Apart at the Seams Read online

  “Arianna,” Ethan calls out, and the door to the apartment hits the wall, thumping the doorstop like a single drumbeat. I spring forward, singing, “I’m in our bedroom.”

  His head pops into the room along with an overfilled box that he hasn’t bothered to tape shut. He sets it on the floor. “Where should I put my photography equipment in the apartment formerly known as your apartment?”

  “Oh,” I say, turning around as if new storage space has magically popped up with this move. By the time I finish rotating, he has pointed one of his cameras at me and snapped a picture. “Whoa, cowboy, let’s not get carried away with documenting this historic moment.”

  He bounces over the bed to kiss me, rumpling my neatly arranged comforter and sheets, and once he has pinned me to my pillow, snaps a picture of my messy hair. “I know,” he murmurs into my ear, “we’re not supposed to be on the bed once you’ve made it. We’re not supposed to have afternoon sex because it could upset the throw pillows.”

  “They’re very sensitive,” I whisper, looking to the door to make sure that Beckett isn’t about to crawl in.

  He pops off the bed and makes a big show of straightening out the linens and smoothing them down with exaggerated sweeps. “Seriously, where should I put my photography stuff?”

  “Why don’t you just leave that box on the floor for now, and we’ll figure out what to do with it once everything is upstairs.”

  Ethan follows me out of my room . . . I mean, our room . . . intersecting in the hallway with Beckett, who has popped out of his room with Case in tow. “Mrs. Quinn,” she drones. “Do you want me to take Beckett to the park? He doesn’t really want to stay in his room.”

  I swallow down the desire to remind her that I am a Ms., not a Mrs., while passing her the diaper bag, stuffing a sippy cup of water in the side pouch. Ethan takes Beckett for a moment while the four of us travel downstairs, swinging him upside down before we get in the elevator. Beckett squeals, letting his arms dangle over his head like a forkful of spaghetti. I bend over and blow raspberries on his exposed belly. Case leans against the wall, staring at a spot by the ceiling.

  When the elevator doors open, Case takes back Beckett as if she’s accepting a UPS package, and Ethan and I walk out the back of the building to the Zipcar. There are suitcases in the backseat and boxes in the hatchback. He pushes the boxes around, trying to find a light one for me to take, and I lean my head into the car so I can see him in the trunk.

  “I love you,” I call out to him, involuntarily, like an eye blink. I wish we were lying on the sofa together, Ethan splayed out across the cushions, one arm crooked behind his head, his other curled around me like our beanbag draft stopper, weighted and warming.

  He looks up at me and smiles as if he’s surprised to find me there. “I packed all of these too heavy. Why don’t you stay down here with the car, and I’ll bring the stuff up? It’s not going to take that many trips.”

  I sit down on the front passenger seat, leaving the door open so I can dangle my legs outside. Maybe tonight we’ll bring in dinner to celebrate. I can light candles after Beckett goes to bed, open a bottle of wine so we can make a toast. Or champagne . . . he could pick up champagne while I’m putting Beckett to sleep. These are the sorts of things that can happen when there are two adults in the apartment; divide and conquer.

  I get up and walk to the end of the alleyway so I can peek at the babysitter pushing Beckett in a swing. Case looks considerably livelier when she doesn’t know that anyone sees her. She is practically effervescent, bubbling over as she tickles Beckett’s stomach each time he swings close.

  Ethan comes back downstairs. He’s wearing a blue t-shirt that shows two birds and comes with the caption: pigeons do it in the park. The front advertises some street festival from his old neighborhood in Brooklyn.

  “Are you going to miss your old place?” I ask, leaning on the car. “Being close to your sister Sarah, in Park Slope?”

  “Not a chance. Sarah makes me eat whole-wheat pancakes. Rachel buys me Cap’n Crunch. Which sister would you want to live closer to? Anyway, I want to be here with you and Beckett. Plus, I’ll be closer to work when that starts. Less time commuting means more time together.”

  “Hey, grown-up,” I say lightly. “Listen to you, talking about commuting.”

