Grace (2)

-2-

Grace

 

When I passed you in the doorway
You took me with a glance
I should have took that last bus home
But I asked you for a dance

-Thin Lizzy

 

“Jack and Coke.”

Cale laid a couple of won on the raw counter top, tugged himself onto the bar stool, and let all his thoughts scatter, like an offertory plate spilled down the aisle during high mass at noon.

It was becoming one of those days, where everything you planned on doing the night before with torch eyes collapses, and all the promise of productivity you swore you had this morning when you woke up and leapt into a light jog through jeweled woods with the momentum of something like ‘carpe diem’ coursing through your veins, shatters-

Completely.

Wholly.

Desperately. 

Like a smoked out rhinestone rain drop against the petals of asphalt flowers and sidewalk.

Cale swore he’d hit up at least half the pubs and bars in downtown by dinner, hoping that at least a handful would offer him, paid or unpaid, a night to entertain the frequents, migrants, and out-of-towners trying to stay convivial, or warm someone else’s bed or dry up their dark water, by soaking their hearts and thoughts in hard drinks.

Paradoxical, Cale thought, what he was doing, what depressed drunkards did, gluing damp blankets over their windows at midnight only to wake to sunlight cause the mortar never holds.

Never.

…a dream pang…

“Here, here.”

The bar tender- a tiny, electric Korean doll with padded skin, a bob cut, and a slim Sex Pistols T- slid his highball across the counter.

“Thanks.”

Cale caught it and wet his lips.  It stung his throat, but all for rough therapy.  So he supposed thought, using physical pain to distract the mental pain, or perhaps we are all sadists, obsessed with feeling abused, used, and recycled, because then we’ve at least convinced ourselves it’s not our fault, it’s not really us, and now we’ve got some cryogen reason to move on. 

                Whatever, tonight he’d get drunk in his favorite bar, this basement crow house christened ‘Communes’, with its salty, dank first circle of hell aura, the Velvet Underground & Nico ‘Banana’ album cover on the back wall, the other Warhol shots circumnavigating it like some geocentric theory in the pipes, the Clash at Earls’ Court, a Sly and the Family Stone shot in the hall of some bleached-out studio, and some Woodstock clippings and Euro Club posters.  It had the vintage feel coupled with these times- a flat screen TV dedicated to rugby and documentaries, a unisex washroom, a tossed stage with amps and a light kit, and a dozen spruce tables under an oily onyx ceiling.

                Cale stared hard into the basket crowd, a small bunch, of likely regulars and irregulars.  The old man with piercings, hay wire hair, and a jean jacket, leaning on a smile, drumming old fingers before a tumbler of gin, still caught up in his lost years because he was trying too hard to pretend it was just another easy night a thousand miles away from anything familiar- some suppose it’s better than drinking alone.  

Behind him, at a far table, sat two Korean couples playing westerner with their popped collars and stouts and chucks doing more without than within, too busy with their heads over familiar shoulders pocketing the demeanor of distant strangers and acting out the game of cultural ditto to bother trading anything more than a few words, a nod, and bought smiles.

Down the aisle a couple of Brits poured spirits, clapped glasses, downed ferment, shattered laughter against the dead walls, and pretended it was all still alive. At least the mirage was saved tonight. 

Just before them, a little bit beyond the bar, sat a washed-up guy, mid-twenties, with corn husk hair, dangling cheeks, and potato sack eyes six feet under the fading ink of some dog-eared novel.

                “What are you reading?” Cale heard her say.        

                The guy looked up, bothered, spine still creased. “Beautiful Losers.”

                “Beautiful Losers?”

                “By Leonard Cohen.” The kid itched the page, waiting to get back, not because he didn’t want to trade words with her, but because he’d been through all this before.  She was beyond him- light coral eyes, curves like a valley, flower-pressed lips, a thin accent, mature beauty with an edge like dusk.  If anything she was coming over here for drunk amusement, to shoot up laugher at her table, to flout around and make him wet, to nail him because he was more interested in the novella between his weathered palms than the angles he would never trace.

Gorgeous women- they always play with loaded dice.  They learn young that it’s safer to bend, to manipulate, to hide their depth behind the shallow, to mistrust the face in the mirror because often that’s all a man wants to get to know.  But what else can she do when you have men who think of women in tallies, or as a conquest?  Men who’ll swear in private that they love her, then swivel once they’re on the bar stool and treat her as another finger on their counting hand so they can swear to the bloke beside them that they had this many or that many, the next day only to ditch her to the curve and collect his bounty like all the rest.

