original fic: a city, like lace
a city, like lace
pg-13, original fiction, 1828 words. for round one of inrevelations. enjoy?
Always in the bathroom her lips look scarlet, garish.
She turns her attention to her eyebrows to avoid the sight, pencils the light hairs so they’re thin and arched and dark. They don’t quite match her hair now; they’re too close to black. But Eva never feels at home in her natural strawberry blonde. It has a strange weight, the wavy curtain resting as though perched on her shoulders. She twirls the mascara brush through her eyelashes. They match her eyebrows, now.
When she lifts her eyes, her painted face doesn’t fit the cracks in the tiles. Jim always meant to fix them. A puff of powder clouds the picture, just a second long enough, and then her face is finished.
Last week one of the other teachers gave her a blouse - Eva didn’t like the look in her eye, but she knows the way saffron blossoms against her rosy skin - and the silk fabric shivers smoothly against her slip as she pulls it on. She leaves the top button undone. Then she tugs her old blue pencil skirt over her hips, fastens the buttons at the zip at the waist. She smooths her hands down her thighs, considers herself in the mirror again.
Against her lips, her teeth are so white. She’s not smiling.
Her good coat, the fur one Mama gave her last birthday, is hanging on the armchair by the door. She slips it on, and pins in place the big black hat she found at an after-Christmas sale, one of those first weeks after Jim was gone. She reaches up for her earlobes. Would the rhinestones look tacky?
It’s wartime, the radio whispers into her head. God.
She pulls the door open, unadorned, and steps outside.
The buttons of her coat are undone and the night air is cold against her face, but she doesn’t fix the buttons or go inside for a scarf. Maybe she deserves this.
She licks her lips.
.
If anybody asked, she’d admit that she picked Costello’s for two reasons: nobody knows her from anywhere else, and it’s in a basement. Since the war, she doesn’t like to see the sky.
The smoke and the smell of booze envelop her the minute she walks inside. As usual, she has to blink against the dimness, remind her eyes to see in the semidarkness. It all comes into focus, maybe a little too soon.
There are the sounds, too, the clashy, dancing sounds of jazz - Costello’s at least has a piano going; tonight there are drums and a bass and a saxophone, tripling the noise - the giggles of the other, too-done-up, girls, the rumblings of the men in fedoras. The clink of glasses. In the clamor she is comparatively silent, invisible even in her yellow blouse.
Her favorite chair is open at the end of the bar. She slides into the high seat, feeling the stretch in her calves. It’s an anonymous kind of pleasure.
The bartender comes over to her with a napkin, his eyebrows raised.
“Kir royale,” she says, coaxing her lips into a smile as she meets his eye.
The bartender nods, turns his back to her. She lets out her breath in a sigh. Not too long ago - this morning at school, even - Eva liked people. Now they have the potential to take away this life of hers, expose it and leave it to rot. It’s smoky enough, though, no one would remember her, even if they’d seen her before in daylight.
Maybe he’s already had something to drink, but regardless the bartender still manages to slosh the liquid as he sets her glass in front of her. It’s cool against her fingers; she can practically feel the champagne bubbles bursting against her skin. She’s probably imagining that. But she can taste the bubbles in her mouth, popping against her tongue, like a celebration. It’s easier to smile. She takes another sip.
When she puts her drink down there’s a weight on her shoulder. Without turning she can feel four fingers and a thumb, the individual weight of them, the square of the palm against her fur coat. She hasn’t taken it off yet. She thinks about ignoring this strange hand, about raising the glass to her lips, concentrating on the slide of the drink down her throat, the warmth of it, all the way to her stomach. She could think about Jim.
She turns in her seat.
His glasses are the first thing she notices. It’s because, maybe, they stand out in the haze, reflecting the gleam of the bar. Jim wore glasses, sometimes, to read, but he always forgot to polish them. They never shined like this, standing out in the haze and the smoke.
He looks at her, looking at him, and Eva isn’t really sure what she’s supposed to do, now.
Maybe there are conventions for this, for meeting middle aged men with paunches and fedoras and glasses at bars, but if so she’s entirely forgotten them. Besides, his tie is teal with swirls of bright pink, and that clash would leave anybody’s mind blank.
