Season of Grapes

As I was going to enter college that fall my parents felt that I should build myself up at a summer camp of some sort. They sent me down to a place in the Ozarks on a beautiful lake. It was called a camp but it was not just for boys. It was for both sexes and all ages. It was a rustic, comfortable place. But I was disappointed to find that most of the young people went to another camp several miles down the lake toward the dam. I spent a great deal of time by myself that summer, which is hardly good for a boy of seventeen.

It was a dry summer. There were very few days of rain. But the Ozark country with its gentle green hills and clear lakes and rivers did not turn ugly and brown as most countries do in seasons of drought. The willows along the lake remained translucently green, while the hillside forests, toward the end of July, began to look as though they had been splashed with purple, red, and amber wine. Their deepening colors did not suggest dryness nor stoppage of life. They looked, rather, like a flaming excess, a bursting opulence of life. And the air, when you drove through the country in an open car, was faintly flavored with wine, for the grapes grew plentifully that season. While the cornfields yellowed and languished, the purple grapes fairly swarmed from their vines, as though they had formed some secret treaty with nature or dug into some hidden reservoir of subterranean life, and the lean hill-folk piled them into large white baskets and stood along the sunny roads and highways crying, “Grapes, grapes, grapes,” so that your ears as well as your eyes and nostrils and mouth were filled with them, until it seemed that the whole body and soul of the country was somehow translated into this vast efflorescence of sweet purple fruit.

Perhaps it was the intoxicating effect of the wine-flavored air, perhaps it was only the novelty of being so much by myself, but I fell that summer into a sort of enchantment, a sort of moody drunkenness, that troubled and frightened me more than a little.

I had led an active boy’s life. I had always been the typical young extrovert, delighting in games and the companionship of other boys, having little time for reading and abstract thinking, having little time for looking inward upon the mystery of myself, and so this dry summer on the beautiful lake, as I fell slowly into the habit of deep introspection, brooding and dreaming about myself and life and the meaning of things, I felt as though I were waking up from a long dream or sinking into one. I was lonely and frightened and curiously content.

It became my custom that summer to go down to the lake by myself right after breakfast, unmoor a rowboat or a canoe from the rickety grey wharf, and row or paddle out to the center of the lake and then lie down in the boat’s bottom, take off all clothes but my swimming trunks, and let the slow current carry me along under the golden-burning sun while my consciousness surrendered itself, like the boat, to a leisurely tide of reveries and dreams.

Sometimes I would fall asleep while I drifted. I would awake to find myself in an unfamiliar country. I had drifted several miles from the camp, perhaps, and the sun had climbed to its zenith while I slept. The lake had narrowed or widened, or perhaps I had drifted in close to shore and directly beside me was a wet wall of grey rock from which obtruded strange ferns and flowers, or over my head was a fantastic, green-gold, feathery dome of willow branches, overshadowing myself and my stranded vessel with barely a motion, barely a whisper, in the windless noon.

Always beyond me, further down the lake, were the open fields of grapes, and however still the air was, it always held faintly the flavor of wine.

I would lie there in the bottom of the boat and continue to stare at what my eyes had opened upon, never turning my head or moving my body for fear of breaking the spell. I would imagine that I had actually drifted into some unknown place while I slept, some mythical kingdom, an Avalon or something, in which all kinds of things could happen and usually did.

It was hard to shake myself out of these dreams. It was hard to turn my eyes—staring as though hypnotized at the wet wall of grey rock or the dazzling dome of sunlit willows—back to the olive-green expanse of the lake. I would feel strangely dull inside and fagged out when I finally roused myself. It was not merely the drowsiness that you feel after a long midday sleep. It was more like the aftereffects of a powerful drug. Sometimes I would feel so weak that it would be hard for me to row or paddle back against the current. Still I would never know exactly what had gone on inside me during the dream or how long it had lasted, or why, in heaven’s name, I behaved like this! Was I losing my mind?

As summer slipped by the population of the little camp increased. Each weekend a new crowd or two would drive down from Saint Louis or Kansas City or still further away. When I first arrived, early in June, the place had seemed deserted and I had felt bitterly lonely and wished that some people, any kind of people, would come. But now I had changed. I no longer felt a thrill of anticipation when a new group or family arrived at the camp, wondering each time how this bunch would turn out, observing with pleasure their equipment for sports, but disappointed, usually, because most of them were either too young or too old. Now the sight of a dust-covered car rolling up the camp drive with tennis racquets and fishing rods, and eager faces protruding from the windows, faces smiling and begging to be accepted into this place and its life, gave me no pleasure, but filled me instead with a vague annoyance. I was becoming like a grumpy old man who wanted nothing so much as a quiet place to sleep, only it was not to sleep that I wanted, but to dream.

Then I began to be really frightened of myself. I quit going out alone on the lake. I made friends with a young professor who was spending his vacation at the camp. I played tennis and learned contract bridge with some young married couples. I tried not to think of the sun on the lake and on my naked skin and the faint, delicious fragrance of the purple grapes.

