Rufus Wainwright Saved My Relationship More Than Once

We were once two kids listening to music and plotting our future

A Rufus Wainwright concert once changed the trajectory of my relationship with the man I would marry.

It happened in a tiny theater in New Brunswick, New Jersey. It was the kind of theater decked out with red velvet seats and ornate gold fixtures, a theater so intimate you can see the performer’s facial expressions in the spotlight.

It was in that tiny New Jersey theater that I watched Rufus Wainwright perform live for the first time, just him and a piano in a spotlight.

It was also in that tiny theater that I was moved so much by his voice that I decided not to give up on a relationship I thought was over.

My boyfriend and I were young — barely 24. We’d spent the first year of our relationship running all over Washington, DC like a bunch of kids who thought they ruled the world.

We spent one night together laughing and sliding around on a thin layer of ice that covered Dupont Circle after a cold front.

We hosted wild parties with friends from abroad, cooking traditional Senegalese food that stained all my roommate’s dishes red with palm oil.

And we listened to Rufus Wainwright together. His album Poses was the constant backdrop to our first year of love.

The music in Poses is youthful and reflective. It’s full of melancholy, but it’s more retrospective than sad.

The songs on that album have always sounded hopeful to me. They are sung by a young person on the verge of adulthood, a man reflecting on his past but musing about the life he wants for himself.

Poses seemed to reflect so perfectly the stage of life we were in as my now-husband and I whirled around our early twenties together.

Except when we went to that Rufus Wainwright concert, all wasn’t well with our youthful love. Our magical first year had transformed into a complicated long-distance relationship limited to weekend visits.

He was happy and surrounded by friends in graduate school. I was lonely and listless with a new teaching job in New York City. He sought independence, and I held onto him even tighter.

And then we’d made the mistake of traveling together to the Balkans for two weeks during our winter break. It was supposed to be a magical time to reconnect, but everything went wrong on that trip.

So when we returned from our trip, we went our separate ways. We took a break from our relationship that seemed destined to become a full-on breakup.

Until one weekend in late January, he sent me an unexpected message.

He wondered if I would consider meeting him just one last time to talk. He asked me to meet him halfway between our homes, in New Jersey.

When I arrived from the train, he had flowers. We shared an Ethiopian meal together in a warm restaurant. And then he walked me down to the theater, and he surprised me with tickets to see Rufus sing.

The minute Rufus began singing on that stage, I was so drawn to his voice that I barely moved my body for the rest of the show.

And then Rufus sang The Consort.

It was always my favorite song on that album, even more so than the catchy Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk.

The song swells from nothing into a triumphant declaration about the future.

Together we’ll wreak havoc you and me Together we’ll wreak havoc you and me Together we’ll wreak havoc you

Prepare your things Dissolve your mind ’Cause I’m your consort beautiful queen of 17

There’s a special intimacy in the way Rufus sings “…you and me,” as if it’s a secret plot between two lovers.

It always made me imagine the two of us roaming the world together.

When I heard him sing this song at that theater in New Jersey, I leaned into my boyfriend’s shoulder. It released me from my pent-up frustrations about our love and brought me right back to our beginning.

We walked out of that theater arm-in-arm, with Rufus’s voice still in our heads. The vision of our past and our future was clearer than it had ever been.

That Rufus Wainwright concert was almost 16 years ago.

We have traveled all over the world, survived even longer periods apart on different continents, married each other before a room full of friends and family, and raised two beautiful boys together.

But if you’ve read anything else I’ve written, you know things aren’t great between us.

We are back at a turning point where breaking up seems even more likely than it ever has, and the stakes are so much higher.

And yet even when I come so close to being sure that our time together has come to an end, I can’t help but think of Rufus Wainwright.

The last concert we attended was right after the birth of our second son, during a tenuous period between my recovery from a c-section and the beginning of our failed open marriage.

Rufus was a decade and a half older than that first time we saw him, and he didn’t play songs from Poses anymore.

The show was in a much larger theater, one with balcony seating. Rufus wore a flashy sequined vest and had a full band behind him. I remember feeling ready to leave early. I was worried about our babysitter putting our boys to bed.

And then the instruments were pushed away, the stage went dark, and the spotlight lit only Rufus and a microphone.

And that’s when Rufus sang a cover of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now.

His version of her hauntingly beautiful song stunned me.

Yet again, I found myself sitting motionless in a theater with Rufus Wainwright, openly weeping next to a man I wanted to love but didn’t quite know how to anymore.

I’ve looked at love from both sides now From give and take and still somehow It’s love’s illusions that I recall I really don’t know love Really don’t know love at all

Yet again, Rufus Wainwright seemed to be singing our lives.

I clung to my husband that night, and have somehow continued to hang on even when all signs point to the end.

With all of the preparations I’ve made to leave my marriage, I still come back to Rufus Wainwright.

I wonder if another one of his concerts is the magic potion we need to reconnect with each other. Even writing this piece and listening to Poses again has changed me just a bit.

I wonder what song Rufus might sing to us now that would shock me back into the core of my love at this stage of my life and my marriage.

Rufus is 49 years old now, nine years our senior. I wonder if he is busy composing a new piece that reflects where he is right now on his own life’s journey.

I wonder if that song is what I need to hear right now.

Because as often as I stare at my husband across our kitchen and wonder what strangers we have become, I still can’t help picturing those two kids in that theater in New Jersey, listening to The Consort and imagining their future together.

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