Chapter Twenty-Five
Following the aforementioned sodomy, which honour prohibits me from describing, the two lovers cuddled in bed, each reflecting inwardly on the sensations—tactile, emotional and metaphysical—which had resulted from what was, for them, a revolutionary and unprecedented act. On Bartoff’s part, upon the point of a prostate-instigated crescendo, he was brought back to his upbringing (so to speak): he had been raised (so to speak) to be, rather than a God-fearing member of a brotherhood of man (so to speak), a hypermasculine, no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoner, kick-the-shit-out-of-the-next-guy capitalist. The picture books his mother had bought him, and whose illustrations he would have loved, as a child left to his own devices, to have gazed at all day, were wrenched from his hands by his father, upon which he’d be drilled (so to speak) in hateful and unedifying competitive sports, according to the stated aim of entering (so to speak) the long familial history of guffawing financiers. When he was old enough, it was, of course, to boarding school he was banished, where he was bullied over his fatness and dim-wittedness, and made no friends. The single incident which broke up the monotony was when he, in the middle of the night, in stifled rapture, half-asleep in his bunkbed, allowed his foremost bully to masturbate him, following which, enraged at himself, he beat the lad (so to speak) almost to death. Too ashamed to admit the reason for his violence, when the now nose-less boy was whisked off to hospital, he was on the verge of being expelled, when he finally broke down and admitted the whole shameful tale to his father—not the part that he’d let the boy touch his penis, obviously, but wording it so that his father would infer that the perverted villain had tried to force himself upon poor lamb-like Bartoff. Bartoff could thus sleep easy that night, knowing that, according to the letter of the law, he had not lied. His father, promising his son, for whom there had suddenly been engendered, unbidden, a newfound sympathy, that he would deal with the matter with delicacy, had a quiet word with the headmaster, who excluded the perpetrator and communicated to the boy’s family his recommendation that their son be enrolled in a seminary as soon as possible. Bartoff the younger, after being taught at home by a series of top-notch governesses who tactfully turned deaf ears to his occasionally effeminate disposition, duly rose through the ranks of moneymen, as surely as Jacob’s angels scaled their way up the sky. It was only years later that he heard, through the most astounding coincidence, that that other boy—you know, the one who’d tossed him off and got kicked out of school—had never, lacking as he did a posh education, got a good job, but endured an arranged, loveless marriage and finally killed himself. These memories, marching past Bartoff’s inner eye, now, as he lay in the arms of his beloved—marching past him for the last time—dissolved into vague and trivial sensations upon the termination of the parade, ordained to try, and fail, to push through to their master’s consciousness in future like ghosts haunting the chambers of his skull, with their significance and power to cause pain duly sapped.
It had been a relief to divest himself of all that when he’d been so forcefully taken by Mifkin; it should be no wonder to either Bartoff or the reader that the orgasm which crept up on and finally overpowered him (Bartoff, not the reader) during the deputy manager’s penetration of his rectum was, consequently, seismic.
As for Mifkin—the thoughts which not so much raced as sauntered through his mind were not the same as Bartoff’s. How could they have been? They were different people, with different memories, occupying different clods of God’s earth; duh! Mifkin was brought back to his earliest recollected sensations: visions of his mother entertaining a succession of lovers (Mifkin’s father having left before his (Mifkin’s) birth). The unaccountable laughs, eerie moans, earnest sheet-rustling and comical bedspring-squeaking looping through the half-opened door to her bedroom composed, for him, an early experiment in modernist found-object music. When his mother’s looks—and presumably, the elasticity of her vagina—slackened, she resorted, for the love of her five sons, to selling herself in the street (by which is meant, prostitution; not, say, twenty marks an arm, with a pinky toe thrown in as a Tuesday special). Ashamed of her, though he’d never been to church or read a book or had any sense of pride instilled in him, so far as he knew, he fled the city to the countryside, in a kind of Dick Wittington in reverse, where he wandered about, starving, until he stumbled on this hotel. He hung around, making a nuisance of himself, perfecting the art of the pathetic expression which was usually rewarded with scraps of food, until they found him the odd job to do, then took him in, and he worked his way up. Along the way, for a little extra spending money, he’d occasionally allow older guests to bugger him, but gritted his teeth and could not pretend to enjoy it. All along, he knew, deep within his heart, that he wanted to be the bugger-er.
And now, here within his arms, this beefy woman of a man who’d strolled into his life! He would not, could not, let him go. Their naked legs pressed together, hair tangled with hair, he felt whole, like embracing halves of a stone statue. Bartoff slept, his breath piffing contentedly on Mifkin’s chest. Mifkin kissed him gently on the brow, and dreamed of possible tomorrows.