews and acoustic performances across the country and a video that ran in maddening rotation on both the main video channels, and chart-charming gigs on all four of the influencing late-night talk shows (while Julian was strong or dithering), “Without Time”—rerecorded, remixed, remastered—became, briefly, the number three song in the country, an accomplishment for which Julian’s wise counsel and coy musery could claim no credit. “You are about to discover Cait O’Dwyer,” prophesied the synchronized full-page ad in eight large-market newspapers, “and you will never forget the day you met.” “Have you heard?” politely inquired the oblong subway posters, twenty in a row, with no other ads to interrupt when Julian raised his eyes on the F. “with opening act cait o’dwyer, courtesy of pulpy lemonhead records,” discreetly murmured the small print at the bottom of the larger posters outside, announcing the coming U.S. and European tour of a more firmly established band. Her photo was in the corner: stretching her arms over her head so that her T-shirt (for the Lay Brothers) rose slightly above the tropic of her navel. The photo was credited to R. Fellow. The posters covered a full block of the plywood barriers shielding a construction site near Julian’s office, the bottom half of the stenciled words POST NO BILLS just legible below the peeling paper. Even though they’d been pasted on by crack urban-marketing commandos within the last twenty-four hours, they already looked quaintly out-of-date, like posters advertising Billie Holiday, Edith Piaf, Caruso, an evening of jigs celebrating General Washington’s inauguration. Two were already super-adhered by Aidan’s face.

Maile was in already. “Hey, listen to this,” she said with an early fan’s obvious proprietary pride, and she played “Without Time” on her computer, claiming ownership of Cait.

“That’s catchy,” Julian said. “Who is it?”

“You know what just kills me?” Maile asked. “She’s younger than me. Can you bear it? And she’s already that. I’m old. You’re a bad influence.”

Julian had two versions of the song now: the demo, where she and the previous bassist played up the anguish, and this finished product, which, with a much more fluid bassist, captured the ironic, heart-bruising laughter he’d witnessed her discover that night at the Rat. The recorded laughter was perhaps a hair less authentic than her first discovery of it onstage, but one would need the memory of that perfomance to know it, Elis Regina’s example discreetly consulted for inspiration and technique, take after take.

The publicly available part of her was now indiscriminately scattered to the fickle world, and he was undeniably sad. He felt her floating off to a country where he could only trail feebly after her, yelping to remind her that he was special. He picked up the phone and put it down.

And she agreed. Another anonymous email: “You were right. Not time yet, is it? Sorry, sorry. You’re right—don’t come near me, please! Don’t give up on me, please. And, lo! It’s a different world today, no? In case you are feeling the need to keep tabs on me from your cool distance …” and a blue-bottomed link to a site where celebrity spot-tings around New York were texted in by subscribers and then redistributed instantaneously to the site’s membership, addresses and maps dispatched to cell-phone screens for efficient ogling. A sidebar on the home page listed hourly updated Newly Exploding Novas, and number four on that list: Cait O’Dwyer, Singer. Julian subscribed, fed credit-card digits to his screen, imaginary money to track his imaginary love. He was allowed ten Stars for the price of his basic membership but selected only her. The site informed him that he was one of 4,886 who followed her movements, a number up by 400 since the day before. On second thought, he added Alec Stamford, hoping they would never be reported geo-chrono-synchronously He was one of 32 watching Stamford move through space, a figure holding steady, but his phone began informing him of the painter’s position almost immediately: ASTRONOMICAL UPDATE FROM THE OBSERVATORY.com. STAR SPOTTED, 7:19 pm: ALEC STAMFORD BUYING FOOD FROM 67th ST. ‘WICH-WAY TEXT *88 FOR MAP.

If she was joking, it was a good joke. She didn’t take fame any more seriously than this. But, beyond that, she was acknowledging and asking him to acknowledge her expanding fame’s potential to blur his appeal. And maybe hers, too. If he meant to continue, he should know that others would be watching her as well, keening for her attentions. Continue to be different from all of them, she was politely requesting, and threatening. Prove yourself.

(She had, in fact, struggled over the text of that email, his silent rejection of her drink offer leaving her unsure of how—even if—to proceed.)

“Do you want lunch with Alec Stamford next week?” Maile called through his open door, an invitation negotiated through assistants, like courtiers arranging a royal wedding. The gallery slave who called on Stamford’s behalf said the agenda was a business proposal, Maile reported, maybe two weeks work. Maile had never heard of Reflex but spoke up in favor of a music video as a step forward for Julian. “I’m going to see you recognized as a director if it kills me,” she said. But Julian accepted the lunch because he wanted to see someone else who knew her, and to study someone who had lived through what was awaiting her.

8

BY THE MORNING of his lunch date, he’d been notified at least daily of the painter’s whereabouts. The reports were not slowed by the arrival that morning of the long-awaited Times “profile” on Stamford, Milton Chi eager from the first word to hone the razor edge of his glinting critical teeth:

They met at a new Haitian-Thai fusion, which the gallery assistant had suggested, and which Maile had accepted only to tease her boss. Julian arrived first, was seated, and a minute later his contemplation of the menu was interrupted by his quaking phone. ASTRONOMICAL UPDATE FROM THE OBSERVATORY.com. STAR SPOTTED, 12:38 pm: ALEC STAMFORD, HAI-THAI RESTAURANT, 28th STREET, TEXT *88 FOR MAP. Julian looked around. Alec was nowhere to be seen, but also nobody was putting their phone away, fresh from reporting a pop star from two decades earlier. No fans of an art provocateur had their noses pressed against the restaurant’s front window, waiting to see him lunch under the mural of Papa Doc Duvalier and Yul Brynner.

Stamford came out of the bathroom, loudly apologizing for the shoddy service at the restaurant as he walked past waiters and diners, then, sitting down, immediately brought up the Times assault as a “victory.” He then fluttered vague professional possibilities at Julian. There was interest at an entertainment channel in a documentary about Stamford’s career, “the transition from music to canvas and all that, the consistency in the ideas even as the medium has shifted.” Despite or because of Milton Chi’s hard work, the gallery wanted a salesy film about the process of the painting, Stamford staring at the blank canvas, the brush suddenly flying, snippets of dialogue about art and influence. “Your name has come up in all the discussions, it goes without saying,” he said anyhow.

None of this was impossible, though it was unlikely. It was uncomfortably likely, however, that Alec Stamford had gone into the bathroom and reported his own presence at the restaurant to a fan-tracking website. And now—as he spoke of his art career and the renewed and simmering appreciation of his old music, as he read the menu through his pince-nez, as he sent wine back with “Oh, now really, this won’t do, will it?” after insisting the poet-waiter taste it and agree that it was swill—the gap between the man and the music was painful to Julian, because those old Reflex songs had meant something to him and did so still. (After booking the lunch meeting, Maile downloaded “Sugar Girl” and kept playing it on her computer into the evening, and Julian had to resist the urge to put his hands on her shoulders.) But now the songs eroded in the presence of the singer. Julian imagined this self-promoter doing those old tunes—the great ones that struck a balance between cynicism and hopefulness, that cast hopefulness as the underdog that everyone wanted to win but probably wouldn’t—and it was grotesque. Julian feared the music would be lost entirely if Stamford proved himself more of an ass at this meal. And he was Cait’s friend? Cait was now entering the same tunnel of self-love that produced this man?

Great music, his father used to lecture him, was often made by wretched people. The wise fan carefully avoided learning anything about the creators of any music that mattered, shut his eyes to biographies of martinet jazz drummers or anti-Semitic composers, and surely avoided lunching with tediously still-living pop stars of his overly impressionable romantic youth. What would his father have said about falling in love with a girl on her way up the charts?

“There were some big names at the gallery the other night, friends of mine. Did you recognize anyone? Yeah, the usual downtown suspects.” Alec dropped names, and Julian let them land.

“I recognized that singer there,” he said after the parade. “Cait O’Dwyer? Is that her name?” But Stamford turned away and snapped at a man at a neighboring table, “Do you mind?” though Julian had missed whatever offense had been committed.

“What?” said the accused.

“I’m sitting here,” the painter argued.

“Do I mind that you’re sitting there?”

“Christ,” Stamford spat, turning his back on his newborn nemesis. “I get migraines, these just awful, awful migraines from people like that, you know? There are times you’re treated badly because you’ve got a recognizable face.”

“Tell me what you’re working on now,” Julian prompted.

In fact, Cait was almost certainly quite the same, in some way, as this patent-leather-spatted fool tipping the second bottle until its curling tongue of wine drooped. They were all, unfortunately, just people, these sorcerors and sorceresses. His treasured feeling that Cait understood him—was in some way singing to him—was not only an illusion but a commonplace one, like a belief in lucky numbers, and not only that but a manufactured and manipulated illusion, hacked together by a performer with ambitions (deathless ones, like Stamford’s), with handlers and market advisers and career plans.

The only real ones, the pure ones, were the dead ones. A recording made by a dead singer is different not only because of the lesser (and thus more emotionally trustworthy) technology but because of the purity that remains on the tape after the merely human is discarded. Sing movingly of heartbreak once, on tape, and that’s art; do it night after night in front of paying customers, sing of adolescent emotions when you are in your fifties, sixties, seventies, ironically laugh at your pain over and over again, and that’s artifice, no more “important” than what Julian did for money, perhaps even less. And Cait wanted some fuel from him? To prove himself, not give up, inspire her? To feed her insatiable appetite for fresh emotion and experience? Like this man across a plate of plantain and lemongrass describing how some incident of heartache and conflict—likely utterly avoidable, pointless, and childish—was transmuted nevertheless into a “work.”

“There’s a, uh, uh, bon mot in there somewhere, if I can find it,” Stamford said, almost apologetically, a little deflated now since the beginning of the meal. “You, uh, your,” he began, but after two bottles and an hour of talking about himself, the transition was rough. That he spoke incessantly about Alec Stamford was no surprise, but that he so aggressively defended his right to do so finished off Julian’s hope for work, for the meal, for musicians.

Julian attempted, “I did a shoot last year for a diamond company a lot of lasery, intense but very well-aimed light, an intimate look, fine detail, maybe something we could apply to—” He mistakenly still thought his credentials were up for discussion.

“I have never been able to tolerate diamonds or pearls, and I’ll tell you why,” Stamford replied, a broad smile on his face implying a fine and relevant anecdote to come. Instead, his monologue roamed from diamonds to computers to cars to driving the Cote d’Azur to lavender fields in Provence to lavender as a perfume to lavender as a color on his palette for a new series of paintings to his friendship with Mick Jagger to a dog he once trained to pee whenever Stamford whistled a major sixth, and then he brought the dog to a friend’s house, and the friend put on “All Blues” by Miles Davis, and before Stamford, in a panic, could reach the CD player—long details here about him trying to push past guests, waiters, named celebrities, furnishings—the dog just soaked the entire place. Any effort to distract Stamford from his past, his projects, his plans, was muscularly overpowered. If there was a job to be won here, Julian would have to wait very patiently and care far more than he did. He stayed at the table only in the hope he would hear some new insight about Cait or some sun-flare of detail from her private life, but he also feared he would hear something that painted her a Stamfordite lavender. “You, uh, what about you?” the painter said over coffee, but the question required obvious exertion, rehearsed but garbled at delivery. “Send your reel to my gallery. I’ll take a look,” he said at the door, and disappeared into the traffic and crowds.

