Matters So Tender and Unreconciled: Chapter 1

[cyanideparty]

Rated: M

“Enjoying the party, dear?”

Erna’s unexpected voice pounced on her from behind, making Eva start like a newborn foal. Her shoulders scrunched up, making her hand twitch, and the front of her black, satin evening gown was hit with a sprinkle of wine.

“Oh, dear me!” Erna exclaimed. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“No, no,” Eva said quickly, her focus forcibly yanked from a dreadful scene playing out before her. She instinctively wiped at her dress with her empty hand, her subtly polished fingers fanning out as she tried to hastily corral her increasingly tempestuous thoughts. She inspected the garment and fortunately noted no discernible damage.

Simultaneously grateful yet anxious to be presented with a distraction, she turned to Erna who herself was festively dressed to the nines in a fitted, deep red velvet evening gown with gold splashed over her fingers, wrists, ears and neck. She gave her host a bashful smile and said lightly, “I’m afraid I was busy daydreaming. My mother says I do it too much. She says someday my head will remain empty if I’m not careful.”

More and more she found herself hoping that her mother’s warning would come to fruition. Maybe there was something to be desired in being empty-headed. Awareness had only planted doubt and dread at her doorstep.

“Come, let’s get you cleaned up,” Erna said, her bedangled, perfumed hands fluttering forth as she took Eva by the shoulders and directed her out of the main room, towards the kitchen.

“Oh, that’s not—” 

But Erna’s hands and mouth were insistent and her ears deaf to Eva’s protest: “You’re certainly looking rather well, you know. Have you been recovering alright then? My, what a scare you gave us all! I was appalled when I’d heard what had happened.”

Eva chewed at the inside of her cheek as she allowed herself to be courted down a hall lined with an obscene amount of pungent garland and glittering tinsel. The relief at having been extracted from her inner turmoil was rapidly evaporating. The clouds were moving in again. 

Erna hadn’t seen her since the incident that had occurred back in August; and every time Eva had to sleepwalk herself through a conversation that somehow touched upon that night, she came to increasingly resent the fraudulent performance. She resented the curious eyes and the inappropriate questions that attempted to hide themselves behind a transparent veil of feigned concern.

Nevertheless, she managed to force a sheepish smile and a demure disposition while delivering to these nosy, inquiring audiences a relatively innocuous story of that night—more a rehearsed novel than a veritable account:

It was an accident. It was only curiosity. It went off by mistake.

More than this, however, she resented the assumptions. The loud whispers behind her back of derangement and lunacy and blackmail. Conjectures hatched from those in the know; who knew for certain or suspected with good reason that it had neither been an accident nor a mistake.

Erna knew the real story, Eva was sure. Of course she would. She was among those in the know. And that awareness made the whole performance even more unpleasant and fatiguing, not to mention absurd.

“I told my husband,” Erna rambled on as she whirled about her kitchen, grabbing a cloth, running it over to the sink, turning on the tap, “I said, ‘Heinrich, if I ever find such a horrid thing lying about in one of my drawers like that, oh I won’t hesitate—’”

Erna’s hollow words melted into a formless yawn of background noise. Eva was no longer listening. She was no longer even in the kitchen. 

There was something else occurring at that moment that was nourishing a horrid sickness within her, something much more paralyzing than the undesirable business of having to entertain a farcical conversation. For all intents and purposes, Eva was back in the main room, standing at the wall opposite her lover and the beautiful woman who was shamelessly intent on monopolizing his attention.

Eva had not recognized this woman. She appeared to be a few years older than herself, with hair that had been proficiently dyed to a shade of white-gold and crowned her head in those tight, flawless, silver-screen curls that Eva was still struggling to master. She was wearing an extravagant, sleeveless silk dress, her distinctly female figure draped in a smooth shimmer of silver and arctic blue fabric that undoubtedly cost far more than Eva’s annual salary. Her unblemished skin was adorned with a smattering of silver jewelry. Tear-drop diamonds hung from her earlobes.

Eva was fairly certain the woman wasn’t wearing any stockings. She had caught what looked to be suspiciously naked skin when the woman had crossed her legs in an overt move to flash her bare legs.

Admittedly, none of this had mattered when Eva had first arrived at the Hoffmanns’ Christmas party. She was more than capable of appreciating a display of exquisite taste in fashion, even envying it; fixating more on the clothes than on the wearer themselves. And that’s the extent to which she had initially taken note of this glamorous woman’s presence. It had been of no consequence beyond her apparel.

That is, until she’d managed to lure Adolf over to a small sofa in the corner of the room where she had ensnared him in conversation for the past half hour that he’d evidently been in no rush to bring to a conclusion, leaning in close as though her words were meant only for him.

This too she could have forced herself to look away from, to bear with clenched teeth and a queasy stomach. She could have swallowed down the thick, bitter pill of jealousy and dealt with its side-effects in private, with only herself acting as a witness to her tears. She had been through this program before. The procedure was terribly dreadful, strenuous, and lonely; but she knew she was capable of stitching together her own wounds and bandaging herself up all on her own, should it be demanded.

But then the woman had placed an unnecessary hand on his arm in order to emphasize whatever secret it was that she was sharing with him through wide, sparkling eyes and a bright smile. And this bold act of imposed familiarity, of stolen intimacy seemed to go completely overlooked by him. He hadn’t pulled away or subtly adjusted his position to break contact and restore boundaries. It was if this touch hadn’t bothered or troubled him in the slightest.

And this was tantamount to an open invitation in Eva’s eyes.

It was then that Erna had come upon her.

“There now, you’re right as rain,” Erna said, giving Eva's shoulders a comforting squeeze, her voice once again piercing the bubble of Eva's imagination and dragging her mind back into the kitchen. “What a fortunate choice in color!”

Eva blinked and glanced down at her seemingly untarnished black dress. She hadn’t even realized Erna had gone about cleaning her up. “Oh! Yes, thank you very much, Frau Hoffmann.”

“Run along, dear,” Erna said, shooing her from the room with a well-meaning sweep of her hands. “You’ll miss out on all the fun standing about in here a minute longer.”

Eva nodded, mumbled an additional thanks, and reluctantly albeit hastily departed. She moved back down the hall with quick feet, having to squeeze herself between a number of bodies that had spilled out from the overly stuffed main room. She moved with no plan on how to separate the two of them. But she would make it happen. She would get him away from her while still respecting the rigid rules of their concealed relationship. She wouldn’t act toward him as that other woman had. She would act with discretion and respectability and would give no one cause to assume anything more than friendship. 

She would behave herself.

Except when Eva returned to the nucleus of the party, she discovered that her lover and the woman had apparently abandoned the sofa—and the party itself.