Christopher Locke

Christopher Locke

Still Lives With Green Dress

The throng of beautiful people decorated in Prada bags and Thom Browne blazers didn’t notice the air had cooled. But once the light surrounding the Los Angeles hills dipped into muted grays, and the temperature collapsed into the 60s, Bill Wenz herded his guests back through the sliding glass doors.

After a bit of cajoling and bright laughter, the caterers shooing themselves back into the kitchen, Bill rounded everyone into a manageable bunch: filmmakers, artists, real estate addicts, and miserable divorcees. Bill stepped up onto the marble hearth and slightly grimaced; an MCL injury he’s ignored for years. He raised his glass high. Others followed suit. Bill looked to his maid Marie and she cut the music.

“Um, well, I’m not so good with speeches,” he said. Polite chuckles: Bill was a speech writer for the governor. “So I’ll keep this brief.”

And then Bill gave one of his very best speeches. The kind a doting father gives to his only daughter. The kind that makes others wish it was recited to them. And though it was thoroughly rehearsed, the speech was imbued with the magic feel of spontaneity.

Looking at Jill and her new wife Katrin as he spoke, Bill felt that the only thing missing was Jill’s mother, Dorian—dead now five years from breast cancer. When he came to the end of what he had to say, his breath settled like a feather and not a single body stirred.

“To Jill and Katrin,” Bill said, and he raised his glass higher.

The guests applauded and cheered. The florist Bill had been sleeping with, Brooke, put a monogrammed napkin to the corner of her left eye and dabbed, her mouth a perfect ‘O’.

“Hear, hear,” the Argentinian phlebologist barked to Bill’s left. Bill couldn’t stand him. Or his wife. But Bill served with them on the board of the California Arts Council, so that was that.

Jill beamed, sensing this was the moment her life would finally begin. Her long red hair twisted in a braid down the back of her green organza dress. Katrin held Jill’s hand and smiled and waved quickly, then ran her fingers through her dark bob cut.

Jill was not good at public speaking, and as the daughter of a speech writer the irony was not lost on her. Before she addressed everyone, she cleared her throat; the green silk of her dress looked almost chartreuse in the light. Katrin worried the guests might think appropriation due to the antique, far eastern style of what Jill wore, the way its stitching flickered with tiny songbirds throughout.

“I don’t want to be cancelled before I’ve even had the chance to start my career,” she told Jill as they were getting ready earlier. Jill laughed and threw a pillow at her, told her not to jinx everything.

But the dress did have an exotic charm, a kind of 1950s Vietnam postcolonial feel, like Jill just stepped from a Graham Greene novel with incense rising through her hair, a wry smile on her lips before she brings the protagonist to ruin.

As Jill spoke, she realized she did not sound as formal and stiff as she feared; she never felt so natural in front of so many. Everyone was held by a combination of her lilting voice and humble words.

When Jill finished everyone cheered once more. Bill looked to his maid and she restarted the music. More bottles of Veuve Cliquot were popped and everyone drank their fill. Later, the Argentinian phlebologist mercifully left without saying a word and the florist Brooke said she changed her mind and didn’t want to spend the night. Bill was demure and did not protest and Brooke went home wondering if she’d made the right decision.

Jill and Katrin left before any of that, hugging and re-hugging Bill in the cul-de-sac. Bill’s cheeks were wet, and Jill never liked when he cried—it reminded her of her mother. Afterward, back at their hotel on Wilshire, the couple clamored into their room laughing and a little drunk, and realized they forgot to close the curtains; their windows captured every gaudy detail of L.A. at midnight. It was as artificial as it was breathtaking.

Katrin decided to raid the minibar and Jill closed the drapes with the remote by the bed. Jill then peeled her dress off her shoulders and shimmied it down past her hips to her ankles; she kicked the dress over the settee and turned to Katrin. Katrin smiled and finished her Grey Goose, and then slowly, firmly, pulled Jill down into the sheets which were also made of silk. They would check out the following afternoon and forget the dress entirely and Jill would think on the flight home that maybe they could get the hotel to ship it to them if it wasn’t too expensive and Katrin would tell Jill she worried too much and didn’t she want a Bloody Mary?

Housekeeping discovered the dress and Isabella said she would deliver it to lost and found but never did, instead hiding it in her work bag during a meal break and bringing it home to her 4-year-old daughter Jasmine, who immediately made it her favorite play dress and wore it every day for almost two weeks until finally Isabella had to take it by force so she could wash the peanut butter and grape juice and other crud from it and Jasmine cried saying her mom would rinse all the magic out. But Isabella tugged harder and said she didn’t care because no daughter of hers was going to play in filthy clothes. Isabella didn’t know the wash rules regarding fancy dresses and tossed it in with the lights, hoping for the best. Later, when she extracted it from the machine, Isabella shook it twice and held it ruined at eye level. She frowned and hid it in the cupboard above the Maytag, hoping Jasmine would forget she ever had it.

It was not the kind of ignoble end that Chu Hua imagined when she originally harvested the silk, everyday dunking thousands of cocoons into long troughs of boiling water to remove the outer gum before extraction was possible; she pictured Lady Gaga or Beyonce forever lounging in the garments made with the silk she provided. Chu Hua worked 11 hours a day at that new factory on the Yangtze River, stirring the cocoons into a thick slurry as she pulled and separated them, lifted them steaming into the light. The air smelled primal, like breath and concrete.

Chu Hua used to feed the silkworms mulberry leaves and that was a job she loved the most; it was so peaceful. Now that job was automated, and her hands were blotched in burns and scars from the endless boiling water. But she didn’t have time to think about that. Only later, as she sat scrolling on her phone during break, smoking and reading new posts on WeChat did she feel most herself.

Then the long bus ride home to her two-room apartment where she’d first check on her father, in bed and slowly dying of a disease the doctors couldn’t identify, only that it was killing him. Chu Hua liked to hum as she prepared dinner for them both and this was her father’s favorite part of the day—he would listen from his bed and smile at the ceiling.

On Sundays, before her father was awake, Chu Hua liked to read magazines that displayed colorful photos of Paris, London, New York. But her favorites were ones of Los Angeles: all that money and fame and California heat. “I’m going to go there one day,” she said to her friend Ai at work during a break.

“Oh, I’m sure,” her friend countered. “You and your crippled father will be in all the movies, won’t you?”

The following Sunday, as her father woke spitting blood into a handkerchief he kept secret under his pillow, Chu Hua cut out a picture of the Hollywood Hills from one of her magazines and drew a red heart in the middle. She taped it to a cabinet over the kitchen stove. It stayed up that day and the following night, through the brisk weeks of winter and then into spring. It stayed up even after her father died unannounced one Tuesday morning. And then it stayed up the next day too, after Chu Hua woke up alone for the first time in her life.