Chapter Forty-Six
Mifkin had just finished sodomising Bartoff again, and the gentleman placed his head on the deputy manager’s chest and allowed the latter to stroke his hair.
“You’ve so much tension in you,” Bartoff observed. “Deep wells of hatred.”
“Not towards you,” Mifkin said. “I hope you know that.”
“Towards whom, then?”
Mifkin breathed in the musk that had congealed in his beard from his investigation into his lover’s buttocks; it was the smell, for him, now, of home.
“Your class,” he finally answered.
Bartoff chuckled, the palpitations of his throat rumbling tremors over Mifkin’s breast. “What rot!”
“Put yourself in my position,” Mifkin countered. “These moneyed clowns are the curse on my head. I only exist insofar as I can cater to their, usually disreputable, needs. Then there’s Voot, that grovelling cave dweller!”
“Why do you dislike him so?”
At this, Mifkin disgorged a sound of disgust which would try the most proficient onomatopoet to render into graphemes, following it up with: “He treats me with disdain. With contempt. With. . .” He nodded, settling, in his head, on a suitable phrase. “I’ll tell you how he treats me. He treats me as if I were a hollow automaton built in accordance with his wishes. In a word: he treats me as if I had no soul.”
Bartoff thought, breathing silently, staring at a vaguely flower-like design on the wallpaper, ignoring the residual pain from his anus. “If you could have anything,” he asked softly, his beard tickling, unconsciously, Mifkin’s nipple, “anything in the world—what would it be? Who would you be?”
Mifkin considered his answer, regarding their hypothetical game with surprising solemnity. “. . .I wouldn’t ask for much. Lord knows I’m not a covetous man. Simply this: I would be manager of this hotel. With you, and Sam, here forever. And Voot’s demolished body lain twisted at my feet.”
“Then why not do it?” Bartoff asked. “If that’s what you want. . .I feel, deep within me, that we’re now living in an age where there’s nothing to stop us from getting what we want. Only the possible competing obstacles of other people seeking what they want—and the spoils must needs go, then, to the stronger. And you—and I—are the strongest, my love.”
“Do you realise what you’re proposing?” Mifkin asked. “Do you understand what that would mean?”
“I do indeed. Civil war.”