“I am extra. There is more of me than of most men.”

I can see a faint ripple go through her pale skin. I am no flatulent producer! I am a peasant! I am Graus! She feels the truth of this.

“I shouldn’t even be seen speaking to you,” she says.

“It will be our secret,” I say. I place a card in her hand with the address of my Stockholm hotel. My hovel. Where the peons, the trash of the production are staying.

“What makes you think I would ever come to such a place?” she says.

She will have to climb through the mud and dirt to reach it. She will do it, if she wishes to be a woman.

“You have always wanted to be there,” I tell her.

She knows it is true. But it is time to return to work. Jerry is calling.

That night, I wait. But I do not doubt. I know that, sooner or later, Elsa will descend to Graus’s level. Smoking, I look out the window at the crappy street. I see a roach creep across my floor.

Then a taxicab pulls up.

I watch Elsa get out, demurely covered by a fur coat. Her feet are in black high heels. She carries a shiny purse. She has probably come from a fancy function. As the cab pulls away, she looks at her surroundings and shudders. Is it from fear or excitement?

Both!

I have switched on no light. I have left the door unlocked. I turn, as it creaks open. She stands there, lit only by a dim bulb hanging in the hall. Our eyes meet. Then she opens her fur.

She is dressed as a chambermaid.

My blood moves.

Without a word, she removes one high heel. Then, with it, she suddenly smashes out the hall bulb. Its fragments scatter to the floor. We are plunged into total darkness, where we both belong, where we are at home. Then she enters and shuts the door behind her.

Of course, I expect to be her master.

“I believe these shoes need shining!” I say, and point to my scuffed-up loafers.

She does not move. I clear my throat.

“I said, I believe these—”

“I heard you!” she yells at me, shocking me into silence.

I regroup, a bit—what’s the stupid American expression?—thrown for a loop.

“That’s no way to keep your job, cheeky young miss,” I say.

Elsa only rolls her eyes. Then she starts marching around the rotten room, rubbing dust and blowing dirt from surfaces. Then she looks at me with a face of purest disgust.

“What a pig you are,” she says.

“Excuse me?”

“Yes, you. You’re scum, you know that?”

I can’t believe my ears. This isn’t the way this encounter is supposed to go. She is supposed to accept my supremacy and her own lowliness. Instead, she goes on and on, blaming me first for befouling the room—“Haven’t you ever heard of a vacuum?”—and then for befouling everything on earth.

Something strange is going on.

Even though she is the maid, Elsa is turning the tables. Her gesture of subservience—wearing the costume—has given her the license not to serve. She is willing to be menial; that gives her the power to be superior. I don’t understand it, either, but I find, to my amazement, that I like it.

Graus Menzies likes being insulted!

Elsa stops. She pushes me. I stumble back, stunned. I approach her again, puffing my chest out, daring her.

“Go on. Or haven’t you got the guts?” I say.

This time, she slaps me right in the face.

The sensation is startling. My cheeks are on fire. But it’s not the only thing reacting. I have become engorged.

Graus Menzies likes being beaten up!

Elsa has hidden a feather duster in her bag. She takes it out, waves it in my aching face. Then she turns it around and knocks me in the head with its handle.

I fall against the bed, dizzy and dazed. But I don’t get up. I choose to stay down.

She takes another object from her seemingly bottomless purse. It is an old-fashioned paddle, the kind you use on naughty boys.

Graus buries his face in the nasty bedspread, his behind in the air. He closes his eyes.

Whack! Whack! Whack!

This is more pleasure than Graus has ever known! I am big enough, proud enough, to provoke such a punishment! The maid pummels her master until the sun comes up, until it’s time to go back to work for Jerry Lewis. It is the greatest night of my life!

Later, before we leave, we sit on the bed, side by side, like children.

“How’s your career going?” she asks, adjusting her apron.

“My what?”

“Your career, how is it—”

“How do you think?” I bellow, jerked back to real life. “I’m Concentration Camp Prisoner number three forty-eight in a Jerry Lewis movie! How do you think it’s going? And what is Jerry doing, anyway? ‘Dying is easy. Comedy is hard’—isn’t that what they say?”

She didn’t reply.

“I have no money, I have no agent—how do you think it’s going?!”

I don’t mean to scream at her, but it’s a sore point. Why does a man of my caliber have to struggle so? It has set me off.