‘Philosopher Kings’ by Brandon Taylor

Late October — rain in New York.

As was his habit, Noam arrived at the studio just after six in the morning. The antechamber was cold. He had not come in for a while because of a bad cough that had left him with a deep ache in his back and a bruise running down his right side. Today, the pain was obeying itself, and he could walk with an approximation of his formerly smooth gait. His orthopaedist had suggested a cane, but Noam, who had run track all throughout his school years, considered this a form of death. The world was a little dimmer now that he was better, as if recovering had permanently cost him some crucial inner reserve necessary for perceiving the full vividness of things.

They were settling the show for spring 2020.

The tall, broad window was dark with rain. The fabricators were standing and sitting on the raised steps and along the elevated platform of the window ledge. They were drinking their coffee and convening among themselves, but when he entered the stiff, chilly air of the atelier, they all looked at him with shining black eyes, and he felt for a moment that he had come into some foreboding scene of Russian Realism. The eerily tense idleness of Makovsky or Yaroshenko. Their whispering grew fractionally louder and then died away entirely, but they went on watching him. He stepped more fully into the room, and could then see, running through the dark of the room, a thin gold thread of light from the west workroom. It flickered in the air like some delicate, transient bit of magic.

His stepping forward triggered something in the women, and Una, the head fabricator, came forward. She was tall, exceptionally pale, and had something that might have once passed for sexual charisma but which now emanated as a resinous heat.

“You’re here, sir? Today?”

“Yes,” Noam answered.

“Does Mr Vadim know, sir? That you’re in today? We haven’t had word that you were joining us.”

Vadim had run the atelier for the last five years, since Noam had begged off, tired, but more than tired, empty of ideas. There was no one he trusted more than Vadim to steady the ship while Noam went in search of something, anything, to get it back. That old easiness in the hand. In the late 90s, Vadim had been his assistant, plucked from a summer internship at Parson’s for his quick eye and sharp instinct. He had a beautiful way with freehand drawing and had come with a brilliant mind for menswear and tailoring. And later, oh, he dazzled Noam with those first, beautiful coats for autumn 2007. How surprising they’d been, an oasis of structure and form amid the tumult and disarray, the lukewarm rehash of mischief from greater eras. Vadim. So young, he’d been then, with his thick lashes and boyish pout, tall but not lean, soft. Tender. Noam could still see the way the nape of his neck had flushed under the glow of those early compliments. Yet, now, he was being asked if Vadim knew that he was stepping into his own studio.

“Does Mr Vadim need to know my every move?”

“No, sir, of course not. It is your atelier. We just didn’t know. We might have prepared better, sir.”

Noam clenched his jaw at this. He felt challenged by Una. The other women’s dark eyes flashed on him as she spoke. Some of their faces turned as they whispered, momentarily caught under the faint gold shade of the workroom lights.

“It is my atelier, as you say,” he said. “I don’t have to explain myself.”

“No, sir. Of course not. Certainly not to us.”

“Certainly not,” he said.

The women stood there, shifting in massing shadow. He could not tell what of them was in the room with him and what of them belonged to that shadowy region beyond the dark glass.

Una’s face hardened and whitened.

“Mr Vadim’s just. He’s very particular, sir. I don’t want any trouble.”

“Well, Una, do as you are told and there won’t be any. I have no plans to interfere with your work.”

“Yes sir. As you say, sir. And how is your health?”

“I’m well,” he said. “Thank you, Una.”

“Of course, sir. Glad to hear it.”

The women with their dark faces and glinting eyes lingered near the raised steps. Looking down on the two of them. He felt watched. Observed. He did not like feeling as though his moves were being logged and reported.

“That’s all,” he said.

“Very good, sir.”

