A curious couple with a devious lifestyle...
The sun stained Magda’s skin to warm walnut, the color of her unplaceable accent. Her big green eyes are outlined in inky black and her cheeks are ruddled in slapdash strokes. The wiriness of Magda's mane gives it great volume—her face disappears entirely when she stands in profile. Habit tilts her head forward (tipped slightly, coyly, like a nymph or a geisha or some other giggly, secretive thing). But, like her mess of misshapen hair, Magda’s strut is all banshee; she walks as if a kick drum plays her every step.
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“How do I look?” Magda raises her arms (as if crucifixion looms), then she does a twirl (as if crucifixion delights). Her dress is black, except for the waist: a Chinese dragon scaled in silver studs.
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“Very chic, you are a temptress.” Gregor offers these things with mounds of sincerity, and a pinch of duty. The duty sounds like automation, like an ATM spitting out cash. Magda likes cash well enough to ignore the grinding of the machine.
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“Did you see my shoes?” a foot kicks forward, as much as her knitted dress’s narrow skirt will allow. Magda isn’t usually a woman to giddy over shoes but tonight she knows—the better she looks, the better she eats.
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Gregor steps behind, then serpentines long, velvet-blazered arms around her dragon waist. Magda is protestless to the velvety embrace so Gregor pushes the front of his pinstriped slacks against the back of her cashmere dress.
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“Should we eat something, before we go?” She removes his hands in the manner of a teacher correcting a misguided student.
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“Whatever you want, Darling.” He steps back, thinking whatever the casually rejected think.
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“We shouldn’t then, I don’t want to spoil my appetite.”
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“As if anything could.”
After a short ride, a car stops in a graveled lot where fifty cars have already stopped. Gregor exits first, as is their custom. He’ll open her door and, in lieu of a tip, she’ll say ‘Thank you, Sir.’ Gregor is an elegant man—dapper and well tailored, in another life he might have had a career playing vampires in B movies—but when accompanying Magda he is easily mistaken for a chauffeur.
The couple is recognized by a doorman and hurried inside, they walk into the chop of light and sound. Magda’s internal kick-drum syncs-up with the room’s, her big eyes scan the crowd from behind a wobble of black hair (an octopus peering from behind its blast of ink). Gregor's talking to a topless woman but Magda ignores their conversation, she’s fixated on the college couple in the next room. She churns the air with her torso and watches what she sees.
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Professionally, Magda dabbles in psychiatry, and in forgery; Gregor, in the preservation of antiquities. Privately, she and he have an impenetrable penetralia, they’ve been coupled for a very long time but perhaps not as husband and wife. They may have a child together, maybe not. There was a maid but they say she returned to Japan. A pet dog fled their house, or has injury kept him away? Whatever the truth, something is crying on the third floor. In Hungry Woman a curious couple with a devious lifestyle make a single decision that has many macabre chapters of unforeseen consequences. It’s a beautifully beastly eighteen-year study in loyalty, tensility, and personal demons.