I didn’t notice anything at all. All I could see was Dorian. He was still touching my shoulder, and holding Madeline’s hand, the three of us connected like nothing had ever happened between us. I couldn’t move. I stared at him. He stared back, his lips parted in shock, while I tried my best to die right there—to stop breathing, to extinguish myself so that the vision of his face would be my last. I hadn’t realized my eyes had craved him so much.
The discomfort of something wet made me break away. I followed a dripping sensation on my leg to a spill on the table, where my glass was toppled over into a shiny martini pool. The glass was broken along the rim, and when I realized there were no shards on the table, I felt them like masticated crystals on my tongue.
I reached my fingers to my lips, and when I pulled them away, they were soaked with blood, and I realized—I had bitten my martini glass.
GEORGE WAS WAITING FOR ME WHEN THE ELEVATOR DOORS opened, in a black dress shirt with gray trousers stretched over his huge thighs.
“Hey, George!” I panted. I had just raced from the subway station at 42nd Street. “How are you?”
He didn’t seem to hear me. “Start time around here is nine o’clock,” he replied.
“It’s nine now.”
“Which means if you’re not here by eight forty-five—” he continued, swiping his ID card with a fling of the glass door “—you’re late.”
I shook away the mild feeling of dread shivering across my skin as I entered Régine at George’s heels. Despite him, it was going to be a good day—a great day. I had made it in one piece to my dream job, and had even managed to match my jacket to my socks. I checked my breath: Before fumbling for my apartment door I had even washed my liquor-saturated mouth. I was already a raving success.
George and I passed through the same hallway as the day before—cubicles buzzing, cover girls smoldering—then the enormous-seeming white door loomed before us and we entered the fashion closet. Even though it was only Day Two, for some strange reason I already felt like I was “back” at Régine, as though I’d been coming to work here for years.
“What did you do last night?” I asked George, still hoping to establish a friendly rapport.
He turned to me as Sabrina’s head came into view, and replied with undisguised irritation, “Why do you dress this way?”
“What way?” I laughed. My royal blue blazer was covered with small pink polka dots.
“Seriously, your clothes—they give me a headache,” George said, shaking his head as we took our seats. “Are you planning to dress this way every day?”
“Are you?” I responded, before I could help myself.
He rolled his eyes and started checking his favorite blog. “Whatever, it’s you they’re going to talk about. And not in the way that you want.”
Still clouded by the haze of alcoholic stupor, I couldn’t figure out how George presumed to know what I wanted. In lieu of a response, my eyes absently followed the cursor across his screen as he scrolled around over a series of attractive faces from some party the night before.
A face appeared just long enough for the memory of last night to jab me in the stomach. “Dorian,” I blurted with a start, and leaned instinctively toward him.
“Who?” George scrolled back to Dorian’s white smile. “Oh, Dorian,” he said knowingly. “He’s a model—Edie Belgraves’s son. He walked a ton of shows last season in Paris, and I hear he’ll probably get offered a Burberry campaign.”
I almost choked with laughter: that George was telling me about Dorian Belgraves. To everyone else he was the Dorian who had just “walked a ton of shows,” but to me he was the Dorian who had ruined everything. He had ruined Madeline, and senior year, and the worst part was—it had all been my fault. I slowly fell back into my chair, and let the reality swoop over me like a crumpling funerary shroud: Dorian was back from Paris.
Last night, Blake had helped me stop the bleeding in the bathroom. There had been only one men’s bathroom in the nightclub, and even though I was able to spit out most of the glass it took about thirty minutes just to get one piece out from the corner of my lip. By the time we were finished there was a line and the only reason nobody said anything to us was because I was still bleeding, and holding a bunch of paper towels to my face like a pulverized bouquet of white and red flowers.
It was pretty much over after that. When Blake and I returned to the table, I had expected to find Madeline and Dorian intertwined like lovers in a Fragonard painting—as rose-cheeked as ever, without sin or common sense.
It was much worse than that.
