A House Of No Women

[I'm writing some fiction and this is a very early rough draft. Don't need any advice or critique, thanks. just send flowers, candy and love letters. ]

House Of No Women

This was a house of no women. That’s all she could think. Or rather, all she could feel. This is a house of no women. It was an enormous house. She noticed it as her boyfriend Peter drove her up the long driveway in his new red sports car. He was wanting her to notice his car so much, but next to this house, crunching along this gravel driveway, his toy car was about as impressive as a kid’s tiny metal Hot Wheels car that you bought in the supermarket for less than a dollar. Neither of them had been expecting so much house – so much big stone house – like a mountain you were asked to climb and it had seemed a nice adventure when you stretched the guidebooks and maps out on your kitchen table one night under a yellow light. All within reason, not ominous, but doable. But this was another matter, in fact it was a veritable Matterhorn of a house. In the daylight rising up and looking nothing short of terrifying, anyone would begin to think that maybe this was just a bad idea all around and it was a good time to turn back.

This is a house of no women. She thought it again even though it wasn’t quite grammatical, not particularly good English, something as a writer, she should be able to articulate more precisely, but this phrase rose from her gut – a house of no women – and every part of the house spoke it. Not that it was a masculine house per se, rather it seemed to pull her in, as if needing her feminine nature, as if needing any feminine nature to balance it out. .

What she was feeling was his presence, but since she didn’t even know Vladimir yet, she could not know that. She did not know that his soul was such a powerful black hole, pulling her and every woman around him in, like a bad table cloth trick where the magician fails to leave every cup, plate, knife, fork spoon and candlestick standing as he yanks away the table linens, but instead, Vladimir had a way all pulling whole dinner party tables of place settings and women into his lap, and they could not resist being upended, all within a few quick looks of his from under those bushy dark eyebrows, now slightly graying. Vladimir could cause incredible damage..

Maybe it was knowing the back story – that Titantia, the beautiful Russian dancer/model his wife had died here – a bit of a scandal it ended up being as it splashed through the papers, she and her lover nude in the swimming pool – Vladimir and the the son away. She was beautiful. And even with the scandal and the tragedy, most of the publications had only printed the gorgeous pictures of her – almost unheard of these days – but Vladimir had had a hand in making sure none of the accident details were made public.

The pictures they ran of her were incredible. She was by then more model than dancer and no one was clear if she ever had been much of a dancer back in Russia. Equally unclear if Vladimir had been much of a businessman, or maybe just a gangster. So it may have been a house with women when she lived there, but today, there was the unmistakable feeling that women had been banished from this kingdom.

And the king of this kingdom was as ugly as the former queen was beautiful, But Vladimir wore the odd combination of ugly-powerful-rich in a way that gave him a strange magnetic quality. You couldn’t find too many photographs of him, again it wasn’t clear why. Was he a gangster ducking the authorities or? Papers were in the habit of cropping his face out of the pictures of Titantia and him completely, or often as not cutting his big bear-like figure and face in half as they let her tiny fairy-like shape take center-stage in the photographs of the couple entering the US at Boston Logan Airport, or visiting the Kennedys at Hyannisport or arriving at Kennebunkport to fish with the President.

And Vladimir was as rich as she was poor, the story being that he had attended the ballet in Moscow with a few of his mistresses, his wife refusing to go anywhere with him at that point, and had seen her dance the lead role that night and had sent all the mistresses home, and gone back stage and had just about kidnapped her, but she had slipped through his fingers that night, making him all the more desirous of her. He was rumored to be a man of great appetitie and was not willing to delay his gratification when he saw something he wanted -- be it real estate, airlines, diamond mines, nuclear power plants or women, all of which he owned several of – except for Titania. Once he saw her, he didn’t want any other women, just her. He cleared the decks, wife quickly and quietly divorced, mistresses dismissed. And then he laid traps for her and waited, looking as confident as any man possibly could that. As he had learned in business over and over again, it was just a matter of time and she would yield. But she did not make it easy, and there were more pictures of her with other men in the papers, other reports of Frenchmen with royal ancestors and that billionaire Spaniard, but Vladimir was undaunted. He knew how to outwait this particular kind of butterfly, until she landed, And he was right. He got her.

Peter slowed down, way down, pulled the car over before they were close to the door, under a shady overhanging of green leafy canopy of trees where they would be sheltered in a little privacy. She noticed his nervousness as she reached for the door handle saying “Wait” as she tried to get out, he touched her arm to tell her to wait, then went around to the other side, to let her out and carefully kissed her and said, “Are you sure you want to do this? You don’t have to, you know.”

But she looked at him quizzically, all this sudden overprotectedness was so unlike him, but he must have sensed it too – that this house might swallow her alive. That the man who lived in the house might … well, that something might happen. They never give men enough credit for male intuition she thought to herself. They always sense when another man is ready to pounce on their woman.

“It’s okay,” she said, knowing it would not reassure him. “They said they’d arrange a car for me when I’m done. You don’t have to wait.”
This reassured him even less, but he let her go.
He kissed her hard – an insurance kiss, she liked to call those – a kiss a man plants on you to remind you for a good long time that you belong to him, to insure that you get returned to the rightful owner soon,. She opened the car door for him, since she could tell he did not want to go and it was getting close to 4:00. Sunday at 4:00 that was her appointment time to meet Vladimir.

She walked up to the house and he turned the circle drive reluctantly, heading back out to the road. She turned to wave to Peter, who was waiting for her wave, car stopped, though heading out and after the wave, he threw it in gear and raced out of there, knowing there was nothing to do. She watched him get smaller and smaller as he followed the long driveway. There was so much Peter didn’t know about this. There was so much she couldn’t say. There was the heart-leap she had experienced that same morning when she went to the ATM with Peter before they were getting bagels, to find a surprise $250,000 in her account – the amount Vladimir had offered her for advising him – the amount she had laughed at, surely he was kidding, the amount she had turned down, she thought. How had he even found out her bank account number?

She had only agreed to have tea with him on Sunday at 4:00. She didn’t drive, growing up in New York City and all. He would send a car for her. No, she told him, my boyfriend can bring me out. He should not wait, I’ll send you home in a car. She had said like some silly girl, forgetting her research on him, “Oh, don’t go to the trouble.” He had said, “I go to no trouble. I own the limousine service. Actually I own a few limousine services.” She looked back to where her boyfriend had been and saw that now he was gone. She turned back to the door and rang the bell. It was 4:01 by her watch.