(Narcissus)

Everyone who was out on Madison Avenue at eight-thirty to ten in the mornings noticed Jean-Pierre. They thought of him as “the man in the brown velvet suit” for that is what he wore in all weathers, and often he had gone past before they thought of him at all.

He walked quickly, especially on the upper blocks of Madison, where the mothers and some fathers were taking their children to school, an event which held no interest for him. His suit was extremely fitted in the European style with two vents in the back that flapped out on windy days when he would add a paisley scarf looped in a way he invented.

Sometimes, he walked with his pipe and sometimes not. Sometimes, he would slap the pigskin driving gloves he carried one against the other.

The mothers watched him because he was extraordinarily chic. They had never seen anyone who looked quite like him, like some  night creature pulled into the day. His long brown hair was slicked back hard and flipped up at the ends over his collar. His brows were thick over unusually pale eyes full of challenge if he bothered to see any of them, which he never did. His tan skin was drawn tight over high cheekbones, his chin was cleft. His body was narrow. It would have been impossible to guess his age.

On the corners, if he had to wait, occasionally he would look down at the old Cartier tank watch on his slender wrist. The expression on his face was amused.

The women and some men looked again over their shoulders after he had passed and held tighter to their child’s hands. The children paid him no attention at all, sometimes a dog would growl as he went by too quickly. Everything about Jean Pierre, even his narrow highly polished brown shoes clicking hard on the sidewalk, said stay away.

When he had passed 86^th Street heading downtown, there were more stores and Jean Pierre began to study his face reflected in the windows. Before he came to the funeral home Frank E. Campbell’s dusty pink façade, he always crossed to the east side of the street and crossed back west at 72^nd. There he paused in front of the Ralph Lauren windows and saw his whole form reflected. He would turn sideways a bit to the right and then the left, he would raise his head and stroke his shiny hair. Often at this point in his daily walk he would laugh a single laugh looking at the mannequins above. He saw himself there with them, belonging to whatever the event or occasion was staged there. Whatever they wore, he was dressed for them, part of their attractive adventures. Then he was off.

After Seventy-Second Street, the mothers and children were replaced by people walking to offices and other workers washing the windows, mopping and sweeping out the metal doorsteps of the boutiques. New stores were getting ready to open and some had died, with dust briefly allowed to settle on the floors and the thick glass shelves before the next tenants arrived. Here stood empty velvet forms where the jewels would rest by ten a.m. and occasionally a hand would reach out to drape a necklace or lower a tray of rings as he passed. Young women carrying keys would look around before they opened the metal gates on the stores where they worked. Heavy gates like they used further east and uptown were rare on Madison where tall black men in good suits soon would stand as statues to open doors and discourage crime.

It was as if each look from others fed Jean Pierre and each self image in the windows captured something and pulled it away, so that by the end of his walks he felt both enhanced and diminished.

All the furniture stores where he had done his business as a decorator were out now—Florian Papp and the deco place whose name he had already forgotten and the one with antiquities had moved on—none of this bothered him. The clever trades he had made long ago sustained him to this day.

In his life as a decorator, Jean Pierre had been happiest when working alone. He would bite his pipe hard on shopping trips with his clients. Once, he had bitten through the stem as his client bent over a particularly ugly chair. Collaboration had horrified him, since his youth he had lived without the great interference of love.

He stopped again at the Chloe boutique. A little nubbin of a woman in the window dusting the $4000 bags with a feather wand looked at Jean-Pierre with delight. She raised her thick hand and waved her wand.

“Ola!” she mouthed through the clean glass. Her lipstick was a purple red that bothered him. He lifted his right hand slightly and walked on with a hard click of his shoes.

In his years of walking on Madison, he would nod to the occasional acquaintance, pointing to his watch to show he must rush on. Encounters bothered him, changing the tenor of his walk, slowing him and diverting his thoughts. No one held him.

On this day, he forgot to pause as he usually did at Giorgio Armani’s large windows and rushed by Nello’s (more stares from the waiters setting up) to compare his shoes to the ones in Lobb’s window. Twenty five years ago, he had bought the shoes he was wearing at Lobb in London and maintained them scrupulously taking them to the dwarf man on 82^rd street who did the best job of all.

