The Fit of it all

(for Amy Hempel)

There is a draining of a glass and a look towards the present and Joe says; I bought
some clothes today. I went shopping.

My wife buys my clothes, I say, and I think about all the clothes I own and how I never have to pull a single shirt or pair of pants off the rack and try them on. The clothes come home. They fit. I wear them. And that’s it.

Yeah, Cindy used to buy my clothes he says of his recent ex-wife. But I would never wear anything she bought. She’d buy me a sweater or something and I’d return it and then we’d fight and maybe fuck and then we stopped fucking so all we did was fight and that’s how it goes and he stops talking and pours more beer out of the seven dollar pitcher and these conversations always come around some sort of pitcher and the conversation moves like a school of fish or maybe a plague and we cover all things — politics and pornography, divorce and disease and how the former makes you worry about the latter even with the women Joe finds on e-harmony and I don’t have to worry about harmony. I just have to worry about being home by eleven. I have to worry about crawling into bed with my wife who may or may not be sleeping and my drunken mind will pull on clean pajamas that aren’t really pajamas; they will be an old t-shirt and a pair of boxers with different sorts of stains and everything will fit just right.