Toward the end of the summer I met a young girl. I did not think her especially attractive. She did not seem either pretty or homely. Perhaps she was really beautiful but I was then too young to find beauty in anything but the outlines of a woman’s face and figure. She was considerably older than I, she was about twenty-five, and I could see that she was lonely, terribly lonely, and was wanting with all her heart to get close to somebody, just as I was wanting to slip away, to float alone on the lake.

The young professor had loaned me some books. He had loaned me a book by Nietzsche which I found especially disturbing.

Was it possible, I asked myself, that all things could be so useless and indefinite as Nietzsche made them look? I shrugged my shoulders, after a while, remembering the sunlight on my body and on the lake, and the mysteriously suggestive fragrance of the grapes. Such colossal doubt, I thought to myself, was more or less irrelevant to life after all!

I was reading this book one evening on the porch of the main cabin, overlooking the lake, and I was feeling particularly rebellious against its doctrines, when the girl came onto the porch and seated herself in the wicker chair next to mine. Without turning my eyes from the book I knew she was looking at me, maybe wondering whether to speak. She had looked at me before. She had been down at the camp for about two weeks. I had only been vaguely aware of her presence, since she was not attractive to my unawakened senses and was easily seven or eight years older than I. But I looked old for my age that summer. I was tall and had acquired a small mustache along with my unusually serious and reflective manner.

When the light became too dim for reading I laid the book across my knees and glanced cautiously at the girl’s profile. I was suddenly stabbed with pity. A look of hopelessness had settled over her face. She was not looking at the sunset or the lake or anything visible from the cabin porch, but her eyes were wide open.

She is a little stenographer from Saint Louis or Kansas City who has come down here to meet some young people and have a good time, maybe fall in love and get married at last, and she has found only two young men, myself and the goggle-eyed professor who hates the sight of a skirt, and here I sit reading Nietzsche and considering the abstract problems of life and wishing only to be left by myself …

It was only a minute or two since I had laid down my book but I had considered the girl since then with such intentness and such a feeling of peculiar clairvoyance that it seemed to me I had known her already for quite a long time. I started talking to her. I was pleased to see the hopeless look drop away from her face. It became quite animated. She started rocking in the chair, then pulled it closer to mine, and soon we were chattering together like intimate friends.

“There’s a dance at Branson tonight,” the girl suddenly remarked, “would you like to take me?”

Surely if I had thought twice I would have refused. Before I went to college my legs behaved like stilts whenever I started to dance and I hadn’t the faintest notion of how to move myself around to music.

But my head was light from reading too much and the girl’s manner was peculiarly importunate. Before I knew it I had accepted the suggestion and we had started to Branson. This little hill town was the location of a popular summer resort; it was a mile or two down the lake from our camp. We walked over, along by the lake and hills, and all the way we talked with a strange excitement. Maybe I had been terribly lonely, too, without knowing it, and had only wanted someone to break the ice. Anyway, in the twilight along by the lake, the girl no longer seemed rather too old for me or too heavy. I noticed something Gypsy-like in her appearance, something wise and significant in her dark eyes and large, aquiline nose, and full, over-red lips. I noticed the deep swell of her breasts, and when she walked a little ahead, the swaying strength of her hips. I had a dizzy feeling of wanting to get close against her and be enveloped in that warmth which she seemed to possess.

“Do you like wine?” she asked me as we started across the bridge.

I admitted that I had never tried it. The summer before, when my grandfather took me to Europe, I had drunk some crème de menthe as soon as the bar opened, a few miles out at sea, and had become violently seasick immediately afterwards. I had disliked the smell of alcohol ever since.

“But this will be different,” she said. “Do you smell those grapes?”

We paused in the middle of the bridge and sure enough the wind from down the lake carried to us the grapes’ elusive fragrances.

“It’s delicious!” I cried.

“I know a place, an old hillbilly’s cabin near the town, where we can stop and get some swell grape wine,” she went on, “and it will make us feel like dancing our feet off!”

Laughing, she caught hold of my arm and we started running along the road. Her black hair blew back from her face and in her running figure, throat arched and deep bosom swaying, there was something excitingly pagan.

“You are beautiful,” I heard myself saying in a husky voice. “You’re like an ancient goddess, or a nymph, or a …”

She squeezed my arm. “You’re funny!” she said.

The hillbilly’s cabin was a little frame house on the road to town. In the yard a white goat was munching the grass. An old woman sat on the wooden steps with her hands folded in her lap. She got up slowly as we approached. Wordlessly she held the door open and we slipped in. These were the days before repeal. I felt quite adventurous, sitting down at the rickety old table with its worn checkered oilcloth and kerosene lamp, while the old man in overalls and the witch-like old woman pulled bottles out of a hidden barrel, opened them with a loud popping sound, and poured the sparkling purple stuff into cold tin cups for us to drink.

At first it seemed rather bitter. But there was not the alcoholic taste that I had feared. So I ordered a second cup and a third. The girl across from me drank slowly. She kept glancing at me in a calculating way, as though she were trying to surmise my age or other potentialities, as she had looked at me on the porch and several times before that, but I found myself no longer annoyed by that look. It pleased me, in fact, more than a little. Here was I, drinking wine with what was obviously a woman of the world, a Gypsy-like girl no longer very young, with a look of strange wisdom in the back of her eyes.