Love is perverted in the now, you prefer to sate Eros because it’s instant, you feel free, you rise above in the ecstasy of a single moment, and you don’t feel like watering and weeding the garden of love because it’s always easier ditching it once it starts to break.  And so you end up gunning through fling after fling after fling without realizing that the strings attached don’t shine in the moonlight until years down the road, when you’re lying next to another empty body and love is grey and distant, because you’ve conditioned yourself not to search for a relationship, but a quick fix, and you’ve come to clasp something unworldly to the temporal and to time, something like love, which should stretch beyond the notion of here and forever.      

                “You read alone in bars?” She didn’t say it in a razor wire manner and she wasn’t trying to throw jacks under his tires, she was just curious, a little tipsy.  Reading was a dying pleasure; reading in a bar- alien.

                But he took it in as vinegar, shrugging, the blood rushing under his skin like frost water under ice. “I mean…”

                “Sorry, I didn’t mean for it to come off as so blunt-”

                “No, it’s fine.”

                “-I just have a terrible habit of wondering out loud I suppose.”

                “It’s not a terrible habit.”

                “Not a terrible habit?”  She laughed and folded her arms.  He was turning out like every other guy, skipping back and forth, polishing the clay just the way he supposed she might want it.  But to him, she wasn’t the valley doll he supposed she would be.  They both kept their guard anyway, knowing that fraud love was a manipulative game where you cheated, shifted cards, and played your best fit hand instead of the raw hand that made you you. 

And maybe that’s why love is dying everywhere, you’re taught it’s better to cash out early on bullshit just to get something, to get anything, to keep on top, and you’re taught to be desperate without knowing, for what? Another one night stand, another bombed out heartbreak, an iteration of a lesson you were supposed to learn from your first love, the one where you dropped your body off the dock because the fallout had pounded out all the color?

“No, no it’s not a terrible habit.  A terrible habit is not asking when you don’t know.”

“Mm.”  She tried arresting her smile, but it broke through anyway, not that it mattered, he missed the hint because he was too busy tripping over what to say, thinking he’d blown it all over, like he always did.

“Do you play chess?” She changed the subject, to save herself from settling into some deep conversation that would only cause her to drop her guard and end in ruin.  He could be different, but was it worth it?

He wasn’t attractive physically, but she’d learned time and time again what a wreck it was ever assuming that should matter in the first place.  She dated pretty boys before, they were soft on the eyes, but when it came to falling asleep at night, she would only lie awake and try to force herself to create reasons beyond the superficial for why anything ever existed between them in the first place.  And then, like everything else in this world, it would fade and die and she’d only walk out damned with fresh scars.

She agreed out loud with her friends that fairy tale love was a hoax, but she had to admit, she never let go of the little girl inside her who dreamed and kept quiet her true belief, that love was beyond everything, that it was a last gamble between two people in the dark to screw it all and create their own garden of forever, and that she might, if she could, find it.   

“Yeah, I do, I mean-”

“Alright let’s play.  They have a set behind the bar.”  She smiled, pivoted, and sauntered over to the bar; she wasn’t giving him any wiggle room to back out, not that he would, he knew that, but he’d  come to find that killing any and every opportunity for anything good in life saved him from the disappointment of failure.  It was better, he supposed, to linger in the limbo and never take a step.  So she wasn’t far off when she assumed that she’d have to be the one to kick it off to make anything happen. 

But this is how it is- ‘The flower that smells the sweetest is shy and lowly.’  Women should make that a cardinal rule: the man in the corner with folded arms, saying much of nothing, is the man with passion, sincerity, and the extinct mannerism of a gentleman who still opens doors, stands on the outside of the sidewalk, and holds the umbrella in a storm.  He’s the man who’ll lay awake beside you when the nightmares become heavy, the one who’ll save you from the fear of growing old, the lover who’ll show you the edge of the world and never, no matter what, love another or fall out of the passion that others so readily expire.

Cale just laughed.  It’s always moments like these, a single decision, a minute conversation, a collision with another, moments that are fragile, delicate, random but precise, that change everything.   

“Another?” The bar tender reached for his glass.  Cale nodded; he needed to unload.  Besides, watching this relationship blossom was starting to rake his soul.  He missed her every time he saw love flare or a couple hand in hand and it tore him up because he felt like it was starting to die, the sparks between them, and he swore it wasn’t him, it couldn’t be him.

“Here.” The bar tender slid the highball across the countertop and wiped her palms with a rag. “You look like you could use a song?”

“That obvious.”

“We’re human. We always make it obvious.”

“I suppose.” Cale leaned forward and drummed the glass.  “You got any Jeff Buckley?”

“Studio or live?”

He wanted to hear something damned before it was even written, something with crypt shadow before light was ever invented, something like honey cyanide, something trench deep, full of longing like the cello in the attic of an arthritic humanist, the requiem echo in the pelvic bones of lost first lovers, something with lyrics like Mayakovski, but he’d let craps shoot craps.

“Surprise me.”

