— Armani. Nice.
The man caressed my shoulder as I stepped toward his makeshift change room. He spoke in a nasal sing-song that sounded to me more like put-on immigrant than real Punjab or Mumbai or wherever the hell he’d come from.
— So why dese?
The man nodded to two pairs of cargo pants that cost me maybe thirty dollars each at the discount outlet.
— Just something rough to wear when I’m—
— Rough? Wanna know rough?
He shoved me into his change room and the plywood door swung shut like a coffin lid. I wriggled out of my jacket and trousers and imagined I was Harry Houdini locked in a cage suspended over a raging river.
— Business. Dat’s rough. I have been in de cleaning business, yaar, twenty-two year. Twenty-two. And not a single holiday. Well, maybe one. I went to Tunder Bay. Sleeping Giant. Ever see?
— Huh?
I was struggling with the zipper on the first pair of pants.
— Ever see de Sleeping Giant?
— No. What’s that?
— Rock. A great big rock in de lake. But let me tell you about rough. Business. Now, everybody, dey want green cleaning. What de hell is dis? But dey want it. Dey tink it some great ting, but don’t want to pay any more for it. Dat’s rough. Rough for me. Got to clean witout cleaner. Save de earth. Stinky clothes.
With the zipper up, I pushed open the door and stepped into the space beside the man’s sewing machine. I would’ve asked my mom to hem the pants, but there’d been a long stretch of rain and the rheumatoid in her knuckles had flared up.
— No more Armani. What you do dat you need such a suit?
The man knelt by my shoes and fiddled with the hems.
— I’m in bonds.
— Look to me like you in Guccis.
— No. You asked—
— I pull your leg, yaar.
— I’m a bond trader.
— So you a big whig banker.
— Medium whig. The big whigs make all the money. The medium whigs just get to wear the clothes.
The man tacked the hem with a pin and told me to put on the other pair of pants. While I was performing my contortionist act in the plywood box, the man went on about how people would leave their clothes for him to clean then forget to pick them up. Not once in a blue moon with a cherry on top, but all the time. I couldn’t conceive of forgetting clothes at the cleaners. My life depended on accounting for every last detail. My work demanded a granular approach to the markets. And my personal life wasn’t much different. I had to keep track of my mom’s meds with an exacting eye. Once, she took too much of one thing and not enough of another and ended up in the hospital with heart palpitations and a rash.
— What am I supposed to do wit so many clothes?
— Give ‘em to charity I guess.
— Exactly. But let me tell you what happens.
He fiddled with the second pair of cuffs, rolling them up and tacking them in place. When he’d finished, he rose from his knees and peered at me over his glasses.
— Here’s what happens. I wait a year. Dis is no storage house. Look at de space I have. But I hold dis suit a year. And after a year, I do exactly what you say. I give it to one of dose places dat sells clothes, like, seconds, like, to raise money for whatever. De day after. De very day after, de man shows up wit de ticket for his suit. Screams like a girl getting raped. You leave it for a year, I say. But he won’t listen to reason. Calls me a brown cunt. And all kinds of udder names. Sometimes. Sometimes. Oh, I need a holiday.
— Go back to the Sleeping Giant.
— What you say, it’s a good idea. Lie back like de Sleeping Giant. Eyes closed. Float on de lake. Forget de world.
The man wrote up an invoice and handed me the duplicate.
— Come back tomorrow after five.
— I won’t forget.
— I’m not here, it means I’m in Tunder Bay asleep on my backside.
After I tucked the invoice into my wallet and left the shop, I forgot the man and his cleaning problems. It had been a simple commercial transaction like any other: in exchange for the man’s pant-hemming skill, I gave him a nominal sum of money and the appearance of a sympathetic ear. That’s it. Twenty paces from the shop, I was steeling myself for a day of commercial transactions on a different order. I’m good at my job and make my employer a lot of money. It goes without saying that my employer is a bank. It also goes without saying that no one leaves clothes behind in a bank, or if they do, the bank quickly liquidates them and turns them to profit. Pants in a closet never made anybody money.
