A Dress to Die For Read online

  “Sweetheart,” Mom said. “You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to.”

  “I don’t want to read it out loud.”

  “All right.” Mom guided Laura back to her chair at the kitchen table. “Just sit down.”

  Ruby poured herself more wine and crouched in the chair. Jimmy got a beer out of the fridge as if he lived there, and even though Laura was about to read the letter, she remembered none of them drank beer. She bent over the letter.

  Dear Lala,

  “It’s not for me!” she exclaimed. “Someone named Lala?”

  “That’s you,” Mom said, and though Laura would have loved to argue, it seemed pointless since she’d apparently wiped out five or so years of her memory.

  I saw a picture of you in the paper. I knew it was you right away. I couldn’t miss that smile. It hasn’t changed in twenty years.

  “Mine’s different,” she said. “He saw me in the paper. I guess it was the Sightings thing from the other day?”

  Last Wednesday, Ruby had come to Laura’s desk in the 40th Street sewing floor with her laptop open to the New York Post’s Page Six - Sightings, laying it on top of Laura’s work.

  “What are you doing?” Laura exclaimed. “You’re moving—” She’d stopped herself mid-sentence, because Ruby was pointing at a picture of her and Jeremy getting into a cab the previous night. He held open the door, letting her in first. She turned to him, he faced her, and they were nose close. They might have kissed the second before or the second after.

  “You look good,” Ruby said.

  “Crap.” Laura’s heart sank as she read the short blurb, which was worded in the most lascivious, ugly way possible.

  “Secret’s out.” Ruby’s flip attitude was infuriating.

  “On Page Six? They’re calling me his patternmaker. They don’t even mention Sartorial. God, they’re making it sound like he’s banging his staff to prove he’s not gay? I mean if he wanted to be gay, he’d just be gay.” She snapped the laptop closed. “Can you kill me now, please?”

  “You need to stop going to nice restaurants after work. They wait there, the photographers. Thomasina and I could go for a hot dog, and we got totally ignored except for the frat boys. One dinner at Grotto or Lanai, and it was like… they were on her like I don’t even know what.”

  “I just want to make clothes,” Laura said.

  “Well, sorry,” Ruby had said, picking up her laptop. “You’re a C-grade celebrity now.”

  Laura began again, committed to reading it through, though still not aloud.

  Dear Lala,

  I saw a picture of you in the paper. I knew it was you right away. I couldn’t miss that smile. It hasn’t changed in twenty years.

  I didn’t know much about children when your mother and I had you two. I was an only child and traveled so much with my parents that I thought I was the only one. I didn’t know how much kids could light up a life until you came along. Seeing you in that picture brought it all back to me. You used to run around the apartment with your sister’s old doll, laughing just because you could run. Your diaper would be half off, and Ruby was sitting on the floor, holding her toys so you wouldn’t take them and start running around with them.

  I don’t know how to explain everything that needs explaining. I feel like I owe it to you, especially, because we were so close. Well, I have nothing for you. Nothing of value. I have excuses. Would you like those?

  I am a useless ass. I lived my life in fear. Of what, I don’t even know. My mother’s voice in my own head, I guess, which is no excuse for a grown man.

  Maybe you don’t know this. I loved you. I love you still. Turning my back on you has been the deepening loss of my life. I doubt twenty years can ever be made up. The fact that I can see you now and I can keep up with you from afar only makes me love you more. I want to get to know you, but I’m not even going to try. There are reasons for this I don’t even want to say. I don’t want to make trouble for you. I want you to know that I am watching you. That sounds creepy. But it’s not in a creepy way. Think of me as beside you, walking with you, wherever you are. I don’t think you’ll ever need me, but if you do, I’ll be there, I promise.

  Love, Joseph

  No contact information. What a bunch of crap.

  “You look green,” Ruby said.

