Chapter 4
Disclaimer: This is a retelling of the story of The Luxe by Anna Godberson, using the characters and locations of Vampire Diaries, that belongs to L.J Smith. In other words; I own NOTHING.
This is to certify that I, Giuseppe Salvatore do leave all my worldly possessions, as itemized below, including all holdings related to business, real estate and personal property to_ _
Damon Salvatore pretended to study the piece of paper for another moment and did what he always did when he found something too serious or too boring to comprehend. He spread his long thin lips back from his perfectly white teeth and laughed.
"Awful morbid, did." He said. "We left the party for this?"
His father stared back at him, large and unsmiling in his black suit and thick dark muttonchops. Giuseppe Salvatore had small eyes in intimidation and dyed his hair an inky black out of vanity. Because of his frequent turns to rage, his skin was a patchy red, and his mustache curled down to his pink chin. But one could see, under all that, the fine aristocratic features that he had bequeathed to his son.
"Everything is a party to you," His father finally said in reply. Damon saw the father he knew best emerge no –the full, unpleasant personality Mr. Salvatore reserved for when he was in his own house or office. Damon had been raised by his governesses, and so his father had always seemed a distant and awesome figure charging about the house while a fleeting of underlings made awkward, obsequious gestures in the vain attempts to please him.
Damon pushed the sheet of paper back across the polished walnut pedestal table towards his father and stepfather, Isabelle, and hoped he wouldn't be bothered about it again for the rest of the evening. Isabelle smiled apologetically at him and gave him a surreptitious little roll of his eyes. She was twenty five, only five years older than Damon himself, and they had often been dance partners before her marriage to the most powerful of the Salvatore men. It was almost strange to see her in his own house, she stilled looked like Isabelle De Ford, who was always good for a flirt and a laugh. It might have been all about money, but Damon still felt secret respect toward the old man for winning her.
"You shouldn't be so hard on Damon," She said in a high girlish voice and brushed a dark curl away from her face.
"Shut up," His father replied in his deep rasp, without so much as turning to look at her. Isabelle made a frowning face and continued playing with her hair. "Get those silly looks off your faces, both of you. Damon, pour yourself a drink."
Damon did not like to look overly obedient to his father, and they avoided each other enough that indeed he rarely had the opportunity. But there was about his father, the rangy discriminating air of all extraordinary powerful men, and there was a part of Damon that craved his attention, that longed for the man to notice his actions and approve. At this particular moment, however, he chose to listen to his father because what he most wanted in the world was a drink. He crossed the room and poured himself bourbon from one of the cut glass decanters on the side table.
The room was dark and heavy with the cigar smoke that attended all his father's dealings. The walls and ceiling were of ornate carved wood –the virtuoso Italian craftsmanship so familiar to Damon that he barely noticed it anymore. So this was the sort of place where business got done, Damon mused with a touch of wonder. His life was so absolutely crammed with play that the serious mood of this room felt like a foreign territory. Earlier he had dined at the Grill on forty Fourth Street, and then there had been an interlude at one of those downtown saloons where one could wear rags and dance with working girls and then off to Elena's grand fete. He got a little preserve thrill from being slightly tipsy in the mist of his father's serious décor.
The elder Salvatore shifted in his seat. The young wife yawned. "So tell me about you and Miss. Gilbert." Damon's father said abruptly.
Damon sniffed his drink and studied himself in the mirror over the bar. He had the smooth chin and slender features of a man of leisure, and his dark hair was pomaded to the right. "Elena?" He repeated thoughtfully. Though he had little or no desire to discuss his romantic entanglements with his father, it was a subject mildly preferable to family wills.
"Yes," His father urged him on.
"Everyone thinks she is one the greatest beauties of her generation." Damon thought of Elena with her gigantic eyes and dramatic dress, which seemed calculated to frighten people as much as to seduce them. He knew from personal experience that Elena was frightening –but then he knew how to enjoy her. He wished he were back at the party, moving her exquisite body across the dance floor.
"And you?" His father went on. "What do you think?"
"I very much enjoy her company." Damon took a sip of bourbon and savored the burning tingle against his lips.
