The Candidate's Wardrobe

Clayton parked his ten-year-old hatchback on the curb outside Donna's building and sat there for a minute with the engine off. Six months. That was how long it had been since Grad University walked him out of the events department with a box of desk junk and a severance check that barely covered the gap. He was fifty-three years old, and he had spent half a year plotting.

He grabbed the folder off the passenger seat and went up.

Donna opened the door before he knocked a second time. She was fifty-one, a grad student in art history who did part-time modeling to pay for her habit of buying other people's old clothes. She had a mug of tea in one hand and ink on her fingers.

"You look terrible," she said.

"Thanks. I've been working on it."

She stepped aside and let him in. Her apartment was small and full of garment racks. There was a sewing table under the window and a garment steamer parked by the couch like a pet. Clayton had met her two years ago when he hired her as a model for a donor gala. They had stayed friendly in the lazy way that people do when one of them still works in the business.

He sat down and spread the folder on her coffee table.

"Okay," he said. "Here's the thing. Gibbs is throwing the fall gallery opening in three weeks. Big deal. Big donors. Press."

"Your replacement," Donna said. She sat across from him and tucked her legs up.

"The woman who took my job. Yes!" He flipped the folder open. "I've been planning a little event of my own. Same night. Same neighborhood. A pop-up exhibit two blocks from campus, free wine, better music. I've got a caterer who owes me. I've got a printer who owes me. I pull half her guest list and she looks like an idiot in front of the board."

Donna sipped her tea and looked at him over the rim.

"And where do I come in?"

"I need a model. A face for the invitations. Something striking, something that gets people talking. I figured you'd want the work. It pays four hundred for the night, cash, up front, no strings."

"Paid up front," she said. "Before the event. Before anything."

"Before anything. That's the deal. Money is settled and done the day you say yes. It has nothing to do with anything after that."

"Clayton, you sound like a contract."

"I've been burned. Sue me."

She laughed and put her mug down. "Fine. I'm in for the modeling. Send me the details." Then she paused, and something changed in her face, some idea arriving. "Actually, wait. This works out funny. I want to show you something."

She got up and went to the closet by the sewing table. Clayton watched her dig through it for a minute, pushing hangers aside, muttering to herself.

"Here." She came back with a flat box, tissue paper inside, and lifted out a nightgown. It was pale champagne colored, some kind of silk, with lace at the neckline and thin straps. It looked old and it looked expensive and it looked like nothing a man had ever put on his body on purpose.

"My thesis," she said. "Underwear as display. Vintage lingerie from 1920 to 1970, shown as objects instead of garments. Everyone mounts dresses. Nobody mounts the under layer. It's the part that touched the skin and nobody ever sees it in a museum."

"It's nice," Clayton said, because it was.

"It's more than nice, it's a 1938 silk slip with hand-rolled hems, and I nearly cried when I found it." She held it up and the light went through the fabric. Then she looked at him with her head tilted, the way she looked at things she was deciding about.

"Can I ask you something kind of weird?"

"That's never gone well."

"I've always wanted to see a man in one of these. Not a mannequin. A man. I collect these pieces and I photograph them on forms and it's never what I actually want to look at." She shrugged. "The thesis is about the garment. The want is about the body. Anyway. Would you model it? Right now. Just for me, not for the invitations."

Clayton sat there and did not say anything for a while. The steamer ticked as it cooled. He thought about the fact that he was fifty-three years old and had been fired six months ago and was sitting in a graduate student's apartment being asked to put on a lace nightgown. None of it made sense and all of it made sense.

"Why me?"

"Because you're here. Because you're built like a coat hanger and it would hang right. And because you owe me for at least three favors and this is the smallest one." She smiled. "And because I think you're curious and you won't admit it."

He was quiet another second. Then he heard himself say, "Okay. Yes. I'll try it!"

"Good," she said, like it was settled and had always been going to be settled.

* * *

She sent him behind a folding screen she used for fittings. He took off his shirt and jeans and stood there in his boxer briefs holding the nightgown on its hanger, feeling ridiculous and then, in a way he did not expect, not ridiculous at all. The fabric was cool and heavier than it looked. Silk does that. It has weight to it.

