An Innocent Fashion

by R. J. Hernández

  It wasn’t all bad, necessarily. Good and bad was a different spectrum altogether, at least as far as God was concerned, and everything I learned at church. But if it wasn’t bad, it was boring, and it was ugly—and those were the two things in life that made my blood run cold.

  Nobody else seemed to mind, or even notice, that Corpus Christi was a famine of beauty, and that nothing ever seemed to happen there. From this I gathered early on that other people were born with ashtrays for eyes. They could shore up all the rot and ash just fine, and tap out the muck every once in a while, but for some inexplicable reason, my eyes were more sensitive than that. I was more sensitive than that, and ultimately I think that’s why I was ill-suited to work in the fashion industry: Fashion is an ornate mirror held up to the world, and the world is all rot and ash.

  CORNERED BY THE CREEPING SUFFOCATION OF A LIFE WITHOUT beauty or stimulation, my only defense when I was younger was to read picture books. Every day I stuffed my backpack at the elementary school library with six, the maximum number, enough to keep me occupied all evening as I read to my dog Lola. Lola was a mutt, like me—a cross between a Labrador and some unknown breed—but beautiful and lithe, with a luminescent black coat. During dinner, Lola would lie under my father’s barstool, knowing that some pork or shredded chicken might fall in her vicinity during the ferocious transference of food between the plate and his mouth; then, when I was finished with my plate, she would sniff a moon-shaped crescent around my father’s stool and follow me to my bedroom, where she was familiar with my nightly routine. I flipped pages for hours, mumbling the words out loud, with increasing proficiency, to her upraised ears. Books of fairy tales were my first favorites, because in them the kindhearted beggar children always ended up ruling some huge kingdom or, in a worst-case scenario, were transformed into birds or squirrels. They also had the best illustrations, and when I wanted to pretend I was inside of them, I stared at the wall, which was blank except for a laminated poster of Jesus Christ with a thoughtful palm upraised and his thorn-wreathed heart bursting through his chest. It was like this every night, Lola by my side as I willed myself through sheer force into another place, another life.

  Outside my window I could always hear the neighborhood boys as they bounced around lumpy balls, or yelled over to who got to control a battery-operated car. There were six or seven of them around my age, all led by Cesar Montana, who was one grade older and resembled a boulder in a T-shirt, with a pebble balanced on top for a head.

  “Oh, come on, amorsito—you and Lola must be tired of all these books,” my mother said the first time she dragged me by the hand onto the sidewalk. She was only trying to help me. The other boys played outside, therefore so should I—but what she didn’t know was that the other boys wanted nothing to do with me. I was too quiet, too gawky, and clearly I was afraid of them, so why should they accept me? Not an hour after this initiation of our playdate, I was crumpled on the asphalt, sobbing, with a bruise swelling on my knee while Cesar Montana laughed and the other boys said nothing, because they knew that if he wanted to, Cesar Montana could probably just sit on them and they would never live to operate a remote-controlled car again.

  I hid the injury from my mother, and thereafter she appeared regularly at my bedroom door, imploring me to join my “friends.” She always had such a hopeful look—all she wanted was for me to be normal—so I would put down my book and leave the house, with Lola by my side. We wandered around the neighborhood as the shouts of the neighborhood boys faded away and the sky steeped, like tea, into a melancholic lavender twilight. As the dust of another day settled all around us, I pulled up flowers from the neighbors’ yards—smelled them, stroked their velvety petals, peered inside of them, and twisted their stems together to make bouquets. If I heard a noise, I would ring my arms around Lola’s neck, pressing our faces together. “Do you hear that?” I would whisper, imagining someone had finally arrived to take me away, to the kingdom that was my birthright. Surely it would be my fairy godmother, or at least the angel Gabriel who, according to Padre José at Sunday Mass, had chosen an ordinary day to tell the Virgin Mary that she was pregnant with Jesus—which meant any day could be the day an angel popped out of nowhere to change your whole life. Of course, the sound always turned out to be just a cat slithering past a rattling chain-link fence, or a ball bouncing in a powdery yard.

