An Innocent Fashion
Page 25
“I don’t mean about summer. I mean, when we get old.” With a glazed look and his hands crossed over his chest, he looked like an embalmed corpse.
“People change so much when they grow up—they get so sad,” he said. “Do you think we’ll stay the same?”
“Your mother’s not sad,” said Madeline.
“My mother’s not smart enough to be sad,” he said, blinking. “Anybody who really thinks at all about life realizes—it just gets worse.”
“Then, don’t think about it,” Madeline said. “Don’t think anything at all.” She pinched her lips into a small o and blew an imaginary eyelash off his face.
Dorian closed his eyes. “I mean, just think about us, all grown up, in offices somewhere . . .”
Now I rolled against him and I tilted my head onto his shoulder. “That will never happen to us,” I said. I tucked my fingers between his clasped hands, and gave them a confident jolt. “Listen to me,” I said. “That will never, never happen to us.” My breath pushed the lingering smoke across us.
“Why? It happens to everybody.”
“We’re not everybody, though,” I said. “People who end up like that aren’t even alive like us. They’re weak, they’re sad. All they can think about is paying their bills. They don’t feel things the way that we do.” I pressed my cheek against his and said into his ear, “When we leave here, we’re going to change the world. We’re going to follow our dreams, and—”
“I don’t even have dreams.”
“Oh, of course you do,” Madeline snapped.
I sat up, and for a moment there appeared to be an unprecedented tear hovering in the corner of Dorian’s eyelid. I blinked, and the tear disappeared, a raindrop which one moment had been hovering on the tip of a leaf and the next had rolled back toward the stem.
“Where is this depressing nonsense coming from?” Madeline asked. “Kiss me.” She nudged him with her nose. Dorian opened his eyes to stare at the ceiling, and she did it again.
The second time he flinched, like a bee had stung him.
“Don’t,” I whispered to her.
He grasped reflexively at my hand.
Madeline saw his hand wrap around mine. She stiffened. Pressed her lips together. Her face flashed with something new. “Then you kiss him,” she said to me.
Dorian stopped breathing. Our bodies suddenly were heavy and still, like logs that had been rolled together into a pile. Madeline traced her fingers over Dorian’s moonlit stomach again, while my own felt trapped in his clutch. Neither he nor I could move.
“We all love each other here,” she continued. Outside a moth flickered against the windowpane. The roof of the neighboring house glowed white in the moonlight, and beyond, a clock tower stood like a sentinel. “Do you love me, Ethan?” she asked.
I nodded slowly.
Madeline leaned over Dorian, her breasts pressing against the back of his hands. “Will you always love me?”
Before I could say yes, I would always love her, Madeline had pressed through the smoke and her lips were upon mine. She kissed me. I swallowed hard at the familiar taste, which was sweeter than a strawberry or a newly picked peach.
She pulled out my hand from Dorian’s grasp and rested it on the curve of her swanlike neck. My fingertips spilled across her pulse. I thought of Botticelli, and springtime, and everything teeming vividly with life. My own throat bobbed.
“You’ll always love me, right?” she whispered into my mouth. I felt myself nod. My heart pounded in my chest. She unstuck from me and my body followed achingly toward her lips. “Well,” she nudged Dorian, “nothing will ever change, boys,” she whispered, my saliva shimmering on her bottom lip. “Nothing will ever change.” She pushed her knee against his leg, and the mattress groaned. “Go on—kiss one another.”
Dorian didn’t stir, elbows still locked at his sides. We were both quiet. The heat of embarrassment prickled my cheeks.
“Don’t you love each other?” She made our hands into a bundle, surrounding them with her own hands like wrapping paper. “Don’t we all—love each other?”
Inches away, Dorian glanced sidelong at me. I felt his stomach tense as he lifted his neck. I closed my eyes, and felt a sudden rush of completeness. After this moment, I will have known everything good in life. Madeline’s breath, her taste, still lingered like a mask over my own face. My cheek struck his nose—a soft exhalation, a sudden, breathy “oh”—
The kiss was cold and stiff, yet, like a handshake between two adversaries, it softened upon contact. I melted onto him. After all this time—our first kiss. Madeline stroked our hands with her thumb, and unable to control myself, I pushed my tongue into his mouth.