“What’s the champagne for, beautiful?” He nearly has to shout it over the sound of other conversations, all the notes the band is playing. Eva’s not sure how she feels about bop, even if it’s the new thing. “And what brings you to Forty-fourth Street?”
When he leans closer she can smell the whiskey on his breath. She doesn’t wrinkle her nose like she normally would.
“Oh, I wanted to see the Empire State Building at night - I’m just in the city visiting a friend - and I forgot all about the blackouts,” she invents, the words rising off her tongue like little bubbles. “I walked around until I got here.”
He considers the story, for a minute, digging each finger deeper into the fur of her coat, rubbing little circles into her shoulder. Eva almost squirms but his hand is so solid and the nights are so lonely in her little apartment.
“I’m glad the blackouts brought you here, gorgeous. One thing this damn war is good for.”
He smiles at her, then, and she can’t help but smiling back. This damn war.
.
Outside, maybe an hour or two later, he presses his hand around hers. Eva doesn’t have little hands, but her fingers disappear completely.
He lights a cigarette. It occurs to her that she doesn’t know his name.
Around them the city rises up, unseen and dark, as though fixing Eva and her nameless companion to their particular path. She can conjure up visions of these buildings, skyscrapers, in daylight, but the glitz of the New York City skyline somehow can’t be forced upon this scene.
“I really should be getting back,” she says, just remembering her story. “To my friend’s house, you know. She’ll worry if I don’t show up soon.”
The man stops. She can feel, can almost see him turning towards her.
“You can ring her from my place,” he suggests, his voice getting louder as he leans towards her. “I’ve got a phone.” He whispers that part, straight into her ear.
Eva remembers that it is night and she forgot her scarf and her coat is unbuttoned and she can’t help but shiver against the February wind brushing up against her skin.
She can feel his hand pulling her closer; can smell the cigarette as the other hand completes a circle around his waist.
His lips are on hers. She can taste the stale whiskey he’s been drinking. She doesn’t step away. This is what she misses, this being held, this particular anonymous pleasure. It has to be anonymous now, covert, squashed against a middle aged man’s paunch with the taste of whiskey and the smell of smoke. Jim is gone - it’s wartime, the blackouts, this damn war.
There’s a hiss and a smell like the one time she tried to use a curling iron in college and her hair lit on fire. For an instant, there’s a flash, her messy dorm room, formals and pins and now she can taste the night air on the skin of her lips.
She can feel the man’s hands, frantic, smoothing the fur of her coat. He growls shit, shit, shit, and she can hear the small patter of his cigarette as it hits the pavement, and his hands continue, matting the fur, running down the length of her coat, and it occurs to her, finally -
Her coat’s on fire.
It’s still unbuttoned, and Eva slips out of it before she thinks, leaves it lying behind her.
There are three or four cigarette burns, glowing faintly on the back. She considers them. There’s no way the coat can be repaired. The marks will always be there, and how would she explain them?
The man rests his hand at the bottom of her hairline, turning her face towards him, leans closer, and he’s solid and warm and too often she’s been out in these unlit nights, making out a new stranger's face in semi-darkness.
She steps away, out of the circle of his arms, each footstep fast enough to keep him from following.
Even in a blackout, she can find her way home. She’s done it before, too many times already.
.
Just like she tells the boys and girls at school, she pulls the curtains shut before she turns on the lights. The apartment looks even smaller in this forest of shadows.
There’s enough light, though, for the letter on the table to consider her accusingly.
Darling Eva, it starts. All my love, Jim, it ends. And in between is the lace of a few words, a few sentences cut out. All the things he doesn’t say.
She wonders, every time she writes him, what her letters look like. If he can see the holes between the lines, between whatever those damn censors are cutting out. If Jim knows, just from the slant of the line, that when his darling Eva goes out she leaves her diamond ring at home, that in two months it hasn’t even left a white mark on her finger.
When she writes, the things she says are real, I love you and I miss you so much and Come home soon, and she means each sentence. But that’s not enough for the days when the sentences are barely three words long and the radio announcer is grim and she’s worried the rent will be late. Swiss cheese letters can’t put their hands on her, claim her, push her into a place where things are better.
She means the words, but increasingly she is finding that words are just not quite enough.
And there are things nobody knows in this war, that maybe nobody will ever know. Eva thinks, late at night in a New York City that feels already doomed, that that could perhaps be all right.
