The Sybaritic Millionaire, etc.

This pastiche is inspired by a British romance novel genre I came across during light reading over the years. It is complete with the insights into the lifestyle of the wealthy, Mediterranean speech patterns in English, the emotional inhibition natural to the male, buried childhood traumas, martyring maternity, hidden offspring, and all the other appurtenances of modern living where humble femininity with no pretences to sophistication but with the possession of a well-intentioned heart encounters the fiscal patriarchy:

Sybaritic Millionaire, Excessively Patient Wife

Annie Petropavlokovskoulos noted without surprise that she was turning heads as she passed. It was not because of her Titian hair, which glowed like a traffic light as it curled to her coccyx; it was not because of her slender legs which appeared to stretch into the stratosphere; it was not even because of her elegant female stride. It was because of her muumuu, a billowing brown monstrosity that looked like a potato sack in an ogre's warehouse, and the classical leather sandals that clapped along the marble flooring of the Petropavlokovskoulos Enterprises headquarter offices. She was a hippy.

All along the hallways lit like an upscale mall and bathed in stiflingly inoffensive pastel, immaculately dressed and coiffed men and women who were clutching monogrammed Blackberries and Hermès suitcases and exhaling discreet perfumes, turned to watch her druidic progress.

At last she swept past a shocked secretary through an enormous portal of a walnut door studded with bronze lozenges, and bearing in gold lettering: Dimitros Markos Georgios Petropavlokovskoulos, MBA (Harvard), President and CEO of Petropavlokovskoulos Enterprises, Inc. As the portal swung heavily open she found herself opposite a set straight out of the architect Schinkel’s design for the original production of Mozart’s Magic Flute. From experience she knew that each careless starry twinkle in the canopy was an amorphous mass of Swarovksi crystals and that the desk sitting in the centre of it, and harbouring not the Queen of the Night but her problematic estranged husband, was made from the single golden mahogany tree that had ever been discovered in nature, and a tribe of Flecheiro Indios from the Brazilian jungles was now in contact with the outside world just because of Dimitros's pursuit of that rare plant.

Her problematic estranged husband now rose to his feet and stood staring at her in foreboding silence. They could see each other in the face. Naturally he ogled her bosom instead, before fixing on her mouth. She looked at the rugged planes of his face, remembering the day when she had given him a cucumber-ginger facial; saw his penetrating silvery-blue eyes, the tint of Mount Everest on a sunny day on a flank where it was not buried fathoms deep in snow; and peered at his flexing eyebrows, which looked as if they were harbouring fascinating secrets. She felt a shiver of electricity go through her.

"You might want to step away from the van de Graaf generator, pedhi mou" Dimitros commented in his gravelly Greek-accented English, finally looking her in the eyes.

"So that's why my hair was airborne," Annie replied and coolly stepped further into the room. "This room – it hasn't changed a bit," she said.

"Well, one thing has," Dimitros replied, and looked suggestively toward the windows, with their splendid view of St.Paul's Cathedral and the gut-wrenchingly distant heads of passersby on the asphalt below.

Annie only glanced at the sill before remarking coolly, "The Fittingsley orchid is gone, and you have replaced it with a bonsai Victoria regia lily. So the orchid is indeed extinct."

“Yes, well, that's why you're the botanist and I'm the businessman. Enjoyable as this conversation is, I must be in my limousine and on the way to a conference in Burj Khalifa in 4 minutes 58 seconds. Why have you come after eight years?"

"To ask for a divorce."

Dimitros’s eyes flickered, a muscle in his jaw twitched, his grip on his chair tightened, a hair at his temple danced a jig, and he felt a sudden and unaccountable surge of attraction which expanded his pupils until the irises nearly vanished into the Everest blue like the shadow of a moon vanishes from the surface of the Earth when the solar eclipse has passed.

He sat down in his chair again, twirled once, and propelled himself with his feet until the wheels rolled to a stop right on top of the hem of his wife’s dress. There was a terrible rip and he was titillated by the prospect of looking under the muumuu until he realized that she was wearing a Victorian nightgown and two – no, three, petticoats underneath.

"As you see I was well prepared," Annie told him wryly. "Now about that divorce."

She was horrified to see Dimitros dissolve into tears. "Please stay secretly married with no income or career or private life. You shall be my de facto mistress!"

"I hate to break this to you," Annie said, "but I'm mature enough to want a fulfilling relationship founded on respect."

"Bah! Who needs that? I'll give you lots of money for your disabled sister!" he said, inclined to emotional blackmail.

"She's been earning her own income for years now," she pointed out.

"I can give you children!"

"About that," said Annie, flushing guiltily, "I'm sorry for not telling you earlier, but I couldn't get in touch with you for five years and after a while I just quit . . ."

"I was rediscovering myself in Tibet. I thought six months would do it but those turned into six years. The monks turned to the Chinese government for a military escort to encourage me out into the world again."

Annie smiled in relief and forgiveness. "So you weren't being purposely cruel!"

"Ochi. But you were saying?"

"I'm really sorry for not telling you this earlier, but you are a father."

Dimitros fainted.

When he came to, Annie said, "Oh dear, you look like you haven't eaten in days. Here's a granola bar."

