An Innocent Fashion

by R. J. Hernández

  Dorian turned the page. A receipt fluttered out like a pale dead leaf. Madeline picked it up off the floor and crumpled it up, tossing it into a tumbler which was pooling with melted ice.

  “Wait!” he rushed in, saving the receipt with a scoop of his tapered fingers into the tumbler. “That’s not trash.” He shook off the drenched receipt and flattened it against his knee. “See, I’ve been writing poems on the backs of them. Like—art poems. If it’s a receipt for cheesecake, I’ll write about cheesecake. If it’s for soda, then . . .”

  “That’s clever,” Madeline half-consciously mused, her head on his shoulder.

  I lost interest and stared at a bead of water that was trembling on the handle of the silver ice bucket, while in the background Dorian unironically recited a poem about Chinese takeout. After five minutes, Dorian had closed his sketchpad and Madeline was asking about Dorian’s mother, proving once more how much like a middle-aged woman she could sound.

  “She and David got stuck in Milan,” Dorian said. “Mom got sick, too many martinis at some Gucci event—said she couldn’t get on a flight in time for the party.” Dorian’s hand fell on my forearm. “They were actually with Jane Delancey—have you met her yet, babe?”

  “I’m sorry, what?” I had graduated from my examination of the ice bucket to the ice cubes in my tumbler. There appeared to be frozen raspberries in the middle of them.

  “Have you met Jane? The creative director?” he repeated to me. “At Régine?”

  I told him that yes, I’d met her.

  “She’s a friend of the family—I’m sure if you ever need anything there—”

  “Sorry.” I tapped my ear. “It’s so loud in here,” I said dismissively, motioning all around like it couldn’t be helped. I didn’t even try to lean toward him.

  Now that Madeline was sure none of Dorian’s female friends had any interest in competing for Dorian’s affections, she sank into the linen cushion and blushed. “Everybody you know is soooo beautiful.” She surveyed them all with a detached serenity. “It’s like . . . ‘Fifty Most,’ all over again . . .”

  I grimaced.

  At school, the Yale Rumpus had published a special issue every year dedicated to the “Fifty Most Beautiful People” at school, for which—after an unexplained consecration process—portraits of the anointed were taken, and profiles scribed for publication. As more typical subject matter for Yale students concerned race relations or dichotomous cells, descriptive powers for “beautiful people” varied, and the issue touted a smattering reliance on cringe-worthy phrases like “washboard abs” and “cheekbones you could cut diamonds on.” On the fateful day in February, friendly clusters in Commons dining hall congregated around copies of the issue to see which of their respective crushes had made it.

  It was intended as a kind of joke, although nobody ever declined to be included in “Fifty Most,” not even the feminists or the politician’s sons, and shortly after its publication the selected crop always experienced a spike in dates, love letters, and passive-aggressive glances from the same sex. Unsurprisingly, Madeline and Dorian made the cover in our sophomore year. Our friends Oliver and Helene were in that issue too, and Blake in the subsequent year’s, on a page with his fraternity brothers Mike and Marcus; the best-looking jocks were generally herded together for a beefcake center spread, although their answers to the questions were boring. I was the only one who never made it, and I remember thinking it was all right—maybe someday I would be as beautiful as my friends, and someone would think to put me on the cover of something.

  At the time Madeline had participated begrudgingly in the superficial annual tradition—she hated “society’s pointless obsession with people’s least important qualities,” which she felt was a conspiracy of “The Institution” to distract from meaningful original thought. For this reason, she had always maintained a terrible prejudice against actors and the media, yet now Madeline was explaining to us how a budding actress should go about getting the attention of Hollywood producers, and regaling us with the thrilling play-by-play of her first audition, in which evidently she had “dazzled” by virtue of having memorized all her lines.

  Dorian caught my eye as I blinked glassily around. He smiled, but I pretended to have something in my glasses, and turned away to wipe them off.

  “I mean, I’m perfect for it,” Madeline was saying. The role in question was a Weinstein-backed biopic on the “doomed” Mary Queen of Scots, in which she presumed that without acting experience she should play the title role.

