A sample from
Seen in Red
Every lamp in the Hotel Solenne's costume store is on the woman in the red robe, which is exactly how Tilly Etcheverry, on her knees at the hem with pins in her mouth, likes it.
Somebody bolted a cage of work lamps to the ceiling over the long mirror decades ago, bare tungsten bulbs in a wire basket, and they pour down a hard, warm yellow that forgives nothing. Under it the robe is the color of a stop lamp. Heavy silk charmeuse, cut long, with a shawl collar and sleeves that end at the wrist. It looks like money. It looks like the last ten seconds before a curtain comes down.
"Again," Desirée says. "From the top of the phrase."
"From the top of the phrase," Tilly agrees, around the pins.
Desirée lifts her arms, tips her head back, and counts it under her breath. On seven her hands go to the collar. On eight she opens them, and the robe is supposed to slide off both shoulders at once and pour down her back to the floor in one red drop, a curtain coming in.
It goes off the left shoulder. It hangs on the right. It sticks to her shoulder blades in a red crumple and stays there, crackling faintly, while the rest of her stands in the lamps in a flesh-colored G-string and a look of pure betrayal.
"It hates me," Desirée says.
"It doesn't hate you." Tilly takes the pins out of her mouth. "It's the wind."
"It's a robe. It's indoors."
"It's the wind," Tilly says again, and gets up.
The Santa Anas came in over the hills on Sunday night and have not let go since. The air in the corridor smells of hot dust and eucalyptus and somebody's cigarette, and everything in the store is dry enough to spark. The steamers hiss on their stands by the racks and lose the fight. Silk that would fall like a sigh in June is clinging to anything it touches, and what it touches most is a dancer's warm, powdered back.
She lifts the robe from Desirée's shoulders and lets it drop to the rail of her forearm. It weighs almost nothing. That is the other half of the problem.
"Turn around for me."
Desirée turns. She is tall even barefoot, a redhead with a dancer's legs and a dancer's way of making turning around into a small event. She is thirty-five on her résumé and lovely in a way the lamps cannot touch. Tilly looks at her back as a map: the long valley of the spine, the shoulder blades, the place where the robe gathered and held.
"The back panel's too full," Tilly says. "When you open the collar, the extra silk has nowhere to go but sideways, and it catches. I cut it with ease for the walk-in. I'll take it out."
"How much?"
"An inch and a half at the center seam. Tapering to nothing at the waist."
"Will it still close?"
"It'll close." Tilly holds the robe up to the lamps and looks through the seam. "And I'll weight the hem. A run of chain inside the turning, so it pulls straight down when you let go. Gravity does the dancing."
"I do the dancing," Desirée says, but she is smiling at herself in the mirror while she says it, which is how Tilly knows they are friends again.
From the doorway the clipboard speaks.
"Is it fixed?"
Antonia Steyn has been in the doorway for a while. She is small and wiry and somewhere in her fifties, with cropped hair bleached the white-blond of a bare bulb and reading glasses pushed up on top of it. She is the director, producer, booker, and on three occasions the stage manager of The Garter Hour, and she is reading the running order for Friday off the clipboard with a pen in her teeth.
"It will be," Tilly says.
"By final dress."
"By final dress."
"Good." Antonia makes a mark on the page. She does not look up. "Because if that thing hangs up on a shoulder in front of a gallery, it's not a number, it's a wardrobe malfunction with a cover charge."
"There's no cover charge," Desirée says. "It's members."
"They pay for membership. It's a cover charge with a waiting list." Antonia turns a page. "Tilly, the fan girls' bodices are still gaping on the second girl."
"I know. I pinned her this afternoon. They'll be done tomorrow."
"Good," Antonia says again, and makes another mark.
Tilly lays the robe over the cutting table and smooths it flat with both palms. The table is a door on trestles, older than she is, its surface scored by years of blades. She turns the robe inside out and finds the center back seam with her thumb. She picks up her chalk.