Outside, Julian dialed Reflex up on his iPod, Lost in the Funhouse, just to confirm how badly its power had faded. The lyrics were puerile, the music hackneyed, even the instruments had become tinkly and creaky, and Julian tagged the album for deletion, then shut his iPod down, for fear of a broader contamination, as if an airborne musicidal virus were loose.

His cell rang as he headed back to his office, but it was Alec, so Julian let him go straight to voice mail. “Oh, oh, oh,” the painter sang when Julian finally listened an hour later on the toilet. “You are wicked, boy. I’m watching you from across the street, and you just screened me! That’s no way to start a working relationship. All right, so you know, that reminds me. There’s something I forgot to ask you. Why didn’t you ring her bell? I watched you stand there for minutes, and you never rang her bell. She’s a nice girl. Spinning in circles, muttering to yourself like a crazy man. Why not pay a call?”

9

IT DIDN’T REALLY CHANGE ANYTHING, of course, Julian told himself, but still, something was spoiled now. He sat at his desk, closed his eyes against the sun and screens, tried to sort out the story he’d been telling himself for weeks, their floundering founding myth. She hadn’t looked down from her window and challenged him to be more original, hadn’t started all this. Alec, of all people, had teased him, and that is how he and Cait had begun. They were never a secret, organic and original, sprouted from nothing but the combination of each other. Alec had watched them, pushed them together. They were the product of that second-rater’s mind.

Of course it didn’t matter, not one bit. Though she hadn’t started this, hadn’t mysteriously learned who he was, she later had sent him to her key, spoke to him on the telethon, asked him for drinks. Julian started scribbling notes, trying to sort out who had done what and when and therefore why, how they’d found each other, even if the end result, today, was the same. But a note of ordinary tedium had started to drone.

As their story unraveled on the page before him—as he could no longer remember whose phone call or email or video had been caused by whom or had meant what—he felt himself finding reasons not to want her anymore, finding solace in thinking she was like Stamford, that Stamford was her future self. He knew this was childish even as he felt it, his feelings unraveling like their story. And he knew, too, that this was that flaw Rachel used to find in him, his retreat from feeling when it suited him, his pride at not being caught flat-footed by some strong emotion. If it was all Stamford’s doing, Julian could go back to his comfortable solitude, if he hadn’t already wrecked it in his reckless pursuit of this child star.

And it happened, and he watched it happen: laughing drily at Stamford’s secret, oafish hand in it all, and at his own adolescent fantasy that he’d been involved in something unique, he now wandered away from Cait, not to other women but to a trial run of permanent elderly iciness, drifting out to his end on a meringue floe, the trip he had begun—pushed out to sea by Rachel and Carlton—when Cait had distracted him and he had stupidly cuddled up to her music and her image, his last effort to avoid the only fate he was really suited for. And for the next three weeks a stream of cold air poured into him, and he felt his little adventure gliding into the vast and overpopulated past.

She was biological, he could finally see, just like the others. He could discern her microscopic unimportance. She made sounds—imaginary things, just nibbling gigabytes—that brushed and made tremble, say, two million sets of eardrum membranes. Of those, perhaps half a million recognized them as her sounds. Two hundred thousand liked those sounds enough to sing along at the chorus. Fifty thousand people would love her music as he did, would listen to it, as he had, gazing at a sunset and letting their minds wander across pasts and futures. A full thousand could conceivably spend time fantasizing about her. And in case of an outbreak of plague, she and they and he would all swell up with pustules and vomit and bleed from the ears and lose control of their spasming, perforating bowels and cry out to a deaf deity, and her digital recordings would be less permanent on a depopulated planet than a condominium or a car or a car commercial. Humans would evolve and adapt. None would credit her music for the species’ survival.

And in his silence, as if she felt him fleeing, she pursued him. A movie set occupied his street for three days and duly covered the hot July sidewalk with a blanket of plastic snow, and more plastic snow drifted down from a cable-suspended stainless-steel trough onto the heads of two lovers weeping and shivering for the giant camera. Two doors farther up the street, a plastic cafeteria tray of snow was waiting on his doorstep. Written on its surface in a yellow too dark and bright to be natural (and of which a whiff proved to be a lemon wood polish) were the words “Always wanted to be boy. Am [illegible] U R” before space ran out.

Days later, rainy, unseasonably cold, and the condensation on his downstairs window, when lit from inside, revealed faint inverted letters. He held a mirror to them: “Will you fly with me?” or perhaps “All too fluvial, ned.” Or a profile of a skinny man on a skinny horse, hugging a flimsy lance.

He received a call from a bookstore he’d never visited: his special order had arrived. At the store was a sealed envelope with his name and the words “For when I’m on the road,” as well as the collected Yeats and a history of Irish music. It was the frisky romantic acrobatics of a very young woman, an undergrad, unfinished. She was half his age and now seemed eager to prove it. He had the Yeats already, a gift from Rachel, but he bought both books anyhow and walked in sunlight, past the florist’s shop where the manager mopped rose water, each stroke of the mop across the threshold ringing her store’s visitor chime again and again, and he reached a little park near his home, a garden and a minor playground Carlton had tentatively explored, a ring of benches tucked between a mews alley and a curtain of millionaires’ brownstones. Under the fragrant branches, he opened the envelope and found in it a bookmark, a painted panorama of Irish countryside. He examined her gift, the books and bookmark, looked up at the short yellow slide Carlton had braved. Rachel had restrained Julian, held his arm so he would let Carlton stand up on his own when the little guy had tripped right there and Julian was about to rush to him. Rachel squeezed his arm, wouldn’t let him interfere. “Baby, you have to let him fall. He’ll be all right, but you …” She laughed at the pain on Julian’s face.

He looked away from the excruciating memory, opened the Yeats, closed it again.

Reconstituting a goddess from a striving girl could not be wished for, or awaited. Julian sincerely floated out to an arctic sea, a little mournful, unpleasantly wiser, past puzzled polar bears. For a couple of weeks he avoided Cait’s music, her newspaper mentions, her Web existence (difficult because an award show’s nominations were announced, and she was in all the chatter).

And then came the postcard. Its picture was of Paris: an old man and woman are walking down the sidewalk, arm in arm. He wears a beret and with his outside hand covers hers, presumably his wife of sixty-some years. Their heads angle in toward each other; whispered comfort is implied. Across the street, two German soldiers walk in the opposite direction, rifles slung, suspicion and fear on their faces. On the back of the card, next to the stylized calligraphy of his name and address, was only a single large question mark. He sat and looked at the picture for long minutes, almost put her music on, wondered if she could really see as far into the future as that. And if she could? She could see a life after her stardom extinguished? With him?

That night he opened a book he’d been reading halfheartedly—an account of a World War Two rescue operation—and noticed the bookmark, the Irish fields. It was the gift, for a dollar or two, of quiet intimate suggestion. Here was an item she knew he would handle only when alone, when his concentration was heightened. He held it lightly by the edges to examine under lamplight the details of the trees and falling mists. He turned it over as the book gathered speed, then leapt from his lap, and he read on its reverse the name of the painter and its plain title: View of Co. Wicklow in Autumn Rain, 1909. He looked at the postcard and bookmark next to each other.

He worked late, storyboards spread before him on the bed, and he sketched out the beauty shots of an ordinary coupe whose price was scheduled to fall just after Labor Day. Across the room, an old documentary about Billie Holiday filled the dead hours of an entertainment-news channel. The camera panned over still photos of her, and they had a few grainy interviews he hadn’t seen, her in furs talking to grainy men with 1950s hair and voices, leaning forward to push the microphone toward her. “Well, we’re going to be making another record with the Ray Ellis Orchestra next year,” she said quietly, her voice rough and slow, but the narrator corrected her, “It was not to be. Holiday was admitted to New York Metropolitan Hospital with kidney trouble four days later, and her last breaths were only weeks away.” There was footage of her funeral, some talk of her lasting influence, and then a transition to Jim Morrison, dead too young, skanky Pere-Lachaise pilgrims. Julian fell asleep. The TV flicked blue onto the photo on the wall of the tango singer Tino Rossi’s funeral in Paris, the elderly Frenchwoman weeping, excess mascara carried down her face like soil in floodwater.

The caller ID read BLOCKED. The clock insisted it was three in the morning. He could have slept through it.

“Did you by any chance watch the piece about Billie Holiday tonight?” Cait asked.

“I did. What time is it? Where are you?”

“I watched very carefully, but there’s something I can’t find out about her that I want to know.”

“I happen to have a family connection to her. I’ll tell you someday.”

“Do you think she was afraid she’d lose her talent?”

“She never did lose it, in my opinion. I prefer the late recordings.”

“I agree. But my question is, did she fear losing it? Did she take steps to protect it, or did she just hope, wake up every morning relieved she still had it?”

“The drugs may have been an expression of fear.”

“I doubt it. But listen: If she was frightened, does that prove that she was strong, because she overcame fear? Or does fear mean that some honest part of you knows you’re weak and basically false, and a true talent like hers would never feel fear?”

“Are you all right?”

“Please try to answer. Please.”

“Okay, okay.” Tino Rossi’s weeping fan. Old Parisian couple in love, occupied despite Nazis. View of County Wicklow, 1909. Red velour photo album, its spine worn white.

“Please. The truth.”

“The truth. The truth is, anyone who puts so much of herself and her life into art as you do must naturally fear any failure in that art as a potential threat to your life. And so you protect your art more than you protect your health or the common forms of happiness the rest of us have. And you probably have this in common with every artist you admire, including her.”

“Oh.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’ve missed you, Julian. Are you still around or no?”

“I am. Just a little confused, I think.”

“That can happen. Should we stay away from each other still? Seems a little daft now. No, wait, don’t answer that. I’m only in town for a minute, and then I’ll be far away for a bit. That should suit you, eh? Don’t answer that either. Good night.”

“Listen: please be careful with yourself during all this,” he said, more like a father than a lover.

“That’s a pledge.”

He allowed himself a 3:30 A.M. glimpse of her world, read the latest news on her site, came upon the vile doubtfulguest: “All the trappings of your relentless will to power, Cait O’Dwyer, nauseate me. What are you so afraid of? That we won’t listen to you if you don’t put up photos of yourself in underpants? We all wear underpants, honey. The 95 reviews you so religiously post? You have a little talent, I won’t deny it. But you must be one very frightened little girl to bet all of this on it.” She must have read that tonight and called him.

