Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire

by Paula Guran

  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, halfexpecting 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 th
e 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.

  Men were watching her. She could tell, she could always tell. Their gazes fell on her and warmed the skin where they touched her.

  Hot Eyes, Cold Eyes

  Lawrence Block

  Some days were easy. She would go to work and return home with
out once feeling the invasion of men’s eyes. She might take her lunch and eat it in the park. She might stop on the way home at the library for a book, at the deli for a barbecued chicken, at the cleaner’s, at the drugstore. On those days she could move coolly and crisply through space and time, untouched by the stares of men.

  Doubtless they looked at her on those days, as on the more difficult days. She was the sort men looked at, and she had learned that early on—when her legs first began to lengthen and take shape, when her breasts began to bud. Later, as the legs grew longer and the breasts fuller, and as her face lost its youthful plumpness and was sculpted by time into beauty, the stares increased. She was attractive, she was beautiful, she was—curious phrase—easy on the eyes. So men looked at her, and on the easy days she didn’t seem to notice, didn’t let their rude stares penetrate the invisible shield that guarded her.

  But this was not one of those days.

  It started in the morning. She was waiting for the bus when she first felt the heat of a man’s eyes upon her. At first she willed herself to ignore the feeling, wished the bus would come and whisk her away from it, but the bus did not come and she could not ignore what she felt and, inevitably, she turned from the street to look at the source of the feeling.