Disclaimer: Not mine. Daniel Handler's/Lemony Snicket's characters and unfortunate events.
Author's Note: Two reviews is the most I've ever gotten for one chapter. Yessss. Chapter One is fairly clean, but as you must remember, the darker, more "human" parts come later. Song excerpts only show my inspiration for a particular chapter. This, by no means, is a "songfic". Any which way, enjoy.
Chapter One:
in-ev-i-te-bel
People always told me be careful of what you do
And don't go around breaking young girls' hearts
And mother always told me, "Be careful of who you love
And be careful of what you do 'cause the lie becomes the truth"
-"Billy Jean"
Cold September and already the leaves were falling fast.
When she glanced out the kitchen window (she always washed dishes in the early evening) she noticed the clouds creeping up into the sky, and the sky blinking colors like water. The prettiest time of day had to be this time, the in-between. Nothing stirred the soul-her soul-before this time. The morning, inconsequential, and the night, inconceivable.
She smiled softly to herself as her ears picked up the sound of buttons clicking and spinning mechanics. An onomatopoeia there, a scrub here, and she swore her heart lightened with domestic bliss.
Light jazz greeted her like an old friend. Purple this, my baby ain't crying anymore, I'm your shoulder forever but I'd rather be your heart…that last bit was unintelligible.
"Klaus, honey, who's singing this?" She picked up the wineglass, the one with the glass embroidery, and began wiping the edges gingerly.
The sound of plastic popping (the cassette case) caused her smile to inch wider.
"Someone named Beretta Jones. Spectacular voice, don't you think?" a voice hollered from the living room. She heard some other shuffling, then, "I'm pouring a whiskey. Do you want anything?"
She peered through the wineglass as her hand brought it closer to the light. The barely visible crack glistened with droplets as she examined. Satisfied, she set it down. "Rum and coke, please!"
"Are you serious?"
"Very!"
She knew just as well that he thought that rum and coke were for ninnies, girls who couldn't handle themselves.
'Well,' she thought to herself, 'Is it my fault that I can't stand the taste of hard liquor?' Not expecting an answer (as that would be silly) she began shifting around the sink with her soapy hands, searching for a lost sponge.
'And it's not very well that I'm not daring', she thought again as she felt the sponge under her hand, 'I've just had enough adventures to last me a lifetime.'
Truth to be told, she'd much rather remain in the house, bathing in the simple luxuries regular, normal people seem to take for granted. 'And with good reason', she often told herself.
Her duties as a girlfriend, she knew, probably seemed boring next to the raging feminist and adrenaline-addicted adventurer. 'Adrenaline-addicted adventurer.' She chuckled to herself. 'Only a poet could think such eloquent nonsense', she thought.
'And just as well. Right on the money and on both counts.'
Pinching another dish, she noticed her fingers and the familiar numbness right away. She entertained the image for a while and compared her fingers with rather large raisins. 'Better get gloves on', she told herself. She moved to the drawer and it opened-with some resistance-to a rusty "rrrrr".
'But where's the sense in that', she thought as the latex slipped onto her unprotected hands, 'when the boyfriend hasn't even proposed?'
Her stomach, the ever-present gymnast, started to execute triple flips as her left hand, the second finger from the left, reminded her of the absence of weight. What she wouldn't give for just one kneel and the words, "Will you marry me" from the one she loved the most.
What she wouldn't give.
She sighed and returned to the table, humming along as she always did. Her fingers drummed syllables and rhymes on the counter, her breath blowing foam castles to the cold autumn air outside. The rhymes often flowed out of her like water, currently running unattended from the aluminum spigot.
The spigot.
"Shit", she cursed as she rushed to the unsupervised sink. Her hands quickly grasped the crab-shaped hats, spinning them counterclockwise. Their water bill was unusually high, but she supposed that's what living next to the ocean gives you.
Wiping her sweaty brow, she quickly set work to clearing the kitchen counter, arranging the vases on the table, and setting the plates away in an orderly fashion.
Always in that order.
'Oh jeez.'
Her cheeks turned a faint pink as she rotated the china so that its darling decoration of bears and bamboo thickets faced south. 'Already thinking wife-y thoughts, are you now, Isadora Baudelaire?'
'Shutup, shutup, shutup.' She knew she'd rather not think about such things, in the middle of chores no less, but with no avail. Being a poet, thoughts came the same anyway.
