Seams of Desire

Reg Dyer showed up ten minutes early for his first fitting. I liked him for that already.

"Melina Gartside," I said, wiping pin dust off my hands. "You're the florist."

"Reg. Hi." He shook my hand like he was afraid of crushing it. Thirty-two years old, big shoulders, soft middle, and he looked at everything in my atelier except the mirrors.

And I have floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Three of them. A man who won't look at mirrors in a dressmaker's studio is telling you something.

"Flowers," I said. "For my sister's wedding, back when I was twenty-eight. Some shop on Delancey. That wasn't yours, was it?"

"No, ma'am. I just moved here two years ago."

"Stop with the ma'am, I'm thirty-four, not eighty." I waved him onto the velvet chaise. "So. Opening your own shop?"

"Corner of Ninth and Vine. Opens in two months. There's a... a party thing. A soft opening. And I need a suit that actually fits."

He said that last part to the floor.

"Well," I said. "That's the whole job, isn't it. A suit that fits."

I got out my tape. "Stand up for me. Arms out. And Reg? Stay still. This takes a while and it goes faster if you don't fight it."

He nodded. He stood. He kept his eyes down.

I measured his chest first. Then his waist, and that's when I felt him stop breathing.

"Breathe," I told him. "In and out. You're allowed."

"Sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Everybody holds their breath at the waist. Like the tape is a judge." I moved lower, hips, inseam, and I took my time about it. Not cruel time. Careful time. My knuckles brushed his inner thigh and he made a small sound, low in his throat.

I looked up. He was red to the ears.

"Reg."

"Yes!"

"Look at me."

He did. God, those eyes. Embarrassed and eager at the same time, like a dog that's been yelled at for fetching.

"It's normal," I said. "I'm a stranger with my hands on you and a tape measure. Happens to half my clients."

"It does?"

"It does. The other half are too old to manage it." He laughed, and the laugh broke some of the tension, but not all of it. Good. I didn't want all of it gone.

I did the inseam slower than I needed to. He stayed still. He stayed very, very still, and I felt how still a man can be when he wants something and doesn't think he's allowed it.

"There," I said, standing. "First pass done. The suit will be wool, charcoal, cut for your actual shoulders and not the ones you wish you had."

"My actual ones are wrong, though."

I stopped. Put the tape down.

"Say that again?"

"Forget it."

"No. You said your shoulders are wrong. Wrong how? Wrong for what?"

He looked at the floor again. Then at my racks of half-finished gowns, which at least was looking at something. "I've never owned a suit that fit. I've never owned much that fit. I moved here two years ago and I've been single since I was twenty-two and I just thought, a good suit, that's a start. A person who looks like he's got it together."

"Reg. Sit down."

He sat.

"I spent ten years as a fit model before I opened this place," I said. "Do you know what a fit model does? Stands in a studio in underwear while forty people a week look at her body and argue about it. I have been watched more than any woman you will ever meet. And I'll tell you the secret."

"What secret?"

"Being watched is a skill. You learn it or you spend your life flinching." I crouched in front of him so we were eye to eye. "You flinch."

He swallowed. "Yeah."

"Well. I'm good at teaching."

* * *

The second fitting was the Thursday after. I'd done the basted suit, all chalk and loose basting stitches, the shell of the thing. He came in with flowers. Of course he did. A bunch of ranunculus, orange ones.

"For the shop. I mean, for you. For the table." He set them down and didn't know what to do with his hands.

"They're lovely. Put them where you can see them, they'll give you something to look at besides the floor." I pointed at a side table near the mirrors. He got the joke one second too late and his face did a whole thing.

"Shirt off, trousers on, these are the fitting trousers," I said, and he changed behind the screen, and came out, and stood where I pointed, which was dead center in front of the mirrors.

"Now," I said. "Rule for today. You look at yourself. The whole time. That's the rule for the fitting."

"That's..." He laughed, shaky. "That's the hard part."

"I know. That's why it's the rule."

I knelt at his ankles and started taking in the trouser legs, and I talked while I worked, because silence makes men retreat. "Look at your shoulders. Not your stomach, your shoulders. What do you see?"

"A guy standing funny."

"Try again."

"A... big guy. Tall. Standing funny."

"Better. Now look at your hands. Florist's hands. What do they look like?"

