Apart at the Seams

by Melissa Ford

  With the tip of my finger, I nervously dust the tabletop for invisible muffin crumbs. Ten minutes, I promise myself. That’s it. I watch Noah wend his way through the crowded coffee shop, holding a cup in either hand. I take out my wallet, but Noah shakes his head. “It’s on me. You were my human shield during Dresspocalypse. I totally planned to hide behind you if that woman attacked the line. It’s the least I can do.”

  “Really, I want to pay for myself,” I insist, holding out a five-dollar bill, but Noah shakes his head again, suddenly looking very embarrassed.

  “I may have asked you in here with an ulterior motive. Consider this payment for picking your brain. My girlfriend is a textile artist. She designs shower curtains right now. Which . . . I know . . . sounds weird. But what she really wants to be doing is designing fabric. Does Davis & Howe have a textile artist on staff?”

  The rush of relief I feel is akin to that moment when the water in the shower changes from tepid to warm, signaling that it’s okay to step into the tub. See, we’re just two taken people, both networking. “We don’t have anyone in-house. There’s a fabric buyer on the design team, and Davis has a few fabric designers that he likes working with specifically.”

  “It was a long shot, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity of asking since I don’t normally find myself standing next to someone who works for Davis & Howe.”

  “I’d be happy to talk to her. You can give her my email address or phone number,” I tell him, scrawling both, along with my full name, across my napkin and pushing it across the table.

  “Thank you so much. Her name is Ellie.” He folds the napkin and tucks it into his pocket.

  “So I can probably admit that I also have an ulterior motive. Nightly tickets?”

  Noah laughs and takes a sip of his coffee. “That is always the first question people ask when they meet me.”

  “Okay, so I’ll ask a different question. What is it like to write for the Nightly? I mean, do you get to hang out with David Lear?”

  “Hang out? Like kick back in my living room at a monthly poker game? No. But yeah, I have to work with him every day.”

  “What is he like? Is he funny? I mean, when he’s off-camera, is he always cracking jokes?”

  “What you see on-air is nothing close to what he’s like off-air. He pretends to be this know-it-all, over-confident, opinionated policy wonk. But in reality, he’s totally self-effacing. Really smart. Really, really smart. Like scary brilliant, able to remember word-for-word quotes from a clip we saw in passing three months ago or notice tiny details that everyone else missed. When the cameras stop rolling, he wants to go home to his family in Westchester, but when he’s at the office, there’s literally no airs or barriers. He’s totally accessible. Collaborative. It’s the best place I’ve ever worked.”

  “Where else have you worked?”

  He looks vaguely uncomfortable, as if I’ve just measured his inseam. “Just other places. I was a joke writer for a few comedians. I’ve written for late-night talk shows for the last few years.”

  I imagine him in the back of a comedy club, writing feverishly while Jerry Seinfeld and Conan O’Brien kick back with beers. I arrange my face to pretend that most of my friends hang out with celebrities; hell, to pretend most of my friends are celebrities, but the truth is that I’m insanely jealous. Nothing exciting ever happens to me. I’ve had the same friends since college, the same job at one fashion house or another for years, even the same apartment for almost a decade. The only interesting thing that has happened to me in the last five years is Beckett, and children don’t count because they’re as common as colds. No one swoons when you tell them you have a toddler as they do when you tell them that you just finished having dinner with Louis C.K.

  At that moment, my phone dings, and I discreetly glance at it, reading a check-in from Ethan: where are you? Where I am feels too complicated to be contained in a text message, which perhaps is an answer in and of itself; if you can’t explain yourself in a text message, maybe you’re doing something wrong. Except this isn’t wrong; Noah has a girlfriend, and he only asked me to coffee in order to help her get ahead. And I only accepted coffee because I thought maybe we could get Nightly tickets out of it. There is nothing inherently wrong with enjoying a conversation with a stranger.