He went back to sleep, his father and Billie Holiday very quietly on the speakers. He dreamt of Cait, no surprise, but of Carlton, too. Cait was encouraging Carlton to be brave, to step forward and shake his father’s hand. “Go ahead now, little man, go on.”

Rachel and Julian had thrown a large party for Carlton’s second birthday, really a party for adults, a good party, unless Rachel had already been sleeping with one of the guests. That, too, hardly mattered now. Two weeks later Carlton was in a hospital, dying from that microscopic attacker in his blood, unnoticed until then by parents and pediatrician alike, all distracted by a different microscopic attacker in his ear, distracted just two days too long, and by then they were in a hospital with wooden trains with faces and chipped paint, which fit on tracks that could be hooked together in four or five combinations, none of which interested Carlton, pale and half-asleep, though Julian built him railroad after railroad in as many shapes as he could; one of them had to be the one to win Carlton’s winning giggle, and Julian held the locomotive in his wet palm, and bright blue flakes of paint came off on his skin, and Rachel sat beside the bed and stroked the tiny hand, out of which grew the red tube and the white tube and the mushrooms of tape.

Three-year-old Carlton was not as clear a character as the twelve-or twenty-year-olds. Carlton’s sporting prowess, his unique friendship and secret chats with his uncle Aidan, his first commonplace photography, his discomfiting and heartbreaking questions about girls: these Julian had foreseen. But Carlton at three—like the child holding his mother’s hand next to Julian the next evening on the Twenty-third Street platform—was an animal he couldn’t quite imagine. “Daddy!” the boy yelled as a man stepped off the arriving train but just laughed and kept walking. “No, Daddy’s at the office,” said the child’s mother as they boarded. Julian sat down again on the bench, let the F train roar away without him, and rummaged through his iPod’s memories. He ran his fingers through eight thousand songs until Cait arrived in his ears and sang to him about how he felt about Carlton as a three-year-old. He replayed the song again and again, now on the next train, turning up the volume to counteract the rails and the screech and the boom box on the floor, not obviously anyone’s, playing a Puccini aria. A passing A train startled and glowed, one track over, the old-cinema flicker of two trains going nearly, but not exactly, the same speed, faces six feet away, inspectable but silent, an inaccessible, parallel world, unreal in the flip-book frames: the Hasidim reading a pocket-size Pentateuch, the would-be model with her portfolio artfully ignoring male attention, the thirty-year-old still dressed like a college kid, the pregnant girl hand in hand with her mother, a bald man in horizontal-striped sailor’s shirt and vertical-striped clown’s pants, Carlton in a stroller laughing, Rachel looking over her thin black rectangular glasses at a file, Cait staring at him as their trains clicked good-bye, and Julian continued on alone into the girdered darkness.

Back on a Brooklyn sidewalk, he replayed the song again and heard for the first time, in the background of the lyric, a sample of distant thunder, a haunting effect he could scarcely believe he’d never noticed before. He pulled the song back a few seconds but couldn’t find the sound again before his iPod’s screen flashed a sketch of a dying battery, then went blank. The sky opened up and released a torrent of hot rain. Julian sprinted the last two blocks home, up his stairs and, still dripping, sat his iPod on its projection throne and played the song again. It had lost—Cait had lost—none of her power for the dozen repetitions. She had only been tightening her grip on him when he’d thought himself drifting away from her reach. He dropped onto the floor in a spreading pool of rainwater and gathered in his limbs, and felt he might throw up, but then sobbed instead.

He pulled the red velour album off the shelf but did not open it, only rocked and wept and wiped rain off its cover and wished he could hold his son. Despair—despair beyond the ability of music to convert into art—shook him so hard that he could not breathe, and when he finally gasped for air, his first thought was the wish that Cait could see him, be with him right then, see how well she understood him and how well he understood her, how he looked at this moment that they had created together, as if her beauty and youth could kill the pain that her music had unleashed in him.

He watched her on the telethon. Her chest swelled, and her eyes closed, and he opened the album.

Photographs of joy: a bear, a balloon, a bottle, a baby, a new family. This was doubly an illusion: raindrops of parental happiness had sprinkled over seas of murky sleeplessness, cyclonic frustration, snipping at each other, dark jokes about catching Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and these carefully selected photos—propaganda for happiness—portrayed almost the opposite of what a yearlong film would have revealed, and Julian hated himself for everything he had missed, for the unforgivable crimes of inattention and self-absorption and the end of that boy. The album was a lie, too, because Carlton was, of course, not, and Julian was not a father, and corny missing-limb parallels occurred to him, and he grunted at them as his fingers glided over Carlton’s plastic-coated faces, and Cait sang, “Leave it out in the rain and let time surprise you” and the picture of Carlton at four months trying out an early smile was not the stab in the eye that Julian had long feared, nor the opium self-delusion, effective for only a second’s high, that his son was still alive. It was something else: Carlton was still gone, but the pictures made Julian happy nevertheless. The necessary catalyst was Cait. That woman, as a whole person—the breath, the voice, the body, the spirit and soul—made him feel this way, and could, perhaps, always make him feel that Carlton was a present joy in his life, not a semisweet torture from his past or a future stolen from him. He could believe, with Cait in his life, that he could be free and tethered, young and old, joyful and mourning, forgiven. The applauding thunder—outside, real—was near enough to shake the windows.

10

HIS POCKET SHOOK, and the Observatory reported Cait’s presence at a Starbucks two blocks away. He calmly asked Maile if she wanted a coffee, walked slowly to the elevator, and, upon hitting the street, sprinted, stumbling into the coffee shop out of breath.

She wasn’t there, and he could see the joke: now he had to see her, today, this instant.

“Mr. Donahue, all ablaze,” came the voice from the scarlet Seussian wing chair against the side wall. “You about took that door down, Jelly Bean.”

“Hello, Alec.”

“Guess who I just had coffee with?”

“No idea.”

“Come on, give it a guess.”

“Huge hurry, Alec. Have to get back to people waiting for me.”

“She talked my ear off about you.”

“Who did?” Julian asked, buying his coffee to go.

That same evening, as he stepped off the F train back in Brooklyn, his phone shivered with another blue alert: STAR SPOTTED, 5:47 pm: CAIT O’DWYER and the address of his own office building back in Manhattan.

And so he bought a few things at the Bangladeshis’ and entered her building through the tea shop, took his key from under the mat, handed Lars a few cookies from the jar on top of the fridge, and prepped a pretty good risotto for two. He timed her arrival, cooked, delayed, finished the work, and then sat before the meal, lowered lights, open windows, mismatched silverware and chipped plates, grated cheese, steaming creamy rice, his pricey purple wine in her old green glasses, and he waited, scratching their dog behind the ears. He lit some of her candles, and he waited. He practiced welcoming her without startling her: “Hey, I’m in the kitchen.” And he waited. He practiced talking to her over the meal, describing Alec Stamford’s request to tour Julian’s office and his invitation to a film premiere, “which I turned down in favor of this idea, so you’d better like the food.” He waited, thought of the very last time he and Rachel had eaten together at home, could count on one hand all the words spoken, Rachel’s insistence she was literally to blame for Carlton’s death, although all she’d said was “What sort of mother.”

He went to Cait’s computer to put some music on and there found her own website guest book open to an entry form, still only half-composed. Blinking, mid-insult, was the venomous doubtfulguest: “You sad little girl, you’re so pathetic, why don’t you look at yourself sometime and” and then she had lost steam. She did this to herself. Of course. He felt an overwhelming sympathy in the form of an urge to pull her hands off the keyboard, to fold her against his chest, to calm her, tell her she had to forgive herself and just go on, with him now instead.

He fell asleep on her bed, woke to a slamming door, but there was no one. He took Lars down to moisten the hydrant, returned to the Pompeian meal and last of the wine, which he drank looking out her window. A minute later everything shifted, and he had to flee before she returned.

11

TECHNICALLY, STAN SHOULD STOP right there, with the one visit to the bar, his offer to her of a phone number. Technically, the singer was correct: this wasn’t his job by a long shot. Technically, if she was going to claim never to have seen the creep, there was nothing to do. His favor to his family was complete. His cousin could always call him if something real happened, if it wasn’t all a crank.

He sat on a bench at his boxing gym, a UU of sweat spreading under him, his gloves at his feet, his elbows slicking off his knees. He had come early and sparred four guys in succession—all above his weight and reach—but held his own. Now with his back to the ring, he watched the homeless guy the owner allowed in, asleep on the lat pull-down, his arms draped over the bar, the resistance pinned just to where it supported him, so that he rose and fell very slightly with each long, cluttered breath. The windows had brightened from black since Stan arrived, but still the bum floated up and down, hanging from his armpits. A pit bull puppy watched from inside a cardboard box.

The thing about inarguably beautiful women was that they were warped beyond repair by the time they were fifteen. They knew they were always being watched, and they heard the identical salivary subtext of every conversation, and so they were suspicious of any talk at all. The most brutal men, the ones who wore their lusts on their foreheads, appealed to them just because they passed for minimally honest, and so women like that invariably ended up with thugs. As they aged, as the subtext gave way under one conversation after another, and makeup could no longer spackle down the truth, they grew needy to be treated as special, and so became the most neurotic of middle-aged women, the most cloying of old ladies. The singer would be no exception.

She was surrounded by people telling her she was a genius, a goddess, so important, and so she probably longed for a little normal life, a little meat in her diet of air and lettuce, and if you were looking for a reason why she wouldn’t complain about the creep, well, you might not be off in thinking (a) she liked it, just because it was different, and (b) she thought she could control it. Long after anyone whose vision hadn’t been permanently blurred by the view from inside her aquarium would have seen a cross-eyed loony with one hand on a knife and the other in his pants, she’d still be thinking everything was for her amusement. She probably thought she could dispatch her dirty old-timer off to the cold, dry world beyond the glass whenever she wanted.

But ignoring this whole thing, taking her at her word—well, if his little cousin was right, if the creep was trouble, and something did happen, then Stan would have to live with having known ahead of time and not done anything to stop it. And, really, this was about family. Despite how silly a person little Ian Richfield had become—and, really, who hadn’t seen that coming, given Bill and Teresa Richfield and, really, the entire barren expanse of the Richfield side—Teresa was still a diCanio. Ian’s fears (and his pretty employer’s) were a legitimate call on Stan’s time. If Ian didn’t get around to mentioning the favor, Stan would when he dropped a line to Teresa.

He poked around the Web, found photos and chat groups, snippets of her awful music, which he shut off. He read a review that called her a genius, the voice of her generation, and he listened again in true bafflement to the very ordinary noise with the singing that—very occasionally—was almost musical (less power than Rosemary Clooney, less nuance than Nancy, less passion than Connie Francis), before it collapsed again into that derivative screaming kids liked. He wondered what he was missing, and that pissed him off. He spilled his coffee across the printout of the creep and swore.

