Women were the world to him. In private he had worshipped them. In public he had triumphed with them. But something was missing in his life. Women were not the only beauties, not the only bodies begging to be wrapped in gossamer and adored.
The wasp appeared in the salon that morning. It was early Spring and unusually cold. The windows were laced with ice, and there was frost on the ground outside. Linderstadt shifted uneasily on the sofa, fighting both chill and dream. He had quarreled the night before, first with Madame Broussard, his head seamstress and lifelong friend, and then with Camille, his favorite model, accusing her of petty treacheries for which she was blameless. After they left, he drank himself into a stupor, stumbling from one workshop to another, knocking down mannequins, pulling dresses from their hangers, sweeping hats to the floor. The Spring Show, the most important of the year, was scarcely a week away, and the Spring Collection was complete. Normally, this was a time of excitement in the salon. Normally, the Linderstadt creations were worthy of excitement. Just the month before, Linderstadt had been dubbed, for the umpteenth time, the Earl of Elegance, the King of Couture. He was a Genius. A Master. His attention to detail, to sleeve, waist and line were legendary. His transcendent gowns were slavishly copied and praised. He was at the peak of his powers, it was said, yet he felt, with this collection, just the opposite. It was bland, it was dull, it was uninspired. It reeked of old ideas and tired themes. It was the product of a man, not at the height of his creativity but at the nadir and possibly the end. He had lost his way with this new line. He had lost his touch. He felt stagnant, bankrupt, pinched of vision, and insecure. Had he been cinched up in one of his own breath-defying corsets, he couldn’t have felt more in need of fresh ideas and air.
Nothing had prepared him for this, and in his despair he came unglued, quarreling and drinking and cursing his empire of taffeta, satin, and silk. He raged against the poverty of his newest collection. He raged against himself and the poverty of his own spirit. It was a dark day in his life, and he drowned himself in the bottle, until, at last, he fell into a fitful sleep. There was a couch at one end of the room, where he lay in a disheveled, quasi-morbid state, half-draped in the train of a bridal gown he had appropriated from one of the ateliers for warmth. With dawn, sunlight appeared along the edges of the heavily-curtained windows, penetrating the salon with a wan, peach-colored light.
The wasp was at the other end of the room, broadside to him and motionless. Its wings were folded back against its body, and its long belly was curled under itself like a comma. Its two antennae were curved delicately forward but otherwise as rigid as bamboo.
An hour passed and then another. When sleep became impossible, Linderstadt staggered off the couch to relieve himself. He returned to the salon with a pounding headache and a tall glass of water, at which point he noticed the wasp. From his father, who had been an amateur entomologist before dying of yellow fever, Linderstadt knew something of insects. This one he located somewhere in the family Sphecidae, which included wasps of primarily solitary habit. Most nested in burrows or natural cavities of hollow wood, and he was a little surprised to find the animal in his salon. Then again, he was surprised to have remembered anything at all about the creatures. He had scarcely thought of insects since his entry forty years before into the world of high fashion. He had scarcely thought of his father, preferring the memory of his mother Anna, his mother the caregiver, the seamstress, for whom he had named his first shop and his most famous dress. But his mother was not here, and the wasp most unmistakably was. Linderstadt downed his glass of water in a single gulp, wiped his lips and pulled the bridal train over his shoulders like a shawl. Then he crossed the room to take a closer look.
The wasp stood chest high and close to eight feet long. Linderstadt recognized the short hairs on its legs that used to remind him of the stubble on his father’s chin, and he remembered, too, the forward palps by which the insect centered its jaws to tear off food. Its waist was pencil-thin, its wings translucent. Its exoskeleton, what Linderstadt thought of as its coat, was blacker than his blackest faille, blacker than coal. It seemed to absorb light, creating a small pocket of cold night right where it stood. Nigricans. He remembered the wasp’s name. Ammophila nigricans. He was tempted to touch it, and instinctively, his eyes drifted down its belly to the pointed stinger that extruded like a rapier from its rear. He recalled that this was a actually a hollow tube through which the female deposited eggs into her prey, where they would hatch into larvae and eat their way out. Males possessed the same tube but did not sting. As a boy he had always had trouble telling the sexes apart, and examining the creature now in the pale light, he wondered which it was. He felt a little feverish, which he attributed to the after-effects of the alcohol. His mouth was parched, but he was reluctant to leave the salon for more water for fear the wasp would be gone when he returned. So he stayed, shivering and thirsty.
