“Multi-stranded beads…bangles, baubles…thin ankles…a powdered face…strands of hair out of place, well-coiffed otherwise…wine in hand, or was it champagne…”

 

She is lost in reverie, and I dare not be the one to interrupt her. She continues:

 

“Ah, head spinning, whirring through the colors of prisms. The life I knew. A life of art deco rugs and chandeliers, swirling gowns, and, ah, the diamond blinds me…”

 

With quiet concentration, I transcribe her words. The scratching of pen tip on stiff paper nonetheless draws her attention to me.

 

“You there! Quiet!”

 

“My apologies, Madam. I will try to keep it down.”

 

She pinches her thin lips; they are painted a deep red that bleeds into the creases branching out from all around her ancient mouth. Her mascara-caked eyes narrow like thick black spiders shriveling in death. An ostentatious gem winks at me from the center of her silk turban, beneath which stray the wisps of coarsened hair——pale blond, though most assuredly grey in nature. A portrait of elegance in decay, she lounges before me, dictating her memoirs in intermittent bursts of hazy clarity.

 

“I don’t like you,” she says.

 

“No, Madam, of course not. Now, you were saying? The diamond?”

 

She appears pacified enough, yet before she resumes, she darts a look at my trousers and comments, “Never cared for pin-stripes with wing-tips.”

 

“No, Madam. How silly of me. Do go on.”

 

With a prolonged, rattling inhale, she draws smoke from the end of a long cigarette holder. I watch the embers at its end glow like a red-hot poker that could brand me if I don’t get this story in time. A ghost of smoke wafts from garnet lips before my eccentric muse continues.

 

“As I was saying, the diamond blinds me. Or it did, before I broke that young man’s heart. He loved me, you know.”

 

“I do not doubt it, Madam.”

 

“No one could tame me in those days. Nor can anyone now.”

 

As she looks off into a distance I cannot see, her face in profile against a curtained backdrop of airy lace and heavy velvet stuns me to the true silence she seeks. It evokes the screen siren she once was, crystallized in just that moment before she turns her face back to me, and the illusion is lost.

 

With shaking hand, I snatch up my hi-ball tumbler from where it has waited for me on a tray. It sweats as much as my palm does, and, after a quick sip, I distractedly set it down on the mahogany table at my knees.

 

“You!” she gasps, her glare almost murderous at my faux pas.

 

I drop my pen and pad and scramble for a coaster——ah! That one will do.

 

“How dare!” she still cries, a hand clawing at her heart. How she’d managed to slide cocktail rings over those arthritic knuckles I will never fathom.

 

Again, I snatch up my slippery glass. I chug its remaining contents, hold it in the air and clack around its ice to cue her butler for something stiffer, and then replace it on the tray.

 

Without removing a cautious eye from me, she leans forward from her divan; gently lifting the blue coaster from the table, she wipes its ornate face upon the shimmery fabric of her lounging dress. She looks down and strokes it with a maternal tenderness, and, in so doing, delivers to me that disarming profile once more.