The Song is You (2009) by Arthur Phillips Page B

he blinked rapidly, trying to smell something else. “He’s a cretin if he won’t beg you to come back.” And then she was crying, and Aidan recklessly promised, “I can bring him to you, whenever
you
want him back.”
    Rachel’s adoption of Aidan had not been a sacrifice for her. He cleaned her apartment obsessively and could make her laugh, to his great satisfaction (and that pleased her most of all: she
satisfied
Aidan, without ever even touching him). More to her benefit, she had eagerly watched his improvement and won—from constantly strategizing how best to handle and help him—some much-needed distraction. She liked solving the puzzle of other people, comparable to Aidan’s love of crosswords. Before she first called him after the Incident, she spent a happy hour calculating how best to approach him, and when she concluded that she must show no sympathy, must hide her deep pity for him, it was a triumphant deduction. She had a suspicion he was holed up in his little apartment with self-hatred, watching his Google hit count rocket, reading the blogs and boards that misunderstood and mocked him, no one noticing the simple fact that he’d been awfully good at that game before his slip of the tongue, no one out there who knew that Aidan coming to dinner every Wednesday had made her husband happy, even in mourning. She was the only one to guess that he was contributing to Web bulletin boards under false names, defending himself, not against the nonsense charges of anti-Semitism but against the brutal charges of stupidity.
    She realized, too, after the first few days, that he was now half in love with her, and all those Wednesdays took on new retrospective colors as a result. She could trace the odd shape of his love, its unlikely contours and limitations.
12

    THE SUNDAY TIMES ran a long profile of Cait O’Dwyer, “Singer on the Verge,” which Julian read and reread with the absorption of a monk illuminating a manuscript.
    The piece, by Milton Chi, fawned, but in the ironic tone of a celebrity journalist pretending to be above fawning, a profile in which the interviewer steps in to play an intrusive starring role, making insightful comments to his subject, hinting that the interview has become the record of a sparkling, flirtatious affair that carries on far into the shimmering night while the subscriber is left at home bunching in jealous fists his inky pages. The love-daffy Mr. Chi left the consummation of his interview in a gentlemanly haze of implication but also revealed a fan’s fear of insignificance: “She’s happy, or so she’ll let you think. She doesn’t mind. She admits to no heartbreak or regret. The world is endlessly exciting to her, she says, and brushes off questions about sadnesses overcome. ‘No, I’m having more fun than should be allowed.’ She’s tough, because that’s how they are back in County Wicklow, seat of rebels. She’ll tell you she’s kin to Michael O’Dwyer, terror and scourge of the English militias in 1798, and she’ll say ‘You can’t trust a Wickla woman,’ and then laugh at you or with you, and now you don’t mind. She’s ‘our Cait’ still, as they say at the Rat, but she wasn’t always, and we can’t hope she always will be, can we?”
    The photos (more available online) included two of her performing at the Rat, and Julian recognized the very moments; he must have been within a few feet of the
Times
photographer, and of this poodly writer as well. One shot had Cait onstage looking demure, as if she’d just been complimented squarely on a point of pride; the other, one hand on the black mike, enraged, in full howl, her eyes shut. “Her charms and her talent are sui generis,” read the swollen text pulled into a box floating in the middle of the article. The details of her (major) label’s vast plans for her (bland background: the industry in perpetual crisis, digital erosion of profits, hundreds of eggs pyramid-balanced in Cait’s basket), the