The Supply Closet

Annie opened the door to what she thought was the bathroom. Oops, nope. Despite the darkness she could just barely make out tight space and shelving: a supply closet. She had to pee like nobody’s business, but Phillip was fumbling with his sound system back in the living room, so she decided to—what the hell—snoop. She reached out blindly in front of her, expecting a string, and there it was, hanging from the ceiling, her fingers brushing against it. She took a tug, and there was light.

Minutes later Annie had found the bathroom and bestowed upon the earth a new ocean. She went to the sink to wash her hands. She stared into the mirror at what she thought was a pretty face, and the pretty face said to itself, “You let yourself get drunk, lady.” The water running, she wiped her wet hands over her face, ruining her makeup, but she didn’t care because she had decided Phillip was a big capital-L Loser.

Yes, he was dull and not terribly attractive; and though he seemed vaguely intelligent, he had few social skills and little common sense. This she had gathered during the first twenty minutes of their dinner together at the steak restaurant.

And that closet, what was with that? It was Creepsville, that’s what it was: office supplies like pens and rubber bands and paperclips, but also bathroom supplies like half-used toothpaste tubes and unpackaged toothbrushes, and, if Annie had seen right, there was even some toilet paper rolled by hand and stuffed onto one of the shelves. And had she seen kitchenware in there, too? Yes, she was sure she had: plastic forks and plastic spoons, and metal forks and metal spoons, an empty saltshaker, a wooden stirring spoon. There was a troll doll in there, a thimble, and there was a whole lot more she hadn’t had a chance to glimpse in the few seconds she was peeking into the closet.

Annie dried her hands on a flower-patterned hand towel and then left the bathroom, rejoining Phillip in the living room. He had dimmed the lights. There was some soft rock playing now, too, softly.

“You find the bathroom okay?” Phillip asked. He patted the cushion next to him, for her sit.

“Uh-huh,” she said, and she sat by his side. “Eventually. I accidentally found the supply closet first.”

“Oh, yeah.” He laughed nervously. “That thing’s a mess. I’m not a very organized guy, what can I say.”

She smiled. “But what is all that stuff?”

“Just junk. You know, junk I keep around for whatever, for whenever. You never know when you’ll need something.”

“Where do you get that stuff? I mean, the toilet paper bunched up and everything?”

“Oh.” He leaned back on the couch, grabbed his glass of Merlot from the coffee table next to him. He sipped, swallowed. “I don’t know. It just collects over the years.”

She nodded, unsatisfied with his answer.

“Listen,” he said, “I’m not a hoarder or anything, so please don’t think that. I sort of collect things, but I’m not a hoarder. But—” He took another sip of wine, swallowed. “But, uh, I do have a tendency to take things on occasion, from houses.”

Annie shook her head. “What, you steal?”

“No, not really. I wouldn’t call it that. I mean, I don’t, like, break into strangers’ houses and take their things, not at all. I mean, I’m invited.” He smiled weakly at her, shrugged.

Annie broke eye contact with him to find her own glass of wine, which was on the coffee table in front of her, by her knees. She scooped it up but didn’t sip. “So,” she said, “you go to people’s houses—”

“—friends’ houses, or family, always invited, like for a get-together or something—”

“—and while you’re there, you take things.”

“Little things, like you saw. I might hang out with my friends the Ellises on Friday night. And I like to just take a souvenir. Like a pen. No big deal, I’m not a felon, I don’t think.”

“Really? Are you kidding me?”

He leaned back on the sofa and his eyes went to the ceiling. “It’s kind of a compulsion, so it’s not like I exactly want to do it. I hope you don’t think I’m a freak or something. I don’t steal diamond rings. Imagine people who work in an office and take a few paperclips or something, it’s more like that.”

“When did it start?”

“I don’t know. A while back. At restaurants.”

“Restaurants?”

“I’d take sugar packets and half-and-half. It grew from there, I guess.”

“You bring it back and throw it in a closet?”

“Yeah.” He bit his lip and shrugged again. “I know, kind of kooky, right?”

