Apart at the Seams

by Melissa Ford

  I laugh to myself while I watch Justin Timberlake dance around the screen, dressed up in chef whites like a cooking contestant. The magical moment comes when he rhymes “ramen” with Fremdschämen, breaking up the cake of dried noodles and tossing them into the air. Kourtnee enters the stairwell as the sketch draws to a close, humming the final bars with Justin Timberlake as she passes.

  “Are you really friends with the writer? That’s so cool.”

  “I wouldn’t really call us friends. More like work associates.”

  Kourtnee’s brow furrows at the term, but she doesn’t ask me to explain what I mean. “I would kill for tickets to the Nightly. I’ve tried a bunch of times but I’ve never gotten them. Do you think your friend could get me two tickets? My sister loves that show.”

  I arrange my most sympathetic face. “I’m so sorry. I don’t think he can get you in.”

  “Oh well,” Kourtnee says, scrawling her cell phone number in pencil on the top of a receipt. “In case anything changes, this is my number. Give me a call if it turns out that he can get me in.”

  I wait until she’s all the way down the steps before I crumple up the paper and stick it in my back pocket. I’m going to have to see him later when I stop by the set to get measurements, but I figure that it would be polite to send him a simple thank you text to let him know I watched the sketch. I pause with my fingers over the phone buttons.

  Saw the sketch. It was so funny! Glad you found something to rhyme with Fremdschämen. I immediately erase it before sending. Sketch was amazing. Loved it. I erase it again. I finally settle on Pass the salt? Brilliant. I hit SEND before I can change my mind, and I’m immediately filled with regret. What if he doesn’t know what the hell I’m referring to? What if he thinks I just send out random non sequiturs or that I’m annoying or—even worse—a pathetic groupie? I cringe and head back into the loft.

  The cardigan is waiting for me when I return. I’m picking up the needle again when my phone buzzes to let me know that I have a new text message.

  Fuck the pepper.

  A moment later, the phone buzzes again. Sorry for cursing, but you started it.

  I laugh and set down the needle to tap out a response. What has pepper ever done to you?

  I manage a few more stitches before the phone buzzes again. Caused countless pogroms.

  I am certain that is the first time someone has sent the word pogrom in a text message. I hit SEND and glance across the room at Francesca. She hates it when we play on our phones instead of working, and to be fair, everything is a little tense right now as we hurtle toward Fashion Week. I slip my phone in my pocket and manage to work in a few more stitches before it buzzes. I am dying to look at the screen, but I will myself not to take the phone from my pocket. I tie off my thread and set down my needle, crossing the room to pour myself a cup of coffee. I sip my drink for a moment and check my phone.

  I’m glad you write proper text messages and don’t reduce the word “you” to a single letter, he writes.

  I was going 2 write the same thing 2U, I return. CU later at the set when I come 2 do measurements.

  “Arianna,” Francesca barks. “You’ll have the cardigan finished soon so we can have the whole outfit together?”

  I drop my phone back in my pocket and arrange my face into a mask of pleasant confidence. “I’ll be finished in about twenty minutes.”

  I pick up my needle and continue stitching on the other side of the zipper to hold it in place. I only have twenty minutes before I need to leave to get to the set, balancing both my Fashion Week responsibilities with the Emmy project. I haven’t shown Francesca the latest drawings yet. I’m waiting until I have all of them finished so she can see the full effect of all the outfits working together.

  I finish attaching the zipper and bring it over to Francesca, who is helping a new model into another outfit, a casual three-piece number meant to replace the traditional women’s business suit, a signature style of Davis & Howe that they’ve played with over the years. The model shrugs herself gingerly into the cardigan, and I step back to grab my purse and sketchpad, barely paying attention to my work as it rests on the model’s body. Francesca will tell me if there’s anything I need to fix when I come back to the loft on Monday. Right now, I have a design job to get to.

  I END UP needing to text Noah to let me onto the set since Julie isn’t there. It’s a Friday, a non-taping day, so the lower floor is quiet as we enter, my apologies echoing in the hallway.

