A lot of my work was about pain. One of my clients had alopecia areata and had lost most of her hair. Much of our time was spent searching for flattering hats and scarves so she felt comfortable.
“I want to look chic,” she said, “not bald.”
She didn’t talk much about the condition, but I hoped that if she needed to, she’d feel close enough to me to open up. But she couldn’t hide the pain, not all the time. It showed in her face for brief moments when we shopped and we couldn’t find exactly what we needed. There were flashes of darkness, and isolation or resigned frowns.
At the end of our outing, though, we managed to find just the right oversized straw hats for summer in different colors to match her oufits, and for winter a few fur hats as well as crocheted hats with crocheted roses. “My props,” she called them.
I watched her try them on in her apartment, along with the outfits we bought to go with them. She exhaled loudly. “This works,” she said, nodding. “I have my confidence back.” The corners of her mouth turned up slightly as she studied herself in the mirror.
“Then it will show,” I said, “inside and out.”
I have my confidence back. Offhand remarks like that from clients made me feel there was a reason for me to get up in the morning. It wasn’t about the clothes. It was about the person wearing them, and the fact that I had given them something intangible and more important than the dress or the accessory.
Another client wore an insulin pump, so we had to find the right pants or skirts and the jackets or cardigans to cover and hide it. I knew how hard it was for her, but I also saw a woman who made a conscious decision not to dwell on what she couldn’t change. So we talked about everything but diabetes and the way she was forced to minister to it every day, even though neither of us ever forgot that. Sometimes she said things like, “If this is the worst thing…” and then she waved it away and we talked about something else.
Even if someone didn’t have a condition with a name, every one of us lived with varying amounts of pain and disappointment. The more experiences I had in my own life, the more I could empathize.
Some people didn’t dignify what they saw as their shortcomings by giving in to them. Instead, they built on what was right about their bodies, faces, and minds and shored themselves up. My job was to be their cheerleader, armed with the tools to make them look their best. As Greta Garbo said, “Darling, the legs aren’t so beautiful. I just know what to do with them.”
I haven’t met many people who don’t have something to hide, or shift the focus away from, and there is always a way.
My week started out with a client I worked with for three years in a row, starting when she was just out of college. She was like no other. She didn’t need a wardrobe consultant, she needed a shrink. She was single, never married, and born in Sicily. Almost every year she went home for a visit, or at least contemplated going home, and that’s where I came in. I bought her new clothes for the trip, packed the suitcase, and got it ready. I left it by the door, where it stood—three months ahead of time.
I usually have a good handle on my clients. By the time we’ve been together for many hours over the course of a week, a month, or often several years, I know about their families, their jobs, their pets, their feelings about themselves, and their attitudes about clothes. But Maria Elena was a mystery. Her secrets were packed up in her bag along with her wishes, her dreams, and her phobias. I didn’t ask about her family and she didn’t tell me. She once said she didn’t work, but she never told me what she did instead. I knew she didn’t have a husband, or children, unless they were in Italy. So I did the job that she asked me to do, and I left the suitcase ready. The following year she never told me whether she made the trip or didn’t.
This time when I left her apartment, I glanced back at the suitcase as I approached the door. Her private world reminded me of Luke’s and how I had walked out of his life, a life I also knew very little about.
• • •
Arnie phoned a week after I got back from Mary Alice’s. He wanted to have dinner.
“I found a pretty decent Greek joint that delivers. You up for it?” He came in with a bottle of wine, and I uncorked it. It had been weeks since we got together. I’m not sure whether it was the advice I gave him, but he was wearing a cocoa-brown shirt and chocolate-brown pants, a vast improvement over some of the get-ups I’d seen him in.
“Lookin’ good.” I high-fived him.
“Thanks.”
“So how’s Brie?” I said as I scrubbed out Harry’s bowl and refilled it.
“Uh, okay.”
I put the bowl down and Harry just about inhaled the food. If you turned away to wash a glass while he was eating, when you looked back all the food would be gone.
“Okay?”
“She had to go out of town on a business trip,” he said. The doorman buzzed up at that moment and I went to the door.
“Are you seeing her exclusively or have you tried to meet other women?” I said, unpacking the moussaka and a large Greek salad. I suppose I was obsessed with the idea of fidelity.
“The online thing didn’t work out.”
“Oh, how come?”
“You’re bombarded with all these women and after a while you forget who said what when you have, like, four people you’re talking to. I thought I was having a conversation with a Wall Street lawyer, and then I realized she was someone else and I was talking to a waitress in Jersey. It’s not my style.”
“But Brie is?”
“No…I thought so in the beginning, but now I think we’re better off being friends.”
“Did anything happen?”
He shrugged and stared at the floor. I studied Arnie, not sure how hard I should push.
“I see,” I said, even though I didn’t. “I’m sorry I didn’t meet her; you acted like you really liked her, so I was anxious to see what she was like.”
Arnie stared at me and then looked away, fixated on the fascinating tip of his shoe. “It turned out she was having an affair with her boss,” he said, looking back at me. “She liked me as a friend.”
“I’m sorry, Arnie,” I reached out and squeezed his shoulder. “I really am.”
He pulled back and raised his chin. “There are a lot of fish.”
“Yes there are.” I was tempted to add, because I was in a sour mood, but a lot of them are rotten.