A Night at the Opera

Eve broadens her cultural horizons, and in the process gets an introduction to corporate ethics and mission statements…

********

Eve’s been a bad, bad girl…

“I do NOT…”
“Oh, really? “ My husband shot me a reproving sidelong glance, one eye still fixed on the road ahead of us. “Well, how about that time last month at Rog and Janelle’s, when you offered to share with the rest of us how wonderful you thought it was that the President had been given the opportunity to tap into his true gifts? How you expected to see him in his old Philips Andover Academy cheerleader sweater and megaphone the next time he addressed Congress, doing a locomotive…’Gimme an ‘E’, gimme a ‘V’, gimme an ‘I’, gimme an…’L’…?”
“Well, Janelle thought it was funny…” I pouted, somewhat defensively.
“Or, oh yeah, or the time you told Gerald Beidecker how you couldn’t understand how a country that had produced Nietzsche and Richard Wagner could possibly have lost two world wars…that was a classic…”
“But all I said was that they probably had been distracted by those lovely uniforms, and trying to learn to march in that quaint way of theirs, as if they had a Tootsie Roll stuck up their collective a…”
“EeeeeevvvvvvvvviiiieeeeEEEEEE…”
I bit back the angry retort rising in my throat and glued my best Southern Belle simper on my puss, smiling sweetly instead.
“Wah of caw-uss, Sugah, Ah’ll jes’ be as nice as nice can be, y’all heah? Ah’ll jes’ set in the kitchen with th’ othah ladies, an we can all hook rugs, dahlin’, oh shell peas, oh somethin’…”
Gary took his eyes from the road for a moment, fixing me with his most disapproving frown. “Eve, I’m serious…you behave yourself like a grown up and a mother of two, for once in your life.” 
He softened his tone and expression a bit. “Please, honey.”
“I hate these things,” I muttered defensively. “‘Opera appreciation for the unwashed masses.’ I always feel like a ten-year old who’s being punished by being sent to her room, and forced to listen to The Ring of the Niebelungen until she promises to behave.” I slumped deeper into my seat, folding my arms sulkily across my bosom.
“And no cracks about Germans, baby, or Germany, please. Full partnership offers are being put together next month by the management committee, and tweaking the senior managing partner’s nose, no matter how good-natured and well-intended, is just not a good career move for me right now.”
“Yes, dear,” I replied in a suitably chastened tone, fuming inwardly - at myself, mostly. For having agreed to come at all to yet another of these interminably dull affairs; for having worn this itchy, hot wool blend dress on such a warm spring evening; for not having had sense enough to have something to eat with the children earlier. Alcohol and an empty stomach often make for fireworks with me in social situations. Throw in some opera, particularly Herr Wagner and, well...
Oh yes - and for not having stuffed a pair of panties into my purse before we left.
I’m becoming a zombie, I marveled to myself. With a cyber-bokor, directing my possessed body’s every crazed movement. This is ridiculous, I chided myself yet again. A woman I don’t even KNOW is sending me to social engagements without any underwear! What on EARTH is happening to me? Even as I thought this, I shifted my legs slightly; luxuriating again in the strangeness, the newness of the feeling, as my bare rear moved against the faintly prickly material of my dress.
Stop this!  I told myself firmly.
I fixed a saccharine smile on my face as we pulled into the semi-circular drive in front of the huge neo-Georgian home, ablaze with lights and silhouetted quite dramatically against the purpling twilit sky. I wriggled my derrière again, and the rigid rictus on my lips relaxed, just the tiniest bit…
Mistress, I breathed to myself, like the invocation of a spell…

