I didn’t want to take too long, so I glanced down the empty hall, and darted inside the women’s bathroom. I opened a tap straightaway, and while the water gurgled into my vessel, I thought I noticed a familiar feminine scent, before realizing—the women’s bathroom at Régine smelled like Chanel No. 5.
Had the smell lingered from an earlier spritz, or did the women’s bathroom at Régine always smell this way? As I was contemplating the possibility that the supply of the perfume was provided by Régine for the janitor to mix into his mop bucket, the door opened and an older woman stepped inside: tall, white-haired, wearing a loose-fitting button-down shirt and a pair of slim blue jeans. She was looking down, immersed in the task of wiping a stain on her collar, but as she drew closer, I recognized her as easily as I had Edmund. She was Jane Delancey, the creative director of Régine.
On replaying Sabrina’s caustic overtures in my head (“You’re nobody’s equal here”), I remained rooted like a tree stump, pretending not to exist while I prayed Jane Delancey wouldn’t notice me, a boy, in the women’s bathroom. Water was spilling loudly over the top and down the sides of the container now, but I didn’t dare touch the faucet.
“I haven’t seen you before,” Jane said, her face still lowered as she strode to the adjacent sink and passed her napkin under a stream of water. She scrubbed at the stain—it looked like tomato sauce—and a teeny diamond earring wiggled in her fleshy lobe. “My mother used to say I was a clumsy little girl,” she said to me, or the stain. “Now I’m just a clumsy old lady.”
I smiled nervously as our faucets gushed in unison.
In photographs she had looked distinguished enough, her forehead flowing with sage-like wrinkles and her long cloud-white hair swept up in an all-American ponytail. In real life, however, she seemed quite plain in her catalogue-white dress shirt and classic tapered jeans, with not a “statement piece” in sight. Her shoes were her only indulgence: white pumps with a diamond buckle—Roger Vivier, I conjectured—and even those were nowhere near as opulent as what she could get away with in her position. For better or worse, she was as simple as a sheet of laundered linen, subtly trimmed, flapping gently on a clothesline.
Jane looked up from her tomato stain. “Are you a woman?” she asked.
Like a cool breeze, her gaze sent a light shudder through me. Her eyes were pale blue, almost clear, and gave the impression that she could see better than an average person.
I gulped, couldn’t speak.
“Okay,” she nodded acceptingly, then turned to go. “The men’s bathroom is by the copy room. Either way, that’s a wonderful suit.”
I tried to say thank you, but choked once more. When her wrinkled hand was pressed against the door, she turned her face calmly back to me. “I’m Jane,” she said, and was gone.
I turned off the water and scurried back to the fashion closet, afraid I had taken too long; when I returned, Sabrina had gone to pay a deliveryman in the Hoffman-Lynch lobby for her lunch and the only person there was George.
“How does a steamer work?” he mocked, pointing to the computer screen where I had unwisely left my innocent search query on display. “What are you trying to steam?”
I gestured to the flaccid plastic hat on the desk. Approaching the steamer, I realized the container in my hands was only half full; after all that, I had sloshed water all over my pants scampering down the hall.
George laughed right in my face, and I could smell the mint he had just tossed in his mouth. “You can’t steam plastic, you idiot.”
“Sabrina asked me to.”
He rolled his eyes. “Not my problem.” The next minute the steamer had seared a pink blister into my palm like a cow-brand, and George was snorting with pleasure.
chapter four
Outside the nightclub, under an ominous cloud of cigarette smoke, a funereal line of black and gray figures cast long, spidery shadows.
“How joyless, these ‘grown-ups,’” remarked Madeline, with an accusatory lilt on the last word. Sheathed in a milk-white kitten heel, her foot dangled out of the taxi as she waited for my gentlemanly arm to escort her. When she got hold of me, she hopped onto the curb, offering me a blue-eyed blink that said, “Well—let’s go already.”
An hour before, I had been welcomed into her parents’ Upper East Side apartment by her mother, who smiled through a face full of well-placed cosmetic injectables, and commented favorably on my green blazer. I blushed, and thanked her with a sense of great honor; a compliment from Mrs. Dupre seemed as sacred and true as any from a deity who had been mummified.