Two of the younger guys had heard of her. Bringing it up was probably a mistake, because soon enough a certain amount of trash was talked—from more guys than just the original pair of jokers—about Stan’s “punk-rock girlfriend,” and whether Stan had gone soft, skipped out on homicide for celebrity babysitting.

Stan even went to the trouble of talking to the department’s shrink about the standard profile in this sort of case. Either it was one-time-only or a regular fetish, she explained. The dangerous ones were the one-time-onlys. The regulars tended to limit themselves to serial shrubbery whacking, but the guys who heard private messages in the songs, who broke into the house, took prisoners for romantic weekends, drew the gun for the loving two-step, they were usually on their first and only celeb.

He found Miss O’Dwyer’s building, looked around the outside, made sure it had good locks and bars on the windows. He showed the perv’s portrait to bar owners and shopkeepers within a small radius. Turned out, creep was a sticky fixture at the deli directly across the street from the victim’s residence. The sweet old Bangladeshi couple who ran it agreed to repurpose one of their security cameras as a gesture of cooperation with the department, and Stan rolled up his sleeves, scaled their stepladder, and adjusted the focus of the front-door cam himself, checked the screen in the back until it framed all activity across the street. He bought them a pack of new DVD-RWs for the system and gave them a decal for the front window bluffing that the premises were regularly monitored by plainclothes officers.

But that was about all he could do. He drove across the river a few times to check the DVD at the Bangladeli, but the Iqbals hadn’t seen the perp again, and there was nothing on camera. Stan could, he supposed, just check in with the singer—Everything okay with you? And one morning he was given a good excuse. He came into Brooklyn, reset the Iqbals’ system, and then walked outside to smoke in the sun, readied himself to ring her doorbell when she came out of her building walking a huge beast, jogged right past Stan without noticing, and led him a few blocks to a little dog run on State Street.

“Funny to bump into you here,” he called, having given her a few minutes’ head start. He stopped on the sand as the Great Dane approached him, sniffed his shoes, and lifted his leg. The policeman, conditioned by years of rousting squirting drunks from doorways, stepped lightly aside and continued to the bench, where Cait watched his arrival through silvered shades.

“You avoided that quite gracefully, Inspector. Very Fred Astaire.”

“I’m highly trained for just that sort of eventuality.”

“Holy hell! Is that an actual gun under your jacket?”

“You mean, or am I just happy to see you?”

“No, seriously. You’re an actual policeman?”

“He’s a fine-looking animal.” Stan sat beside her on the bench. “Urinary habits notwithstanding. Which reminds me, a friend of yours got himself arrested last night.”

She turned to examine him through her mirrors. “The fellow in that photo you showed me?”

“No, not him. Is he a friend of yours?”

“I see. And you just happened to wander into Brooklyn, notice me here, and decide to stop in and share the happy news with me of a friend’s arrest?”

“That’s the size of it. I have a sister lives near here. She and I are very close. The fellow you sang with on TV? For the waterfront hippies? The big fellow, seems kind of gay? You should watch the company you keep.”

“You sound like a priest.”

“He was arrested last night, your friend.”

“Who? Alec?”

“It’ll be in the papers tomorrow. Seems he propositioned some professional ladies, three of them, in fact, but the third one was a colleague of mine. His bad luck.”

“Surely you’re not such a prude as to think we should hang him for the indulgence of that occasional, quite human practice.”

“Yeah, I’m a law-and-order man myself, but I hear you. Certain acts are to be discouraged but not judged too harshly. I’m happy not to labor in vice, professionally speaking. But the interesting part, the part I happen to know because this was a colleague of mine, this is the part I think you’ll enjoy.”

“I’m all atwitter, Inspector. The criminal acts of people I know only slightly are of the utmost interest to me.”

He turned, considered the reflection of himself in her glasses. “I like how you do that: tell the truth but pretend you’re lying. You know, I’ve been keeping up with this case for you, the guy in that photo. And I’ve been thinking about you. You’re a nice girl. Obviously above average. But you must grow tired of everyone treating you like a queen or a prophet.”

“Tremendously insightful. I’m just a little girl inside, frightened, waiting for someone who can see right through me.”

“There you go again. Full-time job, I bet, protecting you from weirdos.”

“You give the impression of a hopeful applicant for the post. Are you truly a policeman? I admit the first time we met I rather doubted it.”

Stan smiled and lit a cigarette.

“Jesus, that smells good,” Cait said. “I wish I still smoked.”

“I read somewhere it’s bad for you,” he replied, and offered her one.

“Cheers.”

With effort he kept silent as she lit up, and then she spoke first, as the guilty did when given space: “I’m performing on Thursday night. Do you think I’ll be in danger from that dirtbag?”

“Difficult to say. I’m not a psychic. But if you’re inviting me to the show, I think I’ll pass.”

She nodded twice—he finally landed a jab after all her swings—but she quickly laughed. “I wasn’t. You have to work late, solving a nice murder?”

“No. No excuse. I just don’t necessarily think I’ll see the best of you under those circumstances. Pop music, you know.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“I think you know that what you do is temporary. Cheap. It’s for kids. I understand—a person’s got to make a living. I don’t think less of you for doing that to pay your rent. But it’s not the most interesting part of you, by a mile.”

“And you can see the most interesting part?”

“If your job was dressing up as a rabbit in a theme park, would you want me to come visit you and pretend you were a real rabbit? I hope you’re laughing because you see how right-on the comparison is. You go sing; I’d worry if you really thought it was a big deal. Now, matter at hand, you want to hear the best part of your friend’s arrest?”

“Without rival, the most peculiar question I’ve ever been asked.”

“I won’t tell you unless you ask nicely miss.”

“Yes, please, Detective. Please tell me the best part of my friend’s arrest.”

“You admit you’re curious? You want me to tell you what only I know?”

“Yes.”

“You would feel let down if I didn’t share my secret knowledge?”

“Yes.”

“Once more, please.”

“Please, Detective, I really want to hear this.”

“Well, all right, since you’re begging. First, Mr. Stamford had hired a gentleman as well as the three ladies he intended to employ. Mildly interesting. Second, the undercover officer and one of the two real prostitutes were redheads; the other was a brunette, but he had a red wig for her, ready to go. He also asked if any of them could do an Irish accent. I do have your attention, don’t I? Hard to tell behind those sunglasses. And, best of all, he told them, as a condition of their employment, that they were all to answer to a particular name.”

“All three of them?”

“All three. All three of them were to respond to this same name. Would you like to guess what it was? You do have that knack for deductions.”

“I don’t think I will, but I appreciate the offer.”

“My pleasure, Miss O’Dwyer.”

“I can see that, Inspector.”

He looked at his phone. “I have to go. But if you’d like, I’d be happy to take you for a late dinner when you finish your concert. There’s a place I enjoy, I can about guarantee you won’t be recognized.”

“Sinatra on the sound system?”

“If you can bear it.” He stood to go, shook her hand.

“I think I’ll pass,” Cait said. “But thank you for the offer, and especially the smoke. I’m going away for several weeks, so I expect I’ll be safe from any dirtbags, but perhaps—”

“When you get back you’ll reconsider.”

She laughed outright. “No, no, no. I was going to say that perhaps, in the interval, you could buy my new CD.”

“Oh, boy. I hate to tell you this, but it’s never going to happen, me and your music. I’m sorry.”

The policeman strode away, with each step becoming smaller and more distorted in her mirrored lenses. He’d followed her here, she knew, and she doubted that he even believed there was any stalker to protect her from, though what Ian was playing at was now quite beyond her.

The detective’s scorn for her music: people who didn’t like her voice certainly existed, that was only logical, but she rarely met such people. He had no interest in listening to her sing but was asking her to supper nevertheless. To want to be with her but not with her voice: it was a strange division.

And oh, but Alec, poor Alec. Poor Alec. Jesus in a paisley sweater vest, poor Alec.

Meanwhile, Julian was the very opposite of that, was cooking dinners for her because of her voice, maybe only that, was reading Yeats, she hoped, because of her voice. What else of her could he be reacting to? And the other night, when she’d had a relatively minor attack—much more mild than previous attacks she’d weathered without anyone’s help—she’d called him in the middle of the night, like a frightened child. How bizarre and pitiful. She should have been able to push through without anyone’s help. But talking to him had so quickly soothed her. Unless that was giving him too much credit. Considering how easily he’d helped her, she probably hadn’t really needed the help. She’d probably called prematurely, out of fear that the attack was going to worsen, and it didn’t, and he was coincidentally on the phone with her when it passed. He was likely gloating over it now, thinking she was his little fool, like the day he’d sat silent when she asked him to meet for a drink, as if she’d proposed something childish. She wished somebody appealing, like Julian, would say what the little policeman had said: “not the most interesting part of you, by a mile.” She wished Julian would get himself arrested for her, like poor Alec. She wished he’d at least come the next night to make risotto, when she’d be home.

“Lars, my love, shall we go?”

(At his desk the next day, Stan listened to her on borrowed headphones. One of the songs was growing on him slightly. If you could screen out that noisy rock ‘n’ roll excess—Ian’s static and crash, and her occasional shriek—under that, she did do something that worked on you, in a way.)

12

THE WORDING HERE is very difficult, and Rachel herself was never sure of it. She did not “stage a suicide attempt to hold Aidan’s attention or win Julian’s.” That would have been unnecessary; she had Aidan’s, and a botched suicide would only drive Julian away. And really, neither did she exactly “attempt suicide” at all. She did, definitely, invite Aidan to come for dinner and that afternoon did, also, leave out wine and prescription sleeping pills on a counter, after she’d swallowed plenty of each. But she’d forgotten Aidan was coming over when she did it; it hadn’t been to show him. And she hadn’t taken enough to hurt herself, she didn’t think, hard to be sure, as she no longer measured the pills out one at a time—that was futile, since just a few didn’t do anything when she was in pain, so she tended to treat them like mints until she could feel them. And she was sometimes sloppy about putting the lid back on the brown bottle because who cared? A child might find them?

She’d had a rough afternoon. It had caught her by surprise. She came home early from work because she suddenly had the feeling that if she didn’t leave her office at once, it might explode. The day felt as if terrorists were afoot in the city, and they had targeted her building. The illogic of it—the sheer stupid hysterical crap of it—was clear before she’d stepped from the elevator into the lobby of giant fountains and two Starbucks, but she went home anyhow because she knew that this stupid early fear was only a tremor of the biblical cataclysm to come, and she’d be tearing her hair out and thinking of Carlton for two days straight if she didn’t reach her bed and sleep before it grew worse. Then she could wake up early and only feel a little not unreasonably sad, stay late tomorrow and make up the work.

