To say that Cleveland Marsh was rather fussy would be akin to saying that
the interior of the sun was rather warm. Cleveland was more than fussy, he was
pathologically neat.
He was also hideously wealthy, having inherited an immense shipping fortune from
his overachieving father. In spite of this, he insisted on doing many of his own
household chores, since the maids either could or would not perform certain tasks
to his extremely rigid specifications.
A case in point was the laundry. Despite the detailed instructions he had given to
the household staff, a surprise visit to the laundry room deep in the bowels of his
enormous mansion confirmed his suspicions that a bit of corner cutting was taking
place down there. Concealed in a cupboard, he watched in horror as the maid on duty
carelessly tossed a handful of detergent into the washer without first weighing the
laundry, calculating the amount of detergent necessary, and measuring precisely that
amount into the little compartment on the top of the machine. To make matters worse,
she took wet laundry out of the washer and shoved it willy-nilly into the dryer
without bothering to fold it first. Granted, she did an excellent job of folding it
after it was dry, and so Cleveland allowed her to remain in his employ; but from that
day forward he tended to the laundry himself.
As further evidence of his fussiness, it may be noted that the clothing Cleveland so
meticulously washed and dried was not his own, but that of the household staff. The
impeccable Mr. Marsh would never be caught dead wearing the same garment twice.
Each morning he arrayed himself in crisp new finery straight from the tailor's shop
downtown, hand delivered to his home in crackling brown paper packages. When he was
finished wearing a suit of clothing, it was whisked away to be given to some local
charity or other. Thanks to this small kindness, the town in which Cleveland Marsh
lived harbored a number of homeless alcoholics who could have easily made Mr.
Blackwell's best-dressed list.
One morning as he was getting dressed, Cleveland noticed something that greatly
ruffled his morning calm. The trousers he had just stepped into had a long black
thread hanging from the outside seam of the left leg. Frowning, he grasped the
offending fiber between thumb and index finger and yanked sharply.
Unfortunately, the thread failed to break, and Cleveland found himself face to
face with an eight-inch gap along the seam of his trousers, through which the
pallid flesh of his thigh peeked out at him.
When he had regained enough of his lost composure to speak, he summoned his valet.
"Walter," he said, pointing to the hole in his trousers, "This will not do. I
want you to call my tailor this instant. Tell him to send another pair of trousers
right away, and make sure they're of a better quality than this. . . this. . . "
"Egregious example of lackadaisical craftsmanship?" offered Walter, who had majored in English Lit.
"Yes. Precisely," snapped Cleveland. "Tell him. . . tell him it's just this sort
of thing that's sending this country to the dogs," he finished in a flustered tone.
When the new pair of trousers arrived, Cleveland looked them over thoroughly before
putting them on. They were manufactured by a company he had never heard of, but
they seemed to be a good product, and the stitching was perfect. He thrust his
hands into the pockets to get the feel of them, and his right hand encountered a
small square of paper. Puzzled, he pulled it out and examined it. It was about
two inches by two inches, and printed on it in perfectly centered boldface text
were the words 'Inspected by No. 17'.
How odd, thought Cleveland. Somewhere in the world is a person completely devoted
to making sure that my trousers are in order.
The idea gave him a strange little twinge of
pride. He felt a certain kinship with this inspector seventeen. Clearly, this
was someone who, like him, realized the importance of attention to detail. If
only there were more people like that in the world, perhaps it would be a better
place in which to live.
Absorbed by this thought, he moved automatically towards the nearest wastebasket
to throw the scrap of paper away, but some sudden impulse stopped him at the last
moment and he tucked it carefully into his wallet instead.
The next morning brought another pair of perfect trousers, and another square of
paper from inspector seventeen. So did the morning after that, and the next
morning, and the morning after that. This daily assurance that someone in the
world besides himself still cared about a job well done was like a campfire to
Cleveland's great marshmallow of a heart. He positively glowed at each day's
discovery of the buried treasure in his pocket. For this reason he simply could
not bring himself to throw the scraps of paper out, and so he ordered a large
leather-bound stamp collecting book and took to pasting the things neatly into it.
The weeks and months rolled by, and Cleveland began having oddly pleasant dreams
at night. One in particular recurred again and again, with minor variations.
A shadowy presence seemed to be standing behind him, watching over him. He
sensed that the presence was female, and felt a vast benign warmth radiating
from her. The smell of roses, a smell that he associated with his long-dead
mother, tickled his nostrils. He would try to turn and face the presence,
but somehow she always managed to remain just out of his view. At some point
she would press something into his hand and whisper the words "I am with you"
in his ear. He would look down to see what sort of talisman he had received,
only to find the now familiar square of paper and suddenly realize that he was
dreaming. This realization inevitably propelled him quickly upward through the
dark waters of sleep towards consciousness, and he would awake with one hand
clenched tightly, as if to pull the dream-paper along with him into the bright
world of morning. It always depressed him slightly to find that his hand was
empty, and his sense of loss was compounded by the fact that he could never
quite recall the dream or the nature of the object he had failed to extract from it.
His attention began to drift in his waking hours. He spent more and more time
gazing at nothing with a vague little smile on his face, oblivious to his
surroundings. He had always been rather good with numbers, but now they seemed
to jumble themselves around in his head. One morning at breakfast he was
amazed to find before him a huge plate heaped high with well over a dozen
quivering fried eggs. The cook, distraught, insisted that he had ordered them.
"You say gimme seventeen eggs," she said. "I ask you how many eggs you want
for breakfast, and you say seventeen. I don't make no trouble, Mr. Cleveland,
you know that. You want seventeen eggs for breakfast, that's okay with me.
I just cook, I don't ask no questions."
It was a few days after this incident that Cleveland had what was, hands-down,
the single most distressing moment of his life. He had just finished getting
dressed, and the corners of his mouth curved upward slightly in anticipation
as he slipped his right hand into his pocket. . . and found nothing.
His puzzlement turned to panic as he explored more carefully and still came
up empty-handed. He turned the pocket inside out; there was nothing there.
She's gone, he thought wildly, and a medley of feelings played itself across
his mind too quickly to be influenced by rational thought, a rapid succession
of emotional sixteenth-notes crying loss, anger, fear, confusion and despair.
She had abandoned him, she had quit her job, she was ill, injured, dying, dead.
He nearly choked with relief and delight when he found the precious square of
paper. . . in his left hand pocket.
There was no longer any denying it. Cleveland Marsh had fallen deeply,
hopelessly, irrationally and irrevocably in love.
It wasn't a pining sort of love, although the object of his affections
was absent. The mechanical details of sex had always seemed rather
unnecessarily messy to him anyway. No, things were perfect just the
way they were. The proof of her love for him came with every pair of
trousers he wore.
And if there was an extra bit of spring in his step, if he was a trifle
more tolerant with his employees, if a smile came to his lips just a
little more quickly than before, it was because Cleveland Marsh was a man
fulfilled.
