The Bucket List

by Georgia Clark

  That’s it.

  Clean Clothes is over.

  Vivian doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve: like me, it’s hidden in an inside pocket. So it’s been easy for me to think that failure, in the unlikely occurrence it could happen, is something she could handle—effortlessly, and without breaking stride. Yet another thing I was wrong about.

  The first few months I was working for Clean Clothes, I couldn’t believe that one day I could get paid to do it. It was easy and fun, planning a look for another girl in a faraway town who I always imagined would be so pleased to get my ideas. But they’re just strangers wanting free advice. The fact I feel this way is part of the problem. If I was still firing on all four cylinders, maybe we wouldn’t be in this position. I wish I could feel the way I used to. I wish I could fix all this for Vivian.

  “I’ll get the ratings up,” I say, more to myself than Cooper. “I’ll do it for her.”

  His eyes are soft with concern. In a way that isn’t awkward or lusty, he steps forward and gives me a hug. We hold each other. He feels strong and solid and like he really cares that I’m in this mess and he really hopes it works out okay. Before it lingers into something soft and uncertain, he lets me go.

  I keep my face neutral, but his absence hollows my chest, leaving me cold.

  28.

  * * *

  I create outfits until 8:00 a.m., fueled by guilt and love and cold determination. Then I drink two espressos and go into work, where I see seven clients back-to-back. By the end of the day I’m making as much sense as the Mad Hatter. I crash by 9:00 p.m., but set my alarm for 3:30 a.m., and am back at it when it’s still dark outside. This becomes my routine. Everything else is back-burnered. I cancel my drink with Bee.

  Rather than phoning the outfits in like I have been, I take more risks and am more diligent in putting together the selections. I work faster, figuring the longer the delay in getting the outfit after requesting it, the more ambivalent the user might feel, and thus a lower rating. I revisit some of my favorite blogs: Sustainably Chic, Leotie Lovely, My Green Closet. I trawl the spring looks of sustainable designers, making new folders of influences. For the art director’s assistant from Seattle, a collarless silk shirt, wide-leg pant, linen scarf, gold bar earrings, leather penny loafers. For the free spirit from Portland, floral-print maxi skirt, loose-fit V-neck cotton tee, denim d’orsay flats, hippie beads, canvas satchel. I try to stay on autopilot. But as soon as I let my mind off its leash, it jumps all over Cooper, and Mara, and being BRCA1. It gnaws at the knowledge that the fashion editor position is a better path than this. But its favorite toy of all is Elan.

  Elan does not call. Or text. I’m surprised. Dinner, and what happened after dinner, went well. Didn’t it? The weekend comes and goes. I stalk his Instagram. I don’t think he manages it himself; it’s more publicity than personal. On Monday night, a photo appears: Elan in a tux at a charity event for children’s cancer. On his arm, Coco Du Bellay, the it girl who walked his New York show. The caption simply reads: My muse . They are both glowering, haughty, carved from ice. They are untouchable.

  Perhaps I never had dinner with Elan, never had sex with him in the back of a white limousine. Perhaps it was all part of a particularly detailed stress-induced hallucination. Because the idea that one day, I might appear on Elan’s Instagram, dressed in couture, eyes low and lidded, seems as likely as my falling down a rabbit hole and ending up in Wonderland.

  * * * *

  Because I am weak, I leave my phone ringer on, even after I go to bed. I have just started dropping off into peaceful oblivion on Wednesday night when it pierces me awake.

  Elan Behzadi calling.

  I whip out my retainer and hurl it across the room. “Hi.”

  The tinkle of ice cubes in a glass. His voice, a low growl. “Come over.”

  My pulse spikes. I consider throwing off my blankets, zooming into a cab. But I’m exhausted. My head’s stuffy with sleep. “I’m in bed.”

  “It’s nine.”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “With what?”

  I elbow my way up, and switch on my bedside light. “Clean Clothes.”

  A blink-long pause. “Chinese investor?”

  “Fell through.”

  “Pity.” I picture him at home in the West Village, spread out on a sofa. Glass of whiskey in one hand, his cock in the other. “Dinner. Tomorrow.”

  Yes. But: “I can’t.”

