The Seventh Button

By Ryan

I first met Jade while inspecting goods at a Brooklyn garment factory. She was wearing an acetate dress I designed last year and pinned an antique sewing needle brooch on her right shoulder—a souvenir from her grandmother’s fifty years working at a Parisian haute couture house, I later learned. “New York fashion is hidden in the fire escape,” she said, twirling a measuring tape bracelet on her left wrist, repurposed from an original tool from the 1947 Chanel atelier.

As we moved through the hidden showrooms of the garment district, Jade demonstrated the true value of being an Asian escort. She took me to see a deaf-mute old tailor, who used cigarette butts to burn holes in silk, which just happened to spell out the fashion trends of the season; in a basement in Chelsea, she knocked out a long and short code, and Iranian merchants took out radiation-proof fabrics woven from aerospace materials; in a Korean town steam room late at night, she taught me to distinguish the steam trails left by five buyers: "The diamond-shaped ones represent price cuts, and the spirals are ready to sign long-term contracts." Once she suddenly threw my sample book into the East River, but the next day she brought back a soaked booklet, and each page of the water stains formed a new print pattern.

On the last night on the Roosevelt Island cable car, Jade unbuttoned the seventh button of my shirt and sewed a note into it. It was not until three months later when I dry-cleaned it that I discovered that it was the longitude and latitude coordinates embroidered with gold thread. I followed the map and found an underground tailor shop, where the Ukrainian proprietress handed me a tuxedo with a smell of gunpowder: "The girl said, when someone shows up with this dress, tell him that I actually prefer the linen color you originally designed." Hidden in the lining of the clothes was a dried bluebell flower, which happened to be the first and last flowering period of the same plant as the one she pinned in my pocket under the Brooklyn Bridge.