Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms - Charles Austen [22]
Morgan dejectedly got into his little, beat-up Toyota, I got into my recently detailed BMW, and we drove off in very opposite directions.
I pulled my car onto Vale Place and passed through the gates at number 1. The familiar feel of gravel crunching under my wheels as I approached the oaken entry doors told me I was home. Safe. Warm. Grandfatherless. I could hump all the water bottles I wanted to here and no one would complain. Except perhaps the Sparkletts man, but he could be paid for his silence.
I live in a very exclusive neighborhood known as Epsoms Roads in a house with more rooms than cells in my body. It often amuses me to think that I could be thoroughly dismembered, every piece of me hidden in a different room, a separate part of the house, and it would take specialized CSI people years to find them all and put me back together again.
Yes, I have a dark side. Who doesn’t?
As I stood in my foyer surrounded by all the opulence; lavish furnishings, very expensive first issues of exceedingly rare comics, and original art lining the walls at regular intervals, I, once again felt eternally grateful to whatever fluke of genetics had made me very rich.
And, as you might imagine, I wanted to stay rich. I would go to the comics convention. Something completely asexual and uninteresting. Let someone else examine Ms. Nuckeby and her nonclothing. My odds were far better never seeing her again and hoping they hired someone who would have less luck with controlling his urges than I’d had. Having seen Ms. Nuckeby, I knew that to be damn near impossible for anyone; anyone interested in women that is. And his foregone failings would forever cement my position as voyeur du jour at Wopplesdown Struts, purveyors of fine briefs. But…what if they hired a gay man? Or—God forbid—a straight woman? Promoted Agrapanthila? Moved Mervin over from men’s underwear? Ms. Nuckeby wouldn’t have near the same effect on them that she had on me.
Damn. I needed a drink. And those Frezee-Pacs I’d bought. “Woodruff?” I called.
Woodruff is my butler. His job is to wait on my every need, and he does so reasonably well, mostly because I have very few needs. He’s a little long in years and not the best manservant around. In fact, if it were anyone but me employing him, he’d likely be dead in a ditch by now at their hand.
“WOODRUFF?”
Nothing. He might be sleeping in a corner somewhere. He had a habit of doing that—stopping and dropping off—sometimes in the middle of a sentence.
“Mister Wopplesdown, your bath is—zzzzzzzzzzz…”
One got used to it.
I opened my evening paper hoping to forget my woes by focusing on someone else’s and tossed my coat onto a nearby divan from the eighteenth century, but which held a discarded coat as well as anything made in the seventeenth century—damn those snooty, seventeenth-century people.
I noticed in the headlines that there was something of worldaltering political significance going on in some other part of the globe and promptly skipped past it to the sports and comics sections. Those annoying political things take up a vast amount of valuable newspaper space that would be better left to athletics, funnies, and crossword puzzles if you ask me.
I was still trying to figure out the latest Opus cartoon, and confused as to why I never found it funny, when Woodruff wandered in carrying my evening drink with the shirttail of his tuxedo hanging out. As I took the offered libation, I found myself wondering if he had enjoyed his own adventure with a water bottle today as well. I folded away Opus and made a mental note to set it on fire later (something not to be filed under ‘Things To Promptly Forget’).
“Woodruff? How are you this evening?”
“Still breathing, sir.”
“Glad to hear it. Listen. I’m going out of town tomorrow and staying through the weekend at least. Could I trouble you to pack me a bag, please?”
There was a momentary pause as Woodruff stared at me blankly.
“You could trouble me,” he said hopefully.
“Yes,” I said more pointedly.