Madeline and Dorian were gone, and I knew that could only mean one thing: She had left with him. Stupid, pathetic, lovesick Madeline, who spent all of senior year pining over the loss of Dorian, had—after only thirty minutes in his exulting presence—gone home with him, the truest bane of her existence, her one true love, and the greatest tragedy of her young life. Now the priceless thing that was already teetering on a ledge had been shoved over, and the only hope was that it might fall through the air forever, instead of shattering. Blake knew it as well as I did, even though he had never been as close to Dorian as me and Madeline. He offered me a gin and tonic as a consolation, and a second, and soon, well—
This was the bad thing about Madeline, that for all her declarations of rebellion, she was (and this was why we were so compatible) just a girl who had read too much Jane Austen—a dreamer. A romantic. A fool like me. She would easily give everything up for a marriage certificate, for a life with Darcy in a renovated Victorian house, and children with golden hair to brush, and who was I to deny her that? To feel jealousy or despair that she would choose this over me, and in signing her name on the dream document, steal Dorian, my other truest and most cherished love in the world?
“Boys!” Sabrina’s voice startled me from the other side of her cubicle wall. “They’re shooting in-house in the small studio next door today, so we are going to have to move all the trunks we’re storing there into the photo closet.”
I was vaguely amused at her use of the word we, wondering if she aimed to aid the cause by moving an empty hatbox.
She stood up for a brief second to glare at us over the cubicle wall—qualifying her instructions with, “Now.” She wore a black headband, and a black pleated dress with silver buttons and a white pointed collar. I met her blue eyes as she lowered herself back into her seat, then popped back up like an ember. She smoldered there, tight-lipped; her eyes narrowed, and she began conspicuously eyeing my outfit up and down, so that I would have no doubt that she was doing it—and even though I barely knew Sabrina Walker, I could hear the rattle of a hundred insults tumbling, like the numbered white balls in a Powerball lottery, in her shiny glass brain.
“How bright,” she spat at last, and I’d never known such a wonderful word could sound so much like a curse.
Ten minutes later, while I was pushing the trunks around, a similar thing happened with Clara, the senior fashion editor. “Clooooset!” she sang, in what I came to learn was her preferred method of greeting us all at once. “I need someone to prepare all of Edmund’s inspiration boards for the white-theme shoot.” She was daintily kicking a white Roger Vivier pony-hair pump with the side of her black Manolo when she noticed me.
She betrayed her own politeness with a sudden cock of her head toward me, twitching like a platinum-blonde bird on a telephone wire. Her erratic movement culminated in a stare, and her eyes seemed to fill up with the polka dots on my suit. She nudged herself back, and visibly swallowing a comment, struggled to disguise her gawk with a justifiable pretense. With an effort, she addressed me, “Ee-than? It’s Ethan, right? . . . Can you please bring me a hard copy of Edmund’s references on eleven-by-seventeen paper, with six images per page, and captions numbered from beginning to end?” She sounded a little winded.
I guess that’s when I realized George was right: With all of my bright patterns, I looked a little out of place.
I had very little t
ime to reflect on this, however, as I was rushed onto the next thing following the disappearance of Clara’s heel through the closet door.
“Okay, so yesterday was nothing compared to what we have to do today. All that stuff we checked in—that was just the half of it,” George said.
Squeezing through a barely navigable channel between the tightly crowded garment racks, I wasn’t sure where the other “half” of the clothes was supposed to go.
“This morning, we’ll get in the rest of the deliveries . . . Then this afternoon we’ll pack the clothes into trunks . . . And then tonight we’ll ship it all out,” he finished. “The delivery people will be here to pick up at nine o’clock.”
“Nine tonight?” On first thought, it seemed rather late for an unpaid intern.
“No, of course not, silly,” he said in a saccharine tone, which served as answer enough. “We never stay late. We just leave a few million dollars’ worth of luxury merchandise unattended in the lobby downstairs so that we can have a nice dinner and get a good night’s sleep and be all smiles and polka dots the next morning, like you!”
