We'll Always Have Paros

The cup was white once. He held it in his fisherman fingers
as he sat on the porch stoop toward sundown. Over time the cup
had absorbed stains, stains so deep that even after a soaping
and scouring it remained a sad vanilla, brown in the crevices.
One day he simply stopped trying to get it clean.

There were other, newer cups in the cupboard but he never took
them down except when pals came by wanting coffee. They
came less frequently now. He had an idea why that was. When
she left, he'd allowed her to take most of the dishes, the pots and
wooden spoons. He kept his cup. It was white then. Her skin was
white. Everything was white then.

From the porch he could see into the neighbors' yard, the neatly-
arranged patio, the barbecue, rakes and shovels, trowels hung
on nails, rose bushes pruned back for another year. Other people
always seemed more organized. He'd seen Mrs. Pavone use two
dozen different cups over the period he'd stuck to his one and
only. She had floral pattern cups, big yellow ones, tall and stately
black ones, cups she only brought out in summer when friends
were invited back from the country club. He was embarrassed then
to sit where she could see him, and would go around the front of
the house, sit in the shade with his old cup, drink his steaming
coffee alone.

He bought his coffee from the young Latin couple who ran the
little deli up the avenue. After trying six or seven kinds, he'd
settled on the dark Peruvian beans. He'd read a story once about
the soul of black Peru, and had seen a photo of a woman who
looked like she'd come out of a fire. When he drank his coffee, he
thought of her sometimes, imagined her in the other room, in the
bed where no woman had been since his wife had left, waiting
for him now to finish his thoughts, tie in his boat, remove his
old boots. He'd bathe first, rub open lemons along his arms and
on his hands to take away the smell of the fish. In his dreaming,
he would ask her things, and she would tell him of Peru, of the
soul of black Peru.

He collected books, in Spanish and in English, but the books were
like the other cups in the cupboard. He would read them with good
intentions, then stop fifty pages in, bend the top corner of a page,
set the book on the table. There was a stack of these books now,
ones he knew the beginnings of, but not the ends. It was The Old
Man And The Sea that he read again now, Hemingway's little
novel about the fisherman whose great fish was eaten by the sharks.
He'd read this book many times, until its pages were creased. He
most loved the parts where the old man dreamed of the Gran Ligas,
of the great DiMaggio, and the parts where the boy, the peasant boy,
would come while the old man slept, dreaming of the lions. He knew
how this story ended, a dream uninterrupted.

Cup of memories, warm in his hands. Black coffee, the beans from
Peru. The cup was white once. Everything was white once, and clean,
and new. Then a day arrived when the whiteness was gone and no
amount of scrubbing could bring it back. That was the day he knew
the cup was his.