Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories Read Online Free

bowed in discussion, analyzing camera angles, architecture, a woman’s face. The woman’s cheekbones jutted out and then the camera had gone to a building with lots of windows. What was the intent, we wondered. How beautiful Eli looked. Once he learned he was beautiful he would become less beautiful. It was the way it surprised you, really, the way it hid, then bloomed. His limp, sandy hair hanging down his cheeks. The unhealthy pallor of his skin, like something not colored in yet. He wore clothes in off shades—a yellow too drained to be called mustard, an infirmary green. Always with him I thought not of color, but of memory of color. Even his eyes were the flattest, stillest blue.
    When I had first moved to town, I would often stay after school to play the piano while the music teacher did her grades. One day—before I knew Eli—I watched him pass back and forth in the hall, carrying a manila folder as if he had messages for the president. He was tall, lanky but not skinny, with broad shoulders and a vertical walk, not stiff—he had a nice walk—but there wasn’t much sway. My music teacher stood to the side of the door in her argyle skirt and wool sweater, as if she was only going to watch, but when he got close, she said, Eli, let’s see what you have.
    He came in with the photographs he had developed in the school’s darkroom. They showed buildings in Portland, gray sky, not many people, only wispy kids who looked lost in the corners of the pictures. Over the summer he had gone there and stayed on sofas and took pictures of homeless kids. He met them in the bus station and bought them sandwiches.
    My teacher lifted each by the corner, then said, Thank you, Eli, for sharing these with us. She poured tea into a Styrofoam cup. She said, Anne plays the piano. I sat scrunched in my chair, a small girl with mousy brown hair, my hands knotted in my lap.
    Do you play Beethoven? he asked.
    Sometimes, I said.
    I like Beethoven a lot, he said, as if it were a singular thing, which for us, up there at the tip of the country, it might have been. He told me they had just gotten a piano in the antiques shop below him. My teacher’s face remained still, but she looked as if she wanted to be nodding it.
    My mother didn’t like the shop; she worried over the prices they charged. The day I went to see the piano, it had been raining and the owner was making spiced apples in a Crock-Pot. Clusters of furniture divided the room. Close to the entrance were ornamental pieces—velvet sofas, Chippendale chairs, French confituriers , gilded fireplace screens. Further in were cruder pieces, cupboards with punched-tin doors, benches with peeling paint. Table lamps gave off a low light.
    In the back room, the two guys sat at their desks, Eli with camera pieces spread out on newspaper, and the owner, Henry, running reports. Henry looked like a photograph of a country person. Every touch was right, including the denim cap and crinkles around the eyes. Still, he wasn’t shut to the world the way so many of the locals were. And his store had beautiful things, things I otherwise wouldn’t have seen in Jonesport. I imagine, he said, showing me the piano, you’ll find it pretty decent for these parts. For these parts , my mother would have repeated after she took us out of the shop. But really it was a game, you could never tell where someone was from, city or local.
    I began to play a piece by Couperin, tentatively at first, only feeling the keys. But as I played, the music expanded. It was as if someone, if they could have seen inside me, would have seen streaks of colors and shapes. Afterward, I went outside and stopped in front of a puddle to find the building reflected there. Light skimmed over it, and it wavered in the wind. It was amazing to me—one couldn’t look at a building in a puddle and not know that it existed, that all of life existed there, only a different life. Where did the second life go, if not further? If there were