The Wrong Cut

When Jane first mentioned the idea of divorce, Pete was too busy looking down at his trousers to really hear or understand her. He was frowning, so Jane took his expression for that of a man who knew what was happening to him. But, in reality, Pete was frowning at his knees, and specifically the way that these trousers made his knees look when he was sat down. It was only after three minutes without a response that Jane pressed him for a reaction.
“Sorry, what?”
               He looked up at her, throwing a smile onto his face in an attempt to dissuade any investigation into the source of his earlier frown. Jane explained her situation again, the descriptions of diminished love leaving her mouth with a lot less care and sympathy than her first attempt. Pete was shocked, sure. But he was mainly surprised that she would use the word ‘divorce’. They were engaged, not married, and in later conversations with enquiring family members and friends, he would choose to explain this distinction by comparing the death of his relationship to the passing of a beloved family pet, as opposed to the passing of a beloved family child. Invariably, this comparison would do little to settle the worries of whoever he was speaking to, but Pete never noticed the odd look in their face.

               He’d really liked these trousers when he bought them. He remembered the day very well. He and Jane had been shopping for their holiday to Southern Italy. Mini shampoo, mini toothpaste, mini sunscreen, two plug adaptors, six hundred euros of exchanged currency, wired headphones, mini moisturiser, mini travel toothbrush, mini hairspray, a watch battery, some film for the camera, a pair of sunglasses. Jane had remarked upon how they’d spent so much money on so many items that could, regardless, still easily fit together into her purse, and Pete took this as a challenge to buy something more substantial and make the trip worth it. They cut their way out of the chaotic net of the shopping centre and made their way to the quieter side of town, down where the vintage shops and the record stores lived. They passed teenagers dressed in big baggy clothes and Pete felt a sudden discomfort in his checkered shirt and straight leg jeans.
               In the second shop they visited, Jane found a couple of nice tops she could wear down to the beach, and Pete finally found something that caught his eyes. The trousers were long, wide, and blindingly white. He held them up against himself and Jane commented with a tone of surprise that she actually quite liked them. That they’d be perfect for summer. Pete tried them on in the changing room and came out beaming, and a returned smile from Jane told him yes. He bought them on the spot and wore them for the rest of the day, and then again for four of the seven days that they were on holiday in Italy. In his new trousers he felt confident, like he was a different man to the one he had been two weeks before. He drank wine by the ocean in the evenings and felt like he was in a commercial for a fancy watch or an electric car. He noticed women looking at him more – Italian women, no less.

               It had been a year since that trip, and they were sat in a café in their hometown. In front of Pete was a pile of untouched pancakes. In front of Jane was an empty cup of coffee. On the way into town to meet Jane, Pete had caught a glimpse of himself in the full-length mirror of a shopfront. It had stopped him in his tracks.
               He looked silly. He looked like a child in his dad’s suit trousers. He looked like he was wearing two sails on his legs. The trousers were too long over his shoes and too wide around his thighs. The belt that he always wore didn’t go with them at all. He carried on walking, but opened his phone and looked at his Facebook profile picture, a photo of himself and Jane from a year ago, down by the water in Italy. He’d loved that photo when it was taken. Had continued loving it every day, passively, until this moment. Now he looked at it and all he could imagine was the laughs that others must have had at his expense. He looked like a clown. He looked like a clown in big, silly, white trousers. He locked his phone and kept walking, looking down at his legs as he went. How had this happened? Tastes changed over time of course – he’d thrown out enough band t-shirts over the years to know that. But this felt extreme. Had the trousers always been the wrong fit for him? Did everyone know that except him? Were those Italian women looking at him only because they wanted to memorise the image, giving themselves something to laugh about in Italian with their Italian girlfriends later that day? Had Jane always known?

               When he entered the café to meet her, his immediate impulse was to ask her about the trousers, but when he did, she answered with little effort, the response of someone who didn’t care enough about her own opinion to try to persuade him of it. After that, they sat in silence, breaking it only to order their respective meals, each of them ordering in very different ways: a coffee for practicality and speed, pancakes because he wasn’t paying attention and saw that they were cheaper than everything else.
               Even after the divorce bombshell, Pete had to resist the urge to ask again about the trousers, convinced they had somehow played a part in the slow decline of intimacy between them. Jane was crying, and Pete felt like he should cry too, but everything was a bit too confusing for him to do it. Especially not in public, sat on high stools in the window of a coffee shop, wearing his stupid giant trousers. Instead, he held her hand and told her it was all going to be okay, and he didn’t know whether it was or not, but that reality didn’t seem to make much of a difference right now, so it didn’t feel like a lie.

               That night, Jane went to her parents’ house to give Pete some time to process things and pack some stuff away. He put his laptop in a box. Threw some work shirts in a bag. Selected his toiletries from the bathroom. Borrowed mini toothpastes and mini hairsprays. He folded jeans into a suitcase. Packed some underwear into there too. He dressed himself in straight leg jeans and a checkered shirt and sat at the edge of the bed, letting his eyes slowly roll over the room in a way that he hadn’t since he’d first moved in five years before. Eventually he found himself staring at the white trousers, collapsed into a heap on the floor, as if evacuated in an emergency. He intended to leave them there. Maybe they’d go untouched by Jane too, the memories too wicked for her to bear. Maybe they’d lay there for the next decade, a single-piece museum of the lost relationship. Eventually they’d grow holes in them, from time or from moths, Pete didn’t really know how it worked. He looked at them for the longest time, and he really struggled to imagine a day arriving where he would like to wear them again. Where he would feel good wearing them. Where it would feel right, like it used to. But he picked them up anyway, and he gently folded them, packing them away into his suitcase. Because maybe it would.