An Eli Paxton Story
If Marlowe could have laughed, he'd have been rolling on the floor, holding his sides and gasping for breath.
Marlowe's my dog. I don't like him much. He doesn't like me at all. But we're all each other's got, so I feed him and he hangs around.
Right at the moment, he was staring intently at me as I was struggling with the black tie. He'd been watching me for the better part of half an hour, as I cursed my way through the suspenders, cumberbund, and the cufflinks. He cocked his head to one side and grinned--yeah, I know, dogs can't grin ... but no one ever told that to Marlowe--as if to say that everything that went before was merely amusing, but my struggle with the tie was hilarious.
It wasn't that I was a stranger to tuxedos. I'd worn one to my junior prom in high school, and that had only been 27 years ago. Well, maybe 28. I could have sworn that first one was a lot easier to get into.
Maybe it's just that I was out of practice. I only owned two neckties, and I never untied them. I just slipped them over my head and slid the knots up, like you do on a noose. The only cufflinks I'd seen in the past decade were the fakes that Benny Fourth Street gave me as collateral for a twenty-dollar loan right before he took off for Gulfstream Park.
I looked at the face in the mirror. It glared back accusingly at me, as if to ask why I was inflicting all this suffering and humiliation on it.
The answer was easy: money.
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