“Mr. St. James!” he exclaimed, fondly patting my wet back with a white-gloved hand. “I’d been wondering when you’d come around again.”
During college, excursions into New York City had often led to sleepovers at Dorian’s apartment, where compared to Madeline’s, parental supervision was appreciably scarce. On the rare nights his jet-setting mother was actually home, we usually found her in the last stages of a “spirit hour” involving Percocet and Veuve Clicquot, sashaying up and down the stairs to help her face mask dry, while Buddha Bar played over the surround-sound speakers, and Nag Champa poured out from a dozen incense burners. “Don’t mind me!” Edie would say, twirling a tassel on her charmeuse bathrobe. “I’m just cleansing.”
Now I buckled under Dorian’s weight while Madeline tried to lean her elbow on my back like a desk.
“Are you all right? Is that Mr. Belgraves?”
Madeline smirked. “Hiiiii Haaaarrrryyyyyy.”
“Welcome back, Miss Dupre.” He turned to me and asked, “Have you seen Mr. Belgraves’s modeling photos from Paris yet?”
I nodded with a sigh. “Can you buzz us up?”
Harry pressed the Up button on the elevator and held the door with a suited arm. “He’s looking very handsome these days, isn’t he?” He gestured with a proud chin toward Dorian, whose “handsome” knees were almost scraping the hardwood floor. “I always said that boy should be a model. Just like his mother.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Yes, you did.”
EVERYBODY HAD BEEN SAYING THAT FOR A LONG TIME, THAT Dorian should be a model. That he ended up actually doing it wasn’t much of a surprise; the surprising part was how long he held out.
He’d go up to New York City for a ball or a gala or “some thing with Karl,” and be accosted by a scout or a modeling agent, and every time he came back, his voice would be tainted with a harsher streak of disdain. “They think with everything I’m capable of, I’d agree to be dressed like a rag doll and propped up for pictures,” he’d scowl. Meanwhile, the “everything” of which he imagined himself capable was known only to him. He loathed to be perceived as just a rich, pretty face, yet had failed to augment this perception with a lasting demonstration of noninherited merit. Madeline had been appeased by his rejection of modeling as a suitable pursuit: She hated the idea of her boyfriend with his shirt off, attracting millions of eyes that didn’t belong to her. Once or twice she’d attended events in New York City with him where she had witnessed the attempts. It was a joke between them: “Three people begged Dorian to sign a contract last night,” she’d laugh while holding onto his arm, proud that it was her who got to have him in the end.
Looking back, perhaps he knew all along, and was merely warming us up to the idea. More likely, though, he had been floating in an infinity pool in Crete when they e-mailed him with an umpteenth invitation to Paris. He probably stirred his gin and tonic with a swizzle stick and looked across the water, then, contemplating his fondness for the Champs-Élysées, thought, Why not?—in regard to modeling, and his entire life. It shouldn’t have come as a shock. For our trio, it had always been about the next exciting thing. We prided ourselves on intimate relations with the halfhearted cousin of true recklessness—elaborate plans culminating in afternoon naps in each other’s arms, talk of road trips and big parties and graduating and going off “into the world,” occasionally committing to some wild gesture: splashing stone-sober into the fountain at Sterling Library, or roaring down a highway sticking out of the moonroof of Blake’s car—the shape of change, an aesthetic.
There were plenty of drugs and alcohol to keep us feeling new and exciting, and when all else failed, we just looked around and remembered that we were surrounded by our beautiful friends, our beautiful, young life. Somehow though, it wasn’t enough for Dorian—or more likely, it was too much. He thought he had eluded a life Path, that dreaded bulwark of boredom and banality which in his mind equated to a life unjustly compromised, yet maybe . . . the dreaded Path was us, and he had unwittingly settled into us as complacently as a gray flannel suit into a seated position from nine to five. We couldn’t be sure. All we knew was that—he left. Just didn’t say a word to us, and was gone.
After a series of unanswered phone calls, a final call to Dorian’s mom’s house in Paris confirmed it: Dorian had left. To us, the reason remained a mystery.
