The Prince slowly lowered his body to the edge of the bed, that listless feeling flooding his limbs again, the page hanging limply from one hand. “You mean to tell me that this was all a practical joke?”
“I’m afraid so, Sir.”
The paper, like a feather that had been detached from a bird shot while in the midst of soaring flight, floated gently to the floor.
“And that would mean that I do have to attend the embassy party given by the Polodni States this evening?”
“That too, Sir.”
Charles allowed his body to fall back onto the bed sheets, arms fully extended, as if he were only marking time until the nails were pounded in.
“Aargh!” The Future King of England screamed.
“I had been just a trifle worried that this might be your reaction, Sir.”
3
Daisy Silverman had once had a boyfriend who had been driven insane by the sound of her constantly running refrigerator. She herself had never even noticed the incessant hum until he had pointed it out to her, minutes prior to tossing all of his belongings into two bags and rushing screaming from the apartment, never to be seen again.
This experience had only served to reinforce one of her pet theories. Daisy believed that each human being had their own very individual thresholds of tolerance and pleasure.
The refrigerator had never plagued her because, as far as she was concerned, all forms of noise represented an almost universal good. Sound, to Daisy, meant that there was life. A foul smell, on the other hand, could be testimony to a high-fiber diet or just as easily mean that, somewhere, someone had died.
For Daisy, even a whiff of cabbage could spoil an otherwise perfect spring day. At the other end of the spectrum, there had been a number of men she had dated for a time that would normally have been rejected by her far sooner had they not given off an odor of fried onions and garlic, the scents of the Italian kitchen representing her version of olfactory nirvana.
In fact, her whole obsession with the aroma thing was all of a piece with her equal obsession with food. This was in no way surprising from a scientific standpoint, what with the nasal cavity residing in intimate biological proximity to the oral cavity. She knew that if you smelled something that you liked, that part of the enjoyment was that you were actually tasting it on the air. Of course, this likewise meant that if you were smelling shit, you were probably eating… best not to go there. Suffice it to say that Daisy often found herself being led around by her nose.
Which explained what she was doing waiting in line, yet again, to pay for her purchases at the not-so-convenient Quik-Cart, when she could have bought her diet soda and lotto ticket at the supermarket that was even closer to her apartment in Danbury, where things were run more efficiently and where the gouging did not cut quite so deep. As Daisy tugged at the brim of her baseball cap, she looked to the head of the line where the cashier was waiting on customers. And she acknowledged to herself that the reason that she kept returning to this grim little slice of consumer hell was all due to the Lotto Lady.
The Lotto Lady was like a human receptacle, a walking atomizer of every good thing that she had ever consumed or had a hand in preparing. On that particular night, a cloud of curry and chocolate suffused the air around her, reaching out to Daisy where she stood in line and making her wish that they had dined together. The larger supermarkets might have faster service, greater selection and lower prices, but those sterile environments had nothing on the aroma of the Lotto Lady.
The Lotto Lady, being every inch Daisy’s equal in the vertically disadvantaged department, was clad in something deep purple and tweedy, and was the kind of woman who gave roly-poly a good name. A face with the textured character of a walnut betrayed a depth of experience far greater than what you would normally imagine based on a life lived mostly within the confines of a Cheez Doodle and Skoal emporium. Brown eyes looked out at the world from behind frameless half-glasses that were perched precariously on the tip of her nose, sometimes—especially with taller customers—creating the curious visual effect of a groundhog on February 2, peering up at the sky from out of his hole and trying to decide whether to cast his shadow or not. A large and extraordinarily loose Victorian bun crowned her, its topknot never quite successful in keeping the somewhat scraggly salt-and-pepper tendrils from escaping.
Time in the Quik-Cart never seemed to quite keep pace with that of the outside world—moving either slower or faster, as if it were its own dimension entirely—and Daisy found herself suddenly at the head of the line.
