Chapter Eleven — Sienna
Three years ago this house stopped returning my calls. Now Marchetti's people take my appointment, pull the swatch books before I ask, and leave me alone with them. I stand there long enough that the girl at the desk looks over to check I'm all right.
There's a chair pulled out for me and a card with my name spelled correctly, and I know exactly whose money bought both. I've decided not to hold that against the wool.
It's market week, so the bolts are out on the tables instead of shelved, every mill on the floor showing what it wants shown. Buyers moving through in twos with their phones up, photographing the labels and not the cloth.
I work the far wall. Coatings first, then the silks. I'm three tables in when I put my hand on cloth I recognize before I read the card.
Vane Group dresses a table the way it always has: cream linen under everything, the story printed larger than the numbers.
WOVEN IN NEW ENGLAND. FINISHED BY HAND.
The hand is beautiful. I'll give it that. Someone spent real money making this feel old. A wool-silk in a dry finish, the kind that takes a press and holds it. If I were a buyer with a phone and a quota I'd photograph the card and move on.
I turn the edge over instead.
Every bolt has a finished edge where the cloth stops without fraying. On a shuttle loom that edge makes itself. The thread runs out to the end of its row, turns, and comes back, over and over, and what you get is closed and a little thick and never quite even. The loom signing its own work.
This edge has been cut and fused.
And when I run my thumb down the face, the weave is perfect the whole way. No thick place, no thin one. Nothing where a hand got tired at four in the afternoon.
It's a good cloth. It was made on a machine in a country the card doesn't mention, and then it was finished hard to make it look like it wasn't.
I put it down.
"Sienna Rossi."
Julian Vane. He offers his hand and I take it, because the alternative is a scene in a room where people know my face again.
"I was hoping you'd be here," he says. "I say that to a lot of people. With you I mean it." He tips his head at the table. "What do you think? Everyone's been very kind about it."
He wants me to tell him about his own cloth.
There's a version of this morning where I put my finger on the fused edge and ask him which mill in New England is running a projectile loom. Four seconds. He would not recover from it in this room.
"It presses well," I say.
"It does." He's pleased. "We still make the old way. Nobody does anymore. It costs us. I've never been able to bring myself to cut that corner."
I look at him and I think about twelve names on a page. Fabric houses, mills, an embroidery workshop in Como that stopped answering inside the same three weeks. Vane Group contact confirmed.
He's standing in front of me telling me he can't bring himself to cut a corner.
"That's rare," I say.
"It is." He lets a beat go by. Then, easier: "And how are you finding Kensington?"
There it is. The reason he crossed the floor.
"Productive."
"Adrian's a thorough man." He turns his wrist to look at the watch and doesn't read it. "Very thorough. I've always admired it. He gives you things in the order he's decided you should have them, and by the time you notice, you've already agreed to something."
"He hasn't told me anything I didn't ask about."
It isn't true. I hear it come out of my mouth and I don't take it back.
Either way he doesn't get what he came for. He smiles like he did.
"Well." He steps back. "It's a small industry. Someone came through the fabric houses last week asking questions about you. Not a buyer. He had a list of every mill you've ordered from in three years, and he worked all the way down it." A beat. "I assumed he was yours."
"Mm," I say.
He nods like I've confirmed something, and moves to the next table, and starts telling a buyer about his loom.
I stay where I am longer than I mean to, with my hand flat on cloth that's lying about where it came from.
I don't correct him about the selvedge. He can carry it into a room full of buyers and I can watch him do it.
But on the street, with the coating weights in my bag and ten blocks between me and the train, I keep coming back around to what he said.
He had a list of every mill you've ordered from in three years. I assumed he was yours.
I didn't send anyone.
I turn it over the way I'd turn a seam that's sitting wrong. Not torn. Not obviously anything. Just not falling the way it should, and no way to know why without opening it. You can wear a seam like that a whole season before you find out what's underneath.
By the time the train comes I'm thinking about the coat again.
***
Istop treating his penthouse like borrowed space sometime around Tuesday.
I know this because on Tuesday I move my shears to his kitchen counter, the flat wooden chalk box next to them, and I don't move them back.
That's my tell. Shears on the counter means I've decided this is where they live.