And so she gobbled some pills and washed them down with a nice balloon of zin—a child’s storybook phrase, hoisting you up and away, and so they leapt into the Balloon of Zin— and she lay down on the funky chaise she’d bought on the street a week after she’d moved into this apartment, and she felt a perfect sleep coming, like an embrace and a kiss of forgetfulness, when Aidan was banging on her door, typical Aidan, banging louder and louder, the only possible explanation for him being locked out being her doped semiconsciousness, not his having the day wrong or her just not wanting to have a guest tonight after all, and so she stumbled toward the pounding door, fell twice, cut her hand on a stray piece of her wineglass, and with much trouble drew the stubborn chain and lucked into the correct combination of all those opposite-dialing dead bolts.

“What did you do?” he asked, peering at the label on the empty bottle. “Oh, you dumb, dumb woman. Do you even know what a milligram is?”

Aidan set about tasks for which he was unqualified: feeding her emetics, bandaging her hand, then, interrupted, holding her hair and wiping her forehead while she bowed to the toilet bowl for nearly an hour; drawing a bath and adding salts and bubbles in quantities that he soon saw were excessive as lacy Andes rose over the rim of the tub, and he batted them and sheared off their tops to carry to the sink; selecting clean and suitable pajamas from a drawer knotted full of nerve-racking and aromatic strings; sitting across from her and listening, replying that of course he loved her (in a practiced tone of fraternal affection, tinted with pity for “her loss”) and that Julian did, too, for heaven’s sake. He nodded placidly when she insisted she hadn’t been trying to hurt herself. At times, Aidan’s eyes would mist, and he feared he would have one of his “lachrymose onslaughts,” but they spared him, and he excused himself as just surprised or angry or stressed (drawing the bubble bath particularly affected him), but the truth was clear even to him, late that night, when she had gone apologetically to sleep in her own bed, and he was lying sleeplessly on her couch, and he thought of this woman dying if he hadn’t come just then. He thought of her being so hopeless, of her leaving him in the world without her to think about or protect or admire or love, and he muffled his tears with his forearm until his sweater was soaked and attached to his nose and mouth and beard by countless trembling cables.

She had, after the Incident, “been there for him,” in the dull language of these things. He had lived in close proximity to her and her clothing and smells. She was the woman to whom he’d been literally closest, physically, since the death of his mother. And so he loved her—not quite platonically, or fraternally, but as close as he could hold himself to those ideals. He would never admit to more, not to Julian, not even decades from now. Besides, he could see things clearly enough to know that Rachel was not “over” Julian, could never be, no matter how Julian behaved. “Why are you doing this to yourself?” he asked her that night as she ate the sandwich he’d painstakingly made for her, and her stubbled calves wandered free of her white bathrobe until she tucked them under her, and the room smelled of bath salts and her other scents. “Why don’t you just stop and let yourself be?”

He understood that Carlton’s death resulted in sorrow. He, too, had felt sad, when it happened, and at the terrible funeral with the tiny coffin and Rachel so beyond anyone’s reach and Julian unable to do anything to help her and Aidan feeling saddest, perhaps, for Julian, so obviously incapacitated, unadult again. With all of his oyster slickness fallen away, he was hardly more than a child himself, and Aidan felt like the only adult present, his sorrow contained and appropriate, a part of him rather than him a part of sorrow, as he judged every other case. But now it had to stop: that a child’s death would produce sorrow lasting longer than the child’s actual life, which had produced some happiness (and not every day! Aidan could remember the scenes of resistant parenthood even if neither parent would admit it now): that was a problem caused only by human stubbornness. To be two forever—surely Carlton was by now as much a source of joy as of misery. “When you think of everything that could’ve happened to him over a long, long life, all the pain he could’ve suffered, all the difficulties he could’ve caused, all the personalities or people he might’ve become, don’t you stop for a second and smile? I mean, he’s just only that sweet little guy, and that’s all, forever.” She was ignoring him in the way people did when they gave up on his ability to understand something.

She said, “The strangest thing. I came to the end of other people so quickly. Each new person was like a glass of water, and at the beginning I was parched, but then each glass tasted a little worse, the water was grittier, and by the end even the first sip was enough to make me gag, you know?”

“Yes,” he said, not at all clear what she meant.

“He …” She took her nearly-ex brother-in-law’s hand, coated with that thick fur, and at first he didn’t know whom she meant. “Julian is …”

“A jackass.”

“I know.”

“Are you really in love with him still?” Aidan asked, and she felt a maternal warmth for that bearded child with the less than acceptable breath and the oily imprints of his eyebrows at the tops of his lenses.

“I think it would be best to be with him again. To be old with him. Sad with him. I keep trying, little things, to jar him open again.”

Aidan nodded, like a tourist working to translate a difficult foreign phrase while not wanting to look like a rube in front of the foreigner. “You have to promise me,” he said, “those pills—you can’t do that to me. It’s cruel. You’re not a cruel person. Promise me.”

“I’m so tired, Aidan.”

“Promise me.” But she was asleep again. He had some months ago recklessly promised to deliver Julian to her, but he didn’t really have any practical idea of how to do it. And so she was punishing him, threatening him for his failure. Though he was a devoted Cupid, his quiver was empty, and a life of abstinence and isolation and trivia had trained him for nothing, now that he had a purpose in life, now that matchmaking was a matter of his own deepest happiness.

13

HER TRAJECTORY FOLLOWED the heptilateral calculus equations laboriously worked out by her label: the download and CD and merchandise figures, site hits, YouTube uploads and Google ad click-through, satellite and broadcast and video rotation, acceleration of adoption rates by adult-oriented and alt rock. She was appealing down to U-18s and up to 35-45s.

With European gigs booked, publicity cogs caught and turned one another. The label’s European offices and the distributor’s subagents postered and stocked and sent press kits to music journalists who gave the enclosed CDs to ambitious assistants who in turn sampled Cait in their second jobs as DJs in Rome, Prague, and Biarritz or, more often, just handed the discs off to girls, gifts to demonstrate the assistants’ perches far ahead of the curve of knowable fashion, like seabirds offering prime clifftop nesting sites.

Her tour schedule went up on caitodwyer.com and blasted out to her list at nine in the morning. Julian, waiting out her silence since their one-sided dinner date, suspecting he had been too eagerly middle-aged and domestic, found the email waiting for him at his office: dates and clubs moving east from Dublin to Budapest. He was unsure what she wanted him to do, but then the second email came ten minutes before he left for lunch: “Ella Fitzgerald” sent him an mp3 of Ella Fitzgerald singing “April in Paris.” And that evening an envelope addressed to “The Solitary Chef” crept through his mail slot and onto the rug, holding a single typed sheet: Charm, amuse, inspire, tempt, overwhelm, dazzle. Will you earn reward? Then the touristic porn: a list of hotels sprinkled across Europe: Morgan le Fay. Lonsom Mews. L’Etoile Cachee. Santa Diabla. La Torretta della Virgine Bianca. U Sarky. Vanatoarea. Gellert. That settled it.

He stood in the hall, smelled the paper, summoned her scent from that crucifix-jingling dresser drawer. His mind flew ahead to the hotel room where she was waiting for him, undressing for him, the Romanian inn where they became lovers, the Czech nightclub where he proved himself by giving her the only direction she needed, children, her singing to their children, a marriage. Only when he saw through his open living room door that the TV was on—a single tilting, squinting boxer with a blue-padded glove attached to his ear—did he let the fantasy flutter away. When he opened the door, Aidan threw a dinner roll at his head and lowered himself over a miner’s pan of syruped bricks of tofu and a half-drawn crossword.

“I don’t much like your Scotch,” Aidan said. “That’s an imaginary tartan on the label, clanless and therefore classless. Can you think of a four-letter word with q as the third letter? I’d rather not use an acronym or Arabic.” Julian walked out of range of his brother’s babble, and he could smell her. Aidan had surprised her here, and she was hiding somewhere in the apartment. The bathroom sink’s tap burbled. He pulled the shower curtain aside, pressed its hundred Rioja wine labels against the burgundy tiles. He opened closets large enough to hide her and cabinets for which she would have had to shed limbs like a harried chameleon. She’d left her scent in his bed, and a long hair draped across his pillow, a giant’s fishhook to snare him while he slept. His ears ringing, he turned and ran for the fire escape in his bathroom, humming “Without Time” just loudly enough to hear through his own skull. Aidan called from across a vast desert, “Hey, have you been in touch with Rachel at all? Any sparks?” The window was unlatched. He looked onto the empty escape, looked skyward in case she’d scrambled up the side of the building.

“I let her in, you know,” Aidan said, his eyes on the boxing, when Julian returned to the living room.

Julian flicked the remote. “You let her in?” He sat down across from Aidan. “Seriously?”

“Seriously? I was watching that. Yeah, she wanted to leave you something. Listen, she’s amazing.”

“And you let her in? What did she leave? You serious?”

“Yeah. Relax. I let her in. With my key. I wanted to talk to you about this. It’s important. You know, she is still your wife. You have a role, a resp—”

“Oh.” Julian fell back into the chair, stared at the ceiling. He started to laugh. “What did she leave?”

“Listen to you!” Aidan attempted the accent of a yenta. “You’re very eager. So, maybe the old spark, huh? Very interesting. That reminds me, the Incans—”

“What did she leave, A?”

“How should I know? If you didn’t find anything, call her and ask, right? I thought you already knew, or I wouldn’t have squealed. You know, she and you—I wish I had the knack for explaining obvious things to stupid people.” Aidan walked into the kitchen. “Is this all there is?” he called. “You’ve let your wine cabinet go to the dogs. More evidence that bachelorhood doesn’t suit you.”

“Open whatever’s there. Pour for me, too.”

“Anyhow, the Incans—”

“When was she here?”

“A few times, actually. I don’t know. Okay, you got me, I gave her a key. But, listen, the Incans …”

So Rachel had left something for him, something he’d credited to Cait. The poem, of course. It hadn’t made any sense at all when he thought it was Cait’s. He’d knotted his thoughts into lanyards to make the poem hers, to continue their story from it, when it was of course Rachel’s, plainly and rightly so: “Where is the love that once I called mine?” she asked him, left the question on his bed, their bed, bought together in another life. Cait hadn’t crept into his house; he’d crept into hers. And another corner of their woven story frayed.

“Seriously, I want you to listen to me, Cannonball. It’s important.”

“In a minute.”

But Cait had given him the hotel list—”April in Paris”—in exchange for the loss, had written a new chapter for them as fast as the old one had erased itself. He turned the TV back on for Aidan, walked to his bedroom, and went online. The hotels matched cities of her European conquest, in order, and he booked flights and reserved rooms in her hotels, even in the city where he and Rachel had honeymooned. Fickle Paris’s allegiances wavered.

“I’m going to Europe for a few weeks,” he said, returning to Aidan and a glass of wine.

“For the deception industry or for a new Boleyn? Never mind: same thing.”

“Funny.”

“Listen, really. I think that’s a mistake. Really. The world, life, sometimes—”

Julian interrupted. “What was it about quicker heart surgeries that would lead to incivility?”