Dorian pulled sharply away. I was torn, a shirt caught on a fencepost.
Turning away from me, he retreated to the pillow, burying his face in it. He breathed in deeply and his whole back swelled. Madeline reached onto the nightstand for the crystal saucer and brought the joint to her lips, handing me a red book of matches. I bent toward her over Dorian’s body, and, hands shaking, lit the flame.
BY THE NEXT MORNING ON MY COMMUTE TO RÉGINE, I HAD forgotten all about Dorian’s résumé. There were more urgent matters vying for my attention: the replenishment of the seat George had vacated, and the potential of his replacement to somehow alleviate the discontentment Régine had stirred in me. Contrary to George’s advice, I was never going to be the frigid, figurative Régine. To execute his policy of measured professional ruthlessness would require all the effort of a theatrical role: I could think of no undertaking more antithetical to my unrehearsed earnestness than to cast myself in his drama of schemes and subterfuge. Were I somehow to rise to the occasion—if the outlook of such an occasion should be considered an ascent, and not as I suspected, a downward spiral into deeper unhappiness—my first step would have to be enlisting a subordinate as my fellow intern. But wouldn’t I rather just have a friend?
On my arrival, unfortunately, the chair in which I hoped to install a new ally already had a person in it. He turned around as I approached him from behind thinking, “No—no—this can’t be happening,” expecting the face to belong to George and the first words out of his mouth to be, “You thought you could get rid of me, did you?”
Instead it was much worse than I could have ever imagined, yet somehow exactly what I should have predicted. The smile that greeted me was uninhibited—the blast from the heated entryway of a friend’s home on a winter day.
“Babe!” he chimed, and in his cheerful greeting I heard my inevitable demise foretold.
I was so stunned to see Dorian there that I froze about ten feet away from his open arms. I took a step back from him.
“What are you doing here?” I balked.
His guileless expression only exacerbated my alarm. “I work here!” he exclaimed, beaming, and to my horror he walked right over and enveloped me in a hug. I stood motionless beneath the blanketlike warmth of his arms over my shoulders, and he continued—in case his meaning had eluded me—“We work together now. I’m the new intern!”
The ground beneath my feet opened up. I plummeted. “But I haven’t even interviewed anyone yet,” I squeaked. I wasn’t sure if I had spoken the words aloud or merely heard them echo in the hopeless chasm of my head.
“Well, Mom sometimes vacations with Jane Delancey, and she mentioned to her they were going to need someone, so—here I am!” He separated from me and grabbed my hand. “Are you surprised?”
“I—yes, I’m definitely surprised, but—”
“Good! I wanted to tell you, but Madeline said it’d make a good surprise. Are you really surprised?”
For the love of God. “Yes, I’m surprised,” I repeated tersely. “I just—I don’t understand.”
He shrugged. “I wasn’t doing anything else back here except partying, and I was getting tired of making art, so I thought I could try it out, you know, see if I like it.”
I gulped. Of course to Dorian my life’s ambition would be
merely an opportunity to escape boredom.
“I knew you’d be here too, so—now we can be together! Isn’t that great!”
I was silent, engulfed by the vastness of my own stupidity—to have blithely thought that because I’d sorted a pile of résumés, and disqualified his, that my actions had any bearing on real life at all . . .
“Dorian, is that you?” came a familiar voice. “Always so handsome!”
Dorian turned sheepishly to Jane—“I didn’t know what to wear”—and the kindest thought I could offer about his defense was that at least he had the sense to feel embarrassed. In jeans and a white tee, a particularly undistinguished variation of his usual ensemble, he was more appropriately dressed to watch television on the couch while stirring a bowl of cereal than to start a new job, let alone one at the most prestigious fashion magazine in New York City.
