October's Rain

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My roommate made sadness seem as beautiful as a Charlie Chaplin movie, and now I remembered how he and I used to stay up all night drinking beer, listening to the Throwing Muses, to that strange, jarring song which contained the line Like an old man in a dress. I never knew what that line meant, but Like an old man in a dress now seemed to bear a certain similarity to Like a sad man with a broken umbrella.

Like an old man in a dress, I thought to myself, holding my broken umbrella before me like a tattered shield. As I passed other people fighting their way through the wind and the rain with their own tattered umbrellas, I would smile a melancholy smile and think, Like an old man in a dress.

I stopped in front of the dirty, rain-streaked window of a music store to gaze at some expensive electric guitars, and they seemed lonely and forlorn. They were too expensive for anyone to buy. Now I passed the Hell's Angel's Club on Third Street, and even the motorcycles seemed dejected and cheerless. No one would ride them on a day like today, not even an old man in a dress.

As I passed a wire trash can, I stuffed my broken umbrella into the heap of wet refuse. It was a terrible act of betrayal, we had been through a lot together, but enough was enough. As I walked away I heard it whispering my name, Tyler, Tyler, in the gloomy, metallic voice of a squashed insect, but I chose to leave it in its sorrow, and carry on alone in mine.

I now found myself, soggy and cold, at the intersection of street and avenue, unsure which way to go. It didn't matter which way I went, because I wasn't going anywhere in particular, but still I couldn't decide. Yes, it's always like that for me, I thought, I'm like a leaf tossed about by the wind. I gazed up the avenue and I gazed down the street. Candy wrappers and little old men blew every which way. I realized I was standing in front of a café, and looked through the window.

The room looked warm and inviting: under the coppery glow of incandescent bulbs, people sat chatting and reading books at dark wooden tables, as they drank coffee from steaming porcelain mugs and munched their buttered croissants and muffins.

In the back of the café, a mottled brick wall housed a fireplace, and above the mantel hung a print of a painting I knew well: Henri Rousseau's Sleeping Gypsy. I also own a print of this painting, and it has hung above my bed in every apartment in which I have ever lived.

But seeing it on the brick wall inside of a cozy café as I stood outside in the cold October rain was different than seeing it in my bedroom; it was as if I saw it for the first time: the gypsy in his multicolored robes, sleeping peacefully on desert sand under a pale moon in a deep blue sky. Beside the gypsy lay his mandolin and water jug, and behind him stood a lion, huge and startling, bending his head to sniff the robes of the gypsy.

What a strange moment! The lion has come upon the sleeping man, but the man, because sleeping, displays no fear to startle the lion. The lion has never seen such a man, a man at peace. This is a night when the lion can stop being a lion long enough to contemplate the ways of men. Yes, under such extraordinary circumstances, the ancient enmity of lions and men becomes irrelevant; the lion's attitude is one of curiosity, not aggression, and so the gypsy sleeps undisturbed.

I wondered now, as I had long ago when I first saw the painting, about the gypsy. In his peaceful sleep, was he at all aware, even in his dreams, of this magical, dangerous encounter?

I have always thought the painting captured the floating, surreal mood of a moment of suspension, that sudden instance of peace and wonder which comes to us odd and unsummoned in midst of our tumultuous lives, that fleeting moment when we see ourselves as if from outside, as if in a dream. But what if the man were to awake?

With some melancholy, I realized that I had not really looked at the painting for years. I had once loved it so much that I bought a print to hang above my bed, but it had quickly become familiar to me, and finally invisible. And now I stood outside the café, wanting to be in that place that seemed as magical and inviting as a painting to me, but I thought, If I go inside, I will no longer be in the rain, and the café will become familiar and ordinary to me, like the print of Sleeping Gypsy that hangs upon my bedroom wall.

I had stood there a long time when an attractive woman inside the café gestured to me, as if to invite me in. I stared at her in wonder, certain that there must be some misunderstanding, when her face suddenly shifted and became a face I knew: a woman I had known for over ten years, our friendship formed during that sepia-toned era of interminable evenings spent drinking beer to the sound of the Throwing Muses.

There she sat, alone at a little wooden table, a newspaper and mug of coffee set before her, and I forgot my sadness, my bittersweet, wonderful, October sadness, and walked inside.