  “I’m tired. I’ve been doing three jobs, smiling for the cameras, dealing with my mother, who is having an attack over a twenty-year-old dress—and by the way, you have not gotten away with not telling me what’s up with that—and now this. Dad, who wrote us now. Why? Because I was in the goddamn newspaper? Again? Why didn’t we get these when Thomasina Wente died and Ruby was all over the place as her surviving lover?”

  “You were special to him, Laura,” Mom said.

  “Fine. I’m a special snowflake.” She stood up. “Ladies and gentleman, good night.”

  **

  Laura clicked the door behind her and crouched in the narrow space between her bed and the wall. She hadn’t turned on a light and had no intention of moving from that safe little space. She huddled over her phone and dialed Jeremy.

  “How are you?” he said by way of greeting. She heard the sewing machines behind him and knew he was paying overtime at 40th Street.

  “My mother just made an ass out of herself at Bernard Nestor’s, and when we got home, we had three letters waiting from Dad.”

  “Your father?”

  “Mine. The asshole who left because he was gay, which is the worst excuse ever. Like no one has a gay father. Like he invented it. And now we have these letters, and mine is two pages long, and guess what? He calls me Lala, which I don’t remember being called because, here’s the killer, he didn’t leave when I was a baby. He left when I was six.” She left out Crapcrotch and the panic attack and Jimmy’s backhanded comments.

  She heard a click. He’d gone into the office.

  “Lala. I like that,” he said.

  “No, you don’t. There’s nothing redeeming about the man at all, not even his little cutie-pie nicknames. He wasn’t like your father, who was there for you.”

  He sighed. “It’s not all hearts and rainbows, Laura. Maybe I made it sound like that.”

  Jeremy had always made his father sound like a prince, a stellar human being, an honorable, upright, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth man of the people who had been born ready for canonization. Jeremy always spoke of the man with a hint of regret, as if he had already managed to fail his father’s memory with slim achievement and slight moral rectitude.

  “Straighten me out then,” she said. “Because I’ve been jealous of you having that dad for years already.”

  “Okay, but you asked.”

  “I won’t sue you for any changed opinions.”

  He paused, and Laura imagined him doodling something on his pile of scrap paper.

  “He made custom suits on the side. It drove my mother crazy because there’s no money in it, even at four grand a pop. Fabric was so expensive, and the horsehair, forget it. So, this was a few months before he died. He had this client that needed his the next week, but the factory had a big order coming up, so Dad had to be on the floor. I was cutting at the time. I guess I was twelve. He laid out the fabric for the pants and asked me to cut it while he went to the floor. He complained about my mother nagging him to do a thousand waitress uniforms when he was trying to make art. He was... frustrated. I wanted to get him out of there because he was making me nervous, so I promised to pin the pattern and just, you know… I told him, ‘Go downstairs already before Mama freaks out.’ I mean, she was such a...”

  He drifted off. He’d finished the sentence in the past, and it didn’t end well. Whatever good he thought about his father, he had the opposite opinion of his mother. “I laid out the pattern and cut it. I was careful. Those suits, the margins are really tight. You can’t waste or make mistakes, or you lose half your profits. And by the way, it took a month to get fabric delivered. But I was sure I did it rig
ht. Positive. You sure you want to hear this?”

  “He didn’t beat you, did he?”

  Jeremy gave a little cough of a laugh. “No. When he came down, he laid out the pieces, and the bottom layer of fabric had slipped. Everything cut for the left side was off grain by almost a little more than a sixteenth.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “He laid out the rest of the fabric, ten yards, probably eight hundred dollars’ worth, and I’m crying already, because I know how bad this is. He hands me his scissors, which were twice the size of mine, and he says, ‘Cut it. Cut all of it. Small pieces. I don’t want to be able to make a facing or a pocket. Go!’ I got snot in my oxygen mask and tears everywhere, and I knew I was going to have to clean out the tubes. And I tell him I can recut the left side, you know, that it doesn’t have to be a total loss. But he takes the stuff I did correctly, the right side, and slices it in two. Then he stands over me while I chop the rest of the fabric to shreds.”

