LAST WEEK, GRAM LEFT for her annual two-week Lenten retreat with the women’s sodality of Our Lady of Pompeii. The ladies stay at a convent in the Berkshires during the ides of March, and find inner peace through participation in daily masses, group rosaries, hikes in the woods, and meals so loaded with starch that when Gram returns home she has to juice for a week to clear out the gluten. However, she considers the sacrifice well worth it because, while her body may take a health hit, her soul is cleansed. Mezzo. Mezzo.
I’m aiming to have my sketch of the shoe design for the competition at Bergdorf’s finished by the time Gram returns. I want to have a clear notion of what we’ll need to build the shoes before we go to Italy. While Gram has left the design of the shoe up to me, she promised to weigh in with any refinements or corrections before we turn it into a pair of real shoes and deliver them to Rhedd Lewis. I have become obsessed with the sketch of the dress, studying it so often, I see it when I sleep. I’ve come to appreciate the design, and the strange charm of it. The Rag & Bone gown has grown on me.
It’s helpful to have the house to myself. I’m one of those people who actually savors being alone. I like to get up in the middle of the night, turn on the lights, put on a pot of coffee, and get to work without fear of waking Gram. There is nothing more peaceful than New York City at three A.M. It’s the rest period before the madness begins at dawn.
I relish a big space with nobody in it but me. Virginia Woolf celebrated a room of one’s own, but I’ve learned that I require a house of my own. When I’m designing, I fill all available surfaces with offbeat objects that inspire me: a marble bocce ball that’s the exact shade of vanilla ice cream, a small watercolor of a cloud that has hues of lavender on a field of white, wheels of paint chips, boards of fabric swatches and skeins of silk trim. I like to create a circus of ideas, which I can walk through and live with, until something speaks to me. Slowly, I winnow out the claptrap until I’m left with just a few things that move me the most. This is how my mind works, several concepts at play at once, all advancing toward an unknown conclusion; disparate pieces becoming a new whole, in this case, a pair of shoes for a wedding gown that may, on the surface, appear to be in tatters, but is actually, after hours of study, a dress design that is forward thinking and new. My laptop is propped open, ready to record any ideas I have, and to provide available research when I need a goose in a particular direction.
The dining table is covered in fabric folded neatly in rectangles, a few old shoes I’ve saved from yard sales, a crocheted bride doll that belonged to my mother in the 1950s and a large collage that I’ve been making since we first met with Rhedd Lewis. I started the collage on an enormous sheet of butcher paper. I pasted images, photographs, scenes, and words from old magazines, then textured the whole by gluing on artful bits of lace, buttons, and loose crystals. Somewhere in this wild stew, which my subconscious directed, lies my design, or at least, the impulse that will guide me through the process of designing our shoe.
Using Rhedd’s sketch as a jumping-off point, my collage is a landscape of women, collected from couture photo shoots, advertisements, and newspaper stories, most of whom are in repose or turned away from the camera’s lens. I imagine the woman in the Rag & Bone sketch, who she might be and why she chose this particular design above all others to wear on her wedding day. My instincts say this dress isn’t for a first-time bride. It’s for a woman who has been down the road of true love more than once; she’s jaded and even a little ambivalent, hence the unfinished details and frayed chiffon. If the bride is not committed, her gown isn’t either.
Gram has taught me that, as custom cobblers, we have succeeded only when we have taken something a client needs and turned it into something she desires. I have to think like the bride who chooses to wear this gown and design shoes to complement her style.
We use line to accent and play up the individual customer’s physical attributes, we use balance to make the shoe comfortable and provide a seamless fit, form is mandated by personal taste and silhouette, shape is about taking current trends and making the shoe contemporary, color is about working with the dress design so both elements flow as one, pattern is used to accent the fabric of the gown, while texture is about the overall statement of the shoe. Is the leather or fabric appropriate for the time of year the bride is married, and do all the elements feed seamlessly into the overall presentation?
Gram says to keep it simple but not to be afraid of dramatic elements. These are the arenas an apprentice must master. All these notes must dance in the head of the artist as she creates; one element cannot take precedence over another, rather, the goal is a harmonious confluence of all of them. This harmony creates beauty.
