I watched Blue Moon on a night with a crescent moon. The story unfolds in a bar filled with drifting piano music and ripples of laughter, crinkling the bartender’s face and the heavy velvet swags. It felt as though I were sitting there with Larry Hart and E. B. White, not drunk on alcohol, but drunk on the moment.
Blue Moon is a failed love story between a man and a woman. Compared with the Before Trilogy, one of the most celebrated soulmate stories, this romance belongs to one soul.
Once, romance took the shape of a single person. A man was called a soulmate. Sharpness softened. Consideration learned to appear. Dresses were bought against habit. A body that had never asked for attention entered my sight.
There was no perfect partner on the lavishly romantic stage. Drama gave way to a late-night bus, with no one to hold. A Broadway performance once meant for two people. A fat rat running past a bench in Central Park.
Early one morning, Shakespeare and Company stood by the Seine, still closed. Ten minutes before opening, a stone bollard by the road. A woman with a canvas bag and a notebook sat there, writing. Waiting.
When the doors opened, the crowd moved in.
One book was picked up—Here Is New York by E. B. White, thin, and priced at more than twenty euros. It was held for a moment, then returned to the shelf.
No lingering. No handsome man signing books at the corner.
An Italian restaurant marked as open on Google Maps was closed. On the way, a small record store called ALT & NEU appeared.
Two South Korean men dressed in black stood in the narrow aisle, taking photos. I squeezed past them to browse the records and chose two CDs. At the counter, I found myself in line behind them.
“Have you seen Before Sunrise?” the cashier asked.
He pointed to a record from the film. “Would you like to listen?”
I smiled and said no. Passing the two men who were listening, I zipped my bag.
The two CDs went onto my bookshelf, above a stack of The New Yorker. At the bottom lay A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker. The first piece inside was Life Cycle of a Literary Genius, written in 1926 by E. B. White.
It tells of a boy who once wrote a poem called To a Little Mouse. The poem begins: “Last night I heard a noise in my scrap-basket.”
In Blue Moon, a bar. Lorenz Hart speaking. E. B. White listening. A story about a mouse named Stuart. Every morning, the mouse was carried down from a nineteenth-floor apartment to Central Park. By the next dawn, it was back in the same kitchen.
Hart left. White opened a notebook. Another mouse found its way into his writing.
After the film, the mouse no longer belonged only to the screen. It seemed to have found another place to live, between the pages of E. B. White and among the layered issues of The New Yorker on my shelf.
My bookshelf carried a similar intoxication: the scent of sentences waiting to be written and read, a place folded with stories, where something returns again and again.
In the film, Larry Hart moves through the city, drunk on beauty wherever he finds it: in men, in women, in the smell of cigar shops, in the pale green eyes of a twenty-year-old poet, in the two tiny freckles on her left cheek.
Near the end, he says to a young man, “Be careful of love stories. Think about friendship stories.”
After years of colliding with strangers and with those we call friends, there may appear one figure who seems to hold everyone inside—men and women, horses, a whole chorus, yellow leaves, and a tree trunk dark with rain.
Long after those years, I came upon Blue Moon. I did not wait for it. I met it the way I had met New York, Paris, Vienna, E. B. White, and a mouse.
After the film, the ride home.
Coasting down the incline, the handlebars were released, and both arms opened.
One line from the film remained: “Nobody ever loved me that way, that much.”
The moon saw someone standing alone.