"Sorry," said Dimitros, smiling weakly as he wolfed down the muesli, "I have indeed not eaten in a while. I could really do with a steak. It is not easy getting two-Michelin-starred chefs to close their establishments and work for you at an hour's notice. — But, wait! My birth control methods are impeccable! How dare you consort with someone else and pass off his children as mine!"

"Dimitros, you seem to be forgetting that you left me stranded on a Caribbean island with your great-grandmother who doesn't speak a word of English but for 'indeed.' We had that disagreement – you know which one – as the rainy season began. You left in the helicopter, the only motorized vehicle at hand, and we were cut off for half a year. There is really no alternative parent."

"So be it," he said, recovering slowly from this deathblow to his bachelorhood. "But, when do I meet my son? What's his name?"

"Well, there are two sons. Lukas is named after your father, Bob after mine."

"Twins! Wow! I'm sorry you didn't have a daughter. It would have been nice – someone who looks exactly like you, but a few inches shorter and fonder of milk."

"Actually, one of them does look like me. Sarah. But Anna looks precisely like you, and Katerina looks precisely like her great-great-grandmother. Not as if she were ninety-nine years old, but you understand."

Dimitros shuddered. "Two plus three . . ."

"Quintuplets!"

And the father fainted again. When he came to, he asked angrily, "How dare you tell me such a tale! The quintuplets would have been talked about in the news!"

"Not if they were born on a dinghy in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico."

He staggered and a terrible compunction overflowed his mesmerizing vision-globes. "Einai ena skandalo! How you must have suffered!"

Annie was touched. "It's nice of you to sympathize, but the terrible twos eclipsed the childbirth experience. Besides your great-granny is an incredible oarswoman."

"I've missed out on so much in my children's lives!" With his manlily-scented 800 thread count linen handkerchief which once passed over the perspiring brow of Louis XIV, he wiped each single manly tear from the corner of his eye as it appeared. Then they suddenly dried away as he effervesced Etna-like with infuriation. "Move in with me this instant." He violently prodded a button on his desk. It split open and a jacuzzi in full roil ascended from the centre. "No, damn it. The other button." He stabbed again and the loudspeaker clicked on. "Miss McGillicuddy, please have a private detective search up the private residence of Anastasia Millefolia May Petropavlokovskoulos. Then have a moving company – the best – transfer everything in this domicile from the dust bunnies up to the quintuplets to my residence in Athens. No, not the light fixtures or the gas fittings. And not the wallpaper . . ."

"We should discuss this move in greater detail first," Annie gently interposed.

"We'll do no such thing!" he said, eyes blazing like the digs of Hephaestus. "If you don't agree to be my married mistress, I'll sue for custody of all of the quintuplets and you will never see them again! They shall go to boarding school in the middle of a Swiss mountain. Their nannies shall be recruited from the most humourless military unit I can find! Their playdates will take place in terrariums under the supervision of sixty bodyguards! They shall all become employees of Petropavlokovskoulos Enterprises under my eagle eye until whoever was born first – except if it’s a female – follows in my footsteps as president and CEO. And they shall grow into adulthood thinking that their mother was a hashish-smoking burlesque dancer with thirty husbands and a longrunning conflict with the tax authorities . . ."

"Honestly! While I'm pleased that you are invested in their future, Dimitros, this might not be the best way to go about fatherhood . . ."

"It isn't?! I’m so sorry," he responded, breaking down into sobs. "Agape mou, I must confess that my upbringing is at fault. My father was never at home, he was so occupied with his work. He was so determined to micromanage everything that he mined rare earth metals in China by hand since the early 1990s and died trying to swim across the ocean to an investors' meeting in San Diego when the flights were cancelled during a thunderstorm. He did not even reach Japan. As for my mother, she resented motherhood so much that after I was born she had a sex change operation. Then she – he – became a steelworker in Pittsburgh. I was five years old at the time. After that a feral cat who crept into the family mansion through the doggy-door raised me, and her grandkitten was my mentor who encouraged me to apply to Harvard." He broke down again. "You see, I have no role models who are not of the feline persuasion."

"Dimitros, you could have told me these things," said Annie, soothingly stroking his brow with the fingers where the 50-carat sapphire of her wedding ring still sparkled, "I wouldn't have thought that your total ineptitude when interacting with other people was your fault. How many years we've wasted!"

"Annie, I have something very important to say to you," Dimitros said haltingly but determinedly. "I . . . er . . . um . . . I love you!"

"I love you too, darling," she replied.

Dimitros pressed a button in the floor. They fell through the Baltic amber into a luxurious bed with gilded sheets which were scratchy what with all the emeralds stitched on them.

Annie said, "Dimitros, dear, we must talk about spending money on obscenely gratuitous items some time . . . but for now, let's just renew our vows."

That afternoon — in St. Paul's Cathedral in full view of the Queen of England and a soon-to-be-extinct bromeliad which Dimitros had had Fed-Exed from Costa Rica in a gold-plated jumbo jet with a host of twenty gardeners in matching Versace bridesmaid's frocks, and in front of the quintuplets in matching gilded and red-velvet-upholstered miniature carriages drawn by Mother Cat's grandkittens — they did. And then they had that conversation about obscenely gratuitous items.

THE END