An hour passed. The temperature hovered near freezing. The wasp did not move. It was stiller than Martine, his stillest and most patient model. Stiller in the windless salon than the jewel-encrusted chandelier and the heavy damask curtains that hung like pillars and led to the dressing rooms. Linderstadt himself was the only moving thing in that cold, cold room. He paced to stay warm. He swallowed his own saliva to slake his thirst, but ultimately the need for water drove him out. He returned as quickly as possible, wearing shoes and sweater, carrying pencils, a pad of paper and a large pitcher of water. The wasp was exactly as he had left it, statuesque and immobile, as though carved in stone.
He began to draw, quickly, deftly, using broad, determined strokes. He worked from different angles, sketching the wasp’s neck, its shoulders and waist. He imagined the creature in flight, its wings stiff and finely veined. He drew it feeding, resting, poised to sting. He clothed it in a variety of garments, experimenting with different designs, some stately and elegant, others pure whimsy. He found that he had already assumed the wasp was female. His subjects had never been anything but. He remembered Anouk, his very first model, the scoliotic girl his mother had brought home to test her adolescent son’s fledgling talent. He felt as supple as he had then, his mind unlocked, as inventive and free-spirited as ever.
He worked all day and into the night, hardly daring to stop, resting only for a few brief hours in the early morning. He was woken at first light by the sound of church bells. It was Sunday, and near and far the call went out for prayer. In his youth he had been devout, and religious allusions were common in his early collections. But piety had given way to secularity. It had been years since he’d set foot in a church, and he felt both pleasure and guilt at the sound of the bells.
The morning brought no visitors, and he had the salon to himself. It was as cold as the day before, and the wasp remained inert. When the temperature hadn’t climbed by noon, Linderstadt felt secure in leaving. His drawings were done, and his next task was to locate a suitable form on which to realize them. This was how gowns and dresses were made, and he owned hundreds of mannequins and torsos, of every conceivable shape, some bearing the name of a specific patron, others simply marked with an identifying number. He had other shapes as well, baskets, cylinders, mushrooms, triangles, all of which had found their way at one time or another into a collection. As long as an object had dimension, Linderstadt could imagine it on a woman. Or rather, he could imagine a woman in the object, in residence, giving it her own distinctive form and substance, imbuing each tangent and intersect with female spirit, joie de vivre, and soul. He was wide-ranging and broad-minded in his tastes, and he expected to have no trouble in finding something suitable to the wasp, to serve as a model. Yet nothing caught his eye, not a single object or geometric form in his vast collection seemed remotely appropriate to the creature. It was odd but tantalizing. No simulation would do. He would have to work directly on the animal itself.
He returned to the salon and approached his subject. To a man accustomed to the divine plasticity of flesh, the armor-like hardness and inflexibility of the wasp’s exoskeleton presented challenges. Each cut would have to be perfect, each seam precise. There was no bosom to softly fill a swale of fabric, no hip to give shape to a gentle waist. It would be like working with bone itself, like clothing a skeleton.
Intrigued, he stepped up and touched the wasp’s body. It was cool and hard as metal. He ran a finger along one of its wings, half-expecting that his own nervous energy would bring it to life. Touch for him had always evoked the strongest emotions, which is why he used a pointing stick with his models. He might have done well to use the same stick with the wasp, for his skin tingled from the contact. For a moment he lost track of himself. His hand drifted, then touched one of the wasp’s legs.
He felt a brief shock. It was not so different from a human leg. The hairs were soft like human hairs (hairs that his models assiduously bleached, waxed and shaved). The knee and ankle were jointed like their human counterparts, the claw as pointed and bony as a foot. His attention shifted to the animal’s waist, in a human the pivot point between leg and torso. In the wasp it was lower and far narrower than anything human. It was as thin as a pipestem, a marvel of invention he was easily able to encircle in the tiny loop formed by his thumb and forefinger.