  “If you don’t want to see me, why’d you pick up the phone?”

  “I do.” I rub my face. “It’s complicated.”

  “Friday, then. C’mon. You can’t work all the time. I need to see you.”

  I smile, pressing the phone to my cheek. “You do?”

  “You’re in my head.” I hear him sip and swallow. Now his voice is raspy, close. “I want to fuck you in an alleyway. Your legs around my waist.”

  I’m right. He’s horny. “That’s really romantic, Elan,” I say sarcastically, but the image floods me with heat. My body, while currently exhausted, is interested in this. After being so hard on it all week, I feel bad denying it what it so clearly wants.

  “I don’t do romance, darling. I’m sending a car. Friday at eight.”

  “Seven,” I say. “I swear, I’ll be asleep by nine.”

  “Seven thirty,” he says. “And you won’t sleep all night.”

  “But I’m not—”

  He’s already hung up.

  * * * *

  On Friday, a black town car pulls up outside my apartment at 7:45 p.m. I’m expecting it to take me over the Williamsburg Bridge, into downtown Manhattan, but we head north, through Greenpoint, into Queens.

  I’m too zonked to guess where we’re going or plan my opening lines. I managed to sneak a catnap this afternoon in an empty conference room: being able to sleep rough has always been a gift of mine. I’m wearing a long floaty skirt in a pretty rose pink and a soft white button-down, rolled at the sleeves, open at the neck. Striped black-and-white flats; hair in a loose ballerina bun; simple, glowy makeup. It’s casual, but you can make out the shape of my legs through the skirt.

  I’ve never had sex in public, which is why it was on my bucket list. This is my fantasy, but tonight it might also be Elan’s.

  I don’t do romance, darling.

  My generation isn’t romantic, not in my experience. Red roses, grand gestures, and candlelit dinners are clichés and bourgeois, as relevant to romance as high interest accounts are to happiness. Everything our parents told us was good is bad: marrying young, the penal system, Woody Allen, almond milk.

  But isn’t hiring a limo romantic? Isn’t ferrying me to an unknown location for dinner romantic? It is to me.

  We’re in Flushing, referred to by some as “the Chinese Manhattan.” It has the look and feel of what I assume an Asian city is like. In the three or so years I’ve lived in New York, I’ve only been a handful of times: a birthday dinner, a bad date. The car stops in front of a busy Chinese restaurant called Golden Century.

  Inside, a crowd of people are waiting for tables—locals, students, hipsters, tourists. Low ceilings, shouted conversations, sizzling pork, chili oil. Unlike most of the old-school places on this block, the interiors are modern. Banksy-style graffiti on fresh white walls, comfortable booths. Framed New York Times and Wall Street Journal reviews hang next to a signed picture of Lady Gaga, standing where I am now. I recognize the restaurant name: it’s a chainlet in the city. This is the original outpost.

  But Elan isn’t here.

  He’s sent me here as a joke; a lesson? He thinks I’m sheltered, vanilla, too white—

  There he is. By the kitchen, talking animatedly with a Chinese man in a Bart Simpson T-shirt. He’s in a loose black linen button-down, faded black jeans, white slip-on sneakers.

  I relax and tense at the same time, the push-pull of relief and anticipation.

  I am hungry.

  He catches my eye and waves me over.

  Bart Simpson
disappears out the back. I follow Elan to an empty booth in the far-right corner, the only free table in the joint. Padded vinyl seats and a variety of dangerous-looking chilis in squat metal pots. We slide in together. Our knees bump under the tabletop. I feel it like static shock. I am the most alert I’ve been, perhaps ever.

  He says, “You made it.”

  “I’m very good at getting into cars.”

  A flicker of a smile. We’re warming up.

  His eyes move unabashedly around my face and dip into my shirt, unbuttoned enough to allow a peek of black lace bra. The sight of it seems to relax him. He props his chin onto the heel of his hand. “I’m happy to see you. There’s something about you that’s very comforting.”

  The fact I let you see my underwear. That’s gotta be pretty comforting.

  “You feel familiar to me,” he continues. “Why is that?”

