Over a Shirt

It was Friday. Payday. So Paul Dent said suddenly to his friend Patrick Bowles, “Let’s go to Wolf & Son’s before it closes.”

They were leaving the office where they worked together. They came right out onto the sidewalk.

Patrick made an ugly face. “What for?”

“I feel like I want to get some socks. Or maybe a shirt.”

“From Wolf & Son’s?” Patrick knew the place. It was a downtown clothier where a middle-aged man in a blazer met you at the door and led you around to look at chunky sweaters and opulent silk ties on plinths. Everything was wood-paneled and polished like the admiral’s quarters on a ship and designed to tickle a rich Dukeport man’s sense of being a gentleman. “Why?”

Paul pulled at the buttoned front of the shirt he was wearing. It bunched up with too much fabric over his chest and lay crooked over his shoulders. “They have such nice shirts there. Everything is so good in that store.” Paul suspected that truly successful men bought every stitch of their clothes from shops like that. Even common jeans and t-shirts could be the raiments of secure, well-provided living. Paul saw these people going in and out of the beautiful, modern lobbies of high-rise apartment buildings. They disrupted traffic when they jumped out of their polished cars on Peyton avenue in the business district. Paul went to Wolf & Son’s to claim that envied life one article at a time. He wanted to live in such a way that nothing he touched could be cheap. “I was in there last month and they sold me this shirt…it was the last one they had and they only had it in a large.”

“You bought a shirt that was too big for you?”

“No, because they offered to have it altered for me. Their man came out of the back with a tape measure and he measured my arms and down to my waist. Everything. And they tailored it to fit me.”

“Free of charge?”

“Well, no. I mean I had to pay for the tailoring. So it would fit more perfectly.” Paul felt insecure suddenly. Was he a fool or would his friend admire his willingness to pay extra for good taste. Were they both the same in the end?

Patrick was about to laugh. “So you paid more over the top to make a shirt right that didn’t fit you in the first place?” But then he stopped himself. Patrick had been going into stores like that since he was a boy. His mother would pick him out a lambswool sweater or a knitted vest and he’d march out of the dressing room with it over his school uniform. Then she would pull at the shoulders and say things like, “We don’t do polyester,” and “Those pants make you look like a coal miner.” It was years before he understood how silly her little rules were and years more trying to undo all the sneaky prejudices they had laced him with.

When Patrick thought of Wolf & Son’s he thought of an elderly couple he’d seen there one afternoon. The man was browsing through a rack of wool jackets on polished-wood hangers and his wife, bony and fierce-looking with a perfect white bob, stood across the floor with two ties in her hand.

She called him. “Reggie? Look.”

He murmured something but didn’t turn from the jackets.

“Reginald!” She called as sharply as a nanny. “Come here.”

And the man looked at her like he would hang her with one of those ties, but he went. Patrick knew well that the rich grow a strange contempt for one another. They recognize that the money alone doesn’t make a person good or even admirable. Then they surround themselves with spouses and children and mistresses and assistants and servants who all play a cruel game, daring each other every day to admit the secret.

But Patrick’s hang-ups were his own and he could do better than to put them on his friend. If Paul could be proud of the things for sale at Wolf & Son’s then he was the kind of customer the store deserved, a working, aspiring, appreciative, young man. He should have a whole closet of beautiful shirts if he wanted them. Patrick ceded to his old discerning habits and examined his friend critically. Yes, Paul could use some help in the shirt department. “Well, if you like what they have there we can go get you some others. Shirts with a flattering cut, so you can toss that one.”

“What do you mean?”

“That shirt you’re wearing? The collar hangs around your neck. It’s huge. Proportions are the most important thing. They’ll tell you that when you buy it. You need something tighter. You couldn’t even give it to them to fix. A tailor can’t do much about a collar. How did the one they altered for you turn out?”

Paul turned red. “What the hell do you mean? This is it!”