I had opened the obvious drawer, the top drawer of the room's only dresser, and found myself gazing into a masculine cache of compressed, crumpled things. Wash-worn Brooks Brothers white cotton shorts now a pale shade of gray. Snake-tangled, unpaired argyle socks, all in bright Easter colors like clover ad mauve which still showed fairly crisp near the tops, but down toward the heels were marred by thread pills and snags, and at the toes by the outright abjection of holes. To see laid bare in their entirety those socks, of which I'd heretofore glimpsed only brief merry stripes, when a pant cuff rose up from the rim of a shoe, was like seeing the man himself fully exposed to me--naked.

Auteur: Susan Choi