Chapter Sixty-Six
Glen Stoupes sat in his room, slumped in a soiled armchair, drinking the liquor he’d found whilst snooping through a storeroom. His face had grown puffy; he felt he could prick his cheek with a pin and pop it. Yes, he was jealous of the erotic gratification Enid had found with her lovers, and yes, he wished he could sexually possess her himself with no little ferocity, but he was not in love with her, and the real envy, it took him half a crate of the hotel’s finest whisky to realise, was of the fact that those three women could experience a fulfilment of which he could only dream. “Why was I not a lesbian born?!” he hollered at the ceiling. “Why is that pleasure—surely, the chief pleasure bestowed on Earth’s creatures—the one least possible for me to attain?! All my professional accomplishments, all my material acquisitions, all the experiences I’ve accumulated—I would burn them, gladly, on the altar of Artemis, to be moulded anew into a lesbian! Take my johnson! Cut it, burn it off! I don’t care! I don’t want it! I don’t believe I, now that I really, for the first time, think about it, ever did!” Rising clumsily out of his chair, he tottered about his rooms, searching vainly for a knife with which to remould his word into deed, then, failing, he reached toward the ceiling, stumbled, and crashed to the rug, on which he rolled up and bawled himself to sleep.