Behind her, Desirée sits on the arm of the fitting chair in her G-string and a hotel towel, and starts explaining the number, because Desirée explains the number to anyone who stands still.
"So it's Suite Four," she says. "You haven't been down there yet."
"I've seen the door."
"The door's nothing. The room is the thing." Desirée stretches one long leg out and points her toe at the far wall, as if Suite Four is just through it. "Gold lamps. A bed you could land a plane on. A chaise. And the whole inside wall is glass, floor to ceiling, and on the other side of it is the gallery. Velvet benches. Little amber lamps. It's like a dark theater with the stage on the wrong side of the window."
Tilly snaps a chalk line. "And they can see in."
"Only when I say." Desirée's voice changes. It drops and slows. "There's a switch. Brass, by the bed. When it's down, the glass is frosted, and nobody out there gets more than a glow. They're out there and you're in here, and it's just a white wall. And then at midnight I read the book."
"The book."
"The gallery book. On the steward's stand by the door, outside. Everybody who wants to watch has to sign it in their own name, and I read every name before I go in. Every one." She holds up a finger. "And if there's anybody on it I don't want, I tell Yvaine, and they're gone. That's the rule. It's my glass."
"And then you hit the switch."
"And then I hit the switch. And the white drains out of the pane, starting at the top. And there they are." Desirée sighs, happily. "All of them looking at me."
Antonia, without lifting her head, says: "Midnight Friday, midnight Saturday. Three weekends. Members only. The rest of the week the suite goes back to the hotel." She circles something. "Don't let her tell you it's art. It's eleven minutes and a robe."
"It's art," Desirée says. "Eleven minutes of art and a robe."
Tilly laughs, low, and doesn't turn around. She has her shears in her hand now, and she likes this part best, the part where the silk is flat and still and the line is already decided. She cuts the old seam allowance away in one long pass. The blades whisper. The fabric parts and lies down on either side as if it was waiting to be asked.
She knows what that room will do to Desirée. She has not seen it, but she knows. Warm tungsten on dimmers, low and gold, coming from beside and a little above. A light like that finds the line of a jaw and the hollow at the base of the throat, and lays a soft shadow under a collarbone so the bone looks carved. It makes skin look like it has been somewhere warm. Red silk under it will throw color back up onto the face, a gentle pink fill nobody had to rig. Against a dark gallery, with the amber lamps out there and the gold in here, Desirée will be a lit stage in a black wall, and every eye on those benches will go exactly where the light tells it.
Tilly has stood beside lamps like that for her whole working life and checked hems in them. She has never once been the thing they were pointed at.
She pins the new seam, fast, a row of steel stitches down the red. Then she carries the robe back to the mirror.
"Up," she says.
Desirée gets up, drops the towel on the chair, and holds out her arms. Tilly settles the robe on her shoulders and ties it loosely at the waist and steps behind her to check the back.
From the doorway, she knows what the two of them look like. Antonia, if she looked up, would see Desirée lit gold and red, filling the mirror, and behind her, half in the lamp's spill and half out of it, a woman in black. Fitted black knit top, high black trousers, a yellow tape measure hung round her neck and a tomato pincushion strapped to her wrist. Near-black hair twisted up at the back and held with two pencils from the cutting table. A shape that belongs behind someone else, holding a hem.
The black is not an accident. Tilly cut those trousers herself, high on the waist and close through the hip, and they fit her exactly, because she would rather die than wear something that didn't fit. But they are black, and the top is black, and in a room full of red silk and sequins and a redhead in a G-string, black is a thing the eye slides over. Fifteen years of dressing rooms have taught her that a woman in black with pins in her mouth is part of the furniture. Nobody asks the furniture a question. Nobody asks the furniture to turn around.
That suits her. It has always suited her.