"So you want to… marry her?" his father asked leadingly.
Damon couldn't help a little snort at that. He caught Isabelle staring at him and he knew she was now thinking not like a stepmother, but like all the other girls in Mystic Falls, obsessing about how and when Damon Salvatore would marry. He lit his cigarette and shook his head. "I haven't met a girl I could think about so seriously, sir. As you have often pointed out, I am not serious about much."
"Then Elena is not someone you could see as your wife," his father confirmed leveling his fierce eyes at Damon.
Damon shrugged, remembering last April when Elena had been staying at the Fifth Avenue hotel, her family had moved out of their old house on Washington Street and the new one was not yet completed. Even though he hardly knew her, she's invited him up to her suite she had all to herself and welcomed him in nothing more than stockings and a shirtwaist. "No dad, I don't think so."
"But the way you were dancing…" he paused. "Never mind. If you don't want to marry her that's good. Very good." He clapped, stood, and went around the table to tower over Damon. "Now who do you think would be a good wife?"
"For me?" Damon asked, managing to keep his face straight.
"Yes you, good for nothing boulevardier." His father spat out, his momentary good humor evaporating quickly. The famous Salvatore rage was one parental touch that Damon had not been deprived of in his childhood, and it had arisen at everything from broken toys to bad manners. Giuseppe Salvatore sat down noisily in the baby soft leather club chair next to Damon. "You don't think I'm just idly curious about your paramours, do you?"
"No, sir," Damon replied, blinking his dark lashes at his father. "I do not."
"Then you're smarter than I give you credit for."
"Thank you, sir." Damon said, meaning it. He wished that his voice wouldn't get so small at times like these.
"Damon, I find your louche lifestyle personally offensive." His father stood again, pushing the club chair backwards across the parquet floor and began circling the table. "And I am not the only one."
"I'm sorry for that dad, but it's my lifestyle, not yours." Damon replied. He had regained his voice and was forcing himself to keep his gaze steadily in his father's direction. "Or anybody else's."
"Possible, but doubtful." His father went on "Since it is my money –inherited yes but multiplied many times over by my hard work- that has allowed your lifestyle."
"Are you threatening me with poverty?" Damon asked, glancing at the will as he lit a new cigarette with the old one. He tried to look carless as he exhaled, but even saying the word poverty gave him an unpleasant feeling in his stomach. The word had a sick lilt to it, he had always thought. His first semester as Harvard he had shared a suite with a scholarship student named Timothy Mayfield –his father's idea of character building, Damon later discovered. Timothy's father clerked a twelve four hour days at a bank to pay his son's tuition, and Damon liked him, who knew all the best watering holes in Cambridge. But it was the first time Damon had ever really thought about doing that soul crushing thing called working, and the realization still haunted him.
"Not exactly. Poverty does not become a Salvatore." His father finally answered. "I am here to suggest an alternative course. One, I think, you will find more palatable than an empty bank account," He went on, lowering his head and staring into his son's eyes. "Marriage."
"You want me to marry?" Damon asked fighting back a laugh. There was no one less marriageable in all of Mystic Falls and even those underpaid society columnists knew that. He tried to picture a girl with whom he would actually want to trip across the lawn of Newport or the decks of European luxury liners forever, but the power of his imagination failed him. "You can't be serious."
"I most certainly am." His father glared at him.
"Oh." Damon shook his head, hoping to appear to be considering his father's proposal. "There would have to be a long search of course, to find a girl worthy of becoming a Mrs. Salvatore…" he offered.
"Shut up Damon." His father wheeled back around the room and put his large hands on his young wife's shoulders. She smiled uncomfortably. "You see, I already have someone in mind."
"What?" Damon said his cool beginning to evaporate.
"Someone with class and sophistication and good family breeding. Someone whim the press likes and will embrace as your bride. As a Mrs. Salvatore, Damon. Someone who will come across as a conduit of civility and culture. I am thinking of-"
"Why do you care?" Damon interrupted. He was fully mad now and standing. Isabelle made a little gasping noise when she saw the two Salvatore men facing each other down.
