The image of a cleanly, self-possessed man exploiting his solitude was not easy to come by, but then he had not expected that it would be. On the next night, he practiced the two-part variations until eleven. On the night after that, he got out his telescope. He had been unable to solve the problem of feeding himself, and in the space of a week had lost more than fifteen pounds. His trousers, when he belted them in around his middle, gathered in folds like a shirt. He took three pairs of trousers down to the dry cleaner’s in the village. It was past closing time, but the proprietor was still there, a man crushed by life. He had torn Mrs. Hazelton’s lace pillowcases and lost Mr. Fitch’s silk shirts. His equipment was in hock, the union wanted health insurance, and everything that he ate?even yoghurt?seemed to turn to fire in his esophagus. He spoke despairingly to Mr. Estabrook. “We don’t keep a tailor on the premises no more, but there’s a woman up on Maple Avenue who does alterations. Mrs. Zagreb. It’s at the corner of Maple Avenue and Clinton Street. There’s a sign in the window.”
It was a dark night and that time of year when there are many fireflies. Maple Avenue was what it claimed to be, and the dense foliage doubled the darkness on the street. The house on the corner was frame, with a porch. The maples were so thick there that no grass grew on the lawn. There was a Sign?ALTERATIONS?in the window. He rang a bell. “Just a minute,” someone called. The voice was strong and gay. A woman opened the door with one hand, rubbing a towel in her dark hair with the other. She seemed surprised to see him. “Come in,” she said, “come in. I’ve just washed my hair.” There was a small hall, and he followed her through this into a small living room. “I have some trousers that I want taken in,” he said. “Do you do that kind of thing?”
“I do everything,” she laughed. “But why are you losing weight? Are you on a diet?”
She had put down her towel, but she continued to shake her hair and rough it with her fingers. She moved around the room while she talked, and seemed to fill the room with restlessness?a characteristic that might have annoyed him in someone else but that in her seemed graceful, fascinating, the prompting of some inner urgency.
“I’m not dieting,” he said.
“You’re not ill?” Her concern was swift and genuine; he might have been her oldest friend.
“Oh, no. It’s just that I’ve been trying to cook for myself.”
“Oh, you poor boy,” she said. “Do you know your measurements?”
“Well, we’ll have to take them.”
Moving, stirring the air and shaking her hair, she crossed the room and got a yellow tape measure from a drawer. In order to measure his waist she had to put her hands under his jacket?a gesture that seemed amorous. When the measure was around his waist, he put his arms around her waist and thrust himself against her. She merely laughed and shook her hair. Then she pushed him away lightly, much more like a promise than a rebuff. “Oh, no,” she said, “not tonight, not tonight, my dear.” She crossed the room and faced him from there. Her face was tender, and darkened with indecision, but when he came toward her she hung her head, shook it vigorously. “No, no, no,” she said. “Not tonight. Please.”
“But I can see you again?”
“Of course, but not tonight.” She crossed the room and laid her hand against his cheek. “Now, you go,” she said, “and I’ll call you. You’re very nice, but now you go.”
He stumbled out of the door, stunned but feeling wonderfully important. He had been in the room three minutes, four at the most, and what had there been between them, this instantaneous recognition of their fitness as lovers? He had been excited when he first saw her?had been excited by her strong, gay voice. Why had they been able to move so effortlessly, so directly toward one another? And where was his sense of good and evil, his passionate desire to be worthy, manly, and, within his vows, chaste? He was a member of the Church of Christ, he was a member of the vestry, a devout and habitual communicant, sincerely sworn to defend the articles of faith. He had already committed a mortal sin. But driving under the maples and through the summer night, he could not, under the most intense examination, find anything in his instincts but goodness and magnanimity and a much enlarged sense of the world. He struggled with some scrambled eggs, practiced the variations, and tried to sleep. “O, marito in Cittr!”
It was the memory of Mrs. Zagreb’s front that tormented him. Its softness and fragrance seemed to hang in the air while he waited for sleep, it followed into his dreams, and when he woke his face seemed buried in Mrs. Zagreb’s front, glistening like marble and tasting to his thirsty lips as various and soft as the airs of a summer night.
In the morning, he took a cold shower, but Mrs. Zagreb’s front seemed merely to wait outside the shower curtain. It rested against his cheek as he drove to the train, read over his shoulder as he rode the eight- thirty-three, jiggled along with him through the shuttle and the downtown train, and haunted him through the business day. He thought he was going mad. As soon as he got home, he looked up her number in the Social Register that his wife kept by the telephone. This was a mistake, of course, but he found her number in a local directory and called her. “Your trousers are ready,” she said. “You can come and get them whenever you want. Now, if you’d like.”
She called for him to come in. He found her in the living room, and she handed him his trousers. Then he was shy and wondered if he hadn’t invented the night before. Here, with his shyness, was the truth, and all the rest had been imagining. Here was a widowed seamstress handing some trousers to a lonely man, no longer young, in a frame house that needed paint on Maple Avenue. The world was ruled by common sense, legitimate passions, and articles of faith. She shook her head. This then was a mannerism and had nothing to do with washing her hair. She pushed it off her forehead; ran her fingers through the dark curls. “If you have time for a drink,” she said, “there’s everything in the kitchen.”
