Chapter 6 The Red #2
"Votre frère n'était pas aveugle," she said. Low. "Il voyait très bien. Il voyait exactement ce qu'il voulait détruire." Your brother wasn't blind. He saw perfectly well. He saw exactly what he wanted to destroy.
I looked at her. At the freckles beneath the concealer.
At the strand of auburn escaping the knot.
At the cardigan straining at its buttons, fighting a war against the body it was supposed to erase.
At the safety pin at her waist, which was the saddest thing I'd ever seen and the bravest, because it meant she couldn't afford a new button and she came to work anyway, and coming to work anyway when you are held together by a pin is a form of courage that men in Tom Ford jackets will never understand.
"Keep the dress," I said.
"I don't want it."
"I didn't ask if you wanted it. I said keep it. There will come a day when you put it on. Not for me. Not for Dmitri. Not for any man. For yourself. Because you look in the mirror and you see what I see, and what I see is not something that needs a cardigan."
"And what do you see?"
The question. The one underneath every question she'd ever asked me.
What do you see. Not what do you want. Not what are you going to do.
What do you see. Because she had spent years with a man who looked at her and saw fat, desperate, easy, broken, and the looking had become the wound, and the wound had become the cardigan, and the cardigan had become the life.
I could have told her what I saw. Could have said the word that had been building in my throat since the first day she stood in my doorway.
Could have told her that her body was not something to be hidden or measured or apologized for.
That her hips moved with a rhythm she tried to kill and couldn't, and that the trying was the crime.
That the fabric she wore was a coffin and she was burying herself alive in it every morning and calling it professionalism.
I didn't.
Because telling her would have been a kindness, and kindness was not what I owed her. Not yet. Kindness comes after the war. And we were still in the early battles, the ones where you test the perimeter and probe the defenses and learn where the walls are weakest.
"You'll see it for yourself," I said. "When you're ready."
"And if I'm never ready?"
"Then I'll wait."
"You don't seem like a man who waits."
"I'm not. For you, I'm learning."
She looked at me. Searching. Trying to find the trap in the sentence, the cruelty underneath the patience, the hook inside the bait.
And finding nothing. Because there was nothing to find.
Not in that moment. In that moment, I meant it.
The way a man means something he has no business meaning.
The way a blade means it when it decides not to cut.
The moment lasted four seconds. I counted.
Then it broke. The way all moments between us broke. With her stepping back. With her returning to the distance that kept her safe, or that she believed kept her safe, which is not the same thing.
"I'm going back to my desk," she said.
"I know."
"And I'm not wearing the dress."
"I know that too."
"Then why send it?"
Because I wanted something of mine in your apartment.
Because I wanted you to open a box and see red silk and know that a man was thinking about your body with more reverence than the man who took photographs of it while you slept.
Because the dress is not a gift. It is a promise.
And the promise is: I will see you. All of you.
The parts you hide and the parts you've forgotten and the parts that Dmitri tried to bury.
I will see them. And I will not look away.
I said none of this.
"Because red suits you," I said. "Et parce que la soie ne ment pas." And because silk doesn't lie.
She left. The door. The click. The careful precision of a woman who wanted to slam it and wouldn't.
I walked back to the window. Pressed my hand flat against the glass. Cold. The October sky grey and low and heavy with the threat of rain that hadn't decided whether to fall.
Something had changed.
Not in her. In me. In the way I watched her walk across the floor to the elevator, the beige cardigan and the mid-calf skirt and the hair unraveling by degrees.
I'd been watching her for weeks. Through cameras.
Through glass. Through the dark of her apartment.
I'd been watching how a man watches a thing he's studying, a thing he's collecting, a thing he's adding to the inventory of his obsession piece by piece, fact by fact, lock by lock.
That watching was over.
What replaced it was something I didn't have a clean word for.
Something that didn't want to watch. That wanted to consume.
That looked at the beige cardigan and didn't see a garment anymore but an obstacle, a barrier, a wall between me and the thing I was no longer content to observe from forty-two floors above.
Hunger. That was the closest word. But hunger implies that eating would satisfy it, and I knew already that nothing would satisfy this.
Not the dress. Not the body underneath it.
Not lthe sound of her voice saying my name, which she still refused to do, which drove me mad in ways that madness hadn't driven me before.
This was the kind of hunger that grows the more you feed it.
The kind that mistakes the eating for the wanting and the wanting for the needing and the needing for the thing that happens when a man who has never needed anything in his life suddenly needs one thing, and the one thing is walking away from him in a cardigan held together with a safety pin, and the walking away is the most devastating thing he has ever seen.
She disappeared into the elevator. The doors closed. She was gone.
The red dress hung in her closet. I knew it.
Could feel it. The way you feel a word you've written in a letter that hasn't been opened yet.
Present. Waiting. Patient in the way that only inanimate objects can be, because they don't need to be worn to matter.
They just need to exist. In the dark. In the closet.
In the apartment of a woman who would one day look in the mirror and see what I saw, and reach for the red, and stop apologizing for the space her body took up in the world.
I would be there when she did.
I would be watching.
I was always watching.
But now the watching had teeth.