Replete with ornate fluting, his bookshelf was topped with a carving of Medusa, and her eyes bored through me as I poked innocently around for Edmund’s diaries. I had expected them to be all together, lined up on a shelf or two, but very few of his books were lined up at all. Instead they were like the magazines on the floor—crammed into haphazard piles, their crevices stuffed with miscellany, everything in danger of spilling out if you removed a single book.
I found the first diary crushed like a bookmark between the pages of a Christian Dior coffee-table publication. Holding in the books above and below, I yanked it out and smiled as I ran my fingers over the yellow satin cover, feeling a thrill at the thought of reading it. I laid it on the bearskin rug at my feet and found a second on a bottom shelf: Tiffany blue, bound in silk with gold-tipped pages, sandwiched between two decades-old copies of Vogue Italia.
As I gathered them all up in every size and shape, in shades of coral and mustard and azure blue, I learned that Edmund also collected greeting cards. Tucked into books and diaries and crannies all around I found a dozen cards, always blank on the inside, and paired up with the unused envelopes. Happiness is a journey, not a destination . . . To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world . . . Life is not about finding yourself, it is about creating yourself. Some of them were in other languages (La vie ne vaut d’être vécue sans amour), and they made me wonder if he bought them on his travels, thinking, “That would make a nice card for John Galliano,” then returned home and forgot about them? Or did he buy them for himself, because, well, he just liked feel-good quotes in calligraphic fonts?
I noticed another blue diary on the nightstand. In total, there were four more diaries in its various drawers; one covered by a pile of pills, with no container in sight, and another guarded by a flaccid wind chime, which like Edmund’s peaceless Buddha alluded to his vague interest in a New Age aesthetic. For good measure, since the diaries seemed to be everywhere, I decided to check the bathroom—and was unsurprised to find two there, resting in a pearly magazine rack. The bathroom was in fact pearl-themed: It contained a pearl-studded mirror and a bathtub shaped like a giant oyster, presumably so Edmund could pretend to be the pearl in the middle.
I took it as further confirmation of his genius, all these diaries hidden in the corners of his apartment like Easter eggs. When I thought I had almost all of them—surely a few still lurked—I knelt on the bearskin rug with all of them fanned out around me like a parasol, and took a breath.
The first diary. I opened it—winced.
Edmund’s handwriting somehow contained greater menace than Charles Manson’s scrawl, and it was while trying to discern his near illegible scratches that I came close to thinking he and Régine and everybody must all have been playing a huge joke on me.
Carla came to the city today she is so fat I can’t believe anybody could look so bad in Alaïa we went to dinner—
It stopped there. I turned the page to see if it continued—that couldn’t be all—but it never did, and in fact the next time he had written was twenty pages later, in a different colored ink:
Today we went to Indochine for dinner I had the salmon the Times said it was their best dish I sat with Coco Rocha Raquel Zimmerman Edie Campbell FeiFei Sun Daria Strokous Joseph Altuzarra and Georgina St. James Coco Rocha was wearing a Vera Wang chiffon dress and Miu Miu open-toe ankle boots Raquel Zimmerman was wearing a Louis Vuitton plaid cropped jacket and skirt and Marni platform heels Edie Campbell was wearing a Rodarte sweater and sequined skirt with lace overlay and Giuseppe Zanotti boots FeiFei Sun was wearing a Nina Ricci lame jacket Céline tapered pants and Jil Sander boots Daria Strokous was wearing a Marc Jacobs polka-dot jacket Dries Van Noten silk blouse Proenza Schouler macrame skirt and Chanel kitten heels Joseph Altuzarra was wearing an Yves Saint Laurent suit and Ferragamo shoes and Georgina St. James is going through a divorce so I don’t blame her for wearing head-to-toe Dillard’s or something.
That was it. There were no sketches or inspirations, no anecdotes or stories, no reference to his editorial work at all.
I fumbled for another diary from the pile—Karlie Kloss wore Christian Dior—then another—Chanel Balenciaga Versace—then another, which was empty except for one word in the middle—open-toe—just OPEN-TOE in the middle of the page, in the middle of the diary, constituting the entirety of the book’s revelations.
