I gulped, and my head twitched. Of course I already broke this rule on a regular basis, trying to initiate conversations with eternally uninterested passengers.
“Of course you wouldn’t,” she filled in on my behalf, saving me again. “For all you know, they could be the CEO of Hoffman-Lynch Publications, and that wouldn’t exactly be appropriate, would it? For an intern to distract the leading executive of our company? Nor would you leave the office for the day with tasks left undone, or let an e-mail go unanswered, or take a bathroom break without notifying your colleagues.” I ran a mental scroll of these unwritten tenets, of whose existence I had been woefully ignorant.
“I understand Sabrina has already explained,” she continued, “that you should never interrupt a conversation between your superiors, and by the same token you should never wear an outfit which is inappropriate for your rank.”
I gasped with realization and glanced down at myself. Head-to-toe turquoise suit, with a flower-print shirt and a pink tie: my boldest outfit yet. In merely three weeks at Régine my style had flourished to peacock-worthy proportions as, day after day, new levels of demeaning office drudgery increased my need to feel dignified, worthy, and unique. My cheeks burned with self-consciousness, conveying my rush of insight to Clara.
“I don’t mean to embarrass you,” Clara said, “but you are an intern. You are here to learn, and to serve others, not to draw attention from the work that is being done.”
“I’m sorry . . . I never thought—I just—” The words flooded out, then struck a barrier: I now hesitated to state the explanation that to me was so obvious.
“Go on,” she said. “Let’s discuss this. That’s why Sabrina and George have been dismissed—because this conversation is private.”
Realizing that Clara had made such a gracious effort to protect my dignity—the dignity of an intern, whose rank was so beneath her own—sent the guilt free-falling through me. Suddenly my histrionic wardrobe seemed hugely presumptuous, and any defense of it a self-indulgent mistake. I slowly opened my mouth; felt my tongue unstick. “I just thought—since this is a fashion magazine . . .” The words were juvenile, and I knew it before they left me. “I thought my style would be appreciated.” I was disgusted with myself, but Clara matched my unworthiness with unfailing sympathy.
She crossed her legs on the other side, and placed her hands calmly on her knee. “Yes,” she admitted, “but if you haven’t noticed, you are also an adult, and this a corporation, and in a corporation we occupy specific roles, with specific ways that we must speak, act, and dress. The magazine, unfortunately, is not real life. Real life is the corporate ladder on which this magazine is built, and the billions of dollars which flow in and out of its pages—a system it is our obligatory duty to uphold.”
Saliva bobbed in my throat.
“This is simply the world we live in, my dear,” Clara stated. “You’ll learn that lesson here, you’ll learn it anywhere. Do you think the worlds of fashion, music, fine art—however brilliant and alive they might seem—are exempt from the cold laws of business and the bottom line? On the contrary, they are ruled by them. Aesthetic beauty is an industry. Fantasies are produced to be packaged and purchased.”
There was no malevolence in her voice, just an acceptance of general truth. She had herself acquired this essential knowledge long ago, and now she was simply passing it on to me, like a patient tutor relating to her pupil that the letter A comes before B comes before C—even though who knew why?
“The bottom line for you is, in these industries there are rules, and rank. One day, if you are successful, you can wear what you want—look at Edmund—but for now, you’re are at the bottom of a very long chain of command, and if you keep dressing like some kind of butterfly you will never see the top of it.”
A terrible, rosy-fingered realization seized me, my head suddenly filled with the sound I was convinced I’d heard when I stepped into Régine’s offices for the first time—the faint tinkling of people trapped in jars . . . And I understood.
Clara pulled me up from the plunging silence. “This doesn’t mean you can’t dress well,” she said. “I would suggest, if you want to wear a suit—I don’t know, a gray suit, or navy blue—something neutral. But a turquoise suit is much too bold. You may feel like you are simply expressing yourself, but unfortunately it’s not your role to express yourself.”
I struggled for a response. I could have never guessed that, of all the possible misdemeanors at Régine, the ultimate cause of my incrimination would be my wardrobe, which I had cultivated for so long thinking it would help me earn admittance to its hallowed halls.
