Oliver Benjamin
while sipping a tequila and lime.
“I like the work,” Roy said honestly.
“So you think he’s a creep, too.”
“No. I think he’s just got a different worldview.”
“Right. That’s because he’s from another planet. Only, on his
planet there’s no gravity because everything orbits around himself.”
Colin thwhacked a ball at the Aphrodite statue, shattering the tip of
its nose. Fashioned especially for Bidden in Paris, Colin had just
administered an exceptionally expensive nose job to the Greek
paragon of beauty.
Roy tried to wax philosophical. “The pursuit of perfection is a
never-ending battle,” he said, “Your old man is a warlord in that
fight, so of course he’s arrogant. Arrogance is the fountainhead of
progress. People like your father are the sculptors of history. We may
not like them, but posterity will.”
“Yeah?” Colin said. He walked angrily over to the statue. Then he
reared back and swung the golf club at Aphrodite’s arm, sending a
chunk into the pool. “Fuck progress,” he said. “And fuck history. Let’s
get drunk.”
Colin and Roy proceeded to toss a few back out by the pool,
missing the dinner entirely. That was when Colin told him the true
story of his mother. Her life story hadn’t been much, really. It had no
beginning and no real end, just an enormous middle that spread out
in all directions.
Rowena Sloane had been an heiress to a coffee fortune at a time when
coffee had been considered an ordinary beverage. There were two
principal species of coffee in nature—robustaand arabica;arabica
was the one that produced the finest, most delicate coffees, but it only
grew at high altitudes and under narrow environmental conditions.
Robusta grew everywhere under most conditions, but was the stuff
that dreary coffee was made of: All instant coffee was robusta.
For most of the 20th century, robusta was pretty much all that
Americans drank and so Rowena was set to inherit a robusta empire.
It was just as well, for she was robusta through-and-through: She had
pedestrian taste, and grew to encompass a relatively large portion of
the earth.
Morris had been a junior executive at her Sloane Brothers Coffee
he first met Rowena. He literally swept her off her feet. Knowing she
had a fear of bugs, he let loose a bag or roaches at a party as an excuse
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