Invest in Rain - Part 3 - Finale

“I don’t think we own an umbrella.” He said putting his arms behind his head as she climbed into bed.

“We don’t.” She nuzzled her head into his shoulder and curled her leg over the inside of his thigh. He pulled a turquoise comforter over the both of them. For several quiet minutes they listened to the fat taps of rain hitting the window. Their legs and arms burrowed and shifted into the sky-colored landscape of mattress, blankets, pillows and warm, tired bodies, crawling for the spot that fit, a familiar nightly embrace. Just as their hearts began to slow and their thoughts began to disconnect and sink, they heard a man call out from beneath the street below. A moment later, there was the faint reply of a faraway woman. The young man opened his eyes and gazed at the sponge-textured ceiling, weaving patterns through the paint-coarsened lines. He wondered if the patterns appeared because his brain was searching for patterns like a face in the night.

“Did you understand what I meant?” He spoke softly.

“Of course I understood. I just didn’t like thinking that way. If we all walked around thinking perception was a trick I don’t think people would be as close as they are now.” She scratched at the little hairs at the center of his chest.

“Well if it is true I think it can be a good thing, too.”
The young woman raised her head and put her hand under it, her elbow supporting the weight of her head. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, if our world really is just a dream, just some illusion, a trick perception plays on us, and we’re aware of it then really we could do whatever we wanted.”
“Sure, you could make me into whatever you wanted.” Her breath felt like fleeting sunlight on his ribs.

“No, that’s the thing. We would change. It’d be our world. Our dream. You and me, all we have to do is believe in each other and everything else is,” He waved his hand uncertainly. “Forgettable. You know? I mean, I believe that you exist along with pretty much everything else. I believe I always will. But everyone else and everything else is easy to forget. You’re not. You know?”

She shrugged.

“I’m serious.” He had his thumb on her cheek with the rest of his hand in her damp hair. “If you just believed in one other person your whole life and nothing else, you could do whatever you wanted with that person. Go wherever. Be whatever.”

“Like be homeless? You know if we did just give it all up we’d still be sued for unpaid rent, insurance, federal loans and, I don’t know, utilities. We’d be thrown in jail.”

“I’m not sure if it all works quite like that.”

“All I’m saying is, we can’t afford to be homeless.” She patted his head like a dog and he turned away.

“I was kidding.” She pleaded and kissed his cheek. “I love your big-fat-brain-stuff.”

“Thanks.” He traced maps in the ceiling. “Your brain’s alright, too.”

“No more talking about philosophy.” She laid her head back on his chest and ran her fingers over his sternum.

“I said that guy was English earlier, but now I’m not sure”

“I said no more philosophy. How about we have a SHOUTING CONT—“
Just like she’d wanted, the young man put his hand over her mouth. Her voice was muffled but she kept on yelling louder and louder. He smiled and held on like a tiny bull ride as she amused herself. After a minute she stopped. “All done.” And they settled back into the embrace.

Waves of wind pelted the side of their apartment with raindrops in short scattered bursts, a car horn below was muffled through the sound of it. The young woman reached over the young man to find the lamp on the nightstand. She turned its knob. The young woman watched the ceiling blacken above her. She laid her head back down and, just as she settled, the young man closed his eyes to get away from the sound of a siren.

“You’re heart rate just went up.” Her ear was on his chest.

“We need a trip.” He pulled her in closer.

“Where would we go?”

“I don’t know. We can’t afford an umbrella.”

“We’re getting one tomorrow. I made a list.” A fire truck roared somewhere far away, its suspended honk like an adolescent foghorn.

“Where would you want to go?”

“I don’t know.”

The young man pulled her up to his chest as he shifted to his side so that his head was resting on her pillow. He could barely see her face in the darkness, but her eyes seemed to glow in contrast to the shadows. The longer he stared the more her face accumulated the sparse light of the room until he could see her so clearly, like a lined map in the ceiling.

“If we could go anywhere, just you and me, anywhere in the world, no debt, no money,” He rested his arm over her side.
“Where would we go?”

She fidgeted under his arm and even in the darkness he could tell she was blushing.

“No money?” It didn’t make sense.

“I mean, like, for the sake of the question, don’t use it as a factor.”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine.” He could feel her become heavier on his side as if she was almost asleep. “There’s too much.”

“Think about a dream vacation. Everything we’d do, every little detail that’d make it perfect. I’ve seen you paint. This is the same thing, just with words.” He knocked lightly on her forehead.

She brushed his hand away. “You go first.” She nudged her cheek back on to his chest. He could feel her resting breath spill down his torso.

“I came up with the question. You go first.”