Una turned and ascended the steps to join the women. Noam could see then that they had stepped out of their slippers and had set their cups and glasses on the ledges of the steps. They stood there in their stockings with the prim white worker coats hanging stiff on their shoulders. These women, young and middle-aged, from France, from Italy, from Nebraska, from Connecticut. They belonged to that loose tribe descended from the local seamstress who had been taught European techniques and French terms. Looking out at him from the sharp cliffs of their eye sockets and from beneath the perch of their brows, gazing at him from some dark and remote corner of bourgeois intelligence.

He did not know what to say to them. There was a time when he might have known what to say. But now these women belonged to Vadim.

When Una had joined the other women, there was a clinking of glasses, saucers, the rustle of their clothes as they put back on their slippers and descended the steps. The women shuffled by him, their white coats and slippers murmuring as they whispered Good morning, sir. But though they acknowledged him with their words and though they passed by him, he had the terrible feeling that he could still see their reflections in the dark glass of the window, staring out at him. As they passed him, the whispering grew louder until it buzzed in his ears, and the number of women seemed to multiply. He felt hot in their shuffling, and he wanted to cry out, to say that there’d been some mistake, but then, the women were gone and he was alone in the wide, empty room.

He made clothes for the quiet hours and for the bright moments of transit that illuminated those quiet hours. A special dinner. A benefit. A party at a friend’s apartment. A ceremony. The opera. The ballet

Noam’s studio was on West 42nd Street in one of those offensively contemporary buildings that expressed a real American anxiety toward history, chosen simply because the developer had given him a discount for opting in early — though Noam concealed this fact and instead circulated a rumour that he occupied two floors of the building solely because it had become trendy to do so. The building had the hideous interior angles of modern American architecture — everything sharp, on a line, curiously angled. Yet Noam felt that the studio retained a shocking degree of human warmth with high, broad windows that soaked the wooden floors in rich light. The workrooms had long wooden tables that he had sourced from an old monastery in Normandy. He combated the contemporary with the historical: 17th-century chairs, 18th-century paintings and sculpture, rugs from the 16th century that had been carefully restored. Everything sourced from some other time, each carrying a long if mundane history. In fact, he preferred objects that had been owned by unremarkable people, things found in backwaters, left to moulder in the ruins of family homes long abandoned.

The women had shut both doors to either workroom, but beyond, he could make out the hum of their activity. The morning banter as they lifted away the tissue from the previous day’s work and inspected the seams they had left for their future selves. The sound of the machines warming up and throwing those first, uneasy stitches in bits of old scrap just to get a sense of what the day’s rhythm would be. Noam pressed his ear to the door of the west workroom and listened to the pedals going down, rising up, the way the women knew how to catch and hold, steady the heavy, driving needles. He could not hear what they were saying. They spoke in a register of whispers and clicks, snaps of the fingers and jotted notes. He crossed to the east workroom and listened to the muslin and the tissue and the pleats and the hiss of the thread being drawn up and through. Morning work.

He tried to forget the unsettling image of the women in the window gazing out at him. That moment when the women had seemed to double and triple around him, when it seemed that something terrible might happen to him. He climbed to the second floor of the atelier, where he found the offices empty and mute. Vadim was not in. He had the unseemly modern habit of arriving late in the afternoon, when all the garments had been made and prepped for his appraisal. By then, it was too late to fix anything. By then, the shape had matured and emerged from the imagination into something three-dimensional and solid. By then, bad ideas had the easy, unearned confidence of existence, and were therefore harder to refute. But if you could catch a bad idea, a lazy image, an ugly curve, before it emerged, then you could do something about it.

He had told Vadim this many times — be like Cronos, Ivan the Terrible, all those great eaters of disappointing children. But Vadim would laugh and say that there was nothing to worry about.

Noam was not so sure. He did not have the advantage of Vadim’s easy way with people or the world. For the last several weeks, Noam had been meaning to speak to Vadim about coming in earlier, but Vadim kept waving him off.

“Don’t worry, it will be fine — everything needing done is done. Please, relax.”

Just last week, Vadim had gently suggested that Noam didn’t need to come into the atelier so soon after getting better. That it made the fabricators anxious and it gave confused signals. After all, had Noam not given Vadim his complete trust?

