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.
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….