fly, my darling: a love story
The Making of a Musical Memoir

We sit thigh to thigh on her piano bench, her jeans against my skirt and bare leg. “Like this,” she says, dropping her hand in an augmented seventh. It is effortless for her. Harmonies, tonalities, rhythms. “Like this,” she says, nodding to me, and I find the shape and rest my hand over hers, my breath trembling, the heady scent of cigarillo floating in her hair.

~

“Are you pressing keys ,” she says, “or allowing the music?” 

“Are you creating sounds...or hearing them?”

~

Lynda Roth entered my life as my jazz piano instructor. An immense musical talent with a renegade past, she was a deeply kind, ferociously intelligent, outspoken woman who enjoyed Scotch and cigarillos and once considered becoming a rabbi. I was a former software engineer, a classically-trained pianist, a beginning writer, a lapsed Catholic living in a gated community with a husband, daughter, and son.

Early in our friendship, after humorously recounting her failed male and female loves, Lynda declared, “Who needs a partner! Hell, I’ve got Zeke [her fat tabby cat]. He’s warm, agreeable, shares my bed, and shits outside. What more could a woman want?”  

It turns out she could want quite a bit more. And I could, too. 

Pinned to the cork wall in my office, along with wisdom from Adrienne Rich, Elie Wiesel, and Dante, is a drawing of that consequential moment when Alice studies the Wonderland potion she holds in her hand, knowing it will dramatically alter her and her life, quite possibly forever. And cork-pinned below, advice from friend and writer, Heather Donahue: “If you’re afraid to do something and it doesn’t include hospitals or prisons, you should probably do it.”

There was seemingly no stopping it, the onset of our unexpected and profoundly life-altering love. When a few years later Lynda was gone from the world, our time together began to feel like a dream. I had an urgent need to make sense of, and hold onto, those luscious, intense, tumultuous years in the middle of my life. They called out again and again, shouting, weeping, and laughing their way into poems and essays. But there was a larger story waiting. Scenes and memory fragments, some on index cards, others on scraps of paper, spread like scattered pearls throughout my office. I studied them for months, searching for the thread that might link them and make them whole.

I began rereading favorite memoirs and narratives: What was it, beyond their captivating prose, that made them work? What was their thread?

In Still Life With Oysters and Lemon, everything flows from a painting Mark Doty encounters in the opening scene of the book. “. . . I have a backache, I‘m travel weary, and it couldn’t matter less, for this whole scene—the crowd and hustle on the museum steps, which seem alive all day with commerce and hurry, with gatherings and departures—is suffused for me with warmth, because I have fallen in love with a painting. . . .” Doty moves through his life (losing a partner to AIDS, the awakening of a new relationship), past to present and back, the painting always somewhere there, sparking the memory, the reflection.

In Rebecca Solnit’s memoir, The Faraway Nearby, she returns again and again to . . . apricots. They’d been on her mother’s tree, and now she has them, a vast pile of them, spread out before her, slowly rotting. “Sometimes the key arrives long before the lock. Sometimes a story falls in your lap. Once about a hundred pounds of apricots fell into mine. [. . .]The vast pile of apricots included underripe, ripening, and rotten fruit. The range of stories I can tell about my mother include some of each. . . .”

In The Memory Room, Mary Rakow’s writing hits the page in lyrical snips and pieces. Not a memoir, though it feels like one. She once mentioned that until she came across the poem, Todesfuge, by Paul Celan, the book wasn’t finished. She interspersed fragments of Celan’s poem throughout, a thread from which all the memories and poetic reflections could attach themselves, until the entire story became a woven tapestry of recovery.

And then there’s Apeirogon, again not a memoir, though the manner in which McCann portrays the two men (one an Israeli, the other Palestinian) and the conflicts (internal, external, worldly) gives it the feel of one. An intimate story. But it is more than their story. Other pieces of knowledge and historical news are pressed into it. McCann travels freely through time revisiting events from different angles, again and again (the daughters have died, then they are alive, then the men are young, then old, then playing with the daughters ), linking the segments one to another with unique hooks, a thought or word in each showing up in the following, creating an intriguing, intellectual puzzle and grounding us in a flowing time fluster.