Of course he had, yes, of course he had, but this was too much, being asked to stay away from the atelier he himself had built with his bare hands. Surely this was too much, this idea that Noam had nothing to offer except anxiety and lingering judgment? Vadim had smiled and said that it was alright, no one was telling him not to come, that he was simply sharing some thoughts passed to him from some of the fabricators.

How Noam hated that smile. Wolfish, calculating, holding back as much as it offered. A smile with no warmth and no kindness, a gesture of total fake humility and vulnerability, a stroke from some new, gestural vocabulary of the young that was both without precedent and also totally just the same old bullshit. Falseness.

He would have another word with Vadim when he arrived in the late afternoon to survey the work of the morning. He would take him by the elbow and stress again that there had been a way of doing things and this way was not what he preferred. It led to substandard work or worse, theoretical concepts. He hated abstraction in designs. Soft ideas. Gummy theories turned into vague notions that existed more in write-ups of shows than on the actual catwalk and even less in the practical wearing of the garments.

Above all, Noam’s atelier was practical. The garments were beautiful, well-made, designed to be worn, to carry a person through a season of life with all its many currents and strange events. He made clothes for the quiet hours and for the bright moments of transit that illuminated those quiet hours. A special dinner. An evening at home. A benefit. A party at a friend’s apartment. A ceremony. The opera. The ballet. Noam had always considered fit and form the highest aesthetic principles worth chasing. The line was everything. Elegance. His clothes were not demonstrative in their argument for the kind of life he wanted to dress people for. Rather, they were inward, contained.

Modernity had once meant a kind of sophisticated, principled engagement with one’s time. And now it meant a vulgar, lashing argument that had to end in tatters on the floor.

Mess and spectacle.

The upper floor of the studio was quiet except for the rain against the window. Empty except for Noam. The offices sat mute and dark. Yes, he would have a word with Vadim.

Around noon, Anouk called to say that her son had a high fever, and so she could not come into the studio for lunch after all.

“I would get a sitter,” she said, “but he’s made me promise to stay with him, and I feel that I should.”

“Of course,” Noam said. “Of course, darling, be with your boy, another time.”

“I was so looking forward to seeing you. I haven’t been to the studio in ages.”

“Yes, but it’s not going anywhere. Come next week, how about that?”

“Of course, yes, that sounds wonderful.”

There was a moment of silence on the phone after that when Noam could hear Anouk breathing down the line. He might have said something comforting to her, but of course he was disappointed that she would not be coming into the studio, and so had nothing to offer her to make her feel better.

“And how are you?” she asked. “Are you better? You must be if you’re in the studio.”

“I am well, darling. You know, very well. Please, go be with your boy.”

“Of course, alright.”

After the call, Noam gazed down at the grey streets and tried not to feel stung. There had been a time, many years ago, when Anouk and any of the other under-assistants would have done anything at all that he asked of them. A time when they would have cut off their own right hands to see his sketches in progress or to be consulted on a matter of line or seam or pattern. There had been a time when they might have given flesh and bone to see him lay pleats upon the paper dolls he made in the later stages of a design, watching with wide, bright eyes as though he were making toys for them. But that was over now. They did not have time for him. They had their own work and their own lives in which they were securely fastened and no longer had any use for symbols of paternal authority or for philosopher kings.

Now that his cadre of assistants, acolytes and former aides had set him aside, Noam parsed his sketches alone. For the first time in a long while, he had felt moved to work on something, at first just putting down some dark curves that suggested a form or the outline of a figure. And then draping drafting paper across these deep, black lines so that he could sketch in soft brushwork the light implications of a garment. Laying one set of strokes upon another, removing it to check, replacing, sketching again. Reaching for the pastel brush markers he favoured, the soft hiss of the fibres against the tissue. Working quietly and in his own way as the light deepened and darkened, grew more certain and then faded, sketching in his office, while below him the hum of the atelier under the marching orders of Vadim or the other lieutenants.