Aidan laughed triumphantly, fell for the diversion. “Ha! I was getting scared you’d never ask. Well, think about it for a minute.” He sniffed his wine with the force of a Hoover factory and sighed. “When you go into the hospital for a risky surgery, you have to face the Big Nothing. They crack you open, and you can read the writing on the walls of your arteries. A slow recovery, big scar up your chest, short of breath, no energy—you can’t help but think. You’re warmed up by death’s proximity, softened up. You rewrite your will, amend for your mistakes. You call your kids to gather round, you tell people the important stuff, you appreciate the very little things, like urinating. But now—pfff. No risk, no fuss, one afternoon, in and out, and your heart condition is all better, and back you scurry to play golf and yell at the valet and expect your children to apologize first. Total up all the love produced by invasive surgery and subtract all the love prevented by speedy laser surgeries. That’s love lost. Now, seriously. Humor me. I’m a little slow. What’s in Europe?”

14

JULIAN PACKED to Cait on the speakers, as loud as the demo could roar without buzzing into pieces.

Rachel rang the bell downstairs, warned by a flustered Aidan (whom she’d had to calm down) that today was Julian’s departure for a long date, but Julian didn’t hear the bell, even as Rachel (and everyone else on the street) could hear “Coward, Coward” and the old bassist puffing against the window glass like an asthmatic giant blowing out his birthday candles. She called his cell, but he didn’t hear that either, and he didn’t hear her voice mail until he was in a taxi to JFK:

“J, can you hear this?” She must have held her phone up and pointed it at his noise, because while Julian’s cab crawled into Queens, on the voice mail Cait now sang “Coward, Coward” through that thin speaker until Rachel’s voice took the lead again and Cait was demoted to backup vocals. “You’re like a teenager, J! Listen to you, rocking out. Well, I stopped by to wish you bon voyage. Aidan told me you have a business trip to Paris and points beyond. Say hi to all our favorite places for me, okay? Have a great trip. I’ll be thinking of you over there. Remember that park with the man completely covered in pigeons? Definitely send him my best.” She paused and the distant, crackling song continued in the interval, like slightly musical traffic noises, or as if Rachel were at a club, like a call from his parents to say good night, sweet dreams: “Okay, get to bed now, Jules. And mind your brother.” “But wait, Dad, is the band cooking tonight?” “It is, little man, it is.” Rachel went on: “Speaking of Paris, did you ever get my postcard? That little couple just spoke to me. They reminded me of—I don’t know—not us, exactly, of course, but, maybe us if we’d been French? And old? And different? See you, J. Have a wonderful trip.”

He listened to the voice mail eight times on the way to JFK. He’d lost another piece of his story with Cait, again to Rachel, even as Cait sang in the background. Even as he packed to her voice, for their beginning, Rachel was saying, No, not so fast.

He tried to make himself dizzy from the possibilities of Cait again, to reignite that chain of fantasies—happiness, sex, marriage, children. He inhaled deeply in the neutral space of the airport, a hundred gates to a hundred fates, leaving Carlton and Rachel outside. He deleted the voice mail and put Cait on the iPod; she would be the soundtrack to this crucial day. He yielded her to security but left her on as she passed through the X-ray machine and reattached her before he put his shoes back on. He’d flown out of this terminal with Rachel on their honeymoon, but it had been remodeled since then, so he could march bravely on and know he would startle no ghosts in the food court, at the gate. In the men’s room, he hopped vainly, trying to flush the motion-detecting toilet, then flapped his soapy hands up and down under the tap, able to coax only a drop or two of water at a time from the motion-detecting sink.

He sailed on the terminal’s long conveyor belts, past a lounge where a businessman shrieked obscenities at a video game. At the end of the moving sidewalk, two little boys ran in place against the direction of the tread. The gap closed, their exertions and Julian’s stillness drawing the three of them together until the older boy signaled his little brother, and they stepped to opposite sides of the infinite path, still jogging against the tide, and Julian passed between them under a herald’s voice, “The sidewalk is coming to an end. Please step cautiously.”

Unable to sit still—off-balance from the loss of the postcard and the scenes he’d constructed around it, composing the latest revision of their love story, hungry to see Cait’s face but worried he would meet her in the wrong atmosphere—oh, yes, hi, well, this is the band, and this is Julian, my, well, he draws coasters— he examined a boutique of useless gifts, mannequins with alert nipples under Statue of Liberty T-shirts. He turned away, back to the huge window overlooking the tarmac. A distant plane swallowed a more distant plane, passed it out its rear, and then Cait O’Dwyer and her band were standing at his departure gate.

Nervous indignities assaulted him—palms and gut and mouth—as if he were now forced to feel the aggregate anxiety he’d been spared for every girl and woman he’d ever spoken to since he was fourteen years old. He had always assumed his natural resistance to these symptoms lay in a moral fitness that others lacked, but now he melted into the boutique to acquire a Yankees cap, housefly sunglasses, and a hooded NEW YORK LOVES LOVERS sweatshirt, then skulked behind the aroused mannequins, watching her and her band’s progress from counter to padded chairs—as unlike a remarkable fellow as it was possible to become—and he considered going home.

First class was called, and she didn’t enter, so Julian remained hooded amidst chocolate and toy Checker cabs, squeezing his damp and wrinkled first-class ticket.

Hers was one of the last rows to board, and when he’d given her sufficient time to find her way down the tunnel to Ireland, he emerged from his post, as an amplified voice began to call the names of tardy passengers, his first, and he proceeded, head down. The pilot, fiddling with knobs behind his folding door, was younger than Julian by nearly a whole grown-up.

He slumped, neighborless, by the window. A ladybug had managed to wedge itself between the two plastic panes. As rain began to fall, it opened its cherry-red body and beat its wings and searched the oval perimeter for a path out of this darkening mess, the raindrops pounding like explosions.

Just before the attendant closed the front door a young black man entered, breathless and covering his mouth. He lowered himself into the last empty seat, at Julian’s right. He was fashionably scruffy but still suitable for first-class upgrade, an actor perhaps, but his cool was belied by how desperately he ordered a glass of water before he’d even sat down, requested it again a few minutes later, while around him other first classers sipped mimosas from plastic, and he began fidgeting with a tube of precautionary, dissolving anticold vitamins, “specially designed for the frequent flyer.” Unable to risk imminent infection while the stewardess dallied with his water, he gave up and placed one of the pale green disks directly into his mouth, where it began to sizzle. He mumbled a “Thanks much” for the cup that came a few seconds later, and pale green bubbles foamed at the corners of his lips.

The plane taxied, and a bird flew alongside, mocking the stiff metal giant. The ladybug suddenly stopped moving as the first-class cabin left the ground, still weighted down by coach, and the panicked raindrops leapt clear of the plane, and the ladybug, resigned and contemplative, faded from red to green. With a deft manipulation of his magic stick, the pilot turned everything on earth into toys, then drew a blanket of gray across his work, and Julian leaned back, closing his eyes, waiting for the butt stuttering of failing engines.

“You want one?” His neighbor offered him dissolving immunity. “Sure? You’re in a petri dish, even in first.” Julian declined, and the younger man turned his chair into a bed. Julian considered how he would save his iPod in the unlikely event of a water landing.

The pilot offered the passengers the romance of a banking turn, spreading the yellow-orange light across the cabin, from first class to coach. She was back there, and the change of light promised further change to come, over there. The ladybug turned light gray.

Julian opened the mystery novel he’d bought for camouflage at the airport boutique. Bhunji Zsemko, Mongolian-Montenegrin detective, found himself in Paris, infiltrating the Grand Mosque in search of Frinz Tishpa, the kidnapped daughter of an Albanian mafia bigwig. (The writer, Homer Weindark, had spun his reluctant dyslexic gumshoe into thirteen novels so far, each set in a European capital, exploiting the American readership’s weakness for a platz, an arrondissement, a corrida.) Zsemko reached for his gun but too late. The blow caught him behind the ear, and he fell against the gold-veined Philip-Augustus bidet, Weindark always expert in both European luxury and underworld terminology, Black Bitch heroin ideally weighed out at a leaded cinquecento window opening onto the Grand Canal.

A dim purple light still clung to the sky, the last hint of yesterday, as they flew over storms beneath which the Atlantic prowled. Cait was mere rows behind him. That thought was warming now, cozy, and Julian looked up from his book in time to see a transparent shell the shape of a ladybug vaporize. Far below, another winking plane slit a diagonal wake in the sea of clouds, a shark’s fin off in the immeasurable, dreamy distance.

“Coffee?” said a lilting Irish accent, and Julian watched the black window’s reflection to be sure it was a stewardess.

“Please,” said Julian’s neighbor.

“How do you take it?” she duly recited.

“The color of my skin,” the black man said with a smile, posing, and the flight attendant enjoyed herself for the first time that evening. She added a few drops of milk, examined her model’s face, dripped a tad more, swirled, scrutinized her handiwork. “Enjoy,” she purred.

“You’ve used that one before,” said Julian, and his seatmate smiled with the jaguar’s sexual calm Julian used to feel. “I’d steal it, but I’d end up drinking a lot of milk.”

The lights went out after dinner, and below the plane, below the Debussy moon and stars hurried onstage for this abridged night, a dozen hollow silver pillars of cloud lit up like pinball bumpers, burned blue and gold for alternating instants, and Julian felt he could put his hand right through them. “You are hardly here. I can put my hand right through you.” Rachel’s words in their terminal weeks, only important in retrospect, in seat 1A on a night flight to Dublin chasing a fantasy, but back then just one of many things she said. “Removed from any risk at all. I watch you, you know, deciding, ‘I’ll never make this mistake. I’ll never make that mistake. I’ll never look stupid this way. I’ll never give offense like that or go too far like him or hurt anyone’s feelings or make myself or anyone else ridiculous. You can’t take that seriously or this, that’s just people.’ But don’t you remember what you were before? You existed before you removed yourself from everything. I remember you before. I do.” How certain Rachel had been, and how willing he was to believe her: this, then, was the essential problem, not Carlton’s death or her behavior. The problem was that he was in some sense removed from life and risk, so blanketed in politeness or fear that he was making it impossible for her to be happy. He may even have vowed to change this about himself, he couldn’t remember now. Later, in a pendular swing of indecision, she retracted every word, expunged the intricate indictment from her permanent transcript of him. But now he vowed again to change. He would take everything seriously, commit himself, throw himself into life, starting with Cait.

1B murmured, “In France it’s allowed, in France,” then awoke with a spastic, electrified kick. He levered himself up and out of his conch shell. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened one slightly at his watch, swore and produced his tube of vitamins. He rang the call button, yellow schematic of a stewardess producing a living one.

“You woke up for your vitamin?” Julian asked as the man gulped his boiling green potion from a plastic cup, like a witch at a child’s birthday party.

“How old are you?” 1B asked in reply. “Really? I would have said older. Either way, you’re in the zone for spinal stenosis and your first jumps of cholesterol. You cleared the first testicular cancer window, but another one’s still coming. You’re almost free and clear for MS, but pay close attention to any tingling in your extremities for a couple more years. You got to keep dodging bullets. But one of them will find you.” He switched off his light and re-reclined, fell asleep with such speed that Julian thought of his father’s story of the Japanese sleepers.