                                                  ***************

“I think that making it with Gerald Beidecker might be a bit like getting it on with a frozen banana, don’t you?”
I nearly choked to death on a sip of my second martini, while Janelle surveyed the room as placidly as if she had just commented on the color of her hostess’s new drapes. 
“Really,” she continued. “Do you suppose that he sleeps in a bed at night? I think that maybe his wife just hangs him up in the closet, with his fifteen-hundred dollar suits and his seventy-five dollar shirts.”
I suppressed the childish giggle burbling up within me, and pressed the chilled rim of the martini glass against my lips again to keep from laughing out loud. Only eight-thirty, and on my second already. Not a very auspicious beginning if I intended on keeping my solemn promise to my husband to stop at two. I took another ladylike slurp.
“Oh, I imagine that Frau Beidecker keeps the sheets well enough starched to accommodate even the Herr Direktor’s nocturnal proclivities,” I mumbled around the olive in my glass. “Whatever they might be.” Speaking of starch made me acutely aware of the maddening tickle of the wool against my bare bum for no good reason. I shifted uncomfortably, plucking at the seam of my dress.
Janelle lifted an eyebrow in my direction, an amused look on her face as I squirmed against the brocaded divan. 
“Uncomfortable, dear?” she inquired solicitously. 
I looked at her shamefacedly, feeling the color rising in my neck. Her eyes widened slightly, dancing with merriment.
“You’re kidding,” she said in a stage whisper. “Again?!?”
I nodded my head brusquely, looking about the room, tugging self-consciously at the hem of my dress. Janelle’s distinctive peal of delighted laughter rang throughout the huge parlor, while I searched the divan for a crevice that I might be able to slip into. Several heads turned curiously in our direction, and I pretended to be busily employed trying to discern my future in the bottom of my martini glass.
“SSSHHHHHSSsssshh!!!” I shooshed her fiercely.
“Darling, what ever is going to become of my Hanes stock if you persist in this trend-setting new fashion statement of yours?” she ran her eyes slyly over the woolen blend material covering my legs. 
I pulled self-consciously again at my hem, suddenly feeling as if it were riding up around my throat. I wondered if it might be possible for me to hide in the downstairs powder room for the rest of the evening.
“What on earth are you up to, Eve? I really am so interested to know…”
“Nevermind, Janelle,” I hissed, fluttering my hand at her in an attempt to dismiss the subject.” I’ll tell you all about it sometime, maybe. Let’s just say I was in a...a hurry, dressing this evening, and leave it at that…”  
Rising abruptly (but carefully), I excused myself and headed for the bar at the far end of the dining room. The two-drink limit for Eve was pretty obviously out the window this evening already …The only question apparently remaining to be answered was whether I would leave the party under my own steam, or be carried out.
After all, I had always depended on the kindness of strangers.