He stepped into it and pulled it up and worked his arms through the straps. The lace sat against his chest. The hem stopped mid-thigh. He looked down at himself and the strangest part was how ordinary it felt, like wearing a shirt, except his whole skin was awake under it.

"You can come out," Donna called. "Or you can hide in there all night and I'll bill you for wasted time."

He came out.

She had him stand by the window where the light was good. She looked at him for a while without touching anything, just looking, arms crossed, and he found he could not read her expression at all. It was not a joke to her. That was the part that got under his skin. She was looking at him the way she looked at the slip itself.

"Turn around," she said, and he did. "Arms up. No, down. Okay, walk to the door and back."

He walked to the door and back. The silk moved against him the whole way. It felt like being watched even when she was just sitting there, and she was always just sitting there, watching.

"See, this is the thing," she said. "On a form, the fabric just hangs. On you, it does something. It moves when you breathe. The lace sits against a chest that's warm. That's what I've been missing in the whole project and I couldn't name it until right now."

"You could have just said that instead of making me model."

"I could have. This was better."

He laughed and it came out shorter than he meant it to. His mouth was dry. She got up and adjusted one strap at his shoulder, her fingers quick and businesslike, and that small touch went through him like a current and he did not say anything about it.

"There's a matching robe in the box," she said. "From the same estate sale. Do you want to try it too, or was one piece enough for your dignity?"

"One piece is holding on by a thread as it is."

"That's a yes or no question, Clayton."

He thought about the folder on the coffee table, the plan, the event, all of it sitting there patient while he stood in a stranger's nightgown in a stranger's living room. The plan suddenly seemed like the costume and this seemed like the true thing.

"Yes," he said. "The robe too."

She pulled it out and held it open for him and he put his arms in. It was the same champagne silk with a lace collar. She tied the belt at his waist and stepped back and nodded like a curator confirming a hanging.

"There," she said quietly. "That's exactly it."

"What's exactly it?"

"The picture I've had in my head for two years." She picked her tea back up and drank, casual as anything, while he stood there in silk worth more than his car payment. "So. About your sabotage. I'm in, and I have one condition, and the condition is that I get to keep photographing this."

"Photographing what, exactly?"

"You. The pieces. For the thesis, and possibly for the invitations, and possibly just because I want to." She looked at him over the mug again. "And maybe a few more fittings. These things need adjusting. That's a lot of nightgowns to sit on a shelf."

Clayton looked down at the lace on his own chest. The apartment was quiet except for the steamer and the radiator.

"How many pieces are in the collection?" he asked.

"Forty-one."

"Forty-one."

"And growing," Donna said, and smiled at him over the rim of her mug.

* * *

The robe lasted maybe ten minutes. Donna drank her tea and watched him walk around her living room in it, and then she set the mug down and went back to the boxes against the wall.

"There's more," she said. "If you're going to sit for me, you should sit for the whole look. A gown and robe alone is half a picture."

"How much more is there?"

She held up a garter belt, champagne silk again, with six thin straps hanging off it. Next to it came a pair of stockings, still in their original packaging, the label faded to brown.

"These are from 1958, give or take. The belt is the same year. They came out of the same estate box and nobody has split them up since." She laid them over the arm of the couch. "Seamed. You can't get seams like that anymore without paying a fortune."

Clayton stood by the window in the robe and considered the stockings. His face felt warm. "I don't know how any of that works."

"I do. That's the whole point of me." She was already moving the sewing table lamp closer to the couch. "Sit down. Take the robe off if it's in the way, or keep it on, your choice."

He kept it on, untied, sitting on the edge of the couch while she knelt in front of him. She rolled the stockings slowly, one at a time, and worked them up his calves. Her hands were cool and sure. She hooked each stocking onto the garter straps and then stopped and looked at the whole arrangement with her head tilted.

"It's crooked," she said. "Hold still."

She adjusted the straps one by one and each time her fingers brushed the inside of his