“Help you, dear?” The Lotto Lady gazed straight at her inquisitively. “Oops! Couldn’t see your hair. Almost didn’t recognize you under that cap.” Her speech pattern, while reassuringly susurrant, possessed an economy that revealed a distinct prejudice against the usage of first-person pronouns.
In spite of a bone-weariness brought on by a long day in service to the Bottom-Feeder, Daisy was able to muster a warm smile of her own. “How are you this evening? I’ll just take the soda and—”
“2-7-18-33-36-41,” the Lotto Lady finished for her, punching the numbers into the ticketing machine.
“How did you know that?” Daisy asked, shocked.
“Wouldn’t have to be a brain surgeon. You’ve asked for the same six numbers every week for the last three years.”
“Yes, but you must wait on thousands of people buying numbers each week.”
“Don’t remember all of them,” the Lotto Lady chuckled. “$3.06 for the soda and ticket. Just yours.”
Daisy studied the eternally spinning hot dogs that were being heated under a glass enclosure set up on the counter. As usual, she found the experience mesmerizing. She would be willing to swear before a jury that they were the exact same six weenies that had been spinning for the last three years.
“Why only mine?” she asked, absentmindedly extending a five-dollar bill.
“Always the same. Only one.” Pronouns of the second-person variety were not as common to her as they might be either. “Others get frustrated, change a number here, a number there. Three years. Only one, always faithful.” She peered around the tiny shop as if she were casing the place for spies. For once, the place was empty of other customers. “Always wanted to know why. Why always the same?”
Daisy strained to tear herself away from the rotating weenies. She pocketed her change. “They were my father’s numbers. It was what he left me in his will.”
“Thought you said he was in the septic business. All those years of work.” She shook her head, whether in dismay or disgust was anyone’s guess. “And all he left you was six numbers?”
Daisy gave a nonjudgmental shrug.
“Thought those guys made decent money. What happened to it all?”
“Bad investment idea. You could say that his fortunes all went down the drain.”
“And you still play his numbers every week?”
Daisy shrugged the shrug again.
“What’s your name, honey?” the Lotto Lady asked, her tone growing confidential.
“Daisy,” she replied, realizing that they had spoken at least once a week for the last three years without ever once having asked each other’s names. “Yours?”
“Bonita.” The Lotto Lady smiled, unveiling two rows of the tiniest teeth that Daisy could ever recall having seen on an adult before.
Bonita leaned across the counter, her face drawing close to Daisy’s, as if for secrecy, even though the shop was still empty. “So, Miss Daisy, what would you do if you did win all of that money? Just for the fun of it, pretend you only have a minute to decide.”
Daisy looked at the poster on the door. The week’s jackpot was set at the minimum one million dollars. At $50,000 a year for twenty years—before taxes—the sum wouldn’t exactly make her wealthy beyond her wildest dreams, but it would mean that she wouldn’t have to look at another toilet bowl with a professional eye ever again if she didn’t want to.
She didn’t even need the whole minute.
“I’d go to London.” And then she paused for only the barest of fractions before impetuously adding, “And I’d take you with me.”
The glare brought about by the marriage of fluorescent light and glass temporarily obscured brown eyes as the topknot bobbed approval. Bonita flashed another one of those childlike grins before uttering a rare, and therefore wonderful, personal pronoun:
“I’ll hold you to it.”
4
The King of Small Talk was working the room as only he knew how. Sturgess, now wearing the hat of royal bodyguard and detective, was trailing at an unobtrusive distance behind.
By that evening, the Prince had once again regained his famous urbane composure. Even as he shot his cuffs, adjusting the onyx and gold links, it was a mien that smacked of a palatial—and thus, suitably fashionable—ennui.
For one who had been brought up with the belief that the laws of primogeniture ensured that one day his hand would grasp a scepter and his face appear on a stamp, he liked to listen and was surprisingly good at it. As he engaged in the usual internal debate concerning whether it would be more time efficient to work the perimeters or to simply make an energetic beeline straight up the middle, he felt his innate good humor threatening to make a comeback and take on the interloping boredom.
