Litman836
Traveller in the arts
Posts: 2
(8/28/02 3:13 pm)
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Perfect Dream(Short Story)
Perfect Dream
He walks down the street passing by the vendors that ply their ubiquitous soda and magazines to the crowds that frequent the train station each morning and night. He stops off in some quiet restaurant, not bothering to look at the name. It’s a little café place with some jazz playing on the sound system, the main point that drew him to it was that he could get a beer and pick a corner to sit in quietly. Maybe take out the little notepad in his pocket and write something, let himself unwind some. He gets the beer and walks to the corner that had the least light even though the lighting in here was dim enough as it was. There weren’t many people in there with him, but it was only five right now and work hadn’t let out yet. The weather was taking a turn for the worse as well, turning from a thin drizzle into a more steady deluge. There would be all types of people in here soon enough looking to escape the passing Spring storm.
Sure enough a few came in immediately and got coffee or beer, a couple of them ordering both. They were all alone, each sat down at tables spaced well apart from the others. They had almost pensive looks on their faces, all looked somewhat lost in a contemplation that was theirs alone. The first who’d walked in was an older gentlemen, worn khaki coat and fedora spotted in places where he’d gotten wet walking under overhangs, the rumpled hat held in one hand and a beer in the other. He sets the beer on his table and sits back heavily on the wooden booth behind him. He no longer seemed tired or run down as he reclined, he heaves a sigh of relaxation. That was what explained the fatigued look he’d on his face moments before. The other two were wholly uninteresting after looking at them more closely, they just seemed bored and restless now that they’d sat down.
But the last one sat at a table not more than five feet from his own, she by far made coming into this place worth it. Piercing green eyes, they seemed to look directly into his soul and tattoo their indelible mark upon it. She’d been glancing at him just as he’d looked her way. Her looks brought to mind a favored song pulled easily from the depths of memory. Their eyes locked for a moment and then she went back to slowly sipping her beer and lighting a cigarette. Even the most casual of her glances was enough to hypnotize him and he immediately wanted to know her. Her lithe form was perfectly contoured and she held a kind of mysteriousness about her that drew him as well. She still wore the somewhat resigned anxiety in her expression she’d had when she walked in. She didn’t really try to hide it though, and it wasn’t a particularly sad expression anyway, she just seemed a bit out of sorts.
He wanted to look at her a while longer but it seemed the respectful thing to afford her the degree of quiet solitude she’d probably come in to find. He took a swig of his beer and wondered what the hell he was going to write about, if anything at this point. He wanted to pen something about her but that might be awkward if they struck up a conversation, but maybe she’d be flattered he thinks and taps his pen on the notepad as he takes another sip of his beer. He stares insistently at the lines on the pad, blue fixed against a yellow backdrop, his mind was working full speed to solve the whole dilemma. First of all he wasn’t used to writing in public just yet, he’d been quite solitary in the last year, working in near isolation to finish his book. It made him self conscious because he took on a blank stare when really enmeshed in the flow of words and images. And after he’d finished the book he’d just sat around trying to figure out what came next.
He’d leaped the hurdle that had seemed immeasurable in height and when it was finished he was left only with the need to do it all over again as soon as possible but his mind took a while getting disentangled from his previous work and he’d found himself languishing for a while. But last week he’d decided that he might as well stop skulking around his apartment and go out and see what the world had to offer him. But he’d only sit in the corner where he could still be kind of anonymous.
He started a few lines about the other people and they ran cold rather quickly as they had nothing distinguishing about them. He waited another ten minutes like that, pen in hand hovering inches above those pale blue lines. Occasionally looking up to further scope the place out to see if anyone else had come in to get an idea of how it would work as a scene. Some aspects of the place stood out well, the mirrored walls reflected everything imperfectly, and the majority of the light was provided by blue Christmas lights that snaked up from the bar and all the way across the ceiling. But there was nothing in the place that sparked the slightest bit of interest except the girl. He chanced another look up at her as he drained some more beer and once again she was looking at him as well, smiling this time. He returns her smile after setting his glass down and wipes away a small foam mustache.
She laughs gently at him wiping it away and lights up another cigarette. She shuffles her hands on the table and sits back still smiling as she looks at him. He’s speechless sitting there, trying to make some kind of introduction or impression.
