The Song is You (2009) Read Free

discussing Julian’s late mother did not automatically result—verbally or tacitly—in references to the desecration of his father’s most cherished relics of her.
    When the label that bought the Bird on a Wire catalog reissued two Billie Holiday concerts as the CD
Summer Holiday
, Julian had already pursued several false leads over the years, bringing home the wrong concerts, studio versions of “Waterfront,” even a drag queen doing a Holiday impression
(I Am Billie!
, Stonewall Records, 1979). He kept his quest to replace the LP secret from his father, listening to the records alone to protect him from disappointments, but the old man had discovered this last disc in Julian’s room, and Julian came home to find him listening to it, clearly believing it had been left lying out for him as a cruel joke. Julian showed him the collection of failed purchases, and his father, now laughing, extracted a filial promise that they would open and listen to records together from then on.
    Thus
Summer Holiday
. In 1985 Julian, visiting from film school, carried with him the sealed CD and a CD player to suture onto his father’s old stereo. He presented his latest discovery in its long, slim box. “Seems
possible
,” Julian said. His father studied the liner notes: Recorded live in concert at the State Theater, Minneapolis, 1952, and the Galaxy Theater, New York City, 1953. Track fourteen: “I Cover the Waterfront.”
    Conversationless, bumbling, Julian sweated to connect the CD player to the rest of the elderly hi-fi and produce anything besides robotic clicking. A trip into town was necessary for a requisite cable, and a second trip to two different stores for a golden and rare umbilical adapter. When Julian returned, both times, his father hadn’t moved, sat with the unopened CD in his lap. He silently looked at his hands while Julian swore unimaginatively every time he misattached the cords or pricked his finger on a lurking staple.
    He wouldn’t let Julian skip ahead to track fourteen, or even to ten, the first song at the Galaxy. First they had to travel to Minneapolis thirty-three years earlier and take in the entire show where some man had shouted, “‘God Bless the Child’!” and Billie replied, “All right, honey, that’s a fine idea.” Julian watched his father’s face for a concert and a half. What could he still hope to feel? If the headphoned engineers had restored the whole exchange, dusted off a crumbling reel in the Bird on a Wire archives, would his father enjoy the fleeting sensation of a wife, a leg, a future before him? Julian watched him: his eyes were closed, but he was surely awake, for he rubbed his hip, the geographic end of his right side (“the Cape of No Hope,” he called it), a nervous gesture but palliative of some eternal ache. He didn’t seem any more agitated when the applause followed track thirteen, “My Man,” nor when a blue 14 formed on the CD player’s screen, and the applause rolled over seamlessly, the applause that nestled within it the sound of his own hands, his excitement, his capacity to love the singer soon to be diverted and channeled toward his future wife.
    In Julian’s childhood living room, his past actions and his father’s history awaited the next sounds from two black boxes on the floor, waited to receive their newest meaning, perhaps their final meaning. If Julian’s behavior was ever forgivable, not irrevocably cruel, then this moment would determine it. If music can ever restore a lost past, then this was the moment. Redemption! We do crave it. But music is different: we tolerate songs without redemption.
Will the one I love be coming back to me?

    Ground control to Major Tom:

Commencing countdown, engines on
.
    —Lincoln-Mercury ad

1

    JULIAN DONAHUE’S GENERATION were the pioneers of portable headphone music, and he began carrying with him everywhere the soundtrack to his days when he was fifteen. When he was twenty-three and new to the city, he