  Noah finishes his drink and looks at his watch, abruptly pushing back his chair and reaching for his dry cleaning at the same time. “I hate to do this, but I have to get going. Are you going to the subway?”

  I thought he was going to take a page from the French and sit in the coffeehouse all night. “That direction, but I live close by. I’ll walk.” I collect my things and follow after him. Volt’s hyper-air-conditioning makes the stale New York heat actually feel good for a few seconds as we fall in step the half block to the subway. “I’m going to give your email and phone number to Ellie.”

  “No problem,” I say lightly. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  “We survived twenty minutes amongst dry-cleaning fumes. We deserved a mocha.”

  “Absolutely,” I agree. “And I’d love to see the Nightly at some point. You have my number if any tickets somehow become available or if we could go backstage and meet David Lear or something like that . . .”

  I realize that I’m talking to the air as he gives a small wave and bounds down the steps into the subway, and I start walking before he disappears just so I won’t know whether or not he turned around to glance back before he turned the corner on the stairs. A strange sensation is nagging at my stomach as if I’ve forgotten to eat, or I’m nervous about something about to happen. And then I realize what it is. It’s just disappointment.

  IT’S WELL AFTER eight by the time I walk through the overly perfumed lobby of my apartment building and take the elevator up to our floor. I’ve always loved the lobby of my building. It feels like it’s out of an Ingrid Bergman movie. It’s the sort of room the heroine runs through before she leaps into the arms of her soldier boyfriend, taffeta gown and long gloves still on from the Manhattan party that she left early due to her broken heart.

  I slip my key into the lock, my news bouncing inside my body like popcorn trying to escape from hot oil. Ethan looks up from the television as I enter, Beckett beside him gumming a plastic Sesame Street figure while ESPN holds a discussion on Yankee relief pitchers on the screen. “Hey gorgeous,” he calls out. “Where were you?”

  I set down my skirt and purse and scoop up Beckett to cover his face in kisses. He squirms away, squeezing his eyes shut when my lips touch the soft skin over the bridge of his nose. I release him back to his space on the carpet, and he returns to chewing on Elmo as if nothing has happened.

  “You are never going to guess what just happened to me,” I tell Ethan.

  “Is it about the drawings? Your sketches?”

  It takes my brain a second to catch up, and I’m instantly embarrassed that meeting a semi-celebrity (a writer for the Nightly is a type of celebrity) could put something that important out of my mind. “No, I wish. It’s just that I met this writer for the Nightly while I was in line getting the dry cleaning.”

  It doesn’t sound nearly as exciting coming out of my mouth as it did in my brain, and I don’t blame Ethan for taking a second to glance at the television screen before he turns back to me and grins. “That’s cool. Any chance he could score us tickets?”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking,” I say. “I was late because I grabbed coffee with him after the dry cleaners because he wanted to pick my brain. His girlfriend, Ellie, wants to be a textile artist, and he was asking me questions about how to break into being a fabric designer for a place like Davis & Howe. I gave him my number to pass along to her, and I thought that when we connected again, I’d ask him for two tickets. Or four tickets and we can take Rachel and Adam now that they’re dating again.”

  “Ask him if we ca
n get a backstage tour,” Ethan adds, placing a hand on Beckett’s back. Beckett wiggles, as if he’s being tickled, and offers Ethan his saliva-covered toy.

  I start tidying the kitchen, placing dirty dishes into the sink and scooping up some spilled Cheerios into the palm of my hand. Last night’s velvet-covered box is gone. “Do you think it’s weird? That I went out to coffee with a stranger?”

  “Are you upset?”

  “I asked you first,” I say stubbornly, turning on the water to soak the empty coffee mug that Ethan left out since this morning.

  “No, I’m not upset. I trust you. Sometimes coffee is just coffee. So now are you weirded out about having coffee with a stranger?”

  “Maybe,” I admit. “I just didn’t want you to think something was wrong.”

