She walks into the the oversized closet and stares at the 2-tiered racks of all-black clothes. Her husband’s signature look — the big man in black. Custom-made unstructured jackets in a thick black non-wrinkle fabric, easily folded into a black rolling Tumi suitcase for endless business trips. Black pleated, cuffed slacks to match. How many of this same outfit hang there? At least a dozen. Black custom-made shirts in a thinner fabric to wear underneath the jackets, too. $700 a pop for those shirts. Ridiculous, she always thought, but he claimed the price was worth it to get something that looked and felt good on his 6’7” 275 lb. frame. And having garments that traveled well was key. “But I wear $5 Wal-Mart t-shirts underneath it all” [and so he did] “so it balances out,” he would joke. She didn’t counter with the exorbitant cost of the silky black boxers that were really underneath it all. He flew around the country and the world incessantly, he worked incredibly hard, and he certainly deserved to be comfortable and to look the part of the successful entertainment executive he had become. Lord knows it was a far cry from the unemployed long-haired cargo shorts and Converse high tops-wearing newly recovering alcoholic and drug addict he’d been when she met him nearly a quarter century earlier. Those years had flown by so quickly, though the last 2 years had had some excruciatingly long days.
She takes a few steps forward and buries her face in the upper tier of clothes, the shirts and jackets, knowing that there are bound to be one or two pieces that have not been dry cleaned which will still carry the scent of his cologne: Issaye Miyake L’eau D’Issaye Bleu. She is right. She picks up faint traces of the smell of her husband. Her late husband. How long had it been since they had wheeled his body out of the adjoining bedroom and taken him to the mortuary? Thirty hours? What day was today? What time was it? What did it matter? What did anything matter? What was she going to do now? What was she going to do with the rest of her life? She fingers the thick black fabric as her eyes fill up with tears. She does not turn around when she hears a sound behind her.
“Mom?”
She does not answer, trying to choke back the tears.
“Mom, are you OK? What are you doing?”
She slowly pivots around to face her 23-year-old son, a young man, but also a boy who has just lost his father, his best friend. She smiles, but does not say anything, instead opening her arms to him. He immediately advances and bends his thin 6’4” frame to give her a deep, tight hug.
“Are you OK?
“Yes, honey. I was just smelling Daddy’s clothes. His cologne reminds me of him.”
“Oh, me, too. Dad always smelled so nice. Even my friends would tell me that: "Man, your Dad always smells so good.”
He releases his embrace and steps over to bury his own face in the garments. “My sense of smell isn’t that good. I can’t really pick it up.”
Because her husband — her late husband — was so fond of his cologne, there were bottles stashed all over the place, including here in the closet. She turns and reaches over to a shelf behind her son and picks up a bottle of L’eau D’Issaye Bleu. She spritzes the rack of jackets and shirts, and without a word, she and her son, this lovely, brokenhearted man-child, bury their faces together into the clothing side by side. He withdraws his face first: “Should we spray ourselves? Is that weird?”
“No,” she assures him, “It’s not weird. It’s sweet.”
He sprays a heavy mist of the familiar scent over her, then himself, and they wordlessly join hands and walk out of the closet to face the day.
