It Must Be Love in the Clair de Lune

She first called him Merman when there were words written, it must be love.

One

And the sun sparkled on the kitchen tiles, they weren’t very clean, but it seemed as if two fireflies were chasing each other, but he had tears in his eyes, she never found out why, because it was one of those moments when you just can’t ask. But she held him, and his hair was warm in the sun, and she saw the lake in the distance, a little, and the bacon was frying on the pan.

She was listening to Debussy’s compositions for the piano a lot on her portable CD-player that spring, and sometimes she would put it on when they were home, getting to know each other. It was hard, they were both changing so much it seemed as though every day they were new and strange people, and it was sometimes frightening. She used to go for long walks through the different neighborhoods, by the lake, in the old woods, where on a good day it seemed as if the whole town was walking towards her. They were going to the scenery spot, to see the gorgeous view. She didn’t go there, if there were many people there, but on a rainy day, the bluff was all hers, and she was having trouble sleeping, and sometimes she would cry. Because if it was love, it was tearing her apart.

She felt that had it not been for gravity, she would have floated away, because her heart had swollen like a balloon, and it was a terrible feeling, not feeling the earth anymore.

Fried eggs, and bacon, and the occasional oatmeal, with oat bran. That was what he liked, but they were both almost middle-aged, so that couldn’t happen too often. Just the oatmeal, with oat bran. Bacon on the weekends.

Two

The first time she told him she hated him was in bed. There were so many people in that room, old lovers and friends, and the sheets became rumbled, and he got up and stormed out, shutting the bathroom door with a huge bang. It was very late, so late it really was more early, and the bang seemed to reverberate through the whole building.

We are both underwater, she wrote, but where I am sinking, he is diving, he is slippery and swift, and can easily swim between reefs and dangerous fish, but I am not as fast, and can’t keep up. What she didn’t see was that he was sinking, too, only she was blinded by the love, too preoccupied with what it was doing to her, to understand she should help.

He comes to me when he loves me, when he doesn’t feel it, he won’t come, she wrote. He is too fast, and the world is spinning now, and I can’t tell which way is up. I hear that can happen underwater, but I was always afraid of the water, and when I dove, I didn’t know what I was doing. It was only way later that she realized, neither did he. She saw a creature of the underworld where there really was a man.

Harsh words, a heart condition, irrevocable alterations. Centuries of heated arguments and apologies, and when he said it didn’t even mean anything anymore, she stopped apologizing.

Three

He told her he loved her the first time they spent a day together. There was a thunder storm, and an underpass, and she was wearing brown suede sneakers, and she thought she had never smelled anything so sweet. His skin that was brown and sugary, and the electricity in the air, and her face was red from his stubble, and when he left the underpass, walking into the rain, she felt that she would never see him again. She walked back home, shoes soaked and destroyed, and felt as if her heart had been ripped apart at that underpass. She thought it was too early to say it, and thought he must have said it because he knew it too, that he would have one opportunity to say it and that was it. She felt like she was less, now, that he had taken something with him that was integral, that she would never be the same again. It must be love.

It must be love, to pull on burgundy velvet gloves and her grandfather’s felt hat, and have him take her to lunch at the corner Chinese restaurant, and it was early fall, and it was a totally unremarkable lunch, but he was there, appropriately impressed and taken with her eccentricity and strangeness, it was before the troubles began, and she only wanted to impress, and bask in his glance, and no one had ever made her feel so beautiful, so she can’t, for the life of her, bring to mind what she had.

It must be love, feeling this unending ache inside whenever he is gone. The ache is present sometimes with him there, even. But she has trouble communicating, so she keeps secrets. Like how much she misses him. Or that she loves his hardness, because it is like steel against the horror of the world. Only when the hardness is aimed at her, does she hate it.

It must be love, seeing him in street corners, when in fact he isn’t there. She has a clear memory of when she left him at a bus stop, when they first met, when he told her, right before she hopped in the bus, that she was magnificent, his words almost drowning into the rumble of the large vehicle. It isn’t always the same man, in her memory, sometimes she can’t see his face, only a foggy appearance of someone, but it is always a man she knows she can find. They didn’t know each other then, and what he said, was enormous, going out on a limb like that, it was a first revelation, and they could have been any two people, with any kind of future. Only they weren’t. And every time his face comes back to her, after a while. His face. The relatively innocent words, that became the origin of their romance.

It must be love, to listen to that same album over and over, and one day she finds a vinyl copy of it, unscratched, in a flea market, and just looks at the singer’s black and white portrait on the cover, thinking, no one in the world can relate to this album better than me.

It must be love, to have this part of her completely open, even though she tried to fight it for so long, to keep it shut, to send anyone and everyone away.

It must be love, when she reads in an article, that the singer wrote and recorded the songs on the album while in Paris, a city that became their city, and she thinks of course, this is the magic of life, meeting him, falling in love, piecing the puzzle, and even the randomnest pieces have a way of crystallizing, and in the end, fitting, like it was always supposed to be this way.

Four

She doesn’t remember when she said it the first time. She remembers the rest of the world melting away whenever he was near to her, and how Frankie and Johnny made sense in a way it had never before, and how she would smell his pajamas when he was at work, and miss him intensely. She remembers sitting in the sun, on the porch, and listening to him taking a shower inside, and preparing dinner, and going about his business, and it was a long while before he noticed that she was home, too. That secret intimacy, listening to the sounds of him thinking he was alone, and she remembers being happy there, in the sun.

The last time was this morning.

Inspired by Rickie Lee Jones’ beautiful, poignant and very underappreciated 1984 album The Magazine, Claude Debussy’s classic Clair de Lune from his 1905 composition Suite bergamasque, and Garry Marshall’s 1991 film Frankie & Johnny