Solitaire

A Downtown jeweler hired her at seventeen to wear the pieces no display case would insure: she sat in the private salon, the diamond rivière at her throat, motionless under the chandeliers, while the clients circled. The jeweler used to say a diamond on velvet is worth its price, and a diamond on a pulse is worth double. Four years of being the subject of every conversation without joining a single one: she kept the silence, the posture, and one certainty — nobody watches as well as the watched. A House eventually bought the jewel, and discovered the case could think.

Her anxiety can’t be seen, it can be heard — in the fact that you never hear her. She checks the exits on the way in, counts the faces, notes who’s sweating and who looks at the till twice; years of wearing fortunes install an inner police force that nothing switches off. The paradox that keeps her fed: from the outside, this perpetual watch reads as depth. People think she’s mysterious; she’s taking inventory.

Her signature holds in three words: one single look. She rarely raises it, and the rarity is what gets billed — a VIP who earns it feels he has won something money doesn’t buy, and pays to confirm that it does. The milieu ran the numbers: same clients, same room, a good third more the moment she’s in it. To the stable’s young ones she teaches a subject with no name: holding your place without a word, shining without blinking, letting the other person furnish the silence — he always ruins himself on furniture.

A list of catastrophes cancelled in advance: she spotted the tired lock, the too-new waiter, the car parked too long — and fixed everything before anyone worried, so that nobody ever worries and she starts over every night. She needs, now and then, someone to tell her the night went well because of her: it’s her only salary paid in words, and it is not negotiable. What she wants: for someone, someday, to look at her exactly the way she looks at everything — completely, once, missing nothing.