——

I was never struck by someone’s singing before her. When Jared and I were sitting next to the window smoking our pot, she was up on the bed, chopping lines with hers legs dangling. She had woven it into the entire trip. She insisted every time we were in the car that you could only put a track on if you were going to sing along. So we played old songs from our high school years, and sang together and to each other as we drove around the little town.

And here again, a song came on and she sang for us. As we sat in this master bedroom in a farm we had rented in the dead of night my friend and I listened to her voice. As I recall this now, the song itself has faded from my memory. What I do remember is how she made me feel. It was a softly seductive voice. A song being sung for her own pleasure but with an awareness of how pretty she sounded to us. As she sung she twirled her foot slowly to the movements of the song.

She seemed to sing everywhere. Not in an obnoxious sense that betrayed a need for attention. It was a self assured singing. Sometimes she would even sing as she sucked my cock. This was not a one off event but seemed to be something she enjoyed doing, a habit even. With her microphone in hand, she would put on a show for me. There was a particlar song that I could never forget, “Miraculous Weekend” by Pete Ivers. When she sang to me there was a sort of paralysis that would envelop me. A beautiful song sung in private intimacy forces one to forget anything that is not in the present. I had never felt something like that.

Prior to her, I had only read of such moments. There was a character in Tolstoy’s “War & Peace” named Natalia that captivated me. Throughout the book, she would sing on various occasions. Sometimes it was simply to her family. On other occasions she was coaxed to sing at a party. Each time, Tolstoy would devote pages to her voice and its effects on those listening. I appreciated those moments he painted into my mind but they were only abstractions. I had nothing in my own life to relate it to. No one in my family sang and, outside of the television, I had never seen it done. My only understanding of it was a some award show performance. Amongst thousand of shreiking fans, a gaudy woman would use all of her lungs to belch some popular piece that made no impression on me.

But in those paragraphs, Tolstoy let me imagine a different scene. One where singing was a celebration of something divine, shared only with a handful of people at a particular moment in an impromptu setting. And by having read his words years ago, my own experience was amplified into something brilliant. I was swept back to those imaginations I had as a boy, a big book in his hands, dreaming up a young girl from a Russia long gone. I was simultaneously there and here in this Brooklyn apartment with soft lights sharing a bed with this pretty girl and her sharp eyes. It brought to life a scene from one of my favorite novels, one that I had tucked into the folds of my mind and forgotten, and splashed it with fresh new colors.

Can such an experience produce anything but love?