Julian would have told Carlton the same fairy tale, an heirloom by then. Carlton at six or seven would have liked it. Julian had liked it, hurried up to bed for the improvised fantasias, his father’s profile against the gray window, still some light behind him in summertime, the smell of liniments and beer, an inflatable brontosaurus on Julian’s dresser, and then a chapter of a favorite story, the endless stories his father just breathed: the good and bad kings of the chickens, the war for boys’ hearts, the abcoyotes of Defghijklistan, and the long serial about the sleepers of Japan, who sent Julian off to sleep every motherless night for more than a year.

In a secluded town nestled up against the Fugu Mountains, a peculiar history had led to an acquired condition, and then natural selection had cemented it into a population’s genetic code: the people of this village all slept for thirty seconds every ninety seconds, day and night, to the second. Individuals varied: everyone slept and woke according to his own unchangeable schedule, and so a perfect match was rare. But if a young man met a young woman who fell asleep when he did, they could spend far more time together—”three quarters of their life, better than we do here,” Julian’s father said, only some months after his wife’s death—and he would always wish to marry her. And yet parents always forbade such engagements: if the couple slept together, who would care for the children, likely to sleep on a different schedule? Who would protect them from bears?

“No, never, never,” grumbled one girl’s father to her suitor, come to ask for his blessing. The father twirled his long gray beard between his fingers and fell asleep just as his old wife awoke beside him. “What did my husband say to your proposal, child?” she asked.

The young suitor, Toshiro, was heartbroken and could not resist the dishonorable opportunity life had presented him. He replied, “Mrs. Yakamoto, your husband sees how much I love your daughter, how good a husband I will make. He has given his blessing.” Mrs. Yakamoto smiled and whisked the tea for a celebratory cup.

Soon, Mr. Yakamoto snapped awake, refreshed, to see tea being poured. Toshiro, his eyelids fluttering, said, “Esteemed he-elder, your wife is happy for us, and has blessed our union. She wishes you to be happy for us as well.” And he fell asleep.

He awoke to Mr. Yakamoto, his wife asleep. “Boy you have forsaken your honor. Never will you wed our daughter, and I shall tell all the elders of your wickedness. Leave at once,” he said in a low voice, and fell fast asleep. Toshiro rose, bowed to the sleeping man, and walked out of the house. In the garden, he looked up to the second-story window where, behind the lace curtains, he saw his beloved, her eyelids beginning to droop, and he sat down on the stone path and fell asleep.

“Will he find a way to marry her?” Julian had asked his father, and later imagined Carlton asking him.

“There’s no reason to think so,” his father replied, for Julian’s own good. Julian had always intended to answer Carlton just so, with the same tone of weary wisdom. “More tomorrow, little man. You’ve had a busy day.”

In later episodes, banished Toshiro made his way out of the hamlet (haltingly) and wandered the Japanese countryside, being wickedly abused by the regular-sleeping people of the rest of Japan. He was beaten, robbed, stripped naked, tied to trees and covered with honey; he woke to endless predicaments he needed to escape in ninety seconds. Julian’s father was willing to torture his creation, to use him to prove life’s enduring and unquestionable awfulness—that was Aidan’s view of the matter. “He used to tell you this when you were a motherless child” Aidan later marveled. “Not a nice man.”

The exiled lover was taken in by a monk in a conical hat and blue rabbit-fur slippers, who taught him the secrets of his order, which allowed Toshiro to shift and consolidate his sleep until, after years of study, he was able to sleep like a normal Japanese. When, for the first time, he slept for eight hours and worked the monk’s fields for sixteen, the monk told him he must leave, there was nothing more for him to learn. “But I have at last forgotten my sorrow,” protested Toshiro. “That is always the time happiness must end,” said the monk. “But master, I am happy here,” Toshiro insisted. “No, you have only learned to hide your unhappiness and form dreams from it instead.”

Toshiro, his face much changed by his new sleeping habits, returned to his village under a false name, feigning sleep for thirty seconds every ninety. He learned of his beloved’s marriage to a nasty butcher, a loveless match, though with fully unsynchronized sleep, pleasing the traditionalist parents. The butcher was also a thief. Having weighed out an order, he would, when his customers fell asleep, wrap up a lighter package, charging them for the amount they saw before losing consciousness. (Although–Julian’s father had to give him his due—some of his customers often took meat off the scale themselves, hiding it in their bags when the butcher fell asleep.)

The vengeful hero spied from the shadows as the butcher scolded his miserable wife, beat her until he fell asleep, then, waking, waited for her to wake up so he could continue the beating where he’d left off. Watching from behind a hanging pig carcass, Toshiro waited until the villain nodded off. Then he revealed himself, kissed the beloved hand, and hung his rival by his coat from a meat hook, leaving before the butcher awoke, letting the cur feel the presence of a devil, before returning to his hiding place in the forest where he caught his requisite eight hours of z‘s.

“He’s going to win her back and teach her to sleep like him,” Julian recalled sleepily predicting, as he now fell asleep in 1A.

One night, in the woods, in the midst of his long slumber, Toshiro awoke to find his beloved standing over him, sobbing silently. She had, with great difficulty, over several nights, followed him discreetly to his nesting area, one leg of the journey each night, since he was able to move so much more steadily. “I thought you were dead,” she moaned.

“No, only wandering the countryside, learning, planning to return for you, and now I have.”

“No! Not then, now. You have been asleep for hours.” She spoke this last word with disgust and finality, and then she fell asleep. Thirty seconds later she spat it again: “Hours!”

She began her slow return to the village and her butcher. She awoke ninety times en route, forest and stream, moon and sand, and each time Toshiro declared his love, entreated her to elope, vowed to teach her the long sleep. But her repulsion was too strong, and the ninety-first time, she awoke alone, and she praised her father’s wisdom in having prevented this nightmarish match.

“She preferred the butcher?” young Julian had demanded.

“Other people are not like you,” his father explained from the bedside. “Look, Julian: love is not sufficient. It never has been. Stories that claim otherwise are lies,” kindly instructed the man still weaving from his losses. “There’s always something after happily ever after.” (“He used to tell you that? When you were a kid?” Aidan later asked. “And you think that guy was not a sick, sad bastard?” “Of course he was,” Julian had said. “That’s easy. But you refuse to see the rest of what he was.”)

As with all childhood nighttime serials, this one had no end. It fizzled out, Julian reading to himself, or his father seeing him off to sleep with bedtime chat about jazz or baseball, or just a good night called up the stairs from beside the stereo, amidst liniment and beer and drawings of inflatable women.

The sleepers, Julian’s father confirmed years later in a hospital in Ohio, had been born in the Japanese hospital where he had swum in and out of morphine slumber, unable to hold on to consciousness for long, unable to drop very deeply into the turbulent narcotic sleep, while actual Japanese people kept themselves at a strange distance, visible only through soap-smeared windows, behind rakes and leaves, murmuring to one another beyond the iron fence, on the dirt path under the bare branches of the reticulated plane trees.

Julian awoke in darkness, not at first certain where he was, unsure how long he’d been asleep. His iPod was dead, so he plugged his headphones in to the armrest. He listened to the audio channels and soon heard Cait, singing for him even as she slept forty rows behind him. The corporate parody of a DJ called her “an Irish angel trapped in the body of your best dreams” and played “Bleaker and Obliquer,” their song, savored in star-eyed darkness, a red strobe on a wing somewhere behind him keeping the beat against the velour sky and the passing time zones, and she sang him back to sleep.

He woke again to the unnatural morning and the sizzle of a vitamin tablet hitting water. “You have some serious sinus clutter,” 1B reported. “You should get that looked at.” Outside, glassy river deltas, like cardiac vessels in a green cadaver, displayed shadows of clouds and the plane. The reflection in the window of Julian’s book stained ponds and fields of green squares with translucent murder victims and the Paris mosque. Lower, the plane’s shadow skewered Dublin’s cars and fleeing birds. Ribbons of cloud still stuck to the plane and streamed behind the wings as, with a squeal and hydraulic barking, the world was made real again. Julian donned his hood and super-fly eyewear, hurried to the door, and hid behind baggage carousels like Toshiro behind hanging pigs, watching her and waiting for their perfect moment.

15

THEY LANDED EARLY IN THE MORNING, but already distant objects had begun to ripple. He raced her to the hotel. Surprise me.

Surprise me. He couldn’t go to her before her tour had even begun, he decided, so in Dublin he posted to her website, just after she left them, the address of every shop and pub and old friend she visited; the cathedral where she sat in late-afternoon half-light listening to the organist rehearse and animate the statues and pillars and glass; even the police station from which she extracted her drummer late at night—a still life of her in motion, a fond hello, wish-we-were-here, a breath of inspiration blown into her ear by an invisible muse. He traced the stations of her journey on a map of the city, drew her final path as an ornately twisting snake with her face, added a high-sheen apple in the serpent-Cait’s open jaws and a self-portrait, as dubious Adam, J.D. on his fig leaf, reaching hesitantly for the tempting fruit, his own Adam’s apple high in his throat. He scanned and e mailed it to her from the Morgan le Fay business center, but when it came time for her tour’s opening notes, her triumphant return to Ireland, he couldn’t walk into the club. He paced outside because the bar was too crowded, too ordinary, and the Adam and Eve drawing already seemed stale. He had wanted to do something to replenish them before they met, the perfect last step before they touched, something to replace the lost poem and postcard, snatched by Rachel, but the new drawing was embarrassing now, just an old gag. There was no point to any more delay, but he went back to his hotel room, and while she sang across town, he sat there like the painting of tree-wrapped Merlin above the TV or the wood-mounted marlin above his bed, listened, on his iPod’s travel throne, to her demo, felt he was a serious contender for the most ridiculous man on earth, effortlessly the most ridiculous in Ireland.

Six hours later, the Smiths’ “London,” the Clash’s “London Calling,” and Lenny Kravitz’s “Mr. Cab Driver” played on his iPod until he fell asleep on the London cab’s hard leather. He dreamt of Carlton, casually conversational, dispensing wise advice, snapping his little fingers to something on his own mini, scarlet iPod. When Julian awoke, it was all he could do to avoid her. She was on the radio in the cab. The details of her London gig were on the posters lining the walls of a motorway sound barrier, where she peeped out at him again and again from behind a lowered Greek fisherman’s cap covering one eye. Her fame was expanding like a boiling ocean.

And then she was standing at Reception with Ian and the rhythm section and a manager of some sort, a boisterous bald Cockney translating from band to concierge with urgent unnecessity, drum and guitar cases piled high on the crimson velour of the brass-arched luggage cart, the groovy bellboy all in black, service fashions trying to keep up with Bohemia. No, not here, not in a group, not in the morning, not in a lobby, not with this lighting, not until he’d showered, not without a blast of pure desire animating him like an organ in an empty church, not unless she just came to him like his mother came to his father in the hospital, indifferent to his leg.

