He surveyed the room once more with new, guilty eyes. With his mysterious hours and lack of visible friends and family, Louis still felt that he needed to display the cautious behavior of a new tenant. The last thing he needed was to be accused of anything indecent. Maybe the owner wrote their name on the tag? No such luck.
Louis held up the silky number up to the basement lightbulb with two hands in the way that he examined driver’s licenses and hundred dollar bills at work. No housewife would be caught dead in this red fishing line, at least in any sitcom he knew. Even after running through the hot wash with his jeans and other non-Hawaiian shirts, its sheen was otherworldly. No housewife, perhaps with the one exception of Jeannie. That’s right, it would take a supernatural TV homemaker to deal with his moods as well as maintain a modicum of sex in her wardrobe.
He had known a Jeannie once, a girlfriend of a roommate. On the weekends, she visited from a world outside the college where, supposedly, she was learning things as well. Once, during the heat of finals, Jeannie offered to do their laundry as a favor. It was as much a favor to her own nose as to them, she explained. Going up and down from their apartment to the community laundry room, she worked silently and looked at peace.
Louis thumbed the lacy collar of the red silk, not able to recall the song Jeannie had half sung that afternoon while working so hard for them. Something cleverly appropriate, about men and laundry. It was the first time he’d ever wanted to seduce a taken girl. With a girl like Jeannie, who once in a while was willing to stoop down to stereotype - do your clothes, cook your meals, out of love - something would happen. The seats in the vacant cars that he valeted wouldn’t seem so large.
The front door buzzer to the building sounded. Silence was everywhere in the building. Somebody usually answered from the safety of their apartment. Nobody really was home.
It was custom to place lost garments in a grocery bag and leave it for its fretful owner to find on top of the drier. He counted the hours left until his next shift: ten. He had a little less a half a day to put this underwear in a bag and return to his apartment.
He tossed it in the air as a pizza pie. The pizza pie glistened velvet and spoke to him wildly. He spun it, oscillating around his finger, a frisbee in suspension. Underarmed and under the leg, the now balled up silk went and his sneakers scuffed against the pavement as in a game of pick-up. The straps went through his arms and created a mini slingshot in the valley of his back. When he wore it, he wore it the wrong way. He took off his striped pajamas and wore them authentically. In the bubbled glass of the window he was a male stripper gone funhouse. He did squats to make his red silk crotch reach his chin in the reflection. There was no stopping him. He had ten hours and that time and money was his alone.
