Unpacking Victoria

Dalton Reyes was thirty-two years old, and he had moved into the Cedar Court garden apartments for one reason, and the reason was petty. He knew it was petty. He had made peace with it somewhere around the third hour of driving a rented box truck through traffic on a Tuesday.

The reason was Samantha Bishop.

They had dated for two years, from when he was twenty-eight to when he was thirty, and he had thought it was going somewhere. She was a freelance stylist, the kind who knew every sample sale in the city and could talk a showroom manager into giving her the good stuff off the top shelf. She was funny in a dry way and ambitious in a way that had looked, at first, like it matched his own. Then a client, some finance guy with a boat and a wardrobe budget, offered her a better life, and she took it. Not just the client. The client's circle, the client's parties, the client's whole orbit. She ended things with Dalton on a Thursday, over the phone, in about four minutes, and by the following spring she was in the background of photographs at events he was not invited to, looking like she had never known him at all.

That was two years ago now. He had done the reasonable thing for a while. He had grieved, or whatever the word was. He had gone to therapy for a year and paid a lot of money to a woman with a soft voice to tell him that living well was the best revenge, which was the kind of thing people said when they did not have a plan.

Then, in the spring, he had heard through a coworker of a coworker that Samantha had moved into a certain part of town, and that her new social circle ran through a certain set of coffee shops and wine bars, and that some of the people in that circle lived in and around a certain 1970s-era garden apartment complex on the outskirts of the city, the kind with carports and a shared laundry room and a pool nobody maintained properly. The rent was cheap. The location was four minutes from her favorite brunch place. Dalton signed a lease on a one-bedroom unit the following week.

The plan, such as it was, was simple and small. He would live there. He would become a normal, friendly neighbor. Eventually, through the thin walls and the parking lot conversations and the laundry room, he would hear things. Things about Samantha. The word he used to himself, when he used a word at all, was dirt. He did not have a specific idea of what he would do with the dirt once he had it. He told himself that was a detail for later.

So he had spent the last week unpacking boxes in a small apartment that smelled like cardboard, with a mattress on the floor still in its plastic wrap, and a kitchen where the only working item was a coffee maker he had found in a box labeled MISC in his own handwriting.

It was on a Saturday morning, in the middle of all this, that he met the neighbor.

He was carrying a box of books down to his unit when he saw a woman in the hallway outside the unit next to his, wrestling with a box that was clearly too heavy for her. She had it half lifted, pinned against her hip, and she was doing the thing people do where they try to shift their grip without putting it down and failing at it. She was thirty-two, maybe, he would find out later exactly thirty-two, with dark hair pinned up off her neck, and she was wearing cutoff shorts and a tank top, which made sense because the building had no central air and the hallway was warm.

What did not make sense, or rather what made total sense but stuck in his eye anyway, was that under the shorts she was wearing sheer black stockings. Full stockings, the kind with a visible seam at the back, ending at mid-thigh where the shorts took over. Her legs were long and the stockings caught the light from the hallway window and he caught himself staring for exactly as long as it took her to notice.

"Hi," she said, not embarrassed at all, still holding the box. "Do you live here or are you robbing the place?"

"Live here. End unit." He set his own box down on the floor. "You want a hand with that? It looks like it's winning."

"It is absolutely winning." She let it down onto the floor with a thud and shook out her arms. "I'm Victoria. Victoria Thom. I just moved in next to you, apparently. I've been here three days and everything I own is still in boxes and I've decided that's fine because at least the boxes are organized."

"Dalton Reyes." They shook hands. Her grip was firm and her palm was a little warm from the day. "I've been here a week. Everything I own is also in boxes, so we're in the same economy."

"Can I ask a huge favor? This thing is books, and I have four more just like it in the car."

So that was how Dalton Reyes, on the Saturday of a weekend he had planned to spend sorting his revenge, ended up carrying boxes of books into his neighbor's apartment. She had a unit that mirrored his, same layout, but she had already done something to hers. The walls had a fresh color on them, a green like the inside of a bottle, and the windows were open, and a fan was going in the living room. The place smelled faintly of paint.

She worked in luxury retail, she told him, at a store downtown whose name he pretended to recognize. She had ended an engagement four years ago, at twenty-eight, to a man named Jeb, after she found out he had been sitting on a pile of debt and planning to make it her pile of debt too. She said this flat, without drama, the way you describe weather you have already driven through.

"I keep the good stuff, though," she said, kneeling at a wardrobe box near the window. "He never got any of this."

The good stuff, it turned out, was a collection of vintage lingerie. She unpacked it the way other people unpack china, with both hands and a certain amount of care. Lace-trimmed slips in cream and black, folded along their seams. Garter belts, six of them at least, in a range of decades. Stockings in their original boxes, some of them, with the old brand names printed on the side.

"That's a lot of," he paused, looking for a neutral word, "fragile."

"Silk doesn't like boxes." She held one of the slips up against the light from the window, checking a seam, and he watched the lace move. "I wear most of it. It's not a museum. It just feels better than what they sell now, and I got used to it."

He thought about the stockings under the shorts in the hallway and decided not to say so. He went back to the boxes. But the picture of it stayed in his head the rest of the afternoon, and by the time he walked the twelve feet back to his own apartment, past his plastic-wrapped mattress and his labeled boxes and his quiet, reasonable little plan, he was aware that he had thought about the seam of a stocking more times that day than he had thought about Samantha Bishop.

He lay on the mattress that night and told himself the two things were unrelated.

The next Saturday it was hotter, and Dalton had learned by then that the trick to Cedar Court in summer was to do your carrying before ten in the morning and then lie still. He was on his second cup of coffee from the one working appliance in his kitchen when there was a knock, and Victoria was in the hallway holding a clipboard she did not need for anything, asking if he wanted to help her sort the last of her boxes because she had hit the point where she was just opening them and staring into them.

He said yes. He did not examine the reasons very hard.

Her apartment was already ten degrees cooler than the hallway, the fan angled just so, and the wardrobe box from the week before had been emptied and turned into a side table. She had on the shorts again, different pair, and today the stockings were a dark taupe with a pattern so faint he had to squint to decide whether it was a pattern at all. He made himself look at the clipboard instead.

The sorting was mostly her narrating and him holding things. A box labeled KITCHEN turned out to be half kitchen and half photographs, and she went through the photographs fast, flicking them onto a pile like she was dealing cards. He gathered the impression of Jeb without her saying much. A man in a boat hat at some lake. A man at a dinner table, unsmiling in the way of people who are being photographed by someone who used to love them.

"The thing about Jeb," she said, into a box, "is he wanted me comfortable. That was his word. Comfortable." She handed Dalton a stack of dinner plates wrapped in newspaper. "Comfortable meant looser. Softer. Nothing that needed a seam straightened. He told me once, and I am not inventing this, that nobody wears stockings on a Tuesday."

"Plenty of people wear stockings on a Tuesday."

"Right? I said, Jeb, I wear stockings on a Tuesday, you are literally looking at them." She took the plates back off him because he was holding them wrong. "It was never really about the stockings. It was that he had a version of me in his head and I was always drifting off of it. I dress for me now. The policy is complete. If I am the only one