  “But I wasn’t thinking that something was wrong. There’s that guilty mind again. Would you be upset if I had coffee with a random woman?”

  I know the correct response in this situation is “of course not.” For the sake of fairness, I should tell Ethan that I trust him implicitly. But something about visualizing him sitting at a table across from a leggy blond, her breasts spilling out of the top of a sexy baseball jersey (because of course she would combine his two greatest loves: boobs and sports) makes my insides slither like an advancing snake. I push the mental image of the stranger out of my head. “Not at all.”

  “Okay,” Ethan says to end the conversation. Part of me wants to ask if the okay means that he’s planning to carry through with that question and take someone out for coffee. The rest of me would rather not know. I look around the kitchen, my stomach grumbling.

  “Did you already eat?” I question. I open the refrigerator door and stare at a carton of milk and a covered bowl of the leftover steamed sweet potato chunks the nanny gave Beckett for dinner.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” Ethan comments, eyes back on the television.

  “Where’s the tagine?”

  “The tagine?” Ethan repeats; he cocks his head to the side, and I visualize all the thoughts in his head tipping toward his right ear.

  “You said you were going to pick up dinner. From Marrakesh.”

  “Crap. I did. I’m sorry; I started watching ESPN and forgot.”

  I close the refrigerator door lightly, trying to keep any edge out of my voice. After all, he didn’t give me a hard time about the coffee, and I could have just as easily picked up dinner.

  Ethan jumps up from the floor and comes into the kitchen to wrap his arms around me. I tuck my face into his shoulder and breathe in the clean scent of soap and detergent. “I missed you,” I mumble into the fabric because it’s true.

  “I missed you, too. And I’m sorry about dinner. Why don’t you do tuck-in, and I’ll reheat the leftover pizza in the freezer. And then I’ll show you how much I missed you.”

  I prepare Beckett’s final bottle of the night, mixing together formula and warm water from the microwave and shaking it together over the sink while Ethan digs through the freezer to find the aluminum-foil triangles. Tagine at home never tastes as good as it does in the restaurant, hot inside the clay pot. I can talk myself into anything.

  Chapter Three

  I YAWN AND tuck my head back over the fabric in front of me on the table. The thousands of tiny beads swim in front of me like a glittering school of fish. Normally I don’t mind beadwork; it can even become a form of meditation, the needle weaving in and out, wiping my brain clean. Fashion-inspired yoga. Not today. Today I’ve already spent four hours in a continuous loop of mind-crushing boredom, each puncture of the needle more like a staccato jab than the peace that comes from a well-executed downward-facing dog.

  I’m contemplating a coffee break when Francesca tells me that Nigel Howe wants to see me. In his office.

  I set down my needle, returning Tabitha’s silently questioning raised eyebrow with a clearly clueless furrowed brow. I expect Francesca to walk with me out of the sample room, but she falls into a conversation with one of the samplehands about the fifteen pounds of silk taffeta they’re about to use in a drape. I wait one more moment to make sure that she’s not going to come with me, and then I make my way through the walk-through closet to the other side of the loft that contains Nigel’s and Arthur’s offices.

  Nigel is on the telephone when I walk in, and he holds up his hand—the universal sign of asking me to wait. Not as if I have any choice. I lean in the doorframe, looking at the marketing team in the main room. Even sitting, you can tell that Nigel Howe is a slight man, a little wisp in his old age. He dyes what is left of his hair a caramel color that he calls ginger, and he always wears the same thing: a white t-shirt and black pants with an open, white button-down shirt on top like a jacket.

  “Arianna, come in and sit down. You can close the door behind you.”

  I slide neatly into the seat across from him, realizing that I’ve never sat here. When we’re planning any embellishments I may be asked to make to an outfit, he comes into the sample room, and Francesca brings my samples to the design team meeting. I pretend my heart isn’t pounding violently while I calmly look around the starkly decorated room.

