Getting ready

I collect the keycard from the concierge and take myself upstairs. There’s a bath run, but it’s too hot. I half-empty it out and run cold in, and then go back into the bedroom to strip myself out of my traveling clothes and lay the others out on the bed, wondering how I’m going to get the really ridiculously sheer and ludicrously expensive stockings on without putting a fingernail through them. I stand in front of the mirror and clean my makeup off, and then straighten up and look at myself. Or rather, I don’t look at me, myself: I look at the body in the mirror, half-critically, and half-forgivingly, because after all, it’s the one I’ve got, and if I’m inclined to be too critical then there doesn’t seem to be much point in dressing it up in fancy stockings and taking it downstairs (and sometimes I think that the reason I stare at it at all is that I think that one day I won’t have this body, and maybe I should remember it, and be grateful).

Even with the cold water, the bath is far too hot, so I wash fast, and denude myself of all visible body hair, then rub lotion into my skin and wrap myself in a towel and contemplate the stockings again, and the fiendishly difficult catch on the garter belt on the back of my left leg. I get the stockings on without ripping them, and then have to peel them off again and back up to make sure the seams are straight. Then knickers, bra, shoes that make me want to sit down again, fast, or failing that, lie on my back with my feet in the air, and lastly a dress, not my usual black; I’m dressing to be noticed tonight. I put on my face, and I’m ready to go.

I put the keycard in my bag and shut the door behind me. It probably took about twenty minutes max, from the elevator up to the elevator down, but it seems as though it was twenty minutes of flat-out effort. I wonder if it shows, if that’s part of the charm, the effort we put in to allure when presumably we were, in ourselves, just as alluring travel-stained and tired. It doesn’t really matter, I think, as my feet remind me why I rarely wear these shoes, it’s part of the ritual – immaterial in the end if it’s for someone else’s benefit or mine; I turn up tired and end up ready