Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

Inside, he turned on the television and had the momentarily disconcerting feeling of seeing himself on screen, an edited highlight of his stunt being used to tease the news at the top of the hour.

He opened a bottle of wine and thought honestly about not even bothering with a glass. He would be the only one to know. There should be two glasses, that much was obvious; the holiday season felt like a weeks-long reminder of how adrift, how uncoupled, he was. There should be, he knew, more. It felt as if the only gifts that Christmas would ever deliver to him were reminders of how much was missing: a spouse, a family, a dog, a home. He hadn’t bothered to put up a tree, and the wreath on his door was a gift from a producer at one of the Sunday-morning news shows. It was the end of another year in which he’d tried his best to ignore the season. On Christmas Day, he’d forgotten to call his sister, and the only holiday cards that showed up in his mailbox were from casual acquaintances looking to promote their law practice or their candidacy for Ward 2 city council. The photos on the cards became advertisements for a life he would not get to lead, no one in his bed, no fireplace, no elderly family dog wheezing contentedly at his feet, no child to watch in the anxious race to tear open every Christmas present with maximum destructive force. Alone at a time when the world told him again how he should be celebrating.

The wine he drank, a highly tannic California Cabernet, from the first sip tasted corky and left a fine silt at the lip of his glass, on the edge between simply not good and turned. It served him right. His ex-wife used to complain about his behavior, his constant introspection, as if he were some long-suffering character in a Russian novel. He thought the changes he’d made in the last year had conquered it, but the malaise (what else would he call it?) returned. His wine had turned. He thought about tossing it, but it was from a decent vintage and the bottle had cost something on the order of sixty dollars, and unless it had gone completely vinegar, he was going to tough it out. Petty crimes deserve petty punishments. So much around him had turned to acid in the past few years.

He powered through the wine because he’d given up everything else. In the past three years, he’d cut down on bourbon; at midnight, it would be exactly a year since his last borrowed smoke. He justified the wine on the basis of its alleged heart-healthy antioxidant properties. He knew too that he’d finish the bottle tonight. Already, on his tentative list of resolutions, this would be the year to cut out the wine, learn half a dozen different and flavorful ways to prepare steamed or broiled fish, walk to the office three days a week (these are the foxhole prayers of a man just beginning to fear his own death). He would learn not to be such a sentimental sap.

These desires for himself were not solely his; they had been his girlfriend’s too. He went to the trouble to dig out a yellow legal pad from under the morass of bills and unread magazines on his desk and wrote down his first official resolution: he would not call his ex-girlfriend, Cadence Willeford, not tonight, not in the New Year. Maybe it was easiest to let Cadence and her demands, her thrills, settle into the fond memories of the recent past.

But that wasn’t going to be his strategy. He had his legal pad and could add to his list of resolutions throughout the evening, but already he sensed a theme. He was trying to mold himself into the imaginary man she’d been demanding.

To wit, she said how the constancy of Richard’s presence, their suffocating weekends, had left her feeling “close to overwhelmed.”

“Not quite overwhelmed,” Richard had repeated, and she laughed.

“Not quite. As of now, I think I’m not overwhelmed, just whelmed. ”

A few weeks after that, she’d called time out.

While he waited for the grill to heat, he emptied the refrigerator of its hoard of abandoned takeout containers. Awash in the flicker of the refrigerator’s defective automatic light, he added a codicil to his resolutions: eat more fresh fruit, broccoli three times a week. He scrubbed the toilet, the tub, and wiped down the bathroom floor. He coated the insides of his oven with a foaming cleaner that made his kitchen smell like a swimming pool.

Then he filled two big bags with trash: year-old utility bills, unreadable taxi receipts, junk mail, a dozen delivery menus, the plastic wrap that the dry cleaner used to protect his laundered shirts, scores of ancient and unread magazines. His pack-rat tendencies meant that even his hall closet was filled with old clothes: a bespoke tuxedo purchased at a thrift shop during his sophomore year of college; a pair of red twenty-year-old Puma Clydes still grass-stained from mowing the lawn of a house he no longer owned. He took some well-frayed oxford shirts, a pair of too-small khaki pants, some stained undershirts, and a hideous blue parka that advanced fiber testing might have dated to the high school era, stuffed them into an old nylon bag, and headed out into the night.

The temperature was nearly sixty, record heat, a good omen for the New Year. Along his street, he walked past partygoers who lounged in summerlike fashion, enjoying cocktails on the front stoops. He passed living room windows flung open. Early revelers shouted down at him from adjacent rooftops. He crossed a vacant lot to a clothing-donation bin that looked like a lime-green dumpster, and tossed the whole pile, blue bag and all, through its swinging metal door.

The truth was that he wasn’t meant for change. He longed for the familiar, specifically the presence of Cadence Willeford, who had excised herself from his life seven weeks ago, a decision that he still did not understand. To say that he’d been stunned was to underestimate the impact. He’d thought they were on an easy path to a future. She thought he needed to make changes.

The discussions still percolated in his memory, variations on a fugue of things he needed to improve, correct, revise. Which gave cleaning his apartment such significance. End of an era and all that. The first step felt obvious. He needed to remove everything from the apartment that reminded him of Cadence. Everything needed to be new. He’d been searching for a word to summarize her chief complaint, and as he opened his refrigerator door to remove a nearly month-old carton of 2 percent milk that had congealed into a curdled mess, it came to him. He’d been stagnant.

Richard knew she was right. Cadence managed to make all the places she inhabited into a home; even her office, in a nondescript black glass building on upper Connecticut Avenue, had been outfitted with oriental rugs, posters from National Gallery exhibitions, a few framed photographs of her father, a Depression-glass vase that her assistant filled with cut flowers each Monday. His office felt temporary, and he’d been living in that state for four years.

Maybe on Tuesday, he’d go look for a coffee table. He moved on to the bedroom, working methodically, and began folding the clean laundry that had sat unattended for nearly a week. He dumped his underwear drawer onto the bed, and from beneath a tumble of T-shirts yellowed with age and sweat fell a black vinyl envelope containing seventeen Polaroids of Cadence; the photos ranged from racy to what any court of appeals judge would be tempted to identify as hard-core pornography. But they were not like that to Richard. They were just another thing he had held on to, as if by this physical evidence that Cadence had once been a regular presence in his apartment and bed, she might somehow return, if only to claim the few items she had left behind: sweatpants, a bottle of eye-makeup remover, a nearly empty antiperspirant, a T-shirt advertising a five-kilometer fund-raiser walk, a collection of the metal clips and elastic ponytail holders she used to secure the flying tendrils of her hair, these photographs.