An Innocent Fashion

by R. J. Hernández

  She was glancing once more into the folder at my résumé—out of boredom, perhaps, or a renewed sense of duty—and chewing her gum with slow deliberation, each bulge of her jawline like the agonizing crank of a medieval torture device.

  “I want more than anything to work here,” I ventured, suddenly changing my approach. It was now or never; if she wasn’t swayed by my background or my résumé, then my only hope was to impress upon Sabrina the sheer intensity of my passion. “Everyone I know from school—they’re all off to law school, consulting firms. They think they’re going to help the world, and they are, I guess, but to me—beauty is more important than all those things. When people are sad, lonely—they don’t look to their lawyers or consultants.” I pointed to an issue of Régine that was laid out neatly on the cream coffee table. “They look to art, fashion—they escape into pictures. Working here, making the world beautiful, more bearable for those people—it’s my dream.”

  The effect of this appeal was a momentary pause, then the completion of Sabrina’s transformation into a smoldering piece of dry ice. “When you refer to beauty,” she replied dully at last, “you mean our Beauty section? Like makeup, and skincare?”

  I let out a little breath—the gasp of a little part of me, dying. My voice almost cracked, “Yes, like skincare,” just to save us both the trouble, but this seemed like an awful offense to the most sacred things in my life. “Not like beauty products. . . .” I croaked. “Like—I don’t know . . . beauty. It’s so much bigger than makeup—bigger than fashion.”

  “Bigger than fashion . . . ?” Disapproval decorated every syllable. “Then what are you doing at Régine?”

  “I—I want to be a fashion editor,” I replied, as the desperateness of my situation set in. “I just—I have so many ideas, so many worlds in my head. The only thing I want is to work here—to make them come to life.”

  “That’s ambitious,” she replied, with a skeptical arch of her brow.

  “I know it won’t be easy,” I rushed in, trying to predict her thoughts. “I’m prepared to work my whole life—just for a chance—but that’s all I want, to be here.”

  Revealing in full her assessment of the situation, she looked like she was preparing to step around a puddle that was forming on the floor. “I’ll be honest with you, Ethan,” she said slowly, “because you seem like a smart boy.” She observed me closely, as though she had earlier allowed a preconception to define my outer edges and was now filling me in. Her eyes passed with measured intensity over my suit, my shoes, my shaking hands, and when I thought she had finally met my gaze, I realized she was squinting at my unruly hair. “We hire two kinds of interns here. The first kind is what you’d expect anywhere, really—went to a decent college, usually majored in fashion or communications. We’re very fair, and we’ll take them from anywhere.” As an aside—“Well, no state schools, but anywhere else, as long as they’re competent.”

  She absently folded down the corner of my résumé. “They put in their time—a semester, or a summer—hard work, but in the end, they’re grateful. I don’t have to tell you that, for a career in fashion, Régine is the best name anyone can have on their résumé. They put it on the top in bold letters, and when we send them on their way, they end up in retail management, or public relations. Normal jobs, you know—and for the rest of their lives, they get to tell people—they were here.”

  Sabrina’s Chanel bracelet clinked as her hand paused over the page, and a moment was granted for my consideration of this generous scenario. She flapped my folder open and closed. “If what you want is what I just described, then by all means—I’m happy to end this interview, and I’ll see you on Monday.”

  I stared at her. I wasn’t here because I wanted a line on my résumé, or a recommendation for a job in retail. I was here because I wanted everything. “What is the second type of intern?” I asked.

  Sabrina permitted herself to flap open my folder one last time. Then she shut it, the breeze stilled, and she returned to her previous pose: hands clasped in a kind of prim finality. “Well, some interns we intend to bring on staff. But they’re a very special case . . .”

  As Sabrina trailed off, I felt a blaze of irritation. In exactly what ways was I not a “special case”? Hadn’t I gotten into an Ivy League school from the middle of nowhere, with zero advantages and almost every obstacle stacked against me? Didn’t she realize I was the definition of a special case? I glared at her, and in the next second she rather suddenly filled the silence. “Did you know we’re the only Hoffman-Lynch publication that doesn’t accept applications through Human Resources?”

