Just a Gigolo novel

2025

novel

"On a foggy evening, the spa's outdoor hot pool steams.
The light from the park's yellow lanterns is refracted by the illumination of the blue lanterns underwater, and the evening mist and steam merge in vivid yellow-blue. Families, children and tourists bathe, many splashing the water from the spouts on their backs, jumping, laughing, splashing, pop music playing...
In the middle of the pool, a man sits up to his neck in the water, gazing at the splashing people around him. He closes his eyes, the music slowly fades out, and he switches from Bach's Suite in D major to the Air movement. The man opens his eyes cautiously: he is sitting on the lap of an old, wrinkled, loudly made-up aunt.
The heavily jeweled-armed aunt massages the man's shoulders, and he slowly looks around: the figures he saw earlier have disappeared, but scattered around him are fat, mammoth-aged uncles sitting in steaming water, and on their laps, bombshell naked young girls are hugging and kissing the old men with relish. He slowly dives from her lap under the water, where a mesmerizing mermaid in a purple glow swims past him, smiling, and reaches out her arm, but by the time he reaches her, she has disappeared.
Bubbles of air burst from his mouth, he just sinks to the bottom of the pool, and just before he runs out of air, he suddenly emerges from the tub in his own bathroom, with a momentary sigh of drowning, crawls out from under the water, and folds the shaving mirror above the sink, where he sees himself: a wrinkled old man looking back at him.... The mirror cracks."