In transit, the turquoise pants had crumpled to the bottom of the black garment bag. “That Ethan is dead,” Clara had said, and indeed, it appeared that I was staring at a body bag—my corpse had just crumpled to the bottom and melted right through it, leaving only a splash of color as a form of identification. The next instant I had a vision of myself at Clara’s desk, tailored in designer clothes from head to toe, my unruly hair clipped beyond recognition, my back straight like there was a wire holding me up—and all around pictures of shoes and handbags, and sitting right next to me, my two faceless coworkers, whom I sat beside for eight hours a day yet barely even knew. “Your beeeeaaauutiful dream,” they cooed, their eyes rolling like colossal white pearls.
As I kneeled there in my loft, dizziness overtook me. My stomach turned and my head swayed side to side, and I felt myself falling as if in slow motion. My arms reached out around the turquoise suit, hugging it like a person begging for forgiveness, then the weight of my body pulled the jacket off the hanger—crack!—and I fell forward into a lump, face buried in its turquoise folds. I lay there in silence, eyes shut, breath teeming in and out of my nostrils, while the feeling continued to flow through me—the feeling that I was falling, falling . . . falling . . .
It was a feeling I’d had only once before in my life, after the first time I rolled on ecstasy. We’d all done it in East Rock Park, steeped among evergreens and a great lake—me and Madeline and Dorian, also Blake and his then-girlfriend Kim, and a few other consorts from our enchanted circle. On ecstasy the whole world was pregnant with poetry—just one little pill, and then suddenly it was eyes wide open, everybody bursting from their chests, and each little unappreciated thing around us like a perfect word in some transcendental scripture. We danced swaying under the moon, buzzing like fireflies with a single night to live; took off our shirts and rubbed each other’s skin all night, while overhead the branches of the trees murmured about all the creatures of the earth silently aching for love. Time was a throbbing heart we were inside, and consciousness a fever dream of skin and sweat and damp kisses and our collective breath leaving our bodies like the sigh at the end of a full, contented life.
Then they all fell asleep, and for me, the plummet came.
It was exactly what Ted Hamilton had cautioned us about when he sold us the pills in his dorm: “You’ll get high, then you’ll come down hard,” he’d said, “like a depression.”
Only it was more than just depression, more than just the typical sad thoughts that filled my head and then swiftly moved on. If you’ve never done ecstasy, and you don’t know the feeling, well—it’s your whole body, a swooping feeling, like you’re in an elevator spinning downward, only there’s no end, and you realize that for your entire life there’s been something holding you together and now it’s falling through you, flowing downward, not in a cathartic way but in a hopeless, never-ending way, and the world you loved will never be the same because you see it now through a gray lens and everything is sharp, and you notice the details, the cracks, the whole gray world made up of flaws and ugliness, and you can’t breathe and you think, I’ll never have it again, I’ll never be happy again, and when you look around nobody is there to comfort you, to save you, and you realize: Nobody cares and you’re all alone, and you’ll always be alone forever, and it makes you want to walk away, just walk away until you die, but—you can’t because your cell phone is in Madeline’s purse and if you missed an exam tomorrow you’d be in trouble and anyway the party you’ve been planning is next week and on top of everything you’re hungry, and thinking all these stupid, sad thoughts about your stupid, sad, futile life makes you plummet farther down, down, because you realize you couldn’t walk away if you wanted to because you’re trapped, you’re a human being and you’re trapped in the web of your own body and the web you’ve made for yourself connecting to all the other bodies.
That’s kind of what it felt like as I lay there, clinging to my former self, with nowhere to go but forward. The thought flashed through my mind that clearly this felt wrong—this dream felt wrong—yet, how could it be, if all my life I had dreamed it? And if it was wrong, what else in the world was there for me?
I WOKE UP TO THE SMELL OF BURNING TOAST.
I swallowed hard and sat up, my head grazing the Dior blazer. The fabric was so elegant. Elegant and cold.
“Hey!” I called cloudily in the direction of the ladder. “Is everything okay . . . ?”