  I must have made a thousand bouquets, and read as many books, when the day came that Lola didn’t follow me after dinner—didn’t even look up, or budge.

  “Lola is old now, she’s going blind,” my mother said, and it was true. I had noticed for some time that Lola’s luxurious black coat had begun to shed, but I had no concept of aging, no understanding that she was getting older, as was I, along with my parents and teachers and the neighborhood kids, all of us moving helplessly toward a bleak, common end. I cried over her as her hair faded and the pus pooled up in the corners of her milky eyes. When I touched her, she tucked her nose under a paw as the tears dribbled down her face, and I realized she was ashamed. My only friend, once so beautiful, had betrayed me—she’d become another sad, ugly thing in the sad, ugly world I lived in.

  Months later, Lola was dead. The veterinarian’s name was Dr. Ramos, and his certificate was from a university in Guadalajara, a Mexican city near the town where my father had grown up. Dr. Ramos laid out Lola on a cold aluminum table—whimpering kennels all around us—and waited for my mother and me to say good-bye. Then he held up a large black trash bag and unceremoniously pushed her inside. She was stiff, legs out, like a pig on a spit.

  Having only just entered middle school, I had never seen death before, but I didn’t cry. My mother, on the other hand, was choking on her own fluids, a wad of crumpled tissue pressed to her face as tears escaped her chipped red fingernails. Later I learned that she’d suffered a miscarriage before my birth, and in the months afterward my father had given Lola to her as a small comfort while they tried again.

  She peered into the black bag and buckled, the fat flapping beneath her arm as she groped blindly for my shoulder. Her watery eyes must have mistaken wetness on my own face, because she pulled me close against her and shakily assumed responsibility for my consolation. “It’s okay, hijo,” she choked. “Lola was safe and happy for many years. She had food and a place to sleep—” she swallowed a placental wad of phlegm “—una buena vida.” A good life.

  And after that I did cry—not for Lola, it was too late for her—but for myself, because somehow from the depths of my mother I had emerged wailing and alive, and now in that black trash bag I saw my own future foretold: I would be trapped in Corpus Christi my whole life, where I would have food and a place to sleep, and eventually die. Una buena vida.

  That night I left the library books in my bag and crawled into bed alone while elsewhere in the house the usual sounds were muffled. No Coronas snapping open, the television turned down, then just the mournful howl of the vacuum cleaner eliminating the last of the dog hairs. Alone for the first time without Lola, I twisted into a fetal position under my paper-thin sheets. Eyes squeezed shut, I clasped my hands together and begged with all my might for Jesus to come out of the picture on the wall, lay his body over mine, and hold me.

  “Lord, please save me from this place.” I dug my palms against my eyes. “Dios mío, ayúdame.”

  WHEN I ARRIVED AT THE HOFFMAN-LYNCH BUILDING FOR MY interview, I handed the security guard my Texas ID and received in return a printed pass. Four years ago, my name had been Elián San Jamar. Now my ID read ETHAN ST. JAMES, a name born of my own willful determination that, despite the conspiracy of my birthright, I should have a second chance in the world. Through these letters I upheld myself to the solemn promise of a new identity that defied the bleakness of my former existence. I thought briefly of my own ghost as I reached out to claim that pass and my rightful destiny. Like a victorious soldier on his passage home, I clutched it and watched the future soar as the battlefield shrunk far behind. This was the long-awaited ho
mecoming.

  “When you get to the twelfth floor, you can wait in the lobby,” the guard instructed me. “Somebody will come get you.”

  I pressed my thin frame against the turnstile, half-expecting that it would press back, then, easily—click!—the metal bar rotated and I was on the other side, one step closer. Black marble underfoot, I stood with a row of elevators on either side of me. Digital panels flashed scarlet numbers as beautiful people were transported to and from the twelfth floor, the floor that housed Régine—the only floor of the Hoffman-Lynch building that mattered. I held my breath, trembling hands at my side, trying hopelessly to be discreet as I swiveled around. Peering back toward the lobby, I saw a few women engaged in boring chatter—ordinary-looking, like a bunch of office supplies on a desk. One of them badly needed to re-dye her roots, which looked like the revolving fringe inside a car wash. They had nothing to do with Régine.