  A hand fell on my knee. “Drink more,” Dorian said. “It’s an open bar.”

  Someone came through with a champagne sparkler. I watched it light up everyone’s faces, and yawned.

  IT WAS MY OWN ATTRACTION TO DORIAN THAT HAD LED TO his union with Madeline; therefore, blame for our threefold intertwinement (and, of course, our eventual unraveling) fell on my own shoulders—or rather, on my irrepressible heart.

  The day after he asked to draw my portrait at brunch, Dorian’s excitable voice called to me from the back corner of our European Art class, where he was sitting in a T-shirt and linen pajama pants.

  “Rough morning?” I teased him. Next to us, muted jewel tones glowed through a stained-glass mural—the meeting of two angels, representing art and science—as our professor prepared a slide which read, Mannerism through the Baroque Era.

  “Not at all, babe,” Dorian said. It was the first time he had called me “babe”; I feigned nonchalance as I opened to the wrong page of our textbook and offered him a nervous smile. “If anything, it was a great morning,” he went on. “I waited up for the sunrise.”

  An absent flipping of pages as I lost myself in his sculpted hands. “Special occasion?” I managed.

  “No. Just Wednesday morning.” He flashed one of those ship-launching smiles, which three thousand years ago would have sent a whole fleet of Trojan troops spiraling blithely to the ocean floor, and of course, I was no match for it either.

  I was in love with Dorian.

  I was in love with him when we sat in class, and he made a doodle on the corner of my notepad—a billy goat standing on an elephant—and whispered, “Your turn, draw something on mine.”

  I was in love with him when we studied late-night for midterms and his head dropped onto his flashcards, as he yawned, “Leonardo da Vinci . . . Lady with an Ermine . . . 1489 . . . what’s . . . an . . . ermine . . . anyway?”

  I was in love with him when we took walks, and he pointed out, “My favorite tree, see? Because it’s got this knot down here that swirls into a branch up there.”

  I was in love with him when he implored me, “Won’t you talk to Madeline? Please, please? Just one date with her and—”

  Of course, I did talk to Madeline. If my own love for Dorian was fated to be unrequited, I could perceive no compensation more appealing than his union with my other truest love. In part, my ends were self-motivated: At the time, I was still her “gay” best friend, and if they got together, I would be an honorary adjunct of their coupling. The more glaring motivation, however, I thought was self-evident. Dorian and Madeline would be perfect together.

  To the contrary, Madeline’s mind was already made up about “talentless, superficial” Dorian, and her righteous indignation no trifle to be reckoned with. Perhaps she knew all along that Dorian would ruin us. Until the day I met Dorian in Pierson, Madeline had never met him either; in hindsight, her presumptive reservations were so strong as to suggest extrasensory perception.

  Madeline, however, seemed hardly capable of passing judgment on men. Having endured twelve years of private all-girls education, she arrived at Yale stifled by trepidation, cornered by her inexperience into a trap: The longer she waited to enter her first relationship, the warier she became of dating. Consequently, she was obsessed with her first love being “exactly right.”

  All of freshman year, I tried with frustration to see her coupled, if only to alleviate the sheer pressure of her misguided chast
ity. She had no shortage of interested prospects, yet she denied me the satisfaction of a single successful match. By year’s end, she had—despite all her fiery rhetoric of cultural revolution—exceeded all expectations of romantic conservatism, and began to incorporate into all her objections the laughable mentioning of “marriageability.” To Madeline’s mind, this dubious quality involved maturity, clearheadedness, and masculine self-assuredness—high-minded qualifications lacking in any male twentysomething, but especially lacking in reckless Dorian Belgraves.