  I shook my head, suspecting that Sabrina had already delivered this conciliatory speech to a number of intern rejects before me.

  “It’s true,” she continued. “We only hire from within. We used to work through HR, up on the seventeenth floor, but they kept sending the wrong types of people—HR handles all the magazines at Hoffman-Lynch, twenty-something titles, but some of the other magazines aren’t as . . . discriminating as Régine. You understand, I’m sure—the qualities Régine seeks in a staff member are very hard to determine from a résumé. We can’t just get anyone off the street, who can technically do a ‘job.’ The perfect candidate has certain other qualities—they look Régine, they act Régine—they know Régine because they are Régine. When they leave the office after a day at work, people need to be able to say, ‘That’s a Régine girl’—or boy, in your case. They have to be a person we can groom. We take them on as interns—special cases, you know—and when a position opens, it belongs to them. Because they belong. . . .”

  Sabrina’s hand fluttered open, like she was demonstrating for me the way her own delicate fingers belonged—or, perhaps, inviting me to appreciate her ring of diamonds encircling a shiny emerald. Draping one forearm over the upholstered arm of her chair, she dangled her hand over the adjacent glass side table. Her wrist was moving lightly in a circle, as if she had picked up a martini glass by its rim and was swirling around an olive inside. “I’d be happy to see you in the first category,” she conceded at last. I realized I had been holding my breath. “We’d give you this opportunity, as a minor endorsement of sorts . . . you’d work hard, and then we’d send you on your way. I’m just . . .” She kept toying with the invisible glass. “For some reason, I’m just not so sure . . . that you fall into the second category.”

  My head raced through alternative interpretations of the words that had just left Sabrina’s mouth, but there was nothing to interpret: Sabrina had declared me ultimately unsuitable for Régine. It was a judgment overwhelming in its offensiveness, yet she appeared so calm, so lovely reclining there, as though she had merely commented on the weather.

  In a kind of stupefied daze, I shook my head. “I’m sorry, but—did I somehow give you the impression that I’m unqualified for this?”

  Upon detecting my indignation, Sabrina livened up. “I don’t mean to upset you,” she equivocated grandly, with an expression so deliberately innocuous as to acquit her of all malign intent. “But with these things, I think it’s important to be honest, don’t you? If I let you have certain expectations—for instance, that you stand a reasonable chance of becoming a fashion editor at Régine—well, that wouldn’t be very considerate of me, would it?” The corners of her mouth turned up, with the wistfulness of a weeping willow branch caught in the wind, and in a second, my latent suspicions of her malevolence were confirmed.

  “But, I’m extremely qualified,” I protested. “I—my whole life I—”

  Sabrina gestured lightly toward me. “Who makes your suit, Ethan? In that lovely color.”

  “What?” My disorientation was complete. “I—I don’t know,” I replied. “It’s just . . . thrifted.”

  She pressed her lips together and nodded. “Thrifted?” she repeated with a feigned ignorance, as though to spare me the dishonor of my own admission. “I’ve never heard of them.” Then she slipped a finger under her Chanel bracelet and rotated it so
the charm with the diamond logo was facing up. “I’m guessing your shoes too—‘thrifted,’ right?”

  I suddenly saw us from above, as a fly would see us if it was buzzing in a circle around our heads. I saw Sabrina’s bracelet and her ring, the alabaster gleam of her white-blonde hair, her arms arranged gracefully over her lap—her skin polished and smooth, like pale, lacquered wood. Then I saw myself as she must have seen me, as some kind of clown in my outdated suit from the Salvation Army—too colorful, uncouth—with my scuffed-up shoes, and my lop of curly brown hair. An outsider who didn’t know the language. She sat coolly back in the chair, as comfortable as if she was in her own home, while I . . . I was leaning forward like a bent antenna, my dignity betrayed by my total desperation.

  “What did you say your parents do?”

  This wasn’t her fault—I knew I had brought it on myself, all of it—but did she have to be so cruel? She somehow must have known. Over one shoulder, perhaps, she saw my mother, rotund and reeking of Clorox; over the other, my father, covered in curly black hair, his brown, sweaty stomach hanging over his belt. “I don’t know what that has to do with this,” I croaked.