The mirror has her anyway, at the edge of the frame. Thirty-one years old, white, from Bakersfield, Basque on both sides back to the sheep camps in the hills above Tehachapi. Fair skin with the last of a summer tan, dark straight brows, grey-green eyes. A strong nose. A wide mouth with a chip out of one front tooth from a staple gun on a music video set in Burbank, eight hours into a twenty-hour day. She doesn't look at her own face for long. She never has. She looks at the seam.
"Breathe in," she says. "Hold it. Let it go."
Desirée lets it go. The robe settles on her shoulders, closer now through the back, lying flat against her spine instead of standing off it.
"Better," Tilly says. "Do the phrase."
"From the top."
"From the top."
Desirée counts it. Arms up. Head back. Five, six, seven, and her hands are at the collar. On eight she opens them.
The robe goes. Both shoulders at once, this time, a red slide down her back that catches for a heartbeat at the elbows and then drops in a soft heap at her heels. Without the weighted hem it isn't clean. It doesn't fall, it slithers. But it goes on the count, and Desirée stands in the cage of lamps with her arms open and her back to the mirror and looks over her shoulder at her own reflection with real joy.
"There she is," Desirée says, to herself.
"With the chain in it, it'll drop faster," Tilly says. "Half a count."
"Half a count is everything." Desirée turns around and looks at Tilly properly for the first time all evening. "You're a genius. You know that? Antonia, she's a genius."
"I know," Antonia says to her clipboard. "That's why I hired her. Is it fixed?"
"It will be."
"By final dress."
"By final dress," Tilly says.
Desirée steps out of the heap of silk and hands it to Tilly without looking. Performers always do. They are so sure that someone will be there to take it that someone always is.
Tilly takes it. She gathers it up off the floor and shakes it out and holds it up to the lamps, and that is when she sees the stain.
It is on the front edge of the hem, a hand's width from the corner. A dark splash of red wine on red silk, no bigger than a quarter, invisible from three feet away and unmistakable from one. Under the gallery's lamps, from the benches, nobody would see it.
Under Suite Four's tungsten, at the moment the robe hits the floor and Desirée kicks it aside, the hem will lie open in the light, and the stain will sit right there in the frame.
"Desirée."
"Mm?"
"When did this happen?"
Desirée looks. She winces, theatrically, with her whole body. "Sunday. The members' welcome thing in the courtyard. Somebody waved a glass at me."
"Sunday. And you put it back on the rail."
"I put it back on the rail and forgot about it, because I am an artist, and you are a genius." Desirée kisses the air near Tilly's cheek, collects her towel, and wraps herself in it. "Can you save it?"
"Probably. It's been sitting for a few days."
"Probably is good. I love probably." Desirée is already at the door. "Antonia, walk me back, I need to complain about the fan girls."
"The fan girls are fine," Antonia says. She finally looks up, over the clipboard, at the room. Her eyes go to the robe in Tilly's hands, then to the mirror, then to her watch. They do not stop on Tilly at all. "Final dress tomorrow at seven. Good work, hon."
And then they are both gone down the service corridor, Desirée's voice carrying all the way to the fuse room, Antonia's flats clicking after her.
The store is quiet. The steamers tick and hiss. Out in the corridor the hot wind finds the gap under the fire door at the far end and moans through it, low and steady. Somewhere above, through the high narrow window over the racks, the Strip is doing what the Strip does at this hour on a Wednesday night. A billboard throws a slow wash of red and then white across the ceiling, and under it the sodium orange of Sunset comes up off the boulevard like heat off a road.
Tilly carries the robe back to the cutting table and lays it out under the work lamps.
She should go home. She should go back to the apartment in Los Feliz with the broken air conditioner, take a cold shower, and come back at eight to finish the fan girls' bodices and run the chain into this hem. A wine stain can wait one more night. It has waited three.
She turns back the corner of the hem and looks at the stain again.
Red on red. A small, dark, spreading mark, the kind of thing that only matters at a distance of one foot, in exactly the right light, to exactly the people who are paying attention. She knows how this goes. A few more days and it will set. Then it will be there forever, and nobody will ever notice it except her, every single time.
End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.