Floral Eden

I could tell by the way he’d accepted my offer for tea that he didn’t really want it. He’d said, Yes, fine, to me and followed me into the kitchen – not his first act of boorishness, but perhaps the clearest sign that he had been raised without regard to the proper handling of things. Decency states that the guest remains seated while the hostess prepares tea. Here I thought everyone knew that bumbling into a kitchen after a woman of quality as she attempted to perform entertaining duties was known to be rude. Evidently, I was wrong.

Do you take sugar in your tea? I asked, as was polite, and tried my best not to look put off by his presence in my kitchen. He held up a hand with five dingy fingers splayed outward – five lumps of sugar, really? I decided to brew the cheap stuff. If he wasn’t going to drink tea pure, I wasn’t going to provide good tea. I set the sugar bowl on my tea tray with, I thought, a remarkable degree of good-mannered acceptance.

He did not suit my house. His calloused, soiled hands did not look right as they pulled my fine china teacups from the cabinet. I could see the dirt beneath is fingernails, ten brown crescents that made my skin crawl, their filthiness contrasting with the vivid beauty of the tea set’s painted flowers and gold accents. He fiddled with them, fiddled with the sugar, fiddled with everything in the kitchen until I couldn’t stand it anymore, imagining the grungy fingerprints he was leaving behind on every surface. I told him twice to wash his hands, as tactfully as possible, but he ignored me.

No use now, he said, with his filthy hands clutched around the handles of my best tea tray. No use, indeed.

Please have a seat in the salon, I told him. Manners were, after all, the most obvious sign of civility.

That is where we are sitting now as I stir my tea and he stirs his. I added one chunk of high-quality, raw sugar to my tea – a reasonable amount, I believe – because the cheap tea is no good without, no matter how perfectly I brew it.

With his ill-fitting jacket and poor posture, he looks no better in the salon than he did in the kitchen. He’s slouched against my floral sofa, probably smudging grime into the fabric, and I must remember to inform the maid to pay special attention to the sofa when she cleans in the morning. There is a scar that slits across his left eyebrow and his face is ruddy with too much sun, or too much drink, or too much time in disreputable establishments. His hands, I notice now, have the tell-tale signs of a recent fight on the knuckles – a day or so ago, perhaps. There is an absolute brute, a barely-tamed animal, drinking tea in my salon, and the look of him against the beauty of my home is striking. I want to make him disappear.

“Would you like anything to eat?” I ask him, swallowing a mouthful of tea and congratulating myself on adhering to the laws of polite society, unlike the slouching monstrosity across from me.

He doesn’t bother with politeness. He just laughs through his nose and keeps stirring his tea. He’s been stirring since he sat down and the clink, clink, clink of the spoon against the china has my nerves on end. I can feel a warm, simmering feeling of irritation rising in my chest and heating my face. I breathe deeply, sipping my tea in an effort to keep my emotions at bay.

“Is there anything else you would like, then?” Why are you here, is what I’m asking, and what do I need to give you to get you to leave?

There’s a smirk on his face and he sets his teacup and saucer down on the low coffee table before him. I see that he has sloshed tea into the saucer, and can barely draw breath past my irritation.

“I understand you knew him,” he says.

The question catches me off guard and I practically cough, “I’m sorry?”

I’m not faking ignorance. I truly don’t understand what he means.

“It was easier than I thought to kill a man,” he says, as casually as one would remark on the possibility of rain or a recent trip to the grocery store for half-priced tomatoes. But those words on his chapped lips, in his coarse voice, are the only things he’s said which have suited him, in all the time he’s been here.

I do not say anything in response. I take another, nervous sip of my tea. He stares into the middle distance before him, stares back in time to when he—

“—wrapped a scarf around his throat and just pulled. It was done in moments, but I kept pulling – to make sure, you see. He deserved it, of course – terrible man. But you knew that, didn’t you? Yes, yes, that’s all old news to you. And how did you manage to get to know him?”

His voice is pointed, more here than it had been before, when he’d been answering nothing questions about tea. His eyes are still focused on the past as he gazes beyond me, and through my own stark realization – the flushing heat that crawls up my limbs in itching, burning trails – I recognize something like resolution in his faraway gaze. It’s the look of a man who understands his actions and would never feel the need to apologize for them.

I cannot speak. I am not sure what I would say if I could.

“Of course, it didn’t take long for me to figure it out,” he is saying. His voice echoes inside my skull, wraps itself around my head, fills my salon and my house and the whole of my world. It dances through the air and flirts with the wafting lace of my fine, white curtains, and I can see beams of gloriously gold afternoon light striking my honey-colored hardwood floors in the most luscious way. Everything is so much brighter, isn’t it?

My tongue is swelling.

“A moron like that?” He is still talking. I wish I could shut my eyes, because the brightness of the room around me has become too much to bear and I can feel them watering. And because his eyes have begun to focus on the present again. They lock on me – piercing blue, and so terrible. “I knew he had to be working for someone. Someone to give him orders, to tell him who to kill… How to kill them… How best to taunt the surviving family…”

I’ve dropped my teacup. I hope that it won’t stain.

“So, yes – easier than I thought, killing a man.”

I do not see where my cup has fallen. My vision has tunneled so that he is all I can see, a vignette of wrath and vengeance feigning calmness framed by the striped pattern of my antique rose wallpaper. He truly does not belong.

He smiles, and it’s a cruel smile. “I do think killing a woman has been even easier, though.”

He rises from the sofa as I fall back in my chair. My hands vainly clutch at my throat, as if I could draw the poison from myself with a light massage.

“She was mine,” says a voice, the voice of a brutish and ill-mannered man I can no longer see. The entire world is black splotched with bright white, and then there is his voice – his calm fury adds color. I can feel, in the most nebulous sense, a hand on my shoulder, a feigned mimicry of a comforting gesture. “You had no right to take her from me.”

There is a part of me that respects him for this. Poisoning me in my own house, with my own tea! Truly, no other human being would have the nerve.

I know he leaves, but I do not hear him.