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Puddles She could have stood inside if she had wanted, but the smug foyer with its cold tiles and high ceiling and bleakly smudge-free glass panes made her lonely, far lonelier than out here in the night-rain and in the isolation imposed by an upraised umbrella. It wasn't raining hard anyway, and at least there was movement out here, with drops winking on the metal ends of the umbrella, and the broken glow from the one street lamp wavering in the puddles. She liked puddles: They magnify the force of a single raindrop, giving something invisible and lost in its dark descent, a funeral halo of ripples that one could see if one looked. As the rain tattoed softly on her umbrella (she liked umbrellas too and the way raindrops lived momentarily on their taut drum skins) and soft sheets of rain died in obscurity in the small, cropped lawns and asphalt parking lots beyond the light cast by the single street lamp, she watched pockmarks appear from nowhere on the face of a puddle and disappear as quickly as though they had never been there. The door behind her slid open easily, and out hurried a man. As she had hurried through and out, he had been waiting in the foyer, and now he passed her, enveloped in its atmosphere of clean, contained nothing. Nevertheless, she half-turned toward him instinctually, in the kind of visceral hope that makes people in foreign countries or strange hotels pivot to the sound of opening doors or approaching footsteps. Past he hurried, umbrella high, and the door behind him slid shut easily, resealing itself. He clomped through the puddle on his way to the car pulling to the curb, and when the rain had regathered itself, she saw that it had changed, become more intense, so instead of random blossoms in the puddles there were sharp, systematic rounds of buckshot that made her shiver for the first time, an admission of sorts. A great mythos of unhappiness surrounds rain. Parents initiate their kids to it in infancy when they grab their little hands and force them to pat out the rhythm to that ridiculous rain-rain-go-away song and then in childhood when parents snarl at the kids trapped inside and bang around and bump into the kids with more force than they realize. Then there are the countless lost-my-love-and-now-it-rains songs, where lovely, lost-looking singers huddle in too-big bay windows and croon at the tears that wind lost and lonely down the glass; then, in movies, there are the countless funerals in the autumn rain, as if we, as viewers, are so desensitized to death that we require the sad, scuttling leaves and the grim drizzle to convince us that something has been lost. She knew,
though, that these images are too poetic, that tragedy is never, in real life, that exquisitely orchestrated. When people leave
you, she knew, they leave in the unremitting glare of God, if only they did disappear into the grey oblivion that always swallows lost lovers in movies. Instead they shuffle out of view down sidewalks fronting strip-malls; they shove their chairs back in uneventful restaurants and are gone. And, according to some sort of immutable law of proportionality, the most deeply loved ones' departures are the least romantic. They go with the scraping shut of an apartment door—footsteps descending the first of the three flights of stairs—before turning, coming back, and knocking. If you're intimate with apartment stairwells—the way a descending footfall on each step sighs with resignation and an ascending footfall resounds with anticipation—you open the door before he reaches the landing and stand in the door with hopeful-eyed despair. You back up to let him in without touching, and he comes in without asking--he lived here for two years, after all. Not touching, he slides a key on the kitchen table. "Sorry. I forgot," he apologizes and leaves again, devastatingly civil. You watch him go, the hard light etched miserably into his weary, retreating back and his shoulders hunched against a defeat already embedded in his spinal column. The light in the apartment itself is hard and business like, scouring from corners any last delusions and daring you to cry about the emptiness. And you can't cry, of course, at least not out loud, not against the grunting of a neighbor's too-loud garbage disposal and the beep-beep-beep of a backing-up furniture truck in the parking lot below. And when it finally does rain, too late, you can't cry either. There's no bay window, and besides, the pain has sunk too deep and won't be plumbed. She knew that, in real life, tragedy is anticlimactic and unpoetic, that people you need—your need almost desperate because it has never and now will never be fulfilled—die in the middle of the day and are buried under flat, bright skies. Because of this, she hardly understood why rain in sad songs and movie funerals was supposed to be the little, ironically unbearable injustice mocking our helplessness in the face of tragedy. She wanted it to rain when she was buried. About her, the rain continued to come down, and the puddles shook with their imprisoned citron glow. The same beautiful but not quite healthy yellow that Van Gogh always used pooled about the single street lamp, illuminating a conical cross section of the rainy night, and she was suddenly quite cold. Sarah Hynes |
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