She offered a helpless shrug of consolation; the natural order had been established long before her. “I suppose, if you must wear color, how about a nice tie?” She let her hand flutter open, to show what a great compromise she considered this sartorial suggestion. “Otherwise, how about just a nice neutral sweater . . . or a neutral—anything?” Seemingly recognizing the totalitarian ring in her own words, she made an effort to lighten my sentence. “It just can’t be anything that . . .” She put her delicate hand over her chest, long manicured fingers spread, and jolted her wrist as though receiving an electric shock. “Nothing that . . .”
“Stands out,” I finished.
“Exaaaaactly,” she said with a single extended nod. Her chin gravitated upward very slowly, and I was reminded of a slow-motion playback I had once seen in Driver’s Ed, of an accident victim’s head whipping back upon collision before, smash!, the video sped up, and he went flying through the windshield.
“Do you have anything to wear?” she asked. “Anything at home that’s not . . . ?” Elaboration was unnecessary; she knew well enough that in my flamboyant wardrobe there could be little which would meet the standard of neutrality that she was proposing. Unperturbed, Clara rose to her feet, patting out the wrinkles on the front of her pencil skirt. “Come with me—quietly, please.”
I followed her with mummified stiffness through the white closet door. She swept through the fashion editors’ cubicle, dipping her fingers into a ceramic dish—clink—and, without a note of acknowledgment to her colleagues there, continued to glide down the hallway, the glint of a key between her fingers. I glanced behind us, but neither Christine nor Will had noticed the subtle pilferage. We passed a dozen wordless cubicles, through a deafening air of dutiful semiconsciousness.
The key fit into the lock on an unmarked door in the farthest corner of the office, and Clara ushered me inside. The door shut behind us. Darkness. Then she flicked on a dim overhead light, and we were standing in a walk-in closet: two garment racks, and a built-in shelf overflowing with bags and shoes, surrounded by towers of plastic crates that contained a hodgepodge of hats, gloves, and sunglasses cases.
“This is where we keep leftovers,” Clara explained, “both men’s and women’s clothes and accessories that, for one reason or another, were never returned to PR. It happens more than you would think, with so many deliveries going in and out for shoots, and sometimes they overlook things. After several seasons we donate them for a tax write-off, or they get put on consignment toward a corporate account.”
Shrouded in shadow, she turned and assessed me at an arm’s length. “You’re a thirty-inch waist, from the looks of it? Excuse my imprecise methods,” she said, and placed her hands around my waist. I lifted my arms as she slid her hands up. “You can relax,” she instructed, giving me a light squeeze around my chest. “A thirty-eight-inch chest, I’d guess, with a fifteen-inch neck? And your shoes . . .” She required half a glance in the dark to determine—“ten and a half, right?”
I opened my mouth to confirm the accuracy of her estimations, but my input was outweighed by Clara’s expertise. Clacking one hanger against the other in quick succession, she shuffled through the selection of men’s dress shirts and emerged with a black Armani button-down.
“This will be a good start,” she said. “You can never go wrong with black—or Armani.” S
he hung the shirt on the front of the rack. “You’ll need a suit, since you like them so much.” Another clack-clack-clack, and she was holding up a three-piece charcoal-gray suit. “How do you like this?”
I ran my hand over its sculpted shoulder. “It’s gorgeous,” I said. The luxurious wool felt cool and new, and the stitched pockets had never been cut open. A lustrous black tag on the interior of the jacket’s neck read Dior Homme.
“Consider this your uniform,” she replied. “You can wear it with and without the vest—it’s versatile.”
My fingers curled longingly around the delicate sleeve. “You mean—I get to wear this?”
“Yes,” she said. She placed the suit beside the black shirt. “You might have to hem the pants for a more perfect fit, but otherwise—it’s as good as yours.”
A moment of stunned silence passed over me as I was struck by the magnitude of her benevolence. “Clara, I—I don’t know how to thank you.”
