“No, I’m not.”
He let go of my hand and went over to the counter. He hoisted himself up so he was sitting by the sink, his heels against the dishwasher. He said, “You wanted to know what I thought about your taking the room. I guess that made me uncomfortable because it sort of raised the question of why you weren’t living here.”
I felt my face color, and I looked away. Refrigerator, range. The kitchen was so clean. There was nothing out, not a salt shaker, not a mug. It was like a kitchen in a model apartment, all potential. I was disappointed by what he was getting at, yet I didn’t really want to live in this place. I wouldn’t be able to add so much as a colorful potholder without fearing I’d upset him somehow.
“It’s OK,” I said, facing him again. “I understand. It’s too soon.”
He grinned. “My internal body clock is set on glacial time.”
I knew what he meant, that he moved with the slowness of glaciers, the incremental progress of ice inching through time and space, but what I thought of was the chill of it, the chill inside him.
That weekend I moved into Alice’s room. Simon and I dragged the futon together, then carried the dresser between us. Arranged against the walls, my furniture gave the room a desolate feel. Having a bed on the floor had been fine for the alcove, where there wasn’t really any floor left, but it was awkward here, a car stalled in a vast desert.
A few minutes after Simon left there was a knock, and I turned to see Lane standing in my doorway, a vase of purple tulips in hand.
“Here’s a little housewarming for you.”
She handed me the flowers and I thanked her and leaned in to them, let my cheek feel their downy firmness. “You’re so nice.”
She smiled. “I’m glad you have a real room now.”
I hadn’t seen her in over a week, but somehow it didn’t matter. My friendship with her was different from any friendship I’d ever had before—from my friendship with Jamie. Lane and I were like lines that intersected and then split apart again, without a pattern but with a kind of purpose. Jamie and I were DNA, a double helix. Or had been—we were nothing now, although at odd moments I sometimes got a sense of her out there, as if her half of the helix had grown invisible but was still present, spiraling alongside mine.
I set the tulips on my dresser and turned back to Lane. “They add a lot—it was a little depressing.”
She looked around the room. “Alice never got around to painting. That and a rug would probably do a lot.”
A new coat of paint. I thought of a pale blue-green for the walls, maybe a dark slate blue for the moldings. I had the exact colors in my pencil set. I said, “I’d love it to feel like your room eventually. Tranquil.”
She smiled. “Funny how rooms have moods, isn’t it? Like Simon’s is boisterous.”
I laughed. Simon had a red-and-pink zigzag bedspread, a bookcase he’d painted to look like leopard skin. On the wall was a painting he’d done of three dogs sitting on a couch, all doubled over with laughter.
Rooms having moods reminded me of my Process assignment. In our last class Piero had handed out cards to everyone, each bearing a single word—“Whimsical,” “Melancholy,” “Reclusive.” Mine was “Witty.” Next week, we were supposed to bring in a garment that expressed the mood on our card. I told Lane about it now. “So if you can think of a witty garment, just let me know.”
“Like a bra that tells jokes?” she said, and then: “Just kidding.” She tilted her head toward my dresser. “We could go through your clothes together.”
I shook my head. “If my stuff talks at all it says, I don’t know, timid, cautious. Definitely not witty.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Your stuff or you?”
“Probably both.”
She frowned. “I don’t know how you can say that.”
“Why?”
“You’re so brave.”
I put my fingers to my sternum. “Me?”
“Think of how you left home.”
I looked down at the floor. After a moment I looked up again. “Don’t you mean selfish?”
A shocked look came over her face, and she shook her head. “Not at all. My God, is that what you lie awake at night worrying about?”
“No, I lie awake worrying about what I’m doing with Kilroy.”
As soon as the words were out, a jittery agitation invaded me. What had I just said? What did it mean? I didn’t lie awake at night, I slept, slept next to him the whole night through, woke rested, alert, aware. Buzzing. Worried.
“Shit,” I said.
“It’s not easy, is it?”
I shook my head. I thought of Simon saying Kilroy was an odd duck, and I wondered if he and Lane had talked about Kilroy. My weird guy. My nut to crack.
