Page 15 of Intoxicated
“I’m fine with money, Mother.” She has a hard time accepting the fact I have my own successful business. Really grinds her gears that it has nothing to do with our family. Oh, and I won’t tell her what it is I really do. Nobody with the last name of Benton knows, and I intend to keep it that way. All they know is that I run a “consulting firm” up in Seattle. My mother loses interest after that. My sister furrows her brows and demands to knowwhoandwhatI’m consulting. My father merely slaps me on the back and starts bragging about his friends. “Thought I’d drop by and make an appearance. You’re always badgering me to visit when I’m in town. Well, here I am. Will be here at least a week for work.”
“Oh, how benevolent of you to come see your old hag of a mother! The one whonagsyou to visit her when you’re in town for more than five days. So sorry we haven’t moved to Seattle. Not that I believe you’d come visit me there, either.”
Yes, Mother, it’s about you. Everything I say and do is an affront. We’re out to get you.
“Whatever. I’d much rather you come crawling back here because you feel some twisted obligation to the woman who had an episiotomy when she birthed you, and not because you’re announcing your marriage to some tawdry hooker who’s having your bastard baby.”
I yawn. Same shit, different day.
“I’m sorry. Am I boring you?” Mother flops back into her seat and motions for me to go inside. “Are you staying for lunch? Dinner? Be sure to let Opal know.” She picks up a magazine left open on the ground. After licking her fingers and flipping the glossy pages, she announces that she’s having some “me time.” That’s my cue to get out of her face before she loses her cool and I’m out a really nice hat.
I drag my ungrateful feet into the house where I grew up. My room is still mostly the same from my college days, although I elected to move into a campus apartment instead of commuting from here to Lewis & Clark College in Southwest Portland. Staying with guys I went to class with, threw footballs with, and attending parts with was way more important than keeping my family happy, let alone saving them the thousands of dollars it cost to room and board me across town. Do I regret it? Hell, no. I had two of my favorite girlfriends that were only possible because I lived on campus! Let me tell you, though, I had great fun sneaking them into my family’s house for Sunday night dinner. It was the only way to drive it into my mother’s head that I wasn’t gay – because, for some really weird reason, she told herself that was why I wanted to live with a bunch of guys. (The 24/7 booze and girls wasn’t it, huh?)
“Guess I’m staying for dinner,” I say to Opal, who is scrubbing down the counters in the house’s giant chef’s kitchen. She’s not much of a cook, but my mom enjoys Opal’s takes on Eastern European and Indian cuisines. Honestly, you get way better if you head east a ways and hit up the local neighborhood eateries, but whatever. My mom’s never gonna dothat.“Otherwise, her highness might have a conniption.” I don’t mention my father or sister, two people I rarely talk to if I can help it. My mother is enough drama. I don’t need my father’s golf stories or my sister haranguing me for not getting involved with the family business. She’s got more balls than me for it.
Opal flips her wet towel over before giving me a sly look “Only for dinner, Mr. Benton?”
I tell you, she doesn’t look a day over the thirty-seven she was when I made the grievous mistake of sleeping with the help. She has to be almost fifty by now. It’s rare for Opal to openly flirt with me, but I suppose with everyone but me out of the house, she feels freer to do so.
Not sure how I feel about that, honestly.
“Yes, and it’s only me. Afraid my girlfriend couldn’t make it tonight.”
Opal isn’t the only one I lie to about having a steady love life. My parents are convinced I’m dating some Seattle socialite or working class girl at any moment. (As you probably noticed, my mother isreallyconvinced I’m paying women to be my girlfriends. Which could not be further from the truth. While I may indulge in the occasional lap dance at the neighborhood strip club, I don’t have the patience for shopping for temporary girlfriends around here.) It’s better than them thinking I’m single, though. Otherwise, my mother would shove her best friends’ daughters in my face, and my father would join my mother in questioning my sexuality. I may be the youngest, but my parents have always been more concerned about my genetic longevity than my sister’s. It’s honestly gotten worse since she took up the mantle of heir and I’ve struck out on my own. Granted, everyone in my family knows I like to date around – and they’ve faced the ire of some of my marks – but I’m half convinced that I’ll wake up one day to a priest and a young, virginal bride hovering over me.