Five feet away, Sabrina’s voice escalated. “I don’t see what’s so difficult about this request,” she enunciated tersely. “Can’t you just track it right now? Isn’t there a GPS or something?”
“No, ma’am,” a calm voice responded over the speaker, “I’m sorry, I wish we could do more, but—”
“Yes,” Sabrina cut in sharply, “I wish you could too,” and hung up with a crack of plastic. “Boys! Are you finished with the trunks? I just got an e-mail—our September It Girl has crashed her car on methamphetamines,” she said. “The new It Girl is only available to shoot this week, so in addition to styling the white shoot, Edmund will be styling this second story too.” She stepped out from behind her desk. “Edmund’s It Girl story will be an off-white theme. That means the first story is white—this other one is off-white. They are completely different, so if you mix them up . . .” With a special glance in my direction, she left, presumably to discuss an important matter with the fashion editors.
George and I erected a new garment rack for Edmund’s off-white story. Because putting the rack anywhere else would have made it impossible to walk through the closet, we had to place it directly behind our desk so that, as the day went on, the clothes multiplying behind us gave the unsettling impression that a crowd was gathering over our shoulders.
As a proudly visual person, I didn’t disparage the distinction between white and off-white, but I did wonder why Edmund couldn’t think of a theme that was less similar to the one he was already styling for the same issue. The only justification I had for it was that he was a genius, and I just didn’t understand his methods yet.
During the first hour of check-ins, George accidentally hung a faintly cream Dolce & Gabbana slip dress onto the white rack. I said, “Oh, that’s not white, it’s off-white”—not to make him feel bad, but you know, just so he’d be aware—and re-hung it on the correct rack.
From then on he refused to say a word to me, and after photographing the incoming clothes began to leave them in a beigeish heap for me to pick through as his retort. This went on until around two, when Sabrina’s desk phone began to ring nonstop. Usually she picked up on the first ring, or sooner, but she had gone downstairs to pay a deliveryman for her lunch and couldn’t know that, twelve stories above, an incessant trilling demanded her attention. George had bumbled to the kitchenette to make a coffee, and a conservative guess deemed me unauthorized to answer on Sabrina’s behalf, so I let it ring on and on, until suddenly it stopped, and a voice rung out from the other side of the closet wall.
“Sa-briiiinnnaaaaaaa, Sa-briiiiinnnnaaaaaaaa!” The sound resembled a fire alarm, which made me wonder—if a fire broke out at Régine, would it be my job to save the clothes?
The closet door burst open, and Clara moaned, “Sabrina, I have been calling and calling you.”
I started to explain that Sabrina was downstairs, but Clara continued in a wounded tone, “Now look at me—I’ve had to get up.”
The closet now contained so many racks—white and off-white garments lined every available space—that the only part of Clara I could actually see was her high heels, barely visible beneath a wall of hanging fur coats. A flailing hand, followed by a faltering ankle and a progressive ripple through the curtain of fur, suggested her ultimately unsuccessful passage.
“Somebody . . . ?” she called, with a hint of despair.
I managed to announce myself and she exclaimed, “Ethan!” sounding much relieved. “Thank goodness! Please, can you bring us the trunk of off-white gladiator sandals? It’s urgent!”
I was seized with panic. This would be my first time in Clara’s cubicle.
CLARA, WHO WAS THE SENIOR FASHION EDITOR, SHARED A large U-shaped cubicle with Will and Christine, the associate fashion editors. As senior fashion editor, she was the highest-ranking among them and directly below Jane, which meant she oversaw Will and Christine, who oversaw Sabrina, who oversaw George, all of whom oversaw me. Due to this hierarchy, intimate relations between their rank and my own should have been impossible—yet an oversight of office design ultimately made it possible for me to know them extremely well. That is, the wall between my desk and their cubicle outside was so thin, I could hear every last word they said. In a matter of weeks, I would become well-acquainted with them and their daily rundown, which went like this:
Clara and the fashion editors would always take their seats at around 9:45 a.m. There was the booting of computers and the muffled rolling about of office chairs—then one of them always began with, “Good mooorrrrning, darlings, how was your evening?” They all spoke like they were in a beauty pageant, with much-extended vowels through strained smiles you could almost hear cracking. The initial response was, “Lovely, how was yooouuurs?,” followed by abridged retellings of their respective evenings prior, always spent unglamorously at a “little party with nice people”; enjoying “a bit of Riesling in bed with the boyfriend”; or otherwise engaged in some dull goings-on, which was their sad obligation to reveal to the others.