  Because you date women in their twenties? But even as insecurity arises, I admit there’s something in this man that feels familiar to me, too. Even if he doesn’t mean it, or is just projecting something else entirely, there is something in Elan Behzadi that I am drawn to in a subconscious, bone-deep way. I just don’t know what exactly that is. Yet. “I don’t know,” I reply, toying with the chili pot. “But you should be careful.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re two minutes in and you’re already sounding dangerously romantic.”

  He snorts. I can’t tell if he’s acknowledging or dismissing this. Two Tsingtao beers appear on our table.

  Elan lifts his. “TGIF, eh?”

  I laugh, and tap my bottle to his. The beer is cold and hoppy, conjuring BBQs, rooftops, flip-flops on hot concrete.

  Summer is coming.

  I say the first thing that comes into my head. “What are we doing here?”

  “This,” Elan says, “is the best Chinese food in New York City. Northwestern Chinese, different from what you’re used to. Assuming you had ethnic food in Buntley, Illinois.”

  “We didn’t,” I say. “But I never told you my hometown.”

  His face cracks. He glances away, embarrassed.

  I almost gasp. “Have you been googling me?”

  “Have you googled me?” he shoots back, defensive.

  “Of course,” I exclaim. “Of course I have.”

  He takes a long sip of beer, and then another. “So much information these days,” he mutters. “It’s hard to resist.”

  I am thrilled. The image of him scrolling through my Instagram, my Hoffman House bio, even the silly articles I’d written for various pop culture sites that paid a total of zilch, is the single most encouraging development of whatever-this-is, and that includes the fact he’s seen me naked. I don’t even list my hometown in most of what’s online, starting my origin story closer to college. He would’ve had to work to find that out.

  He’s curious about me.

  I’m on his mind.

  Something anxious inside me releases. I sit back and take a long, satisfied pull of my beer.

  “You look like the cat that swallowed the canary,” he says.

  Resisting the instinct to make a crude comment about swallowing, I ask, “How did you find this place?”

  “I used to live around here. It was my local.”

  “You used to live in Flushing?”

  He nods. “When I first moved to New York, a million years ago. The owner—Robbie, the guy I was talking to—he opened this place the same year I started my own label. We were dead broke together. I ate here every other night and paid him in clothes.”

  So cool. “How old were you when you moved here?”

  He arches an eyebrow. “I thought you googled me.”

  “I was mostly looking at pictures,” I half lie. There’s not a lot of information available about Elan’s past prior to coming to America.

  He chuckles. “Twenty-two.”

  That’s how old I was. It’s strange to think about someone’s younger self, the many paper dolls layered over an individual that make them complete. I want to pluck out Elan at twenty-two, see how we measure up.

  “What were you doing before you came here?” How much of our journeys overlap?

  He glances around the restaurant. “I, ah, played football. Well, soccer to you.”

  “Right, of course.” I assume he’s joking. He’s not. “Do you mean, professionally?”

  After a moment, he nods. A suggestion of tension in his shoulders. “Yeah.”

  “A national team?”

  He rubs the day-old stubble on his jaw. “Yeah, U-Twenty-Three. The national under-twenty-three football team, in Iran.”

  Elan as former professional athlete is not something I (a) expected or (b) found anywhere online. How does a young Middle Eastern soccer player become a leading US fashion designer? Or more to the point, why?

  Before I decide which thread to pull, Robbie arrives with our food. Hand-ripped biang biang noodles seared in hot oil topped with stewed pork, cumin-spiked lamb burgers stuffed with hot peppers and pickled jalapeño, generously filled spicy-sour lamb dumplings topped with cilantro, crunchy cucumber tossed in black vinegar and garlic. Food from the city of Xi’an, known as the first capital of China, starting point of the famous Silk Road, hence the emphasis on Middle Eastern spices. Robbie grins at me. “I hope you like spicy.”

  “I like everything.” Not entirely true. I don’t generally eat lamb, or any baby animal. It feels cruel, but it seems rude not to try the food the owner, Elan’s old friend, hand-delivered to us.

