the bottom in one scuff-mark
when he’d returned home just before dawn from an extremely important get-together with potential clients to find that his wife had had the locks changed and filed a restraining order and would communicate with him only by notes passed through the mail-slot
Context
The bottom compressed into a single domestic image: the pre-dawn return from "an extremely important get-together with potential clients," the changed locks, the restraining order, the wife who will now speak only through the mail-slot. The one incongruous white scuff on his gleaming wingtip is the whole collapse — the mark of a small man kicking a door that will not open.