Beneath the Seams

I carried the steel table down the stairs one careful step at a time, because the stairs in that basement were narrow as a coffin and had been built sometime before anybody thought about load ratings, and Phoebe stood at the bottom with her hands clasped in front of her watching me the whole way down without saying a word, which was somehow worse than if she'd been talking.

The table weighed maybe two hundred pounds and I'd built it myself out of a half inch plate top and square tubing legs, ground every weld smooth, brushed the whole thing with clear coat so it wouldn't rust, and I was kind of proud of it, which is why I'd volunteered to hump it down there instead of letting her hire the delivery guys. The basement of her studio was old stone, the kind of wall that sweats in summer and stays cold all year, and the ceiling was low enough that I had to duck under a beam near the bottom of the stairs, and the whole space smelled like beeswax and dry-cleaned satin and a little bit of the flux I'd tracked in on my boots.

She pointed at a spot near the middle of the floor, under the one bare bulb, and I set the table down and rocked it on its legs to check it sat flat, and it did, because I'd made sure of that in the shop. "Perfect," she said, and ran her palm across the top of it like she was petting something. "Cold. I like it."

"You're gonna like it less in January," I said, and she laughed, and I noticed she was still watching me the way she'd watched me on the stairs, some look I couldn't name yet.

She took me by the sleeve then, tugging me along the far wall where a heavy curtain hung from a pipe, dark green velvet with a moth hole near the hem, and she grabbed the edge of it like she was about to show me a magic trick. "Okay, so, this is where the dead gowns live," she said, and pulled the curtain back, and behind it was an alcove carved into the stone, maybe six feet deep, crammed with dress forms wearing half-finished gowns, basted and pinned, arms absent, heads absent, just torsos on poles, except for one old shop mannequin in the middle with a papier-mache head and a painted face, all of them staring out into the dark at nothing.

"So this is a confessional," I said.

"I mean, kind of, right?" She was grinning. "That's what I called it when I first moved in. It's got that vibe. You kneel in there and confess your fabric sins."

"It's got a vibe alright." I stepped in and the stone was right there at my back and the gowns hung around me like a bunch of quiet women waiting to be fitted, and I looked back out at her through the curtain gap and she was still watching me, and I thought, well, there it is again, that look.

We went upstairs after that and opened a bottle of red she had standing on the cutting table between the shears and a jar of pins, and we sat on stools with our elbows on the cutting surface, which she'd normally skin me alive for, but she let it go. I'd known Phoebe three years, met her at a metalwork exhibition opening where she'd asked me if I could make her a corset boned with steel instead of plastic, and I'd said yes before I even knew what it cost, and we'd been together ever since, exclusive from the first month and tested together at the one-year mark, so I knew her looks pretty well by now, and this one was new.

She was looking past me at the basement door.

"You keep staring at that door," I said.

"I keep thinking about the mannequin."

"The dress forms, you mean."

"Sure." She turned her wine glass by the stem. "That one in the middle, the vintage one with the adjustable dials. It has this face, sort of. This blank stare. And sometimes when I'm down there alone at night, pinning something, I get this feeling like it's watching me work. Like there's a man back there behind the gowns, a customer, and he can see everything I do and he can't say anything about it and I can't see him."

"And that's a good feeling."

"That's a very good feeling," she said, and looked at me straight on, thirty-eight years old and not one ounce of shame about it, which is one of the first things I ever loved about her. "I've thought about it for a while, actually. Being watched like that. Somebody listening from behind the curtain while you, I don't know. Take charge."

I set my glass down. I'd been turning something over in my head since she showed me the alcove, some low animal thing that had been standing up and paying attention since she ran her hand across my cold steel table, and I figured three years was long enough that I could just say it out loud and see what happened.

"Clear this," I said, and I pushed the wine glasses and the bottle to the far end of the cutting table, out of the way, and she watched me do it with her mouth slightly open. Then I took her wrist and drew her off the stool and turned her so her back was against my chest, and I put my mouth close to her ear, close enough that my breath moved the loose hair at her temple, and I said, "Here's my idea. You put on something pretty and you lie down on that table downstairs, and I show you what a welder's hands can do, slow, while some imaginary man listens from behind that curtain and can't do a damn thing about it. You can say no right now, and you can say red any time after we start, and either one ends it, no questions."

She took a breath that shivered a little on the way out. "Okay," she said, barely any sound to it. "Yes. That."

"That's a yes?"

"That's a yes, Vern."

"Then go put on that green slip you keep in the rack by the fitting room, the one you wear when you're being difficult, and come down the stairs and stand in front of the table and wait for me. I'm gonna go get a few things."

She went. I watched her go, because I'm not a saint. Then I dug through the toolbox I kept in her studio for the occasions when her fittings needed a bracket or a hinge, and I opened it, looked at the tie straps and the leather work gloves, and shut it again, because I wanted nothing between us but hands. I turned off the overhead in the main floor so only the stairwell bulb was lit, which made the way down to the basement feel like going underwater, and at the bottom of the stairs Phoebe was exactly where I'd told her to be, standing in front of the steel table in the green slip with her hands at her sides, barefoot on the cold floor, and the mannequin with the dials was still visible through the gap in the green velvet curtain, but only as a vague shape, staring its blank stare at both of us.

"Good," I said, and I walked around her once, slow, the way I'd walk around a weld I was checking for pinholes, and she stood still for it, breathing careful, and I could see goosebumps come up on her arms in the cold air. "You did what I said."

"You gave me a lot of instructions," she said, and there was a wobble of a laugh in it. "Stand here, wear this."

"Quiet now. That's part of it. You talk when I ask you a question and otherwise you keep that pretty mouth shut and let me work." I stopped in front of her and put one finger under her chin and tipped her face up. "Same as upstairs. If you want to stop at any point, you say the word red and everything stops, everything, and I carry you upstairs and we open another bottle. Say it back to me so I know you got it."

"Red stops everything," she said.

"And my hand light at your throat, like we talked about, never pressing. Yes or no?"

"Yes."

"Good girl." I said it without thinking and then heard myself say it and saw what it did to her