"Cut up. Little scratches. Thorns." He was watching them now, turning one over. "Huh. They look like they've done stuff."

"They have. Keep looking." I moved up to the waistband, pinning. My fingers pressed in at his hip, held, pressed again, and this time he didn't stop breathing. He breathed through it, slow, and he watched his own face do it, and that's a thing I don't get tired of, a man watching himself feel something.

"Melina."

"Mm."

"What are you doing to me?"

"Pinning a waistband. What does it feel like I'm doing?"

"Like..." He exhaled. "Like you're teaching me something and I can't name it."

"You can name it. You're just shy of the word."

"What word?"

"Being seen." I stood up, brushed the chalk off my palms. "Look at yourself, Reg. Right now. Really look."

He did. Four seconds, then eight, then he was just standing there, chest out a little more than before, watching a man in a half-made suit look almost handsome.

"Oh," he said. Quiet. Like he'd found something in a pocket.

"Yeah. Oh!"

I circled him, pinning the seat, and he kept his eyes forward the whole time, and I watched him watching himself while my hands worked his hips.

"How long do I have to keep looking?" he asked.

"Until it stops being a punishment."

"And when's that?"

"You tell me. Does it feel like punishment right now?"

He was quiet a minute. In the mirror I saw his throat move.

"No," he said. "It feels like being touched with my eyes."

I liked that so much I wrote it down later on a receipt.

I finished the side seams and stepped back. "Third fitting, the jacket's ready. Fourth, we do the full thing with shoes." I picked a pin out of my cuff. "And somewhere in there we're going to talk about the party."

"The soft opening?"

"Your suit, your shop, people looking at you all night. Ninety strangers, minimum, and half of them will be beautiful." I smiled at him. "I plan to be there. I'd like to watch how you do."

He turned around, finally away from the mirror, and looked at me the way men look at me when they start to understand what they've walked into.

"You'd come?"

"I never miss a fitting I can attend."

"And you'll be... watching me."

"Reg, I've been watching you since you walked in. The question is when you start liking it."

He went a little red again. But he didn't look at the floor. He looked right at me, and stayed.

He came back the next week, a Tuesday, for what I called a consultation and what was really just him standing in my parlor in the shell of a jacket while I talked.

"I need to tell you something," I said, chalking a lapel. "About me. So you know what you're standing in."

"Okay."

"I like being watched. Not in a vague way. In a specific, daily way. When I was a fit model, ten years of it, I stood in front of rooms of people in nothing but a seam allowance, and I loved it. Not the money. The looking."

He was quiet. I kept chalking.

"It's not a confession," I said. "It's my whole engine. It's why I'm good at this. A garment is a way of asking people to look at you and survive it. I've survived it. I make my living at it."

"And you think I..."

"I think you want it and you're terrified of it. That's my favorite kind of man to dress."

He laughed. Then he didn't. Then he said, "What does it feel like?"

"Being watched?"

"Yeah. From your side."

I put down the chalk. I looked at him for a minute, deciding, and he let me, which was already an answer to something.

"I could show you," I said. "Not tell. Show. But it asks something of you."

"What?"

"It asks you to stand still. There's a kind of session some of us do. Silent. Nobody talks. You stay where you are and you watch me work, and I mean really work, and I mean really watch. I'd undress. Not for you, exactly. In front of you. There's a difference and the difference is the whole lesson."

His ears went red. His hands did the thing where they look for a job and can't find one.

"And if I say no?"

"Then we chalk a lapel and I talk about sleeve heads for forty minutes and nobody's feelings get hurt. Reg. Look at me. This is a real offer with a real door out, and your suit does not depend on your answer. What do you say?"

He looked at me. God, he was getting better at it.

"Yes," he said. "I want to see it."

"Then here are the rules. You stand in the jacket, right there, center mirror. You don't move and you don't speak. If you need to stop, you say the word rose and we're done, no hard feelings, and I never bring it up. Can you agree to that?"

"Rose. Yes!"

"And you watch. That's all I ask. You watch me the way you want to be watched. Generously."

* * *

I put a record on, something slow, and I crossed to the far end of the parlor where the third mirror is, and I started with my shoes.

Not a show. That's what people get wrong. It's not a performance, it's a labor done in plain sight. That's what I wanted him to see. I stepped out of my shoes and unbuttoned my cuff, one button, then the other, and I looked at the mirror, not at him