I began in anguish to flip through more and more pages, desperate to find something, anything, of value. But there was nothing, just a ramble of designers and famous people; a running tab of names, names, names without any punctuation, except for the end of some long passages where his ink had bled into a kind of mottled period, as though the exercise had exhausted him and he could barely lift his pen to prevent an aneurysmal inkblot.
My bottom lip trembled.
It had been one thing to slowly recognize the bland truth about everyone else at Régine—but Edmund too?
Like a slow-moving washing machine, my stomach churned as the truth about him became sickeningly apparent. Even with all the patterns and the colors screaming for attention, the apartment was like the bags under Edmund’s eyes: sagging, tired. In the middle of his huge flashy bedroom, his satin-covered, queen-size bed was collapsed in its center like a broken lung, and everywhere the stacks of magazines leaned against each other for relief.
Edmund Benneton wasn’t a genius. He was a sham. He was tired, washed out, relying on twenty-four-karat bells and whistles to sustain his reputation as a “creative” while all along living in sleepless fear of his inevitable undoing. My idol—Régine—my dream—it was all a sham.
How far I thought I’d come from poring over Régine at my mother’s nail salon, dreaming of an escape—only to realize that this was exactly the same.
My arm gravitated onto my lap as the pages flipped over my thumb and the diary finally slipped away from me. I turned and noticed the bear’s entire head was still attached to the bearskin rug I was sitting on. It had two glittering glass gemstones for eyes—and suddenly, I couldn’t be there anymore. I scrambled in a panic to my feet, excavated a hole on a bookshelf with a swoop of my hand, and shoving, shoving, began to cram the diaries there, patting them in, a worthless row of bleak, colorful spines—pressed the bottom of my hand to my nose—sniffled, with one last, unbelieving glance around me, at Buddha, and Medusa, and cried out.
EVERY DAY THEREAFTER I DESCENDED INTO THE SUBWAY like a buoy being dragged underwater.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are delayed because of train traffic ahead of us.”
One day an old woman with a head scarf spat phlegm into a corner of the train car. She hacked loudly while a wall of people pressed against me, trying to place inches between themselves and her. Someone cleared his throat loudly to remind her that her behavior was inappropriate, but she took it as a sign there was more phlegm in her own and continued to expectorate.
One day two black kids hollered at everybody to “Stand back, stand back, ev’rybody, it’s showtime.” They blasted hip-hop from a handheld radio and started to do handstands before passing around a baseball cap for cash tips. When the train jolted to a stop, one of them accidentally kicked a baby stroller with his Nikes and they escaped onto the platform with dollar bills fluttering behind them.
One day two Asian women got into a fight when one of them bumped a cartful of lettuce heads against the other’s cart of onions. But after a minute I wasn’t sure if they were mad or if they just knew each other and were talking very loudly in Chinese while pointing in each other’s faces.
One day the overhead voice said, “Stand clear of the closing doors, please”—the doors rung ding-ding! to close, then bluffing, rung ding-ding! to close again—then ding-ding! and ding-ding! and ding-ding! and “Stand clear of the closing doors, please,” then ding-ding! “Stand clear of the—” ding-ding! “Stand clear—” ding-ding! and everyone was looking around for whoever was holding the door open ding-ding! ding-ding! ding-ding! and it wa
s a lady with an enormous suitcase who clearly did not fit into the subway car ding-ding! and I wanted to scream STAND CLEAR OF THE FUCKING DOOR, PLEASE! If I wasn’t entitled to be happy or successful, wasn’t I at least entitled to get home without being stuck in this miserable underground hell with you and your suitcase? Ding-ding!
Every day, between all the setbacks, the same woman lent her cheerful but unconvincing voice to the overhead subway speakers—“Next stop, Fourteenth Street—Next stop, Astor Place—Next stop, Bleecker Street.” When she said it, it was as if she was teaching the stops to a child with learning difficulties—FOUR-teenth Street, AS-tor Place, BLEE-cker Street—and I wondered if she was proud of herself for stifling the quality of my life, a life that became increasingly more pathetic with every commute. How old was she and how long had her voice been filling the subway trains? Did she live in New York, and if so, did she come onto the subway and tell people, “That’s me, that’s my voice”?