After he had passed by, the new cleaning woman at Chloe decided that the man in the brown suit would live a better life if he could tear himself from the windows he stared into as he walked along. She had watched after him, entranced, already a bit enamored.

On 59^th Street Jean-Pierre crossed Madison to walk back uptown as he did every day.

He looked west when he came to Prada. Across the street, the cleaning woman saw him and waved again. Immediately, he turned to stare at himself in the Prada window and his shadow stretched on the pavement.

The next morning, the Chloe woman was outside doing the threshold. She raised her head and said a small shy “hello.”

“Bonjour,” said Jean Pierre. Instead of lingering at Chloe as he usually did, he leapt ahead with an angry swish at his scarf.

“French,” she thought. It was already time for her to head to the back of the store where, hidden away, she would fold and steam the clothes, wrap and iron them carefully. She ate her sandwich in a backroom closet and left the store at four. She stopped at her church in Queens for mass, and, since her children were grown, went home to fix dinner for herself and her husband, who was a doorman on Park Avenue. She did not understand why she was angry as she slapped his chop down on the ironed cloth and looked at him with unfriendly eyes.

 

Over the next weeks and months, the woman found herself waiting for the Frenchman in his tight little suit going by clipety-clop. He was her pet, her toy man, her phantom boyfriend. Just like that, she had fallen half in love with a beautiful god.

Jean-Pierre, the object of many varied affections over the years, had been worshipped before. He understood it when he saw it happening. After all, he agreed with his worshippers.

He had taken to crossing Madison to the East side before he came to Chloe but then he changed his mind, exposing himself to the frightening warmth of her smile, granting her a brief “Bonjour.”

It was like giving money to a beggar, not that he ever did that. Only once he had, and felt better afterwards, hearing the “God bless you” long after he had passed by.

He did not know and would not care that the Chloe woman had taken to praying  for his well being just as if he were real and in her life. Santa Maria, forgive him for forgetting me when he goes by on some days.

As Fall became winter, many of those on Madison Avenue had taken to looping their scarves in the unique fashion of the man in the brown velvet suit.

 

It was June and the bonjour man had left Madison Avenue. Perhaps he was lying ill somewhere. Perhaps he had gone away forever. The cleaning woman grew angry and then sad. He had taken himself from her, deprived her of the one brief joy of her working day.

Santa Maria, he was too proud. She thought of his thin body streaming through the windows into all those stores of marble and mirrors, streaming through to the back of the store, down to the basement where she worked on Tuesdays. Madre, if you will not make him come back, make him love with amor no correspondito.

 

After the summer, the man in the man in the brown velvet suit was back on Madison Avenue. He had changed.

He now wore khaki silk trousers and a black silk shirt unbuttoned down to mid chest, his hair was even longer and his face was older. He looked harder into the empty stores with their big clean windows as though he was seeking something further. He stayed longer and was even seen reaching out to his own reflection. Sometimes he would lift his chin or poke it out. The pipe was gone.

The bones showed on his chest, brown from the sun of Marbella, and somewhat sunken as were his cheeks with the already sharp cheekbones. He had lain all summer in his brief black suit by the pool, turning all the time to glance at his face softened to youth by the pool’s waters before slipping in.

Jean-Pierre looked into the empty stores as though he might imprint himself upon all those windows that had enjoyed him.

After this summer, as he stared, he could not get back to the image of his old self imprinted on the windows and he was dissatisfied.

There was the Chloe woman with her squeegee and bucket, startled to see him.

“Bonjour,” he said, somewhat uncertain.

“Bonjour,” she said, her eyes alit as she echoed him.

He is grown old, he is not eating properly. He is unhappy now that he is old. He lives with his hopeless love for what he was. He can never love another. He is unrequited. Have I done this with my prayer?

The weather turned and he was back in his brown velvet suit, walking even quicker and seeming to shiver a bit now. One day, there was a thin overcoat of the finest vicuna on his shoulders like a cape. And then he was gone from the street forever.

Some salespeople swore they still saw his image in the windows after he disappeared from Madison Avenue. Only the most fanciful imagined him a ghost roaming the empty stores.

Some said the man in the brown velvet suit had gone off to Marbella where the weather was kinder. Others said no, they were sure it was Ibiza.

 

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