Cubop City Blues Read Free Page B

too much, she loves too much, she dallies through trains and buses and garbage trucks. The killer killed, the wife be done, a man adrift in the sea, a man adrift in himself. The horn plays through the day, the drums at night. The island sinks into memory, memory into sand. Money like water, money like lead, wandering shadows, wandering blind. When baseballs fly out of the sky, when you find your mother crying, your mother gone, a field where your lover turns away, a building on fire, crumbling to dust. A palace of crystal, a Sepharad for the dead, a street that leads to a street that ends in the palace of lye. You go blind. Sun and moon. Mama, Mama. Cubop City. You go blind. Into the underworld, out of the light.

STORYTELLER
    T he years passed as imperceptibly as dream water. Cornelia stopped coming to the house. It was Mama’s doing. She could have her affair with the perfume magnate but she wasn’t about to let Papa have his, not in her house. Some things are not to be desecrated as crassly as that. There was no confrontation. One day Cornelia was there; one day she was not. Gone were the chess games. Gone were the quiet moments when we sat across from each other reading silently, gone her passion, barely contained within the trappings of her servitude. She was not beautiful, though I could easily imagine her slim and graceful when young. She was with us seven years. When my manhood began to blossom, currents of desire shot through my body and I fantasized about making love to Cornelia in a room overlooking one of the great European capitals where she’d lived.
    She was the loneliest person I have ever known. If you were older, she said to me once, I would fall in love with you. I was shocked. Destitution drove her to passion. That’s the way of Europeans. Nevertheless, I was entering the outer boroughs of adulthood and liked hearing that from Cornelia.
    I wanted to respond that I didn’t need to be older. I let my hand slip over the knuckles and tendons of her hand and let it rest there, until she pulled away and went off to do whatever chore needed doing. She stopped coming to the house soon after and was replaced by a nondescript woman who did her work with a minimum of efficiency and had no poetry to recite, no history to relate. I tried telling her my stories but she grew fidgety and anxious, wanting to get back to her work before the Mr. and Mrs. got home. I told the stories to myself hoping someday I would find someone like Cornelia. Sometimes I made believe I was a nobody living in the greatest city in the world; sometimes I made believe I was an aging professor alone in the city, a boy whose father played baseball with him, a lover of feet, a middle-aged man in love with a twenty-year-old woman, a trumpet player, a struggling writer; mostly I made believe I was myself. The world was made of stories.
    Eventually my mother discovered that the new housekeeper had been stealing from us and let her go. They decided a man in his twenties can care for himself, even if he can’t see beyond his nose, and they were right. I knew every inch of our apartment. Cornelia had taught me to cook and I was quite at home in the kitchen, able to prepare anything from a chocolate soufflé to a simple omelet, as long as I had the ingredients at hand. If a blind man can play the piano, he can be a good cook. Papa again called me a genius, a culinary phenomenon. He was easy with his words. Mama kept her comments in check, though I heard her once moan with pleasure when she tried my risotto alla piemontese .
    Life went on in its quiet way, Papa with his students, Mama with her perfume magnate. They didn’t entertain much, but when Papa’s colleagues from school or Mama’s coworkers came for dinner, I cooked paprikás, goulash, Dobos cakes, and other dishes Cornelia taught me. The guests marveled that I knew Hungarian cuisine, and I told them I had learned the recipes from an old Hungarian witch. It