A Dress to Die For (26 page)

“What’s the point of being prince if you can’t change the laws?”

He had a point, as usual, being the pragmatist he was.

“Did you realize,” she asked, “I grew up five blocks from the 40th Street factory? Hell’s Kitchen is just that way. East and up a little. On the other side of the tunnel.”

He looked around. “So you did.”

“Do you remember meeting a fatherless girl who smelled like she messed her pants three times a week?”

“Do you remember a kid in a clear plastic mask, carrying around an oxygen tank?”

She took a deep breath before saying, “Yes.”

When he stopped walking, she closed her eyes. She didn’t want him to hate her. She didn’t want horrible things to come back to him, but if she and her mob had been cruel, it was something she’d just have to deal with. Opening her eyes, she saw him standing in front of her, studying her as if trying to do a math problem.

“Jeremy, if I made fun of you or hurt you, I’m sorry. I barely remember it. It’s not an excuse, but...” But nothing. “I remember you checking in a bolt of fabric on the loading dock when you were eight or nine. And I remember you by a line of limos when you were about thirteen. And that’s when I remember you as
you
. You were the kid we were afraid of. That’s all I got, and I only got that because all this Dad stuff came back.”

Typically, he barely even had to speak for her to know what he needed. So she stopped fretting and looked at him long enough to read him. “You knew,” she said.

“I knew you. I’ll tell you one time. You were in the back alley behind the factory. I ran out coughing. Maybe I was nine? Ten? I was going to wait for my mother to come down and help with my physio.”

“What was I doing?”

He opened his hands and made an expression that told her he didn’t want to say.

She put her face in her hands. “Was it number one or number two?”

“You were a kid, and you looked scared,” he said, waving it off. “There was this other time.”

“You’re avoiding the answer.”

“In Steinloff and Stohler.”

“I can’t believe you knew this whole time.”

He closed his eyes for a second, as if needing to focus. “And just to put it into perspective, I was nineteen. I owned a factory bleeding red ink, but it was mine. I was having sex, which... even though she was married, was a big deal for a skinny, sickly kid. I was getting my own line, too. I was on top of the world. So... are you with me?”

She wasn’t with him. What had been a revelation to her had apparently been something that had been on his mind from the beginning. She didn’t know
which
beginning—when he saw her at the interview or when they started sleeping together or any of the mornings in between—but it was a significant amount of time to not ask her if she remembered meeting him in an alley when she was battling despair over her father and he was battling a bad roll of the genetic dice.

“I’m really mad at you,” she said. She stopped walking and stood on a set of steps to the brick building, folding her arms. He wasn’t going to just bulldoze through her.

“Yes, you are. I’ll be frank. You ran with a pack of kids in the neighborhood around the factory. You all were from the other side of the tunnel. Your babysitter and her boyfriend were a pain in my ass. You and your sister were too young for me to care about one way or the other. Until the Steinloff and Stohler thing, which you’d remember if you’d stop being so mad.”

She stood two steps above him. He rested his foot on the bottom step, looking up with those brown eyes, with those lashes and that cleft in his lower lip. In all those years of knowing him but not knowing him, she’d memorized his face and voice and the way he walked. She’d learned everything about the business from him, admiring his acumen and facility, but she had never gone any deeper.

“Fine,” she said. “Steinloff and Stohler.”

Steinloff and Stohler was a tiny storefront on 37th Street that sold trimmings, findings, and other emergency sewing equipment at a huge markup. The place hadn’t changed in forty years. It was dark, crowded, and organized like a military installation. Laura had been in there no less than a thousand times, and if she’d ever met Jeremy St. James inside, she’d have remembered.

“Can we walk?” he asked.

“No.”

“Fine.” He seemed uncomfortable facing her. “I was picking up a box of thread. And I was in that situation with Gracie, which at the time seemed great. So there’s this girl looking at machine needles. She’s like, I don’t know. Sixteen?”

“If you’re talking about me, just say it’s me.”

“It was late afternoon. Summer. And you were wearing a red bikini top with this big shirt over it. Sheer. And that red was sun-baked. I’ll never forget it. Big broomstick skirt and I know you had the matching red bottoms under.”