I, too, had assembled a collection of seemingly unconnected elements: moments of longing, desire, grief, death, birth, rebirth. Visits to hospitals, family farmhouses, local bars. Childhood reflections, philosophical insights, riffs on mathematical and musical concepts. I tried linking the memories, one to another and then another, a method which came naturally but resulted in nothing more than a complex memory map, a decidedly non-flowing time fluster.

Themes begin to emerge. Flying, certainly: the free motion and freedom of jazz. Improvisation in music and love. The sense (need) to let go, in so many ways.

I scrapped scenes, added others. Distilled thick paragraphs down to a phrase, a heartbeat. It would be important, I knew, to acknowledge the unvoiced: the emotive stillness that holds so much truth.

~

“Is there more?” My lips at her ear.

“Oh darling. There is always more.”

~

I worked out a rough chronological throughline with past events woven in—a story structure with the bones of a beginning (the searching and finding), a middle (the losing), and an end (the finding again). Segments were shuffled. And shuffled. The number of drafts grew. How would I get this right?

Don’t force it, I heard Lynda say as she had so often in the past. Listen.

I began to envision the story as a musical composition in words--poetic phrases surrounded by pulses of silence, allowing the tones, the emotions, to sing. And more: I realized the story’s beginning, middle, and end patterned themselves thematically after classical sonata form—a three-part musical structure in which each movement explores a central theme or motif. Basically, the first section introduces the main theme in a lively allegro tempo; the middle section (the development) challenges that theme, creating a counter melody, slower, pensive, often somber; the third returns to the original idea and quickened pace, somewhat altered, and occasionally in a different key.

A love story in three movements?

It felt right. Still, it was unconventional. Would anyone get it? Would it matter if they didn’t? 

When I googled sonata form and uncovered this poetic description in Encyclopedia Britannica online of the form’s second movement--an astonishingly accurate telling of the story’s middle section— I knew I was on to something:

“In sonata form, the point at which [the second of three parts] passes into [the third and final part] is one of the most important psychological moments in the entire sonata-form structure. It marks the end of the main argument and the beginning of the final synthesis for which that argument has prepared the listener's mind. The preparation for it is usually a long passage of gathering tension. As a result of the events in the development, the listener perceives the subjects in a new relationship rather like a traveler who glimpses the parts of a valley separately as he climbs a hill and then, when he reaches the summit, sees the entire landscape for the first time as a whole.”

And so, yes, a love story in three movements.

Allegro opens with Lynda standing in the doorway of her cottage as I approach that first afternoon, the sky a deep blue, the air rich with beached sea kelp, salt. The upbeat theme: a sense of anticipation, promise, a knowing that something more will come. The beginning of flight.

Adagio challenges that optimism; the mood turns pensive, soulful, then somber. It’s a passage of grief then spiritual realignment after Lynda’s death, a gradual moving upward toward something, something. . . .

~

I rest my hands on the keys.

It has been a while.

~

When the sun’s fire drops into the Pacific, I uncork a bottle of wine, the aroma intense, like my grandfather’s crushed black grapes. His own wine so pungent the color was nearly blue. 

The close of another day, one more. 

“Keep me open to accept the way forward.”

~

In Allegro con brio, the finale, I open the door to Paul who arrives with his guitar. There’s a sense of closure and of new beginning, a return to the theme of anticipation and promise and love, Lynda still spiritually present; an upbeat tempo—flying, freedom—in a decidedly different key.

The thread I’d searched for, of course, was music. It had been there all along.

Lisa Richter is an American writer and poet. She is the author of fly, my darling: a love story, an intimate lyrical memoir, and Searching for the Talisman, an online essay series inspired by a classic 1929 Italian cookbook. Her poems, essays, and stories have been featured in journals, anthologies, and literary blogs. A poetry alumna of the Community of Writers, she holds an MFA in fiction, earned her BA in mathematics from the University of Virginia, and in 2002 founded a company teaching computer coding to young people. She grew up on the East Coast, lived years in Europe where her daughter and son were born, and now resides in Orange County.