             ************

Eve Powders Her Nose…

“I hate these things,” I mumbled sotto voce to the already slightly intoxicated young matron in the mirror. She, at least, had the good grace not to answer, and instead ran her pinky finger expertly along the line of her upper lip, eradicating the small smear of gloss that had been displaced sometime earlier in the evening during the course of my third martini. 
“Sorry, dear,” I apologized to her, and began scrabbling through my clutch for a comb.
I abandoned the search as this same woman caught my eye again. This time her reflection was eyeing me condescendingly from the full-length mirror on the powder room door to my right. Looking for all the world like a subject at some cheesy Hollywood hypnotist’s show, I reached for the hem of my dress. I slid it up to my hips, and then past them to my waist, mesmerized by the spectacle of the exhibitionistic woman in the mirror flashing me. I stared, mouth hanging open just slightly, at the dark triangle of hair framed by turquoise garters and stocking tops. I looked so different like this. Felt so different. I slipped a hesitant finger into the curls, twirling a bit of hair around it. I felt myself twitch slightly down there, like a child waking from a restless dream.
STOP it!!  I screamed silently at the jade in the glass. 
Had she winked back at me?
Nine-thirty. With any luck I could plead the sitter’s exorbitant overtime charges, and get us out of here by eleven. An hour and a half.  Ninety minutes.
I’ll never make it.
My hand slowly descended to my groin again, and I slid my index finger tentatively down over the fatty tissue, closing my eyes and stroking softly, insistently at my entrance…
The doorknob rattled softly, and I dropped my skirt with a little start just as an elegantly dressed woman stepped through the doorway.
“Oh! I beg your pardon! I am sorry!” she said, acting anything but. “I should have knocked – my mind was a million miles away. Please forgive me…”
I waved her apology off with a little motion of my hand, smiling inanely. “Oh, don’t be silly, no harm done,” I said, smoothing my dress across my thighs uneasily. “I was daydreaming myself; and I have probably been in here forever, anyway…” I laughed, a nervous, school-girlish titter.
She returned my strained smile warmly. “Please let me introduce myself, I don’t believe we have met…I am Gundl Beidecker…” she offered me the most exquisitely manicured hand I had ever touched. I took it in my own grubby paw, grimacing at the contrast to my gnawed, stubby nails, and just slightly dishwater-reddened knuckles.
“And you are…?” She asked, a perfectly penciled eyebrow arched inquiringly.
“Eve”, I managed to stammer at last. “Eve Burkhardt. So nice to meet you finally, Mrs. Beidecker, my…my husband has spoken so often of your husband to me and…” 
She silenced me with a rather severe look and a little shake of her head, a finger to her lips. That mysterious little smile never left them as she leaned back against the powder room door, closing it. I heard the faint click of the lock being turned on it and looked at her curiously, somewhat puzzled, but with my clown’s smile still fixed firmly in place.
Gundl Beidecker was, I knew, at least twenty years older than I, but short of seeing her birth certificate no one would ever have believed it. Her smooth, unlined complexion glowed with the rosy strawberries-and-cream luminescence of good health, undoubtedly enhanced by expensive peelings at a top-drawer Brentwood dermatologist’s, unless I very much missed my guess. Her ash-blonde hair was pulled back into a tight chignon, with a single streak of pure platinum through it at her hairline on the left, creating a sort of stunning white-on-white effect. She wore her smoke-gray patterned silk sheath with the casual grace and elegance of a seven-figure runway model, and her legs gave witness to the fact that she very possibly may have been one at some point in her life.
As she continued to stare at me, that odd smile never leaving her lips, her eyes never leaving mine, I began to feel as I imagined those oysters must have felt on their seaside picnic with the Walrus and his friend the Carpenter. I found myself wondering just how quickly I had gotten my dress down, and exactly how much Mrs. Gerald Beidecker had seen of her husband’s junior partner’s wife’s assets.
“Well, I guess I’ll just get out of your way here, and be getting back…” I began, taking a hesitant step towards her – and the locked door.
“Nonsense, darling,” she cut me off, placing one of those expensively manicured mitts on my chest and pushing me gently, but firmly, backwards until my rump pressed against the cool marble Pullman top. “I have heard a great deal about your husband, as well…and I always make it a special point to get to know the wives of the more promising young men in my husband’s firm more… intimately…” 
She paused, running her cool green eyes over the front of my dress now; I suddenly had the disconcerting feeling that I was dressed in my sheerest nightie, rather than my woolen A-line.
“Especially when they are as attractive as you are, my dear…” 
I felt as if one of those martini glasses was lodged in my throat. Suddenly I was as sober as a priest. 
More sober.
“Uhhmmm…Mrs. Beidecker…I ahhh…I think perhaps I ought not to…” my words caught on that martini glass wedged in my gullet as I felt her nails brush against my nylon-covered thigh, just above my knee. I gave a sharp little intake of breath, staring with incredulity into her dancing emerald eyes.
“Oh, but I think you should, Eve,” she breathed again. “In fact, I insist upon it, darling.” 
She slipped her hand under the hem of my dress, and began gliding it up my stocking. I released that little breath I had just taken with a panicky squeak, as her nails cleared the top of my stocking and slipped beneath the suspender of my garter, continuing inexorably upward. Even I could guess where this might be leading now. My pussy was radiating heat like a small kiln.
Miss Manners never covered THIS, I thought to myself distractedly.
Gundl Beidecker pressed against my abdomen gently but resolutely with her free hand, urging my buttocks up onto the countertop as she slid her other hand home between my thighs, encountering my unencumbered bush. She looked into my eyes, her own dancing merrily.
“My dear, you seem to have misplaced something, I think, haven’t you?” She slid her nails maddeningly across the thatch of my pubes, dragging them teasingly down into the rapidly humidifying environs of my entrance. 
I gave an involuntary little shudder, and squeezed my thighs against her hand. “Please, don’t,” I murmured unconvincingly, my eyes crossing just a little. Her sudden, stinging slap across my cheek helped adjust them for me for the moment.
“I think I’d like you a little more focused, Eve darling…”
She leaned in closely to me, holding my eyes locked in her own relentless green gaze. Never taking them from mine, she deliberately unwound the gray silk belt of her expensive frock, and wrapped it around my limp left wrist. Crossing my right over it, she finished tying them together, then hooked her index finger in the silken restraint and raised my arms above my head, slipping my bound wrists over a gilded hook appended to the ornate light fixture above the sink. I leaned back against the mirror, feeling its coolness against my bare shoulders, and the faucet digging annoyingly into my left buttock. My face was flushed with hectic color, and I was breathing much more rapidly than I should have been for a girl who had simply gone to take a pee and powder her nose.
“I knew you were a whore, the moment I laid eyes on you, darling,” she breathed into my ear, dipping her hand beneath my skirt again. “I am not at all surprised to find you in this state, really. I thought I could smell you earlier, from across the room…it made you very easy to track…” She trailed the tips of her fingers along the bias of my already quite slippery crease.
“Uuhhnngghhnn…” was the only contribution I felt myself competent to add to this conversation just at the moment. I rolled my head back and turned my hot cheek onto my bare left arm, my mouth dropping open slightly. I could smell myself now, my own excitement exuding from my pores like an exotic perfume, filling the miniscule space between us with unspoken questions, and inexpressible longing.
“Slut,” she hissed into my ear, slipping her middle finger up into me like an exclamation point. “Trollop!” she added for good measure, as her index finger joined it, skating over the warm slickness of my welcoming interior. 
Trollop, I thought dazedly to myself, my lining beginning to swell and pulse in a most hospitable fashion already. I hadn’t come across THAT word since I read Defoe in college…
Bending forward, Mrs.Gerald Beidecker placed her mouth high up on my naked inner thigh as she scrabbled with her free hand at my dress, working it past my buttocks and up around my navel. She gnawed and nibbled her way infuriatingly up my leg, all the while getting better acquainted with the lay of my sexual landscape with her other hand. Against my better judgment, which seemed to have slipped out for another martini somewhere along the way, I began to move my hips in gentle unison with the rhythmic bites she was taking out of my thigh, moving them appreciatively to her expert manipulation of my genitals with her clever fingers.
I shuddered again, and gave a very audible moan as accompaniment. She looked at me severely, shaking her head.
“This will never do. Normally, I enjoy the commentary of my playthings, but in these circumstances I think it might be best if you were to remain a bit quieter, don’t you? Now let me see…” she looked about the room quickly. “Since you so thoughtlessly neglected to bring your own, I suppose I shall have to lend you the use of mine.” 
Sliding her own dress up, she reached beneath the lustrous smoke-gray silk of the frock, and started working her panties down those remarkable legs with her right hand, all the while still playing me like a virtuoso violinist with her left. She stepped out of them and wadded the scrap of pale-lavender colored silk tightly in her fist. Without further ceremony she thrust the warm silk between my slack jaws, filling my nostrils with her fragrance, and my mouth with her sharp, slightly musky tang. I gagged a bit, reflexively, as I chewed down on her undergarment. Her eyes never left mine as she worked the knot loose on the pale mauve hand painted silk scarf around her throat. Sliding it free from her neck, she fluttered it briefly before my glazing eyes. I had a quick glimpse of a lovely Imperial Dragon (seven claws, naturally) painted on the Chinese silk before she slipped it over the balled-up undergarment in my mouth and wound it around my head, knotting it in my hair at the back of my neck.
“Better, much better,” she smiled, brushing a stray strand or two of my hair from my rapidly dampening forehead. “Now, let’s see just how randy a little bitch you really are.” Her perfectly lined lips twisted into a half-smile, half-snarl as she sent a third finger reconnoitering up inside me. I jerked, and my own fingers clutched at the gilded hook above me convulsively, my breath coming in short snorting gasps through my nose. I felt that soft, telltale tingling beginning somewhere in the vicinity of my navel, and beneath her talented fingers. I groaned again, in a somewhat more ugent, if muted, fashion.
“Yes…you…are…a …hot…little…number…” she breathed, working me with a will now, punctuating each whispered word with a thrust as she drove her fingers relentlessly into me. She scraped her nails maddeningly along the roughened little ridge of tissue on the backstroke, that sweet spot that I had only just recently discovered, and begun to explore for myself. My buttocks began to lift to her stroking, and slap back on the marble countertop with a soft, fleshy smaaack-ing sound. I rolled my head, eyes closed, a creature existing entirely now within the universe that this strange woman’s knowledgeable hand was creating for me. I gnawed at the silk filling my mouth avidly, mindlessly.