I look at the shards of chiffon on the sketch. I prop it up against the candlesticks on the dining room table and walk to the kitchen and look at it from across the room. It reminds me of something. Something specific. And then I remember. I climb the stairs to Gram’s room.
Gram was married in 1948 in an eggshell silk-georgette gown with a scoop neck and sheer, short, puffed sleeves of organza with a wide band of fabric around the upper arm. The natural, fitted waist flowed out to a full circle skirt. There were accents aplenty: ornate handmade Italian cutwork lace was sewn on every seam. There was spider lace on the bodice, facing, and tips of the voluminous ruffles on the hem of the skirt. A photograph of Gram tossing the bouquet shows the gown from the back, where there are wings of tulle fashioned like a capelet, which must have trailed behind Gram like a mist when she walked. It was a typical postwar, pre–New Look ensemble, overtly feminine and deliberately overdone. The war was over and, evidently, one of the great prizes was the sea of femininity that awaited the soldiers as they returned home.
Today the design looks cluttered and homemade, like the crocheted bride doll my mother loved as a girl. Gram’s gown has small seed pearls on the bodice, whereas the doll has pearls on the clunky layers of yarn skirt. Gram wears the bright red lipstick and pencil-thin eyebrows of the postwar era, whereas the doll’s face is piquant, with red Cupid’s bow lips and no eyebrows at all. The look on both faces is pure domestic contentment. I can even picture Gram the following morning, lipstick matte, eyes sparkling, flipping pancakes, wearing a starched sheer organza apron with a frilly pocket shaped like a heart. A joyful wife the morning after her blissful wedding night begins a new life.
As I flip through the black-and-white photographs of my grandparents’ wedding, I look for clues. There’s something I remember about these photographs that will help me with the design. I’m just not sure what.
Finally, I find a photograph of Gram’s wedding shoes as she lifts the hem of her gown slightly to expose the garter. Gram wears a pair of cream-colored, leather platform sandals. The folds of the leather on the vamp are tufted into diamond shapes accented with small leather buttons.
How interesting: boot buttons on an open sandal.
The gown in the sketch, with its seemingly haphazard layers of ripped material, needs a substantial shoe, but not a boot, to stabilize it. Platforms are out, but hefty straps, large buckles, and bows are in. Somehow, I have to make the eye go to the feet and not to the dress. I’m beginning to understand the point of the Rhedd Lewis challenge. This dress is all about not looking at it, but directing the eye to the shoe. And here it is, the epiphany, the beam of clarity, the moment of truth I have been waiting for: make the shoe drive the dress.
I get out my sketchbook and begin to draw my grandmother. I copy the expression on her face in the photo album, her wide eyes, her hair in sausage-roll curls.
Then I take the dress in the sketch and draw it anew, on Gram’s body. I create a new silhouette, feminine but strong. Gone is the fussiness, replaced with modern restraint. The wide streamers of ripped chiffon now seem fresh, not haphazard.
I flip the page in my sketchbook. I draw the shape of the foot, then fill it, with wide straps and a tongue of soft leather anchoring the straps. Then I add texture on the straps, some of smoot
h leather, others with the striae of silk, a combination of materials that gives it a new-century feeling. I’ll worry about how to execute this later. Right now, it’s about the freedom of letting the idea loose on the page. The gown exposes leg, so I follow that line down to the ankle of the shoe, creating an oversize bow around the ankle, a touch of femininity that looks powerful, like the boot laces on the Mighty Isis in the comic books I loved as a girl. The condition of the fabric gives me license to create a shoe that uses scraps, pieces of luxe materials, soft leathers, offbeat embossing on the leather, whimsical braiding, bold embellishments, and oversize pearls on the strap anchors.
I draw and erase and draw and erase. I sketch again. Soon, I take my putty eraser and reshape the heel. It’s too definitive, it needs to be more architectural to read modern. Right now, it’s too similar to Gram’s stacked heel in 1948, so I add half an inch to the height of the heel and sculpt it until the heel comes into focus to match the rest of the shoe.
My cell phone rings. I pick it up.
“You online?” Gabriel asks.
“No, I’m drawing.”
