A Dress to Die For (7 page)

“Oh, no.”

“He laid out the rest of the fabric, ten yards, probably eight hundred dollars’ worth, and I’m crying already, because I know how bad this is. He hands me his scissors, which were twice the size of mine, and he says, ‘Cut it. Cut all of it. Small pieces. I don’t want to be able to make a facing or a pocket. Go!’ I got snot in my oxygen mask and tears everywhere, and I knew I was going to have to clean out the tubes. And I tell him I can recut the left side, you know, that it doesn’t have to be a total loss. But he takes the stuff I did correctly, the right side, and slices it in two. Then he stands over me while I chop the rest of the fabric to shreds.”

Laura heard voices downstairs, a little laughter, and then the closed front door that meant Ruby had gone back to her garden apartment. Laura didn’t dare leave her room for fear of interrupting Mom and Jimmy’s quiet time. Her living situation was getting tricky. She was going to need to find her own place again soon. “He laid out the fabric, JJ. It wasn’t your fault.”

His chair creaked again. “Yeah. I know. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

She felt the need to make a similar sort of ugly admission. “Ruby says I had an incontinence problem after Dad left. Still think I’m sexy?”

“Can I send you a cab?”

“I can get my own cab, JJ.”

“I don’t know what else to offer. Get your own cab. Are you coming back here? That’s all I want to know.”

She wanted nothing more than to see him, but it wasn’t practical. “I need to get to sleep.”

“If you lived in the city, we’d be together right now.”

“I know. It’s hard to look for something when I’m at work all the time.” There was a soft knock at her door. She got up to answer it.

“You don’t even need to like the place,” Jeremy said. “You’re with me most nights anyway.”

Laura opened the door. Mom walked in carrying a book.

“I have to go. You love me.” The words rolled and clicked around her mouth like a hard candy that hadn’t dissolved yet.

“And you love me,” Jeremy responded. “Don’t oversleep. You have a fitting in the morning.”

Mom sat on the bed, in the dark. Laura clicked off the phone, heavy with the feeling that there wasn’t going to be much sleeping that night. She turned on the light, and with Mom sitting there on the 1970s avocado bedspread she’d found at a thrift store, the absurd poverty of the room was apparent. Nothing hung on the walls. No books weighed the shelves. The curtains had been there when she’d moved in, as if she had never committed to living there at all. Laura had been so broke and hopeless when she’d moved in with Mom and Ruby all of nine months ago. She could afford a place in Midtown if she wanted it, if she could only find the time to see one first.

“You knew I thought he left earlier, and you never told me,” Laura said.

“I didn’t even know you’d convinced yourself otherwise until it was too late. There seemed no harm in it. You want to be angry at me? Go ahead. I had a lot to deal with at the time, and the extra laundry you made me wasn’t helping. I was willing to let you get over it any way you had to.”

Laura sat on the chair by the bed. “What’s happening, Mom? Why now?”

“It’s the gown. And your face in the papers.” She opened the photo album on her lap. “Your father was… I guess you could say bisexual, since he
is
your father, and it was done naturally.”

“If I can take you with Jimmy, I can take you with Dad,” Laura said.

“But it was infrequent, and he didn’t function well. Do you know what I mean, or do I have to get graphic?”

“I’m good.”

“He came out to me when you were five.” She put her hand on Laura’s knee.

Laura wanted to argue: There was no Dad when she was five. That was the story she had told herself her entire life. She took her mother’s hand and squeezed it because Mom had always been there. Whatever Dad did or didn’t do, whatever lies Laura had created to explain it away, Mom had been there.

“We tried to stay in the same apartment for you girls. Laura, when I say he loved you, you were his jewel. When he left, it was you I couldn’t believe he abandoned.”

“I don’t even remember being called Lala in my life.”

“I stopped using it when he left. He was always buttoned up, but once he just accepted who he was, he was a hell of a lot easier to deal with, and it never occurred to me that he’d leave. But, well, I guess he did. God, I am
still
...” She pinched the bridge of her nose and shook her head as if casting off the residual anger. “When your dad told me, I was devastated. I mean, we had these two beautiful girls, and we were friends, he and I, and there had been sex, but like I said. It was what it was. He stayed for you guys, but there were a lot of nights he didn’t come home. I was...” She took a deep breath and looked at the ceiling.

