Paean

She waits tables at the bar.

She greets me warmly when she sees me, but we’ve never spoken for more than 30 seconds. I can’t remember her name (though she did tell me).

She personifies my type: she’s tiny. She fixes her lips in a permanent pout. She attends to her bushy, curly hair fastidiously. It’s gorgeously different, gorgeously interesting, every time I see her. Her breasts are surprisingly large for her height, for her build, and her outfits accentuate her cleavage in a way that feels incongruous to her resolutely (if unconvincingly) asexual carriage.

She has the look that inevitably must make her a constant object of male attention in the bar, in spite of her facial and behavioral efforts to fend off that attention. Hence the incongruity of her cleavage presentation.

Not her. She’s hotter. Classier.

I ask a neighbor at the bar to write down his associations to her: “She has the sex appeal of a Greek goddess,” he writes in my notebook. I feel let down. I wanted more from him. I wanted some appreciation of the contradictions she presents, the questions she raises.

I want to know how often she’s told by presumptuous flirting men to smile.

I want to know how often she does smile when she’s not in the bar. (I see her smile occasionally in the bar, but only very occasionally.)

I want to know more about the relationship between her inner state and her outer presentation.

And I’m hungry to know about the sexuality she so resolutely obscures, denies….

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