Chapter Seventy-Two
The younger La Paiva, Philip, was at that moment wooing Annette in a stockroom.
“Get away from me before I beat you,” was her response.
“If you would only let me show you what kind of man I am,” he protested, palms out, as if to show he had nothing to hide. “I know what you must think of me—privileged young cad flirting with the help. But it’s not like that. I noticed you my first day at the hotel. ‘There’s a different spirit about her,’ I told myself. ‘She’s not your everyday servant, that’s for sure.’”
“You’re annoying. Get away from me before I beat you,” she repeated. She’d had to hide her book and pretend to be actually washing linen when he came in, and earnestly desired him to go.
“It’s true I can’t offer you marriage,” he went on. “You see? I’m being perfectly honest. You can’t say I’m trying to pull wool over anybody’s eyes.”
She held up a fresh bedsheet as a fluttering wall between them, then proceeded to fold it. “Get away from me before I beat you.”
“Look—I’ll understand if you’re too modest to actually engage in full carnal relations with me. But will you at least consent to my watching you defecate?”
“This is your last warning.”
“I can see you’re a blunt sort of girl, so I’ll put it bluntly: How much do I need to pay you to take a shit in front of me whilst I pleasure myself?”
Having completed the folding of the sheet, she lay it neatly on a pile, then proceeded to thrash him to within, as they say, an inch of his life (no ruler being nearby with which to ascertain the exact veracity of this expression). Suffice it to say that the cries he emitted would have alerted a passing ornithologist to the possible presence of an undiscovered bird in distress, and the tears he shed would not have shamed a young shepherdess in torment over a lamb lost on her watch. A thick blackish blood spewing from his decartilaged nose, like the sluggish, unlit tide of the Styx; his welted eyes temporarily blind beneath mushroomed, wine-dark lids; he fumbled his way out of the stockroom, too ashamed to tell a soul.
Annette, pleased with the upshot of their chat, returned to her book and thoroughly enjoyed the rest of her afternoon.