“What is that you’re writing there?” she says in a melodic voice that suited her exquisitely
“Nothing yet. Not sure what to write about.”
“Don’t let me interrupt you then.” She says and folds her arms on the table and takes a drag off her cigarette.
“No, really, it’s fine. I probably won’t get any work done today anyway.”
“I know how it is when you’re trying to write and people interrupt.”
“What kind of stuff do you write?”
“Short stories mostly, some poetry here and there. I’ve got a whole notebook full of them at home. I really can’t stand any of my work but the people who’ve read it seem to like it. What about you?”
“I wrote a book that I can’t stand and now I’m trying to do short stories or find another novel to start on.” He says and sets the notepad and pen down.
“Have you gotten it published yet?”
“No, I’m not sure what I want to do with it. I don’t know whether it’s good enough.”
“What’s it about?”
“Partying and going to raves mostly, I wrote it back when I was doing both a lot. That was pretty much it, by the time I was finishing it I’d gotten to the point where I didn’t even want to look at the book anymore.”
“I know how that is, I’m the same way if I’m taking too long getting a story done.”
“Yeah, it’s bad news when you start dreading having to sit down and tie everything up.”
“You really should try and get it published though. It’s not doing you any good just sitting around collecting dust.”
“I know, I know. But I don’t think publishers would want to take a chance on a first time author, especially when the book’s all about the party life. So that leaves subsidy publishing and I don’t have that kind of cash right now.”
She seemed to mull that over a few moments and stared reflectively into her beer. She leaned a little over the table and her folded arms formed the perfect frame for her body. Angular strands of black hair swung like sharpened pendulums over her eyes and she instinctively brushed them back to sit behind her ears. He started to feel like he was going to burst if she didn’t say something soon because they were both looking at each other expectantly. She drank off what remained of her beer and was getting up for another when he chimed in.
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“Certainly.” She said and sat back down, “I’ll take another beer.”
He walked up to the bar and ordered another for her and one for himself because she was now sitting next to where he’d been in the booth. The beers were fantastically cold in his hands as he walked back and set them on the table—while she seemed draped in an aura that brought to mind pure warmth sitting next to him. He nearly expected to see steam when she picked up her glass. He drank the rest of his first beer in one gulp and slid it off to the side. They both lit up cigarettes and sat back some.
“Are you from around here?” he asks.
“Sort of, I just moved from Maryland. So I don’t really know anyone or what all there is to do. The only reason I found this place was because it started to rain and I didn’t have an umbrella.”
“What was Maryland like?”
“I don’t know. It was boring most of the time. There wasn’t a thing to do in the suburbs and I’m not really a city person. So I got sick of it and decided to move up here one day.” She pauses to take drink from her glass and then her eyes widen slightly, ”We’ve been talking all this time and neither of us has introduced ourselves yet. I’m Claire by the way.”
“I’m Rob.” He says blushing a little because he hadn’t even noticed.
“Some of Maryland was fun, when I was seventeen we lived out in the country for a while. My friends and I used to throw parties with bonfires and cases of beer. We would dance around until the sun came up. That was great, but then they either went off to college or we fell out. Are you from around here?”
“Yeah, born and raised here. But I feel the same way about this place you do about Maryland. There have been some fun times here, but now it feels like I’m just sitting around waiting for something to happen.”
“This place isn’t so bad.”
“You only say that because you haven’t lived here your whole life. I guess it isn’t really too bad, I’m just tired of seeing the same things day in and day out.”
“That sounds about right. All the sights here are brand new to me. So it still has kind of an exciting feel to it.”
Her enthusiasm was infectious and he found himself easily swept up in it. He’d felt anything but enthused when he’d woken up on the couch with a six pack of empties gleaming in the morning sun on the coffee table. Maybe this place wasn’t so bad after all. He drank some beer and smiled at her as they sat there. He wondered why the hell the world had saw fit to grace him with this girl’s presence, even if he was reading her wrong and she wasn’t the slightest bit attracted to him, it was worth it to have talked with and seen her. He couldn’t understand why she’d be interest in him except as a fellow writer, she seemed out of just about anyone’s league in fact. But she dispelled those fears when she rested her hand on his as it sat on the table next to his beer. It was a massive shock of contact running through him after almost a year of near complete isolation and solitude.
