Attention to Detail

Attention to Detail

by

Eric C. Hartlep

The old man was in tears. Hunched on the park bench in old clothes that still held some dignity. Good clothes, well enough made to hold up for years. How many times had they been cleaned and pressed until they lost their shape? By whose hands? Those of his late wife? Or a maid or housekeeper? Or by the owner of the old dry cleaning place two blocks over that had shut a decade ago?

He sat looking down, where no pigeons strutted, literally holding his hat in his hands. And no one wears hats of that kind any more. He could have been a fading star, now a mere movie extra, waiting to be called for his final acting role in a period piece. The tears an actor’s ruse, conjured up to add a fleeting sense of pathos, felt rather than seen in the background of a modern story.

His lines were few. Practiced. But his scene had been cut in the end, so the memory of those lines was all he had in the end. He spoke them over and over to himself in an unhurried manner, but still with great feeling. Because sometimes an actor is given lines that are so perfect for his part that they sum up his existence and become etched on his face or expressed in the way his muscles hang from the bones of arm and leg and the curvature of his spine.

What he had seen that brought the tears was this: an old Checker taxicab, large and bulbous, deepest blue, but pristine. Oversized by today’s standards. Polished to a high gloss and without a single dent despite twenty or thirty years of service. He couldn’t remember which building he’d encountered it because that didn’t matter. He’d walked outside and was dazed by the sun and went to sit in the park. Beyond the hillside dropped away and segments of river glinted below through the gaps between small skyscrapers, outdated apartments and half-empty office buildings.

The old man had gotten lost in the building. He pushed the wrong button, and instead of elevator doors opening on the main floor lobby, or even underground parking, they rolled open to reveal the taxi, perfect of its kind, in the open picture-frame square of a loading dock.

Because of the slope of the hill the car seemed to float on a horizon of hazy air, as if dropped into the foreground of an Impressionist painting. It took him a moment to realize it was not sitting on its own wheels. In fact it had been hoisted up, lovingly, even reverentially, and now laid flat on its chassis. Supported crosswise on the rim of a massive dumpster itself filled to the bottom of the car with construction debris. The taxi’s tires hung unnaturally loose from empty wheel wells.

But at first, none of this registered with the old man. He was mesmerized by the taxi’s classic glow in the indirect autumn light and by all the little details. The red metal badge on the trunk lid. The ornate frame surrounding its license plate. The name of the taxi company, a small firm he’d never heard of, that didn’t actually use the word taxi at all. Harvey’s Hired Livery Service. Most of all by the small number 3 painted on the driver’s door.

The old man imagined a small fleet of midnight blue cars, summoned at all hours, and for any purpose, delivering patrons to or whisking them away from exclusive addresses. Idling curbside, quiet and discrete as cats. Interiors smelling of leather and expensive perfume. Magic words spoken, spells woven or broken.

It was then that he’d noticed the luggage. Among them a Madler Koffer leather steamer trunk with tarnished brass corners. Two Louis Vuitton bags. One a man’s, another a woman’s. A Lady Baltimore train case in robin’s egg blue cloth. All stacked neatly, filling the interior from seat to headliner. The old man had owned a luggage shop and knew all the styles, all the top brands. That explained his hands, which were well formed and elegant, but not those of an aristocrat: hands that had known work. There had been a small bell that tinkled when a customer entered his shop.

He imagined the hands of whoever had placed the luggage in the taxi. Hands like his own. This unseen person had taken their time stacking the luggage. Laid out the accoutrements of former owners with dignity and respect, whether abandoned or left for safe-keeping, now lost forever. Whether a man or a woman, the old man knew beyond doubt that, in his heyday, he would have hired that person instantly to work in his shop. That attention to detail - as caring for things and the people who owned them is referred to these days - was rare enough even then. Again the word reverentially came to his mind. That was when the tears had begun.