Coalescence

The black cocktail dress I bought her for her birthday hung in a lonely way. A spackling of dust coated its neckline and bulges from its wire hanger were beginning to protrude at the shoulders. The garment was exquisite, classy, tasteful. Yet there it hung, neglected from day one simply because it had the misfortune of being the wrong exquisite, classy, tasteful cocktail dress. Indeed, in my haste to procure for my wife her most desired item, I overlooked the ostensibly most important criteria: the designer.

“This isn’t Givenchy,” she whimpered when I presented her her dress. Then she glared at the label before lamenting: “It’s Chanel.” To me the issue was negligible, even laughable – hardly an issue at all. But to her, on this special occasion, my opinion on the matter mattered not. Because I did not understand her fixation with the black Givenchy cocktail dress, I felt it best to remain silent and allow her to fret. This is what I did.

“I’m sorry,” she eventually said in a calm manner. “It just has to be Givenchy.” Then she handed me the dress and descended the stairs to the living room. I thought briefly of returning the dress to the boutique from which I bought it. But pride got the better of me. So I cleared space in the bedroom closet and hung the dress among countless other black cocktail dresses. Perhaps next year, thought I, pulling the closet door shut.

Next year never came. We divorced four months after the Chanel incident. And while I would have liked to think that the dress had nothing to do with our inability to reconcile, when she moved out, she left the black Chanel behind. She left also a note that read only this: “One day you’ll understand. And then you’ll understand women.” I threw the note in the garbage but left the dress hanging on her side of the half-empty closet.

I was lonely, like the dress. And I began talking to it, explaining to it my sorrows, fears, failed ambitions. I asked it why she left. I asked it what was so great about a Givenchy dress anyway.

The dress never answered of course, but when the bedroom window was open it did sway a little in the breeze. The dress and I grew old together, grew vintage together. I refused to meet women because I still did not understand the import of my failure. Therefore, I presumed that I did not understand women.

Then one day, without the slightest warning, I fell in love. Lithe and graceful, yet intimidating and assertive she exuded an aura of dark sophistication that I found irresistible. I thought of the dress, its classic silhouette immune to the fits and starts of fashion. I imagined her wearing it. Then I imagined her stepping out of it.

On our fifth date I asked her to marry me. She agreed, and my long period of loneliness came to an end. I didn’t dare mention the dress, afraid I was of being rejected because of it. But she was a reasonable sort, and this put my heart at ease. We started blowing coke, drinking heavily, and abusing amphetamines. The two of us found a twisted equilibrium in this cornucopia of self-destruction. We would get ourselves high on drugs and delve into our fears and anxieties. It was thus only a matter of time before the topic of the dress. When I broached the issue, she listened with much compassion. Then she spoke: “I would love to wear the Chanel, K.” I smiled, and she continued: “Women love the Givenchy because of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Every girl simply dreams of being Holly Golightly. They get very upset when that dream doesn’t come true.” As she spoke, I thought back to my ex-wife’s mild obsession with Audrey Hepburn and it all seemed to make sense. How stupid I had been.

That night, my fiancé put the dress on. For my part, I wore my best suit, and we stayed awake all night long, blowing more coke in the kitchen and exchanging stories. Then we danced slowly and romantically. The dress, once a hallmark of my failures as a man was now transformed into an expression of masculine success.

And so I bought her more and more cocktail dresses. At least twice a week I returned home with a new one tucked under my arm. We would blow coke and dance romantically; this was our ritual. Our closet bulged; I moved my garments to the little guest bedroom closet to make room for my fiancé’s expanding wardrobe. One day when she was out, I counted the number of dresses: 132. When she got home I made a bold promise: “Your next dress will be the Givenchy.”

I didn’t get the chance. Three days later she died in a car accident and I was left with a room full
of size zero black cocktail dresses. After the funeral I shut myself up in the closet and took in the
sea of black. “What am I to do with all of these,” thought I. These dresses had once clung to my
fiancé’s body, which had endowed them with the warm breath of life and made them move.
Now, however, what hung before me were mere scruffy shadows, cut off from the roots of life
and steadily withering away, devoid of any meaning whatsoever.

Ten days later I placed an ad online for a female housekeeper. Against political correctness, I listed the physical specifications of the housekeeper I required: five-feet-five, size zero. One woman responded to my ad. When I interviewed her the following day, I explained: “I’ve recently lost my fiancé, and I have a huge amount of her clothing. Most of what she left is new or almost new. I would like you to wear her things as a kind of uniform while you work here. I know this must sound strange to you but, believe me, I have no ulterior motive. It’s just to give me time to get used to the idea that my fiancé is gone.”

“I think I understand,” she said. “And I think I can do what you are asking me to do. But, first, I wonder if you can show me the clothes I will have to wear.”

“Of course,” I said, and took the woman upstairs and showed her the closet. She had never seen so many dresses gathered together in a single place except in a department store. Each dress was obviously luxurious and of high quality. The taste, too, was flawless. The sight was almost blinding. The woman could hardly catch her breath. Her heart started pounding. She began crying.

The woman fled my bedroom and rushed down the stairs. “I’m sorry, K” she shrieked, “I can’t. It’s just too much to bear.” Then she left, and I found myself alone with my dead fiancé’s dresses.

I returned to the bedroom and opened the closet door. I stared at the dresses – countless flawless garments arranged just so, standing at attention as though readying for battle. Their rich blackness danced in space like dark pollen rising from evil flowers, lodging in my eyes and ears and nostrils. The frills and buttons and lace and epaulets and belts sucked greedily at the room’s air, thinning it out until I could hardly breathe. Liberal numbers of mothballs gave off a smell that might as well have been the sound of a million tiny winged insects. I hated these dresses now, it suddenly occurred to me. Slumping against the wall, I folded my arms and closed my eyes. Loneliness seeped into me once again, like a lukewarm broth.

In the end, I had a used-clothing dealer take away everything that my fiancé had left behind. The dealer gave me less than a twentieth of what I had paid for the clothes, but that hardly mattered. I would have let them go for nothing, so long as they were going to a place where I would never see them again.

Once in a while, I would go to the empty room and stay there for an hour or two, doing nothing in particular, just letting my mind go blank. I would sit on the floor and stare at the bare walls, at the shadows of my dead fiancé’s shadows. But, as the months went by, I lost the ability to recall the things that had been in the room – they became shadows in the truest sense.

Sometimes I could barely recall my fiancé’s face. What I did recall, though, was the woman, a total stranger, shedding tears in the room at the sight of the dresses that she had left behind.

I clung to her memory, whoever she was, as a life line to my fiancé’s memory.

A year went by in this way, and I gradually lost interest in the woman and what she represented. I let her slip through the cracks in my mind and with trepidation embraced the emptiness that remained.

Finding myself truly alone, I uncharacteristically set out for the cinema: a midnight showing of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.