“Ggghhnghgghhhrrrr…” I opined pointlessly.
Suddenly, the fingers were withdrawn, leaving me feeling emptied, abandoned. I gave a little sob into my gag, clawing at the hook with my nails, bouncing lightly up and down on the hard marble surface of the Pullman. I looked down beseechingly at her; she simply smiled and, running her nails rather roughly along the insides of my thighs, plunged her head at the nexus of my body. I grunted in surprised pleasure as her tongue found the groove that had so recently been vacated by her hand.
The next several minutes – or were they hours? – were a blur of sensation for me such as I had never experienced in my life. Gundl Beidecker dug her perfectly buffed and polished nails deeply into the too-soft flesh of my buttocks, gouging at me, pulling my groin into her demanding mouth as if it were a ripe peach, and she a woman dying of thirst. She tongued my dripping slit enthusiastically, lapping and sucking at my vulva and my clitoris, stabbing her tongue up into me. I vibrated madly, from tip to toe, scrabbling desperately at the silken bindings holding my arms above my head, as though afraid that I might take flight at any moment. My heels drummed a crescendo against the cabinetry; one of my heels fell off as she took me with her tongue, and seemed almost to lift me from the counter upon it. 
My orgasm was unremarkable, By that I mean, of course, that I do not remember it in any great detail, and therefore cannot comment on it intelligently – although I was probably conscious at the time. Or most of the time, anyway.
My first completely conscious awareness was of being collapsed back across the countertop, my shoulders against the now-fogged glass of the mirror, my face flushed and sweaty. I was panting as though I had just done Odette’s death solo in Swan Lake, and my legs were trembling uncontrollably. 
Gundl Beidecker stood to one side, delicately and deftly touching up her lip gloss in the mirror. She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye as she finished, smiling more to herself than to me. 
“Better, darling?” She inquired. 
She reached up almost as an afterthought and loosened the knot in the gray silk belt holding my wrists to the light fixture; then turned her attention back to her makeup, leaving me to remove the scarf and spit out her by now nearly unidentifiable thirty-dollar silk underoos.
“You know, Eve, I believe your husband has a wonderful future before him in this firm.” She laughed softly, giving a last playful pinch to my bare right thigh. “A very bright future indeed.” 
She hooked a finger in her panties, now thoroughly soaked and nearly chewed through, and held them up, inspecting them critically. She shook her head in amusement and dropped the damp scrap of silk on the counter top. “Looks as though we’ll have something else in common for the rest of the evening, hmmm?” With a smile, and a conspiratorial wink, she flipped the lock on the door, and disappeared through it like a wisp of gray, silken smoke.
I sat there, too stunned to move. Only the sound of voices approaching from somewhere down the hallway finally got my rubbery legs working beneath me. I dove at the door, slamming it to and locking it in one swift motion. I leaned my back against it for a moment, panting, trying to gather my scattered wits; then I turned toward the sink and ran cold water, splashing it on my beet-red face. I hiked my rumpled woolen skirt up around my waist again, and splashed water on my pussy as well, then snatched a linen towel and dried myself hurriedly.
“Hey, hurry it up in there!” a male voice boomed from the other side of the door. “The champagne is backing up out here!”  A little titter of appreciative feminine laughter greeted this bon mot, encouraging the owner to laugh in turn at his own witticism.
“Just a seee-eec,” I sang out as casually as I could, running a comb frantically through my tangled black hair, finally deciding that the results would have to do. At the last instant, I glimpsed a pale lavender glimmer on the white marble Pullman – Gundl Beidecker’s panties. Snatching them up, I stuffed them into my bag along with the comb. I turned the latch on the door, plastered a witless cocktail waitress’s smile on my face, and breezed out and past the impatient prospective patrons, fluttering my fingers at them as I nearly tripped over myself in my haste to flee the scene of the crime, still tugging at the seams of my dress.

