Jewelry Box by Aurelie Sheehan

Author:Aurelie Sheehan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.

We were in a city that saw little sunlight. All the buildings were gray, but there were also furtive things about it, furtive decorations: twisted angels, heroes, birds in flight. And there were the legendary finials and bulbs on top of the buildings. Downriver, heroes stood on the bridge in the dying, purple-strewn night. The swans pilfered the silence, and the horizon line, punctuated by the round and the straight, the golden and the violet, seemed mysterious and still tangible as nothing else ever had.

Underneath it all, people waited for buses and none of them were pretty and all of them wore double sweaters and carried fat, relentlessly used-up shopping bags. The young looked old and even the language was peculiar, zigzags and traffic jams.

My friend is a dominatrix. I had never seen her in character, but that night in the basement restaurant, eating something forgettable, drinking bad red wine, I saw her as they saw her.

The men at the other table were eager to make our acquaintance. Probably mainly hers, although I’d done my best to dress up. How to describe her beauty? She’s tall and formidable. Imagine her as a Russian countess, black ermine muff or hooded fur coat and dark secrets and white snow and blood and wine (though usually she dresses in a T-shirt and jeans). That night she wore high black boots and a long leather coat. The men—middle-aged and gray-haired, not impressive or unique—asked where we were from, what we were doing, did we want to join them at their table? My instinct was no. She said yes. Like I said, I had never seen her in her professional role before. And she wasn’t doing anything overt or physical that night, but her dominance was evident. She was aware of their expectations, their assumptions, and she was playing with them. Teasing them like a bored lion. (But if the rabbit wants to play, wants to die, who’s in charge then?) I had been left in the dust.

We went to a bar for a drink and it seems to me now, though it’s just a feeling, one of us was sitting on one of their laps. They were, naturally, paying. As we sat in our small huddle, the dark loud bar with a round table but only three available chairs, whiskeys in front of us, a sense on my part that I didn’t know how long this would go on, how far it would go, a lack of ability to get my friend to the bathroom for a tête-à-tête, any kind of woman-to-woman reconnaissance, the men opened their wallets and showed us pictures of their children. You know the shot: a five-year-old, a two-year-old, crooked smiles and tight ponytails. It was a confession, a rite, and it came as no surprise to us, would-be-paramours, sad Americans, confused in love. From a distance, it’s so clear. The two traveling salesmen. The potential one-night-stand, a little “good fun.” A need, in any case, to put on the table the beauty in their lives, as well as the money for our drinks.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.