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

brought the best of him out to where everyone could see it. He pictured her when he slept with some of those girls after gigs. He suspected she knew that.
    Offstage, she fixed him in place with compliments and ironic bossiness, and he tended not to look at her at all when they spoke. He was the only one in the band she called by name, implying a permanence to his position that was professionally reassuring but personally debilitating. When they wrote together, or when one presented the other with something prepared in private, with no audience to absorb the excess, he felt the room crowding with their other selves, lives unled and correspondences unwritten, happinesses opted against, and he could not believe she did not see it, too. He sweated to ornament her fears and tall tales and fake self-portraits, and with the remnants of his energy he hid the rest of himself from her. The best of him was a child’s drawing of her on an off day.
    He had no illusion that this was bittersweet or somehow necessary to make art. It just burned. Anyone who felt this would take their hand off the stove at once, but he was locked in position, inches from the source of his pain, for as far into the future as he could see, because if he was going to be a musician, if he was going to protect the one profound and real thing about himself, the one thing he loved besides her (but which only she made appear at its strongest), then he would be a fool to leave a singer who so obviously was going to go all the way.
    And her? Cait didn’t notice that Ian was in pain, or, if she did, the knowledge came only in flashes, which she denied at once, joked away. She reminded herself (in the voice of a childhood priest) not to have so much vanity that she cast everyone around her as extras in her drama. More determining, two years of success had led her to an impenetrable and unfalsifiable superstition that their situation—whatever it was—worked, and to change it, perhaps even to
think
about it, would put at risk all they had gained. Whatever percentage of their professional good fortune depended upon a mutually felt but unspoken tension, it was critical enough that only a psychopath would tamper with it. And so she was never so controlled and business-minded as when they were alone during their collaborative sessions in Ian’s latest apartment (never in hers).
    And he, as co-conspirator, would prepare the room for her arrival with the attention paid by a criminal to his fiber evidence, leaving no sign of any other person in his life, without implying there was any inviting space for her. If someone had spent the night, all trace of her was gone or closeted before Cait arrived. Photos were drawered, gifts were stowed, and his cell was off, not just muted; he didn’t want to look at the screen with her watching (besides, if he took a call during their work, she would cluck like a CEO and tap an imaginary watch on her wrist). He carefully turned off the volume of his landline’s antique answering machine, which might otherwise broadcast through-out the room his life’s entanglements. When they were writing, she would only nod after a successful experiment, or after a misstep, she would shake her head and laugh and say in a posh English accent, “I’m afraid that’s shit, that is.” And he would beg in his best Dickensian moppet voice, “Please, mum, can we try again, please?”
    He considered her ruthless, in his moments of pain, but also in moments of happiness, experienced mere feet from her but bound right wrist to left ankle by her rules: nothing could evolve, nothing could be consummated, nothing repressed could surface, nothing previously accepted could be ignored. One must not speak of it, in case one could no longer sing of it. Instead, she only kept directing his attention to the wondrously charged air they could tame and make dance between them.
6

    THE TAIL END of a damp morning’s jog, pushing through icy clouds of his own visible