Chapter Nineteen #2
"You're still coming Saturdays."
"Every Saturday," said Cordelia. "Nothing on earth."
"Okay." He was gone again as fast, satisfied, a man confirming an appointment, and Theo watched him go and then leaned down to the window himself, arms folded on the sill, head of the family to the last.
"Three weeks to the party. So what now? What's left on that famous list of yours?"
"Now?" Cordelia pulled on her gloves, and let her brother see the whole of the smile she had been saving all winter. "Now I need a dress, Theo. A killing one."
"God help Boyd," said Theo, with enormous satisfaction, and slapped the roof of the car like a starter's gun.
The workshop was up two flights in a street of brass plates, one long room of raw silk light where a small fierce woman with pins in her mouth had been building, for six weeks, to Cordelia's exact and private specification, the gown in which the whole thing would end.
It stood on the form in the center of the room like a verdict.
Deep Hargrove blue, her mother's blue, but cut like no dress her mother had ever dared, shoulders bare, the line running long and clean to the floor with a cold shimmer moving in the weave when the light crossed it, a dress with no apology anywhere in its construction, and Cordelia walked around it twice while Adrian stood by the long mirrors with his hands behind his back, ostentatiously professional, the family lawyer attending a fitting for reasons no one had asked him to justify.
"Final fitting," said the fierce woman, through pins. "On. We check the back, we check the hem, we're done."
Behind the screen, silk poured over her like cold water, and she came out to the triple mirror and stood in it, and the fierce woman circled once, tugged twice, pinned nothing.
"I take back what I said in February," she announced.
"It's not too much dress. Stand straight.
" She stood straight. "There's my answer.
Whatever this is for, madame, it will win.
" The pins went into their tin with a rattle of finality.
"The zip catches at the top, the last two inches, it wants easing, I'll do it before delivery.
Don't force it. I'm downstairs ten minutes, the hem thread's in the van. "
The stairs took her, and the long room went quiet, raw silk light and dust motes and the man by the mirrors.
"It's for a birthday party," Cordelia said, to her own reflection, three of her saying it at once.
"I am going to walk into the finest room of that man's life wearing the most beautiful thing in this city, and I am going to end it all in this dress.
All of it. Seven years. A woman should dress for her own liberation, don't you think?
People dress for weddings. This is bigger. "
Adrian said nothing, which was its own remark, and she reached back for the zip, and the zip came up smooth to the shoulder blades and then caught, the last two inches, exactly as forewarned.
She tried it twice. The third try she caught his eyes in the mirror.
"Counsel. Make yourself useful."
He came up behind her, and took the tab of the zip with lawyerly precision, and did not move it at all.
His knuckles rested against her bare back, at the place where the silk gave out and she began, and she watched him in the triple mirror discover the difficulty, which was that easing a caught zip requires two hands, one flat against the spine to steady the fabric, and that there was no version of his hand flat against her spine that had anything to do with tailoring.
The zip surrendered its last two inches at a pace that could not be defended before any bar in the land, his breath arriving at her shoulder well before his hands were done, and when it was over, it was not over, his hand stayed spread warm between her shoulder blades, and the mirror held the two of them in triplicate, three men in dark suits standing behind three women in blue with their mouths gone serious.
"The seamstress," she managed, "is ten minutes."
"Seven, now."
"You're counting."
"I have never stopped counting anything in this room," said Adrian, hoarse, and turned her around and kissed her, and the mirrors filled up with it, three of him with his hand cradling three jaws, three of her rising on bare feet into it, silk crushed cheerfully against a fortune in dark tailoring.
It was nothing at all like the flat. This was larceny, giddy and ridiculous, snatched in daylight over pins and thread, both of them seventeen.
When the street door banged two floors down they broke apart like actual criminals, and she had to press both hands flat to her own sternum to put her breath back in its cabinet, laughing, while he retreated to the window and became, in one stride and a tug of his cuffs, the most professional man in the northern hemisphere.
"When this is over," he said, against her hair, not letting go yet, and his voice had dropped to the register that was hers alone, "I'm buying that lane we learned to drive in, and the car stays, and every year on this date I intend to kiss you in a fitting room until you forget what the dress was for. "
"File it," she managed. "Diarize it. Both hands on the wheel, Mr. Vale."
Feet on the stairs. She turned to the triple mirror and it gave her back to herself, three women in unanswerable blue, color high, eyes lit, zipped to the throat, armed.
"Well, counsel." She said it to his reflection, over her own bare shoulder. "How do I look?"
Adrian looked at her in the glass, all three of her, the way he had looked up from the lobby a lifetime ago, before the doors even opened.
"You look ready," he said.