She served the champagne warm but over ice with a single grind of white pepper and a drop or two of Avery Island’s Finest, a concoction she called “Modern Byzantine” and, when she first served me this beverage, I raised my flute to her and uttered “Et tu brut?” to which she smiled with a wide smile and ever so white teeth that heaved exasperation, and I knew this was the beginnings of something akin to wading in the Rubicon even though she ate pizza on a plate using a knife and fork, painstakingly cutting each tantalizing bite into yet a smaller triangle, sometimes an isosceles sometimes a right triangle, but always in a fashion I found laudable, yet strange, but in a plutonic-erotic kind of way.
Then, and only then, she’d bring out the electric Autoharp.
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