  “Be careful what you say,” Ethan admonishes with a grin. “Grown-up? I will never be that boring.”

  He slams the trunk closed, almost finished bringing a lifetime’s worth of things into a new apartment in just four trips. It seems like such a tiny mark to leave on the world; a man with so few things could disappear inside a city like New York. The thought makes me want to start a collection for him; line up vintage shot glasses on the windowsills or start a library that stretches around all the walls of the apartment.

  He comes over to my side of the car, grinning wildly, his hands behind his back.

  “So, Arianna, there’s just one last box.”

  He drops down on one knee, whipping his arms out to reveal a tiny, velvet-covered ring box as if we’re acting out a romantic comedy. I put one hand on the car to steady myself, somehow sensing that it will be the end of everything if I obey my instinct to jump out of the way.

  “Arianna Quinn, will you marry me?”

  And like a straight pin held against the side of a balloon, the cringe before the pop, I watch his face carefully as I shake my head, telling him no.

  What have I gotten myself into?

  Chapter Two

  “BUT I DON’T get it,” Ethan says to me after we’ve put Beckett to bed and we’ve settled down on the sofa. He’s left the velvet-covered box on the kitchen counter, and it stares at me primly, full of silent accusations. “You showed me those plates. You wanted to buy new plates.”

  “To celebrate moving in together,” I tell him.

  “But I told you that I didn’t want to buy new plates,” he insists.

  “So we didn’t.”

  “No, but I said that I didn’t want to buy new plates because I thought we’d register for them when we got married.”

  “Ethan,” I tell him, rubbing the top of his hand as if that will make these words more palatable. He’s known me for almost eighteen years, when I first became friends with his sister in college. We’ve only been dating for around six months, but surely he’s heard me say before that I never plan on getting married.

  “I love you. It isn’t you. I just never want to get married.” I mentally scramble for a recent example and come up empty-handed. “Don’t you remember that time when I was staying at your parent’s house during college, and Rachel and I came home from the movies. And you were teasing us about how we wanted to marry Brad Pitt, and I told you that I may want to live with Brad Pitt forever, but I never want to marry him.”

  “Yes, but,” Ethan says, leaving the thought dangling open like an empty envelope. The expression on his face says well, no despite his nodding.

  “Then you know that it’s not you. It’s everyone,” I tell him, my eyes involuntarily flicking toward the ring box on the counter. Part of me thinks that if I say it enough times, he’ll shake his head as if dislodging whatever bit of mental debris is keeping him from remembering that Arianna Quinn never ever wants to be a bride. But he doesn’t. He looks at me inquisitively, as if he is suddenly unsure of why I have lapsed into some unknown language.

  Or as if he’s expecting me to punch his shoulder and crow that this was just a long-running joke. Or as if he knows me better than I know myself. We inadvertently enter into a silent staring contest until my eyes break away, returning to that little velvet-covered box.

  Maybe he’s picked up on the emptiness behind my words, as if they’re a façade on a Hollywood set that could be pushed over by an overexcited stagehand. I have been repeating that thought for decades to prepare myself and my parents and al
l my friends for the fact that I may never walk down the aisle. Over the years, that statement—I don’t want to get married—started to feel more and more true than the original lie that I made up because I didn’t think anyone would ever ask for my hand in marriage—until I wasn’t sure what I really wanted. All I know is that not getting married is easier than figuring out whether I want to be joined to someone for life. I agreed to move in with Ethan. I didn’t agree to catapult over this stage and stick the landing in married-ever-after.

  “But, I mean, never? What do you have against marriage? Your parents are married.”

  “Have you taken a look at the divorce rate lately? I don’t want to go through that. I don’t want to go through what Rachel went through when she left Adam.”

  “But it’s like you’re seeing failure as an inevitable part of marriage. What if we got married and it was just . . . happily ever after?”

  “And what if we never got married and just lived happily ever after?”

