Excerpt: Panthère

A New Story Coming Soon from Montgomery Maxton

Marie Golf-Milfred is a wealthy opera patron enjoying opening night at the world-renowned Music Hall in Cincinnati. While the star of the show may be one of the most beloved sopranos in the industry—and the roar of an approaching summer storm overpowering the California bass—the true jewel of the evening isn’t on stage, it’s accessorizing Marie’s haute couture Jazz Age-inspired gown. A stunning $330,000.00 necklace by the famed Paris jeweler plunges into her bosom; bedecked in nearly eight hundred diamonds and complemented by a rainbow of gemstones just like the clique of gay men that surround her. The piece is turning heads all evening and hitting all the high notes that Marie wanted as she emerges from a public scandal in which her rumored extramarital lover was charged by the FBI in a bribery case that rocked City Hall. But when the evening of attention and apparent redemption literally takes a sudden turn, resulting in a horrifying car crash that leaves Marie and her necklace missing, we start to learn that the true villain of the evening isn’t gone with the closing of the red velvet curtain.

Told in Montgomery Maxton’s fast-paced style of Truman Capote’s swans meets Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, while giving us more shock glam similar to Tiffany, his 2022 bestselling Amazon Kindle story, Panthère is bound to roll some tongues and sparkle some eyes.

~~~

It was a gaggle of gays with cocktails in hand, peering down over the lobby balcony, that first noticed; their gasps so audible that Marie Golf-Milfred looked up at them as she walked in the front doors of Cincinnati’s opulent Music Hall. Tossing them a champagne wave from the checkered floor, she removed her snowy fox stole—no doubt cast about her bare shoulders just before entering due to the torpid humidity and rising barometer. Upon removing the dead animal, a stunningly strapless haute couture evening gown was revealed, the design of which was a fusion of Jazz Age chic and contemporary glam. Yet attention quickly turned to the sparkle from her bosom that was so bright it could very well outshine the grand chandelier in the theater.

“She’s wearing her monthly pussy payment on her fabulous tits,” one maudlin queen in a periwinkle suit crudely texted on his phone to another in line at the bar. Reviewing the text message, the stan in his olive-green vintage ensemble quickly grabbed his martini as he swiveled around, releasing a shriek that echoed about the storied hall like one of its many rumored phantoms.

“Marie, sweetie, over here!” he called out as the gaggle in the balcony above began to weave their way down the plush staircase to surround their stately and wealthy town socialite.

“Hello, my darlings, how are you all this roaring evening,” she said as a crack of thunder overcame the darkening sky just outside the 19th-century building; a promise of an approaching summer storm the likes of which the illustrious river city hadn’t seen in quite awhile.

“Oh my god, that necklace! Marie!”

“Thank you, my lovelies. The French ‘C,’ of course, several hundred diamonds, a few sapphires and emeralds,” she remarked while also casually scanning the room and waving to recognizable faces, some of which were slightly altered from last summer’s opening night, be it through eating well at the city’s renowned culinary scene, or simply, but less savory, paying the doctor well.

“Is it a pussycat?” Periwinkle quips.

“Even better,” she whispered, leaning into the half-dozen suited men surrounding her, “a pussycat with a diamond-studded clitoris.”

Polite giggles erupted in the clutch as Marie turned to introduce her evening companions as the group made their way to the bar and the house lights flickered a brief moment of darkness.

“Is it the storm, or is the opera about to start,” Marie quipped. “Boys, this is my friend Gemma, visiting from the mean streets of Gotham,” she said, introducing the middle-aged beauty to the queer clutch.

Dressed in a Marlene Dietrich tuxedo, Gemma greeted the men while signaling the bartender. “They always said the rainbow was duller here,” she joked to the colorful, albeit muted, suits. “But that’s impossible, it’s the Queen City, the Paris of America. Cheers, gentlemen, nice to meet you.”

“And this is my husband’s, well, John’s nephew, Taylor. Hands off, butterflies, he’s straight and recently engaged to Gemma’s daughter,” she remarked, which was met with confused looks over the “Gemma’s daughter” remark.

