As he listened to the maid chomp and chew and slurp—he’d turned away toward the window when she dipped a fat, green pickle into the gravy boat and then licked it clean—Bovard wondered, with more than a little trepidation, what he had gotten himself into. After consuming half a chicken and a mound of mashed potatoes and a relish tray and four buttered rolls, she heaped a pint of chocolate ice cream on top of a three-layer coconut cake and did her best to finish it off, too. For several minutes, she sat looking a bit nauseated, but then grabbed the brandy bottle Bovard was nursing. She took a long swig and belched forth a thunderous, full-throated yawp, such as an enraged donkey might make. He shuddered, thinking again of his former fiancée. In all the years he had known her, not once had Elizabeth ever emitted such a gross sound in his presence. Why, he doubted very much if she had ever passed a whiff of gas outside the privacy of her water closet. He was just about to tell the maid that he’d changed his mind when she stood and quickly shucked off her uniform and undergarments, all of which were stained and tattered beyond description. Then, with a long, lazy sigh, she laid back on the bed and parted her stubby, purple-mottled legs. She looked over at him and patted the place beside her, smiling with teeth that reminded him of kernels of decayed Indian corn. It was too late to back out now without hurting her feelings, he told himself, and he was too much of a gentleman to do that, even to such a vile and loathsome creature. He got up from the chair by the window and staggered toward her.
After a few clumsy, halfhearted caresses on his part, the maid quickly took over, displaying the same unbridled zeal for lovemaking that she had shown for eating. She forced his head between her thighs with her red, callused hands and ground her thickly thatched privates, the orange hair as rough as a wire brush, against his face. Five minutes of this and she exploded like a water balloon, squalling like a mashed cat and filling his mouth with what she referred to in a gasp as her “nectar.” Then she twisted around and pushed him back on the bed. She chewed on his knob and tickled his balls and tugged on his shaft until it was raw, but alas, he remained as soft as a sock in a laundry basket. Finally, after employing every trick she could think of—and it seemed to Bovard that the woman knew every dirty one in the book—she raised up and gave him a knowing look. “I could send a boy up, guvner, if that’s the problem,” she said. “Long as I still get me fifty, that is.”
“A boy!” Bovard yelled, frustrated beyond measure with his cock’s lack of response. “You dirty whore! What do you think I am?”
“I got no idy,” she said, rolling off the bed, “but a regular man you’re not. And who do you think you are anyway, callin’ me a whore? I got half a mind to send me old man up to kick the shit out of ye.”
“Oh, so your husband is hanging around here somewhere, is he? What, lurking in a closet? Hiding under some bed? What is he, your pimp?”
“No, he works the desk downstairs,” she said matter-of-factly.
Bovard stared at her for a second, a puzzled look on his face. “Him? The old fellow who brought up the cart?” Oh, God, he thought, could this frightful mess get any worse? What a mistake he’d made.
“Ol’ Taylor might not look like much,” she said, “but at least he knows what to do when the hinges is greased and the door’s ready for entry. Why, he’s like a young bull when it comes to—”
“Out!” Bovard screamed. “Get out!”
“Would ye like your sheets changed before I leave?”
“No, damn it to hell.”
“There’s a lad I know who—”
Bovard lurched from the bed with a look of insane fury on his face, and the maid grabbed her uniform off the floor and the money from the dresser and ran out of the room, slamming the door behind her. He stopped and stared into the mirror hanging over the mahogany dresser. There he stood, twenty-two years old and naked except for a crusty nightshirt, the sour taste of some scullery maid’s unwashed vagina in his mouth, his tongue blistered and quite possibly bleeding, his manhood shriveled with shame and defeat, his brain soaked with alcohol, at the end of his tether in a hotel room in the middle of Ohio, when he realized with a jolt the awful truth about himself. And the truth was that he, Vincent Claremont Bovard, had never had any more interest in the female body than a woodchuck has in learning the particulars of Latin verb conjugation. Feeling himself getting sick, he stumbled into the bathroom and retched up the sliver of chicken the maid had pushed down his gullet in a playful mood. Then he went back into the room and flopped down on the bed. How could he have been so blind? So ignorant and full of self-denial? After all, his revered Greeks and Romans had written so much about it. Buggery. Pederasty. Homosexuality. Tears began to run down his face. Thank God Elizabeth had called off their engagement. Cold chills ran over his body as he thought about the embarrassing fiasco the wedding night might have been. Then he leaned over and vomited again, this time on the braided rug, before falling into a fitful, nightmarish sleep.