Handicap

Katrina Mueller had won the club championship seven times, and she had torn the seat seam of her tuxedo trousers during a practice swing exactly once, which was once too many. She pushed through the door of Kinsale Custom Tailors at 4:42 on a Thursday afternoon, ten minutes late for a fitting she had booked that morning, and the little brass bell over the door jingled at her like it was scolding her.

Tate Crandall was at the cutting table in the back, sleeves rolled up, chalk in one hand and half a sleeve head in the other. He did not look up right away. He never looked up right away. She had noticed this about him two years ago, at her first fitting for the same gala, and she had decided then that it was either arrogance or discipline. She still had not settled on which.

"You're ten minutes late," he said, setting down the chalk.

"I'm aware."

"Also the appointment was for the jacket, not the trousers."

"The trousers are the problem. The seam went during a swing." She planted a hand on the counter. "I have the awards dinner tomorrow night, Tate. I'm up for Pro of the Year. I need the tux fixed, pressed, and done by noon."

He looked at her then. He was forty-eight, and he wore his age the way he wore everything else, quietly. Silver at the temples, reading glasses pushed up on his head, hands that had spent thirty years doing precise things to expensive fabric. He let the silence sit for a moment, the way he did.

"You're stressed," he said.

"I'm competitive. There's a difference."

"With you it's mostly the same thing." He wiped his hands on a cloth and came around the table. "Take off the blazer and get on the bench."

Something about the way he said it made her pause, just for a beat, and then she was shrugging out of the blazer and wondering why she'd paused at all. Stress. That was all. She hung it on the hook by the fitting room door and followed him in.

The fitting room at Kinsale's was the same as she remembered. Deep blue velvet on the walls, three mirrors angled so she could see the back of her own head, a leather bench the color of old cognac, a rolling rack of half-finished suits with their sleeves pinned up like patients waiting for surgery. Through the wall she could hear the muffled hum of the main salon, where somebody was running a wedding-party dress rehearsal. A woman's voice saying something about hemlines. Here it was still and warm and smelled like wool and starch.

She had first come here two years ago, when she was forty-one, for the gala fitting, and Tate had taken her measurements in about six minutes flat, professional as a dentist, and she had gone home and not thought about him for three days, which was how long it took her to admit she had thought about him constantly. Nothing had ever come of it. She came in twice a year for alterations, he measured her, they talked about golf, and she left. She was not the kind of woman who dated, exactly. She had come close once, at thirty-four, with a member at the club, a decent enough man for the year it lasted, right up until he'd asked her to let him win a match and she'd beaten him by nine strokes instead. That had been that. She'd never married. Casual dating suited her the way a one-iron suits some people, badly, but she kept it in the bag.

"Stand here," Tate said, positioning her in front of the center mirror. "Feet apart. Trousers off."

"Trousers off."

"You tore the seat seam. I can't assess the seat seam over fabric that's currently failing."

He was right, which annoyed her. She toed off her shoes and stepped out of the trousers, folded them, and handed them over. Underneath she was in plain black cycling shorts, which she wore under everything because she went straight from lessons to the range most days. Tate took the trousers, turned them inside out with a quick practiced motion, and looked at the torn seam without comment.

"Swing-related?"

"Full swing. Driver. I was trying to keep my right side connected and I guess my right side got ambitious."

"And the seam lost." He laid the trousers over the bench. "I can rebuild it tonight. But I'm re-measuring you while I'm at it, because if a driver swing is blowing out a seat seam, then this tux was cut to the wrong numbers and I want to know whose fault that was."

"It was cut to my numbers."

"We'll see." He took the tape off its hook around his neck. "Turn around. Face the mirror."

She faced the mirror. She watched him kneel behind her, and there was a moment, brief and stupid, where she registered the picture of it, a grown man on his knees behind her in a velvet room, and she decided not to think about that either.

The inseam measurement was where it started. She had been measured dozens of times in her life by tailors and club fitters and one very chatty man at a ski shop, and the inseam had never once been an event. Tate ran the tape from the cuff up along the inside of her leg, and he ran it slow. Slower than he needed to. His knuckles, on the third pass, brushed the inside of her thigh, just above the knee, a light contact that was surely an accident, and her breath went sharp and short through her nose before she could stop it.

She bristled. She felt it happen in her shoulders, the old reflex, the one that put a nine-stroke beating on a man who'd asked for a gimme. Every instinct said step away, say something, take the tape out of his hands. She did not step away. She stood there with her pulse ticking up and watched the mirror, where his face showed nothing at all, and she thought, with a kind of distant wonder, that her body had just voted without consulting her.

"Hold still," he said.

