GOLDEN FRUIT 2

This is part 2 of a story about an affair between Otto and Nina, a man with money and a young mistress with a great capacity for cruelty. Read part 1 here.

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Before Otto, Nina had an old banker. She had gotten into the car with him a few times, was gifted a gorgeous apricot-colored fox shawl that was softer than a cloud, then fought her way out of his old hands when she decided that there actually was a line to be drawn about what was appropriately worth the life of luxury she was after. Not long after, when she had felt the reluctancy to sell her fox for cash, she reached back out by calling his office, only to be informed by a timid secretary that he’s dead (bathtub, heart attack). She sold the fox.

She had met Otto at the diner where she worked, serving coffees and pancakes to working men who didn’t care about the taste of their coffees and pancakes. Otto had seen her through the window a few times and immediately rerouted his commute home so he could catch glimpses of her—everyday for a whole week before striking up the courage and tearing down his conscience to approach her.

Nina had also picked up the pattern. She would pour him dark, liquid glances every time he passed by the window, where she busied herself with some made-up task.

On their first meeting, Otto purposely dined in around the last hour of Nina’s shift so that she could join him afterwards. That wait was the longest he had ever taken to finish one cup of coffee. With the intuition of a first-time murderer distributing stones in a body bag, he rehearsed (in his head) a few possible ways the conversation would go and how he would get her to agree to seeing him more. When he saw her shuffling his way, he urgently reached his left hand into his coat pocket and pushed his ring off with the thumb before pulling his hand back out, discreetly examining if the red indent it had left was too obvious before clasping both hands down to his lap below the table just as Nina slid into the side of the booth across from him.

While his eyes were hotly fixed on her face (the way her baby hairs were unruly from a day’s worth of sweat, the constellation of wonderful features, lips that made her look permanently unimpressed), hers were fixed on the small tag on his wool scarf, which told her of a particular very-expensive brand. He was clean-shaven, not bad-looking at all, smelled of ginger cologne and talcum, and casually (mostly inadvertently) mentioned his moments in New York City, Berlin, and Paris.

*

Nina had serious ambitions of becoming a model, one of those ghostly alluring cat-eyed muses in glossy magazines found mingling among the who’s-who of the world of fashion and art. To her, it was obvious: the world was her stage, and she felt like the stage was set, just waiting for its star dancer to rise to the light. She wanted to wear glamorous furs and step out of glamorous cars where men held glamorous umbrellas for her as she made her way to the doors of glamorous hotels, where she would exchange bubblegum cheek kisses with glamorous girls who rarely smiled back at their admirers.

And so, the fact that Otto was a gallery owner whose name was his ticket to private exhibitions felt like one rung on a ladder she didn’t want to miss. Although the exact aim was blurry, she could detect that Otto had the right Rolodex, as well as a reputation she would like to borrow as a cape. Sitting across from her was a tastemaker, a trampoline that could launch her straight from the faded diner bench to the golden styling rooms where the dictators of style chain-smoked cigarettes and doled out stardom.

*

And so Nina start seeing more of Otto. She quit the diner and everything became bankrolled by Otto out of trust, for not only had he never seen her apartment or wherever said rent was going, he didn’t even know where she lived.

The day that Otto had dreamt of began with a shopping spree. “Don’t ask me, just buy what you want.” And by the evening, he was utterly spent—in both ways.

At the jewelry counter, Nina tried on a fine selection of necklaces and narrowed down to two strands of pearls, and while she was switching between the two, the clerk on the other side of the counter flashed a candy smile at Otto, “this one looks lovely on your beautiful daughter.”

*

Otto had intended, with the heart of a romantic, to give it to her after sex—not before, because that would feel transactional, like a down payment, and he didn’t want her wearing it during, because he felt like it would be a reminder of his depravity. Even in his decay, he soothed himself by keeping a shred of shame.

After, he thought.

After: in that vulnerable, saccharine window when the room was still warm and the sheets smelled of skin and hair, and men like him—men past the horizon of forty, past the cruel, self-conscious clarities of youth—become sentimental schoolboys, their bodies flushed with the brief illusion of youth, their egos pink and raw, not because they grow young again, but because they grow foolish in exactly the same ways. Otto had learned to hide his desire for years, to keep it leashed with good manners and sharp jackets, but now, in the presence of Nina—careless, elastic, and bouncy—the desire returned in its most humiliating form: as the desire to be adored.

