Chapter Twenty-Four
Bartoff, too, was drunk. He had done little, since the guests had more or less agreed, telepathically, to cease socialising and remain in their rooms, but drink, stroke Sam and dress up in ladies’ clothes he’d pilfered from other guests’ rooms. Just now, he was arching his back, admiring his profile in the mirror, twirling his finger through a curl in his wig and readjusting his undergarments. He had made a botched job of shaving the top of one of his powerfully muscular thighs, so decided to leave them their tangled overgrowth. Likewise, his beard: he’d decided he didn’t want a total transformation into a woman, but savoured, with a part of him he hadn’t, before this holiday, ever known to exist, the tingling tension between the super-masculine, acid-clogged cactus and the heretofore submerged, feminine lily, which was finally poking its petals above water.
Viewing his image, he was half, he felt, himself, and half in love with himself. But, slowly, as the lily blossomed, the desire to ravish the image he viewed faded, and the desire to be ravished swelled.
There can’t be many people about, just now, he reasoned. Why shouldn’t I go for a stroll? And even if the whole scornful world were out there—why shouldn’t I?
Sam yelped. “All right, my friend, you can come too,” he promised.
And so, with a hat with a veil, parasol over his shoulder and Sam cradled against his blouse, he emerged from his room, taking a huge whiff of, as he imagined, spring air, and began to promenade down the corridor.
Gilda Hühnerbeinstein chose that moment to open her door, saw Bartoff, and fell back into her room.
Sashaying down the stairway into the lobby, Bartoff felt a freedom he’d never known: as if he’d thrown off a huge, weighted fishing net under which he’d been squirming all these years. His position at the firm, his standing among his contemporaries, his privilege as a wealthy scion—none of it was asked for, none of it sought, each a stave in the barrel into which he’d been hemmed. If he was now to be humiliated, he reasoned, then so be it: finally, a balancing of the scale, for the humiliation he had once, wilfully or no, visited on another.
Missus Drig, waddling to her room, stopped and stared. Aloysius, sweeping the lobby, rolled his eyes and muttered a joke to himself. Glen Stoupes, moping about, felt a switch thrown between his ears and the sudden urge to murder him. Deirdre, wandering around whilst internally debating suicide, actually smiled, wishing him well. But Mifkin. . .Mifkin, from his post behind the lobby desk, watched this desecration of the unchallenged binary foundation of humanity descend one impudent step after another, painted lips snarling obscenely through their beard (like a woman’s nether lips through her nether beard, one might have remarked), jerking his posterior in a new random direction at every step, a choking stench of musk exhaling from his bodily pores, nostrils flaring elongatedly like two over-reaching singers tremoloing side by side—Mifkin, watching this, squeezed his ring of keys in his fist to the point that the tip of one chipped off, and knew what he must do.
“Sir!”
Bartoff halted on the last step of the staircase. His head turned. The glint in his eye indicated, among other things, that he was unafraid.
“Would you kindly come with me, sir!”
It did not sound like a request.
Bartoff shrugged, elegantly, and followed Mifkin down a corridor. They were both large men, and the soiled rug of the floor resounded with an embarrassing squishiness to their footfalls. Mifkin, hearing this as well as Bartoff, sought to somehow reduce the force of the impact, but couldn’t figure out how. Bartoff, too, wished he could have lent his gait a more ladylike tread. Pish! Pish! Pish! Pish!—that is how it sounded, you see, as if the very furnishings of the hotel gloated over their ability to puncture the gravity of the situation. Mifkin cursed the rug—silently—and vowed, at the first available opportunity, to have it torn up.
He took an inordinately long time to find the right key on his ring, but once he had, he inserted it into the door’s keyhole with a sense of self-possession and agility which impressed them both. With a gallantry which was not lost on his guest, Mifkin held the door open, and bowed. Bartoff entered the room; what else could he do—stand and stare into the room and prolong this pointless silence? No, he did what he was expected to do, as we are all, narrator and reader alike, expected to do, when a door is held open for us: namely—go through it.
Having gone through the door (as described), Bartoff found himself in an empty bedroom. The hotel not having been booked to full capacity, the room had lain unoccupied for some time. As the door was closed and locked behind him, Bartoff, standing erect in his dress, which wispily clung to his massive bottom like a limpet to a rock, pondered the possible residents who had once occupied his same physical space. Princes and peasants; lovers and assassins; men, women. . . But all of them were gone, now. For all it mattered—dead. What if the entire world had been annihilated, through some dreadful cosmic accident, or, on the other hand, divine justice? And the tenants of this hotel were all the sentient life which remained? That would mean that all the previous millennia of romantic pairing-off, state- and church-sanctioned matrimony, childrearing, and songs round the piano had been fossilised into a fairy tale, soon to be remembered but dimly, then as a nebulous, subliminal structure ready to crumble from rot, then not at all. And that would mean—
But by embracing him in a clinch whose tone could not be interpreted as anything other than erotic by even the chief dullard in a congress of dullards, and sustaining the expression of lust up to and including a spell of mutually satisfying sodomy, Mifkin finished his thought for him.