China Blues by David Donnell Read Free Book Online Page A

settling down on tables.
    She says the problem is with me. Yo, I’m bad. I’m bad. I take it out of my pants and I don’t know what to do with it. I wish to God I could find a decent teaching job at Louisiana State, and then I could go fishing on the gulf on Sundays. My other alternative right now is Algonquin Park, but I favour southern Louisiana.
    “No,” Paula says, “you’re a really wonderful guy; but,” she says, licking the soup ladle, “you’re innocent,
innocente, innocente, innocente.
” Paula has an MA in Italian Studies. She says, “You’re a small town boy, and you just won’t admit it to yourself.”
    I once memorized the corporate histories of the 50 largest companies with head offices in Manhattan, and here I am wondering if I have enough money to go away for the hot period of the summer, so I don’t know why anybody would call me a small town boy.
    Then she leans over the chair and kisses me on the mouth. Warm and wet. That’s Paula. Great soup, great smile. Guess I’m just an unemployedtrain man stealing kisses in the midnight tinsel-ceiling ballroom, after everyone else has gone home to frolic in the respectable dark.

OPEN HOUSE
               The night air is clear and soft.
                                                          You can walk
    north of Casa Loma and south down Huron,
    the people who gave us the word Toronto,
    and think about anything you want, housekeeping
    or Willem de Kooning.
    The bag ladies are down on Bloor Street. The
    muggers are drinking wine in Christie Pits far to the west.
    You notice the renovated Edwardian houses more reflectively
    at night. The
    stars to the south over the Toronto Dominion Bank
    building are clear and almost pale yellow;
    the accountants of BrasCan are sitting up late at night
    in their shirt-sleeves counting the month’s receipts.
    BrasCan is a multi-billion company with a base in Brazil,
    where Carlos Drummond de Andrade wrote
    the Charlie Chaplin poem, where African-descent Brazilians
    invented the Lambada. This is Ontario. The grass grows
    freely and the flowers are burning dark
    as smudged coal against the unpainted wooden fences
    in darkness. Cocker spaniels were the most
    popular dogs in Massachusetts in the 1950s. Toronto
    has one of the best music conservatories in America. I think
    that butter wouldn’t melt in the mouth of this city.
                These are details at night; some of them
    in afternoon light. A leaded window pane, a semi-Gothic
    brick arch around a doorway.
                                          Victorian gable, chipped green,
    deep flat cement window sills. They represent an infinity
    spectrum. The cement porch where a painter was murdered
    in 1926, the year that Hemingway published
    The Sun Also Rises
.
    I am quite young, but some of these houses go back
    to the 1860s, approximately the period of the Civil War.
    The police used to raid a frat house on Lowther
    on Friday nights in the 1930s. Whoever owns that completely
    rebuilt house across the street has an extraordinary skylight.
    The bourgeoisie are a problem. More so than the squirrels
    on the roof of my house,
                                    or the raccoon who comes across back
    yards from Madison and begs for pieces of bacon.
              The backyards are larger than you might
    expect. Those raccoons have a fair bit of room. So
    a large back deck gives observation.
                                                   I saw
    3 species of hornet, one reddish, & a pair of nuthatches
    in May. I try to understand the world as it happens
    around me in forms of light.
                                         The hamburgers
    at the Food Works 3 blocks south are the best in Toronto.
    Le Bistingo has one of the best bars in Ontario.
    My