“Sir!” The whinnying cry attacked from the left, tamping any good humor right back down again.
Charles sincerely hoped that it wasn’t what he thought it was. Perhaps a horse was summoning a waiter. He strode on, determined to keep to his mission of working the edges without being sucked into the vortex.
“Yoo-hoo! Sir!” There it was again, only much closer this time, and threatening to overtake him.
The Prince slowly turned, with an outward smile and an inward sigh, prepared to face his doom. The visage that confronted him came as close to being that of an aging equine as any that he had ever seen on a Homo sapiens before.
He flashed a smile that he desperately hoped was benevolent enough to mask the fact that he hadn’t the slightest idea what her name was. He wished that Sturgess were standing nearer so that he could ask him under his breath. But the bodyguard had become momentarily sidetracked by a tray of skewered chicken satay—a relatively minor failing in one who ordinarily served so well—and was thus unable to offer assistance. The Prince had been abandoned to his own recognizant devices.
Was this one, then, Miss Tryte-Smythe, Ms. Slyte-Knyte, or was it perhaps Mrs. Austin Spyte-Blythe? Charles wondered idly. They all looked so much alike, all with their steeplechase-worthy proboscises and their other pickled and preserved parts. It really was too tiresome trying to keep all of their names straight when they were all so bloody interchangeable. As if it mattered somehow in the slightest.
In fact, the Prince had never understood why one couldn’t simply call them all Bootsie and have done with it. Charles chuckled to himself silently as he speculated as to what his mother would have to say about it, if word were to get around that he had begun doing that.
He tried to refocus his attention on the still nameless woman, who was turning out to be much more of a charger than the glue factory candidate he had originally taken her for. Maybe he shouldn’t always be so quick to be judgmental. Perhaps she wanted to discuss something of value, like Balzac or the Baltic States, the current state of Parliament or Peshawar.
Now, then: What was she nattering on about?
“… so I thought to myself, who better to ask than Sir?”
“Pardon?” he enquired hopefully.
“About the fertilizer problem that I was just telling you about, Sir. I thought that, surely, a man of your expertise would be just the one to ask about my troublesome petunias. Who could possibly pretend to know more about fertilizer than you?”
He felt his hopes plummet. Not more small talk! his mind resisted. There were times when he swore that he would end up in Bedlam if he had to talk gardening with one more neophyte.
No, it wasn’t that Charles minded listening so much. It was just that he felt that it would be nice if, only every now and then, people were to find something interesting or worthwhile to say.
And where the hell was Sturgess anyway? Nobody could possibly like satay that much.
5
Daisy had always deemed the “ee” sound, required at the end of her name, to be particularly reprehensible. In fact, she had always found it odious when that phoneme appeared at the end of any woman’s name. She believed that it doomed a woman to a childish existence, one in which she was destined to never completely grow up; or, if she did manage to, it was preordained that the rest of the world should refuse to take her seriously. Men, on the other hand, could get away with the detested “ee”—provided that it wasn’t affixed to Louie (as in “get the car”) or Morty (as in “nu, so how big vas the gefilte fish that got avay?”). For most men, the “ee” suffix provided a welcome respite from self-absorption. And besides, from where Daisy was sitting, it looked as though the rest of the world—men in particular—already took men as a whole far too seriously anyway.
For herself, Daisy would have preferred it had she been given a more adult and, possibly, regal-sounding name, like Catherine or simply Jane. But, she reasoned, with a Morty-like shrug, it could have been worse.
Her father had once confessed that, during her mother’s ninth month of pregnancy, they had gone out for a pre-celebratory dinner, assuming that it would be months following her arrival on the scene before they’d get another such chance. Daisy’s mother had become typically tipsy on a single glass of wine.
They had still not come up with a name for the baby, and the giddy Rachel had suggested to the more sober Herbert that, if the child were a girl, they should call her Goldie Silverman.