She leaned over into the shelves and selected a pair of chocolate brown Louis Vuitton oxfords. “Try these. Men’s sample size for shoes is an eleven, but Vuittons run small. If they’re not right, you can take a pair of Ferragamos, and either way you can thank me with your utmost discretion.” She straightened up. “Now, listen to me: You’ll change in here, please, and if anybody notices that you are wearing something new, you give them a strange look. That Ethan—the Ethan they remember—that Ethan never existed.”
A small twinge rang through my chest at the thought of the self-effacement that her proposition required.
“Once you’ve changed, you’ll put the suit that you are wearing in this garment bag”—she pointed—“and before you reenter the fashion closet, you’ll hang the bag on the coat rack by my desk. Then when you leave for the night, you’ll pick it up and never speak of this again.”
“Really, I—” I glanced at my new Dior suit hanging there, and choked on a rush of gratitude. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything—never mention it,” she said. “You can thank me when you make it in life. Send me flowers. I’m a Southern girl, so I love a nice bouquet.” She smiled, and in the obscure light, I noticed a strange mark above her right eye. It was the closest I’d ever come to her, and now I could clearly see a scar from her hairline to the top of her cheek, slicing right through her eyebrow. The fine highlight of the raised skin was the only evidence of it; blended in by the same brown foundation on the rest of her smooth, poreless face, the gap in her otherwise exquisitely groomed eyebrow filled in with a perfectly matched pencil, yet—there it was when she tilted her head in the shadows, a fine glimmer, like something had slashed her deeply. Whatever it was that had hurt her, it was a wonder it hadn’t taken out her eye, and I shuddered, realizing that even perfect Clara was just a person, covered in skin that could be broken by scars she could never fully hide.
Her voice punctuated the silence, in a register I hadn’t heard before: obscure, unrehearsed. “You know . . .” she trailed slowly, “like I’ve said, you’re not the only outsider here.” She placed her hand on my shoulder. “Some of us have come very far, and take it from me—if your dream is to make it in this world . . . it is possible to do it.” Like the boughs of an overripe tree, her words were heavy with meaning.
Clara glanced sidelong at the rack, then at the floor. Her mouth opened cautiously, and she seemed to be on the cusp of an important caveat. “The thing you must know is . . .” she unburdened herself at last, with a look bordering on desolation. “Sacrifice is at the heart of every dream.” She continued to gaze at the carpet, at the shoes and the crates and the shelves, all shrouded in shadow. “Nothing we want in life comes without sacrifice, and you realize this as you grow up. I did. We all did.” She looked up at me now. In the darkness, I had the impression that her densely mascaraed eyelids were two flickering black wings.
“It is a lovely style you have,” she lamented. A mournful pang continued to weigh down her buoyant lilt. “I regret that you should have to change it, but—I always tell myself, for every thing I loved which I have given up in life, there was something that I gained.” She reached out and touched the knot of my tie. “Sometimes I know that it’s a lie, but—it’s what I tell myself. And this is what you must tell yourself too.”
I felt her delicate fingers tighten around the knot, shift it slightly one way, then back, and remain poised there. “Tell yourself every day. Otherwise, one day you’ll turn, and you won’t recognize your dream, or yourself, or—” She had choked on her own saliva.
“I’m sorry,” she smiled nervously, and swallowed. Even in the dimness, her mouth was perfect lipstick-red; for the first time I saw the resemblance between lipstick and the greasepaint of a clown’s smile, both of them a well-plotted deceit. “I’ve said enough.” Clara patted an imaginary spot of lint off my turquoise suit and took her hand back. She straightened up, and the familiar, white smile followed, with a sweet incline of her blonde head. “Now wait here, and come out when you are ready—and please, remember what I’ve told you.”
She slipped out, and it was as though nothing at all had happened between us.
I FOLLOWED CLARA’S INSTRUCTION’S PRECISELY—wordlessly hung the garment bag by her desk, then passed through the fashion closet door in my new designer outfit. I sat down without a rustle, and reached toward the keyboard. The gray sleeves flashed with strange unfamiliarity over my wrists, and for a second I mistook my hands for another’s.
