Rain Date

Johnston Hughes was going to go on a date. It was a humble plan, but with characteristic seriousness he and his girlfriend had set the date, and the time, two days and three hours ago. They were going to go to the park and eat a picnic and feed the ducks. Johnston had already prepared the food—fried chicken and rice and stale bread for the ducks—though it was only six o’clock and he had an hour before he would be meeting his girlfriend.

It was the summer, and since Johnston had gotten off of work an hour previously, and he had already cooked the food, he had nothing to do. It was July; the air was hot and heavy with moisture. Johnston sat in shorts and a t-shirt by the window, reading by the late afternoon light, with the ceiling fan turned up to disturb the oppressively silent heat. He was reading To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.

At six twenty-seven the clouds started thickening. Johnston had to get up and turn on a light, which he had avoided doing both because even the meager heat from the incandescent bulb raised the temperature in the room a few degrees and because he didn’t like to use the light unless absolutely necessary. Reading was absolutely necessary.

Johnston lived in a very small apartment with very few things except books. There were three lights in the entire house: one in the bathroom; one in the adjoining bedroom, which contained one bed and one cardboard box of clothes and an undetermined number of books; and one in the living room, which led into the miniscule kitchen at the rear of the whole business. During the longest days of the year it was perfectly possible for him to go through a week without turning on any lights at all: there was a handy streetlight outside of his living room window, which faced the street, the faint orange light of which he used if necessary to cook and read.

His girlfriend didn’t much like his apartment, because there was not much room for cooking—in fact, there was not much room for anything. She was amazed that Johnston was able to survive in it, but he had cooked their dinner for the night with ease on the single hotplate he used for everything. Simplicity was easiest for Johnston.

Seven minutes later, at six thirty-four, the first raindrops started. Johnston didn’t register at first the few hesitant drops that splashed onto his arm and the page of his book, but after a moment he looked up. The world, which had, a few minutes before, been a warm dusty color, was darkening as the rain started coming down faster and heavier. He didn’t think the date was over at first, because of the series of brief summer showers which had dampened the city in quick succession over the past month, but after twenty-five minutes with no letup Johnston was forced to call his girlfriend, who lived on the other side of town, and cancel their date altogether.

He got up to use the phone, which was in the kitchen, and get a glass of water. As he was filling the glass he looked out the second window in the house, which was over the small sink and which faced his neighbors’ small garden. The summer flowers were bent over with the force of the water on them; they looked like little traumatized people in subdued colors shaking with pain. The tomatoes by the side of the house, grown as tall as the first story window in the unrelenting sunshine, bounced slightly on their knotty green vines. There were rows of indiscriminate green vegetables collecting the rain in their wide leaves, hanging to the ground.

Johnston returned to his seat by the window, and, carefully setting his book to the side, opened it to look outside. Since he was a small child he had enjoyed the rain and the way it danced in the street and seemed to turn the world blue. The rain fell and fell. A solitary car, dark and newly shiny, shushed its way through the shallow water in the street. He thought of the ducks in the park and where they must be at the moment. Where were they taking refuge from the rain? Somebody somewhere put on a jazz album, and as its muted tones wove through the raindrops to his apartment, Johnston sat and watched the rain fall.