China Blues by David Donnell Read Free Book Online Page B

Croatian friend with a festival mask tumbling
    from her head has gone to sleep for the night
    almost, but not quite, with a small white cup
    of dark Turkish coffee in one hand.
    I have given my whole life, okay, a big piece,
    to the contemplation of certain images. And where
    does that leave me?
                             With a large & very specialized
    vocabulary. I have 47 different words for darkness
    including
scuro
, as in
rosso scuro
, a
deep
red.
    What do you nuthatches think? Do you think
rosso scuro
    is a darker red than those cardinals we saw
    yesterday? I sit out on the deck after late supper
    with my feet up on the white pine crossbar
    & read back issues of
LIFE
magazine.
    I suppose I could be making love, or going for a walk,
    I still haven’t seen
Ju-Dou
    or that new German film by Paul Verhoeven.
               Sun streams through the front living-room
    windows and makes patterns on the board floor. The pictures
    of Willie Shoemaker standing beside Wilt Chamberlain
    are a study of two different sports.
    Willie is grinning, the mouth beautiful;
    Wilt is balancing the ball on one fingertip.
    The greyhound is the most beautiful dog in America.
    They have long legs, deep chests,
    & truly wonderful faces.
    My favourite novels are very often
    about people in new cities.
    My friend criticizes me occasionally
    for leaving criss-cross stacks of papers
    on various tables, or bureaus,
    & for shaving every
other
day, but we reach
    an agreement fairly easily.
    I am happy in a deep inner sense
    like the comforter on the bed or
    the peach on a white saucer on the kitchen table.
    The Chinese family across from my backyard
    have built an amazingly wide 2-stairway porch
    out of fresh pale lumber that glows
    in the after-supper light.

AT JOHN & CAROL’S
    It was a good hour – we sat in the living room on the broadloom and had beer, and apple pie that Carol had made earlier in the evening. John warmed it up and there was cheese. Clips from Rita Hayworth’s films but also 1000s of very effective still photographs with voiceover: New York, Los Angeles; Frank Sinatra, Aly Khan, who was quite a good polo player, Orson Welles, I like
Citizen Kane
but I’ve never seen
The Magnificent Ambersons.
She had a beautiful face and she was a great sex symbol. I enjoyed the film, I like documentaries better than a lot of feature films, but it didn’t give me any special feeling of what it must have been like to be her, although all the guys, myself, John, Frank, agreed that those dresses, and she had great legs, were a key aspect of her image. Sure, Frank says, but what if she shaved her head like Sinéad O’Connor and put on some Wrangler jeans. Different period, says John, totally different period. I try to stay out of this conversation, I want some more apple pie, some ice cream, but Frank pushes it, he says he thinks Rita strikes him as being very much like a guy in drag, but, sure, she was having fun. I think he misses the point a little bit and say so. Carol says, Shave her head, put her in Wranglers, she’d still be one hell of a powerful woman.
            Most of the women I know are into psychology, film production and, in one case, botany. She wants to go to the Sahara to study desert flowers. I might go too, but I don’t think so. How would you feel about a documentary on Steve McQueen? asks Carol, she’s annoyed, she picked out the tape. And I say I wouldn’t bother watching it. I like a lot of American films,
Five Easy Pieces, Body Heat
, look, this could be a long list. But Steve McQueen was just a klutz, besides he was rough on Debra Winger.

RASPBERRIES
                Paul Simon & Art Garfunkel,
    when they were still together
                                          made a song called
    “The Sounds of Silence.”
                                   That’s what my sadness
    is like, dark,