Who knows what may happen tonight? The possibilities began to frighten me a little.

I leaned far back in my chair, tilting against the stovepipe, and returned her smile in a manner that was supposed to be replete with sophisticated suggestion. We looked at each other for some time that way, as though with an understanding too deep for words. Slowly the girl lifted her eyebrows, then narrowed her eyes till they were two slits of luminous black. Her heavy, painted lips fell slightly open, and she, too, relaxed in her chair, as though a question had been asked and a satisfactory answer been given. It almost seemed that I could hear her purring under her breath, contentedly, like a cat.

“I have been so lonely at the camp,” she murmured, “that it hasn’t seemed like a real vacation until tonight.”

She lifted the cup with both hands but instead of drinking she breathed its fragrance deeply. She smiled slightly over the brim of the cup:

“It’s sort of bittersweet, isn’t it?” she said softly. “It always makes me feel like laughing or crying or something.”

When we left the cabin the white goat in the yard looked to me like a fantastic horned monster. The dusty road rocked under my feet. Everything seemed quite unreasonably amusing. Laughing loudly, I caught the girl’s arm, and she, more than returning my pressure, laughed with me, but all the while kept glancing speculatively up at my face.

“Are you sure you aren’t too tight to dance?” she asked. Her voice seemed absurdly serious.

“Too tight!” I screamed. “Why, I’ve never been so loose in all my life!”

I was startled by the hysterical sound of my voice, almost like a girl’s. I staggered against the dark young woman and she put a sustaining arm around my back. It seemed awfully silly. She was nearly a foot shorter than I, and here she was holding me up.

“Leave me alone,” I told her severely. “I can walk all right by myself!”

She laughed a little. “How old are you?” she asked abruptly.

“Nineteen,” I lied.

“Really? I didn’t know you were quite so young as that,” she said. For a while afterwards she seemed quieter and more distant. Then we came into Branson. There were clusters of glazed lamps along the street. There were bright drugstores and restaurants and a picture show with a shiny tin portico and gaudy placards. Everywhere there were gay holiday crowds in white linens and flannels and colorful sweaters. Down by the lake the band was playing noisily and everyone was flocking in that direction.

Then she seemed to come alive again. She caught my arm.

“I’m crazy to dance!” she said. “It seems like my vacation is just beginning!”

The dance hall was a long log building, open except for screens, and lighted by Japanese lanterns that swayed constantly in the wind. My physical drunkenness left as soon as we stepped on the floor. For the first time I found that I could move myself to music. My feet slid effortlessly along the wax floor and the girl’s body was suppliant to mine. It was more than suppliant. I caught her tighter and tighter against me. The warmth of her body surged through my linen suit. Her breath was damp against my throat. Her fingers caught at my shoulder. She seemed to be asking for an even closer embrace than I could give. Then I experienced something that I had never before experienced with a girl. I felt ashamed and tried to loosen my hold. But to my amazement she only clung tighter. She pressed her lips against my throat and clung as though she were drunk, drunker than I had been on the moonlit road. Her feet became tangled with mine, her body drooped, and I seemed to be dragging her along the floor. My warm feeling passed. I looked around at the strange faces surrounding the floor. It seemed that everyone was staring at us. I stopped abruptly at the edge of the floor.

“Let’s go out for a while,” I said, without looking at her.

She must have misunderstood my averted face, the strained quality of my voice. She repeated the words like an echo, “Let’s go out for a while.”

We went down the wooden steps from the dance hall and down the wooden walk to the beach.

Here it was all smooth sand, a pale silver in the moonlight, stretching for a mile or two up and down the lake. The wind was blowing with a new coolness that hinted of rain, although the clouds were still scattered.

The girl caught my arm and stopped for a moment at the end of the wooden walk.

“Do you smell the grapes?” she asked.

I shuddered slightly. I had drunk too much of the wine. The intoxication was passing and the taste in my mouth was cloyingly sweet.

“Where are you going?” I called to the girl.

Laughing wildly, she had started running along the sand.

After a while we both looked around. We discovered that the amusement resort and even the lights of the town had disappeared. There was only the moon and the stars and the wide silence of the lake and the sand crunching under our feet. I felt like an inexperienced swimmer who finds himself suddenly beyond his depth. But the girl’s face was fairly shining with some inner violence. She fell down on the sand and pressed her hands against it and swept them out like a swimmer, again and again. It seemed to me that she was moaning a little, deep in her throat, or purring again like a cat. I was tempted to slip away from her. All my lightness and exuberance were gone. I didn’t feel like awaiting the development of that which seemed to be possessing the girl. I was no longer flattered or stirred. She didn’t seem to be aware of me, for the moment, but only of something inside of herself, a drunken feeling, that made her rub her hands over the sand in a gesture that seemed to me vaguely obscene.

It may have been that I was fascinated, it may have been that I was frightened or repelled. My emotions were cloaked in a dullness that made them for a long time afterwards hard to describe. At any rate, I found it impossible to leave her there. My feet were rooted in the silver sand. I stood above her, breathing the cloying sweetness of grapes on the wind, and waiting for the girl’s private ecstasy to pass.

