The overcoat was his wife’s idea. It would be cold where he was going, much colder this time of year than the city where they lived, and she smoothed her hands down his arms and over the lapels and though she flinched when she checked the price, she said, “I think so—yes—this will do just fine,” her voice gone grave and husky as if some critical decision had been made. He’d never paid so much for an item of clothing in his life, but it was time, his wife explained, for him to look the part of a grown man.
His name, in case you’re curious, was Henry Hull and his wife’s name was Hope Hull, née Harrison, all those H’s like a sign when they first met, and though the morning was clear and mild when she dropped him at the airport, he was glad to have the coat when the plane touched down. It wasn’t snowing anymore, but filthy heaps of the stuff had been plowed onto curbs and medians, and the taxis were all streaked with salt brine. Hope had instructed him to call as soon as he checked into his hotel, but she was busy with a customer when he tried. His wife was the branch manager of a bank. He stood at the window in his overcoat watching miniature pedestrians hunch through the wind. A delivery truck pulled up, a valet stepped out to berate the driver. He supposed the truck wasn’t allowed to park in front of the hotel. Even in this cold. Then his phone buzzed in his pocket and his wife chimed on the line, her voice as bright and reassuring as the flare of a match. “How’s your overcoat?” she said. She answered her own question before he had a chance. “You look so handsome in that coat. You look like a man who gets exactly what he wants.”
“I don’t know about all that,” he said, but her flattery puffed him up, his reflection rising to its full height. The overcoat rippled like a shadow in the glass. He had to admit he liked the way it looked. It was made of lush black wool, not too boxy in the shoulders, tailored just slightly at the waist. The hem cut a dark border across his knees. “It does the job,” he added. “That much I can confirm.”
“Have you practiced your presentation yet?”
“You said to call you first.”
“Do it before the reception. You know how you get tired after you eat.”
This, too, pleased Henry, bolstered Henry. He would have been the first to admit that he often needed looking after. After they hung up, he double-checked his PowerPoint and ran through his notes, then changed into the clothes Hope had selected for the evening—blue sweater, gray slacks, cordovan loafers. He girded himself in his new overcoat and paused before the mirror on his way out, the coat so black his face and hands looked disembodied.
Downstairs, Henry collected a name tag from the welcome table and beelined for the bar, where he ordered a beer, then set a course around the edges of the crowd, hundreds of drug reps already assembled, their voices generating a fizz of chatter that made it difficult for Henry to sift through his own thoughts. Not a word of it offered him entrée into a group. On his second pass, Henry positioned himself in the vicinity of several conversations, hoping a benevolent stranger might take pity and include him, but he received only the suspicious glances and cold shoulders reserved for eavesdroppers and sneaks. On his third pass, on the verge of abandoning the ballroom altogether, he spotted a familiar face, a rep from his district named Brian Lamp. They’d never actually met, but they’d attended several Zoom meetings together and that would have to do by way of introduction. Brian Lamp clapped Henry on the arm—that heartening thump against his overcoat—and presented him to Timothy Wu and Felicia Noble and Darius Usher and Meredith Zinn. Without asking, Meredith Zinn pinched the cuff of Henry’s coat. “What is this—cashmere?” she wondered, but Henry wasn’t sure. He thought the wool might be Australian. They had established themselves at a table in the recesses of the room, far from the stage, so they wouldn’t have to feign interest while the CEO delivered her remarks. To Henry’s immense relief, they invited him to join them.
Two things of note during the meal: The first is that Henry never once removed his overcoat. He considered hanging it on the back of his chair but he liked the weight of it on his shoulders, heavy enough that he was aware of it, comforted by it, but not so heavy that he felt encumbered. No one seemed to think it odd that he was still wearing his coat. No one commented anyway. The second thing is that all through dinner, Brian Lamp went on about a nightclub here in town, a place he’d read about in a magazine, some kind of old-fashioned burlesque. Nothing indecent, he assured them. Super classy, he assured them. There would be dancers, yes, but also comedians and singers and magicians. He reeled off the names of celebrities who’d been sighted in the audience. Henry had imagined a drink at the hotel bar, followed by an early bedtime, but the nightclub was gathering momentum. After all, someone said, they were far from home, far from their real lives. Who knew how long it might be before they had a chance like this again? Henry considered reminding them that the conference was biannual, held always in the same city as the company’s headquarters, but he realized how that would sound. He didn’t want to be a wet blanket sort of colleague. He wanted to be the sort of colleague who was included in outings to famous nightclubs. Hope would disapprove, not because she objected to nightclubs or even burlesques, as far as Henry was aware. She would disapprove because he had a presentation to deliver in the morning. But he was awash in gratitude toward these people and more than a bit intrigued himself, and he didn’t know how to refuse. As soon as the CEO wrapped up her remarks, they marched into the cold and piled into a cab, all six of them, wind howling between buildings like a creature in despair.