Telling Opal I have a girlfriend keeps her from flirting. She merely shrugs, makes note of my comments on the calendar she uses to keep track of family meals, and goes back to cleaning the kitchen. I don’t linger.
I don’t linger anywhere, really.
The house is a cocoon of memories, every single one wrapped in a fragile shell that could tear at any moment. The gardens are so expansive and immaculate that it feels like a waste to have all this space and no one around to enjoy it. Photographs and paintings on the walls remind me of people I don’t like. Extended family who are more concerned with money and status and the soil they tread upon. Animals that are only worth what prestige they bring to the family – pets are not permitted unless they’re prized racehorses or show dogs and cats. My father fancied himself a falconer when he had a platonic affair with eccentric, adventuring billionaire Mr. Bradley. (That didn’t last long. My father wasn’t willing to pack up and hike up Kilimanjaro whenever Bradley felt like it.) You can still see a few remnants of my family’s meddling with animals all over the property.
Everything is disposable to them. I suppose I probably am as well.
That’s the conclusion I always come to whenever I stroll the property and reflect upon my life. To the sounds of my mother summoning Opal for something or other, I sit beneath a tree and attempt to inhale the sweet spring air. June is around the corner. In a perfect world, Iwouldbe out there picking up chicks and showing them the summer of their lives.
Instead, I’m professionally breaking hearts. Because why not.
It’s a winding path that led me to this point in my life. On one hand, I’m proud of myself for starting my own business with little input from my family. On the other, I’m now in my thirties and spending my time hunting down women like Cher Lieberman and trying to get them to fall in love with me – all so I can hurt them where it matters most.
Why? What has she done to me? I can read reports about her sucking the money and vitality of half the rich men around her, but come on, I know these men. Some of them deserve a little shakeup. They’re so complacent with their young girlfriends that they take as much advantage of them as those young ladies do of them. The symbiotic – perhaps parasitic – nature of dating while rich is like that. You never know what women want from you. Men, too, I guess.
I bump my head against the tree and close my eyes. I focus on only one thing, and that’s clearing my head.
Unfortunately, the more I try to empty my head of outside thoughts, the more it’s invaded with the sly smile of the woman I’m supposed to be destroying with my wallet, words, and cock.
Somewhere in the distance of my broken head is the curdling laughter of Cher Lieberman, the frisky beauty who prophetically bats her eyelashes and draws her finger across her lips. Everything she hurls at me is meant to seduce me, deflect from her shortcomings, and make me give her everything she wants.
I get it, honestly. I get why so many men throw themselves at her the moment she crosses their paths. She probably fell into her role as naturally as she grew into her unforgiving figure and learned to flirt from an early age. She’s as effortless as a black widow slinking across her web and going for her life-sustaining kill. She’s never had to know anything else. I may be on to her – hell, so many of her exes probably saw the warning signs early on and chose to ignore them – but that doesn’t stop her from putting a hand on my shoulder and whispering promises of everything I could ever want into my ear.
If you took away the belittling nature and ill-intentions, you would still have a knock-out, gorgeous woman who carefully wields her powers like a sorceress viewing the world from the tip top of her tower. Some women are like that, you know. They’re unfathomably beautiful without trying. Angelic beings blessed by good genes. They’re hit on by pervs from an early age and either get so knocked down by the system or they prevail enough to become the next queen bee of the social sphere.
Cher Lieberman could have any man she wants. She’shadany man she wants. She’s found them all so wanting that she’s made a life out of breaking hearts and getting paid.
I suppose we’re not so different. That may be why I find her so fascinating – while acknowledging the danger lurking within her calculating eyes.
You know, if I can look away from her cleavage for two seconds. That’s the hard part.
Okay.
Not the only hard part.
Youknow what I mean!
