Guillotine

1

There is a certain languor in some kinds of work, a pleasant and soporific monotony that quiets the mind and allows it to tune in to an age-old frequency, the timeless buzz of worker bees happily humming. For Dez Lane, 21, this pleasure settles over her whenever she’s sewing things by hand. Today, she’s replacing beads on a flapper dress, bent over her worktable and wearing granny glasses on a long chain, her fingers sore from the intricate and repetitive motions. This dress is part of her senior thesis in Fashion Design, and it has to be perfect.

As she carefully pins down each bead in the fragile old fabric, her mind roams like a bird’s wings skimming over a field and alights on a freshman year lecture with Dr. Bartz. That was the day she learned about the history of beads—that the oldest beads on record have been around for over a hundred thousand years. Cavemen drilled holes in snail shells and fished bits of mother-of-pearl out of the sea. Egyptians turned crushed quartz into faience tubes and draped glittering nets over their dead. Ancient eyes alit on flashing beetle wings and stones, and something deep in their hearts told them, I want that.

And that’s what Dez loves about fashion—when she sees some beautiful object, and it clicks into place like the safety harness on a roller coaster, and she thinks, I want that, I need that, I must use that to make something transcendent. She craves this feeling enough to build her future around it, to stake all her hopes on it. She’s going to be a designer with her own house one day, making dresses for the red carpet and pinning swaths of cloth around the surgically enhanced hips of the world’s most glamorous women. She is ambitious, and she will do anything to make her dreams come true. Her mother is counting on her, and once she leaves SCAD, there will be no more scholarships, no more free student housing. One more month, and her entire life is sink or swim.

And that is why this dress must be perfect.

Her phone buzzes, and she uncurls her hunched spine and stretches, moving her massive braid of curly apricot-colored hair to her other shoulder. As soon as she unlocks her phone, her heart jerks in her chest.

This is the email she’s been waiting for—

The one that could change everything.

Dear Desirée Lane, the email begins. We regret to inform you—

And that’s when Dez stops reading.

There is no coming back from We regret to inform you.

If there was any good news at all, any hope, they would’ve led with that.

At least they responded. Most of the jobs she’s applied for don’t even bother with that basic kindness. She wakes up her laptop and pulls up her spreadsheet, clicking the Nope box and filing that dead end away where she can’t see it. The list of possibilities is dwindling. It’s apparently impossible to land an interview at a major fashion house if you’re a broke nobody in Savannah, Georgia, with zero connections.

If only this was the eighties, back when any girl with a side pony could land a job at Sassy magazine by writing her resume on a pair of acid-washed jeans.

Her mother warned her, told her to get a degree in something real that would pay the bills and enjoy fashion on her own time, but Dez would rather die than be a CPA and live a life bounded by numbers. She loves color, excess, feathers, beads, sequins. It’s all her mom’s fault. She used to bring home the forgotten things she found cleaning hotel rooms at the Cosmopolitan in Vegas, and the first time tiny Dez got her hands on a pint-sized pageant gown, it was Game Over for a khaki kind of life.

The happy hum of hand-sewing has turned into the glaring pain of silence, and Dez stares at her spreadsheet. She’s too smart to feel this lost, too resourceful to have so few options. If she can’t get a job in high fashion in the traditional way, she has to move sideways. That’s what you do when you grew up poor: You think outside the box.

There’s one avenue she hasn’t fully explored because…

Well, because she’s too proud. And because she knows it won’t be fun.

But it’s been sitting in the back of her mind, waiting like a wad of grimy twenties under the mattress for a moment of true desperation.

With a determined exhale, she scrolls through her phone contacts until she gets to Patrick Ruskin Yucky Yucky Ick Ick Ick. There’s just one message. Although everyone at school knows him or knows of him, Dez met Patrick for the first time at a bar last week. He slid the phone from her unwilling hand and texted himself so that he’d have her number, and she was too surprised to stop him. She danced with her girlfriends until she forgot about this transgression, and the next day he sent one missive.

Let me take you out and spoil you. I’ll be good, I promise.

The fact that he texts with full grammar and punctuation is not the only thing that makes Patrick abhorrent. He’s arrogant, judgmental, sexist, and worst of all, doesn’t know how to take no for an answer, hence that last text. But there are two things about Patrick that might be handy for Dez’s situation. For one thing, he’s rich. For another thing, his mother is Marie Caulfield-Ruskin, editor-in-chief of Nouveau magazine, one of the only fashion magazines still standing—and thriving. Nouveau makes waifs into It girls, struggling writers into columnists, unknown designers into household names. Nouveau is the reigning queen of fashion, an outlier, an anomaly, a golden ziggurat lording it over a sea of once-proud magazines that have now become fly-by-night infotainment websites.

And Dez wants a piece of that pyramid, just one gold brick.

So what if Patrick grabbed her butt at that bar? And so what if he basically forced her to give him her number? So what if he caught her elbow hard enough to bruise, just so she had to stop and talk to him on the way to the bathroom?

All she has to do is fend him off long enough to get an in with his mom. She can blink her fake eyelashes at him and laugh at his jokes and dress up in her slinkiest dresses and stuff herself with crab at the nicest restaurants in the city and make him fall in love with her. Women have done worse for less return on investment. It’s the way of the world.

Aw, that’s sweet, she texts back. What did you have in mind?

She’s not surprised when he responds with, Who is this?

Dez from the bar. Long red hair, short silver dress?

She chooses the things she thinks he’s most likely to remember.

After a moment, he texts back.

Elizabeth’s, 7pm tonight. Where do I pick you up?

Dez grins. He’s so easy.

She doesn’t want him to know she’s a scholarship kid still in free student housing as a senior, so she gives him the address of her favorite Victorian downtown.

