Final Fitting

The last delivery of the day was a box of specialty coffee beans to some hipster place on Ninth, and I sat in my van afterward in the loading zone with the engine off, not really in a hurry to go anywhere, because the only place I had to be was Bruce's studio and going there meant facing the thing we'd been not talking about for months. I'm Rich, I'm fifty-four, I drive a delivery route for a wholesale supply company, and my partner Bruce is fifty-seven and he's leaving me in seventeen days to go teach in London, and I've known about it since April, and I still can't say the word London out loud without my chest doing something stupid.

We met eleven years ago at a dinner party our friend Isa threw, back when I was forty-three and Bruce was forty-six and still doing couture work for money instead of teaching it, and he asked me what fabric my tie was and I said polyester and he laughed so hard he had to leave the table, and that moment sealed it, eleven years of that laugh and here we are.

So I drove over to the studio, which sits above a vintage clothing store in the old downtown district that's half fancy restaurants and half empty storefronts now, and I climbed the narrow stairs with my key, and when I pushed the door open I saw Bruce exactly the way I always see him, bent over a dress form with a mouthful of pins, adjusting a gown that must have weighed forty pounds. The place was dim the way it always is, two work lamps and that one flickering bulb over the fitting platform, fabric swatches draped over every chair, half-finished gowns hanging from the ceiling rack like a bunch of ghosts at a party. The only clean spot in the whole joint was his old leather couch and the full-length mirror next to the platform, because Bruce says a man needs one clear corner of the world or he goes insane, and I guess that's true because I've never tested it.

"Hey," I said, dropping my keys in the bowl by the door. "That the Kowalski dress?"

Bruce spat the pins into his tin, which is how he says hello when he's deep in it. "It is, and before you say anything, yes, she's picking it up tomorrow morning at nine, and yes, I know it's cutting it close, and no, I don't want to hear about it."

"I wasn't going to say anything," I said, which was a lie, because I was absolutely going to say something about how the man leaves the country in three weeks and he's still taking rush jobs, but I let it go and hung up my jacket instead. He went back to pinning, and I stood there watching him work the way I've watched him work a thousand times, this gray-haired guy in his reading glasses with a measuring tape around his neck like a scarf, and my chest did the stupid thing again.

"You eat?" I asked.

"There's soup in the crockpot upstairs."

"I mean real food, Bruce."

"I had a sandwich at two," he said, not looking up. "It had arugula on it, so don't start."

I started helping him tidy, because that's our ritual, the bickering and the tidying, eleven years of me picking swatches off the floor and him telling me I'm folding them wrong and me folding them exactly the same way while he watches and sighs. I gathered pins off the carpet, which is a job I actually hate because the carpet in this place is ancient and every pin hides like a tick, and I swept a drift of thread from under the cutting table, and I carried three finished gowns on their hangers to the garment rack by the mirror. The Kowalski dress stayed on the form, all that beaded bodice catching the lamplight, and honestly it was beautiful, the kind of thing Bruce does better than anybody I've ever met, and it made me mad that some bride I've never seen gets the last great dress he'll make in this city.

"You're sulking," Bruce said without turning around.

"I'm sweeping."

"You sweep angry. Eleven years, I know your sweeps."

I threw a balled-up tissue at his back, and he caught it without looking, which is a trick he thinks is charming and I have never once told him otherwise because I'm a coward about some things. We kept working for a while, and the studio got quieter as it got cleaner, and the quiet is the part I can't handle anymore, because the quiet is where the question lives.

So I asked it. I put the broom against the wall and I said, "Are you really going?"

Bruce stopped pinning. He turned around slow and looked at me over the top of his glasses, and he didn't do the thing where a person softens it or hedges it or asks what you want to hear. He said, "Yes. I am. The residency starts the first Monday of October, the flat comes furnished, and the department has been after me for two years. I'm going, Rich."

"Three weeks," I said.

"Seventeen days," he said. "I counted."

