An Innocent Fashion

by R. J. Hernández

  I wasn’t like Dorian or Madeline, who could retreat into their parents’ wealth while they loafed their way through Plans A, B, C, and ever after until they found something that “fulfilled” them and gave them an illusion of independence by the age of thirty. No: I was on borrowed time as my savings disintegrated like a Christmas wreath left up too long. Once upon a time the four thousand dollars that I had saved up in college had seemed so substantial, as though it could support me for a hundred years; now, between rent and food and the other costs of scraping by, the amount in my bank account had dipped into three digits, and was quickly plunging lower and lower. If I didn’t make it work somehow—fast—then I would be back to Texas where I had started, where it would be like I had never even come close—to anything.

  Every day when I woke up I told myself: Today is going to be the day you make something happen—but I didn’t know how, and nothing ever did happen, except my dread encroaching evermore, like the tide over the deck of a sinking ship.

  I stood there breathing heavily while the refrigerator hummed. In one of my roommates’ bedrooms, I heard a sitcom on TV. The laugh track sounded like something shattering over and over, a vase that kept on getting broken and put back together again.

  I pulled out the knife abruptly from the drawer and held it straight by my side, taking giant, harried steps to the bathroom. With a deep breath, I pressed my back against the door; locked it, and raised the knife to the fluorescent light. Having used it before to open the stitched pockets of my Dior suit, I knew the edge was a little dull. I pressed its tip against my wrist and slowly twisted, trying to draw blood. My skin puckered, like the navel of an orange. I slackened my grip, unsure now if I really wanted to do it. For some reason, I was remembering a movie I had seen in which a class full of Japanese schoolkids had been made to kill each other. They were dying left and right, and every time one of them got stabbed or shot or hacked at with an axe, the blood would come shooting out like a red geyser. My own blood raced now at the thought. I imagined every drop in me like a sperm cell in a Sex Ed video, except instead of swimming happily toward an egg, they were in a panic, trying desperately to escape my knife. I didn’t blame them; if I were a drop of blood, I wouldn’t want to go geysering all over the place either.

  Still holding the knife, I reached into my pocket for my phone, where Madeline’s name was in my speed-dial menu. Madeline would know what to do. She hated blood. She hated anything that hurt people—animals too. She always tried to be vegetarian, and would succeed for a few weeks only to be tempted by foie gras or some other “irresistible” favorite.

  The screen read MADELINE DUPRE.

  The letters of her name were as meaningless as those on a label for canned ham. I couldn’t call her, I just—couldn’t. What would I say? And what would she say? And she’d be busy anyway.

  The phone sort of tumbled out of my hand, clattering to the tile floor at my feet. I was too paralyzed to pick it up. In the back of my head, I thought of something I had heard once, either in real life or on the Internet: “All you need to do to be happy is to start smiling. Just lift up the corners of your mouth, and that’s it, you’re happy.” It seemed like as good an idea as any—I mean, what did I have to lose?—but trying just made the corners of my mouth quiver. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I wasn’t smiling but I wasn’t frowning either, because I couldn’t feel my face at all.

  I started thinking about all the sad characters I knew from books. I thought of Esther from the The Bell Jar, and how she had dealt with things, but then I couldn’t remember if she had gotten better or if she had just killed herself by the end of the book. That made me think of the boy from Brave New World, who definitely did kill himself by the end—he hung himself, which was too horrifying a notion to even momentarily entertain—and Romeo and Juliet, and Ophelia, and pretty much everybody in Shakespeare. Now that I really considered it, everybody sad in great literature seemed to kill themselves by the end. It was, like, the only thing to do.

  To my blood’s relief, I put down the knife on the edge of the sink, then I rifled through the medicine cabinet as I had done before. If I truly wanted to kill myself, I could swallow more than just aspirin. Not that I wanted to, but—if I did want to, I could basically eat everything that was in there. Surely, something would have to happen. A person just couldn’t mix up all those chemicals in his body and not have something happen to him, right?