These unexceptional accounts might have constituted normal office talk were it not for the glaring fact that it was their job to be the most glamorous people in the world. Consequently, they all knew the truth about each other’s boring lives: The “little party” had led to a toast with Marc Jacobs (Clara), and the “Riesling in bed” to sex with a Fortune 500 fiancé (Christine).
To my innocent eye it appeared that the fashion editors were as humble as they were endowed with social grace, at least until my second week, when Clara described an extravagant dinner with Calvin Klein as “simple and charming.” From this gross understatement (images from the supremely un-simple event were posted on every major fashion news site), I finally guessed the reason for their tight-lipped reluctance to divulge: They simply couldn’t trust each other. A position in the palace at Régine could be taken away by a decree as imperious as the one that had given it to them. Just one slipup—a tip-off revealed to the wrong ears, or a secret to the wrong eyes—or a single move that suggested they didn’t meet the standard of gilded perfection that was required, and any one of them could be exiled. Privy more than any outsider to each other’s lives, nobody posed as great a threat to them as one another. Furthermore, they all knew that, as far as their careers were concerned, there was nowhere else they could go. They would always be welcomed with grand fanfare at another proverbial court, yet no other was as fantastic and powerful as Régine—they could hardly do better than their current positions at the top of the masthead. To ascend at all would mean promotion to Edmund’s or Jane’s or even Ava’s role: Each event was inevitable, but how long would it take? And out of the three of them, which one would be chosen? The editors were trapped in the sphere of one another’s ambition—confined in a cubicle every day with their own worst enemies.
And so every day their strained niceties went on and on . . . before they became suddenly s
ilent. An hour later the strangeness would reach new heights when they switched to making meaningful consultations over their shoulders about “Which Chanel slipper do you think is the best for the new story?” and “Do you think this Jil Sander coat is quite right?” and “Don’t you agree we absolutely neeeeeed Look Fourteen from Ferragaaaaaamo?,” everything bloated with an earnest sense of purpose, like they had agreed to a momentary truce in the interest of a greater common cause, which at the end of their handbag-filled day they all upheld with absolute conviction.
This sense of united purpose was somehow reflected in the most curious fact about them; that despite any mistrust they hid from each other, they trusted more than anything in each other’s taste, so much so that they had come to dress alike, and smell alike, and even keep their hair the exact same shade of platinum blonde. They always got their roots re-dyed around the same time, and oddly enough, the more I eventually got to look at them, the more I recognized in the very contours of their faces an identical strain—as if, no matter what they were doing, in the back of their minds they were constantly concentrating on the exact same set of things, like how to tie a difficult knot while balancing a teacup on their head and going up the stairs.
IT WAS THIS COLLECTIVE EXPRESSION OF CONSTANT MENTAL exertion that I mistook for impatience when I entered their cubicle for the first time, depositing nervously at their feet the trunk that Clara had summoned. I was breathless, having tipped over a garment rack of racy lingerie in my unglamorous attempt to extricate the trunk from the overcrowded closet.
Sniffing me out, they wheeled their chairs around me, circling the trunk like slick, muscular sharks. Inside the trunk floundered forty pairs of colorless gladiator-style sandals, captured fish gasping at the bottom of a boat.
With a preoccupied half-glance in my direction, Clara pointed ambiguously to the trunk. “Can you . . . ?”
I knelt down beside the trunk and tried to guess what she wanted me to do.
An Innocent Fashion Page 11