And she knew that half of what she wanted couldn't be all her fault.
It always ended up with him.
For three years now they had been living together. And, for the past two years, Isadora Quagmire passed, feet dragging, through life without any mention of marriage or the possible secrecy of a hidden ring. It should be duly noted, also, that for the past two years mentioned, Isadora Quagmire wished fervently for nothing more than that.
Marriage, in all its infant bundles and tax receipts.
Not that monetary gifts meant anything to her. No, she valued her boyfriend far more than the tidal wave of money could possibly take her. Of course, she wasn't sure if he understood it that way.
Count Olaf had been dead for six years, his whole acting troupe sentenced to eighty years…hell, practically everyone who had been after them in the first place resides currently in cramped cement rooms with bars for curtains and pails for toilets.
She sniggered a bit at that, not at all remorseful at picturing that nasty little Fiona girl and her hook-handed brother peering out from behind tall, locked bars.
But she digressed. The fact remained that Klaus, who at first seemed unwilling to touch her, let alone have sex with her, downright avoided the suggestion of marital life like the plague, and Isadora couldn't, for the life of her, comprehend why. She assured him time and time again that the money, his inheritance, refused to faze her, as she too had riches of her own. She was also fairly positive of his fidelity, admitting-to herself-to spying on him when he spontaneously disappeared, only to find him drinking himself to death at a local bar.
Fairly certain, only because sometimes she'd search and he would be nowhere to be found. However, he always came up with a believable excuse, often reciting to her the places he visited during his absence-places she would always forget to search or passed over in favor of more likely ones. And he had yet to come home with the visual mistakes that most men made whilst committing acts of adultery, like forgetting a wristwatch, bringing an unusual perfume into the bedroom, driving home with discarded jewelry present in the car, or the old-fashioned stained-lipstick-on-collar routine. And Klaus had yet to quench her suspicions. As far as she knew it, her boyfriend was safe and exclusive.
She sighed, burying her head in her hands. Isadora supposed that he could be holding things off ever since his horrible fight with his sister and her resulting disappearance. Sometimes those two seemed too much alike, with their damn disappearing acts and all.
Actually…
She immediately lifted her head. Of course.
Perhaps Klaus did desire to marry her, it's just that…perhaps he somehow regrets the enormous fight with his sister, and well…what's good a wedding without siblings? She rationalized that he probably regretted it ever since, but because of his boyish-albeit frustrating-pride, he refused to act upon his feelings, thus postponing his proposal and the wedding!
Isadora frowned a little, though, remembering his reaction to her initial curiosity about "the fight".
"So that's why Violet never visits us on Christmas and the holidays? Because of some insignificant fight?"
"It was not insignificant, Isadora. And it wasn't just one fight. This fight, actually, has been raging on for years. Anyway, I don't even expect you to understand. You don't know what it's like to have a semblance of normality only to have someone take it away from you-"
"You're babbling again."
"I'm sorry."
"No, you're not. If you were, you would tell me what this fight exactly was about instead of dodging the obvious."
"End of conversation, Isadora. It doesn't matter. No one can change fucking anything now. It's over. End of story."
"Well." She remembered standing up and toppling her seat over. "Well, then that's goddamn unfortunate, isn't it?"
What a disaster that was.
The acrobat in her stomach started up again and she shifted her position, hoping the pain would alleviate fast enough to follow where her train of thought was going.
However, since he did feel quite strongly about it, then perhaps her vein of suspicion ran correct. Perhaps this fight acted as the catalyst to his drinking habits, strange behavior, and what Isadora herself liked to call "Marital Cowardliness".
He called to her again, bless his soul, from the living room, "Isadora, you all right in there? Your drink's ready."
At that same moment, she thought she felt the west wind breeze into the confines of the kitchen. At that same moment, a woman named Beretta Jones was singing her recorded heart out on a two disk cassette, slumming together the sentences, "Twenty-four hours they gave me/But I told her I wanted the gun/Then she said, 'Might as well make it twenty-one."
She stared out the window, into the oncoming deep, at the cable wires tangled in some crazy, unexplainable mess. Everything seemed stumps and gnarled fingers, and even she, capable of forgetting the horrible things she'd seen in the past years, could not quench the creeping anxiety bubbling inside her stomach.
She chose, however, to ignore it for the time being.
She stared at the silent trees, the leaves and bark slowly morphing into a single color and thought to herself,
'I'd better give Sunny a ring.'