From a pocket he took out a tape and began to make his measurements: elbow to shoulder, shoulder to wing-tip, hip to claw, jotting each down in a notebook. From time to time he paused and stepped back to imagine a detail, a particular look . . . a melon sleeve, a fringed collar, a flounce. Sometimes he made a notation; occasionally, a quick sketch. He worked swiftly and confidently. All doubt and despair were gone.
When it came time to measure the chest, he had to lie on his back underneath the wasp. From that vantage he had a perfect view of its hairless and plated torso, as well as its stinger, which was poised like a pike and pointed directly between his legs. He felt a shiver of fear and excitement. After a moment’s hesitation he took the stinger’s measurement too. Idly, he wondered if this were one of those wasps that died after stinging, and if so, was there some way he could memorialize such a transformative event in a dress. Then he crawled out and looked at his numbers.
The wasp was symmetrical, almost perfectly so. Throughout his career Linderstadt had always sought to thwart symmetry, focusing instead on the subtle variations in the human body, the natural differences between left and right. There was always something to emphasize in a woman’s body, something unique to draw the eye, a hip that was higher, a shoulder more prominent, a breast. Even an eye, whose iris might be flecked a slightly different shade of blue than its twin, could trigger a report, an echo, somewhere in the color of the dress below. Linderstadt had an uncanny ability to uncover such asymmetries. This talent flowed from his belief that no two people were alike. A human being was a singular creature. Each was unique. Each was special and deserved to be seen as special. Each of his models, his patrons, even the commonplace women who bought off the rack, deserved to stand out.
The wasp presented difficulties. There was nothing that distinguished left from right, one side from the other. In all likelihood it was identical to every other wasp of its kind. It seemed to mock the very idea of singularity. And yet it was beautiful, stunningly beautiful, and it occurred to Linderstadt that perhaps he’d been wrong. Perhaps beauty lay, not in the differences between people but in the similarities. That, in fact, people were more alike than different. That he himself was not so very different from the women he clothed.
It was revelation to him. Heart racing, he took his notebook to the main atelier and began work on his first dress.
He had decided to start with something simple, a velvet sheath with narrow apertures for wing and leg and a white flounce of tulle at the bottom to hide the stinger. With no time for a muslin fitting, he worked directly with the fabric itself. It was a job normally handled by his assistants, but the master had lost none of his skill with scissors and thread. The work went fast. Partway through the sewing, he remembered the name of the order to which this wasp belonged. Hymenoptera, after ptera, for wing, and hymeno, for the Greek god of marriage, referring to the union of the wasp’s front and hind wings. He himself had never married, had never touched a woman outside his profession, certainly not intimately. It was possible he feared intimacy, or rejection, but more likely what he feared was a test of the purity of his vision. His women, he often thought, were extensions of himself. They were the best he had to offer, his most prized possessions. He clothed them to admire them and to have them admired. And to be admired himself. They were jewels, and they lived in the palace of his imagination and the stronghold of his dreams. He placed them on a pedestal, just as he himself wanted to be placed. The object of all eyes. Adored. Untouchable. Safe.
Yet now, inspired by the wasp, riding a wave of creativity, authenticity and passion unlike any he’d ever known, he knew it was not the time to be safe.
He finished the first dress and hurried to the salon. The wasp offered no resistance as he lifted its claws and pulled the dark sheath into place. The image of his father, gently unfolding a butterfly’s wing and pinning it to his velvet display board, played across his mind. The Linderstadt men, it seemed, had a special gift with animals.
He straightened the bodice and zipped up the back of the gown, then stepped back for a look. The waist, as he expected, needed taking in, and one of the shoulders needed to be re-aligned. The choice of color and fabric, however, was excellent. Black on black, night against night. It was an auspicious start.
He did the alterations, then hung the gown in one of the dressing rooms and returned to his workshop. His next outfit was a broad cape of lemon guipure with a gold chain fastener, striking in its contrast to the wasp’s jet black body. He made a matching toque to which he attached a pair of lacquered sticks to echo the wasp’s antennae. The atelier was as frigid as the salon, and he worked in overcoat, scarf, and kid gloves, the fingertips of which he had snipped off with scissors. His face was bare, and the bracing chill against his cheek recalled the freezing winters of his childhood when he was forced to stand stock still for what seemed hours on end while his mother used him as a form for the clothes she made. They had no money for heat, and Linderstadt had developed a stoical attitude toward the elements. The cold reminded him of the value of discipline and self-control. But more than that, it reminded him how he had come to love the feel of the outfits his mother had fitted and fastened against his skin. He loved it when she tightened a waist or took in a sleeve. The feeling of confinement warmed his blood. It was like a pair of hands holding and caressing him. He felt comforted, nurtured, restrained, and paradoxically freed. What he remembered of the cold was not the numbness in his fingers, the misting of his breath, the goosebumps on his skin. It was his mother he remembered: her steady hand and hard work, her stubborn practicality and abiding love. He remembered the pleasure of wearing her creations and the flights of fantasy they stirred in him. The cold had become synonymous with these.