In her cubicle, Sabrina was eating cottage cheese for breakfast, one hand on a plastic spoon, the other on her computer mouse.
“Did you just get Anna’s e-mail?” George was asking her.
“Anna Swanson?” She chewed absently. “Why does that name sound familiar?”
“She was the PR girl at Saint Laurent last season, remember? She kept nagging you for their velvet hangers back.”
Sabrina gulped, and I could hear her scrape her plastic cup for another spoonful. “Ugh, so annoying. Why is she asking for job opportunities?”
“They fired her. She gained a lot of weight.”
Sabrina stopped chewing. I heard a reluctant gulp, and a rustling whoosh as she tossed the cottage cheese into her trash bin. “I thought her dad was the president of something,” she finally said, and trying to satisfy her hunger, pried open the plastic lid of her iced latte with a click and took a long gulp-gulp-gulp.
“He owns Poland Spring,” George said.
She must have finished her beverage, as she tossed the cup into the trash with her cottage cheese, ice rattling. “Is that all? I thought it was something luxury.”
“No, but do you know how many people drink Poland Spring? That’s like all the water coolers in America. Can you imagine owning water?”
“We should go out for drinks with Geneva Chapman,” Sabrina said, presumably triggered by the subject of water to contemplate less sober libations.
“From Prada PR?” he asked. “Have you ever met her?”
“No, but after enough e-mails, you feel like you do. Her e-mails don’t have spelling mistakes, and she gets back to you in five minutes. I feel like she’d be really put-together, and know the best places for a martini.”
“How about the Chanel PR girl, your faaavorite?”
“Oh please. I bet she’d like, try to roofie herself or something,” Sabrina scoffed, “and then she’d wake up the next morning and e-mail me ten times to return the pearl collar we never requested.” She paused. “She’s probably really pretty, though. Chanel only hires like, really pretty girls.”
George asserted that, like, Régine was pretty much the same as Chanel, so like, you’re really pretty too, Sabrina, and then—Were you wearing that before?
“I said,” George repeated to me, “were you wearing that before?” He eyed me suspiciously. Weren’t you wearing, like, purple or something?”
Sabrina looked over at me. “Is that . . . ?” she began.
“Dior,” I replied.
THAT EVENING, I H
UNG THE GARMENT BAG FROM AN EXPOSED pipe which ran across my four-foot-high tin ceiling. The pipe was a water line, which unintentionally supplied ambient waterfall sounds when my roommates showered; it was also where my clothes hung, the estimation of a closet in my unequipped habitation. I crawled toward the rest of my clothes now—red, pink, sky blue, a rainbow of thrifted hues which for years had supplied the outermost layer of my colorful identity—and pushed them all toward the far side end of the pipe, relegating my past to the shadows with a single shove and one last whimper of squeaking hangers, swinging blithely in unison.
I placed an empty hanger in the middle of the naked pipe, and began to undress. Brown Louis Vuitton shoes, gray Dior suit, black Armani dress shirt. My body relaxed as the air rushed over my skin. At no point in the day had my skin dared to make direct contact with the interior of my new suit; my reluctance to damage its silky lining had yielded seven hours with my elbows raised (consequently, a box of gloves spilled over George’s head and also a number of innovative poses).
Kneeling bare, in my underwear and socks, I inhaled deeply, uninhibited at last. I hung up my new outfit: folded the pants, buttoned the shirt, patted the shoulders of my jacket; placed the shoes neatly below.
I thought of the younger me, who read fairy tales in bed and stole flowers from the neighbors’ yards, all the time dreaming of another world. If only he could see me now, with these beautiful things, this beautiful life ahead of him.
I shuffled on my knees to unzip the garment bag, which had facilitated the out-of-office smuggling of my turquoise suit. I pulled out my illicit embroidered loafers first, then my flowered shirt and wrinkly necktie, and finally my boldly hued jacket: nondescript, unbranded. I hung it with a sigh beside its gray Dior replacement.
An Innocent Fashion Page 17
