Read The Song is You (2009) for Free Online

She’s looking up now, a smile approaches, but no, she’s listening to her own music on her own iPod, maybe a dirge about the fate of a doomed sea voyage, and Julian closes his eyes and the lyrics to the Cait O’Dwyer song begin to lodge in his memory.
    He climbed back to the surface of Manhattan at Twenty-third Street, right where he started. Something snowy was falling out of a clear blue sky. He returned to the studio, where Maile had conjured one of his requested girls. He watched the makeup artist add moisture to this Italian model’s lips. Each sweep of the brush added to the girl’s ripe succulence. A precise amount of visible humidity was necessary to evoke sex without bringing to mind dull biology and oral hygiene. “Wait.” He stopped Makeup when she would have moved on to the Italian girl’s eyes. “More to the lips. Again. More. Again. Once again. Done—thank you.”
5

    BACK IN 2006 , Ian Richfield and Cait O’Dwyer were put in touch by a mutual friend who knew they had both recently fled crap bands. They arranged by email to meet at Ian’s apartment. He offered her a beer, they exchanged war stories, tested for shared acquaintances, and then she said, “Well, let’s give it a go,” not very hopefully.
    And up until that moment, Ian often recalled, anything was still possible. He imagined subsequently that when she said, “Well, let’s give it a go,” he said nothing, simply grabbed her, any part of her he could reach and hold on to, took her on the floor, ran his hands over and under her oversized sweater, seized the back of her head and pushed her face into his, fell to his knees, pressed his cheek against her crotch.
    No. He had laughed and said, “Wow, listen to you. All right, chief, let’s
do
, let’s give it a go.” And partially because it was his hands’ first reflex whenever he picked up his guitar to practice alone and partially to see if the cute Irish girl knew anything about music, he started the Cure’s intro of Hendrix’s “Foxey Lady.” She nodded like a surgeon and told him to take it up a third. He clipped his capo, and she was right there, no errors, no lost words, even quoted the ad-lib from the record—
“This is a good intro”
—but something more: she played off of him, filled in the spaces he left for her, offered him ideas. She sat on the speckled stepladder he had stolen from one of his house-painting jobs, but then stood up halfway through the song and turned up both her volume and his.
“I won’t do you no harm. You’ve got to be all mine, all mine.”
He played this song—which he had studied from an old CD of his uncle’s the very day his parents had bought him an electric guitar—with a ferocity he’d always assumed was only granted to a musician in front of an attentive crowd. He took twice the solo space, keeping the rhythm moving without bass or drums and without interrupting the flow of his ideas. As the fuzz of his last chord was still drifting down to the floor of his loft, he could
still
have changed things, and in recent self-abusive musings, he swung his guitar off his shoulder, tipped over his brown folding metal chair, attached his mouth to her ear, and his hands corrugated her breasts before the amp was done buzzing.
    No. He didn’t. There was this moment. This one moment had come and waited for him, and when he stood still, it had gone on its way forever. That very first song ended, and they both knew: the sound had been a multiple of them both. And they knew. They sat in a long silence as the sound they had made traveled down the street, out to sea, up to distant stars. Only the low hum of his amp persisted, and he was afraid (as she looked at him and he considered leaping at her) that the pickup from his guitar would pick up his heartbeat and play it for her. He pressed his tongue against his upper lip and rolled his black pick with its clean whorled thumbprint over and under his knuckles. She reached for the cigarettes she no