“I guess there are still some place close by that are all right, main street isn’t totally beat just yet. I could show you around some if you’d like?”
“You’d do that for me?”
Without hesitation he says yes of course. If anything she’d done him the favor striking up a conversation with him. It all seemed so arbitrary that the two of them would arrive at the same point and place at exactly the same time. The whole stretch he’d been working on his book he’d not once ran into another writer, let alone a smoking hot one who for some reason seemed to like him.
“Just let me finish my beer.” He says.
“Cool.”
He sits there and tries to remember any of the sites around here that were even remotely noteworthy or for that matter fascinating in the least. Main street was run down, a phenomenon caused mostly by the mall centralizing profit into a single area. It wasn’t like this could possibly be much different than any other small towns she’d seen in Maryland. What was there here besides the drug stores and gas stations, but then again he’d found this little café, and he hadn’t even been inside most of the other places in ages.
He’d just passed right by when he’d ventured out to get some smokes, he wasn’t much in the mood for socializing at the time. Come to think of it he hadn’t even really taken a long hard look in years. He’d kind of skimmed things when he looked around, not taking the time to check things out. It surprised him how easily his outlook had improved just from meeting this girl. He’d passed the last week in a gray haze of alcohol induced bliss. It had served it’s purpose in passing the time but hadn’t served too well in brightening his mood much. He took another pull from his beer, not hurrying or rushing but drinking it steadily down.
“What should we see first?” she asks.
“I don’t know, I was just thinking about it and I haven’t even seen most of the places around here up close in a while.”
“There’s got to be somewhere that sticks out.”
“The park. My buddies and I used to hang out there sometimes.”
“I haven’t been farther than the grocery store around the corner from my apartment since I moved here.”
“It’s only a few blocks up the street.”
They finish their beers and walk out into the street. The rain had stopped at some point when he was in there but he hadn’t noticed it while sitting way back in the corner. The air was filled with free floating drops of mist that stuck pleasantly to their skin. Everything on the street looked new even to him under the columns of sun light that poked through the clouds. They walked past a few places that dealt antiques, one of the thrift stores, and one of the extremely shady bars around town.
“How are the bars around here?”
“Not too good, I don’t really hang out in them for more than the couple minutes it takes me to buy a six pack. I haven’t actually sat down and drank with anyone in a while.”
“You shouldn’t drink alone, it’s bad for you. I used to drink alone all the time when I wrote.”
“I know it’s bad for me, but it’s hard to convince myself that I can write at my best when I’m totally sober.”
They walked on talking for a few more blocks and then they were crossing the street into the park. The grass was still damp and the trees were heavy and glistening with beads of moisture as well. The gravel path crunched under their shoes as he took her hand and they strolled happily towards the center of the park where a black globe sat spinning in a depression with jets of water supporting it. It was the centerpiece in the fountain, where pidgeons congregated on the brick rim and bent low to sip water. The two of them sat down on the edge, away from the pidgeons, and both lit up cigarettes. She leans back and rests herself on her elbows as she kicks her long legs out and crosses one foot over the other. Her toenails are painted a bright red peeking out through her shoes. He looks off at the small hill covered with trees where he’d sat so many nights getting toasted with his friends when they were still going to the school that was just on the other side. It felt good to remember it so clearly.
He turned and looked at their reflections in the water for a little while, she’d looked down with him and they’d both smiled and laughed. It almost felt like a dream, the quality of it seemed so wholly unreal to him that it was hard to believe good fortune when by some chance fluke fait saw fit to send this girl. They both looked at each other and he leaned in to kiss her and it seemed like time slowed down and the colors began to run together. And then he began to realize that it was a dream.
He’d never been more bitter than when he’d woken up, he wanted to drink himself into ten comas, anything to send him back to that place and make it permanent this time. He barely could move for a minute because it was such a shock to wake up back in his dingy apartment. There wasn’t even anything in particular that had woken him up, so he couldn’t even find dull satisfaction in smashing his alarm clock or punching out a neighbor that was mowing their lawn too early. He’d just woken up because the dream was so perfect that it just couldn’t hold together any longer. But he wasn’t going to drink himself off into oblivion in his apartment, as tempting as the thought was, that could still be averted. Today he was going out.
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