But now, looking over the sketches, he felt their incompleteness of vision. Their lack of weight or substance. This was the vague, gestural work that had come to signify his approach in recent years. He recognised in it the soft, diluted sight that had so characterised the work of his drawing masters in Florence and Naples when he had been learning his craft. He could remember looking at their sketches, all implication and innuendo, thinking that they lacked the strength, the vividness of the direct encounter with form. He had vowed to never make such drawings. Yet here they were laid out under him, secured at the corner by tiny silver binder clips and made into lightweight folios.

Now, looking over the sketches, he felt their incompleteness of vision. Their lack of weight or substance

It was still early, yet the day felt done. A yellow cab pulled up to the kerb below, and someone got out under a pale green umbrella. They went into his building. The cab pulled away, joined the idling dead waiting for the light to change and release them. Noam thought, somewhat ridiculously, that he could hear a distant banging of some door being thrown open. He lost sight of the cab. They all looked rather the same.

There was a knock at his door, and he turned to see Vadim standing there with a small plate in one hand and a demitasse in another.

“I thought you might be due for a refill.” Vadim set the plate and cup on the small table near the desk, knowing that Noam did not like food near his drawings. Then, he sat on the leather settee from Genoa that he had given Noam as a gift during the first year of running the atelier as a thank you for his vote of confidence. He had shut the door behind him, Noam noticed.

“So you’ve arrived.”

“Oh yes, I’ve been here a little while. I hear you gave the fabricators a scare this morning. They thought you were a ghost.”

Noam lifted the tea towel from the plate and saw that Vadim had brought him some figs and soft cheeses, a quarter of a warm baguette. A silver-handled cheese knife. The coffee was perfectly hot. He waved off Vadim’s comments.

“Have you given them some reason to think I’m a ghost? Spreading rumours of my demise?”

“Don’t even joke,” Vadim said. “I want you to live another sixty years at least.”

Noam laughed. The figs were exquisite.

“But didn’t we talk about this a couple weeks ago. You would take some more time before you came in. You aren’t well, Noam.”

“Well enough,” Noam said. “I am not a child. I do not need looking after.”

“No, but.” Vadim sighed. “Anouk called me.”

Ah. Here was her feverish child. Anouk and Vadim had always been close. They’d been in the same year at Parson’s. Lonely, angry, snarling and young, tired of their parents and their parents’ Old-World anxieties. They’d been so beautiful, the two of them. Last winter, before Noam got ill, Anouk had a beautiful show of watercolours in one of the Chelsea galleries. She painted with such delicate precision and with such dry pigment that it went on almost like graphite. Soft, powdery, strobed with light and filled with air. She’d made these enormous portraits of her son — Nigerian French, his mother’s large eyes and his father’s terrifically elastic expressiveness — and of her mother and her grandmother. The grandmother had died in the camps. The mother had died from ovarian cancer when Anouk was seven. Her father had remarried to a very wealthy woman from Marseille, and they’d lived in a wonderful apartment in Paris and in Milan. The portraits were of Anouk’s son and Anouk’s mother and grandmother. She’d painted things that she never saw, impossible things, impossible combinations of the people she loved. The show had been wonderful. The shapes still vibrated in his mind. He wished that he could erase them now that he felt betrayed by her.

“And what did Anouk say?”

“That you’re drawing again.”

“Old men have their hobbies,” Noam said.

“And she told me that she fucked up and told you about the spring show.”

“The trouble with loyalty is that you can’t be loyal to everyone.”

“Noam, spring 2020 is almost finalised.”

“It’s my show.”

“Of course. But we’ve done some real work here. And it’s almost done.”

“So you don’t need me. Just my name on the door.”

“We need you. This is not . . . this is not a war, Noam. It’s art. You’re one of the great artists of our time. It is an honour just to hold your pencil. Of course. But. Logistically. I mean. You haven’t. Wanted to be a part of the process in a long time. Just last year, you wanted nothing to do with the designs, not even when they were in fabrication.”