“I adopted,” she said, “or was it David Crosby’s sperm, I can’t remember, it was a wild night,” she remarked to a roar of laughter, the comment no doubt in reference to her fellow lesbian Melissa Etheridge’s sperm donor.

“The kids these days, as evident by Taylor’s blank look, would never get that reference, tragically,” Periwinkle remarked.

“Marie, is that you,” said an approaching, bubbly, America’s sweetheart-type young lady in a gold sequin gown.

“Oh, my dear,” Marie said, reaching for her, noticeably unable to remember her name.

“Jennifer Summers, what a lovely gown,” Olive suit said as Marie and Jennifer embraced, careful not to smash the necklace.

“Thank you! Marie, how lovely to see you. I was disappointed to not see you at my mother’s holiday party last Christmas; you always bring such a graceful, albeit spiked, spirit to the festivities,” Jennifer said while jokingly pointing to everyone’s drinks.

“All of us were,” an ochre-suited man remarked. “But when the world is your oyster, be the pearl,” referencing Marie’s well-known wealth.

“Well, you know, I just had to spend Christmas in Paris for once,” Marie said.

“I’m sure it was lovely. Is that where you purchased that necklace?”

“Yes, actually,” she remarked as the lights flashed again. “But seriously,” she said while returning a wave to other patrons waving to her, “is it the storm or is this supposed grand bass about to grace the stage?”

“I’m here for the California bass, what’s his name again?” Periwinkle says.

“Why, they’re a dime a dozen,” Olive remarks.

“Gentlemen, I think I’ll head to my box, I’ll see you after for a nightcap over at Blanche’s?”

“Of course, dear, we’ll see you there.” Air kisses all around

The gentlemen watched as their fairy godmother made her way through the crowd of stunned, albeit polite, onlookers, shocked as many were to see an apparition of the past back in the grand haunted hall of music.

While the story may be well out of the local gossip-over-cocktails and news cycle, it’s far from the minds of the city’s social elite gathered this evening for this historically rich and vanguard night for the opera company.

Marie’s husband, John-Duke Golf, was partially paralyzed two years ago in a horseback riding accident along the Okavango Delta in Botswana while on a month-long trip hunting for, none other than, diamonds. “Hello, Marie?” a woman’s British-accented voice on her husband’s cell phone said that fateful day. “Who’s this,” Marie asked. “John-Duke’s been in a horseback accident,” the nameless woman said, later to be revealed as Kamille, a ‘friend’ of John-Duke’s tour guide who was a part of the glamping-for-diamonds expedition in the country known for the beloved gemstone.

The news couldn’t have shocked Marie any less; later that very evening she was spotted dining in the semi-private room of the famous Sixth Street Italian eatery with her City Hall paramour, whose name is never mentioned in town anymore following his arrest by the FBI for bribery. She was at times and with certain people an emotional void, but at other times, frank and honest. When asked once at a Democratic fundraiser what kind of First Lady of the United States her husband John-Duke would be if elected President one day, she stoically responded, “the one elected to run the country.”

Flown back on his private jet a month later, John-Duke retired from the job at the insurance company he founded, but remained a disembodied voice during video calls on the boards of two oil companies, spending his time confined to a wheelchair at their palatial manor home up in Indian Hill. The stunning estate had no formal name but was given the moniker of Poppydale, ghoulishly named after the unborn child, Poppy, that John-Duke reportedly forced Marie to ‘abort,’ well after the legal timeframe, the only time they ever conceived. He did so in such a manner that involved an accidental fall down the grand staircase, of which Marie narrowly survived.

Marie weathered the city hall scandal and her split with the possible future mayor at the Golf-Milfred family apartment overlooking the Seine River in Paris where, anonymous Twitter trolls have noted, she was drinking her way about the glamourous city on the arm of, and under the spell of, a fashion executive and noted Playboy so handsome, sexually fluid, and wealthy he could buy Versailles and cut off as many heads of men that gave him head and still get away with the murder.

“But that’s what you can get away with,” one pictureless Twitter user remarked in French, “when you’re allegedly having the ‘[r]ear’ of the President in a bedroom of the Ritz while the panthères are in the next room scooping Almas caviar onto biscuits.”

Coming Soon to Amazon Kindle