Red Dress

She wanted a new dress for the Hanley dinner thing that she had been so eagerly looking forward to and talking about so much, and she had specifically said it should be red. It was very important that the dress be red, a point made clear to Mitchell by the particular way she had laughed after saying it, that it should be red, with her eyes slanting up toward the ceiling, and then she had added that it should also be slinky. She wanted a slinky red dress that would enable her to swish around at the up-market gathering and engage in scintillating conversation with the people she spoke so reverentially about, the current inhabitants of the top level of her social hierarchy, a forbidding structure he pictured as something like the new steel and glass building on the west side in which Martha Stewart had purchased an apartment just before going to jail. So what really mattered on that particular afternoon was that she should get a slinky red dress, because she was the woman he was supposed to be involved with—even though she had dragged him to Atlantic City, a place he’d sworn never to visit again, as recently as last Saturday—and was therefore supposed to indulge, and it was the thing she most wanted, so after a quick dinner of cold leftovers they drove to the mall to look for and to buy it.

Mitch maneuvered the car like an old boat through a sea of other cars while she explained how it was such a great opportunity to have been invited. "They can get you into Palmcrest," she said as they drifted down the entrance ramp, clearly wanting to make sure he would make the most of it and not blow it for her. “You don’t have to make any nasty remarks about golf,” she said. “Movies, you can talk about that.”

"Movies," he repeated bitterly as he guided the enormous car gently into a tight mooring, appalled at her absurd prompting. “Right.” Slamming the driver door, he stood watching her for a moment as she strode purposefully away from him and across the lot toward the big store. He decided to get back in the car and just wait for her, to get back in the car and drive off, to get back in the car, turn on the radio and set it back to the station he liked, but then he turned and ran after her, thrusting the keys into his pants pocket. He caught up with her just inside the entrance, where a group of mannequins was set out to greet them, like fellow shoppers. She made a couple of turns this way and that and then mentioned something about "night shadow" as she vanished into the cosmetics department. Pursuing her through a labyrinth of mirrored aisles, he found himself in an open area with an overhead balcony where the perfumed air was particularly intoxicating. Some male mannequins were set up on the balcony and were looking down over the railing into the cosmetics area where he stood wondering which way to turn. They looked like they were searching for their wives.