  “I’m really sorry to make you come down. I thought Julie said she would be here,” I say again.

  “Really, it’s not a problem. I love swinging by the security desk,” Noah promises. “Let me go round up all the writers so you can take our measurements.”

  The upper offices are buzzing with noise to make up for the quiet downstairs. I plant myself in the writer’s conference room, taking a notebook and measuring tape out of my purse. Through the open door, I can see people milling about the cubicles; a wheeled clothing rack traveling the walkway, overflowing with costumes; and the two male writers tossing a beach ball back and forth over an intern’s head while she tries to conduct a phone call. When Noah walks by them, they abandon their beach ball and scamper into the room like puppies, clearly excited for anything to distract them from doing actual work.

  I take my measurements, feeling awkward as they talk through sketches around me. Usually celebrities come to our loft, to our turf. It’s rare that we ever venture into their world, so I’ve never had this feeling of being a fish out of water when working on an outfit. Luckily, most of the writers walk out of the room once I’m finished with them, so the conversation dies down after a few minutes. In the end, I’m left with just Bee in front of me and Noah lounging on the sofa, checking his email.

  “Bee, did you take a look at the notes I sent you about the Thanksgiving sketch?” Noah asks her.

  “Not yet,” she tells him while I bring my measuring tape around her breasts, and then jot down the number with the most businesslike expression on my face that I can muster.

  “You’d appreciate this. Do you have a second to swing by wardrobe with me when you’re done?”

  It takes me a moment to realize that Noah is speaking to me now, and I have to ask him to repeat the question before I nod, wondering what he thinks I’d appreciate.

  After I’ve awkwardly wrapped my measuring tape around his body, I follow Noah back downstairs to the costume shop. Two middle-age women are sitting on ergonomically correct chairs, surrounded by more wheeled racks clogged with dozens of costumes. Formal three-piece suits and evening gowns and casual dress pants, but also hairy gorilla bodies with accompanying heads and a man-sized fried egg and an old-fashioned scuba-diver suit. There are boxes of shoes, some labeled with the names of various personalities on the show, such as Carter Anderson. There are two clear plastic bins filled with hats. It looks like a cross between the dress-up corner of a nursery school classroom and backstage at Fashion Week.

  “Marts, this is Arianna who works for Davis & Howe. Would you be willing to show her the Turducken?”

  Marts—who introduces herself to me as Martha Gladstone—disappears behind one of the rolling racks and emerges with three enormous costumes. From the way they’re hanging limply from her hand, it’s difficult to tell what they are, but Noah takes them from her with a thank you and ducks into a makeshift changing room in the corner.

  “So after the That Bites! piece, Timberlake agreed to be in our Thanksgiving short this year. He’s going to perform the song, and we have this amazing line-up of people acting it out,” Noah calls out from the other side of the screen. “Marts, I need help with the second one.”

  Martha disappears on the other side of the screen, and the remaining woman smiles at me warmly, repairing a rip in a man’s suit vest. She gives off an air of someone who is looking to finish u
p and leave for the night. I want to tell her that this wasn’t my idea, but Noah pops out from the screen in a ridiculous turkey costume complete with enormous material-covered bird feet. “Luckily, I am smaller than Mr. Timberlake with my girlish figure. I give you, the Turducken. Marts, music?”

  Marts obliges by humming a bump-and-grind type song, and Noah does a mock striptease to reveal a slightly smaller duck costume underneath. I start laughing, holding the back of Martha’s vacated chair, and the other woman looks up from her repair work with maternal amusement. Martha growls out a few extra ba-da-ba-da-das, and Noah unzips the duck and steps out of it to display an even smaller chicken costume under that. He looks like a plucked chicken, rubbery and pale, and he takes a bow, unstrapping the final bird head and tossing it to Martha, who catches it and places it on an already cluttered desk.

  “That is fabulous. How did you design this?”