  “It has everything to do with this. Let’s put it this way . . .” She began to balance her words like wooden blocks. “Have you ever tried to fit a piece of yarn through the eye of a needle?” She shrugged, and the tower teetered, then came crashing down. “It just . . . doesn’t work.”

  Her casual suggestion that, of all things, I should consider myself a piece of yarn—a common, homespun twist of unsophisticated fibers, too coarse, too unrefined to ever fit in at Régine—swung through me like a wrecking ball. It was an evaluation she had made in less than ten minutes.

  Her chewing gum made a sickly sound as she relegated it slowly to a crevice between her back molars and crushed down. “I’m sorry—I can see this isn’t going to happen,” she said. She pushed my résumé quietly toward me on the coffee table and stood up. Her pleated skirt rippled all around her, like a pond whose surface had been momentarily disturbed, and was now returning to untouched stillness. “We’ll be in touch.”

  “I—what?” No. It couldn’t end like this, not after how far I’d already come. My dream was slipping away like life from a dying body, intravenous tubes dripping and a monitor above the bed blinking, TRAGEDY! TRAGEDY!

  I fumbled to my feet behind her, knowing that if I didn’t stop Sabrina Walker, I was never going to hear from her again. My entire future hung in the balance of the next moment. We stood two feet away from each other. She smelled like a particular kind of smoker, the kind who tried unsuccessfully to temper the evidence of cigarettes with perfume and ended up smelling like a flower that had tumbled into an ashtray.

  “Can I meet with Edmund himself?” I blurted.

  She let out an incredulous guffaw. “Don’t be absurd! After Ava Burgess, Edmund Benneton is the most sought-after person at Régine, which makes him the second-most sought-after person in the fashion industry.” Then, in a tone that was, for the first time, not veiled with some calculated affectation: “Do you think he cares about an intern?!” She added offhandedly, with undisguised satisfaction, “I’m sorry, but try Teen Régine. I have work to do.”

  My blood rushed to my head. “Look,” I demanded. “I have a great eye for beauty.” I took a step closer, with an avowal as futile as all famous last words—“I belong here.”

  She exhaled toward the marble floor, like she was embarrassed on my behalf. “Ethan St. James, let’s keep this dignified, please. Do you think I have time to bother with you and your ‘great eye’? I’m sure your skills will be appreciated somewhere else.”

  Striding to the glass doors, she turned around to reveal a row of tiny velvet buttons down her spine. As the heart monitor teetered on silence (beep . . . beep . . . beep!) I half-shouted, “I mean, really—Régine is a fashion magazine—how can it possibly be that hard?”

  At this, Sabrina pivoted just her head, so that her chin was pointed over her shoulder. “You think working at Régine would be not—that—hard?” The corner of her eyebrow flickered, a crack in her otherwise self-assured countenance. “All right, Mr. St. James, with the ‘great eye,’ who went to Yale—” I felt the soul of my dying dream approach the final threshold, as Sabrina pressed her ID card against the reader—beep!

  “Monday. Nine o’clock.” Without taking her eyes off me, she pressed her back against the Régine door, and with a final combative glare said, “Wear something deserving of your presumptuous sweat.”

  chapter two

  If I had possessed a greater sense of self-awareness, or a lesser sense of self-importance, I might have appreciated the perfect irony of my interview—that Sabrina Walker considered me inferior to the standard at Régine, when for the past four years I had entertained a kind of superiority complex toward the world.

  I hadn’t always been as confident as I was by the time I got to Yale. Despite my obsession with reading, or maybe because of it, I had been a terrible student throughout elementary and middle school; semester after semester spent suffering bossy, simpleminded teachers, who believed the height of knowledge was memorization and never had good answers to the important questions. There was no reason for me to think high school would be any better; based on the rumors, it promised to be much worse. Along with the rest of the incoming students, the course I dreaded most was Freshman English, taught by the infamous and decrepit Ms. Duncan, who was “too hard,” assigned too much homework, and failed more students than any other teacher. She ran her classroom like a ballet studio, in which the slightest flail at the barre was cause for ruthless admonition, and unlike the other “mean” teachers who redeemed themselves by selecting favorites, I’d never heard of anyone being spared by Ms. Duncan.

