Leather Test

I spotted Larry before he spotted me, which was a small mercy. He was standing over by the coffee urns in the hotel lobby, smirking at his phone, wearing the same navy blazer he'd worn to every sales meeting since roughly the Clinton administration. Nat Bauer, I told myself, you are forty-two years old, you are here for a logistics symposium, and you are going to walk straight past that man like he is a potted plant.

I did not walk straight past him. I stopped. Old habits.

For anyone just joining us: Larry Newell, forty-five, my ex-husband of two years, sells leather goods for a manufacturer out of Ohio. Wallets, belts, briefcases, the whole catalog. We were married eleven years, divorced for two, and in those two years we had somehow developed the kind of relationship where seeing each other across a hotel lobby felt like a buzzer sounding at the start of a prizefight. Not a fight about money or the house or whose fault anything was. A fight about who was doing better. Who looked better. Who had moved on more convincingly. It was stupid and it was constant and I have never once lost it, mostly because I refuse to let my face do anything interesting when he's around.

He looked up. The smirk, already loaded, went to full cocked. "Natalie. They'll let anybody into these things."

"They let you in, so apparently the bar is on the floor," I said. My badge was crooked and I fixed it, mostly to have something to do with my hands. "What are you doing here? This is shipping and freight. You sell purses."

"Belts," he said, with the gravity of a man correcting a court stenographer. "And the symposium needed a sponsor for the Thursday lunch, so here I am. Rep of the year, by the way. Didn't you hear?"

I had not heard, and judging by the way he announced it I was meant to feel something about that. I felt approximately nothing, which I let show, and which made his eye twitch in a way I found deeply satisfying. Two years of practice and I still had the touch.

We did the usual lap. How's the house, sold it, good. How's the new guy at your office, he's fine, good. He asked if I was still driving routes and I said sometimes, when the regular carrier calls out, and he made a face like I'd confessed to sleeping in a dumpster, and I reminded him that I run a five-ton truck in January in Illinois and he does not, and that ended that thread. Then the bell rang for the next seminar and we both pretended to be relieved, which neither of us was.

* * *

The afternoon seminars were exactly as scintillating as you'd expect. I sat through forty minutes on pallet optimization that could have been an email, and then a genuinely heroic talk about fuel surcharges that sent three people in my row into actual sleep. By the four o'clock break I was ready to chew through the drywall, so I took my bad coffee out to the corridor to find a window and some oxygen.

That's when I found the pop-up shop.

Down past the vending alcove, someone had set up a little display for a high-end leather accessories brand, the kind of outfit that doesn't advertise because its customers already know. Racks of gloves and belts and satchels, all of it smelling like a tannery had married a perfume counter. And in the middle, on a padded mannequin form, a black leather bodice with brass buckles down the front, oiled to a shine that made the fluorescents look almost flattering.

I was maybe ten seconds into looking at it when a voice behind me said, "Careful, Natalie. It bites."

Larry. Of course Larry. He had materialized the way he always did, hands in his pockets, wearing the expression of a man who has just found the one lever in the world built specifically for him.

"It's a display piece," I said, not turning around.

"It's a fitting piece. They do actual fittings, look, there's a room right back there." He came up beside me and put two fingers on the edge of the bodice, flipping one of the buckles open with a click that I felt in my teeth, which was embarrassing, because why would a click do that. "Company policy. They want people to feel the goods. Sales trick. Very effective."

"I'm not buying a corset at a freight conference."

"Nobody said buy. Just touch." He leaned in like he was sharing state secrets. "What, you're chicken?"

I want it on the record that I am forty-two years old and a grown woman with a pension and a credit score in the top decile, and that no reasonable person could be moved by the word chicken. And I want a further note in the record that Larry has known since our second date that the word chicken moves me like a cattle prod, and that he has used this knowledge shamelessly for thirteen years, and that I have fallen for it every single time.

"I'm not chicken," I said. "I just don't see the point."

"The point is it's leather, you've been staring at it like it owes you money, and the fitting girl is on her break so nobody's watching." He shrugged, the picture of indifference, which is how I knew he cared enormously. "Fine. Stay chicken. I'll tell everyone at dinner."

The thing about Larry, and I mean this as an accusation, is that he knows me. He knows that I have had a thing about leather since before we ever met, a thing I never once talked about in eleven years of marriage because it seemed like one of those doors you don't open in a marriage built mostly on lawn care and holiday scheduling. Belts, gloves, the smell of a new jacket. It was always there, quiet, filed away under later. There was never a later. Well. I was forty-two now and single and standing in a corridor smelling of tanned hide, and later had just walked up and introduced itself.

"Fine," I said, and picked up the bodice before my brain could file an objection. "Just to see."

"Just to see," he agreed, sounding entirely too pleased, and steered me toward the fitting room at the back with a hand near my elbow that I chose not to acknowledge.

* * *

The fitting room was a converted storage closet, small and warm, with a mirror, a stool, and a curtain that didn't quite reach the floor. The shop girl had reappeared at the door long enough to hand me the bodice and a size opinion, take my badge as collateral, and vanish. I stood there alone with the thing in my hands and my heart doing something completely out of proportion to the situation.

It was heavier than it looked. Real leather, thick, lined in something soft, with those brass buckles and laces up the back. I put my thumb against it and the smell came up at me, that deep animal smell, and I had to admit, privately, in the privacy of my own skull, that this had been a mistake. Not a dangerous mistake. A revealing one.

I got my blouse off and wrestled into it, which took a while, because the thing did not bend so much as negotiate. First buckle loose, then the next, then the laces, which I hauled as tight as I could get them by myself, which was apparently not very. The leather warmed against my skin and then gripped. Not uncomfortably. Gripped. It took my ribcage in both hands and said, we're doing this now, and my whole body went quiet in a way I hadn't felt in years. I looked in the mirror and a stranger looked back, someone with better posture and worse judgment, and I stood there a long time just breathing shallowly and feeling the panels creak when I did.

So this is what the door was, I thought. All those years of not mentioning the jacket thing. I was trembling a little, hands not entirely steady on the buckles, and I was alone so I let myself admit the trembling was not fear.

Then came the knock.

Two raps, unhurried. "How's it fitting in there?" Larry's voice, casual as a phone survey.

"Fine. Go away."

"I can hear the buckles from here, you're not even done. Come on, let me look. I do this for a living, Natalie. Nobody in this building knows leather fit like I do."

"That's not the flex you think it is."

There was a pause, and then, lower: "It'll bunch wrong at the waist if the laces aren't set right. You'll walk out of here thinking leather's not for you because somebody didn't do it properly, and that'll be a shame, because it's clearly for you. I could hear it in your voice through the door."

I looked at the mirror. The stranger looked back and raised an eyebrow, in effect. The sensible thing, the thing I'd have advised any friend to do, was to say the fitting's over, get dressed, and never speak of it. But the corridor outside was empty, the curtain didn't reach the floor anyway, and the truth was the thing fit like it had been poured onto me and I wanted one person on earth to see it. I hated that the one person on earth was Larry.