The Fat Lady Sings …

“Where in God’s name have you been?” 
Janelle pressed a flute filled with champagne into my noticeably shaky hand. “Gary’s been looking for you everywhere, Evie. He thought you might have gone home, or drowned in the punch bowl, or something…”
I flapped my hand erratically at her, trying to deflect her inquiries as I emptied the champagne flute in three thirsty gulps. I held it out to her, waggling it in silent plea for a refill. Janelle took the glass from my hand, shaking her head in amusement. 
“Sure, lady, anything you want, only…” she smiled knowingly at me again. “I sure would like to know where you and Gundl Beidecker have been for the last twenty minutes or so.” With a last quizzical shake of her head, Janelle headed for the bar, and refills for us both.
As I waited for Janelle to return, my eyes roamed anxiously about the room, looking for my husband. I spotted him at last, over near the fireplace, laughing and sharing brandy snifters and a joke with Gerald Beidecker. I caught his eye as Janelle returned, and gestured with my freshly filled glass in his direction. He lifted his snifter, as did Gerald Beidecker, smiling in our direction. 
With an exhausted sigh, I collapsed in a wilted heap on the small love seat behind us. Janelle, after giving me another bemused little going over with her eyes, slipped into the seat next to me, laying her hand in a maternal way on my arm. I took another long sip of the wine, wondering if my scent was as clear to Janelle as it was to me.
My eyes wandered across the parlor to where Gundl Beidecker stood, engaged in animated conversation, not a hair out of place. To look at her, you’d never have known that only fifteen minutes earlier she had had some drab little hausfrau balanced on that  gifted tongue in the powder room of this lovely home. 
Not, that is, unless you could somehow manage to sneak a peek beneath that fifteen hundred dollar Carmen Marc Valvo frock, at the place where her panties, now cozily ensconced in my purse, should have been.
As the first liltingly voiced tones of the clarinet introduction to Mozart’s Voi che Sapete from The Marriage of Figaro floated out of the surround-sound speaker system, I closed my eyes and settled back into the cushions, a blissed-out little smile wreathing my face.
It could have been worse.
It could have been Wagner...

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