The sound of love (or maybe just juvenile infatuation)

by David Benjamin

“For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, ‘It might have been’.”

— John Greenleaf  Whittier

 

MADISON, Wis. — Lately, I’ve been haunted my the memory of a girl who broke my heart 54 years ago.

I suffer these pangs of nostalgia because my car has a compact disk player on which I play mixes, usually titled “Good Songs,” that I burn in my spare time. Every eighty-odd minutes, the CD currently riding my spindle repeats Leonard Cohen’s languid, lovely and strangely religious ballad, “Suzanne”. In the canyons of my mind, this is Emily’s theme song.

Emily was my sophomore year in college. I shared “Suzanne” with Emily every time I snuck her into my dorm room. We made out and explored each other to the sound of Cohen’s voice and the enigma of his lyrics. One day, Emily—who was an art major—presented me with a small, smooth stone inscribed with lines from the song, “… For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind.”

I know. She sounds too good to be true, which is why I ruined it all with my idiot pattern of clingy attentiveness and withering devotion. Exhausted by my ardor, Emily started the next semester my kissing me off (with no kiss), shattering me so self-piteously that I quit school, moved to Boston, lost my student deferment and ran the risk of death in Vietnam.

Nowadays in my car, as I listen to Leonard and remember Emily’s perfect body, I wonder: Does everyone have theme songs for those they’ve loved and (mostly) lost? Am I normal?

So, yesterday I sat down over coffee and tallied all the girls and women in my past (and present). There aren’t that many. I matched them with the songs that bring each one to mind as soon as I hear the first eight bars. This is a fairly discouraging exercise because—other than being soothingly melodic—it conjures up a lot of heartbreak, regret and dreams (for both her and me) not come true.

For instance, the first girl I ever associated with a certain song was Linda. I was in tenth grade, she was a senior, ethereal and beautiful. She welcomed my friendship and depended on me to make her laugh. I repaid her by writing morbid love poems and hounding her with declarations of adolescent adoration. The Beatles were on Top Forty radio then and the song that burrowed into my brain and forced me, for some subconscious reason, to yearn for Linda every time it came around on the AM dial, was “Eight Days a Week.” Still, today—eons later—when I hear, “Ooh, I need your love, babe,/ Guess you know it’s true…”, there she is, Linda, slipping to the front of mind. She’s usually sitting by herself, alone, serene and secretly sad, in my high-school commons. beckoning me magnetically to mosey over, make a smartass remark and watch her smile.

My first kiss, after a long, timid drought, was Janice. It was my freshman year in college (same place I met Emily). Janice’s theme, which asserted itself deviously after she had dumped me for a guy named Apple, from Iowa (Really? Iowa?), was Simon and Garfunkel’s cover of “Scarborough Fair.” In retrospect, Janice—who was fickle and superficial—didn’t deserve a song so lovely. My big regret was not dating her roomie, Betsy, who wasn’t as pretty but she had moxie.

In the summer of ’68, I was literally accosted by a “Younger Girl” (in John Sebastian’s formulation). She wrote poems to me and swept me—unwillingly at first but then, what the hell?—off my equilibrium. By Labor Day, of course, I fell victim to her attention span as she focused on an entirely fresh crop of boys and—probably more important—girlfriends with whom she could talk about the boys. The LPs I played at the summer camp where she and I sweated out our brief and scandalous passion were by the Doors, the Stones, Richie Havens, Country Joe and the Fish. But memories of Cindy return most vividly with almost any of the cuts from “The Notorious Byrds Brothers.” “Change is now, change is now/ Things that seemed to be solid are not/ All is now, all is now…”

I’ve had three wives, Lynette first. Her theme song, which we played at our wedding and which conjures up her up, bright and vivacious, where I met her, at Deaconess Hospital in Boston—she was a ward hostess, I was an x-ray messenger—is Maria Muldaur’s lilting version of Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.” “Kick your shoes off and do not fear/ Bring that bottle over here…”

My second wife, whose name she prefers I not mention, comes back to me guilt-inducingly whenever—on disk or in my iTunes shuffle—Rita Coolidge’s “Hungry Years” pops up.

Curiously, the girl who broke my heart most grievously never insinuated a tune into my memory. I loved her through a cold Boston spring and a sweltering steelyard summer in Florida, seasons when I went almost musicless. No radio, no stereo, no time to listen. If Becky had left behind a melody, it might have been torchy and exotic, maybe “La Vie on Rose,” or Marianne Faithfull’s heart-crushing rendition of “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, “…where gigolo and gigolette wake up to find their eyes are wet with tears that fell on broken dreams…”

I also have a song without a girl. I mean, there was a girl. I met her at the cast party after a high-school production of Harvey, in which I played the lead, Elwood P. Dowd. At the party, I struck up with a girl whose name—as hard as I strain—I cannot remember. Suffice to say that she was yummy and, unlike most girls I knew at the time, apparently attracted to me. I summoned my nerve and asked her out, next Friday. She said yes! The next week, her father—who was, as I recall, an Air Force officer—got his orders. She moved away on Thursday.

The sound in the room as I courted this alluring teenager—possibly the love of my life and my future wife—was the voice of Grace Slick, wailing away unforgettably at “Somebody to Love.” The irony, even today, just about kills me.

This brings me to the happy ending. With Hotlips, I’ve shared a half-lifetime of music, from Bach and Brahms to George Thorogood and the Destroyers. For more than two years, when we were 6,000 miles apart, she curated my collection of albums, listened to my music and plumbed my psyche. Together in Tokyo, we collected Christmas CDs, played a lot of blues, heard Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, Keith Jarrett and Diana Krall on the Victrola, watched every year the indescribable New Year’s song contest on Japanese TV, met Billy Eckstine at the Blue Note and went to Tokyo Bunka Kaikin to experience La Scala’s production of La Bohème.

Officially, “our song” is “I’m Confessin’ That I Love You,” preferably sung by Dr. John. But, when I consider the music that sinks us deep into the couch, wrapped in each other’s arms, I lean toward the wry piano style of Thelonious Monk, “Straight, No Chaser” perhaps or Monk’s winkingly ironic rendition of Louis Armstrong’s “Dinah.”

Rather than these favorites, though, I think in the end I’ll ask Hotlips to play, for all my friends at my funeral, a talkative, jazzy and seductively intricate lyric that hardly anybody knows. In her sadder-but-wiser babydoll voice, Stacey Kent serves coffee and consolation. Come on, sourpuss, she softly croons “… there’s no reason you should give a damn/ Just treat yourself to a cinnamon cake/ Very soon, you’ll forget your heartache/ When you have breakfast on the morning tram… ”

Okay, I’ve selected my recessional. But none of this idle nostalgia solves my quandary. Am I the only shmo plagued in my declining years by the ear worms of long, lost squeezes and healed heartbreak? Is this malady limited to a tiny subset of verbose, maudlin guys like me, or is it epidemic? And does it affect women, too? Do girls hum the theme songs of high-school crushes and ex-husbands?

Or, maybe, I’m just nuts?