"I am holding still."

"Your shoulders aren't."

She put her shoulders down. He finished the inseam. He wrote a number on the little paper tag without showing it to her, which she also noted, also filed away, also failed to object to.

Then came the trouble.

"What's that?" she said, when he moved to the rack and pulled down her tuxedo jacket, the midnight blue one, and laid it over the bench. "What are you doing?"

"Checking the rise against your measurements."

"The measurements are fine. I'm a 34 long. I have been a 34 long since I was twenty-five. Every suit I own is a 34 long."

"Every suit you own was made from a measurement somebody took in about ninety seconds at a men's store," Tate said. He said it to the tuxedo, not to her, which somehow made it worse. "Arms up."

She put her arms up because her body, apparently, was now taking orders from him. He measured the waist, the drop, the seat, and he took each number twice, and he took them at a pace that could only be described as deliberate, and she stood there in her cycling shorts in front of three mirrors and did not say a word about any of it. Through the wall the wedding party was arguing about whether the flower girl needed a wrap. It seemed very far away.

Then Tate did something she had never seen a tailor do. He took the tape measure, the one with her seat measurement on it, and he walked around in front of her and held it up at her eye level, flat between his two hands, so she could read it herself.

Thirty-six.

"Read it again if you want," he said.

She read it again. Thirty-six.

"That's wrong," she said.

"It's not."

"I'm a 34."

"You're a 36, Katrina. You've been a 36 for at least two years, probably longer, and every tailor who ever measured you told you 34 because it was faster than arguing." He wound the tape slowly around his fingers, one loop, another. "You swing a driver hard enough to blow out a seam cut for a 34. Your body isn't the shape on the card. It hasn't been for a while. I know your body better than you do."

The room got very quiet. Somewhere behind her sternum, something happened that she did not have a name for, part fury, part the thing she'd felt when his knuckles brushed her thigh, and she looked at the number on the tape and then at his face, and his face was calm, and she realized she was not going to argue, and that the not-arguing was itself a strange new country for her.

"You've been waiting two years to say that," she said.

"I've been waiting two years to say a lot of things," Tate said.

He finished the fitting the way a man finishes a long putt, with a certain care, a certain economy, no wasted motion. He chalked the seat seam first, turning the trousers inside out over the bench so she could see the torn stitches and the neat line of white chalk running beside them. Then the cuffs. He had her stand on the low leather bench while he knelt on the floor with a pin cushion on his wrist, and the arrangement of it, the two of them stacked like that in the mirrors, was something she filed away with the rest of the afternoon's strange haul.

The wedding party next door had moved on to a debate about boutonnieres. Through the velvet it came softened, like a radio in another apartment.

"I watched the sectional last Sunday," Tate said. He said it to her left cuff, folding the hem to the right length, chalk in the other hand. "From the gallery by eighteen."

"I didn't see you there."

"You weren't looking at the gallery. You were looking at the scoreboard."

Katrina looked at the top of his head. The silver was thicker at the crown. "So you watched golf. People watch golf."

"You snapped at your caddy on seventeen." He pinned the hem, two pins, three. "She handed you the wrong wedge and you said something to her in front of the gallery, and then you three-putted eighteen and lost by one, and you walked off the green without shaking the winner's hand."

The pins went in with small precise sounds. Katrina stood on the bench in her cycling shorts and socks and felt the specific heat climb the back of her neck that had nothing to do with the room.

"The winner was a twenty-two-year-old with a slice," she said. "She won because the wind helped her on the back nine."

"She won because she made her putts and you didn't. And you made a teenager feel two inches tall about a wedge."

"You hate losing more than you love winning," he said it without emphasis, the way he'd said thirty-six. A number. A fact about fabric. He stood up off his knees, unhurried, and looked at her in the mirror instead of at her directly, which she understood now was a technique, the same way holding the tape at eye level had been a technique. "I've watched you come in here four times in two years. Every time, you treat a fitting like a match you might drop. You correct my numbers before I write them down. You stand the way you stand over a putt. I don't think you know how to do anything without trying to beat it."

"I beat things because winning is the point of doing things."

"Is it?" He set the chalk down on the bench, deliberately, where she could see him do it. "You won your club championship seven times and I'd bet money you can't remember the seventh one as well as you remember the one you lost last Sunday."

She wanted to argue. The argument was right there, fully assembled, and it was a good argument, and instead she heard herself say, in a voice she did not recognize as hers, "What do you want?"

The question came out fast and blunt and it hung in the still air of the fitting room with all the wedding-party hum pressed out of it. Tate did not answer right away. He picked up her tuxedo jacket off the bench, brushed a nonexistent speck from