Spondulix: A Romance of Hoboken by Di Filippo Paul

Author:Di Filippo, Paul [Di Filippo, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: E-Reads
Published: 2013-04-27T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Overlooking Sinatra

Rory studied himself in the steamy mirror above the bathroom sink. For once his reddish hair—unstylishly long through cosmetic inertia rather than societal rebellion—was neatly combed. Good enough. His beard, though—highly unsatisfactory and rather ragged in its outlines. Over the years the bush had crept up higher and higher on his cheekbones like kudzu. Should he just shave the damned mask off? For the thousandth time he put aside the decision (the refusal to decide, he fully realized, a decision in itself). For some formless reason he quailed at the notion of confronting his naked face. He wasn’t sure which outcome appalled him more: that his face would look the same as it had at age eighteen, when he had first adopted his beard, or that it would look totally different.

He swung the hinged mirror aside, fancifully exiling his reflection to stare at the wall, and took a razor and small scissors from the medicine-cabinet shelf. He drew new upper borders to his facial lawn with the Trac II blade and trimmed the frontiers of his furry face. Short red hairs littered the bowl of the sink like rusty iron filings on white paper. He washed the detritus down the drain with a surge of water. There, he looked as good as he ever would.

Rory walked out of the bathroom and into his bedroom to dress. He wore only a tattered time-yellowed towel around his waist. The thirty-year-old towel bore the stenciled identifier property of toronto ymca. Rory superstitiously used the souvenir only when he prepared for a date, since it reminded him of happier times: the Pantechnicon, the Baroness, Kate. He couldn’t say why he had dug out the talisman now, prior to the Outlaw Party tonight. Certainly he had no romantic plans. And yet a nebulous sentimental impulse of the heart had awakened with him this morning. Intellectually, he knew he should not allow any hopes to flourish too vigorously. Nonetheless, he couldn’t entirely suppress his sourceless elation.

In the bedroom Rory had previously laid out his clothes: Jockey shorts fresh out of the package, his best pair of Levi jeans, a clean white polo shirt unmarred by any trademark, and a crisp new pair of Gold Toe socks. Dropping his towel, Rory caught his reflection again, this time in a full-length door-mounted mirror. Why was he so self-conscious about his looks tonight? Generally he cared less than a gnat’s whisker about his looks. Living alone for so long, he had gradually lost traditional self-consciousness about his body. Yet now here he was, drawn to his reflection for the second time in as many minutes. Well, anyhow, he didn’t look so bad for a guy celebrating his fiftieth birthday tonight. (But was he indeed celebrating? All week long he had awaited hints from the various Beer Nuts he had encountered that some surprise party for him lurked in the works. But no such clues had fallen from their lips. And usually the gossipy squatters could hold a secret as well as a roomful of teenaged girls.

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