Chapter One Hundred and Eight
Madame Vanessa Tautphoeus, elderly and alone, had found Curtis/Thaddeus—she wasn’t at all sure what to call him, so referred to him simply as “Boy”—surprisingly receptive to her offer of sex for cash. He’d readily agreed, only insisted that they transact the deal on the stage of the hotel’s theatre, due to a longstanding sexual mania he murmured something about.
The stage was dark, the curtains closed. She arrived in her robe, stage left, having scrubbed her skin, plucked unsightly hairs, covered moles with cream, and perfumed the more pungent parts of her naked person. Curtis/Thaddeus appeared stage right, wearing his usual uniform, no less sloppy than normal, unshaven, swinging a lantern, the saffron light of which suddenly protracted several times the porter’s length, then contracted to a bulb, then protracted, waving back and forth across the dusty floor like a sedated dog’s tail.
She stopped in the centre of the stage. He stopped a pace before her. He stood, only his face illumined by the still glow of the lamp, with a curious snarl. The fleeting supposition that he might be the murderer they had all used to worry so much about registered somewhere in the back of her skull, but then he barked: “Your robe, please, madame!” She unfastened the belt and let the robe fall to the floor, thrilling at the exposure. Likewise, he struggled to remove his shirt, trousers and undergarments. She appraised him: he was hairy, dirty and overweight, and his penis, on the presumption that he had one, was so small as to have been swallowed up entirely in his nether hair.
“Do I arouse you, madame?”
“Pardon?”
“I asked if I aroused you.”
She shrugged. “I’m in desperate need of coitus, Boy. I suppose you’ll have to do.”
Dissatisfied with her answer, he gestured to several of his bodily parts with a sweeping hand, asking, “Do I not suggest a heroic statue of antiquity?”
“Not at all. And yet, I long to lose myself in passion, and you are the only man I have found in the hotel to agree to my terms. Therefore, kindly embrace me.”
“Just one moment, madame, and I will.” He stepped over and pulled on a rope and raised the curtain: the theatre was filled with paying guests.
Curtis/Thaddeus screamed: “Get away from me, you old bag! You hear me?! Clear off!”
She grabbed her robe and ran off backstage.
“You had your day!” her tormentor continued. “Leave this new world to the young!”
Huddling in a corner of her room, scalds across her skin where her spectators’ eyes had burnt her, weeping in humiliation, she vowed revenge—her honour, wobbly though it may have been, demanded no less than the death of Curtis/Thaddeus.