At length she lifted her head, from where she was stooping low upon the sand, swept her hair back with one hand and extended toward me the other. Dizzily I fell down beside her and somehow or other we were kissing and her tongue had slid between my lips. All the while, though my actions were those of a male possessed by passion, my mind was standing above her with a dull revulsion. Her Gypsy-like darkness, the heaviness of her form, the black wisdom of her eyes were now laid bare of secrets. I knew why she was lonely, why she said she had been so terribly lonely until tonight. For all my manly aspirations, I couldn’t help fearing the girl. Catching at my shoulders, she fell back on the sand. She was breathing heavily and her breath smelled of wine.

“Let’s go back to the dance,” I muttered.

“No, I’m tired of the dance,” she said. “Why do you act so funny? Don’t you like me? Am I ugly or something?”

Good God, what is wrong with you? I said to myself. You know what she wants! You aren’t a kid anymore!

But I couldn’t endure the winey sweetness of her breath. I turned my face away and got up from the sand.

“Let’s go swimming!” I suggested wildly.

“All right!” she agreed.

Too late I realized that we had no suits for swimming. The girl was already tearing the clothes from her body. She plunged quite naked into the lake. I could only do likewise. Numbly I removed my clothes and followed her. The cool of the lake broke through the dream-like numbness of my body and mind. I felt chilled and awakened. For a while my exuberance of the earlier evening returned. We swam and played in the water like children. I didn’t think of her nakedness nor of mine. I swam far out and then swam in again. When I climbed out on the sand I was exhausted and lay down and looked at the starry sky, almost forgetting the girl and what had happened between us a few minutes before.

The wind from the lake turned colder. I began to shake uncontrollably. The girl was still splashing and swimming in the water, crying out as though she had gone quite mad. I rose from the beach and started to get my clothes. But then she dashed out of the water.

“You’re still wet!” she cried. “Why do you act so funny?”

Weakly I sank down again on the sand. The girl was laughing at me. She ran over to the willow where she had hung her clothes. She came back with the little white coat that she had carried to the dance.

“Here!” she said. “This will keep us both warm!”

Staring up at this garment that whipped above me like a white ghost in the wind from the lake, observing its length and its breadth and even its thickness, I slowly understood her words, what they meant, what they could only mean. I saw that she was smiling in the moonlight. Her black hair blew away from her face. She stood between me and the wind and I breathed the warmth of her body mingled with the cloying sweetness of the grapes. With a sudden fury I caught at her white legs. I pulled her down in the sand. The coat was forgotten, and the cold wind and the lake, and I scarcely knew whether I hated or loved.

It rained the next morning, starting quite early, before breakfast, and continuing till noon. I didn’t get up. I lay all morning on my bed in the small log cabin, feeling exhausted and rather ill. I looked out at the grey rain and listened to the grey sound of it on the roof. When I finally came out I found that the Springfield bus had come and gone. The girl’s vacation was over and for several hours she had been on her way back to her job in a Kansas City life insurance office. I was relieved.

By noon the rain had dwindled away. The wind rose up again, the clouds were scattered like foam. The grey lake was turning green beneath a blazing sun. But in the rain-freshened air there was already the tonic coolness of the coming fall.

After dinner I stood facing the lake, breathing deep, and suddenly there rushed in upon me the old longing to escape from the camp and the restless gaiety of its population and to be by myself on the lake. I ran back to the cabin and put on my swimming trunks. I took a pair of oars from the manager’s office and sprinted down to the rickety wharf. I felt the eyes of the porch loungers following me down, the eyes of new young girls and young men who had arrived at the camp that morning, and I felt proud of myself, proud of my deeply bronzed skin and my well-conditioned body, but most of all, proud of my freedom, my loneliness that asked only to be left alone. It seemed to me that only I and the lake belonged here; I and the lake and the sun. The others were presumptuous intruders. These weekenders with their pale skins and slow muscles and feverish friendliness could never belong in this country, could never share in my mystical companionship with the lake and the hills and the sun.

The girl was gone. They would go, too.

Without glancing back I loosened one of the boats from the wharf and rowed out to the center of the lake. I lay down in the bottom of the boat and surrendered myself to the leisurely tide of dreams.

But there was something wrong. Maybe it was the unusual coolness of the wind, the lightness of the rain-freshened air, the barely perceptible decline of summer. But I was restless. I turned from one side to the other. The hard ridges in the bottom of the boat irritated my skin. The sun wasn’t warm enough, the wind was too cool.

Swiftly the boat moved down between the hills. The rain-swell on creeks had made the current strong that morning. The wind was bearing from up the lake. The boat moved swiftly, easily, as if carried by sails. The hills dwindled, the bare cliffs fell away, the lake widened and widened till finally I found myself in an open country. On either side were the vast fields of grapes, grapes, grapes! And though the boat drifted now in the very center of the wide lake, their odor came toward me stronger and sweeter every moment till it seemed that my mouth was filled with their purple wine and my whole body suffused with their warmth.

I lay in the bottom of the boat, twisting and groaning aloud, crying with the terrible loneliness of the flesh, remembering the lips of the girl against my lips, remembering the warmth of her body, remembering the Gypsy-darkness of her face, the wildness of her hair and eyes, and most of all, the passionate sweetness of her embrace, dark and sweet, almost cloyingly sweet, like the rich, purple fragrance of the grapes.