Laura had always thought of Mom as Mom. She’d never thought of her as a woman, with romantic feelings and physical desires as strong as her own, a woman who loved deeply and whose heart could be broken and who had dreams that could be shattered by that same love. “It wasn’t you, Mom.”

“I know that,” she snapped. “He lost his job, of course, because he was pissing himself with excitement and grabbed the wrong guy at work. Someone he was managing. It was ugly. And there was no market for engineers during a recession.”

“You said he was a musician.”

“I said no such thing. Your romantic imagination said that. Can I finish?”

“Sorry.”

“Needless to say, I had to cover everything, and when he came home drunk and smelling of sweat and semen, I didn’t need it. What I needed was to keep an eye on him, and I needed him to have some good examples, because this was when gay men were dying by the dozen. So I got him a job as a receptionist at Scaasi.

“Of course, he wanted nothing to do with it. He was an educated man. He built bridges and roads. But he brought you to work one day after school, and he saw how much you loved it there. You were the Scaasi mascot, you know, the only five-year-old in history allowed to handle pins and scissors. He and some of my coworkers got to talking, and he took the job, mostly because he could be as out as he wanted to be.” Mom sighed and opened the album to a purple bookmark. “Almost a year later, the princess came with her entourage.”

Laura took the album and flipped through. People. Faces. The Scaasi studio. The saffron gown on the form. She didn’t know any of the people except Mom, with her needle and thread, and the princess in slacks and a T-shirt, smiling.

“Which one is Dad?” Laura asked.

“Look.”

As much as she hated him, she was hungry for the sight of him. She wanted to see her features in his, to know where the other half of her had come from, to bring form to her disappointment and loathing, to have the target of her anger be a face, rather than an idea. The people in the pictures were all handsome and tanned, smiling with arms around shoulders, crowding into the frames. “Who took these?”

“I did.”

Laura looked up at her mother. “You went out?”

“Sweetheart, please. You think I dropped dead when I had you two? That entourage took us out every night they were here. A month. And what fun people.”

Laura looked back at the pictures, catching it then, out of the corner of her eye, a shape in the cheek and chin, the curve of the eyelid. She gasped. She could never unsee him once he revealed himself. “Ruby looks like him.”

“You have his nose.”

Laura devoured the pictures, seeking every hint of his face and body, trying to piece together a man from bits of emulsified paper. “Holy crap. He was hot.”

“Probably still is, for all I know.”

“So you were hanging out. You were friends, and he was a dad, for whatever that was worth. What happened?”

“Brunico happened.”

**

Brunico had inspired Rat Pack songs and black-and-white films over the decades, solidifying the tiny South American island nation’s reputation as a world-class destination for imprudent carousing, gambling, and money laundering.

The happenings there had been the downfall of many an actor and actress. An inaccessible Las Vegas, a godless Sodom, a den, a haven, an unspoiled blossom on a perfect ocean, Brunico had three months of stunning, perfect weather and nine months of bitter, wet cold. The island lay just east of Argentina, far enough away to be its own little kingdom and close enough to get supplies for a hospital qualified to treat hangovers, broken limbs, small lacerations, and unwanted pregnancies.

During the hundred years following its discovery by a lost beaver-hunting team in 1787, it was a prison colony, proving yet again that the after-dinner social solution to the world’s problems—putting all the people you don’t like on an island and ignoring them—never works and will garner either a prosperous democracy or an abandoned hunk of rock on the shoreline. Brunico stood as an example of the latter until it was purchased in 1880 by the Forseigh family as an investment in the future of the island’s chief asset: peat moss.

Herge Forseigh, the family scion and next in line to inherit ownership, noticed that the island’s proximity from Argentina and the criminal diaspora that called the place home made it a perfect destination for illegal activity. After spending four years of his life being brainwashed by English Calvinists in university, he decided that wealth was fine if one only wanted to influence people’s actions, but righteousness would rule the hand and the soul, as well. His father’s death wasn’t going to transfer just ownership of the island, but the rule as well.

