Love Destroys Time

I.
Every afternoon she makes the two-hour trek to this room where she fell in love, and that’s where you’ve probably seen her, the old woman with silver hair waiting for Bus 162 or shuffling along General DeGaulle before she veers across an overgrown lawn and picks her way along the fence, feeling for the passage that will bring her home. Most people avoid her but sometimes a passerby will notice the peculiar card in her hand with its backside depicting the bottom of the earth and they’ll ask her to tell their fortune, but she stares through them until they move along. They do not understand that she is blind.

She used to be a rock ’n roller, back when music still had the potential to frighten people, to conjure images of wild youth, teenagers necking at the drive-in and drinking liquor out of fruit jars. A lot of people wanted to talk to her in those days because she had a glorious voice that sang about gravity and Jupiter in an age when most people wanted to rock around the clock and twist the night away. She was poised to be a new kind of star. Then she went and fell in love.

II.
One afternoon she noticed her neighbor poring over a book of beautiful maps called The Cosmographical Atlas of the Orbis Terrarum. She asked if she could join him and the big man beamed. “I’d like to go here one day,” he said, pointing at Elephant Island. “It’s down where the world’s weather begins and it’s so dangerous and beautiful that sailors renamed it ‘Hell-of-an-Island.’” She said she’d like to write a song about that island. He was a grand man, the size of three or four people and when he laughed, the world laughed with him, a white-bearded Buddha in blue jeans laughing at the universe. You’ve probably never heard such a fine laugh because despite his jolly disposition, he never cared much for people, preferring his dreams of the sea. Yet when this woman with wild hair joined him to leaf through navigation charts of the Antarctic ocean, he lit up and laughed all the time.

They spent long nights on a rug in this room, surrounded by books. They learned about the fall of Rome, the lunar sea of tranquility, traffic psychology, the importance of ladybugs, and dyschronometria, a disorder that leaves a person unable to comprehend the passage of time. While he studied the seas and the cosmos, she turned her attention to other stars, fascinated by neon and noir, by sirens and bombshells. She loved him for many reasons but best of all because he made her feel understood.

III.
But there was always that other thing, the way she believed she ought to be famous because everyone in her life told her so, from her friends to the people on television to the voices in her head at night. Be ambitious. Make something of yourself. Get ahead. Be a star. She waited for him to get ambitious too, but he only looked up from his navigational charts and smiled. She remembered him as soft and slow, like he was digging in for something, conserving his energy and getting prepared.

One morning a suitcase sat by the door. She told him that she wanted to be a star. He smiled and said the real stars were better, that they could watch them shine on Elephant island. She told him that she wanted to be remembered. He kissed her. and said, “I’ll remember you.” She said she had to go. He fell to his knees and dropped his head in her hands. “If you leave, I’ll go to sea.”

V.
She appeared on the April 1974 cover of Rolling Stone after years of dutiful service as a Supreme and a Shirelle, a Blossom, a Gypsie, and a Marvelette. She enjoyed stadium tours, tabloid romances, and a hit single called ‘Hell of an Island’, although none of it felt real because he was not with her. She needed him as a witness. She continued climbing out of limousines and giving her signature wave to the crowd, and they loved her until they didn’t anymore. She took a Greyhound back to New Orleans and when she stepped out of the station, she knew he was not there. The city felt sharper, the air thinner somehow.