Can’t Stand the Rain

A St. Louis Story of the 1970s

It was cold, and I lay alone in bed with the covers pulled up to my chin. I pulled a pillow in close, embracing it the way I’d used to embrace his naked body when we slept together on cold nights, before the breakup. That was going on a long time ago now – months, almost turning into a year. The pillow a poor substitute, but at least there, and by now as necessary for sleep as a child’s stuffed toy.

I listened to the sound of rain hitting my bedroom window. I kept my eyes closed. That way I could almost pretend it was the beginning, not long after the end. The glorious beginning. I still remembered the euphoria of the beginning. Learning new things every day and feeling new feelings every night. Remembering even the things that came to be issues as the beginning transitioned to the middle – novel, somewhat baffling, but also somewhat amusing, even sexy because they were aspects of him.

I knew that if I opened my eyes I’d see the raindrops trickling down the windowpanes like tears. With them shut, I could see his cocky, silly closed-eyed smile as he blew out cigarette smoke, waiting for me to laugh at the absurdly clever remark he’d just made. Though really smiling as much from pride, pleasure and satisfaction at what we’d just done, for his part in it, for how amazing it was that two men – young, naïve, beginning, without mentors to guide them – could discover such transcendent things.

Eventually I'd come to be a little tired of that smile. Just past the middle, I’d come to see it as a smirk. By the end it infuriated me, the way it seemed to transform all my concerns into ludicrous, unrealistic expectations. It was the smile almost as much as any provable or suspected infidelities or crimes of the heart that made me crazy enough to force almost-the-end, all the way to the-end. The smile that I still saw now with my eyes closed, and that I longed to see again in life. Of all the things one sees, only a few remain to be seen for as long as one sees at all. Oh, that smile.

By now the sharpest of the pain had dulled into a persistent ache, and most of the tears had flowed, like the rain on the windowpanes. Lying there naked under the sheet, I could almost remember the intensity of that first night, the two of us lying naked in the 2 AM darkness, sleeping together, hearts beating to the rhythm of passion, which made “sleeping” only a euphemism.

As I lay there alone I remembered a song we’d heard together at a club somewhere, Gaslight Square, maybe, or downtown near the river, or along Delmar or Washington – places I really didn’t know because I never went to them – but one night, between dinner and disco, we had. The song stayed with me, and this night, with this rain, the lyrics tore into me like talons:

I can't stand the rain, against my window
Bringing back, sweet memories
I can't stand the rain, against my window
Cause he ain't here with me
Hey window pane
Tell me, do you remember?
How sweet it used to be
When we were together
Everything was so grand
Now that we parted
There's just one sound
That I just can't stand

I can't stand the rain, against my window
Bringing back, sweet memories …

Bittersweet memories actually. Because I knew it had been doomed from the beginning, that the end was the only possible outcome. We were so different, so needy in different ways, with some needs neither of us even knew we had. One of those things which everyone knows could never work, after it’s over.

I was insecure and fearful, still close enough to nights of childhood terror, when my alcoholic father forced me and my mother to flee into the darkness, to be paralyzed by memories of them; he presented a bravado-cocky front, which may have masked insecurities and terrors of his own, but he never nodded to them. I was desperate to lock my lover close to be sure he was still there, would still be there when the daylight returned; he wanted lover after lover, perhaps to be sure that he could still attract them, could still overwhelm them with himself and reflect the him he thought he had to be.

And so, yes, it never could have worked, but how sweet – bittersweet – it seemed at the beginning. No, how sweet it was at the beginning.

There’s a simple plotline with a billion variations, of which ours was one: We met, we were together, we broke up. It doesn’t have to be a tearful story, it doesn’t have to be tragic, it doesn’t have to be sad – but it usually is. And so, for me at least, our variation was. I couldn’t say how it was for him, because by the end we no longer shared important things, not bodies and certainly not souls. It was almost as though we no longer even shared memories – our versions so entirely different that no one (maybe not even ourselves) could recognize we’d made the memories together. And so perhaps they weren’t memories at all, but fantasies of the way I’d have liked for things to be if they’d been real.

What was real was the rain and that I was alone in bed. And that it was almost a years since the end, and I still saw the smile, and I knew I’d never see it in life again – not the way it had been at the beginning. No matter what, all that was over – a memory, a fantasy, an impossibility which everyone – even I – should have known all along could never work – but which I hadn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t have wanted to know then even if I could. “Hey window pane/Tell me, do you remember?/How sweet it used to be/When we were together …”