 She shuffled through the computer then disappeared into the backroom. 

Cale only laughed when Buckley’s Thin Lizzy cover started to play.  It was perfect.  He drowned half his highball and slipped into a contemplation he’d long tried to avoid.

Aurora.

He thought about the first time they met.  He was on his way home from work after another long night shift, tired of it all, jaded even from breathing, when she rear-ended him at a light. 

‘You’ve got to be kidding, Christ, what the hell?’ It was the last straw, he couldn’t afford this mess, he was knee deep in student loans and with a degree in music he was lucky just to have the assistant manager gig at the diner downtown.

‘I thought the light changed.’

‘You thought the light changed? It was clearly red, it’s still red.’  Cale was sick of everything going wrong, especially the small stuff that always had to inconvenience him for no reason beyond a just because.  He nearly lost his mind, pacing back and forth, ranting and damning this and that until he noticed her standing there with this smirk on her face, clearly on the brink of laughing.

‘You think this is funny?’

‘It is kind of funny.’

‘Kind of funny?’

‘I mean, of all the people in this town you happen to be the one who ends up in front of me at this exact light at this exact time.’ 

‘And that makes it kind of funny?’

‘Well, you’re pretty funny when you’re overcompensating for how pissed off you are.’

He broke and they ended up sitting in a Sonic parking lot trading dreams and jokes and memories and hopes over fast food and slushies until the sun broke like a paper cut over the horizon.

Cale had never felt so alive in his entire life, so distant from all the bullshit, so weightless, as if he were freefalling out of this world and the black ink of living and dying, of dreaming and waking, of rising and failing, of laughing and hurting, of growing up and growing old, and if he was a draught, she was the rain, and she needed to do nothing more than simply be to save him.   

 

The train shutters, like tinsel in the wind, and slows to a standstill.  I unplug, leave the page, holster my pen and notebook, and shoulder my bag before I crawl down the aisle with footsteps that sink like anchors bombing the Mariana, or a well with shadows for water, feeling like another body dragged off to the gallows.

“Goodbye, sir, goodbye.” The attendant shoots in chopstick English, dipping low.  I manage a throttled smile, I shift my bag, I try to lean forward and posh up my steps, anything to curtail the weight of being back here again, but-

This, this is the kind of place that pains you to remember, because the scars still haunt you wherever you go, and it aches to return because the ghosts have color, even after all these years…

After all these years…

It’s been ten since I’ve been here, ten years of dreading a return, ten years of choking on the malt guilt of what I’ve done and what I could have done.  It’s a kind of silent guilt you box in the pit of your heart, like never admitting to your current fling that your first love was your only love, or never admitting to your first love, who you collide with randomly years later on a street corner, that you still cross her in memory, in the valley, under the only sun that ever flares in color, wanting to say, but never saying, that she was it… that she was it…

I take a taxi to the shore and find a pocket of sand where I can sit alone and collapse into my writing and watch the sun sink before I take the ferry to the island where he and I buried letters for whoever outlived the other.

 

Cale slipped out of his memory, polished off the highball, and ordered another. 

“Same?”

He nodded.

“Can I get a pitcher?”  It was the dame from earlier.  Cale looked over his shoulder and found the guy adjusting himself, a half-moon smile striped across his face, ecstatic fingers sketching chess scenarios over the board, his face like water color, clearly, never feeling this- alive.

She loaded it up and turned to leave when a royal face held her sleeve.

“I’m new here, what’s good on tap?”

He was handsome in the artificial light, his features cut like a river across a continent, soft on the edges, sharp in angles, with small hands, broad shoulders, dressed like he was off to a Radiohead concert.

“Nothing is good on tap in Korea.”

“Then what’s tolerable?”

Cale could tell by the degree of his smile and the way he fit his palm against the bar top, that this was another dick trying to hook up his fix.

“Best go with the Guinness.” She took a step to skirt around him but he knew the move, shifted, and bowled another line.

“That doesn’t look like Guinness.” He tapped her pitcher.

“So you’re not color blind?”

“Only when my eyes are closed.”

Cale leaned around them and caught the guy drilling his eyes into the chess board, trying to pretend he didn’t notice, acting like he didn’t much care.  She watched him over the powder boy’s shoulders, wanting to go back, waiting for him to come over and save her, to be a man about it, but he only reached for his paperback to cower in the words and run from the world.

Cale shook his head, polished off his highball, and ordered another.  He wanted to tear up the guy’s novel and kick and scream something like ‘You’ve got it but you’re letting it go!? Why?’  And he wanted her to skip the love games and the nonsense in between, to rush back to what could be and let this sex pauper burn.

