modern romantic

[strains caught from the Princeton art gallery and a friend combine to form this strange hybrid.]

“Orange is the strangest color,” Suzanne tells her cinema class. They just watched Amelie. “Any other color has a ton of meanings attached to it. Orange, there’s nothing. Nothing. You make orange’s meaning yourself.”

Suzanne designs clothes. She studies at a rural campus, where she thought she would learn to ballroom dance and ride horses, but all she does is draw and paint and sew. She waits, absently, for something to distract her. Nothing does. Her latest line, formal wear for men and women, has left every last one of her classmates in awe of her artistic eye.

“Flesh and Blood.” Her garments come in silk and linen and seersucker, neutrals and deep crimson and burnt orange. The woman who models her silver-and-red dress wears dark red lipstick and glistening white high heels when she walks the runway. She has broad hips and dark hair, like Suzanne herself.

“When he wrote ‘I’m waiting for an orange-colored day,’ it paints a romantic picture only because we know it’s a love letter,” she elaborates to a friend after class. “Orange isn’t really romantic. A red day, a violet day – those are romantic.”

Her friend, whose name is Sophie, nods thoughtfully, and she waves as the two part ways. Sophie is headed to an English class. Suzanne is meeting with her academic advisor, who also happens to be her fashion drawing professor.

Suzanne’s advisor goes by Ms. Schön. (“Shane,” they pronounce it, but Ms. Schön is German, and she rounds her lips for the umlaut-o. Suzanne’s English- and French-trained tongue has no hope of catching on.) Ms. Schön has been making phone calls to New York on Suzanne’s behalf. Her student’s skill has come as a shock, albeit a welcome one. Ms. Schön regularly loses students like Suzanne to schools in cities, schools abroad.

Suzanne is planning a semester in Paris, and another semester in New York, with Ms. Schön’s grudging acceptance. There was no convincing Suzanne otherwise. Her capacity to plan appalls her roommate, whose name is Michele, and who has no interest in fashion design. Michele studies computer science and plays Dungeons & Dragons, and Suzanne will not miss her in New York and Paris. Michele complains at the visits from beautiful, thin women, cannot stand the sound of taut measuring tape snapping, and does not want to turn her light out at 10 PM so Suzanne can turn in early.

She leaves the meeting satisfied that all her plans are well in place. Suzanne likes the feeling of knowing where she’s headed. A pretty vocal line lodges itself in her head as she ascends the stairs to her dorm room on the fourth floor. Michele is not there; she’s implementing a program in C++ with two boys. The boys cannot believe their good fortune, for, like all computer science majors, they never expected to meet a girl in their line of work. Her quick mind does not intimidate them: it fascinates them. Michele gets a kick out of flirting with both boys and watching their nervous reactions.

Suzanne does not know what Michele is up to and she does not care.

People at college bore Suzanne. This, she has realized, is why she focuses so intently upon her designs – why she dreams so vividly, in such colors and shapes. College students study and talk and fool around and get drunk, but they hardly seem to live. Life does not happen around the ivory tower, Suzanne knows. Life happens elsewhere, so elsewhere she will go.

She pulls a cream-colored halter top onto her dress form. Across its shoulders she lays a scarf the color of fox fur.

In their meeting last week, Ms. Schön asked:

“Why these colors, Suzanne?”

Suzanne glanced off to the side, flipping her bangs from her face with a jerk of her pale neck. She smiled with painted lips. “My old school colors,” she said, “mixed up a little.”

“Sehr charmant,” Ms. Schön said. Suzanne had not lied, not really: silver and red are her old school colors. She just hadn’t thought of that as she planned her palette.

Her mind had been in Paris, where her family had vacationed the summer before her freshman year. Suzanne has long planned to write that summer down, and she has finally allotted a few moments in which to do so. She will write it tonight, between study and sleep. Now, as she wraps a silk skirt around the waist of her dress form, she remembers the translucent white of a soaked umbrella, spotted from the tiny terrace of her hotel room. She remembers a hand on her waist, drawing her through burnt orange curtains. Guided by that hand, Suzanne gladly retired from the drumming of rain on cold streets. She fell asleep to the strumming of deep red heartstrings, and, until morning, she dreamt of the runway.