Ice Cream

Cold? No. I only shiv­ered after I ate the dou­ble scoop of vanilla you forced on me; before that, sweat dot­ted my upper lip and I was bored by your antics, your hand­stands, your back­flips, your silly cries for atten­tion. I knew what you wanted in the end, not just the milk of human kind­ness, and maybe I pro­vided it back at the motel. It made you more rea­son­able and I didn’t mind it most of the time. I’d shut my eyes and pre­tend that some­one else knocked at the door, that he smelled like a slice of cucum­ber and not like whisky and cig­ars. But time will not change my com­plex­ion in this still. My fresh­ness is unmo­lested, even now. You, so much older than me, should have known bet­ter than to mess with time. Time is every­thing. So no, I was not cold. The brain freeze wore off by the end of the hour and except for a ping of a headache I went back to my cheer­ful self, per­spir­ing in the California sun­light, my white ankles turn­ing pink. I was not cold. The beret made a fash­ion state­ment, placed me in the moment and blocked my youth­ful hair from the heavy sun. Beyond the facade the only thing frozen there was my smile, frozen in time, how old am I now? In real terms I’m not old — buried some­where in Hollywood along­side count­less other nymphs who never made the cut, who wasted away and wrin­kled up and finally checked out of the hotel of dreams. No, don’t count me among them, not this ver­sion of me, lithe in the sun­light, obliv­i­ous to the stuffed polar bears and the card­board igloo and the palm trees sway­ing in the hot wind, and blind to the super­fi­cial­ity of my dreams and to your insid­i­ous agenda, you in your bil­lowy vanilla suit and Panama hat that no one will ever see. What did I know? I knew I was happy to be pos­ing, happy to be lend­ing my image to the world, and to you (and to you), though my name appears nowhere, happy to be smil­ing at the world, though it never smiled back at me.