In a sort of terror I grasped the oars and started rowing furiously back to the camp. I no longer wanted to be alone. I had never drifted so far as the grape fields nor breathed their purple haunting sweetness so deeply before. Now I wanted to return to the camp and its people. I wanted to feel them moving closely and warmly around me. I wanted to hear their loud voices and feel the strong pressure of their hands. I wanted to lose myself among them.

 

The story will be published in Williams’s collection The Caterpillar Dogs and Other Early Stories, forthcoming from New Directions in April.

Love Songs: “You Don’t Know What Love Is”

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

There was a woman who was always explaining to me the structures of the world, of desire, of experience. Her analysis was brilliant. I have never met somebody so sure of the way things work. Between us, they didn’t. In the end, I learned, form was a problem. Well placed constraints can excite; they can also kill. Either way they tend to leave marks. A studied silence, breezy banter—these are not so convincing if she can take you in at a glance and see where you are still mottled from the pressure of her touch. But it is easy to adopt the position of the wounded lover. If you know what love is, like Nina Simone sings it, then you know that you, too, can leave, must have left, someone with lips that can only taste tears.

Nina Simone was not the first to sing “You Don’t Know What Love Is” and her version is not the most famous. That honor probably belongs to Dinah Washington, with her bright and clear voice, or maybe Chet Baker, about whom I have little to say. Billie Holiday’s take, with her enchanting, off-kilter warble is also probably better known. But Simone’s is something else entirely. Hers was released much later on a collection of rare recordings. It is live, noisy, and the background hum nearly merges with the brushes sliding along the snare drum. That and the crowd’s murmurs lend the track a warmth that all the other versions lack. It speaks, in spite of itself, to love’s inexplicable optimism.

At the very beginning, Simone sings, “You don’t know what love is till you’ve learned the meaning of the blues.” That third word, know, hangs for nearly three seconds. She never loses control of her voice, but she makes the word tremble as does a heart, a hand, a jaw fixing itself in preparation for sentences that cannot be retracted. She performs the standard as a lament sung at the precise moment that mourning’s fog has begun to lift. It is not a warning meant to dissuade young lovers. The blues aren’t miserable; they’re knowing. Simone’s spare rendition comes with the wisdom of experience, of understanding that if love is faith, favor, desire, support, and—when it can be afforded—indulgence and forgiveness, then all of these add up. When it turns, you lose so much: a body to hold yours, eyes that blink too fast in pleasure, a voice that drops too low to even hear it, the rippling sensation that settles somewhere just below the chest. All of the things that accumulate in the miracle of that face besides yours in the morning. It is the loss of such a gift that makes clear what it’s worth.

What makes Simone’s song hopeful rather than bitter is the sly implication that she is not actually singing to a novice. “How could you know how lips hurt,” she asks, “till you’ve kissed and had to pay the cost?” But how many listeners don’t know the price, don’t know “how a lost heart fears the thought of reminiscing”? Love is premeditated grief. That makes it no less enticing.  When she sings “lips that taste of tears … lose their taste for kissing,” it sounds to me like she is someone who knows the taste will return. “You Don’t Know What Love Is” is for when love has lost the sheen of the most saccharine romances and yet maintains sufficient force to upend a life. It is for all those loves that come after heartbreak. Perhaps they are not as clean, but they may be stronger.

What is remarkable is that there are no recriminations across the song’s   five minutes. It turns out it is not the guilt or moral superiority that is universal, but the hurt. “No, you’ll never know,” she finishes off, “what love is.” Then the audience applauds. Someone in the room stamps their foot or pounds on a table. That feels appropriate to me. Words work for some, but others must reach out for something sturdy. Often one slides between these modes. Bliss makes me bristle. Or at least it imparts a similar sensation: the charge in the air has already shifted. I wish it weren’t so. It is too easy to approach love with hunched shoulders. It is too easy to cast a cool eye on simple odes. It is too easy to resort to name-calling, to look askance at the emotion with all its demanding and needing and call it naive. But I think the truest way to speak of love is from just past its bitter end, when you can see what a kiss costs and know you will pay again.

 

Blair McClendon is a filmmaker, editor and writer. He lives in New York.

Love Songs: “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)”

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

I think the best love songs are simple. They’re simple because love isn’t, simple because we need to dream a little. Complexity, ambiguity, doubt—they can have their place in novels or in the movies. A love song lets you live in the fantasy of the absolute; maybe that’s also why they last only a couple of minutes. And that’s why we carry them with us, play and replay them until they wear out like old clothes. They stand for too much.

I have many songs that mark the time of particular relationships, both their highs and the lows of their dissolution. I’ve played songs on repeat enough to drive people crazy, and I’ve locked myself in my room to listen to late-period Billie Holiday with the lights off. But I have only one renewable love song, which I’ve brought with me through all my relationships: the Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody).” That’s probably because, although it pains me slightly to say this, it began for me as a family romance. When my parents were young and childless and living in Seattle, they saw a sign for the movie Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads concert film, at a theater near the Pike Place Market. I don’t think my parents were particularly interested in the hip music of the eighties—they just liked the name of the movie. They bought tickets on a whim and went inside.