  I began to line up all the bottles, just to see—just in case, one day, I went through with it. Just in case I ever wanted to go through with anything. The most powerful thing I recognized was Midol. I began pouring out the pills from every bottle—one after the other along the edge of the sink—and then my roommate Veronica knocked on the door.

  “Ethan?” she asked. “I’m sorry, do you think I can take a shower? I’m meeting Jonathan for dinner in an hour, and I’m so gross from all this heat.”

  I didn’t answer at first. I just stared at the trail of pills I had made—little droplets the color of bone and oleander and cloudy skies. My favorite ones were the faint purple of a fresh bruise, and they cured indigestion.

  “Ethan?”

  “Hi,” I croaked. I cleared my throat. “Yeah—sure,” I said. “Give me—two minutes?”

  I poured them all back into the Midol container and stuck it in the cabinet, tossing the empty containers in the trash. Reconsidering, I scooped up all the bottles and returned them to the shelf, empty.

  Then I tucked the paring knife in a groove beneath the medicine cabinet and went upstairs to sleep.

  THE NEXT DAY DORIAN WAS WEARING A BASIC GRAY T-SHIRT from Alexander Wang.

  “What a great shirt,” Edmund said to him, as he trotted past in a head-to-toe zebra print ensemble, including black-and-white zigzag pony-hair shoes. Fresh from a vacation in Majorca, he was in fine spirits, having just made a lavish fuss over some “missing” zebra cufflinks.

  If before I had feared that Edmund might start to favor Dorian by giving him assignments, the truth was worse: He started to favor Dorian while still giving me the assignments.

  “Ethan, I need you to do some research for me. A very special assignment. I’m sure you will enjoy it. Wish I could do it myself,” he briefly entertained, “but you know, there’s never any time. I’ll need every instance of Spanish influence you can find in the work of Oscar de la Renta between 1950 and 1970. Go through all the archives and make copies of every example there is, even advertisements, and don’t leave anything out,” he instructed before warning me, “I’ll be able to tell if you skipped over any parts.”

  “Okay,” I helplessly agreed. “When do you need this by?”

  “Tomorrow morning, first thing please,” he said as he tried to grab at something on his tongue—a hair, perhaps, from his own shoe.

  I grimaced. Edmund had already assigned me another project for “tomorrow morning, first thing please,” involving the arbitrary reorganization of his portable music library to reflect a chi-enhancing suggestion in his feng shui book. “Honestly I don’t know if all that will be possible before tomorrow,” I said. “Jane’s trunks are being shipped out tonight, and I’ve already got your music library before—”

  The slamming door cut me off.

  “Do you need any help?” Dorian asked, as he sipped a juice box and came up with a poem for the back of his lunch receipt. I smoldered silently at his stupidity. “How far have you gotten with the music library?” he asked. Dorian had always feigned ignorance of flourishing hostilities, believing that with a fumigatory smile they would shrivel like a weed and cease to encroach on his good spirits. This was one thing about him that had infuriated Madeline, who loved to water any cracks in the ground with her full attention.

  “It’s fine,” I said. I would sooner die of exhaustion in that bleak office than ever accept Dorian’s help.

  “We only lend out two at a time, sweetheart,” the librarian notified me as I stood at the checkout counter buried behind a wall of brick-like
archival books. Her white bob peeked over the top: “I suppose I can let you take three, but you’ll have to put some of these back.”

  “It’s for Edmund Benneton,” I explained.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, dear,” she said. I couldn’t be sure if the apology was for not realizing I worked for Edmund, or because, as someone who worked for Edmund, I just deserved one. She pointed to a glass dish full of candies on the checkout counter, and offered up a wan, conciliatory smile. “Here, have a gumdrop.”

  With each year broken up into four volumes, twenty years of Régine was eighty volumes in total—about two shelves’ worth of hardcover books, and a great deal for the librarian to part with. With some reluctance, she let me pile up a rolling cart—and, after helping me and my perilous tower onto the elevator, waved regretfully at me as the doors closed between us.