Julian retreated as far as he could within the sleek and barren lobby, couldn’t find a traditional potted plant and so squatted instead behind a transparent divan to fish out his hat and hood and glasses, then hid behind a mirrored pillar and looked hopelessly at the lobby’s three mirrored walls, its mirrored elevator bank, the mirrors of the reception desk, trying to find some angle by which he would not be projected onto the surfaces in front of her. He despaired at the infinite reversed and double-reversed and triple-reversed versions of himself, multiplying in all directions.

Some long time after her carnival entered two mirrored elevators and vanished, he, official and keyed, pushed 15 and stepped to the back. It stopped on 12. He knew enough to look down at once, his cap’s Yankees logo floating backward in the murk. She stepped in, white terrycloth robe turned up to her ears, hotel-cresty slippers at the ends of smooth legs. The mirror-black marble floor reflected her up to the knees before the view melted into cloudy warm suggestion. She touched the oblong SPA button and didn’t face the swaying man but toyed with her key behind her back, its black-diamond plastic with gold numbers dancing from hand to hand, back and forth, knuckle to knuckle, upside down and right side up, a digit here, inverted there.

At 13 a little American boy in a Boston Red Sox cap entered with his father. The boy stared relentlessly at Julian’s head until he couldn’t keep it in any longer: “The Yankees suck.” His father hushed him, tried to smile at the New York fan stubbornly facing the floor. At 15 the doors opened, and Julian could not move, and she didn’t look behind her but only touched SPA again. An unlit indicator circle read REMAIN CALM. HELP IS ON THE WAY. But it didn’t light up, and Julian feared he would shout for her or bite through his cheeks or melt backward into the black mirror, leaving a vaporized Hiroshima shadow as the only evidence he’d ever existed. The father and son exited at 18. Now, now, now, now’s the time. His lips would no longer function. They knew, if he did not, that his touch would corrupt; she would, with his fingerprints steaming on her, erode. Any beginning would begin the end, even to steal a ticklish touch of that terrycloth would start killing them, a murder even if the cameras in the high corners didn’t notice. She floated off into the clatter of weight machines and clouds of eucalyptus-scented steam, and the doors closed, and Julian dropped all the way back to the lobby before he could rebound again to 15, his rolling suitcase handle dripping.

He scolded himself in his room, slapped his own cheeks: How much of life could he spend aching? Aching is not a stable condition; it must resolve into something. The time had long since come to remove the poison thorn from his groin, wriggle free of the constricting past by scraping against new landscapes. He sat in 1529, thirty feet above her London home, and pictured himself rappeling from curtain to balustrade along knotted sheets, cutting his legs on the glass of her balcony door as he burst through, sputtering blood, unraveling DNA, fiber evidence, the shreds of his heart… and, never mind, she’s not there, have to take the elevator back upstairs, bleeding, call a nurse. Time zones swept back and forth across him. He struggled first to stay awake and then to stay asleep, like a Japanese butcher.

How much of life can be spent aching? He woke, went out, wandered for a place to eat and get a little drunk and find a new way to charm, amuse, inspire, tempt O’Dwyer. He passed a playground. Its giant wooden ship—beached in sand halfway up its hull, its cannons able to shoot tennis balls in short arcs just past the bow, HMS WHIMSY on its side—was almost completely unmanned in the sporadic rain. On the swing suspended from the bowsprit, a too old girl, fifteen, was listlessly drifting, trying to recapture something she’d last seen here.

He watched Cait sing that night at Liquide, a bigger place, a bigger crowd, bigger noise, London in the rain duly ready for her and, despite some of her fears, taking her as its own, not Dublin’s or New York’s, and London’s fearsomely bored critics purred and sighed, offered their tummies to her for rubbing. She’d never sung so beautifully. She amazed him, again, and he vowed to give her what she needed and wanted, to be who she wanted, and to begin whatever came next, melt himself down for that voice, that woman.

16

IN PARIS, he still hadn’t thought of how best to proceed, though he’d decided it couldn’t happen in Paris, when the concierge at l’Etoile Cachee handed him an envelope:

Even with a dictionary and his high school French he still needed an online translation, and then he learned that she had decided for them: the rue Quincampoix, tonight. She decided. She had to, and he wouldn’t resist. He sat in the hotel lobby walking his finger along the map.

He followed his map to the rue Quincampoix, a crooked medieval lane stuffy with neon and art galleries and smut and irritability. He walked it from end to end in the afternoon heat so he would know where to stand at midnight when she would slip away from her band and admirers at le Nid d’Araignee and come to the place she had chosen. At the top of the road their poem was mounted on the wall in relieved bronze.

At the bottom of the road he noticed a second plaque—blue enamel with white letters. The coincidence was uncanny, unnerving, dream material:

His French was good enough. He stood, blinking, his hand half-lifted to touch the dust-dulled words she had discovered for him. At which end of the street did she expect him? She sent him to the poem, their fitting moment? Or she sent him the poem to guide him here, to learn of a namesake’s murder?

He would not hear her sing tonight, wouldn’t even listen to her on the iPod but would await her without music, his ears as hungry for her as the rest of him. He ate alone and walked a spiral spun out from the top of the rue Quincampoix, walked past the building where his mother grew up, rode a boat up and down the black Seine while Cait was serenading her conquered city. The tour boat’s spotlights lit the river’s brick embankments, and the shadows of the skinny trees on the riverside walkway were projected against the walls of the higher promenades, and the swaying, branching shadows wandered down the walls as the boat pulled its lights down the river; the trees watched a film about trees that could move.

The path he walked through Paris had not been entirely random. He had avoided the small hotel where he and Rachel had slept late for a week. He had turned his back when the boat passed the Eiffel Tower, and he had conjugated verbs out loud to mask the prerecorded narration in four languages of any site they’d shared. Paris had to be large enough to contain two separate, nonoverlapping love stories.

Ideally, they should have selected somewhere he had no history at all, and he did consider skipping the appointment, somehow leaving word for her to find him in unknown Bucharest, unclaimed Berlin, wherever there were no competitive memories, but he didn’t have the energy or courage. The thought of touching her was now fixed like a window screen over everything he saw and did and bought and read and heard and tasted.

The two women—one a figment of his past, the other a figment of his future—did battle for Paris. When the boat described something new to him—Napoleon’s battles, Richelieu’s manipulations, rash responses to a plague, the palace burnt by long-dried grievances set aflame by a rhetorical spark—he listened and tried to absorb it as part of his and Cait’s history. When the lights carried his eye too quickly to a spindly bridge where he’d kissed his new wife, or the department store’s awning shadows where they’d stolen shelter from another drizzle, he stuffed his ears with headphones like one of Odysseus’s sailors and turned his mind instead to the street Cait had chosen, the poem in bronze.

He returned early to the rue Quincampoix; she was probably still onstage. The street faded out below him at an obtuse angle, cut twice by other narrow roads. Too tight for modern life, still it blinked its reactions to the expanding world: GALERIE D’ART, DISQUES VINYLES, 24/24 SEXE. He touched the bottom edge of their plaque, another era’s rendezvous after music and crowds.

He walked the length of the street a dozen times, imagining it gray and shadowed sixty years before, imagined an old film of himself meeting a long-pursued love in those days, the cool of her hand, the warmth of her breath so overwhelming after the world and its monsters.

He prepared for all her approaches, from the north, by the poem, him caught unawares as she came straight from the club and her latest triumph, swimming to him from pool of light to pool of light. Or at the middle intersection, the terrace doors unfolding now, the shouting in Arabic, a bright bar open to the street, lined with hookah hoses. Or from the south, the dark end nearer the river, the peep-show club at the crossroad, him walking down to her, meeting at that eerie postcard from an unknown ancestor, sent to arrive at the most crucial moment of his life, as a warning or a blessing. He worried over spending too long at either end, missing her arrival, her thinking he’d rejected her, her departure.

He compromised, sat at the hookah bar, smoked through a woven hose the dried fruit and tobacco, watching toward both hidden ends of the street while the bulky Arab owner who smelled of cumin-scented sweat warmly welcomed him and asked about New York, shared with Julian the secret that all the Jews who worked in the World Trade Center had stayed home that fateful morning, warned by their central authority.

Julian listened to the street, the setting of the jewel that would be her voice greeting him apres la foule, their first words in person. The summer heat pried open third-story shutters, released arguments and laughter that fell to the arch-patterned bricks and cobblestones. A prostitute whose 1 A.M. offer he’d smilingly rejected now returned and stood next to him anyhow: “I am bored and do not feel the work, but I must appear busy.” She accompanied him for a few circuits of his patrol and translated the best of the street’s voices for him, the two o’clock shrieks and moans and threats and jokes. She smelled of a perfume he recalled from a film-school girlfriend, fashions having floated downriver to Paris’s Turkish prostitutes, unless the budgets of students and street women had always been comparable. “He says she is a liar. She says he deserves nothing so good?” she narrated, then asked, “You don’t want me or you don’t want no one?” but she was no longer narrating. Noticing the weakness that had crept into her voice, she added, “I have friends maybe you like better.” Scooters purred and circled.

Cait could have been delayed by fans or press, and he decided to keep waiting, but there would come an hour when she would no longer bother to turn up because she would assume he’d already left. And with that thought he saw her at the far south, by his obituary and the sex club. He jogged, then sprinted past the old Chinese man on the step; past the broken neon offering a buzzing and enigmatic GA; past the Turkish girls’ mackerel, a Swede or a German, shaven close and inked with a map of the sixteenth-century world across his bare back, collecting from his strolling employees; past the shuttered bars and blacked-out, papered-over doors; and it wasn’t Cait at all, just another of the street’s itinerant entertainers misreading his eager approach. She swore at his sudden halt and change of expression, and she spit at his feet and gestured her feelings intricately at him. Above her head, at one of the street’s eastern openings, the sky’s color underwent its first changes. He had given five hours in tribute to Cait, unnoticed and unimpressive, and there in the light was Cait’s face flaking like dried skin, low on the fluted post of a hesitantly extinguishing street lamp.

Back at the hotel, he asked the Etoile Cachee’s night reception man to ring her room. Hair slicked back, pencil mustache, head turned to examine his guest with only one eye, he smiled his condolences. “She has disembarked, sir, with her entourage and my great regret.”

“And mine, and mine,” he said with his father’s weary worldly wisdom and a shaking that overtook his hands and then all his limbs, and by the time he’d scraped his key into the door and had reached the WC, he was quaking with fever, asleep, it felt, even as he was sick in that toilet stall wallpapered with illustrations from a seventeenth-century fencing manual. Hours later that same morning, when his fever climbed daringly high, some of the chevaliers cocked their eyebrows at him as they slowly drew on and immediately peeled back off their deerskin gloves, only to slowly pull them back on again.