It's how I claimed every studio I ever worked in.
Found a surface, claimed it with a tool, and didn't apologize.
I haven't decided anything. I've just stopped carrying them back down to the Sanctuary every night.
He notices. Of course he notices. He notices the shears on Wednesday morning and says nothing. Just moves slightly around them to get to the coffee maker, giving them their few inches of counter like it's a negotiation that already concluded.
That's the thing about him. He absorbs new information without making a production of it.
It's annoying as hell.
I find the Vionnet biography on his shelves. It's in a section I wouldn't have expected. Between an architectural monograph and something dense on Byzantine economics. Not where a man keeps books he displays, where he keeps books he reads. The spine is creased.
I ask him about it on the terrace, Saturday morning, both of us working through a pot of coffee that's down to the last cup by the time I get to it.
"You read it," I say.
"I read it."
"When?"
"Three years ago. After—" He stops. Turns his coffee cup on the tabletop. "I wanted to understand the work."
I hold the book for a moment and think about what that means. A man who had every reason to keep Rossi Designs as an abstraction. A line item, a failed acquisition, a file in a drawer, instead went out and read the primary texts on her philosophy. On her.
"Tell me what you got from it," I say.
"She believed fashion needed a body to complete it," he says. "You see the design, or you see the suit. Never both at once."
I think about that. "What else?"
"The bias cut. She called it an argument about truth." He glances at me. "Straight grain, the fabric tells you what it wants to be. Bias, it tells you what the body underneath it is."
"She said that," I confirm.
"You said it too. At the fitting last week. The fabric should argue for the person wearing it, not the other way around."
I did say that. I didn't know he'd been listening closely enough to remember the exact words.
I sit with that for a second. Three years of designers, buyers, men who nodded along at a showcase and forgot what I'd said before we'd even left the venue. He kept an exact sentence in his head for a week like it mattered.
It does something to my chest that I don't have a name for yet.
"Show me," he says.
"What?"
"The bias cut. Show me what you mean."
I look at him. He's completely serious.
I go inside and come back with the ivory silk I've been using to test the drape before I cut the real yardage. I have a length of it folded over my arm. I stand in front of him.
"Give me your hand," I say.
He extends it. I lay the silk flat across his palm, grain straight.
"That's cut on the straight grain. See how it sits? It stays where you put it. Holds its shape."
I take the fabric back. Rotate it forty-five degrees and lay it across his palm again. The difference is immediate. The silk moves with the heat of his skin, drapes into the curves of his palm, falls toward his fingers like it's choosing its own shape.
"That's cut on the bias," I say. "Same fabric. Different relationship to the body."
He looks at the silk for a long time.
"It's honest," he says.
"Yes."
"The other way was performing. This is—"
"The truth." I lift the silk off his hand. "The truth of the body underneath."
He's very still.
"Is that why you use it," he says. Not a question.
"It's why she used it." I fold the silk over my arm again. "I use it because when something's cut on the bias you can't hide anything. The way it falls, that's the real shape. No scaffolding."
He reaches out and takes the silk from me.
He holds it for a moment, feeling the drape, the way it moves. There's something in his face I don't have a name for. The thing that shows up when he forgets to manage it.
"Show me again," he says.
I lay my hand under his and guide the fold. The silk falls across both our hands at once. Ivory over his knuckles and mine, moving together in the slight wind off the terrace railing. He looks down at it for a moment.
"I see," he says.
"That's the whole point," I say.
He looks up from the silk.
He's looking at me the way the bias-cut silk falls. Like he's stopped performing. Like he's telling the truth about the shape underneath.
Then his hands are at my waist, he pulls me onto his lap, and I go. No hesitation, no checking first.
My legs swing across his thighs, my hands find his hair, thick, dark, unruly at the nape where it curls against his collar and his mouth is on mine.
The kiss is slow and deep and certain, his tongue sliding against mine with a precision that makes my whole body tighten.
He tastes like the whiskey he's been drinking, smoky and warm, and his lips are softer than the silk I'm still holding.
The silk is still in my hand. I drop it. It falls across the arm of the sofa, slides off, pools on the terrace planks in a pale gleam. Neither of us looks at it.