He worked through the night to finish the cape. When Monday morning arrived, he locked the doors of the salon, turning away the seamstresses, stockroom clerks, salesgirls, and models who had come to work. He held the door against Camille and even Broussard, his confidante, who knew his moods as well as anyone. Half-hidden by the curtain that was strung across the broad glass entrance doors, he announced that the collection was complete, the final alterations to be done in private by himself. He assured them all was well. The House of Linderstadt had risen from the ashes. The House was intact. He invited each and every one of them to return in a week for the unveiling of the new collection. It would be a seminal event, and what better time than spring, the season of birth.
He withdrew to his workshop, where he started on his next creation, an off-the-shoulder blue moiré gown with a voluminous skirt festooned with bows. He sewed what he could by machine, but the bows had to be done by hand. He sewed like his mother, one knee crossed over the other, head bent, pinkie finger crooked out as though he were sipping a cup of tea. The skirt took a full day, during which he broke only once, to relieve himself. Food did not enter his mind, and in that he seemed in tune with the wasp. The creature showed neither hunger nor thirst. On occasion, one of its antennae would twitch, but Linderstadt attributed this to subtle changes in the turgor of the insect’s blood. He assumed the wasp remained immobilized by the cold, though he couldn’t help but wonder if its preternatural stillness sprang from some deeper design. He thought of his father, so ordinary on the surface, so unfathomable beneath. Given the chance, the man would spend days with his insects, meticulously arranging his boards, printing the tiny specimen labels, revising and updating his collection. Often he seemed devoted to nothing else. Linderstadt was awed by his father’s obsessiveness, frightened at times, envious at other times. There was something enticing, almost sacred, about it. His mother said the man was in hiding, but what did a child know about that?
The weather held, and on Wednesday he wheeled one of the sewing machines from the atelier to the salon so that he could work without leaving the wasp’s side. Voices drifted in from the street, curiosity-seekers, passersby trying in vain to get a glimpse inside the celebrated salon. The phone rang incessantly, message after message from concerned friends who hadn’t heard from him, from clients, from the press. M. Jesais, his personal psychic, called daily with increasingly dire warnings. Linderstadt was unmoved. He heard but a single voice. He had, now, but a single vision.
All his life he’d worked with women. They were the world to him, sirens of impossible beauty and magic, divinities of mystery and might. Juliette in satin, Eve in furs, the Nameless Queen in stiff and imperious brocade. He had prized them and praised them. In private he had worshipped them. In public he had triumphed with them. But these triumphs, alas, were short-lived. Time and again he was left with an empty feeling inside. Something was missing in his life. Women were not the only beauties. They were not the only bodies begging to be wrapped in gossamer and adored.
He eyed the wasp and crossed his arms. Idly, he ran his fingers down his chest. He was tall, with narrow shoulders and hips. He’d been skinny as a boy and had scarcely thickened with age. His models, who slaved to stay thin, marveled at how he kept his figure. They joked that he could be a model himself. This was meant, of course, as praise, but there were times it felt like a curse. In his heart of hearts he would have preferred a different body, or two bodies: the one he bore, the other with more flesh and curves.
The wasp had no flesh. Chitin was the furthest thing from it. But it had curves aplenty. Head, torso, stinger, legs. Six of them, six shapely cylinders, each broken by multiple joints, a welter of angle, line and dimension. And wings with gently curving tips, wings as beautiful as those of the angel Gabriel himself, a painting of whom hung in the salon and had been the inspiration for Linderstadt’s groundbreaking ’04 collection. And eyes, rounded, compound eyes, able to see god-knew-what. And finely arching antennae, to sample and savor the world’s delights.
