by Chuck Austen
She paused, looked off into the distant past and shuddered a bit at the memory.
“And even then,” she said, a sad, faraway look in her eyes, “they still served the cheese.” After a brief moment of melancholy she sighed, her annoyance with me returned, and she glared at me once more. “So learn to control it. Especially around father. You know he has a heart condition, and he doesn’t much like you as it is.”
“He doesn’t?”
“You know he doesn’t.”
“No, I really had no idea.”
“I figured you must have known by now.”
“First I’m hearing of it.”
“Why do you think he has your picture on his dartboard?”
“He has my picture…?”
“He invites all his friends to throw at it.”
“All his friends?”
“Your grandfather enjoys it especially.”
“My grandfather.”
“It’s improved his game immensely.”
“My grandfather’s game?”
“No, my father’s. Although your grandfather really does rise to the occasion.”
“I imagine he would.”
“No one’s ever told you?”
“That your father despises me and likes to throw sharp objects at my face? No. Somehow that’s never been mentioned.”
“It’s kind of an obsession with him actually. He mutters to himself about you while doing it.”
“Charming. So, how does he feel about our engagement?”
“He’s fine with it.
“You haven’t told him.”
“Of course, not.”
“Do you plan to?”
“Eventually.”
“While he’s walking you down the aisle? After we’re married? When the grandchildren are born?”
“Eeeewww!”
“Eeewww? Grandchildren are Eeeew?”
“Of course! Aren’t they to you?”
“Not really.”
“Well, you’re just not thinking it through. And father hates the thought of them as well. Though he expects an heir.”
“Which will be difficult to provide without procreating.”
“Don’t be gross!”
“So, for ‘dear old Dad’, then, what would be the upside of us getting married?”
She paused, thinking hard.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “But I’m sure there is one. He’ll understand. You’re the least irritating person who’s proposed to me so far.”
“I feel so special.”
“I said ‘yes’, didn’t I?”
I avoided reminding her that I had never actually asked.
“So—those things you do to annoy him,” she said. “You’re not doing them on purpose?”
“What things?”
She stared at me blankly for a moment, her eyes wide with surprise.
“Wow,” she said. “Apparently not. How extraordinary.”
She paused and studied my face, obviously shocked that whatever strange, irritating things I did as a matter of course weren’t planned simply to drive her father insane, and were, possibly, in some way, just my natural state of being. The thought made her shudder.
“Well, suffice it to say,” she continued, “if you had one of your— you know—swelling episodes—in front of him, it would not go over well. He might actually use that gun he’s always threatening to shoot down your pants.”
“He threatens to shoot a gun…” I choked off the rest. Darts were one thing. But guns?
“One can hardly blame him, the way you are sometimes. So you don’t want to provoke him further by letting yourself get…em…erections in front of him. I mean, my goodness, Corky. You have to be the one to show some self-control. It’s not as if I can have these removed!”
Well, actually…
“So get hold of yourself!” she said. After a beat, she realized the double entendre and blanched a bit. “In a manner of speaking.” She glanced over at the car steaming in the ditch. “I mean, imagine if something like that happened every time you had a dirty thought about me. We’d be ostracized from society.”
“What society?”
“Decent society,” she snarled. “Are you correcting me, again?” she asked, the natural anger in her returning and rising to its traditional resting place.
“No,” I said. “Not at all.”
She glared at me as if looking for the lie to seep through my pores and announce its very presence in song. After likely deciding I was too weak-willed to truly display any kind of controlling behavior, she turned away from me and headed back to the car.
Then she abruptly stopped.
“You’re not a gold-digger,” she said without looking at me.
“What?”
“That’s the upside for father in you marrying me.”
She turned to me and smiled; apparently pleased to have found at least one reason for her father to despise me one or more dart throws less. “You’re not after his money.”
Suddenly it struck me that the best possible reason for marrying Mindie was her membership in our exclusive club. Rich people really couldn’t marry anyone who didn’t already have their own fortune. Look what happened when John Seward Johnson, eldest son of one of the three founding brothers of Johnson and Johnson, married the upstairs maid. Scandal, dueling lawyers, and half the money gone. And for rich people, there was nothing more humiliating—or unavoidable—than scandal, dueling lawyers, and the loss of money. Sex on cheese platters was one thing, but actual marriage? Even a loveless union came much farther down the list of bad things that could happen to you, somewhere just above severe blood loss, beheading, and dismemberment. Any sane, wealthy person who married a maid, even one with a bachelor’s degree, and then had the insensitivity to die before she did, would have to expect horrific anger, contested wills, and family infighting to be the obvious outcome—even Mister Johnson himself. So why did he marry her?
Go find a picture of her on the Internet. I’ll wait.
Come on! You don’t even have to look! He married her because she looked great in a swimsuit! And based on the swimsuits she wore, clearly out of one as well.
Now, it is conceivable that Mindie herself might look somewhat fetching in fashionable swimwear, if you discounted her refusal to be seen in the sun, her aversion to the two-piece, and her permanent Pillsbury Dough Boy complexion that is.
