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Sharing Wine with War
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| She lifted her glass. “Cheers,” she said. Her lips curved again around double ranks of teeth uniformed in summer whites. So we talked of Gallipoli and Iwo Jima, of Normandy beaches, and Wall Street bulls. “I always need money,” she said. Then, we walked into the garden where dew spangled flower petals and shivered the hair of our arms until it was time for her to go away with her sleek image promising change and fortune, hope and need, loot, pillage, sex and greed. “Au revoir,” she said, not good-bye, and left singing, "It’s a long way to Tipperary.” I turned toward the yellow light of my window, the comfort of my kitchen, and seated myself across from her empty chair in a room left dull and silent save for the tramping of feet as legions of young followed her down our street. |
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| Usually, you think of her dressed for riding with her friends of the Apocalypse, Famine, Pestilence, and Death. But this evening, sitting in my kitchen sipping a glass of wine, she wore an evening gown of some silver stuff. Forged steel, perhaps. "I’m on my way to a benefit,” she said in her quiet, Western Front voice, her eyes the black only submariners see. She seemed relaxed, at ease. In contrast her cape of some battlefield fabric lined with red satin reminded of tanks and men lobbing shells, of shattered skulls, and shrapnel showers in Mesopotamia. “Have some more wine,” I said when her silence lengthened, expanding like the waistband of an old GI’s shorts. “Thanks.” She held out her glass and grinned at me, a smile so wide Napoleon and his army could have spilled from those lips to form lines around my salt and pepper shakers. Her eyes, deep wells, showed |
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| © 2003 by Patricia A. Stuart | ||||||||||||
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