Chapter Ninety-Six
Poor Larry, wholly uninterested in bloodshed, was meanwhile spending his time in his room, evolving his iconoclastic form of dance. His arms were tensed, his fingers, rigid and beak-like, shot out as if pecking at unseen daemons in the air, whilst his feet kicked spasmodically, as if subject to a malevolent doctor’s continuous hammering upon his knees. Whilst his limbs were thus occupied, his torso swayed, twisted at the waist, puffed in and out like a choking bellows; his buttocks clenched and unclenched and clenched again, as if someone had inserted a walnut between them, which he had it in mind to crack before serving on a salad; and his head bent back, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, his eyes rolled up, strange pre-linguistic utterances bubbling up from his throat.
Passing through his mind, albeit unobserved by a consciousness temporarily dormant, were snippets of his past: the unbearably strict sanitary standards of the orphanage, where an undusted bedframe was as certain to earn you a paddling as a raised lip or manifestation of emotion; then his tireless striving to please, with the confidence that by prospering within the senseless bounds of the orphanage rules, he would prune the tangled weeds from his character, thereby revealing the flawlessly upright young man, ripe for adoption by a discriminating couple with a surfeit of love to bestow, he was sure he really was. In due time, no potential step-parent having expressed an interest in rescuing him, he was apprenticed to the hotel, where, likewise, he did as bidden, convinced that uncomplaining conformity could only succeed in moulding a man, in time, into his best, purest self; and, anxious to discover this true self, whatever it might turn out to be, he stifled any deviating impulse he did not perceive to align with the ostensible conduct of his fellow men. Each month, each year, he felt closer and closer—false façades fell away after he’d tried them on and found they didn’t fit—but his true countenance, like a mask beneath a thousand other masks, refused to reveal itself. Grasping, as at a bird who will not land, he could never reach, could never seem to grow into himself. Like an arrow, shot by the strongest archer, he hurtles higher, higher, higher, but when he reaches the apogee of his arc, he hangs in the air. . .
“Bravo! Bravo, Larry-m’-boy, bravo!”
His eyes opened. His body curled up like a tulip at dusk.
“Encore!”
It was Curtis/Thaddeus, who had somehow slipped in to watch him dance. The intruder moved further into the room; Larry noted a gash on the porter’s forehead, obscenely scarlet, but said nothing about it.
“How long have you been doing this. . .this. . .”
“‘Dancing’?”
“Yes, you’ve got it—dancing!”
Larry shrugged. “Since I left the orphanage.”
“Superlative, I tell you. You must put on a show for the guests sometime.”
“No, I wouldn’t want that.”
“Nonsense!” Curtis/Thaddeus clapped him on the back. “Why, with their discerning cultural barometers, you’d be an unstoppable success! Flowers would be thrown! Reviews posted to the press! Dressing-room ingenues vying for the right to fellate you!”
Larry shook his head vigorously. “I wouldn’t want that.”
“Ah, but you’ll have no choice, my young virgin! It’s your duty, as an artist, to the world! And, for the going rate of twelve per cent, rising to a maximum of fifteen in the event of an international tour before royalty, I am pleased to offer my services as manager.”
“No, no, I only dance for myself.”
All the bonhomie drained from Curtis/Thaddeus’s eyes. “Oh, so you’re a celebrity all of a sudden, is that it? All right: ten per cent. My final offer.”
“I really wouldn’t want to dance for royalty. I’m sure I’d be most frightfully nervous. I might even split my tights, ha-ha!”
Larry, it can be ascertained, had attempted to defuse the rising animosity in his aspiring agent through his little joke, but soon found it to have had the opposite effect when Curtis/Thaddeus struck him across the face. Larry went down, and, though making a vulgar display of emotion was the last thing he’d wish do to before an enemy, he could not stop himself from blubbering pathetically.
“Joke about exposing your genitals to royalty, will you?” Curtis/Thaddeus nodded, as though, secretly, all along, he’d expected no better from such a reprobate. “Keep dancing, my boy. Go on with your dancing. But don’t come crying to me when you find it rather difficult to do so after someone’s sawn off your legs.”
And with that, Curtis/Thaddeus left Poor Larry to snivel in his puddle of drool.