“Well, get online. You’re on WWD flash.”
“No way!”
I pull the laptop over. Women’s Wear Daily has an online board that announces changes in the fashion industry, acquisitions and sales.
“Scroll down to ‘Rhedd Lewis Windows.’”
I scroll down:
Rhedd Lewis shook up the Fifth Avenue aesthetes by announcing a contest among handpicked (by her) shoe designers who will vie to have their line in the Christmas windows. Stalwarts include: Dior, Ferragamo, Louboutin, Prada, Blahnik, and Americans: Pliner, Weitzman, and Spade. Tory Burch is also said to be in the running. Custom Village shop Angelino Shoes is also said to be under consideration.
“You made it!”
“Made what? We’re misspelled. Angelino?”
“Maybe they’ll think you’re Latino. That’s a good thing. Anything Latino is hot. You know, you’ll be ValRo. Like JLo is JLo. There you go. You’re in the moment.”
“We are in the moment, Gabriel,” I say, defending my fledgling brand.
“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger.”
I hang up and close the screen on the laptop. I put my head down on the table. I liked this process better when I didn’t know the competition. Those huge, multimillion-dollar corporations have the resources of the universe at their disposal, and I’m sitting here with rubber cement, some old shoes, and a crocheted doll for inspiration. What was I thinking? That we could win? My brother, Alfred, is right. I’m a dreamer, and not a very good one.
I pick up my pencil and go back to work. I started this process, so I must finish it. It’s funny. As I shade the buttress, I can see the shoe in completion in my mind’s eye. Will my vision carry me through? Or is this a real fool’s errand?
The front door buzzer startles me, and I get up to buzz Roman in. The oven clock says 3:34 A.M. I hear Roman’s footsteps on the stairs. When he reaches the top of the stairs, he stands in the doorway, leaning against the sashes, propping his body up with both hands.
“Hi, hon,” he says.
I keep sketching. “I’ll be right there.” I want to fill in this heel before I forget what I saw in my mind’s eye.
He comes into the kitchen and runs the faucet, filling a glass of water. He comes and stands over my shoulder. I finish the oversize pearl button and put down my pencil and paper. I stand and put my arms around him. He is exhausted, weary from the long hours. I don’t even have to ask, but I do anyway. “How was work?”
“A disaster. I fired my sous-chef. He’s just not up to speed, and he’s extremely temperamental. I can’t have two hotheads in the kitchen.”
He sits down. “I don’t know how my parents have done it, how they’ve stayed in business this long. Running a restaurant is impossible.” Roman puts the glass down and puts his head in his hands. I rub his neck.
“You’ll figure it out,” I whisper quietly in his ear.
“Sometimes I wonder.”
I move my hands down to his shoulders. “Your shoulders are like cement.”
I continue rubbing his shoulders, feeling the pain in my right hand from sketching for too long. I stop and rub my wrist.
“Come on, let’s go to bed.” I lead him up the stairs. He goes into the bathroom while I turn down the covers. I dim the lights in the bedroom. Roman comes into my room, undresses, and climbs into bed. I fluff the covers around him, and he burrows into the pillows. Soon, he’s snoring.
I lie back on the pillows and look up at the ceiling, as I have every night since I moved in. My eye travels around the crown molding, here since the place was built, its Greek-key design reminding me of icing on a cake. The spare white center of the ceiling is like a fresh sheet of sketch paper, empty and longing to be filled. I fill the space with the living image of my grandmother in the Rhedd Lewis gown, wearing the shoes I created. She moves across the expanse of white deliberately and willfully. She is wearing the shoes, the shoes aren’t wearing her, even though they are ornate and structured, they are also wily and fun, as couture shoes should be.
I exhale slowly, as if to blow the images off the ceiling and erase them from my mind’s eye. I imagine Rue de Something or Another on a sunny day in Paris as Christian Louboutin pores over his winning sketch for Rhedd Lewis surrounded by a team of French geniuses, in their expansive, modern, state-of-the-art design lab. The workers bring forth sheets of soft calfskin. They fill the table with sumptuous fabrics—silk moiré, taffeta, crepe de chine, and embroidered velvet. Christian points out aspects of his brilliant sketch to the workers. They applaud. Of course they win the windows, why wouldn’t they? The applause becomes deafening. I’m screwed, I think. I’m screwed. And my greatest folly was thinking for one second that I could actually compete with the big guns. The Angelino Shoe Company. Win? The odds of that are about as good as my father learning to pronounce prostate. It will never happen.