My roommate Veronica replied from downstairs, “Sorry! Yeah—I just can’t—figure—out . . .” A metallic rattle and a low moan. “My God, this toaster is complicated.”
Even though we lived together, I didn’t see Veronica much. Having just graduated from the same class at Cornell, she and her boyfriend Jonathan were both consultants. Whom they consulted, and on what matters, I had no idea, but they were never home, and spent the entirety of their free time at dinner or drinks or Sunday brunch (otherwise talking about dinner or drinks or Sunday brunch).
Evidently giving up, I heard Veronica shut the bedroom door behind her—a sign that she and Jonathan were settling down for the night, after returning from dinner while I had snored in a heap several feet above them.
I felt around for my cell phone. Six mixed calls from Madeline. I remembered at once: Dorian’s birthday party.
For a moment, I pressed my fingers against my eyes once more. I stumbled down the ladder and to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom; pulled out the bottle of aspirin; began to brainstorm excuses for why I couldn’t go with her to Dorian’s party.
I never got headaches, so I didn’t even know how many to take.
I turned the bottle over to read the warnings. Misuse could lead to serious side effects, including stomach pains, and in rare cases—death. I blinked, and wiped a bead of sweat from my brow. The summer heat was the worst in the bathroom, where it got trapped, making it difficult to know after a hot shower whether my body was wet from water or sweat. Right now I kind of felt like that—unsure of what was stuck to my skin. The bottle suggested two aspirin pills, but it didn’t seem that I was having a two-aspirin kind of headache. I gulped down three and called back Madeline.
“But you promised,” she replied, sounding on the verge of tears.
We argued for ten minutes until finally I said, “Fine, I’ll go, but only for half an hour,” and she replied, “Good, because I’m already in a cab to your apartment and will be there in fifteen minutes.”
WE MADE ONE REVOLUTION THROUGH THE CROWDED LATE-NIGHT lounge before I pulled at her and said, “Well, I guess Dorian’s not here.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she scowled. “This is his own party.”
Bossa-nova notes flowed upward from speakers toward a red ceiling, mirroring the ripple of the aquarium walls. Rectangular slabs of polished wood made low-lying tables between sofas upholstered in flax linen, and everywhere white orchids rose out of modern blown-glass vases. Despite the tight guest list at the door, the room was at capacity—nobody else from Yale, just fashionable shadows from his many other lives, whom Dorian evidently counted as his friends.
His first word to us both, like a rope bridge tossed over a vast precipice, was, “Babe!”
A drink in one hand, Dorian was lounging behind a table adorned with tumblers and Belvedere bottles. He was surrounded by silhouettes, illuminated from overhead by a red sconce which caused a shadow on his lips, as if a butterfly was resting there. He swooped to his feet—the butterfly flew away—and as he hopped cheerfully over other people’s sandals and high heels and polished oxfords, he gave the impression of a young acrobat trying his luck on the tightrope.
I steeled my will against him; remembered the mental promise I had made to myself. No matter what happened tonight, no matter how charming or beautiful Dorian was, I wouldn’t forgive him, wouldn’t forget that he had abandoned us, that he was no more my friend than any person whose shoulder I bumped on the subway.
He came closer, in a white T-shirt and tuxedo pants, havi
ng never quite learned how to dress up. With every step I became surer of the inevitable next thing: his bright, effortless smile, and the complete annihilation of my feeble defenses. I knew the trap ahead—I knew it by heart—yet I was returning to it, like a ghost haunting the site of his own demise.
I had the urge to turn around, to simply push through the glamorous crowd that had gathered in his honor and escape, panting, into the night. Madeline, however, was holding my hand and practically dragging me toward him.
