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pops the champagne corks. Her
eyebrows were surprised-looking, arched like something Roman, maybe architectural.
    Bent over like
that, with the top half of her top draped on the edge of the piano and with that kind of dress,
the bar­tender was getting ready to come out from behind the bar and grab her by the shoulder and
tell her that they didn't have a license for that kind of thing. It was that kind of thing, too,
if she didn't stop vibrating.
    No matter how much
of her fell out the front of her dress, she was shrinking. Her feet barely touched the floor. So
it goes, when you're on the way to becoming the smallest thing in the known universe
again.
    And in the eyes of
those around her, she was small. Get­ting smaller all the time. Just like Alice. Even birds would
now mistake her for something to eat. She was small be­cause she had had days when you could buy
her like a sou­venir, so tacky and tourist cheap you'd be afraid to take it home. She came out of
a long line of souvenirs. Her parents were two holes in the night out of which she tumbled
genet­ically. Her inheritance consisted of unprinted instructions on how to live on air. Genetically blue eyes like industrial
diamonds and a high-school scrapbook that hated her so much for being the daughter of nobody, it
didn't choose her as the girl most likely.
    She leans on the
piano, like a featured attraction without a body, only architecture and bust lessons by
corre­spondence. She's got a double smile of lipstick on a full mouth that has always been a
little too empty. Her heart is made out of gold because it doesn't have any calories. She
stretches herself, leaning way over, trying to touch her lover's ribs, and says, somewhat
sarcastically, "You come in like a giant and go out like a dwarf."
    That kind of
statement could be a curtain raiser, but here she says it casually because she is casual about
life in the deadened way that comes naturally to one who has lived. If death was a sexual
experience, she'd greet it with a fresh pot of coffee and clean sheets. Nothing more, nothing
less.
    He pounds the piano
nightly. He is like a prayer kneeling in the snow, combing musical notes out of a blank space in
his life. He knows one thing. When you sing, your mouth speaks and your mind doesn't have to. He
tries to ignore her, singing lightly to the bar stools. To the floor.
    He sings and his
song says, "I found this empty thing and I emptied it." It is like a comment.
    She is like a
reply. She says without words, "I will smile at you with irrepressible hormones." Several parts
of her body are carefully arranged for smiling. Live ammunition is the only thing she knows how
to handle. She knows he knows that too.
    He is terrified in
a dull way. He senses she is about to give out with one big breath to blow out all the candles of
his night. He'd met her once before, in the worst way. He swal­lows the inside of his throat and
misses a chord, musical. If he doesn't sense impending disaster, his fingers do. They sense that
she will make a scene and, because of it, the fingers will do something they will regret. They will become unemployed and that is what
they will regret.
    If she speaks
again, it is going to be a conversation, and she does and it is. "I know you're old enough to be
rubbery but are you old enough to stretch to the required length?" After that jab, she smiles
with the last lilac of the evening dangling out of her mouth like a tongue depressor. She bounces
her top emphatically on the edge of the piano, posed there like a left-handed glove on a
right-handed ball­player. If the words weren't getting through to him, she knew the bounces
would.
    Something gets
through to him. His smile takes on a fro­zen-fish look and his fingers become more mindlessly
me­chanical. He is losing control of himself and his audience. This was not part of the program.
Drinking wore away the first half of his strength. His ex-wife, who thought