Chapter One Hundred and Ten
Glen Stoupes had raided the hotel’s liquor reserves and taken to spending his days sprawled on his bed, drinking himself into a (he was fully aware of the pun) stupor, and predicting, as a sort of scientific experiment, how much of this punishment his body could withstand before giving up.
He’d quite fancied Enid, for some reason, more to do with her personality and wit than any physical attributes, when he first arrived at the hotel, and felt some jealousy over her, and envy over Genevra and Rosella’s capacity to be lesbians, but he couldn’t kid himself it was love. He’d never been in love, insofar as he thought he understood the term. It appeared to exist, by hearsay, at least, because people talked so much about it in novels and songs, but he’d managed to avoid it, through no intention of his own, so far. He’d felt puppy love, or something like that, for a couple of girls, back home. And he’d felt lust—the bleeding anuses of many a prostitute in the brothels of Little Rock could attest to that. But what had that accomplished, aside from a thin wallet and a rash that took six months’ rubbing with iodine to vanish?
He was miserable, but no more so than back home. He was just tired of faking a smile. A good-old American smile. Well, America, he decided, held nothing for him anymore. It could stick all their goody-good girls’ pinafores and bleeding whores’ assholes—it could stick them, well, they knew where. Up their assholes, he supposed, if he were required to be explicit about it. Pinafores up assholes, and assholes up assholes. Who cares?, he asked himself, then answered: Not I.
“As soon as the snow clears,” he announced aloud, to the apathetic Fates, “I’m going to change my life! I swear it! I’ll adopt a solitary life, of contemplation, away from the vapidity of mankind, in the frozen wasteland of. . .why not?—the Yukon!”