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

tasty intern. Once it had been provocative. But by the time he was engaged, it was only evocative, recalling previous negotiations and love songs. Romance and sex became not joyless—not at all—but a pleasant exercise in recalling previous joy, an infinite regression with infinitely diminishing returns. He had still laughed through drinks and kisses with all his parts alert and his sense of destiny and romance sharp, and his mind never wandered, he didn’t check his watch mid-grope, he savored their bodies and the atmospheric vicinity, the ice cubes in the water resembling dental X-rays, her clear-polished nail running lightly over the pale pink grooves of her adman lips, the dual, peelable scallops of bronzed calf joining under the muscular
H
at the back of her knee as she walked from table to coat check, while a not-at-all-bad piano player laced together “All of Me,” “All of You,” “All the Things You Are,” and “All the Way.”
    He’d also tasted enough by then to know that it was, at least, not what all those songs of longing had been hinting at after all. But that wisdom never prevented the next liaison.
    He had always intended to be monogamous. He embraced the idea of it, in principle and for him personally, and especially with his girlfriend-become-fiancee-become-wife. But metamorphosing from polygamous to monogamous was not the simple molt that pop music had long promised him. In fact, opportunities for seducing other women only increased upon his engagement, multiplied even more fruitfully after his wedding. Propaganda songs for true love alternated with contrarian pop music that kept promising some unknown, almost unknowable blurry bliss in
that
one’s eyes (no, wait,
that
one’s), and both types of song seemed credible but seemed also to refer to experiences that he hadn’t yet had; he was not yet living the life described by music, and (the music implied) this was
his
fault. For all that he loved his wife, adored her company, expected their union to last a lifetime, he was never for long free of the old sensation of longing, longing for something that had turned out, to his puzzlement, not to be her either.
    His brother, Aidan, aware of his infidelities in those days, viewed Julian as a pig. “This carnal gluttony is beneath you,” he scolded, but Julian argued that his sin wasn’t quite gluttony.
    “Then it’s a failure of your imagination,” Aidan filed new charges, and that accusation hurt, though it came from a man who had likely never touched a female. It stung Julian because he still viewed himself in those days as a man of vast imagination, an artist no matter the literally commercial nature of his work. But Aidan was inexcusably right: Julian could
not
imagine—even with Rachel—how such an arrangement would exist as they aged, how aging would affect sex and romance, what familiarity might breed (whether contempt or something less easily imaginable). And, in the light of Aidan’s scorn, Julian’s next few exemptions to the marital contract were spoiled, not art but failure, the gutless repetition of previously praised work.
    Toward the very end of his polygamous life, he wandered (not for the first time) down a dim, fetishistic alley to see where it led him (complimenting himself for his imagination as he roamed). This last game began by him saying, “Tell me what you’re doing to me,” demanding from his partner a play-by-play narration. Then it became: “Tell me about a time you’ve done this to someone else,” as it was done to him. Later: “Tell me about someone walking in on us, walking toward the building, going about her day while you do this.” Later still, in its most rococo formulation, the girl he was holding, a struggling and eventually failed playwright, narrated a long history eight removes from Julian himself: (1) a woman in a restaurant sitting alone recalling a night she once spent in the arms of (2) a rough man (a kick-boxing champ), who in turn had