Insatiable

1 THREE YEARS EARLIER "Who was that?" Madam's voice came around the corner from her dressing room and sounded hopeful. God knows, we could use a little joy around this house at the moment. I hung up the phone. I lacked both the heart and the guts to tell her it was the bank. My paycheck had bounced. Again. What some would call my spinelessness, but which I preferred to regard as amenability, has ceased to concern me. I am what I am. And, in fact, I think it is this ability to be amenable, my willingness to play second fiddle, to hold the towel for the victor or the vanquished, to soldier on loyal, steadfast, and true that makes me a good servant. Perhaps even a great one. "Wrong number," I answered. It was a perfect country morning. Sunlight filtered through the lacy branches of the dense hardwoods that towered over the house and down the hill. The trees were now mostly bare after a spectacular Virginia autumn and gave a glimpse of the clear, sharp sky. The sun had forced a velvety mist from the heavy dew that blanketed the fields overnight, and the woods beyond, where the ground was wet and cobwebby, thick with fallen leaves. All the night creatures had retired, leaving only an occasional red fox scurrying home to its den, turning his turf over to the few remaining songbirds and our herd of pet white-tailed deer. The mist was bright and patchy. It danced over the meadow and flirted with the trees before vanishing into thin air. Sometimes, especially on silent mornings such as this, I found our forest as magical as that of Titania and Oberon, where little was what it seemed. Much like our illusory life, filled with phonies of little substance, pursued by others who would go to any extent to join this fake, glittery world. A world where people appear to have unlimited time, money, and happiness. A world of danger and hidden traps ... of silly, vain, reckless flatterers. A world of sophisticated fools. But, I mused enjoying the moment of quiet as I gathered up Madam's breakfast tray they were our fools and their vanity paid our bills. So who was I to judge? And frankly, today, with our finances in the state they're in, we could use another fool or two. I watched three of the white-tails a young stag with furry antlers just budding from his head and two wide-eyed does tentatively enter the meadow, their black noses shiny, ears and tails twitching, their footprints as distinctive in the dew as if it were snow. "The deer are here," I said. "I can't imagine what they think they're going to find to eat until that hay's delivered they've already inhaled every leaf on the property. Did you get a good price on it?" "Pretty fair." See what I mean? We're down to worrying about the price of hay. It had been a rough few months. Madam's mother had died and in a letter delivered from her lawyers the day after her death informed Madam that her mother had left the bulk of her estate, which consisted primarily of her gigantic, demented, and wildly overvalued paintings, to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. This upset Madam so much she locked herself in her room for two days and refused to attend her own mother's funeral, a massive blow-out at the Musee d'Orsay. I went, just so I could report the details, in case she asked. Which she did the minute I returned to the Place Vauban apartment where her mother had lived and painted for forty years, and where Madam had grown up, the only child of Constanza di Fidelio, one of the Twentieth Century's most famous painters, and her late husband, Rubirosa. Constanza was a raving maMarne Davis Kellogg is the author of 'Insatiable', published 2001 under ISBN 9780385495783 and ISBN 0385495781.