  Even had he theoretically satisfied her improbable conditions, his gross unsuitability had been established in her mind by his reputation as a dense New York City party boy. It was true that the summer before he transferred to Yale, Dorian’s image had been splashed with irritating regularity in every fashionable media outlet with high-society coverage. But as I came to realize during our friendship, the assumptions to be made from Dorian’s bad rep were inaccurate; seeking distraction after his brief and disastrous tenure at West Point, helter-skelter Dorian had merely chosen “society” as his latest preoccupation, the way he had blindly selected little papers that read, “horseback riding,” “lacrosse,” “fine art” from the same magic hat. That he was naturally suited for it was a bonus, although largely irrelevant considering his fundamental disregard for other people’s opinions. Parties merely satisfied Dorian’s need to feel purposeful. He danced and laughed and drank. People were excited to see him, and at the end of the night, it was almost like he had actually done something. By the end of the summer, though, his habit had dwindled, and when he started Yale he seemed to have gotten tired of people completely—for a while, at least—as he wandered the campus in self-reflective solitude, preferring interaction with his charcoal and sketchbook.

  Still, this was hardly reason enough for Madeline to renege on her oft-articulated dislike of Dorian—until one weekend in November I was struck with the flu, and unable to join her for the opening of a new exhibit at the Metropolitan.

  “For the love of God, just take Dorian,” I’d implored, blowing my nose. “It’ll give you a chance to get to know him, and I promise,” I lied, “if you don’t like him, I’ll never bring it up again.”

  We quibbled for twenty minutes, and in the end they went together, and what came next was as predictable as a numerical sequence. According to Madeline’s breathless retelling, they talked about Marxism, the origin of consciousness, Ernest Hemingway, North African tribal art, The Myth of Sisyphus; blithely wandered eight times around the Egyptian gallery, twelve times around the statue of Aphrodite in the Greek gallery, and fourteen times through the arch with the banner that read “Incan Treasures,” leading to the reception party. Between them they had nine glasses of champagne and seven pastries, the start of a habit. It was Dorian who always pointed to the open bar, and Madeline who always suggested “a nibble” at the dessert table—although she only ever took a single bite, and deferred the rest to Dorian’s lips.

  By the fourth pastry—a bite-size cheesecake, topped with powdered sugar and an orange twist—the exchange from Madeline’s fingers to Dorian’s lips involved a lick of her fingers. After the first incidence of this guileless indiscretion, Dorian apologized (“Too eager,” he ambiguously stated, through a mouth full of cream and graham cracker crust) while Madeline wiped her hand with halfhearted embarrassment on her cocktail napkin. After the second time, Dorian just stared at her as he licked his tongue deliberately over her French manicured nails, holding her by the waist, while Madeline let her fingers linger there and finally tucked them into the hair on his nape.

  Three hours of conversation and pastry-facilitated flirtation led them to the museum steps, where they stood face-to-face in the center under a banner that flapped COMING SOON with a painting by Gauguin. Enveloping her in his arms on the top step, he kissed her—and it was as though their lips had tied a knot between the three of us.

  chapter seven

  I was counting garment bags in my sleep like sheep when Madeline prodded me awake. “Ethan?”

  The last garment bag slumped lumpily over a white picket fence into the fashion closet as I yawned and rubbed my eyes. The lights were on in the club. Dorian’s head was on my shoulder, and except for a few lingering clusters, all the people had cleared out. A teenage busboy was leaning over the table, collecting watered-down glasses.

  “I have to go.” I stirred. “I have Régine tomorrow.” I pushed off Dorian with a priggish finger and slid away from him and Madeline on the couch.

  “You can’t just leave us,” she said. “What about Dorian?”

  At the invocation of his name, Dorian groaned, “I can’t seeee straight any-mooore . . .”

  “What about him? He’s fine,” I assured Madeline. Dorian slumped over. I propped up his head like a mortician presenting a corpse, and said, “See?”

  She whimpered and tried to shake him, as he collapsed once more with a snore, his breath reeking of gin and tonic.

  “For the love of God!” My nostrils flared at their presumptuousness—that despite Dorian’s yearlong estrangement, it should now be me saddled with the burden of his drunk body. “Where are all your model friends to help you?” I scowled, but the famous faces were all gone, like pages in a magazine that had been torn out. “All right, Madeline, you grab him on that side.”

  Madeline just sat there limp, like a bouquet of wilted flowers, and blinked. “Don’t look at me—” hiccup! “—like that. I’m going to play—” hiccup! “—the Queen of Scots.”