But this is how it is.  No one has the guts to live anymore, to bang up their knees on the pavement, to suffer rug burn every now and then, to take a chance and leap off the bell tower, to say, do, and be what they damn well want to.  Guess we’re all too busy worrying about our own skin or what they’ll think and say or the pain that comes with hitting the bottom or walking around head down making sure our soles strike pavement instead of setting eyes on the sun.  Where has all the passion and the madness gone?  All to the pits, all to the pits.   

Cale wondered about him and Aurora.  Was the passion and the madness there?

She was everything to him.  And not in the cliché sense you hear in radio lyrics, no, she was everything to him because he couldn’t even pound down the streets of a country miles and miles away without falling into her, without wishing she was here, without seeing her face in the turning light slipping between the summer leaves, the autumn bones, the winter ashes. 

Wasn’t that passion and madness enough?

Cale throttled the highball, he wanted to kill it all away, forget the pain of being in love, of missing, and drown out the problems they were having, but in his bid to wring out the shade, he was only left with shadow.

He’d tried to ignore it for some time now, her gradual falling out, her talking to him less and less.  He was sick of waiting up nights and waking up early to hear from nothing and no one, drained from texting her and getting nothing back.  He knew she was busy, but he missed the fire when he was first in Korea, the fire of her sending him love letter after love letter, posting random ‘I love you’ notes on his wall, and calling him just to say goodnight.

But Cale couldn’t excuse her anymore; something was wrong and fading on her end.  He worked long days but he still made time to write her, to try, because he was still deep, deep in love.  But he was tired of the imbalance, of being the only one who seemed interested in the other, and ending up as the only one who really kept it all alive.  And so, he felt, their relationship had gone from hyacinth to oak, becoming old love, used love, between two lovers whose shadows slow danced with the passion they once shared ages ago.      

So when it came down to it, Cale regretted them ever meeting, not because he didn’t love her, but because the end they swore they’d never paint was becoming more and more oblique, and he knew it would hurt forever to do anything else but be with her.

So maybe that was it.  Maybe he was too much for her.  Maybe his passion and love was too heavy.  Did the artist in him abuse color?  Was the paint too thick?  Was he too clingy, too tight, not letting her breathe and grow and live? 

Or was his love not enough?  Did she want more?

                Cale didn’t want to seem desperate or immature or worried pestering her about it, but he’d only be lying to himself and to her if he kept acting like nothing was wrong between them.  Besides, he wouldn’t act like the rest of the world and cope by pretending nothing was ever fucked up.

                Love shouldn’t be like that anyway, it shouldn’t have to rely on denial as a crutch, or anything for that matter, it should stand naked and exposed on its own, even when the end arrives and it’s time for passing ruin.

But what was love really? Cale still didn’t know what it meant, not in words anyway.  But maybe that was it, maybe love is so beyond everything that you don’t know why and you can’t really say and all you know is you do, you love and that’s that. 

Cale drowned another glass and checked his cell.  Aden had sent him a text asking him if he landed any gigs, but he just pocketed the phone and ordered another drink.

Damn it all.  And damn her.

They were complete worlds apart now anyway, he didn’t really know her friends, he wasn’t a part of her new memories, he couldn’t really be there, and vice versa.  Neither of them could understand the new world they were in and that was driving them apart, so what was it worth now, they were running on empty? 

At least she had a world she enjoyed.  He couldn’t stand Korea.  All the sob and plastic and vanity, a society hyper-modernized by the west during the Cold War to shuck quantitative communistic materialism in favor of qualitative capitalistic materialism, a magnet for all the western dregs who wanted cheap booze and a quick fix.

Cale thought back to why he ever wanted to come in the first place, to him kicking stones across Aurora’s driveway swearing he’d trek the world to figure out the purpose of being.  But it wasn’t until he left that he realized the answer and the peace of mind he’d longed for all his life was in being with her, back home, lying on the pavement and staring up at the stars.

He wanted to come back early to be with her, but she told him to stay, to see the world, to live and decide without her as a variable.  But she just didn’t understand, the drive to see it was for the content he’d found in her, and he could wait until she was done.  She only had two years left of undergraduate and then a year of graduate school anyway, besides, Cale wanted to propose and tie the knot because he’d supposed this was it, she said it was it, he swore it was.  Sure he’d said that to every girlfriend before her, but he’d always said it without really meaning it-

Didn’t he?

Surely, she was different, she was a firestorm in a valley of dead and bone dry trees, renewing the cycle of his being, saving him like she always would.  But he also knew she could just as easily destroy everything and crash their city into ruin simply by walking away.

He thought about Aden, about what he’d said a long time ago, leaning against a brick wall in the park, rolling tobacco between stale fingers, the moon cut in half and dangling, ‘She’s changed you and that’s what worries me, because you know,’ He stopped to lick the paper, then lifted his shot eyes, to try and save. ‘There’s no going back.’

And that’s what it was. 

There was no going back.

No going back…