Tact

I usually give my change to the amputee at the Division L stop, but lately, I've been thinking about switching allegiances. It's not as easy as swapping presidential candidates or taking a new lover; there are things to be considered, options to be weighed. My amputee is north of 75, 80 years old, and has exactly one tooth, gold-plated, which earns me empathic glances from women in skirts. This other amputee, that's a whole other ball of wax.

First: you wouldn't know she even was one if your sightline got bisected by a low fountain or a stooped newspaper vendor. From the waist up, she's Audrey Hepburn back from the dead, twenty years older but still as bird-boned and wide-eyed as ever. Really, it's other wordly. I can't imagine her in the homeless shelter, layering makeup along her jawline and neck while sixty men in salvation army pants bang down the bathroom door. Can't picture it, because she never really moves-- she just stares out with this perfect coil of smile painted on, a cup and a bouquet full of swiftly waning roses pointed out at us in specific, motionless angles. 

No one ever drops her change. So really, we need each other, more than the Division guy needs me, more than I have ever needed a woman in my life. Here is something I can picture: my hands on the ribbed leather of her wheelchair handles, pushing her out to crowded vein of that street, she watching no one, no one watching me.

(Painting is Stephane Tartaline.)