  When Dorian and Sabrina had left the closet for the day (“Good luck!” he said. “Don’t touch anything,” she said), I was still combing through 1952. It turned out Oscar de la Renta’s repertoire contained more instances of Spanish influence than the King of Spain’s bedroom; by the time I was finished with a volume, the sides were fringed with stickies.

  At about 1956, the nighttime cleaning lady came around, wearing a mint-green uniform dress with a Peter Pan collar. For someone charged with taking out the trash, she was quite exotic—tall like an Indian palm tree, with olive skin and grape-colored lips—and I took a momentary break to wonder if at Hoffman-Lynch even janitors had an advantage if they were beautiful. Pushing a cart full of cleaning supplies, she swayed around replacing all the trash bags so that in the morning they could get stuffed again with coffee cups and yesterday’s trends. She eventually waved good-bye, like an Arabian princess boarding her jet for the next stop on a world tour, and by 1959 it became clear I wasn’t going home that night. To flip through a single year of Régine—including features, fashion editorials, and endless advertisements—took about half an hour, if I did it fast. I had no choice but to turn every page. From the impeccable lists he kept in his diaries, I knew Edmund would notice if I had skipped something. If I neglected so much as a single “imperative” moment—a flamenco-inspired swimsuit in July 1964, a matador cape in August—he could easily turn his full attentions to Dorian.

  At midnight, the lights flickered off through the entire floor. Thereafter, they’d only come on again if I activated the motion sensor, which required me to stand up and wave my arms like I was directing an airplane to land. Everything was a dark blur between two and eight in the morning, at which point I stapled the paper copies and clicked Send on the digital version.

  Dorian arrived an hour later to find me snoring over my computer keyboard. “Morning, babe.”

  I peeked through one eye to find him smiling there beside me and turned my head the other way, praying he was only a bad dream. Surely when I woke up, I would find somebody else there—anybody but him. Five more minutes, five more minutes, I thought, but I could feel his eyes on my back and couldn’t squeeze mine tight enough to black out the whiteness of his smile in my head.

  “You look like you rolled out of bed.”

  “I wish,” I groaned. I started to prop myself up, but was met with resistance from my heavy head. My face rolled back toward the ceiling, and the fluorescent lighting burned through my half-closed lids.

  “Wait a second,” said Dorian. “You didn’t stay here overnight, did you?” He leaned toward me, then reeled back, which I took to mean that I needed a shower. “You know, I can help you with whatever you need. It’s not fair for you to do all that work by yourself.”

  “Yeah,” I croaked, “next time we’ll have a sleepover by the photocopier.” I bobbed up long enough to wordlessly point to the pile of garment bags on the floor and he had enough sense to end the conversation.

  If I thought the morning was bad, the rest of the day got only worse. With every hour that passed—slowly, like rain passing through hard layers of scorched earth—my body slumped lower and lower, until finally I decided to stand. I knew that if I sat down I would fall asleep, so for a couple of hours I paced back and forth, waiting for Dorian to do all the work while I saved all my energy to look busy when Sabrina came into view. I disappeared constantly into the kitchenette for coffee, where I prompted frequent throat-clearing from behind me by staring too long at the buttons on the coffeemaker. When I arrived back to the closet, my cup was always empty again, and would tumble out of my fingers into a growing pile in the trash. Help Hoffman-Lynch Reduce Waste! the trash can pleaded, and every time I snorted with a demented sense of gratification.

  Dorian struggled in earnest to engage me, but, unlike Day One, I now had no trouble ignoring him. I was being spectacularly like the figurative Régine, and I wasn’t even trying.

  Finally, he said to me, while I was staring at a tortoiseshell button on a Max Mara coat, “I wouldn’t take the credit.”

  I made a grunt-like sound, unintelligible even to myself.

  “For helping you,” Dorian clarified. “If you need help with Edmund’s assignments, I wouldn’t steal the credit . . . if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

  I blinked at his face. His expression contained the overwhelming comfort of familiarity, and also of truth: Dorian was nothing more and nothing less than me, had nothing more and nothing less than what I wanted for myself. If we were switched I would have done as he had done, and I would do as he did.