So the cassette-tape soundtrack of Stop Making Sense was a sonic canvas of my childhood. But it wasn’t until I saw the movie for myself, in high school—watching it with a girl, making feeble couch-based sexual advances—that I was reawakened to the song. It’s unusual for the Heads, who are better known for blending angular, art-school/CBGB cool with African polyrhythm borrowings. The song is very straightforward. Sentimental, even. But a great love song should be sentimental. Why wouldn’t you try to feel everything you possibly can? The groove begins straightaway—simple drums, the bounce of the bassline, some light synth stabs. A perfect little loop. After a couple of repeats, a bubbling riff kicks in, with a soft, pipelike quality to its pitch-shifting. It reminds me of a calliope, although I’ve never listened to one in real life—it’s children’s music from some other, unlived existence: “Love me till my heart stops / love me till I’m dead.”

That’s the naive part, and isn’t accessing innocence without curdling one of the most difficult things art can do? In the movie, David Byrne is the avatar of unrepressed feelings: gesticulating, shaking, yelping, and squawking. As he says in a promotional interview for the film, wearing his now-famous big gray suit, the body gets bigger so the head can get smaller. In the film’s performance of “Naive Melody,” he performs a pas de deux with a floor lamp, elegant and absurd and melancholy-ordinary. Still, despite the naivete, there’s something sophisticated about the rest of the title, that “this” must (emphatically) be the place. Where is “this”? It’s anywhere we point to, anywhere we call home. We try it out and see if it works. There’s something beautiful and agonizing about recognizing love as a placeholder, a space we’re always trying to fill. Every day we have to conduct the experiment of calling that love our own. You could be anyone. You could be mine.

 

David Schurman Wallace is a writer living in New York City. He is an advisory editor of the Review.

Love Songs: “I Want to Be Your Man”

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

I liked spending evenings in my friend Zack’s living room when I moved to Los Angeles. I would make the short drive down Sunset in the dark and park in the lot behind a ceviche stand, then climb a flight of stairs to his apartment and set up on the couch. Zack produces music for rappers and vocalists, mostly Angelenos like him, and his living room was a deconstructed studio, with sequencers and MIDI samplers occupying his coffee table and clusters of new speakers mushrooming every few weeks, filling vacant corners. This was in the fall of 2020; when we would hang out, he would show me the dregs of his midday Ableton foolings, scraps of beats that mostly never coalesced into songs. I think Zack and I became friends years earlier largely because we snagged on musical details similarly. He knew I liked to hear the drafts. 

These flotsam sessions would fade into trading favorite songs, newly discovered or resurrected for driving playlists. One night, Zack showed me “I Want to Be Your Man” by the late Roger Troutman, the star boy of the electro-funk family band Zapp that emerged in the late seventies. Roger and his brothers—he was the fourth of nine, growing up in Hamilton, Ohio—set themselves apart by using the talk box, a device both futuristic and analog in its time. A talk box delivers sound from a source, like an electric guitar or a synth, into a player’s mouth through a plastic tube. The player, clenching the tube with their teeth, shapes the sound by mouthing lyrics, and it is then picked up by a microphone. The result is a tinny, soulful kind of proto-vocoder tone produced by a musician who looks like they’re siphoning gas. Roger built his first talk box with the tubing from a meat freezer in his family’s garage; the “Electric Country Preacher,” as he called the tool, defines the relaxed but fevery ballad that he wrote in 1987. Roger’s bare tenor croons the verses of “I Want to Be Your Man” over bouncy bass, declaring his love for a woman who may or may not want him back. His talk box’d voice careens in for the chorus, pleading the titular phrase four times in a row. I would leave Zack’s and drive back to my house, yanking the emergency brake to park on a steep incline while Roger descended the scale sappily through the aux: “My mind is blind at times I can’t see anyone but you / Those other girls don’t matter, no, they can’t spoil my view / I must make you understand, I want to be your man.” 

I had gone to LA in the wake of a breakup, the end of a long relationship with the first, and still the only, person I’ve been in love with. This love was not so much the pining kind that Roger feels in the track, but one that materialized between us in the dark, or wholly outside of demarcated time, like a warped fact in a dream. I knew how to love only him and often thought that would be the case until I died. We finally came to terms with the fact that we wanted radically different lives and that we had each failed to persuade the other. We doctored a rental car contract so he could drive back across the border to Canada, and I increased the distance between us by moving further west. I felt a numb relief that muffled my sorrow.

Being alone is sometimes easier than imagining feelings of that magnitude again. How dramatically I had been shaped by that person—an experience I worried would make me somehow unable to accommodate future attachments. There is something about Roger’s syrupy song of desire that has helped me understand this idea to be cowardly and false as time passes, though. “I Want to Be Your Man” revels in the pleasure of wanting someone and wanting to be changed by them, as well as in the unavoidably destabilizing effects of falling in love. Vision blurs and communication fails—“I tried, I tried, I tried, I tried to tell you how I feel, but I get mixed up.” (“Sooooooo mixed uuuuuuupp.”) These chaotic pursuits are still generative in the world of the song, in which a plastic tube can let a man possess the soul of an electric instrument and let a silently mouthed word transmit inhuman timbres. Lately I’ve been trying to allow transformations of the heart on small scales, embracing flings or swells of naive yearning. Drafts of myself spawn in front of me, then eventually walk off and die in some emotional outback, but I guess that’s where we all emerge from to begin with. In How to Wreck a Nice Beach, a book about the history of the vocoder by Dave Tompkins, Roger’s collaborator Bootsy Collins explains that, even for masters, the process of the talk box isn’t entirely comprehensible. “It is a special gift, and it is forbidden for you to know the secrets,” he says. “It will always be a mystery.” 