"You counted."

"I count everything," he said, and he picked his pins back up out of the tin, one at a time, like he was deciding something about each of them. "You knew this was coming since April."

"I knew it, sure. Knowing it and it being three weeks out are different animals."

He nodded at that, because he's fair, he's always been fair, it's one of the most annoying things about him. "I know it is," he said. "I'm not pretending it's easy. I want you to tell me if you want me to turn it down."

And there it was, the thing he always offers me, and the thing I can never take, because if I told him to stay he'd stay and then in about a year he'd start looking at me the way a man who gave something up looks, and I'd rather have eleven good years and one bad month than the other arithmetic. "No," I said. "Go. Teach your fancy students your fancy pin tricks. I'm not going to be the reason you're bitter."

"You could never be the reason I'm bitter," he said. "I was bitter before you. You're the reason I'm less bitter."

I laughed at that even though my throat was tight, and he went back to the dress, and I went back to the pins, and we finished the cleanup in maybe half an hour, and then I got two beers out of the little fridge he keeps under the work table, the good local stuff he likes, and we sat down on the leather couch, which is worn soft in all the right places and has a permanent dent where Bruce always sits, so I took the other side and let my knee fall against his the way it always does.

The beer was cold and good and we were both quiet for a long stretch, just drinking and looking at the clean corner of the studio, the rack of finished gowns and the Kowalski dress standing there on its form like a guest who missed the party. I could hear the traffic down on the street, and the store below had its bell go off once, and the flickering bulb over the platform finally just died with a little tick, and Bruce said he'd replace it tomorrow, which is the kind of thing you say when there's always a tomorrow, and I turned that over in my head and decided not to say anything about it.

Here's what happened next, and I've thought about it a lot since. I put my beer down on the floor and I slid my hand over and rested it on his thigh, just my hand, nothing fancy, right on the worn fabric of his work pants about halfway up. It's not like we don't touch, we're a couple, we've been a couple for eleven years, but there's touching and there's touching, and this was the second kind, slow and deliberate, my thumb moving once along the seam. And Bruce's breath caught. I heard it, this little hitch, this tiny break in the machine of him, and he set his beer down too, careful, like the bottle might break, and he looked over at me and his eyes were shiny behind the glasses.

"Rich," he said, just my name, nothing else, the way you say a name when the rest of the sentence would hurt.

"I know," I said. "I know you're going. I heard you. I'm just sitting here with my hand on your leg."

"Well," he said, and his voice had gone rough, "don't take it away yet, then."

I didn't take it away. I moved it up an inch instead, and he closed his eyes and let out a long breath through his nose, and the dress form stood there in the dark holding a stranger's wedding gown while the two of us sat on a cracked leather couch figuring out how to spend what was left.

I kept my hand where it was, and after a minute he put his own hand over mine, not to stop me, just to hold it there, and we sat like that long enough that I could hear the furnace kick on downstairs and the pipes tick in the wall, and then he turned his head and looked at me, and I looked back, and neither of us smiled, because this wasn't a smiling kind of thing. It was more like a dare, the old kind, the kind we used to do when we were younger men, him at forty-six and me at forty-three, standing in his old apartment after Isa's dinner party, circling each other like two guys pretending they weren't about to lose a fight on purpose.

He'd looked at me exactly like that that night, chin up, jaw set, waiting to see who'd blink, and I blinked then and crossed the room, and eleven years later I wasn't going to blink now. I slid my hand higher and stood up off the couch, and I took his beer out of his hand and set it next to mine on the floor, and I took his hand and pulled him up, and he came up slow, the way a fifty-seven year old man comes up off a cracked leather couch, one knee complaining, and I walked him backward across the studio until his back hit the fitting platform and the whole wooden thing thumped against the floorboards.

"Rich," he said, and it came out low, half warning and half dare.

"Yeah," I said, and I didn't move, just stood there with my hands on either side of him on