My Madame Descartes

What an...interesting story "My Tea with Madame Descartes" was.

...I suppose I am to assume that David St. John, for having written it, must also be interesting...

Why, I don't even have a clue what this story is about and I think I've gathered some abstract insight from it all!

I couldn't help but think, Do I have a Madame Descartes, tucked away in the back of a ritzy hotel lounge?  Is my Madame Descartes, too, cloaked by a curtain of cigarette smoke, undiscovered and complex?  Innately beautiful and weathered by the world it's been exposed to?  And then, ...is she waiting to turn the table on me?
I loved the way Mr. St. John in his relative awkwardness, ended this piece of poetry.

"...I simply sat back, trying somehow/ To smile, to look worldly, desirable, nonchalant--/ My hands so self-consciously gripping the small cafe table/ Which Madame had so easily turned."

I am not claiming to have any idea what this poem means.  But I do know, on my first time driving the David St. John-mobile, that this is what it was like to sit behind the wheel:

I had journeyed so deeply within myself to find the illustrious Madame Descartes, and we ended up meeting in a shroud of smoke and with the intoxicated Madame, herself.  She behaved far differently from what I expected, told the stories that I had feared, but in far more depressed ways, and then she turned the table.

I had come here to get the picture of who she was, and yet she took my picture, and we both became aware of who I was.

I felt mildly uncomfortable, almost nervous about the way the situation was unfolding.  The rogue Madame of myself saw the need to see myself.  So, wait...I am an interesting subject.  That means that I am both subject to the world, and interesting...

For the price of having to reveal herself (which she really cared so little about), she got the opportunity to show the world what I looked like.  She revealed me...

Well played, Madame, well played.