He stitched a sleeve and then another. He imagined Camille as an insect, crawling down the runway, striking a pose. Camille on her hands and feet, like a beetle, Camille on her belly, inching along like a caterpillar, or a worm. Would she do it if he asked? Did he dare? It was a monstrous idea. He was a monstrous man. His adoration of women had made him blind to women. He saw what he wanted to see. Surfaces, gestures, poses, shapes. How little he understood of what lived underneath. How little he understood of himself.
He thought again of his father, closeted with his insect collection. Absorbed to the point of estrangement from his wife and son. In hiding, said his mother. Linderstadt, too, was in hiding. Hiding, it seemed, was a family trait.
He finished the last seam and held up the dress. The shimmering moiré reminded him of rippling water, the six-legged gown of a sea creature adrift beneath the waves. To a lesser talent the sleeves would have been a nightmare, but in the Master’s able hands they flowed and were joined effortlessly into the bodice. Each one sported a ruffled cap and was zippered to aid in getting it on. Once the gown was in place, he stepped back to have a look. The fit was uncanny, as though some hidden hand had been guiding his own. It had been that way from the start. There were five gowns now. Five in five days. One more, he thought, one more to complete the collection.
He knew what that one was. The bridal gown, his signature piece. For forty years he had ended every show with such a gown. Brides signified life. They signified love and the power of creation. What better way, with this newest collection, to signal his own rebirth?
The dress took two days. The second was Sunday, and Linderstadt felt a little shiver of pleasure when the bells began to toll. He was working on the veil, a gorgeous bit of organza that looked like mist, sewing and thinking what a pity it would be to cover the wasp’s extraordinary face. And so he had devised an ingenious interlocking paneled design that simultaneously hid the face and revealed it. After finishing the veil, he started on the train, using ten feet of egg-white chiffon that he gathered in gentle waves to resemble foam. Where it attached to the skirt, he cut a hole for the stinger and ringed it with white silk roses. The bodice of the dress was made of rich and creamy satin with an Imperial collar and long sleeves of lace. Queen, Mother, Bride—the holy trinity of women. The gown, to his mind, embodied all three and was triumphant.
He completed it Sunday night and hung it in the dressing room with the other gowns. Then he wrapped himself in his overcoat and scarf and fell asleep on the couch. He planned to get up early Monday and make the final preparations for the show.
That night the cold spell broke. A warm front swept in from the south, brushing away the chill like a cobweb. In his sleep Linderstadt unbuttoned his coat and pulled off his scarf. He dreamed of summer, flying a kite with his mother at the beach. When he woke, it was almost noon. The room was thick with heat. A crowd had gathered outside the salon for the opening. The wasp was gone.
In a panic he searched the workshops, the stockroom, the dressing rooms and the offices. He looked in the basement and the boiler room. He climbed to the roof and swept his eyes across the sky. It was nowhere to be found.
In shock he returned to the salon.
Near where it had been he noticed a paper sphere the size of a pot-bellied stove. One side of it was open, and inside were multiple tiers of hexagonal cells, all composed of the same papery material as the outside of the sphere. Linderstadt had a glimmer of understanding, and when he discovered that his gowns had also vanished—every one of them—he realized his mistake. The wasp was not a Sphecida at all, but a Vespida, a paper wasp. Its diet consisted of wood, leaves and other natural fibers. It had eaten the collection.
Numbly, Linderstadt surveyed the remains of his work. The nest had a delicate beauty of its own, and briefly he considered showing it in lieu of the collection. Then he spied a bit of undigested material peeking out from behind the papery sphere. It was the bridal veil, and it stood on the floor like a fountain of steam frozen in air. No dress, no train, only this, the filmy, translucent veil. Meant to hide the bride until that moment it was lifted and she emerged, in all her newness, freshness, and radiance.
Outside, the crowd clamored to be let in. Linderstadt hesitated for a minute, then drew back the heavy curtains and lifted the gossamer veil. The sun seemed to set it aflame. His heart quickened, and the tiny hairs on his neck and his arms stood on end as he placed it on his head. With everything gone there was nothing left to lose or conceal. A single thread would have sufficed. Raising his face, throwing his shoulders back, standing proud and erect, he opened the doors.