That was why he had prepared the note in advance. He wanted the moment to be perfect, rehearsed, like a trick he’d seen in a film: she would stretch out on the love-made-warm nest of white sheets like a pretty concubine and he would sit on the edge of the bed, producing the box with the note from his pocket like a magic trick, she would read the note while he watched her face gleam brighter than the pearls (she’d say something like oh, how sweet!) and he would reflect her joy with a stupid grin on his own face, or something cheesy like that. Then, he would put the necklace on her and watch it fall cooly against her throat, then they’d kiss. He had even taken time with the handwriting—not too neat, so as not to look eager; not too messy, so as not to look adolescent—the whole thing a pathetic theater of control, of giving without asking, of wanting to believe that she truly loves him.

He wanted to be the man who knew how to make a girl feel like the only star in a dim sky, forgetting that girls like Nina are not looking up at the sky but are busy counting coins on the ground.

Nina’s bedroom acrobatics delighted Otto. In private, she was as inventive as she was insatiable; for her, the act wasn’t so much about affection and more about performance because she knew how to turn softness into a weapon, and she was aware of how she looked from Otto’s angle, what felt good and what didn’t. The space between the sheets proved to be as much of a circus as it was sanctuary—stunts mixed with some sincerity.

And afterwards she would prance and skip around like a child, humming a little tune and swaying her girlish hips before curling up in an armchair to munch on a cold buttered role left over from dinner.

That scenario in Otto’s head never came to fruition, because Nina never waited for ceremony. She padded around the room bare-legged and disinterested, rifling through his coat while he lay stunned by his own good fortune. She wasn’t searching for the note. She didn’t think there would be one. She was searching for the thing itself—the proof, the prize.

The necklace was still packed in its box, folded inside tissue paper in his coat pocket, alongside the note. Nina dug through two pockets before finding the box and tugged it out with such impatience that the pocket flipped inside out, the letter fluttering to the ground. She picked up the paper (upside down), thought there were too many words, folded it back up and punched it back inside his coat pocket along with the exposed salmon of the inner lining, thinking it had nothing to do with her. Then, she plopped the coat in a puddle on the ground and strutted back to bed like a cat disinterested in a knocked over vase.

Otto forgot about the note entirely.

Until, weeks later, Lydia, who folded her husband’s clothes with the clinical tenderness of an archivist handling manuscripts of Napoleon’s letters to Josephine—discovered the note while shaking out the winter coat. She read it twice, face white as a ghost.

*

Otto was a 34-year-old bachelor when his older sister decided that he would die alone if no one intervened. Love takes luck, and Otto—quite handsome, well-bred and well-spoken—had everything but the luck that was needed to reap the benefit from his appeal to women. He tried romance in his student days, but they all flattened out one way or another, like cola left aerated overnight.

And so he was introduced to Lydia, a translator at a publishing house and the daughter of well-known musician parents. Her personality was as soft as a lamb’s ear. A wispy young woman with pale eyes who wore cream-colored cardigans and a small gold cross, she wasn’t gorgeous but her presence was clean like the smell of linen and her laugh was as open-hearted as sunshine.

“She’s very stable. Good for you,” Otto’s sister would say about the gentlewoman who enjoyed modest things like planting tulips, making chamomile tea without being asked, and doing puzzles in the winter. And Otto, who could talk about pigment or provenance but not pleasure, found that Lydia slipped easily into the open spaces of his life.

They married a year later, quietly, in Antwerp in order to escape the blitz of their friends and extended family in Brussels.

*

The next time Otto saw that note was on the oak credenza by the foyer of the home he had shared with Lydia for over twelve years. The man mirrored his letter—frozen stiff in rigor mortis. He ran upstairs yelling for Lydia and baby Julie only to find the whole house empty, drawers half-closed, clothes on the floor, and trinket boxes left open.

“Sir, they left in the afternoon,” said the housekeeper. Her warm, sad eyes looked at a devastated and guilty Otto. “She’s living with her aunt for a while, she told me.”

END OF PART 2.

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