Elena Saavedra Buckley is an associate editor of Harper’s Magazine and The Drift.

Love Songs: “Hang With Me”

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

Someone I recently kissed sends me a PDF of a rare, out-of-print book by John Ashbery. The fragment I tug from Fragment: “Seen from inside all is / abruptness. As though to get out your eye / sharpens and sharpens these particulars; no / longer visible, they breathe in multicolored / parentheses the way love in short periods / puts everything out of focus, coming and going.” It’s been a while since I’ve been in love, and, most of the time, the idea fatigues me: I can see the end before anything’s begun. But these lines make my clarity of vision briefly undesirable; I miss the blur.

When I was nineteen, an anxious wallflower at my first literary party, Ashbery barked at me to fetch him a gin and tonic. Now these lines of his wind back the tape to adolescence: when everything is seen from inside even as the self strains outward and time exits its usual shapes and the imagination knows no end. Teenagers make love and ontology anew. I remember the smell of wet grass on long night walks with the first girl I loved. The matching pale green stains on our white sneakers. Our long hair mingling, dark brown and red, in the stairwell, the party we’d just left still loud down the hall. That this was the most surprising thing that had ever happened to my nineteen-year-old body, though it was also the culmination of months of cloaked flirting as well as—it seemed—the culmination of every desire ever. Yet I also glimpsed how much more wanting there was to do.

Since I am time-traveling back to that relationship, my first queer one, which careened to a slow disintegration I didn’t see coming, I am listening to “Hang With Me,” Robyn’s dance-pop love song that forbids love. “Will you tell me once again / how we’re gonna be just friends?” she begins, a plea that morphs into command in the chorus: “Just don’t fall recklessly, headlessly in love with me.” This is the brinkmanship common to teenagers and lovers, feigning control over feelings.

“And if you do me right, I’m gonna do right by you,” Robyn sings before she gets to that other condition, the one that gives the song its title: if you don’t fall in love with me, you can hang with me. These are the stipulations of a contract that’s never going to work. It’s clear from the ecstatic production and obsessive insistence that Robyn herself is already in love. And in her demands, I hear seduction, the kind that plays out when you’re already in bed with someone, whispering “we can’t” while you do.

Wild requests, wild promises, nothing that can be kept—going as it comes. The “heartbreak, blissfully painful and insanity” that Robyn is worried about speeds toward her. It strikes me that this song is, like me, revisiting adolescent passions from a distance. The time travel is imperfect. “Heartbreak” is the tell. For falling in love to become possible, I’ll have to forget that heartbreak is equally possible, but the anticipation of pain worms into love that hasn’t yet earned the name. 

The internet reveals that “Hang With Me” hadn’t yet been released during the short period of love I’ve just described. At first, I am sure that there’s a mistake. The song is overlaid on so many memories of her. But it seems I made a sequential connection simultaneous. At some point that I don’t remember, I heard this song and remembered my ex, and then, at Ashbery’s instigation, I remembered the song and the story together. Now that I’ve written this down, they’ll never be separate. Such a teenage word, never. Like: Don’t worry, I’ll never fall in love with you.

 

Elisa Gonzalez is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. 

Love Songs: “Up in Hudson”

There was a month in spring several years ago when I rode Amtrak ten times in two weeks, taking the 7:05 A.M. out of Boston Back Bay and returning from Penn Station on the latest train possible. I had to be in New York for various reasons and obligations, but the person I loved was in Boston and my logic was simple: I did not want to spend a night apart from him.

I spent many hours with my forehead pressed against the cool glass of the train window, taking in flashes of the Connecticut coastline, mouthing the words to the Dirty Projectors’ “Up in Hudson,” a song David Longstreth wrote as part of his 2017 breakup album, which chronicles his split with Amber Coffman, former bandmate and partner.

Why was I so obsessed with a breakup song while experiencing a love that made me feel like I’d been hit in the solar plexus with a bag of cement? It’s the chorus that was stuck in my head, for reasons I wasn’t totally aware of. “Love will burn out, and love will just fade away,” Longstreth sings over and over, bitterly interrupting his own melody, cutting through parts of the song that describe falling in love (“In a minivan in New England, our eyes met / We said yes and we said yes”; “First time I ever kissed your mouth, we both felt time stop”). 

What I couldn’t see then—or didn’t know I saw—was that the end with this person I loved was drawing near. It’s in the very structure of the song, how it alternates between their love story and that distressing chorus (“love’s gonna rot, and love will just dissipate”). Though when I hear those lines now, I can’t help but think of the verse that follows: “Now we’re going our separate ways / But we’re still connected.” Maybe that’s just Longstreth trying to console himself with a generic, post-breakup line. But now, I still find myself asking what the nature of that connection is—if absence really can still hold two people together years later, and what claims that makes on the heart.

