She paused for a moment, perhaps expecting that through flattery she would gain my respect, but I continued doggedly to refuse eye contact, preferring to clench my teeth and reread over and over: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the best of times, the worst of times, best of times, worst, best worst best worst—
“It was insightful, and well written. It was, in fact, one of the most provocative analyses that I have read on The Great Gatsby, and trust me, I have read a lot of them.”
I nearly blurted, “Then why did you give me an F?,” but it was true that I didn’t want to miss the bus, so I crossed my arms over my chest instead.
“Not interested to hear it, are you? I suppose you don’t care what your teacher says?” She tapped the butt of her pen against her desk while I switched to staring at the door. “Now, where are you going to college?”
I responded with a paltry shrug.
“You don’t know . . . ? Then I guess you envision yourself in Corpus Christi forever, don’t you?”
I finally looked at her. She was sitting there, beadily judging me, and repulsion rose in my throat: “Nothing in the world could make me stay here.” These were words I had never said aloud: words from deep within, which inside of me had always seemed so strong and complete, but suddenly flung into the open air they sounded fragile and thin. In my terror that the words might not be true, more words came flying out, shattering against the wall and tinkling to the floor around Ms. Duncan’s desk: “Four more years and I’ll be out of here—out of this school, this town—I’ll be far, far away, while you and everybody else will just rot here, and if you think I can’t do it—” I gulped.
Ms. Duncan silently twirled a pen between her bony fingers. “And how do you plan to make it anywhere with these grades?” She gestured once more to the front row. “Sit down, Darcy, and let’s have a chat. If you miss the goddamn bus I will take you home myself.”
MS. DUNCAN WAS THE FAIRY GODMOTHER I HAD HOPED FOR. Our long conversation in her classroom that afternoon marked the first time certain synapses in my brain had connected to form an important thought: I might actually be able to reach my destination, if only I followed a map. I swore to follow Ms. Duncan down every turn if it meant I would have a chance in the world, and thereafter my success was her fiercest passion, as I became her one chance at achieving whatever glory had eluded her in her own life.
I read and studied and followed a rigorous schedule of college prep exams; and ironically, after I had dedicated myself wholeheartedly to escape Corpus Christi, I finally started to feel okay there. My suits got more colorful, my attitude more eccentric, and the more comfortable I was with myself, the more comfortable others were around me—girls, at least.
None of them were attracted to me romantically. Evidently it was a truth universally acknowledged that a boy who wears a suit and pink socks “must” be gay, and pretty soon it was not only Cesar Montana but also the rest of the students who had applied that truth to me. It was a fair enough assumption. The prevailing gay stereotype in Corpus Christi centered on criteria abundantly satisfied by my fundamental qualities: my preference for female company, my disinterest in typically masculine activities, and especially my love of fashion and the arts. Even though I’d never had a boyfriend or a girlfriend, and was in fact hilariously ignorant about sex, the boxes were otherwise checked.
I didn’t want to be gay. At least not at first. Growing up, I knew that being gay was the single least-acceptable thing I could do in life, less so even than becoming a drug addict, or failing school. Yet, outside the context of my own home, being gay actually made it easier for me to be accepted. At school, nobody had understood me when the only label they could apply to me was “strange,” but when that label was replaced with “gay,” I became as predictable as the head cheerleader, or the football quarterback—a character everyone could “understand,” even though nothing about me had changed.
Whether or not I was actually gay didn’t matter. Because everyone else thought it must be true, so did I, and either way it made school bearable. Of course there were the kids, like Cesar Montana, who “hated” gay people, but they weren’t going to like me regardless of whether I was gay or straight or anything else.
By the end of sophomore year, not only did I have friends, but I had enough of them to be voted into Student Council. Granted, Ms. Duncan pushed me to run, and within my apathetic class the competition wasn’t intense, but it was the start of something—and the year after that I was voted president. I was running the class, working at the library, and taking college prep exams with Ms. Duncan; when I wasn’t busy, I was with my best friend, Claudette, who would pick me up in her dad’s Jeep and take me shopping at the local strip mall.