  We gorge. It’s nothing like the Americanized Chinese food I’m used to. Everything is fiery, aromatic, rich with spice, slick with chili oil. The noodles are the best: wide and soft and chewy. I can’t stop putting them in my mouth. It’s a decadent theatrical degustation. We moan and roll our eyes back: Try this. This is so good. Our lips stain crimson with chili oil.

  When we can’t eat any more, we slump back, comatose. My mouth burns. My blood sings.

  Unlikely we’ll be fucking in an alleyway now.

  Robbie appears back at our table, smiling. “Well?”

  “Xièxiè n˘l, w˘o de l˘ao péngy˘ou,” Elan says. “M˘ei yˉlcì dˉou m˘eiwèi.”

  Robbie’s smile broadens and breaks into laughter. “Sorry, man.” He giggles. “Your Mandarin is still shit.”

  “Hey, shut up.” Elan swats at him. “I’m trying to impress the girl.”

  I press my lips together to keep from grinning like a carnival clown.

  There’s no check. Elan tells Robbie to expect something in the mail. By the still-crowded doorway, the two men pound each other on the back. A table of kids my age nudge each other. “Who?” one of the guys asks.

  “Elan Behzadi,” the girls whisper in unison.

  Pride inflates me like a balloon. He holds the door open for me. I feel the girls’ gaze on my back as we leave together.

  Elan knows a bar a short walk away. Am I up for a drink?

  I’m up for anything.

  We walk side by side, past fruit and vegetable stalls, and vendors selling Chinese-language newspapers. The air is a mix of diesel fuel and sizzling duck. I ask him about living in Flushing, what it was like twenty years ago. He tells me about his first roommates, a vegan nudist from California, two students from Beijing obsessed with Baywatch. His first studio above a laundromat that was too humid and smelled like detergent. Days spent studying, nights spent cutting cloth, dreaming, creating. He packed his only suitcase full of samples and took it on the subway to show buyers. I’m a quiet detective, gathering each piece to complete a picture. The specific nature of fortune seeking fascinates me. I can relate. The more I uncover, the more I have to learn. But I have staying power. I’m committed.

  Black Cake is a small, cozy bar that looks old but is new. Edison light bulbs, no TVs. A girl with a cloud of seventies frizz plays dominoes with a lanky boy sporting a curled mustache. We take two stools at the end of the bar and order whiskies.

  He asks, “So what happened with the
Chinese investor?”

  “Zhu?” I’m surprised he brought it up. “He took a look under the hood, didn’t like what he saw.”

  “Which was?”

  I smile, charmed by his interest. “We have good user acquisition but bad sales conversions.”

  “Why?”

  “Truthfully, most teenage girls can’t afford fifty-dollar T-shirts. Even if they want to buy ethical, they can’t.”

  “Interesting.” He swirls his whiskey.

  “Why do you find that interesting?” I ask teasingly.

  “It might be something I’d like to get involved in.” He says this casually, like he’s talking about checking out a restaurant I recommended.

  In the far reaches of my brain, a soft alarm sounds. I ignore it. “What do you mean?”

  In a quiet, unhurried way, he tells me how he looked up Vivian Chang: quite a résumé, knows what she’s doing. He read the articles in Fast Company and Forbes when she first launched the app last year. He thinks it has potential. Do I have it, on my phone?

  It’s a little buggy, because we no longer have a developer, but it works. He asks where I source the clothes from, questions user base, popularity. Before I know what’s happening, I’m pitching, using all Vivian’s best lines: Disrupting a multibillion-dollar industry. Fashion that doesn’t cost the earth.

  “Do you like it?” he asks. “Do you believe in it?”

  I imagine Vivian sitting behind him, mouthing what she says about all investors: Tell him what he wants to hear. “I do,” I say, and it’s not a lie. The enormity of what is happening right now comes into full focus like a tsunami on the horizon. “What kind of involvement are we talking about?” I ask. “Investment?”

  “Maybe,” he says. “Or maybe as an adviser on your board of directors.”

  Elan Behzadi, familiar to every industry insider and fashion fan, as influencer. That changes everything. That’s even better than money.

  “Why?” I exhale. “For me?”

  His lips twitch into a smile, not unkindly. “I’m a businessman, Lacey. It sounds like a good idea.” He edges closer. “And you’re someone I want to get into bed with.”