Barely able to believe it, Madeline cried and cried. I was upset, too, but at first I refused to take it personally. Like a housewife who convinces herself that her absent beloved must be “working late” or “out to buy milk,” I made excuses for Dorian. He must have had some troubles we didn’t know about. His mother had just remarried for the second time, and I knew his relationship with his father wasn’t the best. Money and good looks weren’t everything, you know—surely something was bothering him, and he’d be back when he was ready.
Then Paris Fashion Week happened, and the whereabouts of the spectral spouse were finally known. For the first time since his disappearance, Dorian’s ghost appeared with a proverbial stumble onto our idyllic, shrub-laced porch, Windsor knot askew over his open shirt-front, and his head swirling like aerated wine. Intermingling with the faded notes of our own disgraced romance was the overpowering stench of the Other Woman’s cheap perfume: There is no love whose fragrance lasts forever.
Who knew if between us there had ever been any love at all?
When the splashy headline appeared in the Yale Daily News it was the end of September, which had been a month of intimate relations with Madeline’s tear-streaked face. “MODEL STUDENT,” the paper screamed in block letters, and all was explained with a picture of Dorian on the Jean Paul Gaultier runway. He appeared in pictures on the front page for the rest of the week, walking in a new show every day. Technically he wasn’t even a Yale student anymore—he had transferred to la Sorbonne, we later found out—yet his was the only news anybody at school was interested in. At Yale we were used to all the usual newsworthy stories: The pre-med major discovering an elusive cancer cell, or the Rhodes scholar publishing his debut novel. The most insufferable write-ups always happened after summer vacation, when all the do-gooders returned from the corners of Africa to pen op-ed articles about their acts of compassion in the third world, but Dorian’s news-making story was atypical and alluring.
By the third day, the well-worn grooves of campus talk were universally trampled by many have-you-heard? pairings of “Dorian Belgraves” and “Paris Fashion Week,” the latter term having never invaded undergraduate discussion before. Dorian was like an advancing army of one, whose image steadily laid greater claim to the defenseless pages of our school paper. Over dining-hall trays he had his makeup applied backstage, his foppish long hair clipped up with silver barrettes; on study-room desks, between notes on stem cells and the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, he attended Fashion Week after-parties with all the other gorgeous Impossibles who, we assumed, had run away from their own Yales everywhere. Soon there was not a person or a surface across the Yale campus that didn’t know Dorian Belgraves was having the best life of anyone we knew.
It was different for me and Madeline, of course. We were the Kübler-Ross couple, carrying out our grief in the five predictable stages. Denial, because Dorian “could’ve never”; then anger, because of course he did; then rationalization; depression; until finally, when we should have felt acceptance, just a deep, black lull, as Madeline relied for a few weeks on half-sputtered words and I finally realized that, if once I had loved him, now I hated Dorian Belgraves.
Dorian had stolen my own dream. He’d gotten the life full of glamour and excitement, at least ten years sooner than I could even hope for, if it ever happened for me at all, because of things he hadn’t even worked for—wealth, beauty, and a disposition whose sweetness could attract no enemies—while I prayed every day for a chance at the smallest bit of it. And sure, if you want to know the truth? If I was him maybe I’d have done the same, just left and become fabulous and forgotten everybody. But the di
fference was that I knew that, if I was him, if I was the lucky one and he wasn’t, at least I would say sorry. I knew I would turn around and say something, anything, to acknowledge the unfairness of it; that despite the obstruction of my silver spoon in my hand I would make some self-deprecating gesture toward those I had one-upped, to clear the air of that evil illusion that somehow I had earned it all.
Madeline at least had devoted herself to a higher cause. For every hour we spent together, she spent a dozen in solitude, poring over books that might help her change the world somehow. Even if in the end she never made a real change in the world at all—just chaired a high-profile charity, or funneled money into a leftist nonprofit—at the very least she was conscious of something outside of her immediate self. But Dorian never was. He was never conscious of anything except living his enchanted life, and something about knowing that, it just dug into me, as if all along Dorian had been a silver knife that, in my ignorance, I had allowed to pierce me, pushing deeper and deeper, until finally, the only thing to do was just rip it out for good and bandage up the wound with the tattered shreds of my own dignity.