Sitting with his legs crossed on the damask couch, Mr. Dupre waved at me from behind a copy of the Times, while above his head soared a portrait of their family photographed before their mantelpiece a few feet away. I had once tried to wrangle a similarly respectable image out of my parents. Among the rest of my books, I had read a lot of biographies growing up and, from Picasso to Gandhi, it seemed that everyone with the hope of any bright future at all had at least one early family portrait in which they visibly radiated with the promise of greatness, flanked by a dignified-looking mother and father. I certainly didn’t consider myself highly enough to anticipate a biography would be penned in my honor, yet—who knew? If I ever managed to get out of that small town, it would be good to have at least one decent photo of my parents and me, on the off-chance someone thought to write a chapter about my humble beginnings.
“What for, cabrón?” my father had grumbled, preferring to lounge like a half-naked lump in front of the television than to get dressed up and miss a fútbol game. Having gotten the idea in my head—and considering it my parents’ duty to oblige me at least a single indulgence in life—I begged for it with an insistence my peers reserved for a puppy or a go-kart, and in the end my parents didn’t even sit up straight. We came out looking quite how I should have expected: as dignified as a bunch of kumquats.
But the Dupres appeared to be prepared for a portrait every moment: well-postured, with the slow-moving grace of glaciers.
I turned my head to a rustle of taffeta at the top of the staircase.
“Is that you?” exclaimed Madeline with a hint of surprise, as though she hadn’t in fact been expecting me. She had a way of making me feel like every moment was a revelation, as if the whole world teemed with blossom-ready buds that, if I went along with her, would have no choice but to divulge their fragrant secrets.
My eyes filled with the sight of her hovering between the chandelier and a cascade of shimmering marble, framed under a mahogany arch like a goddess in an Alphonse Mucha lithograph. She wore a pleated knee-length cocktail dress, bell-shaped and Oriental blue, with the chain of her quilted Chanel purse over her bare shoulder. Just-washed hair fell around her face, tousled and still damp. She rested her hand on the banister in a Greek contrapposto, then pointed her toe toward me, and descended slowly. When she had tiptoed halfway down, her grace was replaced with characteristic urgency as she beamed at me and ran clattering over the remaining steps.
I caught her at the bottom in a leap of outstretched arms and billowing hair, her taffeta dress crushed under my arms as I swung her in a half-moon swirl. When we were still she collapsed onto my chest and laughed.
“Anyone would think we’d been apart for years,” she said.
But really, it had only been a week ago that we’d walked together through a Gothic arch on Old Campus amid a stream of navy-blue caps and gowns, the two of us holding hands in the air—the champions of something—after four years of an unclassifiable kinship.
She separated from me, then spun around to ensure I’d got a good look. “Just look at us!” she exclaimed, as if somehow I too commanded the attention that followed her like a shaft of morning light.
“You look stunning,” I said.
Madeline kissed a corner of my eye and pulled me up the steps.
“Just look at us!” she repeated over the railing to her parents. The whole foyer fell away into gilded bas-relief, and when we were up
on her bedroom door she pressed her knowing hand over the bag of marijuana in my blazer pocket, and smiled. The white door gave in, and we tumbled inside.
Golden trophies stood proud on every shelf, boasting eminence in horseback riding, ballet, and Model U.N., while the ivory floral-patterned walls were decorated with newly championed idols: Malcolm X over the nightstand and Che Guevara smoldering with purpose behind the lace bed canopy from Madeline’s girlhood.
The canopy rotated slowly as we fell onto the powder-blue sheets, faint lacework shadows playing on a bedside picture of the Dupres in front of the Eiffel Tower.
“Do you think your mother noticed the smell?” I asked, as my elbow sunk into the mattress and I began to pack my glass pipe over her sheets.
“Just spray it with cologne next time,” she suggested with a shrug.
The herby stench mingled in the air with the lingering aura of Madeline’s elderflower shampoo. I compressed the pillowy green buds into the pipe’s bowl with my thumb while she turned onto her side and draped her blonde head upon an extended arm.
“I hope I’ll have some brain cells left,” Madeline said. “After all those graduation parties, a lot of them just had a laugh and disappeared on vacation.” She added, “Woohoo!,” which in her head must have been the sound of a brain cell on a road trip.
