In the Forests of the Night by Vanessa de Sade

Author:Vanessa de Sade
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Urban erotic fairy tales
Publisher: Sweetmeats Press
Published: 2013-11-28T05:00:00+00:00

Handsome and Gertrude

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Story Four

Part One

Where we meet The Girl, follow a trail of Breadcrumbs and end up at the Gingerbread House

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Heartbreak House stood two blocks south of Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile. With a view of the park from its privileged upper stories, brooding in its own shady canyon and untouched by all but a brief glimpse of the noonday sun, its quiet aspect revealed not even a hint of the river of alimony that fuelled its very existence.

Inside, processions of sober-suited lawyers tiptoed reverently up and down the house’s plush-carpeted labyrinth of sedate one-bedroom apartments, delivering their monthly cheques to the nut-brown former trophy wives who populated the building’s main arteries, living out their days in constrained luxury at the expense of grudging ex-husbands. Fifth Avenue store bags may have littered their trash, and masseuses and aromatherapists flitted silently from door to door, doing what they could to restore the deteriorating complexions of their patrons, but the main topics of conversation at Heartbreak were always of the past. Past apartments, better clothes and, of course, lost youth.

“They have all had their day, no?” the Mexican cleaning-women joked, far out of the earshot of their employers on the echoing back stairs as they trundled heavy buckets in and out of the hushed brownstone cathedral. “Those shameless painted putas, put out to grass like old horses on the range.”

“Si, si,” the others nodded. “Though even out to grass they are richer than all our families put together, mi estimada. And that one upstairs, she is richer than all of them and all of us too.”

Another chorus of “si” would ring out, and even in the smart drawing rooms of the residents, the talk would eventually come around to Constantina Cavarlini and her legendary bank balance.

The ex-wives club all called her Norma Desmond, a nickname awarded in honour of her mausoleum-like dwelling house, an Art Deco palace spanning the entire top floor of the building like a gilded cancer, most of its opulent rooms shut up and shrouded in dustsheets, whispering ghost chambers for the disconsolate Constantina to haunt like a wraith. Some said that she was now thin as a rake, starving herself in mourning for her last husband — a wealthy Greek shipping magnate rumoured to be richer than even Onassis. Others insisted that she had grown obesely fat and was eating herself to death by degree, and crumpled cake boxes redolent with the scents of rancid cream were reputed to be blocking her trash chute like the furred arteries of her late husband’s heart.

Of course, no-one really knew, and although Maisie Dellamore claimed to have been inside the penthouse once, just before the death of husband number four, it was so long ago and Maisie was so old and doddery on her feet these days, nothing she said could be believed, though this didn’t stop a regular procession of painted tabbies gathering at her feet each Thursday when she was “at home” for afternoon tea and scandal.

The real truth was,

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