Third class hallways
The glass beads are sadder now. They don’t sing, gummed together with rusting blood but they swing around her knees as nonchalant as a distillery with the law out front. Her steps aren’t so quick now either but there’s no music to mark them to, just the beat of her heart. The high buckled shoes are scummy with dust from kicking under the seats in a theater older than death. Vaudeville is a romp, a skirl to tinny piano, a belt to the back of the music hall but she’s slower. The skip in her step is smaller and one stocking has come unrucked and fallen into creases around her knee. She’s the morning after the night before, blood smeared on the lily-slope of her neck like worn lipstick on a pillowcase, like a good-night, good-morning and see-ya without a backward glance.
The otter-mink hair is not quite so sleek, the knot of it crumpled from the back of a chair and the bandeau she’s dropped along the way. She’s a story told with a backward glance, the end of a bawdy joke. The old-young man in the overcoat and the smoke with a kiss like death stopping by, he’s gone and she’s not, Vaudeville’s alive, an age as spiteful as youth. She can taste her own blood on her tongue, ripe as burst plums and her greengage eyes seek out the living with dissatisfaction. She found death in the corner of a movie theater with the dust and the shadows and she didn’t die even if she commanded it, grabbed hold before it walked away, Gatsby’s light shines on.
She walks out of the theater, with her head held high, proud as dollar bills folded into a palm. He had it wrong, the man in the coat, the man who drank vitality like it was wine. She doesn’t want to lie back with her stockings down and the part of her thighs shocking white, the beads a siren song for quick fucks on the grass beyond the house, damp soaking through her silk and a cigarette in the awkward afters and an eye on the back-door for a light. She doesn’t want it slow and easy either with salt and iron in the air, anonymity sweet in the dark. She doesn’t want to die either, it isn’t that. She’s mad, mad at the man who walked away as she drifted, looselimbed as too much champagne. She’s mad at him and she doesn’t know why and she’s mad she doesn’t know, with the piquancy of jilted youth. She wants to drink moonshine and laugh at poor jokes and someone’s wanting and she wants to dance until she’s sick. She wants to be droll and smoke like a Parisian dream on a postcard but she’s forgotten the cigarette holder and after a furious, fumbling moment with her garter that sends her beads rattling, she’s lost her lighter down the back of her seat.
She throws the cigarette in her fingers down with more of that pique and stamps on it with one high buckled shoe and she cusses with the fluency of an age before fricatives became commonplace, with satisfied spite. She looks up at the passage of footsteps and is composure, the gin-soaked drawl of a back room.
“Do you have a cigarette and a light, darling?” She smiles polished ivory, “I’m parched.”