“Nope, I’m not going unless you go first.” She fiddled with his ear.

“I came up with the question.”

“Oh, the big-bad, question comer-upper. Who gives a shit?”

He ignored her till the sirens quit.

“Go.”

“Fine, but let me think for a second.”

“Oh, you already have an idea. You wouldn’t have asked if you didn’t.”

“Yeah, but it’s cheesy.”

“I like your cheese.”

“Let me think.”

“No thinking. No editing.” She rolled on top of him and buried her head next to his so that their necks were touching. “I want unedited cheese.” She talked into the pillow as he tried to focus his eyes to see the dark maps on the ceilings. “Raw cheddar.”

“Fine, but you can’t be a jackass.”

“No deal.”

“Fine, you can be a jackass.”

“Fine.”

“Fine,” He started. “You’d be wearing a hat, but not one of your winter beanies or your stupid trucker hat.”

“It’s not stupid. It makes me feel tall.”

“How does it—Is that really why you wear that thing?”

“Yeah, it makes me feel tall.”

“Okay. Well, it would probably be one of those fully rimmed black ones with the lace band around it. Something you’d imagine Audrey Hepburn to wear.”

“I don’t look like Audrey Hepburn. No one looks like Audrey Hepburn”

“Well, no, you wouldn’t look like Audrey Hepburn. The hat would just be something she might wear.”

“I’ve never seen her wear a hat.”

“Okay. Well. Regardless of what you think you have or have not seen what you think Audrey Hepburn wears, in this particular vision you’d have a hat, you’d pull it off with your own charm, look very lovely in it and it would make you feel, really tall.”

“Cool.”

“Anyways. We’d be on a train heading out to the city, Paris. We’d be coming from the south. Maybe we’d be coming from the coast with sand in our boots. The French countryside would pass by our window while our fingers were interlocked. The leaves would be falling and it’d be just cold enough to have on our wool coats.”

“I love when your pea coat collects the little bubbles you can touch.” The young woman barely was aware that she was speaking. “It’s like a bunch of tiny snow globes.”

“Eventually every golden tree would be replaced more and more by churches, villas, cobbled nooks and charming shops. Our world would turn from amber garden into unreal city. We’d barely say a word. We wouldn’t have to. You’d have your hands on me or, probably, you’d just have the one on me while the other bent and ripped an old brochure.” The young woman buried her weight even deeper into the young man’s side just as the rain outside had picked up, blanketing the noisy street below till it was somewhere far away.

“A ticket-man would let us down from the train steps and welcome us with a thick Parisian accent. I would scramble down first and hold your waist as you hopped down to me. The wind would blow the flaps of your coat behind your hat and I would get to see that first light in your eyes as you took in the whole city behind me. I’d see all that wonder and curiosity take hold of you as the trip became real, as you realized we were really there, Paris in autumn.”

“If we ever get a cat let’s name it ‘Autumn’”

“Okay.”

“Auto for short.” The young man scratched the young woman’s back and they both imagined the pale terraced lines of loose skin that would disappear in moments without anyone to witness their existence.

“The hotel would be something we researched. Something we were convinced was authentic, with a view and what some online review called ‘an ambrosial scent of the city.’ The first night we’d probably figure out it was owned by Holiday inn and smelled like every hotel in America. It wouldn’t matter.”

“Old candles.” It sounded like sleep talk.

“The first dinner, wouldn’t be French, but we’d be so hungry we wouldn’t care. We’d ask the waiter where to go for dinner the next night. We’d struggle to understand his directions and after we’d leave we’d decide to just pick dinner at random.

Then we’d walk in the rain like we’ve done a thousand times at home, but the rain wouldn’t remind us of home. It’d remind us that the closer we held each other the less rain could creep between us.

You’d run over to the first place you saw baguettes and I’d stay in the street to watch the left side of my coat fill with weeping drops. You’d come back with a mouth full of bread. ‘Try it!’ You’d muffle and shove the chewed side under my chin. We’d both believe it was something new and amazing even though it tasted exactly like the bread we bought at home; the bread we only bought when it had an orange discount sticker.

That night I’d take your coat inside the doorway of our hotel room. I’d turn to put it on the rack and even though I couldn’t hear you turn, I’d know that you were waiting for me to turn back around. To turn into you and hold you close for the hundredth first time that day, the thousandth first time that week, for that I’d be waiting too. I would have been waiting that whole day just like every day before that. To turn to face you and be recognized like I recognize you; It’s all I ever wait for.”

The young man and the young woman made love that night listening to the rains of Paris beating like a thousand hearts against their window, then the following night above the noisy street splendor of Hanami and, the night after, under the brilliant stars of the Blue Desert.