“I’m just up in Hudson, bored and destructive,” Longstreth sings in the last verse, “knowing that nothing lasts.” On one particularly long Amtrak ride, I spent the hours compulsively scrolling through my camera roll, zooming in on photos of us, smiling faces frozen in time. I see now that I was already, even then, trying to reassure myself as to what I had—and as such, admitting its loss.

 

Camille Jacobson is The Paris Review‘s engagement editor.

Love Songs: “Water Sign”

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

Parliament’s “(You’re a Fish and I’m a) Water Sign” is an unabashed ode to passion, to the base and the sensual, to the possibilities of love in the juiciest ways it can exist between people. The song moans into being, a beseeching follows, then there’s a bass so low you can’t possibly get under it, and finally the central question is posed: “Can we get down?” In true Parliament fashion, the tune doesn’t follow a traditional verse-chorus-bridge structure; it consists of an ever-evolving chorus that departs from the lines “I want to be / on the seaside of love with you / let’s go swimming / the water’s fine.” The arrangement is magnificent and the execution velvety, and the soulful, overlapping ad-libs of George Clinton, Walter “Junie” Morrison, and Ron Ford are just romantic lagniappe. Add the production of the track itself, with its big band-y rise of horns and whimsical flourishes atop the funky bassline, and the song is a liquid love affair that pulls you under and takes you there. It’s orgasmic.“Water Sign” is the B side to the much more well-known “Aqua Boogie (A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop),” from Parliament’s 1978 hit album Motor Booty Affair. While “Aqua Boogie” is told from the point of view of a person who is afraid of water, having never learned to swim, “Water Sign” shows us how beautiful and liberating it can be to get swept away.

Addie E. Citchens is the author of “A Good Samaritan,” out in the Review’s Winter Issue.

Love Songs: “Mississippi”

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

Someone once accused me of being unrealistic about love’s aftermath. This was in the middle of an interminable argument, one in a long series of interminable arguments. I am not really someone prone to interminable arguments, which probably should have told me something about this person and myself sooner than it did, but at the time I was experiencing a new experience and not every aspect of it was entirely unpleasant. What he said was something like this: “You think there are never any consequences! You think you can go around hurting people, and that everyone you hurt will still want to be in the same room as you, having a drink!” I thought about this for a second. It wasn’t true but it wasn’t not true either. Then I said something stupid, which was, “Do you know the Bob Dylan song ‘Mississippi’?”

Is “Mississippi” a love song? Yes and no. I think it is among the most romantic songs ever written and also among the most ambiguous, which are not disconnected qualities. It is not even clearly about a romantic relationship—some people hear it as a sociopolitical song about the state of America, which isn’t wrong. It might be about a guy who has literally stayed in Mississippi a day too long. Yet it contains, I think, every important kernel of wisdom about love and the loss of it; it hits every note that matters. Is that too much to believe about a single song? “Mississippi”—and I am talking about the Love and Theft version, the heart likes what it likes—is about the love that outlasts love. I think often of the line: “I’ve got nothing but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me.” And I think, Yes, that’s how I feel! This is true!

Of course, it isn’t true. It isn’t any more true for me than it is for anyone who harbors their own bitternesses toward me. I have plenty of things besides affection—wells of pain, streaks of anger, pain and anger about things so long past you would think they would have disappeared rather than calcified. And yet when I hear that line I think about everyone I have ever loved and everyone who has ever loved me—I think of us on a boat together, maybe drinking martinis. But it’s almost like we are ghosts, like the dead children in the final book of The Chronicles of Narnia, because I know this is a wild, impossible fantasy of the past and the present colliding. Still, it’s beautiful and in its own way even comforting.

But then there is the sadder part of this song, which I can’t ignore. There are those heartbreaking lines, “I know you’re sorry / I’m sorry too”—and who isn’t sorry too? Then: “Last night I knew you / tonight I don’t.” Dylan sings those lines in a kind of mournful howl that in certain moods can bring tears to my eyes. After all, more often than not, we become strangers to each other. These lines are truer, probably, than my fantasy of undying affection, though they coexist with it; these things are not mutually exclusive but in fact inextricable. The magic of the song is its ability to contain all of this.

“Mississippi” is a song about longing—overlapping and conflicting kinds of longing. So I suppose what I was asking when I asked this person if they knew the song “Mississippi” was: Do you not understand that I can want everything all at once, even things that contradict each other? Do you not understand that these conflicts and tensions are at the heart of romantic love? And do you not believe, as I do, that love’s shadow extends long past these bitter arguments, and that is what makes it worthwhile and also why it is making us suffer? But I didn’t say those things; instead, I found myself talking about a song. The argument ended in exhaustion, and not too long afterward, we parted ways for good. But what is for good? The past is ticker tape running underneath the present. There are those other perfect lines from the song: “I was thinking about the things that Rosie said / I was dreaming I was sleeping in Rosie’s bed.”

 

Sophie Haigney is the web editor of The Paris Review.