The nightclub was tucked away on the basement level of a residential block, its presence indicated only by an inconspicuous sign, the word MENAGERIE in dignified wrought iron. Brian Lamp paid the fare and everybody hustled down a flight of stairs into a sort of underground antechamber, where Henry could hear music coming from behind a curtain, and there waited a hostess at her podium and a coat-check girl in her alcove, both of them attired in black turtlenecks and black skirts and black stockings and black heels. The hostess was stern and long-limbed and intimidating, and Henry worried that she might ask them to leave. The coat check girl, on the other hand, was freckled and round-faced, attractive but approachable, and Henry had the idea that she was, like him, the child of an unremarkable city in an unremarkable state, the nightclub a necessary way station on the road to the rest of her life. She was a singer, perhaps, definitely a performer of some kind. She was awaiting her big break. He understood that he was thinking in clichés, that he knew nothing about this girl, but there was something about her mouth, he thought. She had a singer’s practical mouth.
Her alcove was accessed through what he’d once heard Hope call a Dutch door, the top half swinging open while the bottom half remained closed and, reluctantly, Henry slipped his arms out of his coat and passed it over, and she held it up by the shoulders for a moment, admiring it. She draped the coat over the door and began to button it before searching out a hanger. She hadn’t bothered to button Felicia Noble’s coat or Timothy Wu’s. She was treating his coat with special care.
“Oh no,” she said, scrunching her face. “You’ve spilled something—see.”
She flipped the coat around so that the collar was on her side, the hem on his, and pointed at a dribble below the right pocket, an archipelago of dried spots. Henry knew immediately what it was—drips of ice cream from his dessert. His face went hot, his neck. What a clod he was. His brand new coat. The girl licked her thumb and scrubbed at the spots and Henry reached out to stay her hand, her knuckles warm beneath his cold fingers.
“Please,” he said. “Don’t trouble yourself.”
“I handle a lot of coats. I know quality when I see it.”
“I’ll have it cleaned when I get home,” he said.
She shrugged and turned away, taking the overcoat with her, reaching for a hanger. She passed Henry his receipt and he paid his cover charge and the hostess drew the curtain back and led them down a long hallway lined with mirrors, her heels clacking, the music swelling, Henry’s reflection bringing up the rear.
They were seated in the back, nearly as far from the stage as they’d been at the reception, the worst table in the house, in Henry’s estimation, though Brian Lamp pointed out that they were lucky to be admitted without a reservation. The band was wrapping up a number, the trumpeter blaring something that sounded like a cross between the best good news and a funeral dirge, while triplets in tap shoes and sailor hats took a bow beneath the spotlight.
The triplets were followed by a swami who levitated above the stage, folding his legs up under him three feet from the ground. Henry couldn’t make out any rigging, couldn’t for the life of him figure out how he did it, but the man hovered there for several minutes, lecturing the audience about his meditation practices and his discoveries on the astral plane. After the swami came a drag queen doing Audrey Hepburn and after the drag queen came a knife thrower, his assistant strapped to a spinning wheel while the knife thrower popped strategically placed balloons with his deadly blades, the band picking up the pace now, the saxophone skittering out ahead of the rhythm section in a way that made Henry feel like something terrible might happen any minute, the knives landing ever closer to the assistant, the final balloon bursting between her legs. After that came a brief intermission so the stage could be reset, and it was during this lull in the action, the houselights coming up, that Meredith Zinn noticed a man alone at a table in the front, an actor famed for portraying creeps and maniacs in the early part of his career but who’d settled, in late middle age, into critically acclaimed supporting roles—divorced fathers, lonely neighbors. He was wearing a blue beret and holding an unlit cigarette, which he brought to his lips now and then in a sad pantomime of actual smoking.
“I told you there’d be celebrities!” crowed Brian Lamp.