  I pick up the duck costume from the floor and turn it inside out, trying to follow the panels. Martha whips out the sketches they did, trying to figure out the dimensions so all the costumes would fit inside one another. I’ve never been that interested in costume work, but Martha makes me wish that I was working someplace a little less staid than Davis & Howe when she tells me about ordering dozens of yards of the rubbery vinyl innards.

  Noah neatly wraps up the conversation, thanking Martha for letting me see it, and like the time at Volt, ends the visit abruptly, as if he’s suddenly realized that he was supposed to be someplace else ten minutes ago. “Let me walk you out the audience entrance.”

  “Thanks for showing me that. It’s really cool to get to see behind the scenes at the show.” He passes the wrong way through a security stand and metal detector, taking me into a white-walled vestibule covered from floor-to-ceiling in black graffiti.

  “It’s sort of a tradition to sign the wall. Guests and audience members and the entire cast and crew are up there. Like I’m here,” he points to his signature, high up on the wall. “I’ll tell you a secret. They only repaint from this point down. So sign your name above here. That’s what we tell anyone famous to do.”

  “I don’t know if my signature deserves to be hanging out with famous ones,” I laugh, taking the Sharpie from his hands. I pick a discreet inch of wall space out of the way and scrawl my name. I’m in good company; above me are a few musicians who have performed on the show and Mayor Bloomberg and Bruce Willis. “Where is David Lear?”

  “David?” Noah says, spinning around to try to locate the name. He crosses the vestibule and slaps the wall. “Right next to Carter Anderson.”

  “I should have asked that before I signed,” I say, handing him back the pen. “It’s really odd luck that I bumped into you at the dry cleaners and then ended up getting hired to design your Emmy outfit. What are the chances?”

  Noah looks uncomfortable but shrugs. “It wasn’t exactly luck. I mean, when David said he wanted to hire a designer for the Emmy outfits, I told him Davis & Howe. I sort of hoped I’d end up running into you at some point in the process. But yeah, it was kismet that Davis & Howe assigned you to the whole project.”

  Something wiggles inside me like a goldfish won at a carnival: like a goldfish scooped up and contained in a knotted plastic bag. Maybe Noah reads the expression that passes over my face because he quickly backpedals, apologizing if I got the wrong idea and insisting that he only meant that I seemed like a cool person when we were talking at Volt. I want to believe him because we’re going to have to work together until these Emmy outfits are done, and I mostly do when he looks at his watch and tells me that he needs to get going because he has a hot date.

  “Need to go make myself pretty,” he tells me. “Sorry again if that came out wrong. You’d think as a writer I’d always know the right words, but I’m much more comfortable with the page than speaking off the cuff.”

  “No problem,” I reassure him, wanting to be the cool sort of girl who isn’t fazed by anything, even unwanted crushes.

  “Anyway, I haven’t forgotten about the tickets,” Noah tells me. “It’s just a really strange time because we’re going on a break soon. But September. I’m going to get you in here in September.”

  “That would be perfect,” I tell him, despite the fact that September is overrun by Fashion Week.

  I step outside, holding my purse close to me as I walk quickly toward the subway. The word kismet spins around in my head like a leaf caught inside a rapid, making me wonder what the truth is and whether it even matters.

  THAT NIGHT WE have dinner with our friends, Gael and Gwen. Gwen is an NYU postdoc working in an area of psychology that she refers to as truth studies. Being with her makes me hyper-vigilant about being truthful lest I be judged and deemed not mentally sound, even though she admits that she lies just as much as the next person.

  But I don’t believe her.

  I think about her area of study whenever I see them because going out with Gael and Gwen results in a lie of omission to my best friend. Ethan introduced Rachel and Gael, and they dated during the year that she was divorced from Adam. They broke up when Gael started acting like a petulant teenager, and I assumed that would be the last time we’d see him, sort of like how I stopped hanging out with Adam once they got divorced.

  But Ethan thought we should embrace a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy with the friendship, continuing to see Gael but not talking about it with his sister. He pointed out that Rachel would continue to see me if we ever broke up since our friendship predates my relationship with Ethan. This is true, yet Ethan’s friendship with Gael is very different from my friendship with Rachel. Ethan called me a friendship snob when I told him that.

