Portrait of a Lady #3

My tween daughter and I conducted a bicycle reconnaissance mission of enemy territory yesterday. We glided silently through its alien streets until, creeped out, we decided to sneak back across the international frontier and return to headquarters.

The intersection of Ridge and Pidge Streets (I’m not making that up) marks the beginning of the DMZ, that grey intermediate zone between free, funky Providence and the dark mystery city of Pawtucket to the north.

We crossed without incident, the border guards apparently fraternizing at a strip-mall Dunkin’ Donuts.

Relieved, we made a stop at an ice-cream shop. The tween operative went inside to place the order, while I remained outside with our two-wheeled stealth vehicles.

I thought we were safe.

Across the street, on a park bench, sat a man about my age, kinda preppy, trim grey hair, khakis, white-bread. Beside him, a young woman in an electrifying red dress, low-cut, high-hemmed with a Marilyn flare of scarlet flounces. She had long, raven-black hair, which she shook frequently, dark sunglasses and a smile that flashed like arc-welding even at a distance of about a hundred feet. Her shapely tan legs, crossed now, ended in high-heel leather sandals whose straps climbed the lower half of her calves.

They appeared to be in desultory conversation, two strangers, a middle-aged sparrow with a sex-bomb cardinal, sitting comfortably in the late-afternoon sunlight.

I tried to look away.

I tried. Really.

I knew I had been unsuccessful when the woman stood up. She was looking at me. Then, to my horror, she started walking straight in my direction.

The whole infernal machinery was set in motion as she crossed the few yards of grass to the curbside opposite me. Hips swaying, dress dancing, her red lips forming a slight, knowing smile.

On the curb across the street she performed some mysterious move with her torso that made what little that had been left to the imagination about what lay beneath the red fabric smaller still. Astonishing. The move would have stopped traffic, had it not already come to a mesmerized halt.

She stepped off the curb and crossed the roadway, eternal.

At precisely this moment my daughter emerged from the shop and handed me my ice-cream cone. By the time I had straightened up, cone in hand, the lady in red was but three feet away. A blinding, almost thermonuclear smile… but she did not step up onto the sidewalk. Instead she opened the trunk of the car parked in front of the shop. Her car. She threw in her purse then slammed the trunk shut.

I sat down in a café chair, opposite my daughter. I did not look across the street for a long moment.

But then I couldn’t help myself. The two had left the bench and were walking further into the park, the boring john and the swaying, scarlet woman.

When I turned back to my daughter, she said, “Do you know that lady, Daddy?”

“Sort of,” I replied.

As an archetype, I thought.