Chapter Thirty-Four
Mifkin, returning to his room from his duties, found Bartoff inside, in an apron borrowed from a broom cupboard, his wig, and a delicate chemise, finishing his dusting.
“Where have you been?” Bartoff asked, in his new, gentle register.
Mifkin came over and gave him a peck. “Some idiot’s pulled out the furniture from several rooms and blocked the corridors with it.”
Bartoff laughed. “It sounds like a fun idea! Why don’t we all sit round in the corridor and chat about all the things back home we’re supposed to be missing, but really aren’t? Why not?”
Mifkin considered. “This is my home.” Bartoff went back to dusting, leaving the unspoken question—What about your home, Bartoff?—hanging, like a broken-necked parachutist tangled in a tree, in the air.
Mifkin cleared his throat. “Might I. . .?”
Bartoff turned to him. “Yes, dear?”
“Might I. . .you know.”
“Hm?” Bartoff’s smile spread open his beard.
“You know—fuck you.”
Bartoff chuckled. “I thought you’d never ask.”
Following this latest expression of love, Bartoff and Mifkin lay in bed, cuddling Sam, who had been allowed into the room following the finale, and, in exquisite silence, breathed in the residual aroma of their congress. Bartoff relished the surrender of his masculinity, as a balloonist, to trade in a second aeronautic simile in the span of just a few paragraphs, who found himself finally able to soar to the heavens once he’d dumped the ballast his fellow citizens had, unsolicited, tied to his basket. And Mifkin, in Bartoff, had finally found something which approximated, for him, a home: a cosy cabin, complete with lacy curtains, soft slipcovers and whistling kettle, to harbour his phallus—although, for various reasons, it could not accommodate it twenty-four hours a day. Why, so simple a task as walking about a room would prove comically difficult, with the two of them stuck together like that! Ha ha!
But that was not what they were thinking about. Though the content of their thoughts stretched placid as a windless sea, their musings mixed together like drowning sailors in a whirlpool. Muscles rippling like whitecaps endlessly across their bed, breathing synchronised as by metronome, their contentment was complete.
With only the one small strip of paint flaking off this masterpiece, revealing the canvas beneath—Bartoff’s shame, unsmotherable, when the long-decayed eyes of his father made themselves felt on him, and guilt, when memories of Pluck, his family, and the boy from the boarding school sneaked in through the unlocked window of his thoughts.