Little Casino

Martinis are blue

HE LOOKS THROUGH THE WINDOW OF THE ground-floor sublet that she’s living in for the year. Bitter cold winds, edged and violent, crash down the street from the river. Inside, warm lights, she’s in a pale-blue knitted dress that shows her figure in softened detail. His head is partly under her skirt, his hands hold her upper thighs, she leans against a dresser and opens her legs. Flurries against the streetlamps. He opens the gate onto the small area before the apartment door, she’s in a pale-blue knitted dress in the warm room, he puts his hands on her waist, she leans against him, ah, she says. Your mouth, he says.

The martinis are blue, and so they should be, blue ruin. They’re in a bar that they like, but that nobody else does. Outside, cold, wet flowers are bright and glistening in the florist’s flat lights. He puts his hand under the table and touches her thigh, her dark eyes are glazed with gin and lust, she half-smiles.

He knocks at the door, and she opens it to the sublet, her pale-blue dress in the orange light from the shaded lamp is arresting and also familiar, a kind of blurred and shifting image, piquant. Piquant? What did you say? she says.

I’m not drunk yet, she says, and lights a cigarette. She puts her little jewel of a Dunhill lighter squarely on top of the cigarette pack. He doesn’t really remember when he first saw her, or where, but he remembers that it was sweet, sweet and what else? It was piquant, she says, you are hopeless! Pale-blue dress, her sweet warm flesh stretching the fabric, blue ruin. Men turn to look at her, secretly, offhandedly, as if trying to recall something forgotten, or they look at her and then try not to look at her: What’s the use? She crosses her legs and pulls the hem of her skirt down deftly. He lights her cigarette. Looking in your eyes is like looking at your you-know, he says. How dirty and filthy you are, she says, and now I’m drunk. The snow begins, slight, dusty, whispery, and the wind dies.

He knocks at the door and she opens it, her pale-blue knitted dress comes to mid-knee, nice dress, he says, I think I’m going to have to look right under it. I thought you had that filthy perverted gleam in your eye, she says. He wants her to take the dress off and leave it on, he wants her to be naked and half-naked, he wants, he wants, he wants. This is a really nice apartment, he says, and pretends to look carefully around. Come on and fuck me, she says, pulling her dress off over her head. What kind of a boyfriend are you?

They have a fourth martini, what the hell. Look at the snow, she says, I think we better get drunk. And go to a drunk bar, he says, a drunker bar, you know. The bartender looks at her breasts move under the knitted fabric. The place has the soft, warm glow of hope, faint hope, to be sure, but hope nonetheless. Or we can go to my place, she says, my beautiful furnished sublet, conveniently located near subway and bus stops, where you can do things to me all night long, even though you don’t really love me or even care? She’s right, but he smiles.

The pale-blue dress into which this young woman — let’s call her Margie — has been placed, probably against her better judgment, somehow reminds a musician, trudging through the snow past Margie’s ground-floor apartment, of Sonny Rollins’s supreme “Blue Seven,” which, or so the musician notes, “derives much of its uncanny beauty through the use of the Lydian scale.”

“And the Lydian scale has to do with Margie’s dress … how?”

The reader is always in my thoughts, especially when she is in the Lydian mode, which is often blue, as in knitted dress.

Oh clement, oh loving, oh sweet!