In the bathroom her lips look a little less red.
pg-13, original fiction, 1828 words. for round one of inrevelations. enjoy?
Always in the bathroom her lips look scarlet, garish.
She turns her attention to her eyebrows to avoid the sight, pencils the light hairs so they’re thin and arched and dark. They don’t quite match her hair now; they’re too close to black. But Eva never feels at home in her natural strawberry blonde. It has a strange weight, the wavy curtain resting as though perched on her shoulders. She twirls the mascara brush through her eyelashes. They match her eyebrows, now.
When she lifts her eyes, her painted face doesn’t fit the cracks in the tiles. Jim always meant to fix them. A puff of powder clouds the picture, just a second long enough, and then her face is finished.
Last week one of the other teachers gave her a blouse - Eva didn’t like the look in her eye, but she knows the way saffron blossoms against her rosy skin - and the silk fabric shivers smoothly against her slip as she pulls it on. She leaves the top button undone. Then she tugs her old blue pencil skirt over her hips, fastens the buttons at the zip at the waist. She smooths her hands down her thighs, considers herself in the mirror again.
Against her lips, her teeth are so white. She’s not smiling.
Her good coat, the fur one Mama gave her last birthday, is hanging on the armchair by the door. She slips it on, and pins in place the big black hat she found at an after-Christmas sale, one of those first weeks after Jim was gone. She reaches up for her earlobes. Would the rhinestones look tacky?
It’s wartime, the radio whispers into her head. God.
She pulls the door open, unadorned, and steps outside.
The buttons of her coat are undone and the night air is cold against her face, but she doesn’t fix the buttons or go inside for a scarf. Maybe she deserves this.
She licks her lips.
.
If anybody asked, she’d admit that she picked Costello’s for two reasons: nobody knows her from anywhere else, and it’s in a basement. Since the war, she doesn’t like to see the sky.
The smoke and the smell of booze envelop her the minute she walks inside. As usual, she has to blink against the dimness, remind her eyes to see in the semidarkness. It all comes into focus, maybe a little too soon.
There are the sounds, too, the clashy, dancing sounds of jazz - Costello’s at least has a piano going; tonight there are drums and a bass and a saxophone, tripling the noise - the giggles of the other, too-done-up, girls, the rumblings of the men in fedoras. The clink of glasses. In the clamor she is comparatively silent, invisible even in her yellow blouse.
Her favorite chair is open at the end of the bar. She slides into the high seat, feeling the stretch in her calves. It’s an anonymous kind of pleasure.
The bartender comes over to her with a napkin, his eyebrows raised.
“Kir royale,” she says, coaxing her lips into a smile as she meets his eye.
The bartender nods, turns his back to her. She lets out her breath in a sigh. Not too long ago - this morning at school, even - Eva liked people. Now they have the potential to take away this life of hers, expose it and leave it to rot. It’s smoky enough, though, no one would remember her, even if they’d seen her before in daylight.
Maybe he’s already had something to drink, but regardless the bartender still manages to slosh the liquid as he sets her glass in front of her. It’s cool against her fingers; she can practically feel the champagne bubbles bursting against her skin. She’s probably imagining that. But she can taste the bubbles in her mouth, popping against her tongue, like a celebration. It’s easier to smile. She takes another sip.
When she puts her drink down there’s a weight on her shoulder. Without turning she can feel four fingers and a thumb, the individual weight of them, the square of the palm against her fur coat. She hasn’t taken it off yet. She thinks about ignoring this strange hand, about raising the glass to her lips, concentrating on the slide of the drink down her throat, the warmth of it, all the way to her stomach. She could think about Jim.
She turns in her seat.
His glasses are the first thing she notices. It’s because, maybe, they stand out in the haze, reflecting the gleam of the bar. Jim wore glasses, sometimes, to read, but he always forgot to polish them. They never shined like this, standing out in the haze and the smoke.
He looks at her, looking at him, and Eva isn’t really sure what she’s supposed to do, now.
Maybe there are conventions for this, for meeting middle aged men with paunches and fedoras and glasses at bars, but if so she’s entirely forgotten them. Besides, his tie is teal with swirls of bright pink, and that clash would leave anybody’s mind blank.
“What’s the champagne for, beautiful?” He nearly has to shout it over the sound of other conversations, all the notes the band is playing. Eva’s not sure how she feels about bop, even if it’s the new thing. “And what brings you to Forty-fourth Street?”