Ms. Nuckeby, on the other hand, would undoubtedly look amazing in a swimsuit. If she ever wore one, which I was beginning to doubt. And that only lent credence to the idea that she was in it for the money. She was hot!
And yet, some nagging niggling little something was still trying desperately to tell me I was wrong. Not that Ms. Nuckeby wasn’t hot, but that she was truly loveable, and more genuinely interested in me than Mindie ever could be. It was an insistent thought that kept scratching away at the back of my mind like an irritating little Chihuahua that wants to be let in, even though nobody’s home.
It must be my libido. You can’t trust the libido, you know. On some level, the libido wants to be poor so that it never has to wear clothes.
As I turned to follow Mindie, I looked at her very full and exceedingly well rounded behind and tried to picture it naked. But the image wouldn’t come, even though it was barely covered in thin, matronly underwear, and already fairly well exposed. Probably because all I could think of was Ms. Nuckeby’s entire nude body from all sides—touching me—rubbing against me…
Gloop.
DAMN YOU, LIBIDO!
As if she had a sense for it, Mindie turned around, right on cue, and caught the rising of my tides.
“Dammit, Corky, stop that!”
Irritated, she covered her rear end with her hands, picked up speed and hurried away from me as though I were giving off radiation.
“Just don’t look at me if that’s going to keep happening,” she said.
I watched her storm up the rise toward the car; absorbed in the way h
er panties quickly rode up the crack of her muddy, wiggling ass, and found myself not the least bit aroused by the image.
In fact, just the opposite happened.
Well. At least I might have found a way to prevent erections, and thereby keep us from being ostracized by decent society.
All I had to do was look at my wife.
We returned to the Duesenberg, which was fairly well smunched in front, and rather deeply embedded in the tree trunk and muddy ditch. It was leaking coolant and spewing steam, and I couldn’t be less interested. Unable to control my feelings and desires, I kept looking away to see if Ms. Nuckeby might have heard the accident and come running. The thought of her sprinting, naked, invigorated me like Mindie’s bunched undies and Ms. Waboombas endlessly exposed breasts could never do, and little Corky sprang forth again, rather overenthusiastically.
If I ever did want to have children with Mindie, I would clearly have to spend a lot of time reminiscing about Ms. Nuckeby beforehand.
“You were right,” Ms. Waboombas said to me, eyeing the evidence. “It ain’t dinky.”
“CORKY!” Mindie snarled. “What did I just say to you?”
With the pastor’s, Ms. Waboombas’, and Morgan’s help, we got the car out of the ditch and back onto the road, while Mindie sat in the moist grass shredding leaves and offering guidance. Safely back on the edge of the highway, I left the others and walked the few hundred feet back to read the road sign I’d missed moments earlier due to Ms. Nuckeby’s gloriousness.
Before even glancing at whatever was written on the marker, I checked the wooden stairs for any signs of life, naked or otherwise. The wooden planks twisted and turned their way downhill through the various shrubs, stones, and bushes for maybe a hundred yards until they reached bottom, disappearing into a grove of trees that blocked any view of the beach.
Ms. Nuckeby was nowhere to be seen.
The temptation to race down there and find her was near to overwhelming. The need to look at her, to be near her, to smell the purified air around her, ran like hot razor blades through the soft meat of my heart. It had my attention, certainly, and at that moment, I finally understood how Duke Orsino felt at the beginning of Twelfth Night when every, stupid question reminded him of Olivia, the woman he desired most in the world and he just wouldn’t shut up about it.
A Verbatim Moment from Corky’s Memories Of His Education in The Classics:
RANDOM LORD: Hey, Curio. We need to get the Duke’s mind off Olivia.
CURIO: No prob, Random Lord.
(To Orsino)
Hey, Duke. Wanna go hunting?
ORSINO: Hunting for what, Curio?
CURIO: I dunno. Deer?
ORSINO: Sure. Of course. The best deer I have, or ‘hart’ as we call them in this day and age. And, you know what hunting deer—or hart—makes me think of?
Olivia.
CURIO: Oh, Jesus.
ORSINO: The first time I ever saw her, she smelled great! It was like she killed the germs in the air or something.
CURIO: A girl who’s basically disinfectant. Nice. Listen…
ORSINO: At that moment, I became like a deer myself, you know? Or hart, as we call them. I want her so bad, it’s like my needs have become cruel, yappy little hounds—Chihuahuas, if you will— chasing me around everywhere I go, and they won’t shut up.
CURIO: Oooookay.
(To Random Lord)
Let’s go without him.
I too felt like a skittish little deer whose desires had become cruel hounds trying to run him down and eat his ‘hart’ alive. It was scary, and at the same time kind of thrilling, like a love roller coaster, yow.
Roller coaster of love. Say what?
Suddenly, I understood how Mister Johnson must have felt. Dying, naked, on top of a hot maid—or in my case, a hot Ms. Nuckeby—now seemed worth all the scandal, dueling lawyers, and money it took to get me there. I mean, really. Who cared? I’d be dead anyway, right?
