Classy Girls

Another Story From the Jukebox

Classy girls arrive at tea rooms ten minutes before the hour,
claim the chair where sunlight spills like dappled cream across bone china.
They pour without tremor or apology, fingers curved

as if tracing the ghost of a Chopin nocturne.

Conversation floats, light as lapsang smoke:
Zurich bids on forgotten Monets, the correct Frenching of quinoa
(never the nasal cringe of the newly converted),

how certain Rilke translations commit quiet treason against the original hush.

In libraries smelling of glue older than their grandmothers’ perfume,
they open books the way a dismissed might open a vein,
knowing the blood is already committed.

The firelog crackles in small applause.

Pages turn with the gravitas of someone
who has read the last sentence and returned anyway
to savor the syntax’s slow bleed.

Rain arrives and they walk beneath it,

trench-coat collar raised like a question no one answers.
Umbrella held low—a black wing shading the streetlight bruise.
They do not hurry.

Melancholy is too obvious a word.

They simply listen to the city’s pulse
softened under pit-a-pat percussion, 
undisturbed by the wet roar of lesser tribes.

At the opera they sit velvet-deep, program lightly creased,

eyes locked to the stage while the room studies them instead.
The music enters the way an old lover returns—
no explanations, only the familiar ache of phrasing.

Later, over espresso gone cold, they speak,

of the soprano’s breath,
never confessing how the tenor’s profile aroused them
during the long suspension of the aria.

Classy girls don’t kiss in bars.

Bars are all shortcut neon and shouted lies.
Classy girls choose the long way: a note folded once and slid beneath oak,
a glance permitted to linger three heartbeats beyond decorum,

the invisible masonry of wanting built one withheld breath at a time.

Restraint is not punishment; it’s vintage Bordeaux
sipped while the rest of the world gulps grocery Zinfandel from plastic cups.
Some pleasures curdle under fluorescent light.

They understand this the way stone understands weather.

---

She paused beneath a streetlamp that stuttered,
as though the bulb was reconsidering its purpose.
Half-turned, her sharp profile carved against wet obsidian.

“You still here?” Not cruel. Merely curious,

the way one asks after a moth that refuses the dark.
I lifted one shoulder. “Apparently I read tea leaves
the way drunks read horoscopes—optimistically, incorrectly.”

A half-smile arrived—small, sealed, ruinous in its thrift.

Then the coat swayed once more, final curtain
with no one left to clap.
Rain came harder. I stayed.

Some nights you simply stand in the downpour,

letting refusal settle over you like expensive wool.
Not rejection, precisely, but curation
so exquisite it feels like mercy.

And mercy, my love, is the classiest cut of all.

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Classy Girls