Lane said, “Maura and I had a really rocky beginning. Like, we’d sleep together, and then the next day we’d see each other in the dining hall and we’d both think the other person was acting cool and so
we’d
act cool, and—well, it was pretty awful for a while there.”
“What helped?”
“Time,” she said. “And a lot of therapy on my part.”
I thought of the summer night when Dave King had found me—followed me?—outside the hospital. How he’d asked if I’d thought of talking to someone myself. An image came to mind, of my mother in her little office with its two chairs set face to face, and I shook my head to erase it.
“Can I ask you something?” Lane said.
“Sure.”
“Do you love him?”
I thought of his face. Of being scratched by his stubble when we kissed. Of how quick he was, and how funny, and how kind. Of the way the beginning of his erection felt against me when we were lying like spoons and he hadn’t yet shifted his hips back so it could lift. “I do,” I said.
“Well, then, that’s probably what you’re doing with him.”
We talked a little more, and then she said goodbye and went into her own room, where I heard her moving around, the floor creaking under her feet and then, after a while, the faint whistling of her kettle. I opened my closet door and looked at the green velvet dress, which I’d carried over from Kilroy’s earlier. It seemed out of place in this dusty closet. It expressed a mood I wasn’t in.
I crossed my room and sat on the futon. My legs jutted out in a way that reminded me of the dead witch’s legs in
The Wizard of Oz
, sticking out from under the crushing weight of Dorothy’s house. I scooted backward, then lay back so my head was on my pillow. Staring at the ceiling, I noticed a web of cracks emanating from the light fixture. The sight reminded me of something, and I stared, trying to figure out what. Then I realized: it was like roads leading away from a town. Verona, Oregon, Stoughton, Lake Mills—I was thinking of the roads out of Madison.
I arrived at Piero’s class early that week, my witty garment folded into my shoulder bag. Piero came in right on the hour, and while a few people usually continued chatting until he’d cleared his throat and begun to speak, today everyone stopped abruptly. I figured they all felt as I did, worried about what they’d brought. I wondered if anyone had been given a card that said “Nervous.”
“Let’s hang up the work, please,” he said, and we all stood and began arranging our projects on hangers and then hooking them onto short retractable rods that pulled out from the walls.
“What do you think?” he said. “Hang your word nearby, or no? Perhaps no, then we can try to determine the word from the work itself.”
We started at the far side of the room, where a pink-haired girl had hung up a black linen jacket with a high, mandarin collar and a loose, baggy shape.
“What does this say?” Piero said.
“Funereal?” said someone.
“But that’s just because it’s black,” said someone else.
“It’s sort of sexless,” said a third person, and Piero nodded.
“Yes, it is, isn’t it—a Mao jacket, really.” He turned to the girl who’d brought it. “What were you trying to express?”
“Reclusive?” she said. “I was thinking, you know, the high neck, and how it’s so loose it would kind of hide the person?”
Piero nodded. “Yes, I see, but have you perhaps been too literal? Let’s move on.”
Next was a slip hung over a bra, with the two stitched together so the lace trimming on the bra cups showed. The woman who’d made it already looked embarrassed.
“Sexy,” someone said.
“Flirty,” said someone else.
“My word was flirtatious,” the woman said, looking hopefully at Piero.
“Yes, but it’s the same problem, no? The garment doesn’t
express
flirtatiousness, it relies instead on a kind of telegraphing. It says slip, bra, peekaboo, rather than through subtler means evoking the spirit of flirtatiousness in the way that, say, a little cotton sundress in a bright polka dot would. What does the word mean: not sex directly, but really more the opposite, the idea of sexiness, the promise. I think the point here is to evoke, not to translate.”
On we went, past whimsical, melancholy, frantic. The one Piero seemed to like best was a skinny, horizontally striped navy-and-white T-shirt hung over matching vertically striped walking shorts. The guy who’d brought them in had also brought white knee socks and navy fisherman sandals, and I thought it was the first thing we’d seen that someone might actually wear.
“Lovely,” Piero said. “Very playful. Was that your word, playful?”
The guy nodded. “I was thinking it was something a woman might put on for a fun day, just because she was in a good mood.”
“Well done,” Piero said. “That’s just right.” He looked around at everyone. “Do you see how the spirit of the word is expressed?”