“Babe!” he said once more, when he was almost close enough to touch us. The word sent a jagged spike through me, like a rumble charted on a seismograph, which plummeted on recollection that Dorian called everyone “babe.” He had done it all through college in that playful tone of his, an exclamation over monkey bars and swings—Babe, babe, babe! If you didn’t know him, you would just assume he really liked you and wanted to play; then, if you were as unlucky as we were to fall in love with him in the sand pit, you later learned that it meant nothing. Sure, maybe he did like you, but in the end your friendship was just one of the many games that preoccupied his roving, amusement-powered life, and you were no more special to him than a daisy he had enjoyed looking at, or a song that made him want to dance—one that he would turn off when he got bored or heard a new one he liked better. Madeline seemed to have forgotten about all this as she closed in on him now.
He kissed her lips while she regarded him with the reverence of a pious Sunday school girl. She was a fool. I knew, and Dorian knew too—anybody who knew her knew—that she was just one of those women who would sooner pardon a hundred unpardonable blows before admitting her bruised body to a hospital. He enveloped me next, and I remained as hard as a pillar while he was soft and warm and familiar, like a favorite blanket on a winter night.
“You look great,” Dorian whispered, his low, penetrating voice coaxing out the reluctant longing in me. His breath smelled like gin and tonic as he kissed me with unhurried sentimentality on the cheek—soft lips, hovering too long, too innocently: I tightened my jaw, and he let me go at last. “It’s really great to see you, babe,” he whispered with heart-wrenching earnestness as he took my hand and squeezed it. He smiled.
I smiled foggily back. The only thing I could think to do was stay completely still, afraid that my body would betray me, that I would throw my hands around him and moan, “I missed you so much.” Madeline saved me from an inevitable collapse by pulling him toward the sofa. She was holding his hand like nothing had ever happened, while I silently resented that, like a coat of paint over a graffiti-desecrated wall, she was willing to simply bury the ugly marks he had made on us both. I had made a terrible mistake. I had known it would happen this way, and yet I had let it happen: I was letting it happen.
They approached the sofa, and I followed them like a puppy on an invisible leash.
“Are these your model friends? Hello,” Madeline interjected forcibly, making a visible swinging spectacle of Dorian’s and her locked hands. “I’m Madeline.”
It was too loud for anybody to hear. Dorian’s friends smiled blithely at us from the couch before returning to hushed conversations with each other. I surveyed their silhouettes, recognizing the frizzy-haired one from outside the club where I first saw Dorian in New York—Penny, who last season had been the face of Givenchy and various other campaigns. Beside her sat the current face of Dolce & Gabbana, then Versace, and then the English girl who had starred with Naomi Campbell in an Alexander McQueen campaign. They all slid to the side to make room for us while we stepped over their shoes, which like the monthly accessories feature in Régine seemed to illustrate the latest trends: rhinestones, Western-style fringe, and the dusty pink color that, after appearing in the latest Prada collection, was being emulated everywhere.
I ended up next to Dolce & Gabbana, with Dorian sitting between me and Madeline. The sofa was the enveloping kind—too comfortable—with any illusions of a fast exit dashed, or rather swallowed up, by its plush linen cushions.
“Have a drink,” Dorian said as he leaned forward toward the ice bucket. He poured Belvedere into two tumblers, and topped them off with orange juice—a generously inverted ratio, which at our prestigious university we had learned was prerequisite for a distinguished evening.
Madeline winked at me over Dorian’s back as he poured, but before I could respond with an expression of discomfort she looked away, unable to tolerate a moment in Dorian’s presence when she was not fully absorbed in exultation of him. Dorian handed us each a drink and settled back in the seat.
“Are all your friends from Paris?” Madeline asked in a loud, hollow voice, like a “cool” mother fishing for details about her son’s new friends whom she suspected of introducing him to sex, drugs, and other forks off the straight-and-narrow path.
“From shows,” he nodded, picking up his own drink, a gin and tonic which had begun to leave a sweaty moon-shaped puddle on the glass table. “I’m done with modeling though—I quit yesterday.”
“Done? You only just started,” she protested, with a startled clink of her own glass.
“Yeah, but I’m tired of it. I want to be creative again.”