“Are you going to be a pig?”

“I wanted to put my hands up your skirt and pull that bikini off you. Does that make me a pig?”

“I can’t believe I walked around like that.”

“You were so unselfconscious about it. That was… I mean, it was incredible.”

“Ruby and I went to the beach a lot that summer. I guess I stopped caring.” She felt defensive and exposed, having no memory of a young Jeremy wanting to put his hands under her clothes.

“Your hair was a wreck. You had sand all over you. You looked like the same street rat I’d seen around but with curves.”

“I was in private school, you know.”

He ignored her defense of her rattiness. “I hadn’t seen you guys in a long time. After my father died and my stepfather got onboard, I didn’t leave the factory much. But yeah. I knew it was you. So you know, I thought... I can talk to her. Right? I’m a big shot now. God, I was...” He smiled and looked away, then back at her. “You were just the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen. I walked up to you, and I pulled out the Tasken needles. I said something stupid like, ‘You should get these. They’re German.’”

“Those are a hundred dollars a dozen.”

“Yeah, well, I realized you didn’t remember me. So I went on and on about why they were the best, and you’re tapping your foot. And I was so excited you didn’t remember me from the neighborhood, I kept on talking. It was like I couldn’t stop saying stupid stuff, like explaining to you why they were so good and how I had my own line and you should stop by the factory some time. God, this is so embarrassing.” He couldn’t look at her. Jeremy. Embarrassed. Over something that had happened ten years ago.

She stepped down and put her hands on his cheeks. “Okay, so what happened?”

“You listened to me blather. Then you said, ‘Can I see that box?’ I held out the needles, and you put your hand on mine.” He picked up her hand, palm up, and laid his on top. Then he closed his fingers. “You took the box and ran out.”

“Oh, my God!”

“You stole them.”

“I brought them back like half an hour later.” She remembered stealing the needles, and she remembered there was a guy in the store holding them and talking to her, but she didn’t remember another thing about him. He seemed like just another guy who would have gone after Ruby if she’d been there. Just another jerk caught in the crossfire of her rage at Dad. There had been dozens. She decided he didn’t need to know that.

“I paid for them,” he said.

“Oh, Jeremy, I just wanted to annoy you.”

“I thought you just wanted me to shut up.”

“Don’t shut up. Don’t shut up ever.” She kissed him, hands still on his cheeks.

He pushed her away enough to speak. “I thought reinventing myself meant I could get girls like you. I didn’t know I was trapped with Gracie.”

“The Saint JJ red,
your
red. Not a deep crimson but—”

“Sun-baked. Yeah.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Come on, Laura. You knew me before. Skinny and sickly. With the mask.” He put his hand over the lower part of his face for a second, then removed it and held out his hands. “This is the guy you want. The right suit, the right shoes. Not skinny. Not sick. Always knows what to say. Always closes the deal. Always gets the job done. And don’t lie.”

When he’d sat with her on that rainy day, a week after their first night together, describing his daily routine and his disease, he’d seemed so nervous. She’d attributed it to his vanity. In a way, she’d been right. It was vanity, but he must have been afraid his telling her would jog her memory and she’d walk out.

“Can’t I have both of you?” she asked.

“No. That kid is gone, and you don’t want him.”

“I have a kid like that, too. And you never answered about her.” She touched her nose to his and whispered, “Number one or number two?”

He whispered back, “I’m taking that secret to the grave.”

Something in the way they kissed on that dark street, some shared breath or sigh, something about the pressure of their lips or the position of his hands on her neck, shifted him into place within her. She felt that same satisfaction the first time the corners of the sleeve cap ended just at the corners of the armhole. They fit. They’d been cut and eased gently into a place where they were complete, as they should be, serving the purpose they were designed for.

“I want to take you home right now,” he said.

She wanted to go home with him. She wanted him to undress her and pull her onto his mattress. She wanted to stay up all night with her tingling skin pressed to his. “They just laid out the wool crepe for the Westchester shift. If it slips and goes off grain—”

He kissed her again, and she might have gone home with him then and checked the fabric in the morning when it was too late, but he leaned away.

