Dapper Dan Imperial Clothes
Summary: For thirty years, it's a friendship and a romance and a heartbreak. (1,575 words)
"Pick up some milk on your way home, will ya?" Kitty's voice sings out from the kitchen.
Seymour nods, not that Kitty can see him, not that she's waiting for an answer. Seymour has been bringing home the milk for thirty years. Today won't be any different. He takes his hat from the peg by the door, dons it carefully, peers into the mirror of the hall tree, straightening the hat with an almost prim attention to detail. A man can never be too careful about his appearance. That's what he's always told his customers.
Of course, this opinion is very much in the minority these days. The evidence is all around him as he walks the few blocks to work. Few men seem to bother with a hat anymore. Many crowd onto the streets with their shirtsleeves rolled up, their ties askew. Seymour averts his eyes. More and more, he prefers to live in a world that exists nowhere else but in his imagination.
He turns the corner onto the block where the store is located: Dapper Dan Imperial Clothes, named by his business partner and best friend some three decades ago.
It's raining the day the sign arrives, and the installer and the boy who's assisting him stand beneath an umbrella, eyeing the face of the building, deciding if they can go ahead or if they'll have to come back the next day.
Seymour steals a look beneath the protective blanket in the back of the delivery truck and frowns. "I thought we agreed — Who the heck is Dan?"
Milton laughs. "Nobody. Everybody. It's catchy. Seymour and Milton? Not so much.
Seymour pulls the enormous ring of keys from his pocket. It must weigh a good ten pounds. He sorts through the cascade of metal, looking for the familiar brass square-topped one that unlocks the front door. Many of the other keys fit things he doesn't own anymore: the first apartment he lived in with Kitty, his daughter Alice's skates because as an earnest nine-year-old she had insisted that only he could keep it safe, the strongbox he has never used that sits gathering dust in a closet. Some are useless in other ways, like the one that goes to the back storeroom that Seymour does his best to avoid these days.
Inside the store smells of leather and wool and talcum powder, man smells, increasingly obsolete in the world today. Seymour can feel Milton everywhere, can almost hear his voice, low and wrecked by cigarettes, the most familiar sound in the world. It's gonna be a big day for sales. I can feel it in my bones.
The store won't open for another two hours. Mickey, the morning clerk, won't arrive until nine. Seymour takes himself back to his office, puts on a pot of coffee, sits down at his desk. There is a stack of purchase orders to take care of and an even taller stack of bills. He bends his head and digs into his work, but every little while, his eyes flick up from the page to the empty desk facing his. The room sounds like emptiness, which is surprisingly loud.
"I bet I can guess your drink."
That's what Milt says the day they meet at a bar that Seymour won't remember afterward. Those heady first days, after victory is declared in the Pacific and he's shipped home, pass in a blur of relief and exhaustion and the free drinks doled out by patriotic bartenders. Milton, though, stands out sharply in Seymour's awareness, tall and dark and reed thin, more real than anything has been since Seymour got back, as if the outline of Milton's existence is drawn in extra dark.
"A Manhattan," Milton declares, as if there's no doubt in his mind, although they haven't even exchanged names yet.
"How'd you know?" Seymour asks, not just then but many times in the future.
Milton shrugs. "I just have a feeling for you somehow."
There's a framed photo on Seymour's desk: of him and his wife Kitty and their three daughters, Alice, Mary Rose and Glenda. He displays it proudly, turning it around so people can see, bragging on the girls to the salesmen and suppliers who visit the office. In the locked bottom drawer of his desk is a snapshot of him and Milton, standing in front of the store the day they opened it, their arms flung across each other's shoulders, smiling into the camera with all the bottomless optimism of young men. This he doesn't share with anyone. This belongs only to him.
The bell on the front door rings, and Mickey calls out, "Boss?"
"Back here," he answers.
Mickey appears in the doorway. "You want me to finish up in the storeroom before we open?"
Seymour nods, and Mickey heads off to work. There is a vague understanding that the storeroom is all Mickey's province now. Probably he thinks this is because of Seymour's balky back and his trick knee. Time is the most unkind thing of all. This is what you learn as you grow older.
Only two people have ever known the real reason that Seymour is skittish about the storeroom, and only one of them is still around to recall the memory.
He has been wrestling with boxes for half the afternoon and losing the battle, only barely managing to contain the string of profanity that threatens to spill out of him. There's a prickle of awareness on his skin, and he looks up to find Milton leaning casually against the door frame, watching him.
Seymour knows he looks a mess. His face feels flushed, and his hair hangs in his face, a fine sheen of perspiration broken out across his forehead. He makes a face at Milton. "Yes, I have been bested by boxes. Go on and laugh if you must, you joker."
Milton shakes his head, smiling. "Not at all. The exercise has done you good. Your eyes are bright. Your cheeks are glowing. You're..." He doesn't look away. In hindsight, Seymour will find that very brave. "Beautiful."
There's a sudden charge in the air, and the thing to do, Seymour knows, is to laugh it off. But he can't. He doesn't. "I have a feeling for you" echoes in his head.
Milton takes a step toward him and then another and another until he's right there. "Beautiful," he says again and frames Seymour's face between his hands.
The touch of lips shouldn't come as a shock. Seymour has kissed a lot of girls, a fact he is careful to keep from his wife who likes to believe that she is his first, last and only. Nothing, though, has prepared him for kissing Milton, for a pair of strong hands grasping him by the shoulders, for the rasp of a beard in sharp contrast to the softness of lips, for the taste of coffee and tobacco and desperate need.
Seymour sighs, and that lights a spark in Milton. He kisses more fiercely, his body pushing Seymour back against the cartons of linen shirts and leather shoes. For a few moments, Seymour knows what it's like to feel the play of muscle in shoulders and the torsion of hips and the skittering of a pulse, the intimate mysteries of his favorite person in the world. For a few moments, Seymour understands what the word "exquisite" means.
But it's only moments, and then the old vocabulary comes rushing back into his head with a vengeance: pansy and queer and perversion. He breaks free of Milton's embrace and takes a step backward, staring wildly, his chest rising and falling heavily with his breath. Milton studies him, a pinch between his eyebrows, and then the deepest sadness Seymour has ever seen settles into his eyes.
He nods calmly. "Of course." He reaches out his hand. Seymour can't help flinching, but Milton just lays his palm against his cheek, only for a moment and so kindly. "We won't talk about it again."
He turns slowly and goes back out to the front. Seymour is left there, more alone than he's been in his life.
Thirty years of minding the store together and sharing the same small office and entwining their lives in almost every way conceivable, and Seymour never stopped expecting Milton to break his vow of silence. He always imagined there would be another opening. A look. A touch. Something. And when it came, this time he would know what to do with it.
But the only chance he ever got was the one he threw away.
He glances up at the clock on the wall, at its white face with its black numbers, plain and strident, and sees that it's almost ten. He lets out his breath and gets to his feet and goes to open up. Not that there will be any customers waiting, but this is what he's done for thirty years. Today will be no different.
Sun slants through the glass of the front door. Seymour turns the sign to "Open." On his way back to the register, he swears he catches the overripe scent of lilies, can feel himself choking on the thick cloy of incense. The priest's voice, too high and scratchy, plays in his head: We must not fear for the dead or grieve on their account. They have no trials. They endure no pain or want. The dead have nothing left to regret.
Seymour takes his place behind the counter to begin another business day, all too painfully aware that regret is the job of the living.