See you there, he responds, plus a winky face.

She goes to her closet and flips through her dresses. Some she made by hand, some she thrifted and altered, a few she found off the clearance rack and fixed up. It’s pathetic, how scared most shoppers are of a missing button, loose thread, or deodorant skid mark, but Dez loves the thrill of the hunt. Anyone with money can buy something perfect, but there’s a shine to stolen glamour that someone with a black credit card will never understand. There’s a magic to taking something no one else wants and making it something everyone praises.

As she gets dressed that night and does her makeup, she is well aware that she is baiting a hook, choosing just the right fly, the right feathers, the right—whatever Will was doing on Hannibal, back when he had encephalitis and went fishing a lot. Her goal is to make Patrick Ruskin fall in love with her. She can’t be seen as a fling; it has to feel real if she wants in with his family. She will do anything to avoid returning home to Las Vegas, to the couch of her mom’s cramped one-bedroom apartment, to the smog-filled air and breath-stealing desert. She did not come this far, follow her hopes across the country and get her dream degree, just to end up cleaning hotel rooms at the Cosmopolitan and watching her exhausted, overworked, under-insured mom wince every time she bends down to pick up a discarded champagne bottle in a room that costs her entire weekly salary for one night.

She chooses an emerald-green dress, halfway between sexy and classy, and lets her long, wild hair tumble to her waist in a cascade of curls it’s taken her years to master. She knows just the right accessories to set off her beauty, to bring out the seafoam in her blue-green eyes and the unexpectedly golden tones in her skin. She has never known her father, has no idea who he is or what he looks like, but she has been told all her life that she looks exotic, like a little doll, and asked what she is and where she’s from, like she’s some weird breed of dog. She finishes her outfit with her beloved pair of thrifted Jimmy Choos, which she keeps immaculate, the leather always touched up carefully, and an antique purse that she prizes more than any name brand.

When Patrick pulls up to the address she’s given him at 7:15, she steps from the shadows, smiling, welcoming.

The moment she’s in his black Tesla, his hand is on her knee, a heavy gold ring with a family crest shining on his knuckle, and she swallows down her distaste and tells herself that every relationship is, in its way, transactional. From what she’s heard of Patrick, he really only wants one thing, and she is happy to provide that thing, and thus perhaps they can trade. She has found something shiny, and she tells herself, I want that. Maybe it’s not Patrick Ruskin, but it’s what he represents. It’s the doors he can open. Much like a dress on the clearance rack, for the sake of her future, she’ll take what she finds—what’s within reach—and make it work.

2

On their first date, Patrick does all the talking, and Dez pretends to hang on his every word. They eat a seven-course prix fixe meal at the nicest restaurant in Savannah with wine pairings, and it would be the best night of her life if she didn’t have to put up with his embarrassing behavior. He’s rude to the waitstaff, and when he tries to play footsie with her, she jerks away and drops her fork because she’s fairly certain he’s dented her shin. At the end of the date, she tilts her face up toward him outside a building in which she dreams of living, and he rams his tongue down her throat with all the passion and elegance of a clumsy dog sticking its snout in a jar of peanut butter.

This is not a man who’s ever given a single second of consideration to another person’s pleasure. He’s never had to. He can have anything he wants. Money tends to do that.

On their second date, he takes her to a loud party in the penthouse of a fancy hotel, steering her around the many rooms of the suite with a protective arm around her waist, taking every chance to use the top of her ass as a handlebar. He brings her glass after glass of champagne, introduces her to a fleet of men who look and dress and act just like him, and their eyes roam hungrily over her body as though she’s a boat they’d like to take for an aggressive spin before buying. No one asks her about herself, her major or her past or her future. She is an object, but a beautiful one. It’s almost a relief when they forget her to argue over football.

On their third date, Patrick orders oysters, slurping the gooey gray blobs from their dinosaur shells while making intense eye contact; he doesn’t seem to understand that oysters are only an aphrodisiac to the person who eats them, and he doesn’t offer a single one to Dez. By the time they pull up to his apartment building, his stomach is making terrible noises, and he pushes her hand off his thigh. On the way up in the elevator, he stares off into space as if troubled by a noise only he can hear. Dez spends the next two hours rubbing his back and murmuring sweetly as he hurls into one of those fancy Japanese toilets that can sing a lullaby while heating your tushy. She brings him ice water, tuts over him like a nursemaid, and kindly ignores the fact that he has obviously shit his slacks. She doesn’t leave until the worst is over and he’s showered and tucked up in a bed bigger than her dorm room, sweating through his navy silk sheets.

After she kisses him gently on the forehead, he reaches for her hand.

Tonight didn’t go as planned, he croaks.

Poor baby, she says. Let me know if you need me.

When he texts her the next day asking for ginger ale and Saltines, she magically appears in his apartment to make toast and heat up soup and coo over what a rough night he had. He doesn’t thank her, but he does say she’d make a good nurse. The lust is back in his eyes again, so he must be feeling better. When he jams his tongue down her throat, she is certain she tastes the sea.

On their fourth date, they go on a carriage ride downtown, which isn’t as romantic as it seems unless you’re really into the smell of manure and the ramblings of an old man dressed like a pirate who is more interested in pointing out ghost sightings than in letting a couple canoodle. Dez is grateful to the pirate; she doesn’t want Patrick pawing at her in front of the tourists, with her crotch at eyeball height. At least they’re not eating spoiled seafood this time, she tells herself.

In the car on the way back to the place he thinks is her home, his firm fingers roam so far up the hem of her tight dress that his clunky ring catches on the fabric. When he yanks it free, they both hear the cloth rip.

I’ll have my mother’s people send something over, Patrick says in what should be an apology but isn’t. Just text me your size later. The hand goes right back to business, but the