{Vignette}

At the Servant Jazz Quarters jazz bar, the bar lady dressed in a dress striped with wide white and black stripes fixes me with eyes not unkind but commanding attention from beneath a lighthouse tower of hair:

‘Do you think,’ she asks me, her eyebrows arching like raven’s wings flying high above the cliffs of her teeth: ‘that people are afraid to love?’

‘Yes,’ I say, without hesitation, for I know I am.

‘Why?’ she shoots at me as if I had made it so.

‘I don’t know.’ And it’s true: I don’t know; but I think that maybe it’s because it makes us feel vulnerable, and I say so: ‘Maybe because it makes them feel vulnerable.’ (I change the pronoun, hoping that she won’t notice.)

‘And is that a bad thing?’ she demands, probably having noticed, and I say it isn’t, but that it’s what makes us afraid.

I feel that I’ve closed the loop and maybe she feels so too and she places a cocktail of her recommendation in front of me; in a gesture of reconciliation, more, I think, with the way that it is than with me, for we have no cavil with one another, and her cliffs give over to a white Dover smile.