  Laura heard voices downstairs, a little laughter, and then the closed front door that meant Ruby had gone back to her garden apartment. Laura didn’t dare leave her room for fear of interrupting Mom and Jimmy’s quiet time. Her living situation was getting tricky. She was going to need to find her own place again soon. “He laid out the fabric, JJ. It wasn’t your fault.”

  His chair creaked again. “Yeah. I know. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

  She felt the need to make a similar sort of ugly admission. “Ruby says I had an incontinence problem after Dad left. Still think I’m sexy?”

  “Can I send you a cab?”

  “I can get my own cab, JJ.”

  “I don’t know what else to offer. Get your own cab. Are you coming back here? That’s all I want to know.”

  She wanted nothing more than to see him, but it wasn’t practical. “I need to get to sleep.”

  “If you lived in the city, we’d be together right now.”

  “I know. It’s hard to look for something when I’m at work all the time.” There was a soft knock at her door. She got up to answer it.

  “You don’t even need to like the place,” Jeremy said. “You’re with me most nights anyway.”

  Laura opened the door. Mom walked in carrying a book.

  “I have to go. You love me.” The words rolled and clicked around her mouth like a hard candy that hadn’t dissolved yet.

  “And you love me,” Jeremy responded. “Don’t oversleep. You have a fitting in the morning.”

  Mom sat on the bed, in the dark. Laura clicked off the phone, heavy with the feeling that there wasn’t going to be much sleeping that night. She turned on the light, and with Mom sitting there on the 1970s avocado bedspread she’d found at a thrift store, the absurd poverty of the room was apparent. Nothing hung on the walls. No books weighed the shelves. The curtains had been there when she’d moved in, as if she had never committed to living there at all. Laura had been so broke and hopeless when she’d moved in with Mom and Ruby all of nine months ago. She could afford a place in Midtown if she wanted it, if she could only find the time to see one first.

  “You knew I thought he left earlier, and you never told me,” Laura said.

  “I didn’t even know you’d convinced yourself otherwise until it was too late. There seemed no harm in it. You want to be angry at me? Go ahead. I had a lot to deal with at the time, and the extra laundry you made me wasn’t helping. I was willing to let you get over it any way you had to.”

  Laura sat on the chair by the bed. “What’s happening, Mom? Why now?”

  “It’s the gown. And your face in the papers.” She opened the photo album on her lap. “Your father was… I guess you could say bisexual, since he is your father, and it was done naturally.”

  “If I can take you with Jimmy, I can take you with Dad,” Laura said.

  “But it was infrequent, and he didn’t function well. Do you know what I mean, or do I have to get graphic?”

  “I’m good.”

  “He came out to me when you were five.” She put her hand on Laura’s knee.

  Laura wanted to argue: There was no Dad when she was five. That was the story she had told herself her entire life. She took her mother’s hand and squeezed it because Mom had always been there. Whatever Dad did or didn’t do, whatever lies Laura had created to explain it away, Mom had been there.

  “We tried to stay in the same apartment for you girls. Laura, when I say he loved you, you were his jewel. When he left, it was you I couldn’t believe he abandoned.”

  “I don’t even remember being called Lala in my life.”

  “I stopped using it when he left. He was always buttoned up, but once he just accepted who he was, he was a hell of a lot easier to deal with, and it never occurred to me that he’d leave. But, well, I guess he did. God, I am still...” She pinched the bridge of her nose and shook her head as if casting off the residual anger. “When your dad told me, I was devastated. I mean, we had these two beautiful girls, and we were friends, he and I, and there had been sex, but like I said. It was what it was. He stayed for you guys, but there were a lot of nights he didn’t come home. I was...” She took a deep breath and looked at the ceiling.

  Laura had always thought of Mom as Mom. She’d never thought of her as a woman, with romantic feelings and physical desires as strong as her own, a woman who loved deeply and whose heart could be broken and who had dreams that could be shattered by that same love. “It wasn’t you, Mom.”

  “I know that,” she snapped. “He lost his job, of course, because he was pissing himself with excitement and grabbed the wrong guy at work. Someone he was managing. It was ugly. And there was no market for engineers during a recession.”

