“You’re just about broke?”
I nodded.
“Great city, terrible prices.”
“Tell me about it,” I said, pulling a pair of jeans from the tangle and shaking them.
“But things are good with the K-man?”
I thought of last night, how Kilroy and I had roasted a chicken and eaten it with our bare hands, pulling the meat from the bones until our fingers and mouths gleamed with grease. When we were done he got up and brought back hot washcloths, then cleaned my fingers for me one by one.
“They are,” I said.
“He’s kind of an odd duck, but I think that’s good in a way.”
I smiled. “I’m so glad you approve.”
“Hey, I’m your sponsor here—I get an opinion.”
“My sponsor? You make me sound like a foreign exchange student.”
He studied me for a long moment. “Are you OK?”
I nodded. I’d finished my folding, and now I stood up and began putting things into my cardboard dresser, underwear and socks in the top drawer, shirts and sweaters next. The dresser wasn’t holding up very well. I’d thought of trying to find a cheap wood one somewhere, but it hardly seemed worth it, given how depressing the alcove was. That morning, getting ready to go do laundry, I’d wrestled the sheets off the futon, and when it thumped back down clumps of dust darted across the floor like tiny mice.
“You can’t use the bottom drawer, can you?”
I turned and looked at him sitting against the wall, a concerned expression on his face. There were times, usually when other people were around, when I forgot how much I liked him. I said, “There’s not enough space for it to open.”
He pressed his lips together thoughtfully. “I bet you could really use the extra room. There’s got to be a way.” He sat for another moment, then suddenly got to his feet and headed for the stairs. “Hang on, I’ll be right back,” he called over his shoulder as he hurried down. I heard his footsteps continue to the first floor, then move in the direction of the kitchen.
I turned back to my clothes. Part of the problem was that the drawers were way too full. I wiggled open the third one and jammed my jeans in, on top of the pants and skirts that were already in there. I should get rid of
some of this stuff: there were things I hadn’t worn since arriving in New York, things that were just too dowdy. If the people in the stores in SoHo knew I even had this stuff, they’d write me off in an instant.
I thought of the green velvet dress, hanging in Kilroy’s front closet so I wouldn’t have to crumple it into the dresser. “When are you going to wear it?” he kept asking me, but now that I’d bailed on wearing it to the occasion that had inspired it, I didn’t have a clue. It wasn’t exactly the right thing for the Cuban-Chinese greasy spoon we’d tried a few nights back.
Simon’s footsteps became audible again, and from the second-floor landing he called, “You’re going to be so happy.” I went out to the top of the stairs, and there he was, halfway up, two stacks of bricks held precariously against his body. He smiled a big smile. “They were in the backyard,” he said. “They’ll be perfect.”
He reached the top of the stairs and carefully squatted, then set the bricks on the floor one by one. There were about a dozen of them, red and crumbling, a bit dirty in places. We brushed them off into the bathroom garbage and then rocked the dresser onto its side and slid three stacks of two underneath it. Simon got his fingers under the other side and lifted, and I wedged the remaining ones in, trying to separate them so the weight would be supported evenly. “You’re totally brilliant,” I said.
“If I were totally brilliant I would have thought of this the first time I saw your little cardboard wonder.”
He went into the bathroom and washed his hands, then came out, squatted in front of the dresser, and pulled open the bottom drawer. “Voilà,” he said, but then his expression changed, and he reached in and pulled out my silk nightgown and robe. “Whoa,” he said. “What are these?”
My face was warm. “Nothing.”
“They don’t look like nothing.” He took hold of the gown and straightened up, and it dropped open, a tumble of gold. He held it by the spaghetti straps and turned it this way and that, and the long drape of it caught the light. He laid it on the futon and picked up the robe, which he unfolded carefully. “Jeez, Carrie, where’d you get these?”
“I made them.”
He stared at me, his eyes wide. “As in sewed them? You better not be fucking with me.”
I smiled. “I’m not.”
He placed the robe next to the gown and then stood looking at the two pieces, a pool of silk waving a little over the wrinkles in the scratchy
green blanket he’d lent me. “Jeez,” he said again. “And you don’t even wear them with lover-boy.”