My mother thought all the commotion was wonderful. She tailored all my zany suits, exclaiming, “How different the styles are for boys these days!” Not only that, but I finally had friends—“girlfriends!” she giggled in either a brilliant display of denial, or sheer cluelessness. The one dark cloud was my father. For years, the tenets of our family dinnertime routine had remained exactly the same. The sweaty embrace; “Ey, cabrón!”; the hug and smack on the bottom. The two differences were my height and his girth, until I began to notice that in the light of my brighter self-image, his own view of me had darkened; soon he was barely speaking to me. By that point, though, I didn’t really care what he thought, and he remained tight-lipped until, one day, I suppose I took my differentness too far.
The piercing was Claudette’s idea. A black pearl stud in my upper ear—a reckless whim, but then again, I was sixteen, and it was just for fun, and I had paid for it with my own money.
Within minutes of arriving home: “¡Mariposa!” my father roared. He grabbed me by the collar and pinned me against the wall, bellowing in Spanish, “You won’t be a faggot! I WON’T LET YOU BE A FAGGOT!” And as I prepared to defend myself and shout, “You don’t know anything about me!,” I realized he had tears in his eyes. My poor, stupid construction-worker father, who had grown up in another country, and had no hope of understanding me, thought that because I had a pearl in my ear there was something wrong with me, and furthermore, that it was his fault.
A shadow descended on the house after that, and six months later, Ms. Duncan was driving me to a college fair in Austin. There were booths for Columbia and Brown and Stanford—each one promising the best four years of my life—then there was Yale, under a banner which read, Lux et Veritas.
“What’s it mean?” I asked the boy at the booth.
“It’s Latin. It means light and truth.”
WHEN, ON MY FIRST DAY AT RÉGINE, THE ELEVATOR DOORS parted—my own reflected likeness split in two—Edmund’s head intern was standing directly opposite me in the foyer, having somehow foreseen exactly which of the twelve elevators would shuttle me up to that floor. His first words to me were an accurate summary of the relationship we would come to share: “My name is George, and we have a million things to do.”
George Beckett was as short and as round as a prize-winning pumpkin. Underneath a hardened shell of shiny orange hair—his white side part appeared chopped by a knife—his upturned nose assessed me for barely a second before he barreled away.
“Good to meet you!” I scrambled to catch up to the heels of his black oxfords.
George wore a dress shirt and trousers, all black. Despite this, he was Sabrina’s physical opposite—pasty and white, the sole color on his face supplied by a bounty of freckles scattered like toasted nuts over his doughy cheeks. I was struck by the fact that, for a body of such Lilliputian proportions—I think he grazed five feet—his gait was astonishingly accelerated.
“This’ll be my first time in the office,” I confided, as we approached the glass doors.
He turned slightly. His scrunched-up nose gave him the look of someone permanently in the midst of an objectionable odor. In a voice that was at once nasal and high-pitched, he said, “Great color scheme. You’ll fit right in.” Then t
hat nose commandeered a pucker of repulsion across his whole face.
I looked down at myself in my head-to-toe raspberry-pink suit, with a white shirt and striped purple necktie. After Sabrina’s indictment of my thrifted garb, I had unwisely splurged on a new pair of shoes—plum velvet loafers, each embroidered with a lion’s head in gold thread—although when I had dressed that morning, Sabrina hadn’t been on my mind. The primary object of my bombastic efforts was my new boss, Edmund Benneton—my idol—who was always traipsing around to parties and fashion shows swathed in shades of ruby, amethyst, and citrine, his fingers glittering like Aladdin’s cave of jewels.
