This is "Wallet."
And if Stephanie was here, which she's probably
at home with her darling children,
I would say it's for her because it's set in Prague.
So I just had a hallucination of that, sorry.
"Wallet."
We were in a city that saw little sunlight.
All the buildings were gray, but there were also
furtive things about it, furtive decorations, twisted angels,
heroes, birds, and flight.
And there were the legendary finials and bulbs
on top of the buildings.
Downriver heroes stood on the bridge
in the dying purple strewn night.
The swans pilfered the silence and the horizon line punctuated
by the round and the straight, the golden and the violet
seemed mysterious and still tangible
as nothing else ever had.
Underneath it all people waited for buses and none of them
were pretty.
And all of them wore double sweaters and carried fat,
relentlessly used up shopping bags.
The young looked old and even the language
was peculiar, zigzags and traffic jams.
My friend is a dominatrix.
I had never seen her in character,
but that night in the basement restaurant eating something
forgettable, drinking bad red wine,
I saw her as they saw her.
The men at the other table were eager to make our acquaintance,
probably mainly hers although I'd done my best to dress up.
How to describe her beauty.
She's tall and formidable.
Imagine her as a Russian Countess, black ermine muff
or hooded fur coat and dark secrets
and white snow and blood and wine,
though usually she dresses in a t-shirt and jeans.
That night she wore high black boots and a long leather coat.
The men, middle aged and gray haired, not impressive
or unique, asked where we were from, what we were doing,
did we want to join them at their table?
My instinct was no.
She said, yes.
Like I said, I had never seen her in her professional role
before.
And she wasn't doing anything overt or physical that night,
but her dominance was evident.
She was aware of their expectations,
their assumptions, and she was playing with them,
teasing them like a bored lion.
But if the rabbit wants to play, wants
to die, who's in charge then?
I had been left in the dust.
We went to a bar for a drink and it
seems to be now, though it's just a feeling, one of us
was sitting on one of their laps.
They were, naturally, paying.
As we sat in our small huddle, the dark loud bar with a round
table, but only three available chairs,
whiskeys in front of us, a sense on my part
that I didn't know how long this would go on,
how far it would go, a lack of ability
to get my friend to the bathroom for a tete a tete,
any kind of woman to woman reconnaissance.
The men opened their wallets and showed
us pictures of their children.
You know the shot, a five-year-old,
a two-year-old, crooked smiles and tight ponytails.
It was a confession, a rite, and it came as no surprise to us.
Would be paramours, sad Americans confused in love.
From a distance it's so clear, the two traveling salesmen,
the potential one night stand, a little good fun,
a need in any case to put on the table the beauty in their lives
as well as the money for our drinks.