“Because you didn’t need me, did you?”

“That’s not fair, Noam. I called you every day. I showed up to your door and I brought sketches, I asked your opinion. You didn’t want to be consulted.”

“Who wants to be consulted for their own execution?’

Vadim laughed loudly. “Those shows got raves. We can’t keep the Rebecca dress in stock. The Florence coat is out the door five times an hour. We have more clients for fittings than we know what to do with. Everyone wants us now.”

“As I said. My execution. Congratulations on your ascendancy.”

Vadim leaned forward and put his chin in his hands and gazed at Noam boyishly. “May I see the new designs? It’s been a long time.”

“Don’t patronise me.”

Noam eased into a chair near the window.

“I’m not. I’d like to see what you’ve been doing.”

“So you can pretend to humour me? Consider my work for my own show?”

“Noam. I’m not your enemy. It’s your atelier. If you want to do the show, it’s yours. Of course it is.”

“And if I said yes, I do?”

Vadim shrugged. Noam could not read his expression.

“Look, if it pleases you.”

Love is just betrayal in slow motion’

Vadim stood tentatively. He crossed the room to the table and he slowly withdrew the sheaf of papers from the leather folio. He lay them down as though they were precious and turned the tissue paper, inspecting the layers of lines and light. Noam felt his stomach grow hot. Vadim pursed his lips, then made a low humming sound. He turned pensively through the garments. Extracted the next sheaf from the folio and inspected that too. The room felt warm, close. Noam could remember being in drawing class. The way the instructor’s hand would come to rest on his shoulder, following down to his elbow, his wrist, correcting tension, correcting posture and line, directing him to adjust himself so that the line would flow from the shoulder to the hand to the tip of the finger to the pencil and to the paper, so that the line was a thing moved from him into the outside world on one continuous bead. The line had to begin in you. The mark was just the end of a long, slow gesture that had begun somewhere deep, deep in the dark of your body.

But watching Vadim look over the drawings, he felt a perverse anger towards Anouk. It should have been her looking over them. Cooing approval or clicking her tongue at his mischief, encouraging him to go to Vadim. It should have been her, not Vadim, here looking at them now, before they were ready. And what had he expected? That after five years, he’d have something other than a revelation of his own inadequacy? He felt dumb. Stupid. The inchoate scribbles of an old man.

“These are stunning, Noam,” Vadim said. He looked at Noam with another of those inscrutable expressions of his. “They are so. Pure.”

“You mean simple? Naïve? Boring?”

“No,” Vadim said. “I mean pure. They are. Effortless. Clear. Just. Beautiful.”

“Vespers,” he said. “They are vespers. Nothing solid to them.”

Vadim took the folio in hand and brought it over to Noam. With the tip of his finger, he outlined the shape of the dress amid the soft, fluttering lines that Noam had sketched in silver and grey.

“No, here,” he said, “it’s beautiful what you’ve done. It reminds me of what I first loved in your clothes.”

“Oh, is that so?”

“Yes, here, look,” Vadim pointed to a loose, black sketch, a woman in profile, long coat, wine-dark, a flare about the shoulder, denoting openness, weight at the bottom. “It’s just the opposite of what people are doing now, with all these cutaways. Here is like, inwardness.”

Vadim’s eyes were bright, shining. He looked again like he cared about Noam’s thoughts.

“I think it is very beautiful, these sketches. These clothes.”

Noam took the folio from Vadim and folded it closed and set it aside on the desk. Vadim looked at him curiously as he did this.

“They were not ready to be shared,” Noam said. “But thank you for looking.”

“I’m just glad you’re drawing again. It’s wonderful.”

“Is it?” Noam asked. “It can’t be good news for you. Having an old man in the attic knocking around, scaring the fabricators.”