She finally sipped her wine, and he sipped his. Their eyes met, just for a moment, and then she studied his face closely, trying to glimpse even a hint of a serial killer behind those eyes. He didn’t look like a serial killer. Just normal. Maybe too normal. That’s why she’d agreed to go out with him in the first place.

Annie’s dating history was a cruel but common tale. She had met all types: the whiny milquetoast, the boasting meathead. And there was the obligatory jerk back in college who had hit her. Annie was twenty-six now. She had never been married, hadn’t had a steady boyfriend for longer than six months. She was still young, she knew, still had time to find the right one, but sometimes, like right now, for instance, she felt the right one didn’t exist.

She and Phillip were quiet for several minutes, just sipping their drinks and listening to music and looking at the wall art, which was unfortunately not very tasteful—not as creepy as his supply closet, at least, but not very tasteful.

Finally, Annie said, “Can I ask you another question?”

“Sure.”

“About the stealing…”

“Oh, but it’s not stealing,” he said, perhaps a little too strenuously. “I mean, I know it kind of is stealing technically, but really, it’s just a thing, an activity. It’s like people who pop their knuckles. They just do it.”

“Okay. But, what would it take for you to, you know, not do it. I mean, could you stop?”

“Could I stop?” He dropped his eyes back to his wine, rolling the stem of the glass between his thumb and forefinger. Perhaps he’d never before considered the possibility of leaving a restaurant or a house party without something stealthily stuffed inside his coat pocket. “Well,” he said. “It’s just so ingrained, you know? I guess I could try.” He cleared his throat. “Listen, you want to take another look at what I’ve got in there? Maybe you’re getting the wrong idea about me.”

“I’ve seen it,” she said. She felt like putting her wine glass down and making a steady clip for the door. She didn’t want to wind up the latest conquest among the varied items crammed inside Phillip’s musty old closet.

“Please?” he said. “I know it’s ridiculous, and I know I need to stop taking things. But if I show you what they mean to me...”

Maybe it was the alcohol in her veins, but she said, “Okay.” And as they stood up and he led her back toward the hallway, she sized him up, thinking, yes, she could probably take him, if it came to that. She’d been attending self-defense classes ever since that date with the guy who had thought she was a punching bag.

Phillip opened the closet door and tugged on the string, and the closet sprang back to life. Again she saw his screwy collection, built up over, certainly, years. Stuff snatched from various homes, from businesses, from his family and friends, etcetera.

He removed a miniature stapler from one of the shelves. “This came from my brother-in-law’s parents’ house, circa 2014—that’s the year of the visit, not the stapler itself.”

He handed it to her.

“Oh,” she said. It was an average, unimpressive mini-stapler.

“They had like three crammed in an office drawer. So I took one.” His eyes brightened. “It doesn’t even have staples in it.”

She nodded and handed it back to him, now deciding for certain that he was mondo nutso. He returned the stapler to its home and brought back a pencil he’d taken from his best friend’s housewarming, a party his friend had thrown after moving out of the dorm they’d shared back in college.

The toilet paper, and there was lots of it, came from various sources, Phillip said, including restaurant bathrooms.

“These are all snapshots,” he said finally. “These are photographs from my life, that’s all. When I take something, it’s a memento, a reminder. I remember who I was when I look at a pencil I took from Gil’s house, or a napkin from Grandma’s. Annie, I really like you. I like you a lot. And I don’t want you to think I’m crazy.” He reached back into the closet and removed a lone plastic rose from a bottom shelf. “Here, take this,” he said, handing it to her.

“Thanks,” she said, and took it.

“It’s from the house of a dead aunt, where we gathered after the funeral. I went to use the bathroom at the back of the house, and it was there in a vase among others, and I took it and put it in my inside coat pocket. These things are worthless in value, but I guess they mean something to me. But I’d stop it all for you, to get to see you again.”

He wanted to kiss her, but she said she never kissed on the first date. That was a lie, although it was a rule she wished she obeyed more often. In this case, it was easy. She left the house shortly thereafter, lucky to be alive, lucky not to have become part of his storage closet, another vignette from his life to remind him that he had once had a date.

Then again, on her way home that night, as she glanced over at the plastic rose riding in the car seat next to her, she thought that maybe he wasn’t so dangerous, just weird and lonely—like her.