Entry #27: Lip Service
❓❓He asked what turns me on. He wasn't really listening for the answer. 🙉 🙉 *******
I haven’t posted in more than 2 months.
I spent the time clearing every storage space in the apartment. Kitchen cupboards full of equipment that stopped being useful after Crown Street: a wok, a rice cooker, a mandoline still in its box, bought with full intention and never used once. This open-plan setup has poor ventilation, and I stopped cooking the way I used to. The equipment stayed anyway.
The wok is going to the Salvos on Thursday.
Papers that should have been shredded in 2014 were still sitting in a filing cabinet drawer. Bank statements. Old leases. A warranty card for a phone that has been landfill since Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, then Kevin Rudd again.
Then the wardrobe.
Most of the everyday clothes went to Salvos. The decent lingerie too. A small collection of clothes worth selling went onto eBay. Pristine pieces from another era, the kind that disappear into storage and emerge years later fashionable again. I could wear all of them tomorrow and look completely current. I listed them anyway. The window existed. I was busy. Next.
The old sex toys went to landfill. Some things cannot re-enter civilian society. They had sung their swan songs years ago, the castrati of a production that closed long ago.
Objects survive the personality that bought them.
Then I found the toolbox.
A fully functional household toolbox: hammer, drill, assorted screwdrivers, and an entire tray of screws sorted by type and diameter. I know this because I read the labels. I have owned this toolbox for years. I must have opened it before. I could not have told you what was in it.
This reminded me of the afternoon I went to Bunnings to buy nails and a hammer.
I knew what nails were. I knew what a hammer was. That was approximately where my hardware knowledge peaked.
The tradies moved through the aisles with that quiet, focused certainty I always notice. An entire wall of screws. Different heads, different lengths, different purposes. I had no idea where to begin.
A mature Bunnings worker appeared at my elbow. The kind who has seen this before and does not make you feel stupid for it. He asked what I was trying to hang. He asked what kind of wall I had. I did not know walls had kinds. He explained drilling, wall anchors, rawlplugs, and several other things I had not planned to need but apparently did.
By the end I had gone in for two objects and come out with a complete household toolkit, because if a first-aid kit belongs in a home, apparently so does a small hardware one.
I brought the whole kit home, watched a couple of YouTube tutorials, and decided the mirrors could wait.
The mirrors are still on the floor.
Then I found the finger cots.
A whole box, pristine, forgotten at the back of a drawer. I graduated to full gloves some time ago, which are cleaner, faster, and considerably easier to remove when the situation requires efficiency. The finger cots belonged to an earlier version of the job.
So did some of the lingerie, the costumes, the uniforms, the fantasy outfits. Things I would never have bought for myself but did, because somebody’s brief required lace, satin, a nurse, a schoolgirl, or whatever his imagination had decided that particular week.
Before deposits, bookings came with their own small chaos. A man could spend days in contact: emails first, then texts, then a phone call to clarify, then more texts adding things, changing things, specifying the colour, the shoes, the stockings, the lipstick, the precise mood he wanted from the afternoon.
The brief grew with every message. By the end he had constructed something elaborate, detailed, and entirely his.
Then he would find a reason not to come.
Sometimes the day before. Sometimes an hour before. Sometimes there was an excuse. Sometimes there was only silence where confirmation should have been. The excuse varied. The pattern did not.
The fantasy had exhausted him before he even arrived.
Not all of them were outfit men. But the ones who were specific were very specific.
Combinations assembled like competing governments forced into coalition. Lace with suspenders, thigh-high stockings, and then thigh-high boots on top. I will note for the record that suspenders exist to hold stockings up, and that thigh-high boots make that entire structural project redundant. What he had requested was a solution to a problem he had already eliminated. An outfit that argued with itself from the waist down.
The most ambitious brief specified a white bridal corset paired with black leather thigh-high boots. No explanation offered. No acknowledgment that these two items had never previously appeared in the same sentence outside of a very specific fancy dress competition, or a hen’s party that took a wrong turn somewhere around the second venue.
Standing in the combination he had requested, suspenders arguing with boots, stockings redundant under both, I had a brief Pauline Hanson moment.
“Please explain…?”
Not to him.
To the outfit.
The outfit did not respond.
I wore it anyway.
The heels were his specification. The kind that require advance notice, core strength, and a written agreement with your physiotherapist.
Not Manolo.
Not Jimmy Choo.
Not even the same fantasy twice.
The shoes stood by the bed for two hours. They had a better evening than I did.
This was before deposits. Before I understood that a long list is not the same thing as commitment, or that a man who has opinions about stocking denier will not necessarily appear to inspect them.
I implemented the deposit policy. Not because of him specifically. Because of the pattern he was part of.
Clients arrive in different ways.
Some arrive with lists. Funky lists. Occasionally ambitious. Always entirely his.
Some ask before they arrive, in the middle of all that briefing, as if my answer might be added to the document.
Some ask face to face.
Some say it turns them on when they please me.
Some do not ask at all, but proceed as though my pleasure is whatever they have decided it should be.
A few are genuinely curious.
Most want confirmation.
I tell them. Directly. Not that. I don’t enjoy that.
They nod like they heard me.
Then they do it anyway.
Rough bare fingers with jagged nails heading somewhere they were told not to go.
Why ask if the answer is optional?
Last week I stopped for brunch on a Saturday. A young waiter with a Sicilian accent asked if I wanted a coffee first.
I did.
He brought it over and came back a few minutes later.
“Ready to order?”
Some accents do that before the face even finishes arriving.
“The big breakfast…” I said,
…”Eggs?”…
“On my face, please…”, I set my coffee down, and watched.
“And the sausages…”, I added before he had finished processing the first answer… :
“Dry.”
For a few seconds I could see the machinery working behind his eyes. A blink. Another blink. The brief expression of a man trying to connect several dots that had absolutely no business being connected on a Saturday morning.
Somewhere between Sydney and Palermo, he came back online.
Then I gave him the real order:
“Sunny-side up. Toast. Another Coffee.”
He wrote it down and disappeared.
A little later he returned, set the plate down with a grin that told me he had arrived at the joke somewhere between the kitchen and the table.
“Enjoy, signora. And if you need anything else.”
He let the sentence finish itself.
********
The pile is still there. Not landfill. Not Salvos. Not eBay. I put it in a box so the apartment stays tidy, but the box itself is still waiting for judgement. Some of it might be another toolbox. Some of it might be another wok. I haven’t worked out which is which yet.
The wok is still going to the Salvos on Thursday.
The pile is still on the floor.
__________
Gina
That cafe order........very cryptic Azura. Was a seductive smile exchanged with his grin? I'm still trying to guess your poolside holiday pic from a while ago! Love your thoughtful blogs.