Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-One
Herra Brotherus, too, publicly relished his humiliation, having taken to whinging, on his knees, outside Mademoiselle Godefroi’s door like a dog. Curtis/Thaddeus, among others, found this unmanly behaviour to be disgraceful, but some, such as Betsy Drig, took pity on the wretch. Betsy liked to take him food, and stroke his hair, and taught him to play fetch. When Betsy asked Brotherus what he wanted, the gentleman replied, “Further debasement at the hands of Mademoiselle Godefroi,” but Betsy wasn’t entirely sure what that meant. Sometimes, when he was alone outside Annette’s door, he would hump it. The rest of the time, he would roll around on the corridor’s carpet, moaning and making an idiot out of himself. He admitted his worthlessness—he was the first to admit it—but did not know what else to do. He had nothing else to do. At least, he reasoned, this was something to keep him occupied.
At times, he would push his ear against the door, and could make out faint snatches of Annette’s dialogues with Madame Lapin-Défunt. In this way, he could at least enjoy Annette’s castigations against the male sex. At other times, he could interpret various sounds as emanating from their lovemaking, which made him howl with envy and long for death.
In the raptures of self-pity, his backstory rose up before him: He had had a normal upbringing, joined the family banking business straight out of university, was too diffident in his physical unattractiveness and acknowledged want of wit to speak a word to a lady off the topic of interest rates, and thus led a chaste social life until, at the age of nineteen, his father arranged his marriage to a daughter of a rival banking clan. She was sweet and coy, significantly less aesthetically repugnant than he, and boasted all the intelligence he lacked. On the first night of their honeymoon, when she finally lured him out of the bathroom, she proceeded to viciously abuse him with straps, a whip and a spiked cudgel—he took to it immediately, as if, having wandered through a purposeless desert all his life, he’d finally stumbled upon a horde of treasure of whose existence he’d had no inkling; or, as if he’d sailed through a shallow romance borrowed half-heartedly from the library, only to discover, at its climax, that there had been a philosophical undercurrent all along which now, on the point of its discovery, reoriented his whole life. Any way you want to look at it, he had found the purpose for which he had been put on this earth: to be sexually humiliated by his wife, for the pleasure of them both. They were soulmates, completely symbiotic, until she died of a fever two years ago, collapsing the cornerstone of his existence, and leaving him a lost soul wandering the world.
Just as he was reliving this past, Annette and Petunia opened their door. He looked up, but failed to recognise either of them in their new, ungendered forms. He dropped his head into his paws and whinged some more.