“Thank God we work together,” he said. “Who else would put up with us?”

**

Sartorial Sandwich’s first production run was being cut on the fourth floor, and Laura lovingly set up every spool of thread, made sure every blade was sharpened, and checked every needle. The fabric lay out on the cutting tables, relaxing twenty-four hours before cutting. It was straight-grained, clean, and ready to go in the morning. When she looked at the magenta wool crepe stacked in a four-inch-high pile, she couldn’t believe she was in such a lucky position. She stood before the table and bowed her head with reverence for what was about to happen, the steps that had to be taken to get her there, the sacrifices, the late nights, and the fights with her sister. She even thanked Pierre Sevion, her agent, because he was one of the pieces that fit together to put that fabric out for cutting the next day. She thanked her sister, Jeremy, Bob and Ivanah Schmiller, and Carlos, the sample cutter who would do a perfect production run as a favor to her. And she thanked Gracie, who’d likely hated her because Jeremy loved her and whose death had made that magenta fabric possible.

Jeremy left her alone and took care of his own fires. He’d set up screen printing on the top floor to do fast runs of blanks sewn on the third and needed to make sure the shop was ready. She heard him coughing down the airshaft and reminded herself to make sure the cleaning crews were coming the week before Christmas. She thought she’d felt a touch of fever on his lips, and she had no idea how to handle things if he got sick.

“JJ?” she called.

“Lala?” The name echoed through the red brick of the shaft.

“I’m done.”

“I’ll be down in a sec.”

When Laura walked back to the cutting room, she found Ruby looking at the wool crepe much the same way Laura had a few minutes before.

“What are you doing here?” Laura asked.

“Can you believe it? We’re going into production tomorrow.”

Laura joined her sister at the table. “Sometimes I can’t.”

“Did you check everything?”

“We’re ready.”

“Thank you, Laura. Thank you for knowing all that stuff.”

“Thank you for letting me do my job.”

Ruby paused before digging an envelope out of her back pocket. “This was at the house.”

Laura took it. The cream paper was thick and handmade. It said
Laura Carnegie
on the front in fountain pen script, and on the back, an orange wax seal. “They have got to be kidding me.”

“Open it. I’m dying.”

Laura cracked the seal and opened the letter, feeling as though she should be announcing the winner of the Oscar. Inside, in ball-point pen and handwriting that seemed no better than an eighth grader’s:
Salvadore, the high prince of the kingdom of Brunico, requests your presence at 538 West End Avenue. Announce at reception.

“Damn it,” Laura mumbled.

“Hello? What’s not cool about that?”

What wasn’t cool was that she wanted to go home with Jeremy and lie in bed like puzzle pieces. Her body ached for him. The fabric could have waited, but she held back from going home with him because it wouldn’t have been right to pretend they’d had a full meeting of the minds when she hadn’t disclosed the results of her lunch with Sheldon. Like a gift, another big fat excuse to put off telling him had showed up.

“Are you coming with me?” Laura asked.

“Totally,” Ruby said. “Then I’m meeting Elaine for a thing at the Self-Actualization Society.”

“Let me go talk to Jeremy.” Laura heard him coughing in the back hallway before seeing him come down the concrete stairs. She waited for him at the bottom, deciding she wasn’t ready to tell him she’d met with Sheldon. Maybe not tonight. Maybe never.

“I need to go,” he said. “I can avoid getting sick if I stay home a couple of days.”

Before he could utter another word that would tempt her back to his place, she handed him the envelope.

He opened it and read. He pursed his lips, handing it back to her. “I don’t want you going alone.”

“You sound like hell. I’m worried about you.”

“I’ve only managed this my whole life.” He took her hand. “You can nurse me back to health when we get back.”

“Ruby’s coming. She’s beat up people on my behalf since we were little. Really, go home.”

The way he looked at her, like reading a row of numbers that ended in a loss, and the way he let her hand slip from his, as if a lie was pressed between them, made her feel she’d gone one too far. Did he think her knowing about their shared past turned her off? Or that she remembered some other unattractive incident?