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are delayed because of train traffic ahead of us.”
Maybe she was poor and destitute and wore rags, and when she tried to tell people it was her voice on the loudspeaker they all thought she was another crackpot.
“Ladies and gentlemen, you are getting sadder and more pitiful every second.”
Maybe she was just like me, and when she heard her own voice, she thought, “God, this is so all so exhausting.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s never going to go away.”
Maybe she was already dead.
“Ladies and gentlemen, and you, Ethan St. James, you’re dead too.”
It was like this for one, two, three, four, five . . . days? Weeks? I honestly have no idea.
ONCE I ARRIVED AT RÉGINE, IT WAS ALWAYS THE SAME.
Somehow it was always me who ended up with the task of finding missing things in our overflowing closet. It was always something dreadfully obscure—either very insignificant (a missing pearl from a Chanel belt), very elusive (a pair of transparent plastic, fingerless Pucci gloves), or very generic (an unlabeled white crewneck Alexander Wang T-shirt, resembling every other unlabeled white crewneck T-shirt we had). Accessories were invariably the worst: Finding a simple top hat from the Giorgio Armani collection involved sifting through about a hundred top hats we had received for a Charlie Chaplin-inspired couture story, looking frantically for the one that most closely resembled our check-in photograph while Sabrina pestered me every minute, “Armani! Armani! Armani!”
Because most of the accessories were unlabeled samples, I had suggested to Sabrina that we begin labeling everything, just writing the name of the designer on a piece of removable masking tape and slapping it somewhere we could easily see later. “You can’t just put ordinary tape on haute couture,” she snapped. I considered proposing to her that we find a tape designed by Valentino.
My so-called “good eye,” on which I had so prided myself during my interview with Sabrina, became the bane of my existence, and although most of the missing things turned up after an hour or two of tedious searching, I felt like I was always looking for something I couldn’t find.
I knew every morning when I stepped through the closet door, a familiar weight descending over me like a funerary shroud, that during the course of the day Sabrina would bark, George would scoff, Edmund would barge in, and the whole time in the background the fashion editors would gracefully loathe each other while Jane floated around, oblivious to it all.
I could see the truth now about Edmund. Of course the pictures he made were beautiful. He had every imaginable resource at his disposal—the best models and hair and makeup and clothes. He shot only the hottest, of-the-moment girls (“Call Ford, I need the black girl with the gapped teeth,” he’d say, or “Who’s this? I saw her at Karl’s party and now she’s shopping with Plum Sykes! Book her for tomorrow’s shoot and cancel Natalia.”). As far as I knew, he had no true inspirations. His “inspiration boards” were just a random sampling of his favorite looks from the current collections, with a few shoes and handbags among them for good measure—everything chosen less for its aesthetic value than for its association with a brand name he liked.
My whole existence now felt like one of his diary entries:
Today I photographed in samples from Comme des Garçons Valentino Dries van Noten Fendi Max Mara Gucci Versace Tom Ford Christian Dior Michael Kors Miu Miu Alaïa and Giorgio Armani . . . Meanwhile Sabrina asked George did you see what Dorian Belgraves wore to Karl Lagerfeld’s party while I continued looking for Armani and anyway it turned up on Will’s desk but it didn’t matter anyway because a call came in that Steven Meisel had to postpone the shoot we were prepping so everybody wanted their clothes back and I spent the rest of the day returning everything that had come in which I didn’t even have the time to forget was Comme des Garçons Valentino Dries van Noten . . . Sabrina said Dorian Belgraves should do a shoot with his mother Edie . . . Fendi Max Mara Gucci . . . George said that was a brilliant idea . . . Dorian Belgraves Versace Dorian Belgraves Tom Ford Dorian Belgraves Christian Dior Dorian Belgraves Michael Kors Dorian Belgraves Miu Miu Dorian Belgraves Dorian Belgraves Dorian Belgraves
ON ONE FRIDAY OF AN INDISTINGUISHABLE WEEK AT RÉGINE, the editors sent me to pick up a package at the FedEx office.