When he leans closer she can smell the whiskey on his breath. She doesn’t wrinkle her nose like she normally would.
“Oh, I wanted to see the Empire State Building at night - I’m just in the city visiting a friend - and I forgot all about the blackouts,” she invents, the words rising off her tongue like little bubbles. “I walked around until I got here.”
He considers the story, for a minute, digging each finger deeper into the fur of her coat, rubbing little circles into her shoulder. Eva almost squirms but his hand is so solid and the nights are so lonely in her little apartment.
“I’m glad the blackouts brought you here, gorgeous. One thing this damn war is good for.”
He smiles at her, then, and she can’t help but smiling back. This damn war.
.
Outside, maybe an hour or two later, he presses his hand around hers. Eva doesn’t have little hands, but her fingers disappear completely.
He lights a cigarette. It occurs to her that she doesn’t know his name.
Around them the city rises up, unseen and dark, as though fixing Eva and her nameless companion to their particular path. She can conjure up visions of these buildings, skyscrapers, in daylight, but the glitz of the New York City skyline somehow can’t be forced upon this scene.
“I really should be getting back,” she says, just remembering her story. “To my friend’s house, you know. She’ll worry if I don’t show up soon.”
The man stops. She can feel, can almost see him turning towards her.
“You can ring her from my place,” he suggests, his voice getting louder as he leans towards her. “I’ve got a phone.” He whispers that part, straight into her ear.
Eva remembers that it is night and she forgot her scarf and her coat is unbuttoned and she can’t help but shiver against the February wind brushing up against her skin.
She can feel his hand pulling her closer; can smell the cigarette as the other hand completes a circle around his waist.
His lips are on hers. She can taste the stale whiskey he’s been drinking. She doesn’t step away. This is what she misses, this being held, this particular anonymous pleasure. It has to be anonymous now, covert, squashed against a middle aged man’s paunch with the taste of whiskey and the smell of smoke. Jim is gone - it’s wartime, the blackouts, this damn war.
There’s a hiss and a smell like the one time she tried to use a curling iron in college and her hair lit on fire. For an instant, there’s a flash, her messy dorm room, formals and pins and now she can taste the night air on the skin of her lips.
She can feel the man’s hands, frantic, smoothing the fur of her coat. He growls shit, shit, shit, and she can hear the small patter of his cigarette as it hits the pavement, and his hands continue, matting the fur, running down the length of her coat, and it occurs to her, finally -
Her coat’s on fire.
It’s still unbuttoned, and Eva slips out of it before she thinks, leaves it lying behind her.
There are three or four cigarette burns, glowing faintly on the back. She considers them. There’s no way the coat can be repaired. The marks will always be there, and how would she explain them?
The man rests his hand at the bottom of her hairline, turning her face towards him, leans closer, and he’s solid and warm and too often she’s been out in these unlit nights, making out a new stranger's face in semi-darkness.
She steps away, out of the circle of his arms, each footstep fast enough to keep him from following.
Even in a blackout, she can find her way home. She’s done it before, too many times already.
.
Just like she tells the boys and girls at school, she pulls the curtains shut before she turns on the lights. The apartment looks even smaller in this forest of shadows.
There’s enough light, though, for the letter on the table to consider her accusingly.
Darling Eva, it starts. All my love, Jim, it ends. And in between is the lace of a few words, a few sentences cut out. All the things he doesn’t say.
She wonders, every time she writes him, what her letters look like. If he can see the holes between the lines, between whatever those damn censors are cutting out. If Jim knows, just from the slant of the line, that when his darling Eva goes out she leaves her diamond ring at home, that in two months it hasn’t even left a white mark on her finger.
When she writes, the things she says are real, I love you and I miss you so much and Come home soon, and she means each sentence. But that’s not enough for the days when the sentences are barely three words long and the radio announcer is grim and she’s worried the rent will be late. Swiss cheese letters can’t put their hands on her, claim her, push her into a place where things are better.
She means the words, but increasingly she is finding that words are just not quite enough.
And there are things nobody knows in this war, that maybe nobody will ever know. Eva thinks, late at night in a New York City that feels already doomed, that that could perhaps be all right.
In the bathroom her lips look a little less red.