“Do you not want to smoke?”
“Of course I want to!” she swelled, and the next moment she was coughing into my shoulder. “You haven’t told me a thing about Régine,” she said, waving away a cloud with one hand. “Are all the girls there prettier than me?”
“Please,” I rolled my eyes, raising the pipe to my own lips. “Nobody compares.”
She seemed dubious and, reminded of other beautiful women, sat back a little straighter. “They’re like in all the movies? Glamorous, and tall?”
We passed the pipe between us, and I told her all about Régine—about the glass doors and the white clothes and the steamer, with its mystical snakelike head and the glass container like a fishbowl. She laughed over Edmund saying, “Who shoots a beautiful woman in plastic?” and gasped with incredible sense of personal offense when I told her that Sabrina had called me “nothing.”
“Nothing?! Wait till you take her job, that whore!” She winced at her own word; Madeline considered herself a feminist and, in theory, hated put-downs against other women. “I’ll call her what I want,” she maintained with an impassioned firmness. “She’ll be lucky if I never run into her, or . . . Who cares about her! God, I’m so excited to introduce you now,” she changed the subject, “tonight, and every night from now on—I’m going to say, ‘This is Ethan St. James, and he works at Régine, and he’s going to be famous!’” We laughed as smoky ringlets unspooled before our faces like promises of fame and fortune, and for a little while she held my hand before, suddenly, she exclaimed, “I almost forgot! I have news too!”
“Another boyfriend for me?” I drummed my fingers on her bare knee.
“Nooo,” she scowled, brushing my hand off. “I’m done with that pointless game. You don’t know what a disappointment it is to find you someone, then have you dismiss them outright because they don’t know who Renoir is, or they bring you the wrong flowers on the first date.”
“Those were both horrible, plain boys,” I protested. “Car-nations? I don’t know how you ever thought—”
“You’re pickier than I am!” She shook her head, even though that was a lie. Then, on a note that, in her altered consciousness, seemed like an important segue: “You know, since graduation, I’ve decided to only eat peas. And drink champagne.”
“How unlike you,” I said with mild disinterest. It sounded to me like her normal diet.
“Yea, it’s an ethical thing. Animals, deforestation . . .” Madeline coughed suddenly, eyes watering, then remembered, “My poor makeup.” She dabbed with her pinky finger at the corner of her sparkling eyelid.
“So what’s your news?” I asked. “The peas?”
She pushed at me and coughed again. “Oh come on, I can’t remember.”
I reached out before I could stop myself. “God, your fingers,” I breathed in awe. “They’re my favorite thing.”
She held out her fingers over my hand for inspection, then nodded in agreement. They were fingers made long and slender from a childhood of compulsory piano practice, which—never having had such a luxury as music lessons—I imagined as Madeline pounding Für Elise onto the keys and then pleading, “Daddy, I’ve got it, now can we go to Central Park?” to which he would reply, “You missed a note, try again and we’ll see,” and she’d give a pouty harrumph, and a rebellious stomp of her pink Mary Janes. Privileged fingers.
I took her hand in mine and felt her pulse through her silky palm.
The next moment had the inevitability of a setting sun. Outside a siren whistled through the night sky like a firecracker—then all was quiet as the bedroom blended like an oil pastel.
Madeline ran her hand up my forearm. She leaned forward. The bed creaked.
Her fragrance washed over me; a cool mist after a summer rain, diffusing the aroma of fallen fruit. My eyes closed. Reverberations left my chest and came pulsing back, as though my heart was submerged in water. Then her lips—her wet, familiar lips—were against mine.
The wave of silence rose up and filled the bedroom, lapping over my ears, and I was swimming.
I felt the immediate stiffening in my pants as my blood swelled in my veins like a pupil in a dark room. My tongue left my mouth, felt her teeth—soft against hard. There was a whisper of taffeta as she shifted slowly onto me.
Then, the searing heat of objection inside my chest. The water level fell around me. Its surface slapped my ears, and I could hear the siren outside.
“I’m sorry—” I said.
