The Song is You (2009) by Arthur Phillips Read Free Book Online

breath. As if to tease him in his months-old mood, like a banderillero with a worthless bull, Julian’s iPod suggested his old no-fail song, and he had to laugh in the cold air:
that
song of eight thousand categorized possibilities. His own iPod felt free to mock him. When he was in high school, he had discovered the no-fail song’s magnetic field only by chance: if it played unexpectedly on the radio or a mix tape, then the night ahead would provide effortless adventure, Zen promiscuity. If, however, Julian ever
intentionally
used the song to inflate sagging confidence, it had no effect; its potency was only accidentally available.
    The song had once flung him from victory to coincidence to miracle across a single day. The memory of that day came back to him in pieces now, as he jogged, and the first piece to arrive was not one of the women’s faces, or a perfume, not even the season or weather the day his triple crown had been awarded. No, the first recollection was the sensation against his ear of an old-model headset’s padded disc. It was orange (the next memory), which meant it was connected to his silver-blue cassette Walkman, which fixed that extraordinary day prior to reliable portable CD players, so probably 1988; he had been twenty-three. And only then, after that calculation, did the whole day return, the Manhattan October. He had even—the next day, not sure he still lived on the same planet as everyone else—suggested to a bartender friend that there should be a drink called an October Manhattan, and he pledged to finance the research and patent if his friend could reproduce in a glass the experience Julian had had over the previous nineteen hours, the feeling that his well-being and the well-being of the whole world were connected through his headphones, and that the recognition of that connection would always lead inevitably to his meeting and sleeping with some stranger.
    Or, on that day, three strangers in succession. If such a thing were a matter of some statistical improbability, then two-a-days should have happened 50 percent more often, but they never had. No, something impossible occurred that day, a meteor landing at his feet with a steaming whimper, a jowly basset hound wishing him a brisk “Good day,” a broken bottle reconstituting itself. And any man should have looked back across those two decades, with the same song in his ears, and felt warmly nostalgic.
    Except nostalgia like that requires some identification between the recalled and the recalling selves, and as Julian couldn’t imagine even talking up a stranger now, could hardly remember sexual arousal, he didn’t feel anything besides amusement at the boy who had done
that
so many eons ago. He remembered him but could not hear what he was thinking from this distance.
    He jogged down Atlantic Avenue, past the unmarked door of the Rat, its melted snow refreezing into silver seascapes, recalled, for a moment, Cait O’Dwyer’s voice and laid it over the song he was actually hearing. Two girls in their twenties were on the sidewalk, but instead of the no-fail song stoking a longing for the girls, the girls’ proximity somehow damaged his iPod’s electronics, and all the potency seeped out of the music, and the girls disintegrated as soon as he looked carefully, and he thought irresistibly of his estimated taxes.
    “Never Gonna Love Anyone (but You)” shuffled up next, the first time in ages. He used to play it for Rachel, early in their engagement, as a promise. He’d stood on the new bed, straddling her as she awoke to him singing along with the CD, demanding she join him on the chorus. He also sang it as a reminder to himself, a little jingling spur to the heart, when he found, to his disappointment, that even an engagement had not transformed him into a monogamist.
    Before and after his wedding, Julian still indulged in the perquisite struggling actresses and relaxing models his work delivered him. He sampled here and there a