Read The Song is You (2009) for Free Online Page A

longer had in her bag, having quit a week earlier, and he walked to the fridge for two more beers. They chose.
    The choice was mutual but they had opposite reasons: he was a coward, she was ruthless. In his defense, he hadn’t known the choice was going to be inscribed eternally as grave marble law. That was
her
will, enforced from that moment on with flinchless discipline. If he’d known, he told himself, he would have chosen her over the music, over anything. He would have.
    “How about ‘London Calling’?” she suggested. He played everything she asked. Their vast vocabularies and listening histories—their long educations for this moment—overlapped almost without overhang. He called more and more obscure favorites (Cramps, Creeps, Crito’s Apology, Crooked Bastards, Crud), and she almost never pleaded ignorance, rarely even hesitated, just requested different keys until he started to compensate for her range automatically. He had never known anyone to keep up with him at calling tunes, let alone force an admission that he was weak in the canonical Irish bands. She couldn’t really play guitar but she could sing him through his part of a Pogues song, “Na-na naa rhythm and then up to the five and back down and then break for two bars of unintelligible slurring.”
    He especially loved how she handled the songs originally sung by men, how she either sang the lyric straight (singer wants girl) and then gleefully, evilly put it over as a blood-red lipstick-lesbian tune, or reversed the pronouns (singer wants boy) and then she could vary it, do it as neurotic girl or raging girl or seductive girl or funny girl. The best, though, was when she kept a man’s lyric the same but then somehow turned its meaning around, kept it in his words but put the whole thing in quotation marks, as if she were singing what a man had once sung to her and now she was only recalling it. Elvis Costello’s “Alison,” a jealous ex-lover’s unhinged ballad, became in her mouth Alison’s defense and grudging admission of shared guilt:
“I heard you let that little friend of mine / take off your party dress”
became as much about the girl’s remorse as the man’s jealousy.
    “This is something I’ve been fooling around with, if anything comes to mind,” he said and played a chord pattern, and in minutes she found some words and a melody that he desperately wished he’d written and then knew he never could have, not with infinite time or infinite musical training or infinite therapy. He suggested “Infinite Monkeys” as a title. She wisely disagreed.
    Two years had puffed away since that first afternoon in Williams-burg. They wrote all the band’s songs together. He contributed almost equally to all band decisions
(almost—
it was her increasingly magnetic name that drew all shiny good fortune to them). And he had adjusted his personality around the pointlessness of his feelings for her, molded himself around their absence. As if he were constantly carrying a heavy box down steep stairs, his posture had come to reflect his predicament; he curved, slouched, withdrew even when standing. He ground his teeth when he thought about it, stood naked in front of the mirror in the bathroom, looked at the pale slump and scrawn and dangle of the case he’d been issued. There was nothing to be done. A gym-designed coat of mannerist muscles would not add anything important; what he lacked was unacquirable.
    When they played he stood up a little straighter, watched her for cues, for the reflection of his music on her face. Something awoke and rustled between them onstage, sometimes from the first note, and that current—even when her back was to him and he was looking down at his hands or pedals—powered part of the band’s appeal. Men liked her, but women—in audiences, at the record label—saw how Cait looked at him and understood the underlying balance, and they found Ian more attractive as a result of her attention, as if she