  Ethan studies me, and I hope that my expression isn’t saying something I don’t mean. I think of good things, hoping it will make my face look pleasant, like a Victorian woman sniffing a sachet in order to get through the garbage-strewn streets of London. I think about the way Ethan plays with Beckett and how he wraps his arms around me from behind, spooning our bodies together. I think about the times he has surprised me with a meal already made or the laundry folded or sleepy sex in the middle of the night. But my eye keeps catching on the ring box. Why did he leave it out on the counter?

  “Ethan, I can’t do this right now. It’s too much.”

  “Okay,” Ethan answers simply. He leans back on the sofa and smiles at me as if he knows something that I don’t know.

  “Do you regret moving in?” I ask him, scared of the answer.

  “No,” Ethan tells me, shaking his head. “Absolutely not. We’ll figure this out.”

  We’ll figure this out? What is there to figure out? Instead of filling me with peace that he’s heard what I’m saying, his words give me a sense of foreboding.

  But Ethan has apparently decided something internally because a few minutes later, he’s busy uncorking the champagne and filling a glass so we can toast ourselves. The unaccepted proposal is tucked into the back of our minds like restaurant leftovers. I know we’ll have to crack open the conversation again at some point. Or maybe not. Maybe just living together will convince Ethan that what we have is perfect as is.

  But I can’t worry about this tonight. Tomorrow morning, I plan to give my drawings to the atelier designer and kick off phase two of the Re-creation of Arianna Quinn.

  I CAN BARELY breathe, my eyes trained on the door to the little closet-turned-side-office that Francesca, our atelier designer at Davis & Howe, uses from time to time when she wants privacy. We’re supposed to get lunch in a few minutes to talk through some of the ideas that are shaping up for the next collection, but she’s also promised that we’ll talk about my design notebook that I handed off to her with a well-practiced-in-front-of-the-mirror and hopefully breezy, “would you take a look at these and tell me what you think?”

  In my wildest dreams, Francesca informs me that they have completely overhauled the spring collection to center on my designs. In my more rational dreams, Francesca politely tells me that my drawings are fine and life continues on as usual.

  But I really hope that it’s the former.

  I wind and unwind the end of a spool of thread, my work discarded on the table in front of me. When I woke up this morning, I internally debated whether to bring Francesca my sketchpad. Yesterday was so stressful, and maybe it would be better to wait until we’re past Fashion Week. But then Rachel called to wish us congratulations on the move, and she asked me how long it would take to hear back from Francesca. The waiting can’t be over with until I let this moment begin, so I slipped my drawings into my satchel and stood in front of the mirror, figuring out how best to convey to Francesca just how much I want to be part of the design team.

  It’s not that I mind my work as a finisher for Davis & Howe; a lot of people would kill to be on staff at a mid-tier fashion house, willing to do any job to be in that space. But back when I first came to New York, taking evening classes at FIT while interning at any fashion house that would teach me, I thought that by this point in my life, I’d have my own, eponymous design house. I’d go from being someone else’s head patternmaker to designing my own line. I didn’t think I’d still be in someone else’s sample room, and I certainly didn’t think I’d be a finisher.

  But somewhere along the way, I took the easier route, the less rejection-filled route, the less banging-my-head-against-the-wall and begging route. It’s what I needed when I was putting all of my emotional energy into other pursuits, such as having my son on my own. Something safe, a position that people didn’t covet, and therefore came with little competition.

  But I need to play in the sample room. I’ve been working to support myself but not really working to fulfill myself. Following our design team’s ideas has given me the structure to remember just how much I need to tap into my creativity and see my drawings come to life on someone’s body. Now that I have a nanny share and I’m back in the loft, I have more time to think and pursue breaking into the design space.

  And the first step toward design work is convincing Francesca, our very stylish Milanese gatekeeper, that my drawings should hop off the page.

  Tabitha, our head samplehand, sits next to me baste stitching a pattern, her sheet of long, stick-straight black hair creating a temporary curtain between us. I can tell that my jiggling legs are driving her crazy—my legs have already started walking toward lunch while they’re still under the table—but she doesn’t ask why I haven’t been able to sit still all morning. While Rachel rewrites my love life to see what she wants to see, Tabitha is my friend who can’t even pick up on my nervousness when I’m vibrating beside her.

