On The Back of the Napkin

He stands there in the closet, wondering if somewhere along the line, he’d let himself go. The mirror always adds ten pounds, though, so they say. Or is that the camera? He turns to see his stomach at a right angle, but Renee’s voice mercifully yanks his focus before he can more accurately assess his own protuberance.

“Ollie, sweetie, please hurry!” she called from downstairs.

Her voice keeps going, but by now it’s muffled by the sight of his own foot sort of big-toe’ing a pair of loafers around at the foot of the mirror. The softened name that Renee had called him only a moment ago seems to be somehow pushing him away from the black loafers and toward the brown. It is June, after all. A more summery look wouldn’t be totally inappropriate, he supposed. Of course, he would have to reconsider his pants and belt, but as he sees his own shins and bony ankles in the mirror beneath the towel around his waist, he realizes he’s put the cart before the horse.

Best to start at the top, really. Nobody will be looking at his pants or his shoes in an hour or so while they’re neck deep in this. He grabs one of his stark white office shirts from a hanger and slides it up one arm, around his back, then the other. As he begins to button it, a nasty little thought begins to take form just behind his right ear, where that cowlick is.

Jerry had better have this shit figured out. I want to walk in, I want to sign a couple of forms, and then get the fuck out of there. I’m talking those skinny little yellow note tabs with the arrows that say, “Sign here, and here, and here.” Have this shit fully together, Jerry, or I swear to fucking God, you make this any harder on me, or especially Renee, well…

At that precise moment of his imagined threat, the towel around his waist suddenly loosens its grip, gives up, and falls to the floor around his feet. He still has one more button to go at the bottom of his shirt, and yet, despite the indignity of it all, his prick is out there in the open. Confronting him in the mirror with sheer abject failure to meet the gravity of the moment. Oliver has always found non-sexualized nudity to be awkward at best, but he was a man of action, and in two shakes of a lamb’s tail –why the emasculating expression?– he lets the waistband of a fresh pair of boxers seal his manhood safely away from his own eyes.

He gives his own reflection a small nod of respect, as if to say, “You navigated that rather unfortunate situation quite well, sir.” His sense of accomplishment quickly fades as he realizes he’s only put a white shirt on. All that to get to the starting point. Maybe pants next. That’s a lot of outfit I can knock out in one shot. Somewhere in the back of his mind, the way the brown loafer had felt on his big toe had been quietly working, persuading him that black was far too severe. Sunday had been a day for that sort of thing. And it’s just Jerry, and I already sort of decided fuck Jerry. The amount of money I pay him, I should be able to wear whatever the fuck I want.

“Yeah, fuck him,” he hears the words come out of his mouth much louder than he’d meant to say them. But at least they didn’t sound angry. He grabs a pair of gray loose-fitting trousers and steps into them. Pulls them up higher than he used to wear them, back before he kept putting off research into whether he might be allowing himself a paunch. Over and around the tails of the shirt. As he’s tucking in one side and then the other, though, Oliver once again comes back around to Yeah, but fuck Jerry. And in that particular moment, that really does seem to be the most important thing about this whole “getting oneself dressed” fiasco.

He has a sheer moment of brilliance, then! He could simply ask Renee what she’s wearing! She’s always been much better at this stuff. What stuff, getting dressed? Fuck off, you know what I mean. She is probably stylishly dressed, as always, but practical. Not too stylish, though. Oliver firmly believes, in his heart of hearts or wherever they say Jesus lives, that there is some balance between lamentation and denial. I could just see what she’s got on, and match that! Problem solved! But before the thought has even completely formed in his feeble little brain, the complete idiocy of it all collapses in on itself like the moment the water at the bottom of the tub finally gives way to the pull of the drain. It’s not a fucking homecoming dance, Oliver. It’s a “Trust…what the hell did Jerry call it? An adjustment? Adjudication? Something with an “A”… Amendment? A trust amendment, maybe. It’s the continuation of a fucking nightmare, whatever it is, Jerry.

Oliver suddenly feels a burn in his nostrils, and it must’ve been what made his eyes get a bit watery. He glares at his own reflection in the mirror for the lapse in defense. He coughs a quick, forced hack, to clear the distractions; the same kind of cough that Dr. Brennan elicits from him while Oliver’s balls are in his hand.

“Ollie, are you ready yet? We’re going to be late!” Renee calls to him again.

The nickname hits him again, from the side this time; he didn’t have his guard up over there. He slides his shirt over his head and this time, he reaches instead for a linen button-down short-sleeve in Columbia Blue. He’d never even heard of the color 25 years ago. Now he knows how it smells, how it tastes. He knows how Columbia Blue feels.

He takes a deep breath in and lets it out shakily. Pulls on his matching gray blazer around himself, slides his feet into those brown loafers he’d settled on without realizing it, and leaves for another time the matter of his gut/not gut. He leaves his closet, his bedroom, and walks down the hall past the room they painted Columbia Blue twenty-four years ago, and he greets his wife with a squeeze of her hand, and a soft kiss on the top of her head. It will be a difficult next few hours, and Renee will need Ollie far more than she’ll need Oliver.