“You look wonderful,” Jane said, and I fumed at the unfairness of it—my colorful suits had constituted a violation against Régine’s unwritten rules, but any garment touching Dorian’s imperial skin was exempt. They embraced and he kissed her cheeks, clasping her influential hands in his.
“I have to let you know—I’ve never worked in an office before.”
“Oh, there’s nothing to it,” she said. “An office is just a place.”
Oh, was it? “But isn’t it a ‘corporation’?” I wanted to interject, just as Clara had said to me, “where ‘we occupy specific roles, with specific ways that we must speak, act, and dress’?”
Jane rubbed the top of his hand like she was bestowing a benediction on him. “Don’t worry. You belong here.”
All I wanted was for someone to say the same words to me—“You belong here, Ethan”—and yet there was Dorian, less than five minutes at Régine and already crowned with the wreath of belonging, an honor for which I had been prepared to work a lifetime.
Jane looked over and smiled at me. “Dorian has told me all about your close friendship. Aren’t you glad he’s here?”
With my neck trapped in that tight noose, I could barely nod.
“You two are lucky,” she said, ushering me closer with a flick of one hand. I had no choice but to let myself be drawn toward them as she said, “Take it from me. A good friendship doesn’t come all the time.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but no words came out.
“Dorian used to talk about you all the time in St. Tropez—it was you and, what’s her name? Margaret?”
“Madeline,” I said quietly.
Jane nodded and, smiling, said, “Come here,” before pulling Dorian by the hand into her office. “We must catch up, I haven’t seen you since Cannes.” A moment later her door was closed, their laughter emanating from beyond it in a vivid stream.
I collapsed into my chair and closed my eyes. “Make him go away, make him go away,” I whispered to myself, “please, make my best friend go away,” I groaned. The question was never “How did Dorian get here?” but rather, “Why didn’t he get here sooner?” With his famous mother—he should have just written her name on a sheet of notebook paper and called it his “résumé”—it was a wonder he hadn’t started at Régine twenty years ago, crawling around the fashion closet on his hands and knees, teething on Yves Saint Laurent heels.
I peeked now through the glass door at Dorian. Our friendship had been one of my greatest seeds of joy, which I had nurtured into a flower, and eventually displayed with pride on my lapel. Surely now he would charm Edmund, and any favoritism I had cultivated would be choked by Dorian’s weed-like presence. I wrung my hands and was looking down when a corner of paper, poking out from underneath my mouse pad, caught my eye. I pulled it out. It was a piece of paper folded in half, with my name written on the outside in permanent marker, in George’s unmistakable block letters. I peeled it open.
BE RÉGINE
Dorian swept out of Jane’s office. I hid George’s note in my pocket when I felt his arms around my neck and his head swooping next to mine. He smiled. “You’re so hard to get ahold of now!”
“Late work hours,” I said dryly, thumbing the corner of the paper in my pocket. The truth was, after my depression had set in, I had been spending all of my free time in bed.
“Well, no fear—I’m here now!” He unhooked himself from me and said, “Is this my chair?,” even though obviously it was. With a comfortable sigh, he sat down and started rearranging the stapler, and the mug full of ballpoint pens.
“You know,” I burst, with all the conviction I could muster, “things aren’t going to be like they were before.”
He selected a blue pen from the mug and tested it out on a sticky note, as if he had never before seen office supplies in his life. “No kidding,” he agreed emphatically as he scribbled Dorian—a cavalier swish. With a roguish smile, he declared, “Things are going to be so much better now!” My mouth opened a little in shock as he leaned toward me. “You know what this means now that I’m here? We’ll leave together every day, and go to all the best parties!”
His sheer brainlessness astounded me. To think that Régine would be all fun, and that after a day here he’d have enough energy left to party.
Sabrina entered then in her typical fashion—closet door whooshing, just a rush of black—and I never thought I would be so glad to anticipate her yell of, “Boys!” and her delegation of the day’s intense workload. This moment would be Dorian’s rude awakening. Maybe now Sabrina and I could even be friends. She would surely hate Dorian too once she saw the undeserved attention he commanded.