“Noam, if you want to take over again, then just say. What’s bad is confusing everyone. You show up, glare mysteriously. People wonder. They talk. They get confused.”

“I don’t want to do the spring show,” Noam said. “I have no intention of getting involved. It’s all yours.”

Vadim had enough tact not to sigh in relief, but Noam could see his eyes grow just a little brighter at this news. He nodded tightly. But then, he leaned over the desk and kissed Noam on the lips. The kiss was warm, affectionate, not without sexual heat.

Noam remembered the first time that they had kissed, New Years’ Eve, 1999, the end of an era, the end of the world. Vadim, nineteen, drunk on champagne for the first time, yelling at the top of his lungs on the rooftop of some art dealer in Tribeca. Noam holding his coat, watching Vadim’s broad shoulders expand with the effort. And then, how he’d turned, New York a beautiful blur behind him, leaning in, kissing, hungry, searching, looking for love and finding it in every wrong place, how deeply, how fully they’d kissed. And then, going home to Vadim’s small, cramped studio apartment and undressing in the dark, bumping into his cheap furniture, knocking over a mason jar, having sex on the futon, and then stepping on the broken glass in the grey morning light.

They were so far from that moment now. Kissing in his office. These many years after the fact, these two decades later. He felt the acuteness of the years between them more now than he had then, and he’d felt it plenty then, bleeding on Vadim’s mattress, trying to tweeze the glass out. There had been many more mornings and nights since then. Many, many more. But he thought of that first night now. Cold. Dark. High up on that rooftop, watching the millennium glide to an end and another begin. When Vadim had kissed him as though it was the thing he’d lived his whole life for.

“I’m not your enemy,” he said. “I love you.”

“Love is just betrayal in slow motion.”

Vadim laughed and kissed Noam again. Then he put his hand on the folio and looked at Noam quite seriously.

“These are very beautiful. It is good you are drawing again. It is good you are still with us. I was worried you wouldn’t get better.”

“It must — ”

Vadim took Noam by the shirt gently, but firmly and he held him close.

“Stop it,” he said. “Just stop it. You asked me to run this atelier. I said yes. You have to forgive me for saying yes, Noam.”

Noam felt dizzy at the suddenness of the gesture, and the jolt of heat running up his side. The pain was waking up again. He’d been doing so well.

“There’s nothing to forgive on that score,” Noam said.

“Then what is it? Why do you keep pushing me away? Why do you keep punishing me for doing what you’ve asked me to do?”

“If I forgave you, I’d have to forgive myself for getting old,” Noam said. “And I can’t do that. So please just bear it.”

Vadim released him, stepped away. He turned from Noam and took several deep breaths. Noam put his hand between Vadim’s shoulders. Could feel his warmth. The solidity of him. He drew Vadim into a hug and kissed his throat and his lips.

“Abide with me,” he said.

When Vadim looked up, there were tears in his eyes.

It was late evening. Vadim had convinced him to see the fabrications. His back was sore and his side hurt. His lungs burned and itched. He wanted to go home. It had been a tiring day. But he did want to see the moment when the paper dolls came to life. When they slipped those first rudimentary garments over the models and the clothes took their first steps.

Noam sat in his customary chair on the first floor, Vadim to his left. The under-assistants had arranged themselves behind the two of them, notebooks and pens at the ready. The fabricators were lined up in two rows on either side of Vadim and Noam. Vadim nodded to Una across the broad room, and she opened the east workroom door and the first model stalked out in the ghostly white muslin. The rest followed, a spectral sisterhood wearing their hypothetical clothes. Their heads were concealed by paper fencing masks with a delicate front mesh for breathing. Walking without music, just the soft swishing of the paper fabric, the lashing rain against the window. The lights were bright, unkind. Noam watched as Vadim’s vision emerged. The clothes were organic, loose, but there was still his trademark architectural touch. Everything had a sculptural air to it. He could understand how the argument moved from the skirt to the broad hips of the pants to the subtle flaring at the bottom of the blouses, the long gowns made of pinned sections that hitched over the floor, slithering like a snake.