  They’re the only couple we ever venture out with beyond Rachel and Adam, and I agree with Ethan when he points out that it’s important to be friends with other couples. Plus we like being with them: Gael—when he’s not dating Rachel—is laid-back and warm. Gwen is his perfect foil, intense and intelligent. Being with them is easy, uncomplicated. There are no sibling relationships to navigate, no long-term friendships to worry about bruising. Still I feel horrible enjoying nights out with Gwen and Gael. It feels like stealing thread from the notions closet at work to hem my pants at home.

  Over skewers of ginger chicken, Gwen poses a question her students have been grappling with in class, something central to Gwen’s current research on the sort of information we withhold from our partners in a relationship. I arrange my face in what I think looks like an expression of openness while she speaks, a slight tilt of my head, mouth ajar, a tiny fold of disbelief between my eyes. I have nothing to hide so why do I feel as if I need to act innocent to convince everyone at the table that I’m not lying?

  “Mi cielo,” Gael says, stealing a chunk of tuna off Gwen’s plate. “Not telling your partner everything doesn’t mean that it’s a bad relationship. There are plenty of good reasons why someone would keep information to himself or lie about where they’ve been. It’s free will. We all need to be free to follow our bliss if we want to keep returning to our relationship happy.”

  Gwen raises her eyebrow at him. “So you weren’t really at the movies on Tuesday night?”

  I look over at Ethan when Gwen mentions Tuesday night, but he’s deeply engrossed with picking apart the garnish on his plate. On Tuesday night, Ethan told me that he couldn’t pick up Beckett because he had a school event; a summer meet-and-greet that he had forgotten about until that day. I took it on face value at the time, though now upon consideration and his guilty expression, it seems odd that a private school would hold an event like that in the middle of July.

  “My lips are sealed,” Gael tells her sweetly.

  Gwen chooses to ignore him. “Anyway, the point of the study isn’t to make a judgment call but to determine how open people want to be with one another. To find out how widely we swing open the door and invite someone into our lives. For instance, d
o you tell your partner about the purchases you make throughout the day? Are you more likely to tell your partner about buying groceries that benefit both people in the relationship than you are to tell them that you stopped to get yourself a cup of coffee? Do you tell them about speeding tickets or parking tickets, money spent that you could have avoided spending? Do you tell them when an old friend contacts you, and do you do that all the time or just when the relationship was always platonic? Would you tell your partner if someone made a pass at you in a bar? See, we’re looking at a lot of different information.”

  I pick up another chicken skewer and take a bite off the side. How did she come up with that last example unless Gwen guessed Noah’s comment about kismet because she’s a human polygraph sensing how much my armpits are sweating? It was his inappropriateness, so why do I feel as if I’ve done something wrong just by hearing about it? Because if I were a good girlfriend, I’d tell Ethan about it? Gwen says that the point isn’t to make a judgment call, but it certainly feels that way when her intense, bird-like eyes are boring into your own, as if she’s digging her way into your soul.

  “Across every dating site, people state that honesty is one of the most important traits they look for in a relationship, and then they lie and omit things to the person once they’ve established a connection with them,” Gwen continues. “We’re just trying to figure out why people do this; why we don’t give others what we say we want for ourselves? Maybe it’s because we don’t really want honesty.”

  “Not all of us are lying sacks of shit,” Ethan drawls. He smiles at me, an honest, relaxed smile that extends up through his eyes, creasing his forehead. Why did I think that he was holding back something from me? I smile back automatically, thinking how lucky I am to have him in my life. To have someone so easy, so sweet, such an open book.

  “Fine.” Gwen smiles. “Then answer the question my students were discussing this week. Your partner comes out of the kitchen carrying a tall glass of clear liquid. She’s ecstatic because she has been working on this project for years, and she has finally cracked the recipe. It’s a truth serum—perfectly safe to drink from a physical perspective—and she wants you to try it. After you drink it, anything she asks you will be answered with full honesty. So. Would you drink it?”