I’d had a fever dream the night before about our first encounter. In my dream I had been minding my own business, tending the flowers in some meadow—obviously—when Edmund rolled past me in a golden carriage. “You there!” he’d called out across a ripple of long emerald grass. He ordered the carriage to a screeching halt, and leapt out in breeches and leather lace-up boots, like some Don Juan on the cover of a historical romance paperback. “Don’t you look stunning!” he proclaimed. “How about I be your mentor, and help you get everything you want out of life!” Naturally I demurred, and just as I was preparing to accept his invitation—to ride with him in his carriage into the sunset, toward a life full of photo shoots and exclusive events—a giant casserole dish fell from the sky, and we were instantly crushed.
Beep! George now pressed his ID against the electronic reader.
“When we go through this door, you cannot speak,” he threatened. It was hard to take him seriously, with his little freckles and bright red hair.
He pushed open the glass door, and I prepared myself to enter the hub that had rocketed so many into the glittering cosmos of fame and beauty. A million years from now, when all the friends who loved me were gathered at a dinner party in my honor, I would recount this very moment. Edith Wharton would be sitting at one end of the table, and Edmund at the other. “Ethan used to see beauty everywhere,” my mother would whisper to Edith, reaching into her purse for the disintegrating remains of a flower garland I had made as a child. Ms. Duncan would be telling them the Gatsby anecdote, and then Patrick Demarchelier would say, “He was the best editor in the world, always just—full of ideas!” There’d be roses on the table—lavender and pastel yellow—and everybody would be drinking out of bone-white teacups with Oriental dragons painted on the sides. “When I entered Régine for the first time,” I would say, my lips holding the attention of the entire room, “everything was perfect at last.”
At Régine, there would be none of the ugliness that I had spent my life trying to escape, first by losing myself in the pages of the magazine itself and later, as an art history major, through marble and oil paint. Here, people would all have sensitive eyes like mine. They would appreciate the beauty in life, and share my goal of making the world more beautiful.
I followed George through the glass door.
WHEN WE PULLED UP TO THE FRESHMEN GATE ON MOVE-IN day, Yale was just like I’d imagined, with its turrets and wrought ironwork and stained glass windows and—
“Are you sure this is it?” my mother gaped. “This looks like—I don’t know, a castle or something.”
“No, mi amor,” my father corrected, “is just el famoso Jail.” He laughed at his own joke and almost swerved into a parking meter.
Since the arrival of my crest-emblazoned acceptance letter in the mail, all interactions with my father had included some variation of this overplayed joke: When he attempted to pronounce Yale, his coarse Spanish accent produced “Jail” instead.
It was, I suppose, better for both of us than the icy curtain that had descended after his outburst against my ill-fated earring. At some point, he seemed to actually realize what that letter meant—I was leaving for college, far away, and those months would be the last time I would live with them. Furthermore, in the time he had been silently condemning me, I had been trying hard to actually accomplish something. He had no true context for the significance of “getting into college,” let alone getting into Yale; nobody he knew had ever even done that, and Corpus Christi wasn’t like any town in the Northeast, where every parent drew their child from the womb and then immediately enrolled them in college-prep exams while prodding them to acquire hobbies and passions and admissions-worthy “special skills.” Independent of him, I had done this “great” thing, and—most crushing to the pride he took in being the family breadwinner—he was no longer needed to provide for me. Yale was paying for everything. As a mixed-race boy from a small town, with SAT scores and accomplishments to rival anyone who had attended Hotchkiss or Horace Mann, my application was an easy case for a diversity-craving admissions panel.
“You excited, cabrón?” he had started asking me at dinnertime, reeling me into one of his sweaty embraces. “I hear dey have good food over der in Jail!”
Now my father said, “Mira los prisoners!” I didn’t hear him through the wind coursing around my ears. Like a child, I had unbuckled in the backseat and thrust my head out of the window, an uncontrollable grin spreading over my face. I was dressed in a navy double-breasted suit, with an orchid pinned to my lapel, ready to introduce myself to the next four years of my life. The New Haven air cooled my cheeks, coursed through my hair, sent my silky open collar flapping around my neck.
