The Last Dress

My apartment got too quiet after my roommate Gary moved out. Not quiet like peaceful. Quiet like you can hear the refrigerator hum and your own swallowing. I came home from work in October and stood in the living room and realized nobody was going to walk out of the kitchen and ask what I wanted for dinner.

So I started staying late at the firm. Twelve hour days. Fourteen, some weeks. I told myself it was the Anderson case. It was not the Anderson case. I am thirty-four years old and I was hiding from an empty living room, and I knew it, and I did it anyway.

There was another reason I liked the empty office, but that one I did not say out loud, not even to myself. Not for a long time.

Here is the thing about me, the thing this story is about. When I am alone, when the door is locked and the blinds are down, I like wearing women's clothes. Not a kink thing, or not only that. It started four years ago with a pair of tights I bought on a dare to myself, and it turned into a whole quiet life I kept folded in a duffel bag under my bed. A few dresses. A wig I paid too much for. Makeup I taught myself to apply from videos at two in the morning.

Nobody knew. Not Gary, not my brother, not Deidre.

Especially not Deidre.

* * *

Deidre and I met three years ago at a paralegal mixer, which sounds like the most boring sentence in the world, and it was, until she sat down next to me and said the caterer had clearly never tasted his own hummus. We talked for two hours. She was thirty-three then, and now she's thirty-six, senior paralegal, sharper than half the associates and paid worse than all of them. My last serious girlfriend had moved to Denver around the same time, and Deidre kind of filled the hole she left. Not romantic. Never romantic. She was the person I texted when my car died and the person who brought me soup when I had the flu and the person who knew I hated my birthday and threw me a small one anyway.

We had never talked about the duffel bag. She did not know it existed.

That Saturday I was at my desk at six in the evening, cleaning out my inbox because the apartment was empty and the inbox was not, when my phone buzzed.

Deidre: conference room. Now. Bring nothing.

I stared at it. She was still in the building somewhere, which was unusual for a Saturday. Usually she was the first one out the door on weekends, with a guilt-free conscience I admired.

I walked down the hall. The carpet is gray and old and the copy machine hums in the corner like it always does, even when nobody is using it. The conference room blinds were half drawn. The light inside was the bad fluorescent kind.

She was standing at the head of the table with a tote bag as big as a small dog.

"You're still here," I said.

"I could say the same." She had that look she gets before she delivers bad news to an associate. Braced. "Sit down."

"I'll stand."

"Fine, stand. Javier." She breathed out. "I've been holding onto something for a couple of months. Since August, actually. And I keep chickening out, and I decided if I chickened out today I was going to throw it in the river."

"You're pregnant," I said, because my brain goes to the worst option first.

"What? No. God!" She laughed, short. Then she reached into the tote and pulled out a garment bag. Navy, long zipper, dry cleaner's tag still on the hanger hook. "I bought this in August. I've moved it from my closet to my car and from my car back to my closet about nine times."

"Okay," I said. "A dress."

"It's not for me."

I did not say anything. My heart was doing something I did not appreciate.

She unzipped the bag. It was a dark blue dress, long, simple, the kind of thing that looks plain on a hanger and expensive on a person. She held it up by the shoulders and looked at me the way she looks at opposing counsel when they've made a mistake and she's deciding whether to be kind about it.

"I bought it for you," she said.

The copy machine hummed. Somebody's door chime went off in the empty lobby, one floor down, probably just the HVAC.

"How," I said. My voice came out weird. "How long have you known."

She set the dress down flat on the table, careful, like a deposition exhibit. "Remember the holiday party two years ago? You left early. Said you had a migraine. I forgot my scarf in the coat room and went back for it, and you were in the stairwell." She paused. "You were on the phone with nobody. You were adjusting a wig in your phone camera."

"Jesus!"

"I didn't say anything. It wasn't mine to say." She shrugged, but her ears were red. "Then in August I saw this dress in a window and I just. Bought it. Like an idiot. And I've been carrying it around like an idiot ever since, because I didn't know how to say, hey, I know your secret, also I bought you a dress, also I don't think it's weird, also can I see?"

"You don't think it's weird."

"Do you think it's weird?"

I thought about the duffel bag. Four years of it. The videos at two a.m. The way I'd felt in the stairwell, caught, like the floor had opened. "I think it's the thing I've been most afraid of anyone finding out," I said. "For most of my adult life."

"Well." She smoothed the dress with one hand. "Now one person has found out, and she brought you a size twelve in your color, and the building is empty, and nobody is going to walk in on a Saturday. So."

"So."

"So do you want to try it on, or do you want to go home to your quiet apartment and pretend this didn't happen?"

I looked at the dress. Dark blue. My color, actually, which she'd have known from the shirts I wore every day for three years. My hands were sweating.

"Yes," I said. "Okay. Yes!"

"The men's room is down the hall," she said, and her voice went softer than I'd ever heard it. "Take your time."

* * *

The men's room smelled like industrial lemon cleaner. I locked the door and stood there for a minute with the garment bag hooked on the stall door, breathing.

I had done this a hundred times alone. It had never once felt like this. This felt like walking out onto a stage with the lights still down.

I took my clothes off and folded them on the counter. The dress came off the hanger and the fabric was cool against my skin, that slick heavy kind of fabric that settles on you instead of sitting on you. I worked it up over my hips. It fit. Of course it fit, she'd clearly done recon on my sizes like the terrifyingly competent professional she was, and it fit through the shoulders and the waist and the length was right and I stood there in the bad fluorescent light looking at myself in the mirror and my eyes got hot, which was stupid, which I let happen anyway.

I looked good. That was the part that got me. Not dressed up, not playing a part. Good.

I checked the wig situation, decided no, no wig tonight, my own short hair, and unlatched the door.