Audition by Kitamura Katie

Author:Kitamura,Katie [Kitamura, Katie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000 Fiction / General
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 2025-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

8

XAVIER’S ROOM WAS FILLED WITH RANDOM CLUTTER that had accumulated over the years, objects that I couldn’t remember acquiring and that had no obvious source. It now seemed odd to me, that we had taken our son’s bedroom and so briskly converted it into what was essentially a spare bedroom, a place for visitors rather than family. What had been the hurry, when we had no need for this space, when we appeared to have used it as little more than a storeroom? Of Xavier’s old things, there was no trace, we had boxed everything away.

I spent several days preparing the room for Xavier’s arrival. I dusted and vacuumed and scrubbed, I washed the linen and made the bed. There was a bedside table and an armchair and little else, the furnishings somehow provisional. As I stood and tried to think what else he might need, I had a memory of the room in his adolescent years, a mess of dirty clothes and half-eaten sandwiches, a disorder that had irritated me to no end, but for which I now found myself nostalgic. During that period of his life, I had myself been living in too contingent a way, spendings weeks and months in interstitial spaces, too often away from home, it was the nature of the work I did. Now, I only wanted for Xavier to be comfortable, to save him from that feeling of precarity, I wanted him to feel as if he were welcome, as if there were space in the apartment for him, his presence in no way conditional.

When I was done with the bedroom I continued working, even when it was evident there was not much else to do. The apartment had never been so clean, so presentable. Like a showroom of our lives. Several times, I caught Tomas watching me as I went about the apartment, cleaning and tidying and then cleaning and tidying again. It’s Xavier, Tomas said teasingly. There’s no need to treat him like a stranger. Remember, we don’t want him to stay forever, we must not let him get too comfortable. But I brushed the comment aside, Tomas was always saying things like that, it was part of the reason why his relationship with his son was, on occasion, subject to strain.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.