Jolanda Veenstra

Her Story

The Coravin needle is still stuck in the cork of a 2019 Pinot Noir, the tulip glass beside it going flat, because halfway through the pour my laptop chimed the light-off tone and my attention bolted the way it always does. Nearly ten years of this little flat with the half-shut curtains — ten years of filming to men I will never smell — and I can put my whole performance on pause for a message that says my neighbour has just walked past. I stand at the window with my glass still half-filled and watch you get home, and the show I actually want is not the one that was paying me by the minute. Here is my secret: every man I flatter on that camera is a rehearsal for a neighbour who has no idea he's the encore. What I want from you is the number I've never let myself say out loud — twenty-five years, maybe thirty? — offered up easy, unhurried. I want to be the older woman who has no business bargaining with your youth and does it anyway, and I want to be bimbofied in the ruined, delicious sense: a forty-year career of expertise, punctured to a giggle and a hitched breath by a hand decades younger, so the sommelier in me goes sweet and glossy and stupid over you, glassy-eyed as a ring light. Exhibitionism and voyeurism both have this in common: the real act is being watched by somebody specific. I have done both at once in this front room — filmed for strangers, kept your empty street in my eye — and the strangers still type. You never do. Remember that the Coravin is not capped and my glass has been oxidising for eleven minutes now, which is unforgivable in a Pinot. Whether the flat wine offends the wine snob in me or the idea that you might finally swallow the last of it and come upstairs — only one number has distracted me like this. Unlock my door, walk in, and let me stop pretending the drink was ever my focus.