Clair de Lune

[This vignette is an homage to the Terrence McNally play, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. The characters are his. The moonlight belongs to all of us.]


“I’m in love with you.”

“That’s crazy.”

“You don’t believe someone can fall in love in four hours time? It took Romeo and Juliet . . . what? Maybe three seconds? If my calculations are correct then, milady, we’ve had exactly . . . lessee, carry the one . . . forty-fou--no! Forty six hundred times their good fortune. That’s a verible eternity in Shakespeare’s world.”

“Not in mine. I don’t think you get to like someone after four hours.”

“Man, your tits are dynamite.”

“My whats are what?”

“Breasts, then. Is “tits” off limits? I didn’t know. Things change. I thought it might be wrong, but I said it, anyway. So what of it? That’s what you do to me. That’s love. Makes me reckless. And tit-horny.”

“Johnny.”

“Was that out of bounds? See, I think—”

“Johnny.”

“I mean, I would hope—”

“Johnny!”

“Huh.”

“Who says these things?”

“Me. I say them. We say them. Why shouldn’t we say them? This is real. We’re real. Right now. You. Me. And the moon makes three.”

“You’re . . . crazy.”

“But you like it. You love it, Frankie.”

“I don’t know. It’s . . . alarming.”

“I thought you'd say romantic.”

“No. It’s too much. I feel like you’re pressing me against a wall or something. This is a huge mistake. I mean, Jesus Christ, Johnny! I can’t fucking breathe!”

“There is no wall, Frankie.”

“There are always walls.”

“Don’t turn away. Don't cry. Look at that moonlight.”

“Moonlight. That’s a streetlight.”

“It’s moonlight. It’s heard about us—Frankie and Johnny—it’s seeking us out, as friends of fate. Watch it ease through your window now . . . massaging your tired ankles . . . there . . . and now it’s sliding up your lovely, lasso legs that I want to sling around my waist until—well, moonlight, I envy you that—and entering into the dark world between your hips, making you move like a cello string, making a low, gorgeous noise, though you can’t hear the music yet. . . and now your belly, which bulges slightly with a meal that neither you or I remember, since we ate unconsciously, like wild animals scared that something would be snatched away from us . . . and there . . . there . . . your dynamite tits . . . of which I will say no more, since we covered that subject thoroughly and with no help from Shakespeare . . . and now that light, that universe light, it stretches its fingers and wraps around your neck, like a choker no man can buy, but every woman should want to own, until finally, finally I say, the moonlight rescues your angel face—yes, rescues—because Frankie, my beloved, Frankie, my darling, you need rescuing from the darkness, from all them walls . . . and not just by me, and not by that moonlight, but by the all of us, this happy, dumb equation we've stumbled upon that's more beautiful, more true than anything Shakespeare or Einstein dreamed up in their laboratories of loneliness. Just us. Here. And now. Streaming across the stars.”

“It was forty-eight.”

“Huh?”

Frankie fields Johnny closer, wrapping her legs tightly--more tightly than moonlight--around his waist.

“Forty-eight hundred times as long as Romeo and Juliet had. Probably a good deal more as far as that goes, after all your jabbering.”

“You liked it. You liked the moonlight. You like me.”

“No, Johnny."
Her face erupts in the clair de lune, and she smiles.

"No."



[video of Suzanne Godenne performing Debussy's Clair de Lune courtesy of theoshow2]