I turn over and put my arm around Roman, who has fallen into a deep sleep. I imagined so much more for us with the full run of the house. I dreamed of romantic nights drinking wine on the roof while I point out the hues and shifts of the Hudson River; I imagined Roman making me dinner in the old kitchen downstairs, then making love in this bed in my room. Other nights, where we just relax, he with his feet up on the old ottoman, me next to him while we watch The Call of the Wild so I might teach him everything I know about Clark Gable. Instead, he is gone all day, works through supper and into the night, comes home near dawn, bone tired, and crashes. As soon as the sun is up, after a quick cup of coffee, he is gone again.
We don’t have the long, intense conversations that I crave. In fact, we hardly talk at length because there never seems to be enough time. The texting, the twenty-second phone calls, while plentiful, make me feel needed, but then I feel abandoned when he hangs up in midsentence. In the rush of it all, I assign him feelings and tenderness he may not have, because there isn’t time to find out what he’s feeling. When we do scrape together an hour here or there, his phone doesn’t stop ringing, and there’s always some crisis in the kitchen that only he can negotiate, and usually, it needs his immediate attention. To be fair, I’ve been consumed with my work, too, with the slate of orders in the shop, trying to find financing to move forward, and the competition for the Bergdorf windows. I’m probably not full of fun because I’m busy, with work and life, worried about my father’s health and my future.
Maybe this is what relationships are. Maybe this is the work my mother and Gram refer to when they talk about marriage. Maybe I must accept the disappointments because it’s nearly impossible to make room for someone in a life crowded with ambition, drive, and deadlines. Now is the time to establish our careers, as the opportunity may not come later. Roman had his wake-up call, so he moved to New York and started his own restaurant. I surely had mine when I found out about the debt, and my brother’s determination to sell the building. I’m not just an apprent
ice anymore. I have to mastermind the future so that I have a place to work in the years to come. Roman and I know where we’re going in our careers, but where are we headed in our private lives? I touch his face with my hand. He opens his eyes.
“What is it?” he says groggily.
I want to tell him everything. But instead, I don’t. I can’t. So I whisper, “Nothing. It’s nothing. Go back to sleep.”
“I don’t care if it’s Lent. A bribe is a bribe and they work,” Tess tells me as she fishes two Hershey kisses out of the bottom of her purse. “Charisma? Chiara?” The girls clomp down the stairs to the workshop, then burst through the door like two pink bottle rockets.
Tess looks down at them. “Enough with the running and the jumping and the noise. Young ladies should have some finesse. You sound like a longhorn cattle drive on those stairs.”
“Well, you called us.” Charisma stands before her mother in a shiny pink T-shirt that says PRINCESS and a full tulle skirt that conjures up the lead swan in the ballet. Her black laceless Converse sneaker slips-ons have two rolls of knee socks clumped around her ankles. Chiara is still dressed by my sister, so she wears a pressed pink-striped corduroy jumper, a blouse with a Peter Pan collar, and Stride Rite lace-up boots.
“Cool down. There’s a chocolate kiss in it for you if you do. Mommy is trying to talk to Auntie Valentine.”
Charisma and Chiara put their hands out. Tess drops a kiss in each.
“I’m saving mine!” Chiara hollers as she follows her sister back up the stairs.
“I’m the worst mother. I use payola.”
“Whatever means necessary,” I tell her.
“How’s it going with Roman?”
“Not so great.”
“You’re kidding. What happened to making 166 Perry Street into a love spa while Gram’s on retreat?”
“It’s so not a love spa. I work all day. I sketch all night. He works all day and all night, gets here at three in the morning, goes to sleep, and wakes up the next morning and goes. I’m getting a little taste of what a permanent relationship would be like with him, and let’s just say that the only permanent thing about Roman is that he’s perpetually in motion.”
Very Valentine Page 22