Finally we came to mine. It had been sheer luck that I’d thought of something—sheer luck and a mirror, because last night, desperate to come up with a solution, I’d paced Kilroy’s apartment over and over until I was stopped by my own reflection, the bathroom mirror showing me myself wearing my Adolpho-overtaken-by-the-Gap T-shirt, as Alice had put it.
Now it hung in Piero’s classroom, braid-trimmed, a row of anchor-stamped brass buttons marching down the front. It was nearly the same red as the mock turtleneck Piero wore, a red that was just faintly tomatoey, as if the tiniest drop of orange had been added.
“This is great,” someone said.
“Yeah, it’s really clever.”
“Witty,” Piero said, turning to smile at me. “That was your word, right?”
I nodded.
“The nice thing about this project,” he said, “is the way it juxtaposes two ideas—the basic T-shirt with the rather stuffy Adolpho suit. That’s what much of wit is, really, the unexpected joining of opposing ideas. Well done, Carrie. I think we’ve learned something about mood today.”
The class period was over and everyone began to scatter. I slid the T-shirt into my shoulder bag. I was halfway to the door when he called my name.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” he said, standing at his desk at the front of the class, putting papers into a briefcase. “You’re taking Draping also?”
I was surprised he knew. “And Patternmaking.”
“And you already have your bachelor’s?”
“From the University of Wisconsin.”
He smiled. “What do you think so far, do you enjoy your work here? I think you might like to consider full-time, no? Working toward a degree?”
I was flattered but for some reason also suddenly unnerved, as if it wouldn’t be my choice whether I went to college again or not. “I don’t know—it’s expensive, isn’t it?”
“We have financial aid, of course,” he said offhandedly. “Tell me, the T-shirt—have you thought of playing with the idea a little more, trying different versions, maybe?”
I bit my lip. “What do you mean, different versions?”
“Well, a T-shirt is in some ways a blank slate, no? A tabula rasa. You can sew on a fake pearl necklace and you have a play on an evening dress. I think a tuxedo shirt was done many years ago, but that’s no reason not to try some other ideas now.”
I considered. I’d worked on the red T-shirt as a lark; I’d have to think about alternatives.
“Play around a little,” he said. “I’ll be interested to see what you come up with. And think a little about what we’ve been talking about, yes? I think you are still young—it’s not too late to pick a new career.”
I thanked him and said goodbye. Out on the street, I wrapped my scarf around my head against the early-March wind. I usually took the subway to class, but I’d taken to walking home, something appealing about being out and among people at the end of the day, being part of the two-way stream of New Yorkers going home.
A new career. A career of fabric and silhouette, color, style, mood. What Simon had had in mind, but for real. As I walked I wondered: was it possible?
I thought of what Kilroy had said, long ago in McClanahan’s:
See, there it is right there, the pernicious little idea that who you are should determine something as trivial as what you do for a living. Life’s not like that. It’s not that malleable. It’s not that neat
.
But what if it was? What if it could be? I was someone for whom it was a thrill to browse among fabrics, to touch them, to play in my mind with color and shape. Why shouldn’t these things move into the center of
my life? Why shouldn’t I move them there? I was walking down Seventh Avenue, cold and shadowy in the late afternoon, crowded with traffic and pedestrians, when all at once I stopped and laughed out loud. Up ahead of me in the intersection was the now-familiar sight of a guy wheeling a huge rack of clothes across traffic, and I thought how perfect it was that I’d been thinking what I’d been thinking exactly while walking through the garment district.
C
HAPTER
28
The following week, I headed out of Draping behind tall, skinny Maté, who was the talker of the class, his lilting Caribbean-accented English flowing around the edges of the brightly lit room. He tended toward long, colorful sarongs topped by Oxford shirts knotted at the waist, and today, preparing to leave, he’d wrapped a capacious loose-weave brown shawl over the ensemble, leaving nothing showing but his lean brown calves and his red suede clogs. The first few class meetings he’d annoyed me, but today I’d found myself admiring his extravagant sense of style, and now, walking behind him, I realized that he reminded me of a model on a catwalk, the way he strode along on his long legs and held the shawl close, the angles of his body revealed with every move.