  “You said he was a musician.”

  “I said no such thing. Your romantic imagination said that. Can I finish?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Needless to say, I had to cover everything, and when he came home drunk and smelling of sweat and semen, I didn’t need it. What I needed was to keep an eye on him, and I needed him to have some good examples, because this was when gay men were dying by the dozen. So I got him a job as a receptionist at Scaasi.

  “Of course, he wanted nothing to do with it. He was an educated man. He built bridges and roads. But he brought you to work one day after school, and he saw how much you loved it there. You were the Scaasi mascot, you know, the only five-year-old in history allowed to handle pins and scissors. He and some of my coworkers got to talking, and he took the job, mostly because he could be as out as he wanted to be.” Mom sighed and opened the album to a purple bookmark. “Almost a year later, the princess came with her entourage.”

  Laura took the album and flipped through. People. Faces. The Scaasi studio. The saffron gown on the form. She didn’t know any of the people except Mom, with her needle and thread, and the princess in slacks and a T-shirt, smiling.

  “Which one is Dad?” Laura asked.

  “Look.”

  As much as she hated him, she was hungry for the sight of him. She wanted to see her features in his, to know where the other half of her had come from, to bring form to her disappointment and loathing, to have the target of her anger be a face, rather than an idea. The people in the pictures were all handsome and tanned, smiling with arms around shoulders, crowding into the frames. “Who took these?”

  “I did.”

  Laura looked up at her mother. “You went out?”

  “Sweetheart, please. You think I dropped dead when I had you two? That entourage took us out every night they were here. A month. And what fun people.”

  Laura looked back at the pictures, catching it then, out of the corner of her eye, a shape in the cheek and chin, the curve of the eyelid. She gasped. She could never unsee him once he revealed himself. “Ruby looks like him.”

  “You have his nose.”

  Laura devoured the pictures, seeking every hint of his face and body, trying to piece together a man from bits of emulsified paper. “Holy crap. He was hot.
”

  “Probably still is, for all I know.”

  “So you were hanging out. You were friends, and he was a dad, for whatever that was worth. What happened?”

  “Brunico happened.”

  **

  Brunico had inspired Rat Pack songs and black-and-white films over the decades, solidifying the tiny South American island nation’s reputation as a world-class destination for imprudent carousing, gambling, and money laundering.

  The happenings there had been the downfall of many an actor and actress. An inaccessible Las Vegas, a godless Sodom, a den, a haven, an unspoiled blossom on a perfect ocean, Brunico had three months of stunning, perfect weather and nine months of bitter, wet cold. The island lay just east of Argentina, far enough away to be its own little kingdom and close enough to get supplies for a hospital qualified to treat hangovers, broken limbs, small lacerations, and unwanted pregnancies.

  During the hundred years following its discovery by a lost beaver-hunting team in 1787, it was a prison colony, proving yet again that the after-dinner social solution to the world’s problems—putting all the people you don’t like on an island and ignoring them—never works and will garner either a prosperous democracy or an abandoned hunk of rock on the shoreline. Brunico stood as an example of the latter until it was purchased in 1880 by the Forseigh family as an investment in the future of the island’s chief asset: peat moss.

  Herge Forseigh, the family scion and next in line to inherit ownership, noticed that the island’s proximity from Argentina and the criminal diaspora that called the place home made it a perfect destination for illegal activity. After spending four years of his life being brainwashed by English Calvinists in university, he decided that wealth was fine if one only wanted to influence people’s actions, but righteousness would rule the hand and the soul, as well. His father’s death wasn’t going to transfer just ownership of the island, but the rule as well.

  That was managed at a deathbed signing, where the elder Forseigh made himself high prince, closed off the currency to foreign trade, made Christ the eternal king, and pronounced an unbreakable monarchy with no parliament. Anyone who didn’t like it could leave. No one did. The rock of an island produced both peat moss and blind loyalty in seemingly unlimited quantities.