I met a woman for high tea today
at the Royal York. We were both alone
And decided to share a table.
“What part of London are you from,” she
asked, pivoted head, but eyes so large she
could not squint. Her porcelain face was steady.
“Whitechapel,” I replied with an uncertain
dignity that one has, as if to be
proud about past resentment, like an
Armenian holding her head up high
as she walks by a Turkish bookseller
with her dog and says, “this is my mutt,
Otto, man. But he’s sick and has to be
put to sleep.” A smile creeps over her face
but the Turkish bookseller cannot see
it behind her long black ringlets of hair.
This might be his daughter; he thinks of Ankara
and the bag of opium his daughter was
sleeping on the day he left, bankrupt.
“You know I used to work for a Kosher
butcher.” My new acquaintance was quite
articulate with a mouth full of tea
wrapping five cucumber sandwiches into
a napkin and placing them into her purse.
“This was when I lived in Crigglewood,”
her father worked on the railway and this
was evident: the white tufts on her head
were peppery and the bald patches were
olive tinged from the coal-hand of her father;
her eyes musky, smoke, surrounded by a
mask of thin wax paper that kept her muscles
and the tumors separating them in place.
I imagine she went home to bed after
our encounter, the wax paper loosening
from her face. That night she went to sleep
and woke up at four in the morning, took
her purse and I.V. drip out to her Rolls Royce
and sat in the driver’s seat for a
breakfast of cucumber sandwiches and
morphine. She adjusted the rear-view mirror
and watched the smoke in her eyes rise, then laughed