There were two men waiting at the counter to assist me. The first man’s name was Harvey, which I read on a tag on his shirt that said, HELLO, MY NAME IS HARVEY, and below it in smaller letters, PLEASE ASK ME ABOUT OUR MOVING KITS! The other man’s name was Bert, and his tag was pretty much the same, except it said, PLEASE ASK ME ABOUT OUR BUY-TWO, GET-ONE DEALS ON SHIPPING TAPE!
Harvey was black, Bert was white, and both had more wrinkles than a prune or a golden raisin. When I handed Harvey the sticky with my tracking number, he said to Bert, “Hey, Bert, you remember how to log off this? I don’t want to lose my place,” and I noticed that he had been playing solitaire on the computer.
“You just gotta . . .” Bert said, as he slowly stretched his arm out toward Harvey’s mouse, in a movement reminiscent of tai chi. He couldn’t quite get to it with Harvey in the way, so he said, “Wanna move that way, Harvey?”
And Harvey said, “Sure, Bert,” and inched his stool to the side, while trying to remain perched on top of it.
“I’m sorry to rush you,” I broke out, “but can you please hurry?”
They blinked at me, like What’s the rush? and How fast do you think we can go anyway?
Hoping to inspire a sense of urgency, I added, “It’s for Régine.”
“What’s Régine?” they asked together.
I started to take a breath. “It’s a fashion magazine,” I disclosed. “A very important fashion magazine.” Bert’s hand hovered over the computer mouse; they had progressed from moving slowly to not moving at all.
“Just—please!” I begged with a motion toward Bert’s arthritic hand. The screen remained frozen on Harvey’s solitaire game.
“A fashion magazine, huh?” Bert prodded. “Do you get to see a lot of women? Like supermodels?”
Harvey looked over and asked me, “That why you got on that nice getup?” referring to my Dior suit from Clara that, being the only understated outfit I owned, now constituted my daily wardrobe. Like a scorekeeper at a ping-pong game, his gape alternated between his computer screen and my suit. My suit won his favor and he altogether gave up any attempt to track my package. “Where could I get a suit like that?” he asked.
Bert seemed interested in the answer as well. Together, they shifted toward me and propped their elbows on the counter, like they expected me to tell them a bedtime story.
“You could go to Bergdorf Goodman,” I offered unhelpfully.
“Do you get to see a lot of women?” Bert asked me a second time.
“No.”
“You mean you’ve never worked with Claudia Schiffer?” He turned a little to Harvey. “You know, I asked Claudia Schiffer on a date one time.”
“You ain’t serious,” Harvey scoffe
d. He warned me, “Don’t listen to Bert. He’s just old.”
“I swear,” Bert insisted. “I used to be a busboy at an Italian restaurant—was wipin’ up some minestrone soup when she came in. She was with another lady, but I wasn’t interested in her. Went right up to Claudia and gave her my phone number on the back of somebody’s receipt.”
“What you think Claudia Schiffer gonna do with you?” Harvey laughed.
“I was real good-looking then, Harvey! Didn’t have a busted leg. I said to Claudia Schiffer, ‘Now ma’am, I don’t mean to intrude on your dinner, but I gotta tell you, you even prettier in real life than in the magazines.’ She took my number and said ‘Thank you’ like a real lady, didn’t make me feel bad or nothin’. Never called, though. She was like my fish that swum away. Ever heard that?” he asked me. “Or maybe it’s the one that goes, you feed a fish once, you feed him just once, but you feed a fish twice—”
“I—I’m sorry,” I said, getting serious, “but I really, really need this package, like—now.”
Bert squinted, like he wasn’t certain what package I was referring to.
“Look,” I said, leaning forward, “I’m not technically allowed to tell you this, but you seem like nice guys, so . . . this package I need—” I pointed at the number on my sticky note “—it’s actually for Claudia Schiffer.”
Bert’s and Harvey’s eyes widened.
An Innocent Fashion Page 22