After I realized all that, I was glad I would never see Dorian again.
Dorian is a brat, I told myself. He was too beautiful, too rich; without Dorian it would be one less beautiful person standing between me and the life I believed was my birthright. When I applied for the internship at Régine, the thought thrashed viciously across my mind that maybe I should reach out to Edie, Dorian’s mother. To work at Régine was my truest dream, and I knew that to guarantee my internship there I only needed to ask for a single phone call from the woman whose face had countless times graced its pages. Edie Belgraves would have happily done me the favor, having on several occasions taken a superior liking to me (apparently I was the spitting image of her first high school boyfriend)—yet to gain any privilege with the utterance of Dorian’s family name would be like balancing my life’s dream atop a hollow house of cards. I preferred to build a shack from scratch, using my own incomplete deck, than to ever think of him again.
THE ELEVATOR DOOR SLID OPEN TO THE FOYER OF THE BELGRAVES’ private apartment. They owned the entire floor, and the one above. Despite the newly minted origins of their wealth—hundreds of exorbitantly paying fashion campaigns resulting in six-figure checks to Dorian’s mother, combined with a fortune made in Silicon Valley by his stepfather—their decor spun an illusion of old money, with all the trappings of anyone with blue-blooded relations. We dripped rainwater onto a Persian carpet as Madeline sniffed at one of the potted palms, watering it with her swinging wet hair.
I fished in Dorian’s pockets for the keys while he groaned and pressed his forehead against the toile wallpaper. Captured in a perennial pastoral bliss of fluttering aprons and swinging apple-bearing baskets, the French countrywomen were duplicated every three inches in the same arrangement, their bonneted faces always preferring the peaceful contemplation of produce and pillowing haystacks over us.
“Do you realize where we are?” Madeline whispered wondrously at the houseplant. “Dorian lives here!”
A click, and the door creaked into a grand entrance hall.
I reached for Dorian’s waist, tore him away from murmured small talk with his Gallic neighbors. “We’re home.”
It was quiet in the apartment. Light swirled in from the foyer like cream into black coffee. My eyes adjusted to the phantom before us: Edie, gazing out from a blown-up cover of Vogue. All around glowed ghostly eyes that belonged alternately to Dorian or to his mother. I had never realized how similar they both looked; the same timeless almond-eyed countenance, a beauty rooted in the finest sensitivities of both sexes. It made sense that Dorian and his mother had always been extremely close. Most people are, when they remind one another of themselves.
A majestic staircase loomed ahead, shadows from a curlicued wrought iron railing writhing like ivy over the marble steps. Dorian smacked his lips and seemed to regain a bit of his senses. “Do you think you can climb up yourself?” I asked. I gestured to the stairs and his knees crumpled beneath him.
I took a breath, and held my hands around his waist to steady him. The handrail was polished wood, but it felt like ice.
“Darling . . .” called Madeline from behind us, her voice echoing like a penny into an empty wishing well. “Darling, why don’t you show Ethan your piano . . . ?”
Having already seen Dorian’s piano a dozen times before, I rolled my eyes as she caught up to us at the foot of the stairs. With a tug at my arm, she cooed, “Before I met you, I’d never seen such a marvelous piano.” She gazed fawningly at me through crescent-moon lids—evidently, she thought I was Dorian—then let me go, drifting back into the light like a ballerina who had forgotten her steps.
Dorian hung on, wringing his arms around my torso while I began to drag him up after me. His legs twitched in earnest, but his feet always missed the stair—after a few tries he just gave up completely, and it was like carrying a piece of furniture. Halfway up, I took another deep breath and leaned against the rail for relief. His whole body pressed obliviously against me and I wondered, as his heart beat serenely into my ribcage, if this had not been the state of our entire friendship.
“Come on, babe,” I urged, not realizing that I had adopted Dorian’s habitual pet name.
“Are we—?” Dorian lifted his head up from me with a faded sense of recognition—he loosened his grip around my body and started to slip away. He was coming undone, like a loosely tied towel, and—flash!—his head rolled back and his Adam’s apple caught the light with a bladelike glint. The stairs below us wavered. My body tensed as Dorian’s whole weight rested over my arm, and with a strong heave I jerked him back onto me.