I rolled my eyes. It was the one thing that could be counted upon in human nature, that every person should set out to prove their weakest virtue. Beautiful people always wanted to be more talented than they really were, and talented people more beautiful. Despite his constant attempts to be the exception, Dorian would always prove the rule—as would any person who tried to challenge fate.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Dorian rushed in, “it kept me busy. They call it Fashion Week, but it’s more like a whole month—there’s one in London, Paris, Milan—each one’s a week, plus castings before. I mean, I was barely going to class. I would go to auditions with all my French homework, and practice pronunciation in the makeup chair at shows—everything was crazy—and still the whole time I was so bored.”
“Isn’t it fun though,” gawked Madeline, “meeting people, wearing all the clothes?”
“Sure,” he admitted, “the first couple of days it’s great, but then you realize it’s the same thing every day, and all anybody wants from you is your picture. If I thought nobody took me seriously before—well, over there nobody cares what I have to say about anything. Backstage is always loud and chaotic—hair dryers going, people barking into headsets. Interviewers come around from all the magazines, and yell the same questions at me—‘Dorian Belgraves! Enjoying Fashion Week so far? How do you like following in your mom’s footsteps?’ It’s like, what am I supposed to say to them? ‘Hi, I’m my own person, and can we talk about something else?’”
He rolled his eyes and went on, “If they think they’re being really clever, they’ll know about Yale, so they’ll say, ‘How do you like being a smart model!’ and they just laugh like it’s the funniest thing they’ve heard all day. They just—assume we’re all stupid, when really, I mean they’re the ones that are. Let me put it this way—my best friend through it all—”
I gave myself away with an upward glance, curious to hear about the “best friend” who had replaced me and Madeline in Paris.
“—he has a PhD in microbiology, though nobody ever asks him about it. He has a really ‘commercial’ look, so he gets a lot of department-store jobs—big billboards and stuff—he told me, ‘Don’t sweat it. Just nod and smile, pretend they’re right about you—at the end of the day, it’s a job. You get paid, go home—everybody wins.’” Dorian swirled around his gin and tonic. “For him, it makes sense, but why do I need the money? If I’m going to do it, it has to be for something else. I have to want to, but at this point I’m afraid there’s nothing I actually want to do.”
He gulped, lifting his drink to his lips. “I’m not like you guys, who always had a Path,” he reminded us, and took a deep, ice-clattering swig.
I rolled my eyes once more. Second only to Dorian’s own self-amusement—an undertaking that, like a winter fire, required endless fueling—these w
ere Dorian’s two all-consuming passions: rejecting the idea of a life “Path,” and reminding everyone that he was too special to have one.
I almost made a joke to draw attention to this point, but then Dorian’s voice wavered. “Except you know, maybe one day . . .” He trailed off on this hopeful note, his voice getting a little high at the end, and smiled—the familiar, all-comforting smile, which had always confirmed the uprightness of the world but somehow now seemed to shake at the corners—and for once it occurred to me that maybe Dorian actually wanted a life Path.
He glanced up to find Madeline just staring at him with a placid smile. She seemed not to have heard anything at all he had said.
“I have been making art again, though,” he said. He reached into the back pocket of his pants and pulled out a wallet-sized sketchpad. “I think—I want to be an artist after all.” He turned to an ink drawing on the first page, of a long, gaunt face, with sad, all-seeing eyes, and a barbed chin resting on a skeletal hand. “Guess who?”
“I don’t know,” Madeline shrugged, “but he sure is ugly.”
“It’s me . . .” Dorian explained, his voice dropping off with a dejected echo. “It’s a self-portrait.”
“What?!” she balked. “But it’s . . .” Madeline gulped. “You always had such a—unique drawing style.”
Madeline, of course, hated Dorian’s drawings, although she would never bring herself to admit it to him. She thought they were crude while, ironically enough, I had always liked them. They reminded me of the work of Egon Schiele, an Austrian protégé of Gustav Klimt who drew everyone with long, sad faces and atrophied limbs. Coming from Dorian, they seemed unexpectedly flawed and heavyhearted, qualities misaligned with the vision of Dorian that Madeline wished to have, as he was her champion of vitality and unmarred goodness.
An Innocent Fashion Page 18
