Franzis tears his trousers

Franzis, I’ve always wanted to make a story out of him.  With an androgynous name like Franzis, it was inevitable.  It’s not difficult to know everything about him.  Those stick legs with rotten grapefruit kneecaps.  Always trousers, regularly two inches too short.  People love Franzis.  They wave to him on the street from their buildings.  There should be a song playing whenever Franzis comes walking by.  A piano, played by some smiling fool with an exaggerated mustache.  

Franzis raises his hat, a millimeter from his hair, and nods to the people.  Old women especially love Franzis.  They smile from their thighs and their bosoms and from their cheekbones.  Not for just anybody, but for Franzis.  

He looks quite like his Grandfather, Franzis.  Only Franzis hold his cigarette between the thumb and the forefinger.  Granddad held his between the first two, a bit more elegant.  The older generation’s model made large sweeping gestures.  Cigarette smoke outlined grandfather Franzis’ tales.  Big tales, tall tales, stories for any occasion.  In that regard, Franzis tells a different type of story.  His stories are short and he shares them intimately.  They are good stories.  They’re churned with humor and spice.  But he keeps them concise.  He doesn’t meander in his stories or in his speech.  And people, men and women, get lost in his eyes while he’s telling a story.  

Francis doesn’t have particularly pretty eyes.  Dangerous is a better word.  They put an invisible pressure on whatever is caught in his gaze.  If he’s looking across the room, daydreaming or otherwise, a person on the other end of the room might turn around and pick him out, feel his stare.  If they don’t know Franzis, they might leave the room entirely, or shift so that they no longer fall in his line of vision.

Franzis eats lunch alone in the afternoons.  He doesn’t wear a tie, but if he did, he would remove it before the first bite. He eats with small bites and chews until there’s nothing left.  The tip left on the table is generous, not superfluous.

Twice a month Franzis tears the crotch seam in his trousers.  It happens while shutting the door with his foot, hands full of groceries, or laundry.  Leaning over to pick up a coin dropped in the gutter.  Plopping down in the single chair in his narrow kitchen after a long day.  The seam goes like a zipper.

In public places, Franzis uses his lanky stride to disguise the tear in his trousers.  He is an expert at crossing his legs just so while sitting, making a pair of otherwise ruined trousers seem intact.  There’s a way he holds his bag or his coat that disguises the flaw in his fabric.  It’s almost as if Franzis himself doesn’t fully accept the torn seam in his trousers until the day is done.

At home, Franzis will fret and sweat and curse over a pair of wrecked trousers.  A stabbing pain comes where his nose meets his eyebrows.  Once, Franzis pinned a steak knife into the wood tabletop.  The evidence is there, almost exactly center, a knife wound, an inch deep.  There have been broken plates and unopened mail torn to shreds.  If there was a bird on the windowsill on an evening where Franzis tore his trousers, he might lift the window and scold the bird so ruthlessly that the bird would fly upside down or into the wall of the next building.  

This would go on for several minutes until the tension was gone.  The pain between the eyes would lessen.  The trousers would be removed and folded neatly, left on the edge of the table to be taken to the seamstress the next morning.

Marla, the seamstress, is a woman at least three times Franzis’ age.  She grows white hairs out of a mole on her chin, but is otherwise pleasant-looking.  She wears several dresses, none identifiably different from the others.  Always floral print, always cut to her exact proportions.  Only loosening with age, like the very skin she wears on her cheeks and the backs of her arms.

Marla only knows Franzis as a guaranteed source of monthly income.  She always leaves a small space in her schedule, knowing, without hoping or guessing, that he will show up.  In Marla’s eyes, Franzis is a gentle, quiet man, with long legs that wreck havoc on trousers.  She has tried every trick and technique to mend his fabric permanently, but the crotch seam always gives.  There’s always a new stitch, a new formula, a new patch.  And two weeks later, like clockwork, Franzis shows up with his trousers folded under his arm.