"Why do I care?" his father roared, pacing around the table. "Why do I care? Because I have ambitions Damon, unlike you. You don't seem to understand that every move you make is reported in the society pages. And the people I care about read those pages, however silly they are, and they talk. You make us all look ridiculous, Damon. With your dropping out of college and your running around town… Everytime you open your mouth, you tarnish the family name."
"Doesn't answer my question." He shot back. His father with his explosive temper and famous love of money would seem to have quite satisfied a few ambitions already. He had built a railroad company from scratch and made it hugely profitable, had treated the tenements built on his family's ancestral lands like his own personal mints and had married two society beings and buried one. "I really don't get it dad." Damon said. "What do you want?"
Isabelle's small pointed elbows came excitedly to the table. "Giuseppe wants to run for office!" she blurted.
"What?" Damon's face puckered. Unable to disguise his incredibility. "What office?"
His father looked almost embarrassed by the revelation, and it quieted the tension in the room. "I've been talking to my friend from Albany and he wagered me that…" Mr. Salvatore trailed off and then shrugged his shoulders. Damon knew that his father was a longtime friend and rival of Governor Roosevelt's and he nodded for him to continue. "I admire the man's call to public service," Giuseppe enunciated, his voice growing warm and stately. "Who says the noble class should not be involved in politics? It is our noblesse oblige. Man is nothing if he cannot rule his world in his time and leave it better off when he departs for-"
"You don't have to give me the speech." Damon interrupted, rolling his eyes. He was infuriated by this stroke of bad luck. "What office do you want anyways?"
"Mayor first, and then-"his father started.
"And then who knows!" Isabelle broke in. "If he becomes president, I will be the first lady."
"Well, congratulations, sir." Damon sat back down dejectedly.
"So there will be no embarrassing me anymore. No more tales of your wildness in the papers. No more bad publicity." The elder Salvatore pronounced. "Now you see why you must marry a lady. Not a Elena. A girl with morals whom the voters like. A girl who will make you look respectable. A girl…" Damon watched his father as he leaned against the table and pretended to have an idea. He raised his eyebrow at Isabelle. "A girl like Katherine Bennett, say."
"What?" Damon snapped. He knew the older Bennett girl, of course, although he hadn't had a conversation with her since before he went to Harvard and she had been very young and gangly then. She was impeccably beautiful, it was true, with her chocolate brown hair and small round mouth, but she was obviously one of them. She was a rule follower, a tea sipper, a sender of embossed thank you cards. "Katherine Bennett is all manners."
"Exactly," His father pounded his fist on the table, which caused the gold liquid in Damon's snifter to slosh back and forth.
Damon couldn't speak, but he knew his face was twisted with outrage and disbelief. His father could not have suggested a poorer match. What he had prescribed for his son was nothing short of a prison sentence. He could feel the life of quiet gentility already rolling out before him, like the endless manicured lawns on which so many narcoleptic garden parties had been held by the matrons in his class, in Tuxedo Park and Newport, Lockwood Estate and all those other places.
"Damon," His father said warningly. He snatched up the piece of paper and waved it in the air. "I know what you are thinking, and you should stop it. Now. I want you married and respectable, you will have to do away Elena. I am giving you an opportunity here Damon." He paused. "But gods help me, if you cross me, I'll see that every damn picture frame goes to Isabelle. I will throw you out and it will be very swift, and very, very public."
The thought of a brown future of threadbare clothing and rotting teeth made Damon feel suddenly, horribly sober, and his eyes drifted to the bottles crowded together on the sideboard. For a moment, he wished he could go back to Harvard, all the reading and lectures so so pointless when he was there, but he saw now how college might have been a way for him to carve his own path, to guard against these threats of pennilessness. It was too late for that now.
His bad behavior and pathetic marks ensured that, without his father's intervention, he would never have a place there again. Damon stared into the silent amber bottles and knew that the only route of independence left to him was through the quiet, deathlike boredom of a life with Katherine Bennett.
A/N: Ohhh, Damon into a forced marriage? Poor him. Tell me what you think. That means Review!
Also, if you want to read a really good story about Bamon read 'This Is War' by Cynner. It was EPIC! I don't know how to explain it but READ IT. You won't be disappointed.