  With a scowl, and a flash of self-hatred—Why? Why was I doing this?—I tossed Dorian’s lazy arm around my neck and excavated him, half-dangling, out of his luxurious burrow. His fingers moved graspingly over the front of my shirt as he moaned again and dragged his feet against the wooden floor. I held him by the waist and guided him past the sweating ice bucket of empty Belvedere bottles.

  “Hey, what’s the rush?” Madeline whined. “Don’t you—” hiccup! “—think we should say bye at least?”

  We passed two reed-thin girls that had lingered behind. “Happy birthday, Dorian,” they said. One of them tipped over like a Chinese bamboo fountain to kiss him on the forehead, and he smiled with the blithe appreciation of a baby being put to sleep.

  We stumbled outside into pouring rain. Water rushed down the cobblestone streets in rivulets, and as the ground churned, I was reminded of something I had heard once about the Meatpacking District—that a hundred years ago, when all the butchers had their shops there, the streets used to puddle with blood.

  “Madeline, get that cab!”

  Teetering just below the nightclub awning, she pressed her hand against the brick wall and swayed there with her face to the ground.

  “Hey,” I prodded at her, “can you—”

  The cab’s lights whirred right past us while Madeline moved away from me a little, staring at her feet.

  “Why are you so useless?” I groaned. I ventured out into the street and squinted through the droves. One arm clutching Dorian and the other outstretched for a cab, I was punished for my resentment by a merciless onslaught of wet lashes.

  A yellow cab pulled mercifully up to us. I pushed Dorian inside, and tumbled closely behind. “Come on,” I shouted to Madeline, holding the door open.

  She clopped blindly toward us, eyes closed as the rainfall draped her like a veil. Her billowy sleeves fused like papier-mâché to her outstretched arms, and when her hands collided with the side of the cab, she yelped in surprise. She tilted her head back like she was about to sneeze, then suddenly keeled forward, vomiting all over the car door.

  “Dear God, Madeline, we’re not at Yale anymore!” I yanked her inside the cab and the driver turned to us.

  “She gonna puke in here?” he barked.

  “No, she’s not,” I said, and pulled at her arm, which was dangling in the rain.

  “I don’t wanner in here if she’s gonna puke. She could puke in some other cab.”

  “I told you, she’s not
going to vomit in your cab.” I finished yanking her errant limbs into the cab before he could protest, and slammed the door. The sound of the rain subdued, and I recited Dorian’s address by heart.

  Madeline’s sopping head started to tailspin toward me. “No,” I instructed, as though she was a misbehaving dog, and nudged her upright with a callous jerk of my shoulder. Her hair was plastered to her face with an ambiguous blend of vomit and rain, blonde strands lining the contours of her cheekbones.

  She blubbered, and I wiped off her cheeks like a child’s with the back of my sleeve. The first time we had gotten drunk together was at a Pi Beta Phi party, where we had our introduction to “jungle juice.” “It’s just like Kool-Aid,” she had marveled, having been denied all “sugary drinks” in her youth by her mother, before gulping it down in droves. Back then, it had been funny; now I was tempted to redirect the driver to my own apartment and leave both her and Dorian stranded in the cab when we arrived.

  The driver kept giving me sidelong glares while the others dozed away. Despite constant propping, they seemed determined to undermine me: Dorian’s head ended up on one shoulder, and Madeline’s on the other. We arrived twenty minutes later, and I prodded them awake. “Wake up. It’s twenty dollars.”

  Madeline was cross-eyed, with her chin tilted up like she was trying to balance an invisible spoon on her nose. “No cash,” she shrugged.

  “Come on, Madeline, I’m not paying for this.” I elbowed Dorian—“Hey! Hey!” I turned up his thigh to yank out his wallet from his back pocket. Squirming like a cat dangled over a bathtub, he remembered me and let me go ahead.

  The rain felt colder the second time. Even though Dorian’s building had an awning that extended to the curbside, the two of them took so long to exit the cab that we were soaked anew by the time we reached the front door. It was a familiar door—ornamented wrought iron, in a Gilded Age style—and when it opened to a familiar foyer of mahogany wood bordering peach damask walls, it revealed Harry, the night porter, who was also familiar.