Thursday, March 11, 2010

Lua

Lua – Conor Oberst + Gillian Welsh [listen in new tab]

Claire is dreaming. She always dreams about things cobbled and chipped from the confusing, ossified flow of her past. Not like K, who has complicated messianic-conspiracy dreams, or G.T., who says lately he only dreams of airport washrooms he can’t escape.

This time, she’s eight or nine, sitting in the new seats of a summer night’s SkyDome. Claire had never been anywhere so big. There was nothing like it in Cobalt, up north. Her class had won an essay contest and the province paid for their trip and seats at the gluttonous Stadium’s grand opening.

No one on the rattling school bus believed Claire that it was her first trip ever to Toronto.

In her dream, she remembers walking around putting her hand on the concrete and limestone buildings. The city whirred and roared. People bumped her slender pre-adolescent frame around as she tried to look into all the windows. She fell in love with the city that June weekend and spent the rest of her adolescence trying to get back there.

And then she dreams about the Fisher King. The empty bar. It was late. K and Shannon were getting up to leave. G.T. leans back slackly, watches his friend and his new girl make an excuse to go home together. Claire and G.T. had argued all night. Their transcript rattles off pointless, sharp disagreements.

G.T.’s a good guy, despite how much he irritates her, and walks her home. She talks endlessly on the way about how she wants a stake in the city’s life, not just wage-slave her heart away. He listens politely, talks about how he hates the endless drag of the 9-to-5. Claire doesn’t remember what he did to make her pull him in and up to her apartment.

She wishes she could remember. She’d ask him to do it again. All the other time after that were about getting him to do whatever it was again.

When she wakes up she is happy to find herself in her bed, caught comfortably under the weight of the duvet. Through her closed eyes, she can tell the sun is up. Light bleeds through her eyelids, making slow congealing constellations.

Her legs move easily under the cover, and she realizes that Sbeckett didn’t sleep-in with her. She keeps her eyes closed. She wants to be in the dark for a little longer, but her other senses are awake – she smells waffles and hears the low wave of music from the kitchen.

She feels Sbeckett jump onto the mattress, moving with slow paws along the duvet, coming up to poke his flat, brown and grey face close to hers. She feels his small breaths on her cheek. After a moment she opens her eyes. The edges of the cat’s head are aurulent white in the sun.

Claire reaches out with her hand and rubs the cat’s forehead apologetically. “I know. I just woke up. You’ve been up forever, I bet.”

The door creaks. Sbeckett shrugs himself up on all four and jumps down from the mattress. She lifts her head up a little. G.T. leans against the door frame, wearing a white undershirt and yesterday’s rumpled slacks. His belt is undone. The hanging buckle reflects an unsteady shard of sun into her eyes.

“Are you hung-over, Claire?”

Claire rubs her temples lightly. “No. I’m fine. Are you making breakfast?”

“It’s the least I could do.”

“Gregory, how’s your eye?”

He touches the side of his face, tapping the edge of the tender purple bruise wrapped around his left eye. “Fine. Sore. Honestly, I can’t believe you were on a date with a guy who has hired goons.”

Claire: “Well, it’s not like I went home with him.”

G.T. knocks lightly on the door. “No. I suppose not.” Despite the bruise, the night’s drama has washed off him. “Anyways, if you’re hungry, I’ve made waffles.”

“Yeah. That sounds good.” She looks at her faded, digital alarm clock. “I gotta get to the café soon, anyways.”

“You know that if you had a straight job, you wouldn’t have to work on Saturdays.” He laughs a small laugh, shrugs himself off the doorframe and heads back towards the kitchen.

Claire slides out of bed. She’s naked and glows for a moment in the morning sun before she slides into her bathrobe and knots the terrycloth belt around her. Sbeckett reappears and mews plaintively. She reaches down, picks him up, holds his warm squirming body to her chest. “I know, I know. He feeds me, but never you. How will you survive?”

Last night was a fine enough mess. But, it doesn’t matter that G.T. ended up fighting her date, or that G.T. isn’t much of a fighter, or that Edmund’s friends stepped in. Dates go poorly sometimes. The dust settles.

K had gone to a store to get some ice, and G.T sat beside her on the curb explaining everything. At first she thought it was a drunken, jealous rage. But it wasn’t that or just that.

It boiled down to this: G.T. ran into a junior partner from Percy, Bors, and Galahad. He said that Edmund’s company was a big new client and that Edmund was buying up or trying to buy properties in some “hipster neighbourhood” to “turn them around.”

The partner listed a few streets as an example, his voice dripping with casual disdain. “Like Ithica St. Not much there but some oddball stores and a couple desperate coffee shops. Have you ever been to Ulysses? Exactly like that place. Desperate. Off brand. Edmund’s on track to own all of it in a year. Then he’ll knock it all down. He’s a killer. Lines them up - knocks them down”

G.T. confronted Edmund, asked him basically what the hell he was doing. Edmund pushed. G.T. pushed back and was about to punch when some bigger guy caught him across the side of his face. G.T. fell back. K pulled him out the door. Claire followed them. Old ties beat new guys, as she says sometimes.

As G.T. told her all this, it felt like when she was sitting in those uncomfortable plastic seats in the SkyDome or riding a subway for the first time or standing in front of the Sam’s Record Store lights, just like on the Degrassi High.

She’d been drifting a little. Now she wasn’t. She wants to save her store.

Sitting in her little kitchen, at a table she’d rightly placed by the bay window, G.T. gives her a small stack of waffles. The chipped plate makes a small clink as he puts it down.

She pours out some of the maple syrup her mom sometimes mails to her in brown paper wrapped care packages. It’s the good stuff from the guy out on Telemachus Road.

As she cut in to her breakfast, she watches G.T. He is looking out the window, his roughed up eye squinting in the light. “How come you never took on the other guys?”

“Like Who?” He reaches across the table for the syrup and begins carefully filling each of the little indents in his waffles.

“Like Desmond. He was a total douche to me?”

“Johnny Dreads? That loser hippy wasn’t worth my time. And besides, Edmund pushed me first.” He taps his swollen left eye. “This is from one of his goons.”

“I don’t think he really has goons.”

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter. It was a lame party. There were a couple partners from my work there. I’m sure I’m gonna have to tell a story on Monday. Hell, maybe they’ll fire me.” He cuts a corner off and puts it in his mouth. “That’s fine by me.”

“Well. Thanks.”

Later, as G.T. is leaving he stops in the door way, sticks his foot out to block Sbeckett as he tries to make a run down the stairwell.

He reaches out and puts his hand on the side of Claire’s arm. “Johnny Dreads was an idiot. Edmund knew he’d hurt you the whole time.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Call me later?”

“I will.”

As he bounds down the stairs, she doesn’t realize her hand has found where his had been on her arm. She stands like that at the top of her stairs, even after G.T. has closed the door and gone. After a while, her cat wanders up beside her, curling his tail around her bare leg.

“Sbeckett, I had a really weird night last night.”