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.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.12THE 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 A&R man’s oily praise and acrobatic hopes, the life story—artfully burnished here and tarnished there—of her Irish girlhood, the village twenty miles from Wicklow Town where her maimeo still talked of banshees and will-o’-the-wisps while young, willowy Cait had to drag the boys into manhood, so ready was she for life, and the Big Move across the sea when she was eighteen, with some Immigration issues, now more or less settled to all parties’ legal satisfaction, and the exhilarating dive into the Village and Loisaida and Harlem and Brooklyn, the experiments with jazz and soul, the late-night jam sessions and compositions and heroes and influences (a list matching almost to the album—but for some newer names he’d never heard of–Julian’s late-night speculations), and then this, the detail that caused Julian to reread and reread and reread:Part of the joy in watching Ms.O’Dwyer perform is to see and hear her varied influences on shameless display, to notice how she draws on, and then makes her own, her godmothers, as varied as Sinead O’Connor, Janis Joplin, even Billie Holiday.When I tell her this, citing as an example her vocal work on “Blithering,” Ms.O’Dwyer fidgets with her silver Claddagh ring and several times starts to speak, but stops herself, as if unsure of the wisdom of revelation.When I press, she yields only this: “That’s funny you say it.Much on my mind lately.I know a remarkable fellow who would debate you on that.” “Someone important to you?” I pursue.“Something of an adviser who spots all my flaws.You reach a point in this game where people start getting afraid to offer helpful criticism.Anyhow, he says influences are to be hidden away, that they distract, become competition to the ear.” And that’s all she’ll give on the topic of her mysterious Svengali.Ms.O’Dwyer is nothing if not enigmatic and, unusually for a young woman whose approaching stardom is so widely predicted, her discretion comes easily and not without an appeal of its own, as if this one, at least, had her head screwed on properly back in Ireland.She smiles and looks down, an effect overpowering, more so for its air of unpracticed sincere shyness, unexpected and disarming.Julian calculated that she had given the interview since he saw her sing and drew those drunken coaster cartoons filled with impromptu advice, and he tried to recall exactly what he’d advised.There had been something about hiding influences, he thought.No, yes, he was sure of it, though that obviously didn’t mean that this was him in the article.He reread the passage, wished he’d made copies of his coaster-borne advice.And the bartender gave them to her? Had Julian meant him to? And she read them, absorbed them, and now they absorbed her, Claddagh-fidgeting, hesitating to mention the remarkable fellow whose advice she treasured?It was an enchanting fantasy, that he’d somehow given her something, made real that two-way exchange he felt when she sang directly into his ears.It was just possible.For all Milton Chi’s intimations of intimacy, the journalist had some obvious trouble, three hundred million words later, specifying the one unique thing about this woman, though he sweated text in his manifest certainty that there was unquestionably at least one
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