Thursday in Canberra--On Hearing Vita's Voice

October 05, 2003 8:04 p.m.

We sit, in white dresses whose necklines are just south of decency and hats with ostrich feathers, in a caf� at four o�clock on a Thursday. The mountains are a red flatline in the distance, and their breath hardly rustles our table cloth.

Everything is made of light. The cut crystal glasses with their mouthfuls of anisette, the silver forks glinting like wind chimes, the small plates that shine empty, for we have spent far too much on our hats to afford cakes and pastries. It that peculiar late afternoon gold filtering down through a canvas-sky and illuminating our quietness. Her china-silk hair blows gently against her cheek and I stifle the impulse to tuck it behind her ear. Her eyes are perpetually downcast, lashes smoking her high cheekbones, affecting demureness while pulling her dress up over her knees.

She is a body of paleness to me, all pastels flooding into each other in a rush, like a Monet at the bottom of a glass well. She is opium smoke and ivory dust sprinkled over bleached braids, a platinum corona fallen from the head of a Russian saint. But she is so hard, and brittle, and I fear she will never let me touch her, let me dress her in black.

It is not that we have nothing to talk about. There are a thousand books we could open together, a hundred women we could be for each other, if the day were dark, if it were to rain and drive us back into our hotel. But as it is warm and the wind is a whisper of licorice and skin, we sit together and divide the silence between us like a thick brown cake, each wiping the icing off of the other�s lips.

I would give my last five dollars to hear her laugh.

I reach for my drink and she reaches for hers. Our hands brush as we wrap aristocratic fingers around the glass stems of glasses. One finger against another, skin papery and soft, with the hot pulse of dark blood beneath. Our fingernails brush, pearl against plum, and linger longer than they should, resting flesh on flesh, and our eyes do not meet.

--Anais