New Coat of Paint

"It's like a movie, or a Tom Waits song I once knew."

She says this to me over drinks, at our local bar, The Refectory.

It's a place where conversations takes a back seat to the swarm of business-driven chatter that frequents this place like an old drunk, shouting out daily profit expectations like pernicious cat calls, speaking out about shitty bosses, denied advancements, and the eventual feeling that someone will come and whisk them away from their careers, placing them in the ivory towers of upper management.

We're in the corner though, where the din of yapping is relatively low-key.

"Grapefruit Moon?"

"New Coat of Paint"

Listening to it now, it's playing in my brain now, reminding me of that second year of college, when I lived upstairs from an international buidling, and I'd watch the students smoke cigarettes, look up at me looking down at them, feeling like the odd man out at the UN building.

I worked at the University Library, a cavernous affair, built underground with seven floors drilled into the subterranean limestone. I'd get back late at night after hours of cataloguing volumes of microfishe, and I'd stare into the reflecting pool at night, while "New Coat of Paint" echoed in the recesses of my brain. I could hear the rasp in Tom's voice, and it took me back there, but now I was staring at Stacy, knowing that one of us would have to break the silence.

"I'm moving to Paris, next year, and I dont expect to be back for at least two years."