691: “I hadn’t been . . .”
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 21 begins
21
“I HADN’T been in any of the guest rooms since those nights when I had visited the place before it was finished. It was a queer feeling, to be in those rooms. It got to me. When I was in someone’s room, alone, with someone else’s aura all around me, I felt—don’t laugh at me for this—I felt influenced by the other person. I even felt attracted to—him—her. There was something about entering the room, slipping into the room, that was like putting on someone else’s clothes, even—I know this sounds mystical and spooky—but there was something I felt that was a little like trying on someone else—period.”
“Did you—like it?”
“Yes. I did. And that was not at all what I had anticipated. I had expected to find the whole experience repulsive. I mean, when I was at home and had to help my mother with the laundry, I could hardly stand to enter my brothers’ room—and the worst thing was having to touch my brothers’ clothes. Sometimes even my own dirty things disgusted me.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes. I’m tempted to say, now, that the dirt on my clothes—”
“—the exfoliated flakes of skin, the dried sweat—”
She turned the corners of her mouth down and stuck her tongue out: a comical look of repulsion, of offended sensibility. I laughed.
“I’m tempted to say,” she said, “that my own dirty clothes repulsed me because the me who was being repulsed wasn’t the me who had soiled the clothes.”
“What?”
“You heard me. I don’t know. I’m not sure about this, but it’s something I’ve begun to think about—the idea that I’ve been leaving a trail of old selves behind me, people who used to be me, strung out behind me in attitudes that are no longer mine—”
“—like pages in one of those flip books you used to get, where a little cartoon character is in a slightly different position on every page.”
“Yeah.”
“Or like people left behind at turnings in the labyrinth.”
“Yeah, that too. Anyway. I don’t want you to think that I’m getting too weird. I’m not sure that I believe what I just said. I’m still thinking about it. So. There I was, standing alone in a room that someone else had soiled. That was the way I felt about it. I thought of it as soiled, like dirty clothes. But I hadn’t anticipated that I would also find it fascinating. I hadn’t given any thought to the fact that people’s things would be there, that their lives and their selves would be so completely on display.”
She smiled. She stood. She walked to the end table and took a cigarette from her pack, lit it, took a drag.
“On display,” she said. “An interesting term. An interesting concept. It’s the backside of privacy—to be on display. That was the feeling I had about these people whose rooms I slipped in and out of, and from my point of view it was accurate. Their things and their secrets—some of their secrets anyway—were on display, for me to see. No. No. Wait. I forgot. I have to make a distinction here. For some of these people, most of them, their secrets weren’t on display, because I didn’t count as an audience. I was nobody, so nobody saw their things, so their privacy was preserved. These people would leave a great deal of themselves out and on view—and never even thought about it. They kept many things hidden, too, of course, but that was more because they thought I might steal them than because they didn’t want me to see them. If they could have been sure that I wouldn’t take anything, they probably would have left everything out, where they could see it, where I could see it. Then there was another group. They surprised me. Perhaps they won’t surprise you. These were the people who left things out so that I would see them.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes. Women who would lay their best dress out on the bed for the maid to see. Men who left their underwear lying on a chair for the cute little maid to see. Men who would leave a package of condoms on the bedside table for the maid to see. But I don’t want to talk about that now. Let me save it for later, if I get to it at all. I want to go back to that first day, the first time that I was in one of the guests’ rooms, alone.”
[to be continued]
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