I stifled a smile. I couldn’t imagine showing them to Kilroy, let alone wearing them with him.
“This is the answer, you know,” he said.
For a moment I thought he meant the answer to my problems with Kilroy, and my heart pounded. But I didn’t have problems with Kilroy: I had Kilroy, who was a bit of a mystery sometimes, but not a problem.
“You don’t get it, do you?” Simon said. “You’re going to become a famous clothing designer.”
I smiled. “Probably by tomorrow.”
“Carrie, come on. I’ve noticed—you’re interested in clothes. In fashion. You are. And look at these things: you’re obviously talented.”
“I can sew.”
“So push it,” he said with exasperation. “Seriously. Take a class.”
“I have no money.”
He sighed and then got down on his knees and began folding the robe. He was careful with it, smoothing it as he went. He put it in the drawer, then did the same with the gown. “I’m going to take a shower,” he said. “And then you and I are going for a walk.”
Where we went was Parsons School of Design, and what we got there was their course catalog, the one with continuing studies offerings. We took it to a coffee shop and looked through it together, the course names interesting to me and then thrilling, full of promise: Color and Design, Draping, Patternmaking. Fashion Trends, Design Sketching, Couture Sewing Techniques. Simon sat beside me bristling with pleasure. On a paper napkin he doodled a dress, then wrote “Carrie Bell, Designer” off to the side. “I’m so pleased with myself I can hardly stand it,” he said. The classes started in a few weeks, and they were $380 each. Which meant there was only one way I could make it work: by selling my car. It was suddenly that simple—give up the car I never used, and get something I could use. Of course I would sell my car! The fact that Mike had been a kind of guardian of it—that he’d helped me buy it, had packed a roadside emergency kit to keep in the trunk, had rescued me a couple times when it died—this no longer mattered. Or it mattered differently from how it had. Before, it had been a reason to keep the car, a nerve connecting me to a body of old habits. Now it was free, a small foreign body wedged inside me next to the ongoing ache of my failure to go home for Christmas.
I got $2,500, from a thirtyish couple in Patagonia jackets who had a weekend place on Long Island and wanted an extra car to leave out there. I registered for Draping, Patternmaking, and a class called Process, new this spring, that was described as “a general and wide-ranging introduction to fashion.” Waiting for the term to start, I pondered my wardrobe, what to wear with what, how to give it verve. The January sales pulled me into store after store, and before long I’d succumbed to a black velvet shirt, then a pair of black ankle boots, and finally a bucket-shaped black leather bookbag with brushed nickel hardware.
It was strange to go back to school. I felt all the excited jitter of school beginnings in Madison, of being a third-grader in a new dress, a high school senior wondering what a new year would mean to me and my boyfriend. My classes were held at Parsons’ Midtown campus, just a couple blocks from Times Square, and it was a rush of stimulation to leave the subway and enter the street with its chaos of honking cars and squealing buses, its towering buildings, its giant electronic signs, its hotdog smells and crowds and crowds of people. Once I was in the building the commotion subsided, or didn’t so much subside as change, into a commotion of looks: of hair dyed blacker than black; of high, high heels or enormous, bulbous-toed boots; of bold interplays of color and pattern. Downtown was full of this, but it was odd to find such a concentration in the middle of that other New York, the New York of tourists and huge commerce: an enclave of edge.
Draping and Patternmaking introduced skills I saw right away I’d use forever, but it was the Process class I looked forward to. The teacher was a small, plump Italian named Piero Triolino, who wore a different-colored merino-wool mock turtleneck to each class, tucked into black jeans. In his accented English he told us again and again that inspiration was everywhere—in movies, through the viewfinders of microscopes and telescopes, in the daily lives of a hundred foreign cultures. He had us get large, hardbound books with unlined pages, and he told us to record our ideas in them—about color, silhouette, whatever. At first I felt frozen, thinking I
had
no ideas, but then a guy in class showed me several pages of fabric swatches he’d stapled into his book, and suddenly I got it. I taped in slips of paper from Chinese fortune cookies because I liked the grayed pastels; I bought colored pencils and markers and experimented with unexpected combinations, like cherry and pale yellow, or olive green and light blue. Remembering how I’d tried to draw dresses during the summer in Madison, I even tried sketching some ideas for clothes.