I glanced toward the Duesenberg, where everyone sat slumped in his or her seat, waiting for my return. Mindie eyed me intently. There was no way I could casually race down the hill and get away with it. But perhaps if I really did throw myself down the stairs…
Good Lord! Was I insane? I couldn’t believe I had actually considered doing such a thing. How cruelly hound-like had my needs become? Was I really so desperate, lonely, and overheated with desire that I might do something so idiotic as to toss myself down a mountain just to see a pretty girl?
“CORKY! STOP DAWDLING!” Mindie screeched. “GOD! YOU ARE SO ANNOYING, SOMETIMES!” Her face was twisted with irritation and rage, and flushed red with hot, asexual blood. It was a face that—within hours—would be staring at me day in and day out as my beloved, my companion, my one-and-only wife.
I threw myself over the edge.
Next to the hairless monkey, this may have been the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. The idea had been to ‘pretend’ to fall, then right myself and race for the bottom. Unfortunately, the pretending part very quickly took on a life of its own.
Mindie screamed. Amazingly, I could hear her wails of horror even over my own.
Fortunately for me, the shock left me with very few memories of the incident, which I will share with you here for posterity, just in case—for reasons, either of stupidity or love, which often seem to be interchangeable I’ll grant you—you feel the need to attempt such Jackass-like lunacy at home.
My first memory is of me taking flight, then impacting that first stairway landing and sailing from those—relatively—painless planks of wood out into nature’s harsher punishments.
That part was kind of fun.
The second memory is of broken branches, twigs, and pointy leaves stabbing enthusiastically into pretty much every one of my body’s most tender tissues.
That I didn’t enjoy so much.
The fourth memory was of a particularly large and rugged bit of stone attempting to remove one side of my skull, and the brain matter contained therein without sufficient anesthesia.
Not gonna do that again ever in my lifetime if I can help it.
Fifth: random, flickering images of a bird which somehow became entangled in my hair, and really seemed quite put out by it, as if I’d done it on purpose. Kind of an Alfred Hitchcock moment, and not many of you would want to experience Alfred Hitchcock in real life, trust me. The pecking, flapping, clawing little beast did, however, keep my mind off some of the other more painful moments during the remainder of my fall. So for that, I thank him. Or her. It.
Whatever.
Eventually I bounced repeatedly to a stop, somewhere—oh—ten or so feet above the beach, and only a few yards from certain death on a fallen tree stake. I lay for a long moment, staring up at the sun, and trees, and sky…and just hurt.
Eventually, my eyes closed, unconsciousness licking at the corners of my brain like a lonely Labrador until I heard the voices and movements of people all around me, some up near the top of the hill and a few closer by, down toward the beach.
The voices on the beach were approaching, and eventually came very close to me. Each was tinged with gentle sympathy.
The ones above were like nails on a chalkboard, and were hard to distinguish from the screeching bird still struggling in my hair. Inwardly, I hoped for the sources of the lower voices to reach me first, and I was surprised when they actually did. The god who spends his days ruining my life (bastard) must have been too busy laughing his ass off over my fall to intervene negatively, at that particular moment.
Tender hands gently freed the bird, then lifted my head from the anthill I had landed on and brushed away a few of the stinging insects as they were making a concerted effort to pull me into their hole. I suppose they would get some considerable street cred around the colony if they succeeded in feeding me to their queen. In my delirium I somehow missed them when they were gone.
“Mister Wopplesdown?” a voice asked. A lovely, mellifluous voice. “Mister Wopplesdown, are you okay?”<
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Slowly, I opened my eyes. The exceedingly naked Ms. Nuckeby and her handsome sunhat held me in their arms. I was in heaven. A heaven with stinging ants, but never mind.
“Ms. Nuckeby,” I wheezed, managing a smile. “How lovely to see you again.”
“Are you all right, Mister Wopplesdown? My God, the way you flew down that hill—like someone had thrown you. Are you hurt?”
“No. No. I feel quite wonderful actually.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve never had sex.”
There was some laughter behind her, and I noticed naked body parts of various other individuals just beyond hers. Was everyone naked? What had I interrupted?
“I’m not worried about that,” Ms. Nuckeby said. “I’m just concerned that you’re okay.”
“You have no idea how perfectly okay I am.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I came to see you.”
“Me?” Her expression melted, and she sounded deeply and genuinely pleased. My heart jumped.
“CORKY?”
It was Mindie’s voice, digging into the chalkboard of my brain and scraping its way down the hill. My heart stopped jumping with pleasure and fell over, curling itself into a fetal position.
“CAN ANYONE SEE HIM THROUGH THE TREES? OH, MY GOD, CORKY, ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?”
Other voices joined her, calling my name in faulty harmony as they raced down the stairs towards us. Ms. Nuckeby looked up, trying to see through the foliage herself.
“Who’s that?” she asked.
“Um—why, that’s Mindie,” I said, my voice rising, trying to make her sound fun, and exciting, and welcome—as if she were bringing gifts, food, and champagne for the needy.
Ms. Nuckeby’s expression darkened. “The one from last night. The girl with the giant bazoombas who made you stiffen up.”