After work the next day, I picked up my two pairs of pants, took them upstairs to my penthouse suite, and forgot about them until the weekend. I had more important things to do than think about pants, like arranging my mom’s meds in a plastic pill manager and arguing on the phone with my ex-wife. She was threatening to apply to the court for bigger support payments. I told her more money for her meant less money for my mom; she was as much as threatening to steal from old ladies. She told me I was full of shit. That’s pretty much how all our conversations have gone since the day we got married. Our wedding is the only transaction I’ve ever fucked up and I still can’t figure out why. It has me worried that one day I may lose my touch at work.
On the weekend, with Mr. Armani stowed in my closet, I tried on the first of the pants the talkative cleaner man had hemmed. They were perfect. I wheeled my mom to the park and not once did I trip on the cuffs. At the same time, they didn’t ride high on my ankles. My argyle socks stayed hidden underneath. On Sunday, I tried on the second pair of pants, but the fit wasn’t so happy. Once or twice, I felt the cuffs dragging through the pea gravel as I pushed my mom along our usual path. If this happened too often, they’d fray and people would think I couldn’t afford a decent pair of pants. People would look down at me. At first, I worried that the man hadn’t measured properly, but by the end of my walk, a more desperate thought took hold: maybe he hadn’t bothered to hem them at all. Maybe he had tried to pass them off as hemmed when, really, he hadn’t done any work. I tried to rationalize my pants situation by telling myself that this sort of thing could happen to anyone; the man was busy; he probably forgot. But there was a possibility that nagged me like a thorn in my flesh: maybe his failure was on purpose. Maybe he resented me for some reason and wanted to stick it to me. Even as I helped Mom scatter bread crumbs through a flock of pigeons, I could see the man sitting behind his sewing machine, hemming my first pair of pants and saying: I’m going to fuck over dat Armani-wearing bond-trading prick by not hemming his second pair of his pants; see if he even notices.
I was determined not to let him get away with it. I’d confront him. I’d hold him to account. I’d force him to do the work he was contracted to do.
On Monday morning, I stepped into the man’s cleaning store with the maliciously unhemmed pair of pants hanging over my left arm. Like a toreador, I whipped the pants from my arm and spread them on the counter.
— You were supposed to hem these pants.
The man rose from his stool and inspected a pant leg.
— Yah, and so I did.
— No. They’re still too long.
— Well, try dem on and we’ll look at dem.
— I’m in a hurry; I have to get to work.
— Just two minutes.
I crawled into his plywood box and did my David Copperfield stunt, emerging in khaki cargo pants and Saville Row shirt. The man knelt and examined how the cuff bunched up on the top of my foot.
— See what I mean?
— Hmmm. Maybe de pants have stretched?
— Pants don’t stretch. If anything, they shrink.
— Maybe you shrink.
— That’s absurd.
— One thing dat’s certain … I hem dese pants. Dat’s my signature stitch.
— Well if you did, you hemmed them the same length as before.
— No, dat impossible.
— That very possible.
— My signature stitch. It’s a magic stitch. You watch. In a minute, you get all puffed up bigger dan you are and den de pants, dey fit.
I sneered at the little man, sitting smug on his stool. I rose to my full height and glared down at the man. He smiled, implacable, and gazed back at me. I demanded a refund but he shook his head and said I was being impatient.
— Look.
I slapped my hand on the counter, as if, somehow, I didn’t already have enough of the man’s attention.
— Look, you little brown cunt, you’re just trying to cheat me.
Again, the man smiled.
— It’s just like I say.
He motioned to the mirror.
— Look at yourself.
Damn, but the man was right. I was at least three inches taller than the day before and a couple inches broader across the chest.
— See, yaar? I knew from de minute you come in here wearing dat Armani suit. I says to myself: now dere’s a man who gets all puffed up like a proper righteous prick. And so you have. Your pants fit just fine now.