With one hand on the banister, I adjusted him across the front of my chest and tightened my grip around his waist. He buried his face into my neck. He snorted. Snored. We swayed for a moment there and I gazed up into the darkness, which like a black hole in a recurring dream felt both terrifying yet familiar. Then he fastened his arms around my body once more—hugged me, really—and we continued upward into it.
The whole time Madeline lingered behind us, a hand holding onto the banister and the other conducting an invisible orchestra as she swayed from side to side with her eyes closed, a concerto trapped inside her head by her wet blonde hair. “Boys . . .” she called out musically. “Why don’t we all go on a double date this weekend?”
“Who’d be my date?” I grunted, as I lugged Dorian over the final step.
“Me,” she said.
“What about Dorian?”
She tossed a limp-wristed hand in the air. “Both of you would be my date,” she yawned. “That’d be the double part.”
Dorian’s bedroom was pitch-black, but I still knew it like my own. With a final effort I heaved my charge facedown onto the middle of his four-poster bed. He fell with a cushioned thud, and I crumbled like a demolished building onto his fifteen-hundred-count sheets, just as Madeline’s forehead cracked conclusively against the bedpost and she bewilderedly mumbled something about Dorian’s piano.
I ANSWERED THE PHONE. “RÉGINE.”
“Edmund needs a reservation.” I failed to recognize the voice amid a hectic background of New York traffic.
“Er, sure,” I replied, reaching for a notepad as a distant car alarm filled in my ear. “I’m sorry, who’s calling?”
“It’s me,” he said, and I realized with horror that I was on the line with Edmund Benneton, who had inexplicably referred to himself in the third person. From my end, a sharp intake of breath; I swelled with embarrassment, back straightening as though Edmund was suddenly right there, ominously slapping a ruler against his palm. “I’m so sorry—” I began, but he ignored me and yawned. “Is this the redhead?”
“No,” I replied, “it’s Ethan . . . black hair.”
He considered this—perhaps trying to remember me—then prodded, “What are you wearing?”
I glanced down at my gray Dior suit
, which I had now worn every day for two weeks.
“Not maroon, I hope.” He took a long, audible drag off a cigarette, and sighed, “I hate maroon . . . Can you make my reservation?”
“Of course,” I gushed, like a tidal wave hitting a city, “yes, yes, I—”
“Good. Somewhere well-reviewed, and new.” He puff-puffed once more, and specified: “New in the past six months. Make sure it’s below Fourteenth Street—eight o’clock for two people, under Edmund Benneton. You can confirm to my personal e-mail.”
The words were still forming on my tongue when he hung up on me. I sat there at the edge of my seat, scribbling furiously while murmuring to myself, “Well-reviewed. New. Eight o’clock. Below Fourteenth.”
I brandished the note in the air like Charlie Bucket with his golden ticket as the significance of the moment descended upon me: This was it. This was my big break. A seemingly insignificant task, but I had guzzled enough Horatio Alger Kool-Aid to know that a few favors here and there, and pretty soon I’d have worked my way up the ladder. I would be traveling the whole world with Edmund, going to photo shoots and helping him dress all the top models, and—
“Who was that?” asked George, fat fingers pressed around a carrot stick.
“Er—” I had a vague idea of what would happen if George learned I had intercepted an assignment from Edmund. “Nobody,” I lied, “just Jenny from HL Group.”
“She’s so loud, I could hear her from over here,” he crunched.
I stood up with an abrupt scrape of chair casters against the carpet. “I’m going to use the bathroom,” I announced in a flat voice.
I enclosed myself in a stall, and began to scroll on my phone through restaurant reviews. Without much time to waste, I settled on the first restaurant I found that fit his description, a Spanish-Japanese fusion restaurant in the West Village that was only three months old, boasting a series of “unclassifiably succulent” squid dishes according to the Times. Good enough for me. It certainly sounded extravagant, like one of those places nobody really enjoyed but that sophisticated people raved about while drinking musty wine and making superior remarks: perfect for Edmund.
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