But for the life of him…
And recalled how just then Dick had honked the horn on the limo and Su’ad, glancing up toward the sound, rushed down the last of her de-raisined Raisin Bran.
“That’s my driver,” Druff had explained.
“Oh,” said Su’ad, muffled, the little face bib reattached, her lips, teeth and jaws and other private parts decent again, only the tiny strip of self between her brow and nose visible, “you have a driver. Good. I’m late for class. You can drop me off. But first we’ll have to stop by my dorm.” (Sure, Druff had thought, she has to change her chador.)
So, he thought, he’d managed to place Su’ad and his spy together, within — what? — ten or so feet of each other in the long limousine. What have we, what have we, he wondered and, when he couldn’t figure it, decided it would be a good time to break for lunch.
Stopping off first at Brooks Brothers to pick up his suit. Reminded of the errand by his driver (though he already remembered and it wasn’t necessary) as they left the office. (Well, thought Druff, what a heap of trouble it must be to know your man. Though, he thought, if they really knew me — Rose Helen; my spy guy, Dick — they could save their breath. I’m a politico. A politico never forgets a face or a chore.) And reflected on the streak — streak, hell, swath — of laziness that must line his being, recalling the spasm of irritation he always felt under the burden of such chores, his fettered, bothered spirit and all the mucked floors and clutter of his littered personal household.
His suit. His suit was an example.
Druff was a difficult fit. He’d never worn clothes well and now he felt a sort of physical disgrace whenever he saw himself in photographs. Dressed, he put himself in mind of some clumsy, human chimera — a gray, unformed behind and a slack, powerless belly and something off plumb about the shoulders that sloughed his right suspender — he called it his brassiere strap — and sent it sliding off his shoulder and halfway down inside his suit sleeve when he moved. His posture was shot. (It looked, his posture, as if it had taken a direct hit.) Well, he supposed it wasn’t his size or weight — he was lighter, even slimmer, than he’d been in years — so much as his time of life, living along the cusp of the elderly, his body abandoning itself and his chest caving and his torso sinking, lamed, skewed, going down like a ship — like a ship, yes; that was exactly the staved-in sense of himself he had — the cut of his cloth leaking lifeblood.
So how could trying on clothes be a chore he’d forget? Because they don’t know their man, Druff thought. They don’t know me, that’s why I have spies. Or maybe they know me but just can’t find me. Out here on the cusp. Between houses. My neighborhood’s changing, thought hopeless Druff.
His salesman didn’t recognize him.
“Druff?” Druff said, and spelled it for him.
“Oh yes,” said the salesman, “you’re here for the overcoat.”
“The sun is shining, I’m here for the suit.”
“Of course,” said the salesman, “I’ll see if it’s ready.”
“I called. They said it was ready,” Druff told him, already beginning to feel his strange pique and building rage, whatever the flaw was that high-horsed his character and made him unfit to hold office. Some failed democracy in him, he supposed, and understood before the man even found it and brought it out that the suit wouldn’t fit.
“Better try it on,” the salesman said, “before my tailor goes to lunch.”
Druff following him to the tiny, flimsily curtained dressing room with its hard little bench, shallow as a bookshelf, where the man handed over Druff’s purchase and left him, the venue suddenly, subtly shifted, vaguely medical now, as though Druff had been called in for devastating examinations, something unforeseen popped up in the blood, the stool. (And this, well, aura, too, like a stall in the gents’ in a restaurant. Something he couldn’t think of as private property, yet understood — from his jacket on the hook on the wall there; like some flag slammed into enemy terrain in a battle — to be his as surely as if blood had been spilled for it, the front lines of the personal here, hallowed ground for sure, if only because of the men who’d occupied it before him, but not so hallowed he didn’t resent them, their collective spoor and lingering flatulence.)
It was like dressing in a closet or an upper berth, Druff’s limbs and mood pinched, crippled, hobbled as a potato-racer’s in the close quarters.
He stared down the inside of the trousers he had just removed into a cloth scaffolding of seams and tucks, great squirreled-away swatches of excess material, some strip mine of fabric. And, as he traded pants, overheard the proprietary tone of the other customers, men — he’d seen them appraising themselves in front of the three-way mirrors as he followed the salesman to the fitting room — whose salesmen, holding jackets for them, helping them into sportswear, seemed more like trusted valets and aides than actual employees of the store.
“What do you think, Barney? Cuffs on these?”
“On crushed, distressed linen, always. That’s just my opinion, Doctor.”
“Waist thirty-six,” a second tailor said.
“Waist thirty-six for the judge,” the salesman repeated.
“The collar rides up in back too much,” said the doctor.
“I can steam that out.”
“Think you should take the shoulder pads down?”
“I’ll steam it out, I take the shoulder pads down I throw off the whole armature of the jacket.”
“You’re the doctor.”
“The doctor says I’m the doctor,” Barney said.
“Where do you want the trousers to break? Here? About here?”
“There, just above the top of my shoelaces.”
“So what do you think?”
“You’ll be wearing this at the club?”
“Sure, yes.”
“There’s dancing?”
“Some dancing, some sitting some out.”
“For some sitting some out just unbutton the jacket. For the dancing I can take a couple tucks in the left side panel.”
“Tony, you flatter me,” said a man just coming out of a changing room.
“No,” Tony said, “no.”
“No? Who am I, the Jolly Green Giant? There’s enough room in the crotch.”
Tony was furious. “That was special-ordered. Do me a favor, Mr. Gable. Talk to the store manager, lodge a complaint. Look, I’ll show you the measurements I took. There’s no relation. You see? You see these measurements? No, take it off, I don’t need to check it. I can see from here. Irreparable, irreparable. There’s no excuse. Our helpers in New York did this.”
Druff’s suit, as his heart had known in advance, did not look good on him. It didn’t. (Druff humiliated by his hologram in the three-way mirror, the comings and goings of his balding, frailing self like a body knocked down on an auction block, going going gone. His image there telling as a CAT scan — of shabby old mortality and downscale being. Slackened fat looked awful on a frail man. Druff bitterly damning trousers that wouldn’t hold a crease, sagged buttonholes, his too-small handkerchiefs and scarves and failing zippers. Mourning the points of his collars, rounding, curling in on themselves, collapsed as old petals, fallen socks. Argh, Druff thought, I’d look shitty in furniture even.) What looked swell on the rack seemed — he recalled a Nehru jacket he’d owned, outmoded the first time he put it on — on him, in daytime’s available light, already played out. It was part of the humiliation of shopping and purchase. And didn’t even get the benefit of salesman- and-fitter talk, the shorten/lengthen arrangements, the tuck compensations and break-of-the-trouser breaks.