“Holy shit,” Charlie said as he followed the old man into a walk-in closet the size of his own apartment. “I mean—your wife had exquisite taste, Mr. Mainheart.”
There was row upon row of designer couture clothing, everything from evening gowns to racks, two tiers high, of knit suits, arranged by color and level of formality—an opulent rainbow of silk and linen and wool. Cashmere sweaters, coats, capes, jackets, skirts, blouses, lingerie. The closet was shaped like a T, with a large vanity and mirror at the apex, and accessories on each wing (even the closet with wings!), shoes on one side, belts, scarves, and handbags on the other. A whole wing of shoes, Italian and French, handmade, from the skins of animals who had led happy, blemish-free lives. Full-length mirrors flanked the vanity at the end of the closet and Charlie caught the reflection of himself and Michael Mainheart in the mirror, he in his secondhand gray pinstripe and Mainheart in his ill-fitting houndstooth, studies in gray and black, stark and lifeless-looking in this vibrant garden.
The old man went to the chair at the vanity and sat down with a creak and a wheeze. “I expect it will take you some time to assess it,” he said.
Charlie stood in the middle of the closet and looked around for a second before replying. “It depends, Mr. Mainheart, on what you want to part with.”
“All of it. Every stitch. I can’t stand the feel of her in here.” His voice broke. “I want it gone.” He looked away from Charlie at the shoe wing, trying not to show that he was tearing up.
“I understand,” Charlie said, not sure what to say. This collection was completely out of his league.
“No, you don’t understand, young man. You couldn’t understand. Emily was my life. I got up in the morning for her, I went to work for her, I built a business for her. I couldn’t wait to get home at night to tell her about my day. I went to bed with her and I dreamed about her when I slept. She was my passion, my wife, my best friend, the love of my life. And one day, without warning, she was gone and my life is a void. You couldn’t possibly understand.”
But Charlie did. “Do you have any children, Mr. Mainheart?”
“Two sons. They came back for the funeral, then they went home to their own families. They offer to do whatever they can, but…”
“They can’t,” Charlie finished for him. “No one can.”
Now the old man looked up at him, his face as bereft and barren as a mummified basset hound. “I just want to die.”
“Don’t say that,” Charlie said, because that’s what you say. “That feeling will pass.” Which he said because everyone had been saying it to him. As far as he knew, he was just slinging bullshit clichés.
“She was—” Mainheart’s voice caught on the edge of a sob. A strong man, at once overcome by his grief and embarrassed that he was showing it.
“I know,” Charlie said, thinking about how Rachel still occupied that place in his heart, and when he turned in the kitchen to say something to her, and she wasn’t there, it took his breath.
“She was—”
“I know,” Charlie interrupted, trying to give the old man a pass, because he knew what Mainheart was feeling. She was meaning and order and light, and now that she’s gone, chaos falls like a dark leaden cloud.
“She was so phenomenally stupid.”
“What?” Charlie looked up so quickly he heard a vertebra pop in his neck. Hadn’t seen that coming.
“The dumb broad ate silica gel,” Mainheart said, irritated as well as agonized.
“What?” Charlie was shaking his head, as if trying to rattle something loose.
“Silica gel.”
“What?”
“Silica gel! Silica gel! Silica gel, you idiot!”
Charlie felt as if he should shout the name of some arcane stuff back at him: Well, symethicone! Symethicone! Symethicone, you butt-nugget! Instead he said, “The stuff fake breasts are made of? She ate that?” The image of a well-dressed older woman macking on a goopish spoonful of artificial boob spooge was running across the lobes of his brain like a stuttering nightmare.
Mainheart pushed himself to his feet on the vanity. “No, the little packets of stuff they pack in with electronic equipment and cameras.”
“The ‘Do Not Eat’ stuff?”
“Exactly.”
“But it says right on the packet—she ate that?”
“Yes. The furrier put packets of it in with her furs when he installed that cabinet.” Mainheart pointed.
Charlie turned, and behind the large closet door where they had entered was a lighted glass cabinet—inside hung a dozen or so fur coats. The cabinet probably had its own air-conditioning unit to control the humidity, but that wasn’t what Charlie was noticing. Even under the recessed fluorescent light inside the cabinet, one of the coats was clearly glowing red and pulsating. He turned back to Mainheart slowly, trying not to overreact, not sure, in fact, what would constitute an overreaction in this case, so he tried to sound calm, but not willing to take any shit.
“Mr. Mainheart, I appreciate your loss, but is there something more going on here than you’ve told me?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean.”
“I mean,” Charlie said, “why, of all the used-clothing dealers in the Bay Area, did you decide to call me? There are people who are much more qualified to deal with a collection of this size and quality.” Charlie stormed over to the fur cabinet and pulled open the door. It made a floof-tha sound that the seal on a refrigerator door makes when opened. He grabbed the glowing jacket—fox fur, it appeared to be. “Or was it this? Did the call have something to do with this?” Charlie brandished the jacket like he was holding a murder weapon before the accused. In short, he thought about adding, are you fucking with me?
“You were the first used-clothing dealer in the phone book.”
Charlie let the jacket drop. “Asher’s Secondhand?”
“Starts with an A,” Mainheart said, slowly, carefully—obviously resisting the urge to call Charlie an idiot again.
“So it has nothing to do with this jacket?”
“Well, it has something to do with that jacket. I’d like you to take it away with all the rest of it.”
“Oh,” Charlie said, trying to recover. “Mr. Mainheart, I appreciate the call, and this is certainly a beautiful collection, amazing, really, but I’m not equipped to take on this kind of inventory. And I’ll be honest with you, even though my father would be spinning in his grave for telling you this, there is probably a million dollars’ worth of clothes in this closet. Maybe more. And given the time and space to resell it, it’s probably worth a quarter of that. I just don’t have that kind of money.”
“We can work something out,” Mainheart said. “Just to get it out of the house—”
“I could take some of it on consignment, I suppose—”
“Five hundred dollars.”
“What?”
“Give me five hundred dollars and get it out of here by tomorrow and it’s yours.”
Charlie started to object, but he could feel what felt like the ghost of his father rising up to bonk him on the head with a spittoon if he didn’t stop himself. We provide a valuable service, son. We are like an orphanage to art and artifact, because we are willing to handle the unwanted, we give them value.
“I couldn’t do that, Mr. Mainheart, I feel as if I’d be taking advantage of your grief.”
Oh for Christ’s sake, you fucking loser, you are no son of mine. I have no son. Was that the ghost of Charlie’s father, rattling chains in his head? Why, then, did it have the voice and vocabulary of Lily? Can a conscience be greedy?