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

him with a model, and Julian studied her face slowly, a face he’d hired from a photo, before shaking his head and her hand: “Thank you, but not today. Maile, sign her papers with my apologies.” This was somewhat for the client’s marketing managers visiting the set—corporate sleepwalkers for whom a day amidst cameras and lights watching a director’s offhand dismissal of high-rent beauties, damn the expense, was one of the job’s titillating perks, a whiff of diva glamour.
    But the last-minute firing of models was becoming increasingly common, and Julian was lately frustrating modeling agencies with his sharpening standards and his refusal to explain them. Early in his career, he’d realized that the final test before engaging a model had to be the search for premonitions of aging. Not symptoms: premonitions. Julian could—often at a glance—see how and where most women’s faces were only temporary versions of their older selves. He could spot the shame even in some of the modelinas of nineteen or twenty; he could see their old-womanhood lurking, while the ideal faces (and that Irish singer’s, come to think of it) gave no hint, showed no vulnerability. Others would hire those same women, obviously; he had no exclusive claim on them. But he would never book the esteemed ubermodel whose dark secret he had glimpsed. Despite advances in CGI, even the best retouching guys couldn’t reliably erase the truth, and so Julian maintained his standard, his trade secret, and all of his ads—from the prosaic floor cleaner sold by a magnificently beautiful “housewife” identifiable by her rolled-sleeve oxford to the exalted mascara shot close enough to show pores—produced in the client the same paradoxical sensations of danger and safety, lust and exaltation. He was, for several years running, the single most rehired director in the city, though it was a very rare marketing person who could have explained why.
    The problem, however, had arisen in the last eight to ten months: there were fewer women whose future elderliness (even elderly beauty) was imperceptible. He was hiring slightly younger than he used to, but the bottom limit loomed as large as the top. He couldn’t explain this to frustrated model-house reps, because he didn’t want to disclose his tricks, but the truth was plain: more and more women looked merely temporarily beautiful. He knew this was likely a result of Carlton and Rachel; certain events were going to permanently affect one’s vision. Still, he was saddened to see the effect, the growing endangerment of one species of beauty.
    He pointed to six possible replacements in the binders, gave Maile time to call to check availability, authorized her to pay rush penalties, and left the set with an air of purpose, but only to ride the F train and listen to his iPod.
    And now Julian sits on the F train in a nearly empty car. At the far end, wired to a slender iPod full of hip-hop, a young black man dressed for corporate life bobs and mutters to himself like a Talmudic scholar. Julian is slightly affected by the dismissed model’s face and disappointment. She smelled of breath mints not quite eradicating the evidence of a recent noisy purge, and now from the banking train’s orange plastic seat he examines the reasonably but not impossibly pretty girl across from him. Hers is a kind of prettiness he appreciates all the more, considering his daily routine shaping and, frame by frame, preserving ludicrous beauty, and in his headphones a love song plays, a different girl singing, an Irish girl, and she sings of the vast golden fields of possibility that stretch out before him, there for him to wander through, the sun will never finish setting. It is physically impossible—with the right song—for a certain sort of man not to feel (before he remembers how to think) that the girl across the subway aisle hears and feels something, too, that she will be his co-star in this romance-glazed landscape.