  I had known this all along. It was the thing that hurt the most.

  “Have I changed, Dorian?” I murmured.

  He was cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by black lace lingerie. He quietly bent his head, and draped a French lace garter belt on his knee. “No,” he lied. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m really afraid. I’m afraid I’ll never be happy again.”

  Dorian looked up at me as I crumpled beside him. My knees hit the carpet with a deadening thud. I swayed, and he caught me with the grace of Mary in a Pièta. He didn’t say anything. I dug my head into his chest and he put his arms around me, and we remained there, wordless, for five minutes.

  “TELL HER I’M NOT HERE!” SABRINA YELLED.

  “Sabrina’s not here . . . ?” Dorian ventured, with a hopeful glance toward the phone. Like me, he was a terrible liar. I could see him squirm as the person on the other line retorted in the familiar way, something like, “But I just heard her yell at you.”

  “Is that Jenny from HL Group?” I asked.

  He nodded. His green eyes widened, reflecting light from the computer screen.

  I rolled my eyes. “Don’t worry about her,” I assured him. “She’s always pestering for their Cavalli clothes back.”

  “Well, what do I say?” he mouthed, holding the receiver to his chest. “She talks so fast.”

  “You know what I do?” I confided, “I tell them I’m going to transfer them—”

  “To whom?” he whispered urgently, as Jenny from HL Group’s voice spiked over the receiver.

  “To anybody: Sabrina, Jane, the Queen of England, whomever, then—I just hang up.” I took the phone from him and interrupted her. “Hi, Jenny, let me transfer you.” Click! I pressed the button, and then passed the receiver back to Dorian. “See,” I said, straightening my back. “Now don’t pick up when she calls back.”

  Dorian stared at me.

  I straightened my shoulders and shot him a defiant look—“What!?” My pose reeked of affectation—this was the “new me,” who sat up straight and hung up on Jenny from HL Group.

  The next second, the two of us had deflated like balloons and were laughing aloud.

  “Hey!” came Sabrina’s voice. “What’s going on over there?” She sounded like a police officer knocking on the windshield of a couple of teenagers’ hot-boxed car, and suddenly, my entire life seemed to have reached such an unprecedented level of ridiculousness that I began to laugh even more.

  “Hey!”

  I reached over to cover Dorian’s mouth with my hand, and when that only m
ade us both laugh harder, I realized I had never laughed at Régine.

  “Do I have to come over there?” Sabrina threatened, and that’s what really set me off—that after all my delusions about the grand purpose of my postgraduate life, I was surrounded now by dresses and handbags and high-heeled shoes, and had to answer to a crazy person whose own dreams probably involved e-mail correspondence with the PR girl from Prada. And on top of everything, who should be sitting next to me but Dorian—the bane of my foolish existence? The whole thing was so tragic, so funny, that my hysteria hit fever pitch. I was a broken weather vane, swinging in every direction.

  I had no idea why Dorian should find this funny, but he was in hysterics too, and that made me laugh even more—to think that together we were the dumbest pair in the world, and combined with Sabrina, the dumbest people in any room, ever.

  Probably too hesitant to confront Dorian—Jane’s favorite—Sabrina never acted on her bluff, and it took about five minutes for me and Dorian to settle down. When we finally did, I realized my hand was still covering Dorian’s mouth. I lifted it away from his lips, and my palm glowed with his saliva.

  DORIAN HAD BEEN EGGING ME ON SINCE HIS ARRIVAL, PASSING one tennis ball after another into my court, while I just fumed in the center with my arms crossed and let them tut-tut-tut toward the unloved corners of the fence.

  In a moment distinguished by the completeness of my own stupidity, I finally raked up my racket from the concrete and thwacked the ball back with all my strength.

  Ping! “Tell me more about Paris,” I demanded.

  Ping! “It was beautiful, and dull.”

  Ping! “That’s all?”

  Ping! “I missed you and Madeline.”