  An elevator pinged. The chrome gates parted. Raised to an immortal height on Corinthian stilettos, two long all-black pillars towered before me adorned with cell phones and structured handbags, and topped off by white faces like Narcissus flowers.

  Now, these—these women had come from Régine.

  “—spattered red paint all over her!” exclaimed one, her lips the color of Gorgon’s blood. “Afterward she moaned to the cameras, ‘It’s not even fur—it’s only pony-hair!’” They both laughed as they circled around me, trotting fast. Together, sliding their sunglasses over their eyes, they hit the turnstiles—bam!—and reconvened into a canter, clip-clopping toward the glass revolving door. In a daze, I stepped into the elevator and pushed the button, hardly believing that in a moment I would be rocketed skyward to the heavens from which these beauties had descended.

  The only other noteworthy floor of the Hoffman-Lynch building housed Régine’s teenage sister, who sagely reassured high schoolers that they would fit in by pairing their Converse sneakers with five-hundred-dollar dresses. Every other floor existed merely to make the building taller. There were several men’s fashion magazines—widely known ones, I guess—but their intended readership skewed toward hopelessly unfashionable “guy’s guys,” the adult approximation of the neighborhood boys I had grown up with, who had graduated from bouncing around their own basketballs to watching other people do it on TV, and needed to be taught every month how to tie a Windsor knot.

  Having long ago mastered the fundamentals of men’s fashion, I was dressed that day in a wine-red suit—one of my favorites—and was trying to decide whether to undo the last jacket button when a woman joined me in the elevator. She was older, with gray hairs drawn into her businesslike bun and a mouth crowded by severe wrinkles. The twelfth floor button already radiated, but she pressed it once more for several seconds, as if she believed she could force it to move faster. I never understood why anybody did that, as if without the influential push of their own finger the world would get lazy and forget to rotate.

  My excitement rose with the elevator as I gazed at the woman’s impeccable outfit. She wore a black dress shirt and matching pencil skirt, with no frills or fun of any kind, yet unlike my clothes—which, despite being tailored to fit, still gave away their outmoded Salvation Army origins—hers gave that special impression of being very expensive, somehow sewn more precisely with a finer thread on a sharper needle, then selected right off the back of a runway model months in anticipation of the general trend. Her three-inch heels were black patent leather, shiny enough to have been unwrapped from their box that same morning.

  “Your shoes,” I gestured, unable to help myself. “Divine.”

  She didn’t reply. From the mashing of her thumbs on the keyboard of her cell phone, she could have been playing a game with a timer, but more likely she was preoccupied by something a hundred times more thrilling; an e-mail about ostrich-leather handbags or candidates for the cover of the September issue. I figured then she must not have heard me, so I repeated myself, more clearly, “I like your shoes!,” the words as bright and crisp as a soap bubble.

  The elevator pinged at our destination. She turned her face toward the parting doors and said simply, not to me, but to the air before her, “Christian Dior.”

  My little bubble spun around, stunned, and quietly burst as she disappeared through a set of glass double doors. On one side of me now loomed a floor-to-ceiling television—showing runway models walking on a loop—and on the other side, a huge red logo: RÉGINE.

  I WAS TEN YEARS OLD THE FIRST TIME MY MOTHER DRAGGED me along to her nail appointment at a local salon called Angelina’s—the one regular indulgence of her otherwise unglamorous existence. There, beneath an unfading waft of acetone, against the dramatic soundtrack of the afternoon soap opera, I stumbled upon Régine. Around our house, the only magazines were the tabloids my mother piled up by the bathroom toilet, with features titled, “Your favorite stars look just like you without makeup!” Headlines always involved the latest cheating scandals and speculation over surgical procedures, while inside one was sure to find several pages dedicated to which rich and famous women had worn which unflattering dress to some party or award show: on the whole, every kind of stomach-turning, and printed on bad paper.

