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

later watched in anguish through binoculars as (3) a woman in the apartment across the street from his stood naked and spoke on the phone to (4) a former lover, who, at that very moment, was doing to (5) another woman what the woman on the phone was describing to him, and then, afterward, that other woman left his apartment and told of her adventure to (6) a close girl-friend, who later indiscreetly repeated it in the steam room of a health club to several barely loinclothed women, one of whom (7) had an obsessive attraction to (8) another listener in the sauna, who was the very woman just then placing her hands on Julian.
    There had to be a last one; that was the last one. And then he became different. As is often the hope but rarely the case, the stimulus to change that Julian required was his wife’s pregnancy, and then the effect was photon fast, a microwave conversion from boy to man, dog to human, unimaginative to imaginative, as he knelt on the bathroom floor and pressed his ear to Rachel’s belly. The change that had been promised but not produced by their courtship, engagement, wedding, honeymoon, homemaking, even by his beloved brother’s disappointment in him, had occurred at last. With this new growth, Julian’s fingers swelled until his wedding ring could no longer be slipped off.
    As if purging old toxins, his unconscious mind then spit up acidic dreams of jealousy. He would dream Rachel was ferociously promiscuous, and he would, restrained by invisible wires, watch her betrayals, or learn of them from casual friends or passing thugs or his own snickering parents. The dreams scorched him. He writhed, bound his hands in damp sheets, stripped the covers from Rachel until she swatted him, and he would awaken, nightmare-pounding and amazed. He had never felt jealousy in waking life, at least never at these temperatures, and never once, not a pale red ember, over his wife.
    Otherwise, the end of other women’s appeal was neither painful nor, considering how much energy he had spent over the previous twenty years pursuing and avoiding them, particularly disturbing. Rather it was like he had finally developed antibodies strong enough to keep his system clear of infection. He had never expected to be an elderly philanderer. He had always thought loyalty would win out, and when it did, with a small black-and-silver ultrasound photo (knees hiked to the chin, the sea-horse spine, the string-of-pearls vertebrae, the tiny fist of greeting), Julian looked at passing women with a feeling of gratitude and a fond, regretless farewell. It was a feeling, he later told Aidan, much closer to love than when he had longed to buy them food, walk them through parks, touch their cheeks. He saw them and he would hurry home to his wife, so eager was he to make love or stroke her hair or simply watch her maneuver that impossible abdominal luggage around the room. Even when he discovered, to his laughing astonishment, that pushing a stroller or wearing a Baby Bjorn was even more appealing to single women than a wedding ring or (according to one friend) walking beagle puppies, the women held no power over him, and his laughter was colored by relief.
    During Rachel’s pregnancy and for two more years, he was permitted to live in a gated garden with walls of flowering vines, long promised but never accurately described by music, and he felt, these thirty-three months (sleepless nights, sexless weeks, lingering fat thighs notwithstanding), that he was earth’s most fortunate man. He longed—no matter the music around him—for nothing but slower days and endless evenings.
    “‘Waterfront’! ‘I Cover the Waterfront’!” Julian had found Rachel pressing his headphones against the striped armor of her belly. “That’s your grandpa on lead vocals,” she said, her chin on her chest, and Julian choked with love for her.
    The question had occurred to him, then and later: If there had been no child, could he ever have become a real