A freakishly warm Saturday in February pulled me and Kilroy out onto the street, and before I knew it he was steering us to the Museum of
Modern Art, where I’d never been. I wasn’t wild for museums, but it was the exact kind of thing Piero was always encouraging us to do,
Go to new places, see with new eyes
, so I was game. I had my sketchbook in my shoulder bag.
At the museum we entered the lobby and checked our coats, then stood in line for tickets. Near us stood a tall, angular girl wearing the shortest kilt I’d ever seen, and I got out my sketchbook and drew her, changing her top from the long, baggy Shetland sweater she wore to a skinny, cropped cardigan that would leave half an inch of midriff exposed. I eliminated her tights in favor of a pair of knee socks on which I scribbled the cables from some Bonnie Doons I remembered from grade school. On her feet I tried for a pair of clogs, but feet were hard.
Sketching
was hard: I wanted to take Design Sketching next, or maybe even Life Drawing.
“So what do you want to see?” Kilroy asked once we’d paid.
“Everything, I guess,” I said with a shrug.
He grinned. “You thought I wanted to just traipse through the whole place? Forget it, that’s window shopping with a forty-pound pack on your back. The only way to tame a place like this is to pick four things to look at, max, and be out in an hour. No wonder you hate museums.”
“I don’t hate museums.”
“Sure you do,” he said with a smile. “They make your feet hurt, and you always end up feeling stupid.”
I had to laugh, it was so true.
“When was the last time you were at a museum?”
I looked up at the high ceiling, considering. “A few summers ago, with Jamie. We went to the Art Institute in Chicago. She’d just finished a course in Impressionism, and she was just insufferable. There’s this painting there that’s all dots—
Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte?
I had to hear all about ‘pointillism’ for twenty minutes.”
“It’s a pretty cool painting,” Kilroy said.
“You’ve been to Chicago?”
He nodded.
“It’s OK,” I said.
I thought of the day with Jamie, a day I hadn’t thought of in ages, had perhaps never really thought of. It was the summer before our senior year at the U, and the two of us were in Chicago for the weekend, staying with her aunt. We did the whole Michigan Avenue thing, bought sandals in some shoe store in Water Tower, the same sandals, although she bought white and I bought brown. After the Art Institute we got cups of ice cream
from a sidewalk vendor and sat on the steps, side by side, spooning it up. Jamie was coming off a bad crush, and while we were sitting there I happened to look over and see tears on her cheeks. I set my ice cream down, about to put an arm around her shoulder to comfort her, but she shook her head hard. “I’m happy,” she said. “I’m crying because I’m happy.”
Kilroy was watching me, his eyes searching mine. “Call her,” he said, but I shook my head. Calling wasn’t the thing. I’d called Mike right after New Year’s and had found his voice so low it had seemed he wasn’t articulating his words so much as merely releasing them. In not going back at Christmas, I’d done something to Madison and everyone in it: set it on an ice floe and given it a push. What was I going to do now, make a big deal about waving goodbye?
We rode up the escalator and for fifteen minutes sat on a bench in front of a giant, all-black painting. People wandered in front of us, but mostly our view was clear. The painting just seemed black to me: I wasn’t about to say I could have painted it myself, but that’s pretty much what I was thinking until all at once the edges began to tremble. Nothing had changed, not the light in the room, the noise level, not my mind in any way I could recognize, but when Kilroy nudged me and asked if I was ready to move on, I found it hard to pull my gaze away.
Next we looked at a painting that I thought was enchanting, although I could tell Kilroy didn’t think much of it—when I slowed in front of it, he glanced almost longingly toward the doorway to the next room before stopping with me. What I liked were the colors, rose and sky blue and a clear grass green, all against a cream background that played a trick when you studied it and seemed to become foreground before it ebbed away again. In my sketchbook I wrote,
Raspberryish pink but a little grayed, Blue over Lake Mendota mid summer
, and
Green like grass in sun, not kelly, yellower—yellow-green like a pear, but saturated
. I wondered if the words would ever lead me back to these colors. It was too bad I didn’t have my colored markers with me.