Herbert, desperate that his child not bear a name that was in any way reminiscent of an Atlantic City pawn shop, had seized on the first thing that his eyes had fallen upon. Plucking a cheap flower from one of the equally cheap Chianti bottles that dotted each of the restaurant’s dozen tables, he had declared imperiously: “Nein. Nyet. Nevermore. If our bundle of joy has an innie, we shall name her Daisy.”
Still, it could have been a whole lot worse, and Daisy was accustomed to making do.
In light of the considerable disadvantages that Daisy associated with her given name, it was somewhat surprising then that her surname posed no similar problems for her. But she had always considered Silverman to be of a piece with herself, much as she did the gold Star of David that she wore on a slim chain around her neck, unconsciously fingering it with her left hand as she stood in her microscopic kitchen, inhaling and tasting the eggplant, garlic and pine nuts for the sauce that she was sautéing with her right. It was a tradition for Daisy to make a homemade dinner, no matter how busy the day had been.
The jewelry was the sole legacy bequeathed by Rachel, who had died when Daisy was eleven. She wore it daily, much the way that someone else might wear a wristwatch, as a habit and as a requirement. It served more as a tribute to the love that she felt for her mother than it did to symbolize any depth of religious devotion.
In fact, Daisy considered herself to be a non-practicing Jew. This tended to define more of who she wasn’t than who she was. From a purely practical standpoint, this meant that, while bacon might find its way onto her burger, no amount of talking would ever convince her that any savior had already come and gone.
It was another tradition with Daisy, perhaps brought about by Rachel’s premature death, to try to make every moment count as much as possible. And so, as she seated herself at a plastic table built for two—a heaping plate of pasta in one hand, diet cola in the other—she reached for the top of one of the bottomless stacks of reading material that had always trailed her through life.
The uppermost item brought a smile to her face. It was a copy of Majesty magazine, forced onto her by Bonita just prior to Daisy’s exit of the shop earlier that evening. The tiny Lotto Lady had advised that Daisy start doing her homework now if she were really serious ab
out taking her winnings to London.
She studied the high-gloss cover just briefly—taking in the dotty but oddly welcoming and ageless blue-eyed smile of the Queen Mother, who was being escorted on the steadying arm of Charles—before rejecting it in favor of the second item in the stack. Oh, sure, it was okay to escape with the Royals during her day job, but there was such a thing as carrying an obsession too far. And this was Daisy’s real world. She couldn’t be bothered with the likes of People magazine. She needed a more edifying fictional escape route. So she reached for Dostoyevsky instead.
Social prejudgments that the cleaning lady does not read Crime and Punishment, coupled with the presumed tedium inherent in her job’s description, could lead a person to believe, in spite of Daisy’s professed doctrine concerning the value of time, that she was wasting hers. Such an assumption would be grossly unfair.
Daisy was already a full year older than Rachel had been when she had died; an odd feeling, that. Thus, she recognized that it was wrong of people to live their lives as if they were part of one big holding pattern, toiling away in jobs that they hated, marking the years off until retirement. The notion that your real life might be starting at some nebulously future time was bogus. Daisy knew that most people never even lived long enough to begin.
You must remember, though, Daisy was a Silverman by blood. She wasn’t just marking time. She liked cleaning toilets. When she was doing it, her mind was free to go wherever she wanted. Had she been saddled with more creative or intellectual career aspirations, her mind, along with her time, would have belonged to someone else. This way, she got to keep the good part. And the only thing that really belonged to the Bottom-Feeder was the one dish-panned hand.
In fact, the Hand Thing was the only problem she had ever had with her job. And by “the Hand Thing,” she wasn’t referring to the fact that her right hand was callused or that the job enforced a radical manicure upon her or that her cuticles were hardened in such a way that she would never be mistaken for any class but her own. No, the Hand Thing was a verbal catchall, encompassing any and every activity requiring the use of both hands at the same time. As long as just one hand was needed for the performance of any given task, she could always continue plugging away at her stack of books. But both?
Falling for Prince Charles Page 2
