Losing Charlotte by Heather Clay

boxers and bought new pairs, joined a regular pickup game at the gym, carried himself taller in those moments before he caught sight of her—then forgot himself so completely during their times together that when he glimpsed himself again, in the mirror over a restaurant’s bathroom sink or in the bits of misshapen glass that Charlotte had pasted to the wall above the bureau opposite her bed, he felt like laughing over his earlier nervousness. Here he was, the wine consumed, his pressed clothes removed from him, his hair wild, the skin on his face rougher, his eyes clearer, and he looked fine. Better than before, if he cared to make a judgment—which, at those times, he didn’t.
    “Hey hey!” A shout, from below. Bruce looked down and Charlotte was there. She wore a printed silk dress that he had never seen before, buttoned carelessly over a T-shirt, sneakers on her feet.
    “Hi,” he shouted back, leaning out the open window. He knelt on the sill, which Charlotte had already turned into a makeshift window seat over the course of her weekends at his place. There were a few tapestry pillows strewn on it now, a brass ashtray which Bruce had cleaned the butts out of this morning, rinsed, dried, put back in its place.
    “That’s what you wear to move in?” He spoke at a lower volume, now that his head hung over the street, just above her.
    Charlotte laughed, looked down at herself, yanked at the waistbandof the dress. “I know,” she said. “I’d packed everything else. This happened to be on top of the Goodwill pile.”
    Bruce smiled. He tried to stop smiling, but he couldn’t.
    Charlotte smiled back, drawing her brows together. “Why am I nervous,” she said, loud enough for Bruce to think of neighbors, listening over their morning tea. “Why am I standing in the street like this?”
    “Hold on,” Bruce said, in a quieter voice than she had used. “I’m coming down.”
    “I have two hot Israeli movers, by the way.” Charlotte could never let him go; she extended conversations a subject or two beyond their natural conclusion—often nodded, then kept talking, after the word goodbye . “They let me drive.”
    “They did? Where are they?”
    “I don’t know,” Charlotte said, looking around. “I imagine they’re tight on my tail. I asked them to let me out at the corner. I lost confidence once we hit all these little streets—the progress felt so … slow.”
    “Stay,” Bruce said. “Hold on.”
    He hit his head on the window casing on the way back in and kneed the ashtray aside in an attempt to raise himself from the window seat. He opened the door, flipped the deadbolt shut, and let it bounce on its hinges as he ran down the stairs. The possibility of framed photographs of people from Charlotte’s life on the mantel, the bedroom walls, excited him. He had lain in his bed until late last night, awake (after she had called to wish him good night and complain about having left so much work until the last minute—which she always did, he was learning—to complain again that she didn’t need a moving truck, she didn’t have enough real furniture to warrant it), and imagined her clothes in his closets. He imagined her coats, the long gray tweed he had seen, and the celery-colored poncho, and a rain slicker, if she owned one, perfuming the darkness of the closet by the front door, hanging among his own coats. He wished they were hanging there already, believed for the few moments just before sleep that they might be, so that, if he had the energy, he could get up and close himself inwith them, finger their empty sleeves, explore the little piles of detritus in their pockets: the squares of cellophane, pennies, tokens, crumbs, broken matches, bits of gravel.
    Out on the street, the air was cooler. Bruce felt a flick of relief that he had remained relatively unmussed until this moment: his head wasn’t bleeding from the place where he’d knocked it, his shirt wasn’t soaked through, not yet. He