“Welcome! Welcome!” yelled face-painted upperclassmen, herding awestruck tenderfoots to their residential dorms. “If you’re in Calhoun dorm, come with me! Branford, come with me! Davenport! Pierson! Berkeley!”
I couldn’t breathe. I was like an orphan who had been disappointed on every Christmas morning of his life, only to be confronted this year by a mountain of presents grander than he’d ever dreamed of.
All around, there were people just like me—odd ones, outsiders. A black father, photographing Wife and Daughter’s first tread through the hallowed gate; an Asian girl, calling for her dad to help unload an armchair. One Indian family consisted of at least twelve well-wishers in tunics and saris, crying and clasping their hands together. The beneficiary of their profuse affection was a ponytailed girl in a Yale cable-knit sweater who beamed visibly with relief, like a crab who had outgrown her shell and was finally clattering toward a roomier arrangement.
There were all the white families too. Mostly New Englanders, all of them cut out of some preppy catalogue, the mothers with their pearls and their headbands and the sleeves of their dainty sweaters tied over polo shirts; the fathers with monogrammed dress shirts tucked neatly into pleated khakis; a coordinated mélange of summertime colors—pink and tangerine and azure blue—like a fete of colorful umbrellas gathered on a beach in Nantucket. These were the “old money” families, from a class I had never known—families with stock portfolios and black cards and sprawling legacies of personal worth, with memberships at golf clubs and an ancestral claim to passage on the Mayflower. For their progeny, today was a preordained rite of passage, the culmination of a lifelong debate over whether they would choose Yale like Daddy, or Princeton like Mother, or maybe pull a radical stunt and end up at Harvard in the footsteps of loony, lovable Uncle Charlie.
Once we had parked, my father couldn’t get enough of them. “¡Mira estos locos!” he exclaimed, drunk with bewilderment, and my mother had to scold him for pointing openly at all the white people. Having never traveled beyond Texas or New Mexico, she seemed frightened by all the banners and turrets. She held on to my father’s arm in a daze, while I ran ahead of them into the swarming courtyard.
I could scarcely tell what was happening. From the car to my dorm was a blur of green lawns—I couldn’t believe how green!—but somehow I knew exactly where to go, and when I arrived at the dorm entryway, the door was vaulted and the stairway was stone and the windows leading up the tower (yes, tower!) were stained glass, and I realized this wasn’t just a dream, but that every day, from this day forward, I would pass through that vaulted door, and climb that stone stairway, and pass those stained glass windows, and when I got
to the top there would be a door—my door—and inside would be my room, full of my things, and my beautiful new life.
I was jostled by faces moving up and down the stairs, shouting, “Hello! Hiya! How’s it going! What’s your name! Where are you from!” every voice an affirmation of community, of friendship, of you and me and us together, every moment a handshake and a set of white teeth and a new friend, exclaiming, “I’m Charlotte! I’m Nick! I’m Fatima! James! Cecilie! Francisco! Jessica!” like hands raised in the air in a collective declaration: We’re here! We did it! We’re together now, and we will never be sad or alone or unhappy again!
Amid the faces were the things getting dragged, exchanging hands, or going clonk! clonk! clonk! on the steps—a lamp and a bookshelf and some pillows and an armchair and another lamp and more pillows and a box full of books and a picnic basket and an ironing board and a cage with a parakeet squawking, “Mildred! Mildred!”—all of things we brought to make this place belong to us.
The transport of my own belongings to my dorm suite was a process quite unseen by me. One moment I had flung open the door to an empty common room, greeted by the sight of a stone fireplace; the next, my parents had appeared with my suitcases and my rolled-up art posters and my potted calla lily, which was already swaying on the mantle.
“What do you think of this here?” my mom asked, holding up to the mahogany-paneled wall my poster of John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X. I didn’t look up, but ran to the bathroom and dementedly proceeded to test the faucets—open and close—thinking, My water! My sink! My bathroom! as the water guzzled out in abundance.
“Elián . . . ?”
An Innocent Fashion Page 5