When the last girl had come through the door, they all stood in a line at the top of the raised steps, the city behind them. It was a lovely assembly of garments, all very beautiful, but it lacked some core thing, some central idea, some final piece.

Vadim sighed. “It’s still not got it.”

“Yes, I think it needs something, but what?”

Vadim smiled at him wryly, then he nodded once more to Una, and the door of the west workroom opened, and out came a girl wearing a long, dark garment that began seemingly as a coat and then morphed into a gown. It was the garment from his drawing, Noam realised. The speed with which it had gone from something on tissue paper to this thing in front of him was startling. How strange to see it in front of him as it glided up the steps and joined its sisters.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh.”

We begin in white,’ Vadim was saying. ‘White and taupe. Grey. Rich wine colours. Wine dark. Yes, then black. We end in black’

The long, slender dark coat gave some note of contrast to the other garments. It was an inversion, not a wedding dress finale, but some gesture of grief or mourning. The end of something. But also some startling new terrain.

“We begin in white,” Vadim was saying, standing. “Yes, white and taupe. Grey. And. Rich wine colours. Wine dark. Yes, then black. We end in black.”

One of the under-assistants was hurriedly taking notes, jotting down Vadim’s murmurings as he moved from garment to garment, adjusting, hitching. Noam leaned back in the chair and watched. He was staring at his coat. Thinking about the women in the morning, when they’d stared at him as if from out of the region beyond the glass. Gazing at him from some deep, dark plane.

He stood up stiffly. And he rose up the steps and he saw that they had done the coat in a series of delicate, thin pleats. How strange this technique. He would never have thought of it. It gave the coat a textured, feather-like quality. He ran his fingers along the papery ribs through which he could feel the model’s muscles contracting. The coat was seamed together from pieces of black fabric on muslin. The dress form itself was impeccably made for being so quickly thrown together. He ran his hand up the hip and waist of the coat, admiring how much curve they’d found despite the pleating technique. How miraculous. He wondered when Vadim had realised that his coat had something to offer the collection. He wondered when in that brief exchange had it occurred to him to have this made. And how quickly the fabricators had worked. How diligently. How they had translated his line and gesture into measurements so precise that they’d been able to cut and assemble. But then, there were mistakes. Gaps. He could see the model’s flesh, her tender white skin. There, just above her waist, one of the pins had gone in too deep and pricked her. She was bleeding slowly into the garment. But she said nothing. Her face, like all the model’s faces, was concealed behind white capehood. She had an animal, raw smell, like fresh milk. But there was blood. He removed the pin, and when he looked up at her, her blue eye crawled across the gauze of the mask and he jerked his hand away, startled. The bloody pin dropped to the floor.

“Noam?” Vadim called.

Brandon Taylor

Brandon Taylor’s debut novel Real Life — which centres on a gay black biosciences student at a university in America’s Midwest — was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, the 2020 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize and the 2021 Young Lions Fiction Award. Taylor is also the author of the short-story collection Filthy Animals, which won the 2022 Story Prize and was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He was born in Alabama in 1989 and resides in New York City.

He stepped away from the model and joined Vadim further down the row, but the whole while, he thought he could feel the model’s eyes on him. Her breathing whispering through the muslin, carrying to him some message he could not decipher. He was afraid to look at her. Afraid that if he turned his head to glance, she would be gone, or worse, right up on him.

The sound of that breathing stayed with him even after Vadim called him a car and sent him home. It followed him up the elevator and into his apartment. It followed him into the shower and later into bed. Noam was lying on his back, his eyes closed, thinking of the dresses, thinking of Vadim, and all the night, issuing from this corner of his room or that, he could hear the rustle of the coat, the crackle of the breathing, the hitch and scratch of the segments coming free, something getting loose.

© Brandon Taylor

Brandon Taylor’s new novel ‘The Late Americans’ is due to be published in June