  But that’s Tabitha. She’s used to being the center of attention and doesn’t always notice those of us on her periphery. After her family moved here from Vietnam, her father became a hotshot fashion photographer whose pictures pop up everywhere from Vogue to Bazaar. Anna Wintour came to her Brearley graduation dinner. Match all of that with an education in France and the ability to speak flawless French, complete with a Parisian accent, as well as internships with some of the hottest designers in New York, and Tabitha really has no clue what it’s like to break into this business as a nameless, faceless Minnesotan. If Tabitha wanted, she could leave tomorrow, and with her father’s connections, have her own line debut in a few months at Fashion Week. Her one saving grace is that she is one of the most generous people I know, always happy to pass along anything—from her connections to her time and money.

  “Do you want to grab lunch today?” she asks me, snapping off the end of her thread after she knots it. “Walk down to the ’wich? I’ll buy.”

  “I’m actually waiting for Francesca. We’re doing a walking-to-pick-up-lunch meeting so we can nail down some of the trim for Arthur’s pieces in the spring collection and talk about some other stuff . . .”

  I let the rest of the sentence hang in the air while Tabitha threads a new needle, but she doesn’t snatch it up and ask what other stuff is, as Rachel would do. “Oh,” she says, “then will you pick me up the goat cheese sandwich?”

  I nod, feeling deflated from the lack of release. I look at the door, willing the knob to turn.

  I didn’t plan to tell Tabitha that Francesca was looking over my drawings until after lunch, when I knew her thoughts on my designs. If Francesca hated them, I hadn’t planned to tell Tabitha at all, and if she loved them, I figured I could tell her during a coffee run in the late afternoon. But now that I’m stuck waiting, the door to the office still ominously closed as the second hand slowly drags itself well beyond the minute I thought I would know Francesca’s verdict, the
words feel as if they’re beading out of my skin like sweat. I need to talk about it with someone, and who better than Tabitha, who not only works in fashion but also shares my love of vintage, old-Hollywood style?

  Tabitha is my closest friend at work, but we also hang out outside the loft. She’s the only person who will accompany me to see old movies. Rachel is fine with anything from the Brat Pack era, but ask her to go gawk at the Givenchy dresses in Audrey Hepburn’s How to Steal a Million and she’ll ask if that’s one of the movies that contains Andrew McCarthy. Tabitha, on the other hand, will not only go with me but will dress up in a Hepburn-like little black dress for the occasion.

  Tabitha may not be my go-to person for when I’m PMS-ing or need to whine about Beckett’s teething marathon, but she’s fantastic when you need to be around someone who can turn the mundane into a fantastic story. Which is why, I remind myself, I decided not to tell Tabitha until I knew Francesca’s answer. It would be hard enough to hear anything negative from Francesca, but to have to rehash it with Tabitha would make being in the sample room downright impossible. Especially if my news ended up being whispered around the loft, entertainment to break up the monotony of creating hemlines.

  Tabitha doesn’t ask about my cryptic statement, and I don’t volunteer any other loose threads of information, but still my leg jiggles under the table as if it’s begging to be noticed. “Sure, I’ll pick up the goat cheese.”

  At that moment, the door opens, and out clicks Francesca, traveling over the wooden sample room floor as if she’s a windup toy, released from someone’s hand. She moves with purpose, not even bothering to slow down when she passes my table, and I get up knowing the drill and fall into step beside her. Francesca never stops moving. I don’t say that hyperbolically. I’ve never seen her in a chair. I don’t attend the design team meetings, but I imagine even in there that she bolts around the room like a restless pigeon while they’re talking, landing on the various samples and fabric swatches. Our meetings with Francesca are usually held on the way to or from somewhere, which gives them a somewhat frantic vibe. Today the destination is Bryant Park, a few blocks away from the loft, and its small sandwich kiosk.