GOLDEN FRUIT 1

A story of a man who let his mistress ruin his life

This is part 1 of my first fiction. It’s about Otto (rich and stupid) and Nina (beautiful and malicious). Otto loves Nina. Nina loves money. Otto throws his family away for Nina. Nina uses Otto. Otto regrets everything, gets into a fight with Nina. He dies a laughable death in the struggle. I’d stop here if it weren’t so devilishly fun to tell the whole story:

The room was bound by two sets of French windows on either end, thinly veiled by white muslin embroidered with violets so that the pale light passing through imprinted florette shadows which danced on blank walls and shut eyelids.

Nina was lying in a kimono on a spinach-green chintz sofa, feet crossed at the ankles, one arm behind her head and the other stretched out to the side so that the tips of her fingers could barely tickle the bowl of peaches on the bamboo tea table. An open book was pitched like a tent on her stomach, rising and falling gently as she breathed and stared at the ceiling, dull with childlike boredom.

The phone rang in the other room—thrice, before Otto rushed in to answer it. It was an old friend who was asking about his children, how his wife was doing, and if the couple wanted to join him and his wife for dinner at their place on Saturday. Otto, in his usual meek (cowardly), unsure tone, had to awkwardly explain how the two of them had been “living apart for the while” and hesitated (avoided) mentioning the new young woman in his life and his house, who happened to be just shy of half his age.

Curious about how her provider was framing their relationship to his respectable friends and polite society of colleagues—not out of sentimentality but because she wanted to know how Otto was negotiating his private obsession with his public appearance—Nina perked her ears from the other end of the hall. Their most recent fight (she bawled, he begged) was about Nina not wanting to be a secret anymore.

The girl slithered the arm out from behind her head and pressed against the upholstery, helping herself to the crowning fuzzy yellow fruit. She sat up, and the loose kimono fell off her shoulders like snakeskin. Eyes fixed on the parlor that trapped Otto, she bit into the peach and it hissed and spit as she applied her lips to its flesh and tried to suck all the juice that came from the initial injury. Golden droplets rolled down her wrist, neck, and naked torso as she chewed, slurped, and fixed her robe back up, which darkened in the spots where juice had fallen on her skin.

Peach in hand, Nina stood up (the book fell to the ground), slipped her feet into heeled sandals and clicked and clacked her way across the oak floor to see what was going on.

*

Otto’s wife was a prim and delicate woman who organized the family library by author’s last name, cried at the movies (“Oh, Otto, the resolution was just so unbelievable!”), and never raised her voice—except the day she had found out about the affair, the day she screamed and screamed so that the housekeeper declared SNAFU and rang up her mother and tried to bring her to the house. After all, affairs were plot catalysts that were only found in clothbound novels and the lives of pitiable strangers far, far away. It was never supposed to happen in her own nest.

Lydia was the kind of domesticated woman that department stores made ridiculous money off of with the invention of the shopping catalog, which was consulted when she felt like Otto needed new ties or the kitchen needed new forks. On the occasions guests floated about, she was the model hostess, knowing what to say and how to balance diplomacy with warmth, served with a smile, always.

Nina felt like a stray brought into the den of a well-bred angora. She would sample the wife’s eau de parfums from her vanity, spraying a careless amount on her thin wrists before rubbing them together, sniffing, then making a face, not to approve or disapprove, but out of due disdain (jealousy? fear?) for Lydia simply because of their diametrical roles in Otto’s world.

Nina’s reaction to her things was also a genuine reaction to the foreignness of it all: though not curious to learn about this other woman, the life of The Wife intrigued her because it was so different. Through slender-fitted dresses of splendid fabrics and imported bars of lavender soap, the whore gazed at the madonna.

*

Nina made herself a Tower of Pisa against the frame of the drawing room, nibbling on the golden fruit, fixing her dark eyes on Otto for a second before strutting right past him to plop herself down on a velvet armchair. Legs crossed and posture slouched with that unintentional elegance of youth, she watched as Otto finished up the conversation with one hand cupped over the speaker to block the sound of a second person in the back.

The drawing room had a long sofa of burnt orange, two white armchairs (mistress sold separately), a round marble table, and a large mirror that had a long sofa, two armchairs, and a round table in it. On another wall was the Gobelins where Lydia used to stand in front of, holding baby Julie and bouncing up and down ever-so-gently while the baby pointed a chubby finger at the exotic birds on the tapestry. It was also the residence’s most complimented piece of decor.

Otto thought of how these rooms—all these rooms—were so full of memories. He even remembered what it looked like empty, when the realtor stood at the entrance while a heavily pregnant Lydia grinned widely as she fantasized out loud about how she was going to decorate the nursery.

With Nina in the house, those memories did not disappear. Rather, they faded in vibrancy the way a photograph does when left in direct exposure of sunlight for too many years. Brass statuettes of greyhounds, crystal dessert bowls, stationary sets—anything that Nina trifled with would immediately lose the sentimental value they once held, making the house suddenly very light, almost hotel-ish. Otto still loved Lydia very much (he would shoot himself immediately if Lydia died from heartbreak).

Yet despite the weightlessness of his own house, now a museum of gifts he exchanged with Lydia, his obsession—with something so young, so piercing—beautified everything with a sparkling newness, as if Nina gave everything a new soul once she had touched or repositioned it.

END OF PART 1.

~

Stay tuned for part 2!

(feedback is appreciated in the comments)