Everything Changes

person. “What?” she says self-consciously. “Do I have something in my teeth?”
    “No,” I say. “It’s just, you look very pretty today.”
    She breaks into a full, surprised smile. “You’re just saying that because it’s true,” she says, blushing.
    My phone rings. I let it go to voice mail. “You’re screening?” she asks, raising her eyebrows. Screening is the universal marker of an embattled middleman.
    “I’m just not in the mood today.”
    Tamara grabs my arm and steers me toward the door. “You need Bloomingdale’s,” she declares.

    Tamara tears expertly through the labyrinth of racks in the evening wear department at Bloomingdale’s, pulling dresses off and folding them over her arm, handing them to me when her pile threatens to become unmanageable, all the while insisting that the odds are still in my favor. “It could be anything,” she says. “A kidney stone, a muscle tear, or a million other things that mean nothing.”
    Although she’s shed it for the most part, the trained ear can still occasionally pick up the last vestiges of Tamara’s suburban New Jersey accent, the softer
r
’s and stretched vowels betraying an adolescence of food courts, big hair, and Bon Jovi albums. The accent becomes more pronounced whenever she’s speaking forcefully, whether in anger or, as is now the case, stern, maternal tones, and I always take a secret pleasure in hearing the unpolished syllables roll off her tongue, a vocal intimacy to which few are privy.
    “I know,” I say.
    “Just don’t jump to conclusions,” she says. “You’ll make yourself crazy.”
    “I just can’t shake this feeling that it might be something serious. Things have been going too well for me lately. I feel like I have some bad karma headed my way.”
    Tamara frowns at me as she leads me toward the dressing rooms. “That’s a pretty dire outlook on life,” she says. “What’s the point in working to be happy if you’re going to be constantly looking over your shoulder, wondering when it’s time to pay the bill?”
    “What are we shopping for?” I ask her through the dressing room door, trying not to think about what she looks like slipping in and out of dresses on the other side.
    “A dress for your thing.”
    “What thing?”
    The door swings open and she steps out, making minor adjustments to a snug black cocktail dress. “Your engagement party? This Saturday?”
    “Oh,” I say. “Right.”
    “You forgot your own engagement party?”
    “Just for a second.”
    She looks at me inquisitively, seems about to say something, and then flashes a wry grin. “She’s a lucky girl, Zack.”
    She steps back into the changing room and within seconds the dress is flung half over the door. What technique does she employ, I wonder, that enables her to doff it so quickly? “Come in and zip me,” she says.
    Christ.
    I step into the stall and she turns her back to me, staring critically at her dress in the mirror. When I pull on the zipper, the dress moves ever so slightly back, giving me an accidental view of the spot where her spine descends into her backside, and I am afforded an inadvertent glimpse of the twin uppermost curves of her bottom, just below the waistband of her thong. As I move the zipper up past the creamy expanse of her back and the soft curves of her scapulae, I can feel my hand starting to tremble. When I’m done, I look up to find her staring back at me from the mirror, a strange expression on her face. We stand like that for a few seconds, daring each other’s reflection, and then she turns around to face me. “So,” she says, banishing the moment with her bright tone. “What do you think? A little too slutty?”
    I step back and affect a critical pose. “Just slutty enough, I should think.”
    “Just slutty enough,” she repeats delightedly. “That’s exactly the look I was going for.”
    It’s close to noon when she’s done shopping. We step out of the store into midtown, a cold October wind battering our cheeks as we walk downtown, toward my office. The sidewalks are teeming with the professional lunch crowd racing to and from lunches, grimly purposeful, looking up only to invoke their right of way against turning cabs at crosswalks. “Listen,” Tamara says, looking at her watch. “I have to get home. Celia’s babysitting, and I told her I’d be home by twelve.”
    “Where are you parked?”
    “Around the corner from your office.”
    “You’re going to be