The Bathroom
Humming, watching threads of hot water pour off his head, splashing at his feet, when he hears glasses clink together—a toast in the next room. He stops his song and stiffens, listens, hands tucked into his underarms. Just the drilling of water hitting the tub floor, a full sound that usually floods the room. After a few alert seconds, he squeezes some conditioner into his open palm and uses it to get hard.
Glasses, again. Maybe not a toast—the cat jumping into the kitchen sink, or someone carrying a bag of bottles downstairs to the curb. Holding his erection absently he pulls the edge of the shower curtain away from the wall. He sees his reflection above the cat, who is sitting upright before the mirrored wall, eyelids heavy. His image recedes behind a fog of moisture as the steam that's been set free glazes the mirror, then he hears glasses tap in discordant unison, just outside the open bathroom door. Like Salud.
Cinematically, he spins the water off and opens the curtain, whips his towel around his waist folding away his softening dick, and jumps out of the tub.
His dark bedroom; an ironing board. A still blue curtain hanging at the shut window, lit orange by the parking lot. He hears the refrigerator come on in the kitchen, an empty house noise, properly distant. The cat walks past his ankles into the black.
The music was too loud, distracting. He wet the radio dials pressing the sound down, and hopped back into the waterhole his body had lifted out of the bath foam. There are two light sources in this new bathroom: the bright bulb panels mounted on the mirrored walls, and the soft, round spotlight directly above the oval tub.
He was experimenting with the second one, its potential ranging from serenity to eroticism. He can read under this light, yet it leaves the body’s imperfections in careful shade. When he stood naked under this fixture for the first time, he noticed that his pecs cast shadows down his torso, awnings of false brawn. He wasn’t muscular, but the lighting wished it so.
He left the door ajar hoping Adrian would wander away from his work and follow Chopin into the dim, humid bathroom. He looked at the tub’s generous border, where he sits to soak his feet after walking home from work, and where a cat he wishes he had might sit, absorbing the warmth, keeping him company and unafraid of the water. Along this edge rested his lean, beaded arms, and his crossed ankles, propped to the side of the chrome faucet. He started to arrange the spattering foam around and on himself absently at first, then deliberately, to cover this and not that, reveal his stomach, but not those sporadically haired parts of his hips and thighs. He placed certain things at careful angles, and as flesh changed dimension with arousal and warmth, he reconsidered and rearranged according to the light and remaining froth.
He thought, this might make a good photograph. He thought, I should just call Adrian in here, maybe he would want to add to his work a picture of me in this tub, sweating, half-aroused. He moved the cheap looking shampoo bottles onto the floor, out of the possible camera frame, then resculpted the bubbles that had been disturbed by the clumsy movement. He thought, me in this white tub, my flesh firm and arched, an imaginary black cat sitting nearby contemplatively, I should just call Adrian in here with his camera. But he would have to shout Adrian’s name, and that would startle the cat, and the foam, and Chopin. It would pierce through the steamy weight of the air. What? What for? Hold on. The picture would be gone.
The bathwater flattened. The Chopin CD ended, and he could hear Adrian’s typing two rooms away. Before the cold began creeping in the open door, he stood up and got off to his own image in the bathroom mirror, slid the curtain closed with a metallic skate, and showered fast under a high, hot stream.
He feels himself getting hard against the counter’s edge as he leans towards the mirror, tweezing the ever narrowing gap between his stubborn eyebrows. The cat rests on the bed now, filling the lasting round recess his curved body has pressed in the fleece. Grooming, he looks into the bedroom every few seconds, at his cat’s glowing yellow eyes disembodied in the darkness past the bathroom’s light. Quiet. Only appliances and the muffled, unbusy parking lot make small sounds.
Under the bright bulbs on the mirrored walls, his face looks thick and overgrown. His eyes lose any subtlety they carry in daylight and here become shallow, finite blots of ink. He puts on his glasses and steps back. In his reflection he sees the ropey mound of the lingering erection under his white towel. Cold air is starting to wrap his feet and slip around his shoulders, chilling the water in his hair and on the backs of his arms. His image makes no sense. An abstraction. Regular flesh.
He hears the clinking of glasses outside the bathroom door and finds that he can’t turn toward it. The sound takes place within feet of where he is standing, and he reads it now: 5 or 6 people, their whispers surface slightly, the glasses meet and chime, then silence. He’s frightened, and he knows the light shines only a very short distance beyond the door frame. If he looks into the bedroom he’ll see nothing but darkness and his cat’s eyes floating, reflecting the light source like moons. He extends a wild arm and shuts the door blindly, startling his towel off to the damp floor. He sits naked on the toilet lid and listens.
Adrian’s typing ceased. He looked up from the book he was reading. The toilet lid was beginning to get uncomfortable, the plastic popping concave, convex under the shifting of his tail bone. He heard the giving, cracking footsteps of living on the third floor. Adrian was moving from carpet to tile and back again, wearing shoes at midnight. He heard him shuffle through things stored in the hallway closet, a thump, and steps heading away, but he stayed in the bathroom, determined to ignore before being ignored. He heard the inkjet printer load a sheet of paper and start zapping back and forth. One page. Two. And three. Footsteps onto the kitchen tile, an opening door, the slide of a bolt, two flights of shoes on stairs, and Neil was a lone in the apartment.
He figured he was free to roam, then. The night’s standoff had ended. He got up and put on his bathrobe, no longer fascinated with nudity or seduction. Without eyes taking it in his body becomes a conveyance. His chest flat, fat sitting lazy at his sides, his eyes blacker than brown, nearly one brow if not for diligence. He felt done with it for the night, until Adrian would come home, probably to bed, to sleep soundly, solidly, obliviously. He pulled the door open and a balloon of cold air compacted the last two hours back into the bathroom’s corners. He found that the rooms ahead were completely dark. He stepped out of the bathroom light’s dim square reach and felt his way by wall and furniture, annoyed, shivering, through the bedroom and to the living room light switch.
A white rectangle on the floor. A letter.
The neatly stapled pages explained 5 years of… Neil read the final line: Don’t confuse my intensity with yours.
Chopin scratches at the bathroom door, which is so normal. Neil gets the sensation that the cat has woken from some supernatural episode of sagacity, and is now a pet once more. He listens to the treading for some time, letting it evoke reality, breaking the bathroom’s seal.
He lights the bedroom brightly and gets dressed, avoiding the small framed mirror mounted above the light switch, the only other mirror outside the bathroom. He pets the cat between feeling for shoes beneath the bed, ironing three shirts indecisively, digging through his drawer for a condom. Everything where it is every night, like a sequel. He brightens the living room and shuffles away a few stray, dusty objects that make the large place look untidy. He drinks half a glass of water from a plastic cup and props it between the spokes of the empty dishwasher rack, then walks to the living room and sits on a couch that creaks a little. He waits for his friends to knock at the door. New friends who hardly know him, who sit around him in class, who made plans for tonight and worked him in with excited courtesy. He tries pressing folds out of his black pants, and the smooth creases divide and stretch. Chopin walks out of the bedroom and curls up on a nearby chair. After 45 silent minutes, Neil falls asleep, lights on in every room, chin against his ironed shirt.
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