She stopped halfway to her desk. With a smile, she clasped her hands demurely in front of her—no trace of the smoldering girl whose most fervent ambition it was to corroborate with every word the superiority of her status—and said, “You’re lucky, Dorian. It’s a slow day at the office today.” She bowed her head, like she was a maid in his service. “Ethan can answer any questions you have, but if you need anything, I’m over here,” she offered, pointing to her desk with an inviting finger.
I flinched at the refreshing lack of volume in her voice, the alien, almost soothing quality of it—remembering that, of course, Sabrina and Dorian were cut from the same cloth.
The latest issue had wrapped last week, so there was nothing urgent to be done: no garments streaming in for him to inventory, no trunks leaving tomorrow for him to pack. The fashion editors were still developing their ideas for the next issue, and lots of people were on vacation. I looked desperately around for a task to delegate, anything to establish Dorian’s inferiority.
“Let’s organize this wall of hosiery,” I said, even though I had organized it myself the week prior. “Can you make sure all the packages are in the right crates?”
In an hour, when he was done with that, I said, “Let’s dust all the jewelry cases—they look terrible.”
It went on like this all morning. Dorian didn’t seem to think I was bullying him, but then again, I wasn’t as good at it as George had been. Even when I told Dorian to do something, I sort of asked him, theoretically giving him the option to say no. “Can you take inventory of these scarves?” and “These gloves?” and “These hats?”—ending each of these feeble orders with a word so pathetic I wanted to bang my head against the desk. “Please?”
The whole time he kept on talking; his idea of “catching up” with me. He had never talked so much. He talked so much I felt like a piece of luggage at the airport going round and round on the carousel, eluding him whenever he tried to run up and take me. To uphold Régine’s policy of institutionalized restraint had never seemed so impossible: I tried with concerted effort to ignore him outright, but was foiled repeatedly by my own nature, responding every time with the fewest words I could manage without feeling like a complete jerk. On several occasions, I was so determined to maintain my uncharacteristic taciturnity that I had to stand up and pretend to use the bathroom. In the end, he probably didn’t think I was trying to ignore him at all, just that postgraduate life had instilled in me a bladder problem.
“Is everything okay?” he finally asked on his return, spooning jasmine rice into his mouth.
I didn’t reply.
All of a sudden, in a rare moment of lucidity, he seemed to recognize the tremendous outline of what was wrong between us—the colossal iceberg under the surface. He shuddered “Oh!” with a look of uncharacteristic intensity and, laying aside the Styrofoam tray, gulped and grabbed my shoulder. He looked like a child who had wandered off for miles only to discover that nobody had followed him. “I—” he stammered, a pinch of desperation between his brows. If he didn’t say the right thing now—right now—he knew he was going to lose me forever.
I swallowed. This was it. He had caught up to me on the revolving belt and was about to grab me, but I would never let him. “I am Régine, I am Régine, I am Régine,” I repeated to myself, straining to remain fixated on a file folder on my computer screen.
“Do you want to go to a few museums this weekend?” he asked. “Your favorite painting—we can go see it.”
My favorite painting depicted a redheaded Greek princess named Danaë, sleeping, with her legs curled up against her chest and her long hair trickling around her shoulders like a bough of orange seaweed. It was by Gustav Klimt, and it wasn’t even in New York. If Dorian couldn’t even remember that much about me, then he was so far away from me he would never, ever catch up. I squinted at him. I should have been devastated, but I had been for a whole year. Now I breathed a sigh of relief. It was true, then. He didn’t know me anymore.
“My favorite painting is a Klimt, Dorian,” I said, twisting a paper clip between my fingers. “It’s in Vienna.”
“Oh, I know!” he said with an eager shake. He was still holding my shoulder, eyes pleading. “It’s on limited exhibition in New York,” he explained. “At the Neue Galerie.”