Happy Birthday!
"One hates to be maudlin, but it's oh so much easier to remember the
difficulties," said the long necked woman, too thin to have come by it
naturally, as she linhaled leisurely on her unfashionable cigarette and
looked above the head of her companion.
She exuded old money and class, you could see it in the way she
looked distantly at the person closest to her, as if erecting an
invisible barrier - "your class...mine." It was hard for anyone to
imagine her young, although few even tried. See, women like that were
difficult to humanize, with their taut, controlled elegance and
withering yet graceful demands.
She tapped her tea cup ever so slightly, and the waiter standing by
poured her tea, refilling the porcelain cup only three quarters so as
not to be garish. Nothing in excess.
"The problem with the
scenario," she said, exhaling over her left shoulder which was
ornamented with a cloisonne clasp on cinching together an umber raw silk
scarf, "is that if I tell you the truth about my childhood, you simply
won't believe it."
She raised one eyebrow and looked directly at the befuddled man
sitting across from her at the small cloth covered tea table. He seemed
tongue tied and instead of speaking, looked at her like a curious Basset
hound might eye a stranger with a piece of raw liver in her hand.
"Oh, all right - if you insist." She crushed her cigarette gently
into a leaded crystal ashtray which was taken away and replaced with a
clean one before she finished exhaling. "I suppose you could say, it all
started at midnight on terribly hot August on The Cape."
Just then the Basset's cell phone rang, a horrible tropical horn
blurting in a space that was not used to such a banal and inappropriate interruption.
"Uh.
Oh. Dear - I'm so sorry," he managed to say while trying to turn off
the phone, which of course, as one would expect in such a situation, was
accidentally dropped into his tea, causing the cup to overflow onto the
tiny plate beneath it. They both looked at the golden brown liquid as
if it were urine or poison, yet neither said anything more.
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