But Madeline cupped my face in both hands, pressed her forehead against mine. “It’s okay. Just kiss me.” A series of pecks, interspersed with: “Just think . . .” kiss “. . . both of us . . .” kiss “. . . together . . .” kiss “. . . at last . . .”
She must have felt the stiffness of my lips. “What’s wrong?” she whispered, shaking my shoulder. “Things can be different now . . . now we’ve graduated, left that all behind . . . I know we should be together,” she went on. “And just look at you, you always get so excited—” She reached down between my legs.
I seized her hand before she could confirm my unsubtle arousal. “Madeline, please!”
A snap of fingers!—the end of the hypnosis session, and the room returned instantly to normalcy—everything clear, defined, separate. I felt like a soul sucked back into a body after a lucid dream.
“What? Don’t you see—this is what’s meant to happen?” Then dejectedly: “You’re my best friend. This is what best friends do.”
I swallowed a ball of misgiving in my throat, eyes lost in the shiny crumples of her iridescent dress. “Not after Dorian.”
Madeline winced and raised her hands to her temples.
“It’s true though. I can’t replace him.”
“For the love of God,” she seethed. “I always loved you more than Dorian.”
This was difficult to believe. She seemed to realize this too, and she gazed out of the window as another siren roved through the city.
“Come on,” I urged. Our friend Blake was waiting for us at the club.
Madeline’s eyes remained drawn to the dark square.
“Hey,” I rested my hand on her knee and she remembered me. “Are we all right?” I adjusted on the bed.
“Oh shut up,” she scowled. “Yes, we’re all right, I’m just . . .” She turned and slipped her hands into mine. Then she shook her head as though she was casting off a troubling thought—rebuffed herself with a tug on my arm. “Let’s go to the club—like adults!” Since graduation, she had gotten a vicious pleasure from the notion of our embodying this unlikely role.
I laughed at her. “We’re hardly adults.”
“Speak for yourself,” Madelin
e said. She collected her hair in one swooping twist, and made a businesslike bun on her head. Back erect, she said, “I’ve gotten a hundred times more dignified in the past week.”
“Oh really?” I snuck my hand under her upraised arm and tickled her. She shrieked with laughter. Her hair cascaded over her shoulders as she lowered her elbows against her chest. “Is that really the word you’d use?” I asked. “Dignified?”
She fell backward into a parachute puff of soft sheets. Squirming, she squeezed her arms against her sides and rolled onto her stomach like a taffeta cocoon. “All right, all right!” she howled, barely a breath left in her lungs. “Let’s go to the club like kids!”
After we collected ourselves, we saw that we had scattered gray ashes from my pipe all over her sheets. Madeline tried to stand up, tripping on a pair of mislaid heels, and we spent the next moments laughing and stumbling in a clouded stupor toward the door.
MADELINE REMEMBERED HER “BIG NEWS” WHEN WE WERE IN line outside the nightclub. “Guess who’s going to be an actress?” she shook me, practically shouting.
“What?”
“That’s the news! I’m going to be an actress!”
The people in front of us were smoking up a heavy cloud over our heads, while beneath our feet the cobblestones flickered from the light of the blinking club marquee.
Madeline had never expressed the slightest interest in acting. As far as I knew, her life plan had been the same since our first class together: Attend Georgetown Law School after Yale and then work toward election to the Senate, where she would wear a dress suit every day and commandeer the world to adopt her anarchistic politics.
Even though half the time her political science classes put her into a blind emotional rage (she had no shortage of biting words with which to castigate the “small-minded politicians” in power), she was convinced that “setting things right” in Washington was the cross-like burden of having sprung from a manger of privilege. She told me once she couldn’t remember when her radical ideas had taken hold—just that she had always been a purist, and that since she was a girl she had observed the state of the world from afar and thought, “This is a disaster, and it needs to be fixed, every ugly last bit of it.” More than anything, she was determined not to be merely “humored,” and after a life of being patted on the head, had started wearing heels in an attempt to appear older and more put-together than she really was. When she ran every year for Yale’s College Council, she made a concerted effort to wear blazers over her little dresses so that nobody could say she’d had the advantage of being “hot,” and once she had won, which she always did, the hours she spent practicing speeches in the mirror numbered in the dozens every year.
An Innocent Fashion Page 9