  “The Nightly was nominated for its first Emmy,” Nigel informs me. “Are you familiar with the Nightly? It’s a fake news show.”

  “I know it,” I tell him quickly, feeling as if I’m being stalked by the television show. First Noah and now this. What are the chances that we’d be talking about the Nightly right after bumping into one of the people on staff?

  “Anyway, David Lear’s people called and told me that he wanted to thank his staff by providing them with their gowns and suits for the award ceremony. Normally we try not to take on too many special projects this time of year since we have a small team and we’re focused on the upcoming line. But this is the Emmys, and he was calling it in as a personal favor. Francesca showed me your drawings last week, and you are clearly talented. We’d like you to be the point of contact on this project and do the lion’s share of the work, though Francesca will be signing off on the designs and the toile.”

  My pounding heart changes beat, like the switch in Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” when the frantic tempo gives way to the measured, stately march. I feel my head start to bob up and down by its own accord, agreeing for me since I seem to have lost the ability to speak for a moment. “Thank you for this opportunity.”

  “As another favor, their stylist asked that you come to the studio and do the fittings there. I agreed not because I condone prima donna behavior, but because it’s an unusually large group and we don’t want this project to compete with the current collection for our space. Anyway, Mr. Lear wants the gowns to be of the same style, though not match outright.”

  “That makes sense,” I say agreeably. Inside my body, a mini version of myself is running around, doing a very un-Midwestern-like fist pump in the air.

  “I don’t need to tell you how much the reputation of Davis & Howe rides on your design. You are not to agree to anything or make any promises until Francesca has signed off on your work.”

  “Understood. Mr. Howe, thank you. I won’t let you down.”

  He picks up a note from his desk and passes it to me. “Mr. Lear’s personal stylist is handling this account. Julie Courtland is expecting your call this afternoon.”

  He picks up his telephone, which seems to be a signal that our meeting is done. I practically dance back to the sample room, pausing inside the walk-through notions closet to text Ethan my good news. It’s an abrupt change from how I was feeling a few days ago while walking back from lunch with Francesca. An opportunity like this could launch a career.

  FRANCESCA GIVES me the next day to work at home sketching out some designs based on the ideas Julie Courtland floated me over the phone. This works out perfectly because the nanny needed the day off, and now I don’t need to use up a vacatio
n day on childcare coverage.

  I quickly realize that I’m out of practice at parenting and working at the same time after a few short weeks of using a nanny. I used to be able to finish a hem and entertain Beckett simultaneously. I sit on the floor beside him with my sketchpad while he gums the six pieces of his puzzle. I watch him try to shove the drool-covered wooden dog into the puzzle slot for the wooden cow, grunting when he can’t make it fit.

  Julie told me that David Lear suggested a uniformed look without looking overtly alike. Like an optimistic bride promising mileage out of a bridesmaid dress, he wants the women to be able to wear their dresses again in the future. So the dresses can’t be too outlandish or too dated, they can’t scream award ceremony, they can’t use the exact same material or be the same length, though they all need to work cohesively together to visually convey the idea that the Nightly staff is one, big, happy family.

  No pressure.

  I’m sketching a sleeveless, peplum top over a full skirt studded with tiny crystals when I hear a knock at the door. I slide the sketchbook under a pile of catalogs and scoop up Beckett while I let Rachel in. He howls in protest because he’s been thwarted from running into the hallway, and I try to smile at Rachel while he bucks against me. “I think this honeymoon period of working at home is coming to an end.”

  Rachel doesn’t actually know that we’ve had the nanny for two weeks. I think I wasn’t ready to admit that I was going back to the loft. It was hard enough to walk out the door that first day without first dissecting it for hours over the phone with Rachel. Those types of discussions are never helpful for me, which makes me feel odd since everyone else seems to be able to get themselves to peace of mind with a good venting session. But now that we’re set with Martina the nanny, it’s time to fill in Rachel on the details, pointing out how helpful Ethan has been in picking up Beckett once last week.