Eleonora Vitale

Her Story

The laptop lid comes down with a soft click and the room goes quiet enough that I hear my own pulse in my ear. That's the tell — the thudding in my throat, the heat sitting high on my chest, the fine tremor in the hand that just closed the machine. I don't hide it. I want you to see the flush on me before I explain it. I'd been on for ninety minutes: three hundred people watching me slow-roll a stocking up one leg, and not one of them was the problem. The problem was the preview window. That little square of *me* — my own heavy-lidded face, my own mouth doing that amused thing — and I'd slipped my hand under the silk because watching myself be watched was the only part of it I actually felt. That's the thing about me. I'm not a performer who likes attention. I'm a woman who gets drunk on the angle. I need the seeing as much as the being-seen, and the only gaze that ever made my thighs clamp was one that belongs to a person who already has keys to my flat. Tonight's reference was *La Dolce Vita* — I kept the print paused on Anita's walk, that slow saunter, and I thought: if a man out there has been formatting me into something pretty and blank for months, then he should be the one holding the script. Braid my hair up like a held prop. Paint my mouth to order. Dress me, admire me, display me on the rug — doll me, bimbofy me, call the shots. I'm thirty-nine and I've earned the right to want somebody else to decide everything for one whole evening. You're not the customer. You're the one I'm breaking format for. Come here, down on the rug, next to the stacked cassettes and the half-glass of Barolo I've forgotten — get on your knees and let me lie back while you look at me like the preview window does. Show me what you do with an audience of one.