  Desperately hoping she wouldn’t pick on me, I took a seat in the back row of her class on the first day, as she prattled about her “rigorous standards” and distributed worn-out copies of The Great Gatsby. Pausing two desks in front of me, she caught my eye and gestured toward my suit, which admittedly distinguished me from my peers. “Looks like we have ourselves a Mr. Darcy,” she commented with a self-amused smirk.

  Having read Pride and Prejudice, and almost everything else by Jane Austen, I knew exactly who Mr. Darcy was, but lowered my gaze to the desk to discourage further negative attention.

  Ms. Duncan mistook my silence for a lack of comprehension. Raising a droopy brow, she sighed, “I should know better than to make literary references to illiterates.”

  I was one second flabbergasted, the next inwardly erupting like a furnace that had just been stoked. Who did she think she was to make such an assumption about me, when I had probably read more books than she had? My anger bubbled upward as she creaked slowly down the aisle and thrust a book on the student’s desk in front of me; I watched her long, woolen dress swing nearer, and before I could control myself Austen’s own words escaped through my teeth with the searing precision of a lighter’s flame: “‘Angry people are not always wise.’”

  Her wrinkled jaw dropped, then she recovered. “That’s a line you learned from the movie version, surely.” Her shadow fell onto my desk. “Let’s see how well you do writing ten-page literary essays based on terrible movie adaptions. You won’t be the first who tries, and you won’t be the first I’ve failed.” She slammed a tattered copy of Gatsby onto my desk as a conclusive retort, and if I hadn’t been so infuriated, I would have laughed out loud. I had already read it. Twice.

  For two weeks, I participated in class through scalding glares. Then our first essay was due, and out of sheer spite, I turned in fifty pages, a whole dissertation about East and West Egg representing states of mental illness. I received the paper back after the weekend, tossed from Ms. Duncan’s hand and with a red F on the top. “For not following the word count,” she spat. “I’ll need a word with you after class.”

  I fumed silently as she went on to berate the entire class: “With all the vocabulary in our magnificent language, I
would have hoped you all could find better words to describe The Great Gatsby than—” she pulled out a list of words my classmates had employed in their critical essays “—cool—awesome—fun—nice—really nice—and my favorite, great, used without ironic relation to the book’s title.” It seemed obvious to me that she had experienced some kind of bitter failure in her life; she had probably dreamed of being a great writer herself, before getting rejected by all the publishing houses, and being forced to teach dullards at our deadbeat high school.

  When class ended, I tried unsuccessfully to slip by her.

  “Sit back down, Darcy!”

  I rolled my eyes and faced her desk while the other students flooded around me and out of the room. The door slammed shut behind them, and Ms. Duncan pointed at a desk in the front row.

  “I’m going to miss my bus,” I said, and refused to sit.

  Her eyes narrowed. “I requested your records from middle school,” she rasped, patting a folder on her desk. “Dismal at best. As I’m sure you are all too aware. The comments are all the same—you miss classes, you don’t participate, and you only do the bare minimum to avoid failure.”

  I shifted my weight and glared above her gray head at a quote from A Tale of Two Cities tacked to the wall, loath to give her the satisfaction of my full attention.

  “Where did you learn to write?” she continued. “Because the person who wrote this, the person who—”

  “Look,” I snapped. “I didn’t plagiarize that essay if that’s what you’re getting at. I obviously know what my grades were like in middle school, and if you keep hassling me, I’m going to miss the—”

  Ms. Duncan pounded her desk with two fists, her nostrils flaring as veins emerged on her forehead like cracks in an old vase. “Don’t interrupt me, Darcy!” The pens rattled in the cup on her desk. “I know you didn’t plagiarize that essay-–that’s the first thing I made sure of.” Her shoulders lowered. “Yours was the best paper in the class.”