  But Régine reminded me of the illustrated fairy tales I used to check out from the school library. Like all fairy tales, with their stock characters and predictable endings, the magazine had its fair share of faults, not least of which were the celebrity profiles it proudly touted on the front cover. What did it matter to me if the star of some forgettable summer blockbuster had birthed yet another child with her second husband, or that it took her just four months to work off the pregnancy fat? It didn’t matter to me, either, that anybody had attended this or that party, or that they had worn Gucci for the first half, then—surprise!—changed into Dior. And my one enduring question was never answered: What was an anti-wrinkle serum, and why were so many pages dedicated to them?

  Once I got past these minor irritations, however, I flipped through one breathtaking picture after another, fingers trembling, my heart throbbing with longing. Régine’s power wasn’t merely in the beauty of its models, with their long endless legs and little noses that hit the light just right; it was in the whole world they lived in. They could be fanning themselves beneath an arch in a Moorish palace, or frolicking on the beach of some private Caribbean island, yet they were always part of a picture that was perfect and complete—color-coordinated by somebody, with nothing ugly or wrong to mess it up.

  Later, as an art history major at Yale, this was what I would love about all my favorite paintings, whether by Renoir or Van Gogh or Pollock. In the space of a canvas, they could create a whole world that was beautiful, and made sense. The best fashion spreads were just like that, only better because they were photographs, taken from actual life; and even though I knew they were staged and airbrushed, they still seemed real, as if I could set out looking for the perfect world they showed and find it. I had inexplicably imagined the Régine office as one of these worlds—women majestically lounging about in magnificent long gowns, lacing up each other’s embroidered corsets, their swanlike necks dripping with the world’s finest jewels.

  When at last someone entered the foyer through the glass double doors, she wasn’t wearing a ball gown, but rather an ash-gray sheath and matching sling-back stilettos, and holding a copy of the current Vogue issue while she bit into a green apple.

  “Ms. Walker!” I exclaimed.

  She looked up at me for one second (that was one second longer than Ms. Christian Dior, from the elevator) and uttered, simply, “No,” before calling the elevator and returning to her magazine.

  “I’m sorry.” I recoiled like a gustless paper party horn. “I’m just waiting for Ms. Walker.”

  Evidently she had been looking forward to her apple all morning; a series of crunching noises was her response. When she disappeared a second later into the elevator, the fruit was no more than a fragile stem. She tucked it like a bookmark into her magazine, and the door
s closed.

  A second woman appeared after five minutes (black secretary blouse, black pencil skirt, black kitten heels—not Ms. Walker), and a third another five minutes after her (gray silk jumpsuit, black stilettos—also not Ms. Walker). As I waited, I mentally sifted through all the answers I had practiced the night before, like index cards before a midterm: my accomplishments and my strengths and my career goals, all of which I would share in a humble yet confident tone while also reminding them I went to Yale, Yale, Yale at every opportunity. The only other interviews I’d had were for library posts in high school and college, and both times I’d just entered with a big smile and the fresh-faced ease of a person who has just returned from a summer holiday. But this wasn’t just any interview—it was the most important interview of my life. When Ms. Sabrina Walker asked me about my strengths I was prepared to bubble up, like champagne from a just-uncorked bottle, about my imagination and my great eye for beauty—then, before I came across as too frothy, I would bow my head with a sober crinkle of my brows and add that I also knew how to “get things done,” that I was smart, and resourceful, and had received high marks from all of my professors at Yale.

  In my mind, Ms. Walker would nod her head agreeably at this, and smile. Even after observing several of her colleagues in dark monochrome, I inexplicably maintained my belief that, like an angel, she would shine very bright—the hallowed gatekeeper who would admit me to my fashionable destiny. When, after a series of my well-pitched responses, she asked me why I wanted to work at Régine, I would reply, “Because my life’s purpose is to make the world more beautiful,” and she would open her arms to me, with a pearl-like tear in her eye, and say, “Come, child: you belong here,” and the cream-colored lobby would glow like blond hair in a shampoo commercial, and a wreath of laurel would descend from the air onto my head, while around the world everybody laid down their guns and cancelled the bombings and all the hungry children got an organic fruit basket with my name on the calligraphed gift tag.