THE SUEDE

"We took turns wearing it around campus and taking it home over school breaks."

The jacket cost $40 at a Salvation Army. I didn’t have $40, and neither did Steve, but we both liked it, so we bought it together, $20 apiece. We were juniors in college. We called it The Suede.  

The night I met Steve—in the first month of freshman year—I was visiting M, a girl I was wildly attracted to. I found her in her dorm room folding her laundry. The room was tiny, really just large enough for a bunkbed. Steve was lounging on his back on the bottom bunk, hands behind his head, sneakers dangling off the mattress. 

I fully expected to dislike the guy. Steve had no such plan. He was open and friendly. He had an easy laugh, and he loved discussing the odd, the mundane, the details. A month after we met, my interest in M had faded, but Steve and I were hanging out every day. 

We became regulars at a local dive bar, played squash, speculated about who would lose their virginity first, and wrestled drunkenly on the hardwood dorm floors. The matches always ended the same way: Steve slamming me to the floor, me laughing my head off.  He’d wrestled in high school and despite being shorter and skinnier than me, he could take me off my feet in a heartbeat.

We started rooming together junior year, 1984, the year of The Suede. It was old even then, and it fell straight down our skinny frames. We took turns wearing it around campus and taking it home over school breaks. When we graduated, Steve brought it with him to his suit-and-tie life at Goldman Sachs. A few years later he sent it back to me. I wore it throughout my late twenties, then sent it back to him. Thanks to business trips and shared vacations, then my wedding, then his, we saw each other regularly. We never talked about The Suede. Years would pass, then one of us would think  to ask for it and the other would send it. 

The last time I asked for The Suede, Steve told me apologetically that he’d had the lining replaced because it was falling apart, and now it no longer fit. He sent it anyway, but he was right. The Suede was tight around the shoulders and shorter, ballooning up around me. I didn’t say anything to Steve. I figured I’d see if a tailor could fix it. Then I forgot, then Steve got cancer, and three years later he died. And The Suede stayed with me.

I don’t think I will let it outlast me. I’ll burn it probably, if my life ends in a way that gives me time to wrap things up. I’m sure someone else could love The Suede, but the thought of it being unappreciated or forgotten is too much.  Steve is gone, and when I am gone I think The Suede should go too.

—P.G.