That was managed at a deathbed signing, where the elder Forseigh made himself high prince, closed off the currency to foreign trade, made Christ the eternal king, and pronounced an unbreakable monarchy with no parliament. Anyone who didn’t like it could leave. No one did. The rock of an island produced both peat moss and blind loyalty in seemingly unlimited quantities.

Thirty years later, everyone on the island wore brown, herded sheep, harvested moss from the riverbed, ate turnip soup, and behaved. Then the bottom fell out of the peat moss market. They could harvest their calloused little hands off. They could ship it three times a week instead of two. They could pray. Yet nothing made a difference. The money that the Central Bank switched to the Brunican currency, the tonk, was always the same.

Herge Forseigh, who wasn’t entirely without a heart, hated to see his people starve. He ate peat moss soup to share their yoke of hunger, which any idiot on the island could have told him was a very bad idea. He took on a spore from eating the soup and died three months later after a crippling bout of dysentery and the eruption of crusty boils on the palms of his hands.

He left behind a wife, three adult daughters, and an eight-year-old son. The son inherited the throne because not only was Herge a Calvinist who thought pleasure was sinful, he was also a misogynist. The placement of Alexander Forseigh on the throne was the end of Calvinism, as his mother wanted to have sex, and his sisters wanted to make money. High Prince Alexander wanted to play tag, and as long as playmates were provided, he’d agree to anything except something that would take him out of power because he was young, not stupid.

Apparently, Herge was right. Women were the source of the world’s iniquities. Within a year, Brunico became the Sodom of the South Atlantic.

Begats were logged in Bibles all over Brunico for the next few decades, with Theodore Forseigh putting in more roads, phone lines, and a second hotel, promising security and privacy to all of his Hollywood friends, of which he had many. Ronaldo Forseigh promised his friends in finance a rock-solid tax shelter at the Central Bank of Brunico, housed in a stone building at the exact center of the island. Three months a year, the island hopped along at a constant nightclub pace. The alcohol and illegal drugs came in on a boat and left in bloodstreams. The beaches were trampled, and the hotels were full.

But the real happenings on Brunico occurred during the other nine months. Under the wind and rain, through the driving February snow, in the old structures kept warm with nine-foot-high fireplaces, the haven was truly a haven. Deals were brokered in the dead of night, the players coming in and out on silent boats no bigger than dinghies. The hotel rates during winter were astronomical, not because the facilities were fantastic, but because of the guaranteed security.

And thus were riches amassed and a reputation earned. The traditions of Brunico, however, stayed the same. The citizens remained straight and conservative. No high prince had been without sons to take his place. The monarchy controlled the printing and distribution of all the money, which had been fully, loosely, and enthusiastically changed over at the Central Bank and nowhere else in the world.

“What do you mean? Brunico happened?” Laura asked. “It’s not like you can just move there. They don’t have immigration.”

“The high prince can allow a residency. They needed roads fixed, and they wanted a bridge so they could build another hotel. Your father fixed roads and built bridges. And he’d fallen in love.”

Mom flipped through the album, past herself, Dad, the princess looking un-princess-like in a T-shirt and loose smile, a tall man in the leather hat, and another couple so dour and plain they could have been at the end of a hallway in a horror movie, until she found a picture of a slight redhead with broad shoulders. The man in the photo sat in the corner, smoking a cigarette, while Mom and Princess Philomena pinned the hem of the saffron gown. He didn’t appear anywhere else, and Dad wasn’t in the same shot.

“His name was Samuel, and I didn’t even see it. Your father was getting distracted. He was practically part of the entourage the entire time they were in New York. Came home when he felt like it. He took care of you guys when he had to, but when he didn’t, he was gone. He could have been an athlete—he was a tennis player at Cornell—but he was dropping things, and he’d get this faraway look in his eye. One night after dinner, he was drying the dishes, and he broke one of Grandma’s bowls. I just exploded. I said, ‘Joseph! Who is he? Just say it. You’re like a schoolgirl!’ He got so upset. Maybe because I called him a schoolgirl. I still don’t know. But he walked out without saying good-bye to you guys, and I didn’t see him until work the next morning.”