Out of Time Part 3 ...La Belle Dame Sans Merci Has Me in Her Thrall

Soleil dans le ciel de Saint-Paul

I’m sitting in the Wonderbar Café with a beautiful girl from a different time—at least, that’s how it feels to me.

A song comes on the phonograph and she gets this far away look in her eyes. I feel myself drawn to her as if being pulled into her world.

I see a tall building. She lives in the penthouse with a view of the lake. I can hear a distant foghorn—and then suddenly, the scene dissolves, and I’m back in the café staring at her lovely face.

“You daydream. Don’t you? Just like me.”

It was no daydream, but I nod anyway, pondering silently what the vision might mean.

She finishes her coffee and puts on her raincoat.

I leave money on the table, hoping to walk out with her.

“You finished too?” she smiles, “Going my way?”

“What way is that?” I ask.

“I live in an apartment down by the lake. You can walk me home, if you like.”

My heart races, but I feign nonchalance. “I’d like that,” I tell her, and I do, with all my heart.

We walk down Yonge Street, stopping occasionally to look in windows, pausing outside a small art gallery and admiring a few canvases on display.

“I love painting,” she enthuses, “my favorite artist is Chagall—do you know his work?”

“I do. My favorite painting is Soleil dans le ciel de Saint-Paul”

She looks at me curiously. “Strange. I don’t know that work.”

“It’s lovely,” I tell her, “a bridal couple floating over a town in a blue sky with a farm animal accompanying them. You know Chagall—he's very lyrical. He might have a goat playing fiddle.”

“Of course, goats play fiddle when you’re in love,” she laughs.

When we reach her apartment, she invites me up. It has a magnificent view of the lake, or so she informs me, but unfortunately, today it’s shrouded in mist.

There are several Chagall reproductions hanging on her walls. We drink champagne and talk until it’s dark.

I’m tipsy, definitely light-headed— not much of a drinker—two drinks are my limit, and I’ve gone well beyond that.

“I think you should stay,” she cautions, when I bump into the couch on the way back from the washroom.

I agree. There’s no way I’m going to try navigating traffic to get back home.

I remember her getting me to lie down on her couch and placing a blanket over me.

I sleep fitfully, dreaming of the two of us, embracing and flying above the town.

When I awake, I’m on a cold concrete floor in a dilapidated high rise. I panic as I look around at a building obviously in the process of demolition.

Somehow, I find a stairwell and make my way down eighteen floors to the ground.

I come out onto a muddy parking lot filled with construction machinery. A foreman in a yellow hard hat is shocked to see me and gruffly orders me off the site.

I can’t piece together the events of the preceding day. I dimly remember walking down Yonge Street, but after that, everything is vague, as if wrapped in a haze.

I go back to my apartment and sleep for two days.

When I finally feel somewhat normal again, I venture back to The Wonderbar Café, only to find it closed. A note on the door says it’s slated for demolition—a condo tower to be built on the site and completed in May 2020.

Nothing about my adventure with the girl makes sense. And even after a month passes, I’m still in a daze.

I don’t know if Cyn was even real, or where the world is hiding her. Sometimes, at night, the injustice of losing her seems very real, especially around 3 am.

My writing’s changed too. No more random thoughts or journaling. I’m writing poems.

The other night when I couldn’t sleep, I sat at my old oak table writing a poem for Cyn. Somehow, it seems appropriate.

Thoughts on Lonely Nights.

If only we could be
you and I,
as in a fable
by Chagall,
where horses and cows
play fiddle and fly,
and love outlasts
the longest of nights.

© 2018, John J Geddes. All rights reserved

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