the clothes so hard I could have drawn juice from stones. Eventually, I stopped, but I wasn't finished. My old jeans and shirt, I fished out of the trash and piled on the counter. The sodden lump of new clothes, I threw in the trash.
Using fresh towels and another armful of bottles, I scrubbed the floors, including each of my footsteps, and then pummelled those towels till they were rags and the only smells I could detect on them were dreadfully expensive. And then I stood under another downpour and used everything left on myself—purifying, scraping and polishing till an epidermal layer had whirled down the drain and my skin and hair jangled smells only of bottled scents.
Exhausted, but finished washing, I sniffed ... roses!
I tried to open my windows to dump those stinkers, but they were hermetically sealed. So I buried vase and all under the sopping clothes disasters, and dressed.
~
Brett did not understand my humiliation.
We were in the lounge, Brett up on his futon mountain, me in the chair that I'd dragged from my room. My hair was still wet. The eau de homeless person scent of my old clothes was already overwhelming my washed body. The roses in the entry hall insinuated the lounge's air, but I was too tired to bury them. Besides, I had higher priorities.
Brett did not see that he should have waited for my assent to enter.
I hadn't objected when he first dropped in on me at Kate's place, had I? And he had only bothered to knock here for the show of it, so the Restonia chap could deliver my flowers, which I had asked for with some degree of urgency, hadn't I? How was Brett to know I'd be naked?
He was a better self-excuser than I have ever been capable of. His faults he spun to be my shortcomings. 'And once the chap was there, and he'd already gotten an eyeful, what was I to do? Shove him away and compound the problem? Better to let him finish delivering the flowers and leave, and I wager you a tadpole to a muffin, the empty-headed varlet wouldn't have remembered the incident for a moment. Besides,' Brett reminded me . . and on and on he went, in a liturgy of not-to-worry.
If, he assured me, the Restonia lived up to its reputation to fulfil every desire, and if this hostel was of any venerance, the only outré aspect of my activity could be its bad taste—if clichés are judged that harshly. Why, the likes of that young blue-eye must have servanted dining tables in the person of my folded-up body, oh ever so many times, years ago. With candlesticks flaring from ...!
Oh, Brett could tell me of ... and he did .
So what was I worried about? What was there to be embarrassed about? It couldn't be the hired help. And certainly not Old Brett, eh?
~
Brett just didn't understand me. Actually, he was right about himself. If it had just been Brett at the door, it would have been a temporary shock, but when I thought about it—no more so than my surprise when I entered his room where his nakedness stared at me. And less of a shock than when I thought he'd been reading my journal over my shoulder. My shape, I was sure he didn't notice one way or the other, having seen so many he must have been bored stiff by any of us. And, besides, neither Andrew nor the luscious Simone had gotten a rise out of him. So that left the indescribable—my filthy shame right in front of his eyes—and that didn't bother me when I contextualized it for his culture. The worst part of it, the shit pouring out of my arse and running over the floor, was, when I pictured it from his point of view, just everyday-person stuff. In Art History, I'd seen many pictures of naked people in hell, in all kinds of embarrassing positions, often with things poking up their bums and surrounded by environmental conditions murky in the extreme. Brett couldn't regard filth with the same derisive horror as we. Maybe the gross failure of bodily functions didn't register with him as anything different than, say, a burp after eating. Nature.
But that still
Using fresh towels and another armful of bottles, I scrubbed the floors, including each of my footsteps, and then pummelled those towels till they were rags and the only smells I could detect on them were dreadfully expensive. And then I stood under another downpour and used everything left on myself—purifying, scraping and polishing till an epidermal layer had whirled down the drain and my skin and hair jangled smells only of bottled scents.
Exhausted, but finished washing, I sniffed ... roses!
I tried to open my windows to dump those stinkers, but they were hermetically sealed. So I buried vase and all under the sopping clothes disasters, and dressed.
~
Brett did not understand my humiliation.
We were in the lounge, Brett up on his futon mountain, me in the chair that I'd dragged from my room. My hair was still wet. The eau de homeless person scent of my old clothes was already overwhelming my washed body. The roses in the entry hall insinuated the lounge's air, but I was too tired to bury them. Besides, I had higher priorities.
Brett did not see that he should have waited for my assent to enter.
I hadn't objected when he first dropped in on me at Kate's place, had I? And he had only bothered to knock here for the show of it, so the Restonia chap could deliver my flowers, which I had asked for with some degree of urgency, hadn't I? How was Brett to know I'd be naked?
He was a better self-excuser than I have ever been capable of. His faults he spun to be my shortcomings. 'And once the chap was there, and he'd already gotten an eyeful, what was I to do? Shove him away and compound the problem? Better to let him finish delivering the flowers and leave, and I wager you a tadpole to a muffin, the empty-headed varlet wouldn't have remembered the incident for a moment. Besides,' Brett reminded me . . and on and on he went, in a liturgy of not-to-worry.
If, he assured me, the Restonia lived up to its reputation to fulfil every desire, and if this hostel was of any venerance, the only outré aspect of my activity could be its bad taste—if clichés are judged that harshly. Why, the likes of that young blue-eye must have servanted dining tables in the person of my folded-up body, oh ever so many times, years ago. With candlesticks flaring from ...!
Oh, Brett could tell me of ... and he did .
So what was I worried about? What was there to be embarrassed about? It couldn't be the hired help. And certainly not Old Brett, eh?
~
Brett just didn't understand me. Actually, he was right about himself. If it had just been Brett at the door, it would have been a temporary shock, but when I thought about it—no more so than my surprise when I entered his room where his nakedness stared at me. And less of a shock than when I thought he'd been reading my journal over my shoulder. My shape, I was sure he didn't notice one way or the other, having seen so many he must have been bored stiff by any of us. And, besides, neither Andrew nor the luscious Simone had gotten a rise out of him. So that left the indescribable—my filthy shame right in front of his eyes—and that didn't bother me when I contextualized it for his culture. The worst part of it, the shit pouring out of my arse and running over the floor, was, when I pictured it from his point of view, just everyday-person stuff. In Art History, I'd seen many pictures of naked people in hell, in all kinds of embarrassing positions, often with things poking up their bums and surrounded by environmental conditions murky in the extreme. Brett couldn't regard filth with the same derisive horror as we. Maybe the gross failure of bodily functions didn't register with him as anything different than, say, a burp after eating. Nature.
But that still
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