The staff scramble to oblige. The sommelier swings open the doors. The fromagier yanks the napkin from Osmond’s lap. The crumb scraper kicks loose the brake of his chair.
“Yegor, have the starfruit cobbler sent to my chambers!” Osmond shouts as the waiter steers him haphazardly toward the egress. “à la mode, s’il te pla?t!”
“I’m Maxim,” says the waiter dryly. The doors swing shut again, but they can still hear Osmond shouting in the lobby.
“He will have no ice cream tonight,” says Katya. Of course, Katya herself hasn’t eaten anything at all.
* * *
After dinner, Humphrey and Pippi disappear in the direction of Humphrey’s office, Katya slinks off to bed, complaining of “heartburn,” and Ripple takes Hooligan and Swanny on a tour of the house. He doesn’t bother hooking Hooligan’s leash onto the collar. Swanny coldly regards the dog.
“Shouldn’t he take these jaunts outside? In case he needs to relieve himself?”
“Nah, he likes going where it’s climate controlled.”
“Your dog defecates inside the mansion? On the floor?”
“Sure, they’re always shampooing these rugs. It’s like somebody’s full-time job.”
They’re walking down a hall near the Man Cave, the carpet plushly patterned beneath their feet. Swanny wrinkles her nose.
“That is the most revolting thing I’ve ever heard.”
“You’ll get used to the smell.”
“No, I assure you, I will not.”
Ripple stops in his tracks. “Fem, do not tell my dog where to poop.”
“Or you’ll do what? Refuse to marry me?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I haven’t really decided yet. This is your audition.”
“My audition?” Swanny’s laugh is an ear-gouging little shriek. “Let’s abandon the pretense, Duncan. You’re terrified of your father, and of my mother. You’ll marry me even if every fiber of your being screams for an eleventh-hour reprieve.”
Ripple fakes a yawn. “Break another knickknack, Super Bitch.”
Swanny grabs an obliging candelabra from a nearby hall table and hurls it into an enormous gilt-framed mirror on the opposite wall. Glass shatters and rains to the ground.
“Tell them to clean that up!” she wails, and runs down the corridor.
Whoa. She must be stopped. Ripple blinks twice, gives chase. But Hooligan, catching on to the game, runs on ahead. They race past the entrances to the ballroom, the animatronic zoo, the mud baths. As Swanny rounds the corner into the Hall of Ancestors, surprisingly swift in heels, Hooligan vaults into the air and tackles her to the ground.
“Get it away!” She pummels Hooli even as he lands slurp upon slobbery slurp on her face and neck. His preternaturally human hands paw her cleavage.
“Down, boy,” says Ripple, yanking the dog back by the collar. “Swanny? You OK?”
Ripple is not accustomed to seeing girls cry. At underschool, they had a class called Gender Differentiation, to make up for the fact there were no wenches in a three-mile radius (except for a couple of postmenopausal teachers, who had apparently taken vows of natural aging). By the end of term, they had learned all about stuff like Feminine Wiles, Estro-Rage, and Breast Tenderness, the illustration for which looms large over Ripple’s masturbation sessions to this day.
Still, nothing could prepare him for this.
Swanny does not just have a few tears trickling out of the corners of her eyes. She’s given herself over to a possession dark and voluptuous, which seizes her in gasping, heaving tides. Her body strains at its constrictive garments, like all that flesh has turned lycanthropish and is about to bust seams. And yikes, she’s got a lot of teeth.
Ripple’s scared, he can’t lie. Yet another part of him is curious, even a little turned on. He thought Abby was untamed because she doesn’t wear shoes or eat with a fork. But this one is wild on the inside.
“Hey—hey, um, don’t be sad.”
Swanny lunges to her feet; Ripple recoils.
“You’re intimidated by my intelligence! Mother warned me this might happen. She warned me, but I didn’t believe it. Because I am—so—beautiful!”
“Yeah! Yeah, super hot!” Ripple, backpedaling, can’t agree fast enough.
“But what does it matter,” she sniffles, “when you don’t even love me.”
“Look, I just met you. The beauty hasn’t had a chance to work on me yet.”
“One always falls in true love at first sight.”
“There’s a rule about this?”
“Have you read any of the books I recommended?”
Ripple vaguely remembers a lengthy missive titled “My Most Essential Personal Library,” with a numbered list that went well into the hundreds. “I’m a reluctant reader.”
She pronounces it as a verdict: “Unforgivable.”
“Wait—so you wrote all those letters? Yourself? I just figured they were from your mom. They had so many big words in them and stuff.”
“You haven’t even read my letters.” Swanny turns away, gazing dolefully up at the portraits on the walls. Hooligan shoves his head under Ripple’s hand, whimpers, but Ripple shushes him. They’re not done here.
The Hall of Ancestors isn’t Ripple’s favorite room in the house; it isn’t even in his top five. Back before reality, the only way to immortalize yourself was art, but executive portraiture doesn’t do much to bring a person back to life. The paintings are muddy and heavily shadowed, the Ripple men in them going back seven generations, bluish-pale and stiffly posed, pin-striped and cuff-linked, displayed in gold frames like open caskets leaned up against the walls. Even Humphrey—the only one still living, heart attacks take these pros out young—looks embalmed in his picture, too tranquil without the telltale vein pulsing in his forehead, giving off signs of a frustrated, pressurized life. It’s like a cemetery except for the eyes. The eyes follow you.
“How ghastly,” Swanny observes, gazing up at Ripple’s great-great-grandfather, who rests his gnarled hand protectively upon an indistinct globe. “It’s a monument to an obsolescent patriarchy.”
“I know, right?” Ripple dares to come up behind her, fairly close, to look over her shoulder. She smells like dry flowers, old leather, and teenage tantrum sweat. “Sad thing is, some of my grandmas were real damsels. But instead we have to look at all these bald dudes.”
Swanny clearly didn’t expect him to agree with her. She turns warily, her crinolines swishing. “Where will your portrait hang?”
“Right there.” Ripple points at the designated wall panel. “It’s not going to be boring like these, though. The guy I commissioned is a real artist. He did the extinction mural downtown, at the Center for Global Capital.* He’s going to mythologize the fuck out of me.”
Swanny raises an eyebrow. “I didn’t realize you were so interested in visual art.”
“I’m interested in my image. I don’t want to go down like some loser.”