Henry wasn’t sure that the person was, in fact, the actor in question—one of his most bankable traits was his ordinary, everyman mug—but the rest of his party was convinced, the actor’s presence generating fresh excitement around their table, gossip about his alleged affair with a married costar, debate about his finest performance. Hope had always liked him in the romantic comedy in which he portrayed a bookstore owner with Tourette’s, but Felicia Noble and Timothy Wu and Darius Usher favored grittier characters—the serial killer who lived with his blind sister or the born-again Christian homophobe.
“No, no, no,” said Meredith Zinn. “It has to be The Last Tattoo. He was so disturbing, so poignant in that film. God—that scene at the end where he inks his great love’s zodiac sign on his own chest!”
In this discussion, as in all discussions of its kind, no consensus was reached, and soon enough the houselights faded, the column of the spotlight took shape in the dark and into this spotlight stepped a woman with a boa constrictor across her shoulders. She was tall and shapely with wild red hair almost to her waist. She was also, Henry thought, nude, though the snake was displayed in such a way that her delicate parts were concealed and it was possible that she was wearing some sort of body stocking. The band started up, the drummer chugging along beneath the bass, a feral rhythm over which the saxophone and the clarinet squealed like frightened things, the woman swaying and stalking and writhing across the stage, the snake slithering between her legs, down her spine, both prop and partner, and it seemed to Henry, craning and leaning way in the back, that nothing was ever quite revealed.
As the music reached a fever pitch—hardly music anymore, Henry thought, more like a fierce, primeval throb—the woman crawled on her hands and knees toward the actor, the snake gliding over her shoulder, cradling her breasts, the wedge of its head bobbing at her ear, tongue darting, its eyes focused on the actor, who appeared to be gazing back with equal intensity. It was as if he’d been mesmerized by the woman and her snake, and maybe he had. The only sign that he remained in control of his faculties was the unlit cigarette rising to his lips.
When the music stopped, releasing them, Brian Lamp banged the table with his fist. “Now that was worth the price of admission!”
And he was right, Henry thought. Or would think. The woman with the boa constrictor was followed by a juggler and another dancer and a magician and more dancers, some of whom were very good, but years after the fact, it was the woman and her snake who returned to Henry, her wordless exchange with the actor indelible in his mind.
Around midnight—not too early, not too late—our cadre of drug reps decided they’d had enough of Menagerie. None of the acts that followed could match the electricity of the woman and her boa constrictor, though no one in their party said these words out loud. Down they went along the mirrored corridor and out into the antechamber, all of them, including Henry, feeling satisfied with their outing and pleased with themselves for being so intrepid. One by one they handed their receipt stubs to the coat check girl and one by one she returned their coats.
When she came to Henry, however, she blanched.
“I need to get the manager,” she said.
Before she abandoned her post, her eyes flicked up to his, her gaze bleary with shame. The long-limbed hostess was smirking at her podium, the other drug reps chattering about what they’d seen and heard that night, unconcerned with whatever might be happening with Henry’s overcoat. As for Henry, he felt dimly embarrassed to be associated with the delay but he wasn’t worried yet, not really. He didn’t begin to worry in earnest until the coat check girl returned with the manager and, this time, she wouldn’t look at him at all.
The manager was suave and silver-haired and he explained in accented English that a certain important personage—his words—had arrived at Menagerie without proper seasonal attire but desired something warm in which to travel home and, because he was an excellent customer, the manager had offered this man his choice of outerwear from the coat check room. He had, unfortunately, selected Henry’s overcoat. It took a moment for Henry to comprehend what he was hearing.
“You gave my coat to someone else?” he said.
“Not just anyone,” the manager said, wagging a finger. “Some people would be flattered that a man of such talents had chosen their coat. He is attired right now in your overcoat as he makes his way about the city.”
This last line he delivered with a flourish, and it occurred to Henry that he was referring to the actor with the unlit cigarette.
“It’s brand new,” he said as if the date of purchase might alter what appeared to be the facts. “I’ve barely had that coat a week.”
“Be that as it may,” the manager said.
By now, Henry’s colleagues were aware of the situation and Brian Lamp and Meredith Zinn, both of whom had had too much to drink, asserted themselves into the dispute, Brian Lamp demanding that the manager write Henry a check, Meredith Zinn threatening to call the police, but two very large men appeared on their side of the curtain, their presence muting the outrage from Henry’s group. As calmly as he was able, his voice coming to him tinny and small, Henry insisted that there must be an equitable solution. Surely the manager understood that he’d been wronged. But the manager never wavered from his rhetorical position. “Be that as it may,” he kept saying, as if the conclusion to these events was foreordained.