A tear burned in the corner of my eye. George wasn’t even rich, or beautiful. At least those reasons I vaguely comprehended, even if they were unfair.
He glimpsed my wounded face, as I tried to swallow the emotion that was welling up in me. “God, you’re pathetic,” he said.
“It just doesn’t make any sense,” I said, shaking my head. “Between the two of us, it’s me whose been paying my dues, slaving away while you . . .”
He rolled his eyes. “You think that because you’ve been interning for a few months, you’ve paid your dues? Some people work for years for the job they want.”
“Like you?” I scoffed, my misery crystallizing into scorn.
“I know how lucky I am,” he said. “But maybe if you weren’t such a self-pitying brat, you could learn something from me.”
My voice escalated: “Learn what? You’re horrible.”
“Lower your voice, if you know what’s good for you.” He slid a stick of peppermint gum onto his tongue and tossed the foil wrapper into the wastepaper basket. “Remember, I’m the one that’s leaving. You’ll still have to make it work here, day in and day out, until you’ve proven you’re more than a pitiful slave.”
I cemented my teeth together and looked away.
“Now listen to me, Ethan St. James,” he chewed. His gum made a sickening smack as he moved it contemptuously from one side of his mouth to the other. He leaned in toward my face while I glared at the Régine logo on my screen. The veins in my throat bulged. The smell of artificial mint filled my nostrils. The hair on the side of my head tingled as his mouth hovered by my ear. He opened his lips, and I heard the slow unsticking of saliva as they parted over my earlobe.
“Grow the fuck up. You think I’m so different from you? That I’m here on a free ride, like Sabrina, and everybody else? We’re both playing the same game. Except for you—” he leaned back in his chair “—you’re just a child. You show up on the first day with all your colors like this is kindergarten, wanting everybody to think you’re so special—”
“That’s not true,” I interjected. My voice was hoarse. “You don’t even know me.”
“There you go, thinking you’re so unique all the time, when really what you want is the exact same thing I want—the same thing everybody wants. You don’t realize, you’re just a clone of everybody here—a less competent clone.”
I gritted my teeth and repeated, “You—don’t—know—me.”
He leaned back a little and laughed. “Is that so? I can tell you everything about you in two seconds.” He rolled his chair next to mine—tap!—and grabbed me by the wrist. I winced as he stretched out my palm and pretended to read it like a fortune-teller. “You want to be the center of attention,” he said, as he poked his finger into my flesh. I remained still as he prodded one spot after another on my unflinching hand. “You want to get ahead. You want to be loved. You want to be noticed.” Then he traced his finger slowly in a full circle around my palm. “You want to be a beautiful person . . . and be surrounded by beautiful things . . . and have a beeeaaauuuutiful life,” and to hear him say that word, “beautiful,” which in fact had ruled my entire life—it suddenly seemed like a terrible, sinister thing, and my fingers curled like the petals of a dying flower. “Don’t pretend you’re above all that,” he said. “Don’t pretend, because at the end of the day, you’re a person just like the rest of us.”
My shoulders fell slack. I gazed at my fingers twitching in George’s hand.
He picked up the Louis Vuitton watch resting by my keyboard, and slowly brought it into his own lap. “Remember when I asked you to get that pointless book from the library—how you didn’t ask questions?” He unclasped the watch. “You just did it.” George began to slide the Louis Vuitton watch onto my wrist. “And after that, the book sat there all day. And the next week, after I made you lug a hundred trunks, while I just sat here arranging gloves, I asked you to take it back to the library. And you still did it. That’s why I’m going to London to get paid as a fashion assistant, and you’re staying here to work for free, photographing handbag check-ins.”
He turned my naked wrist up to shut the clasp—click!
“See, what you don’t understand is, your degree doesn’t matter,” he went on. “Your interests don’t matter. You don’t matter. You think anyone cares what you know or what you like or what you feel? There are a million nobodies like you—individuals, whatever. You really think you’re the only one? That you’re special? We all have lives, you know—‘personalities.’ Clara and Will, Christine and Sabrina,” he rattled, “all of them, and me. But at the end of the day, it’s not their names at the top of the magazine. It’s not your name or my name—it’s Régine. And that’s how all those people get to be here, because they know that when they’re here, they’re not Clara or Will or Christine or Sabrina. They’re a grown-up woman named Régine, and you know what?—Régine might be beautiful on the outside, but on the inside, she wouldn’t even care if everybody else in the world died.”
I was silent. I thought of Clara and Will and Christine, forced to gather around a plate of cupcakes for Clara’s birthday—tense, mistrusting, each of them hiding a knife behind their back in case one of the others moved too quickly. I thought of Clara, dressing me in acceptable neutral shades. “This is simply the world we live in, my dear,” she had said.
Outside the fashion closet, I could hear Sabrina buzzing to them, and the copy machine humming, and everybody’s cubicle-encased hearts beating in the same mechanical rhythm, slow and calculating. Grown-up. Soulless.
“You think I hate you, and that I actually like Sabrina?” he laughed. “You know how she even got that position, right? She’s best friends with Ava Burgess’s daughter. No fashion experience, no credentials—never worked a day in her life, for a job both of us would kill for. But you know what . . . ? I can’t do anything about that, and neither can you.” He pointed in the direction of Sabrina’s desk. “If you were in Sabrina’s chair, it’d be you I would pretend to like—but you’re not.”
I stared at Sabrina’s empty cubicle.
“When I’m gone,” George said, “someone else will sit here, and I’d suggest you take advantage of them. Learn your lesson: Be more like Régine.” He pointed to the folder full of résumés—all the people who wanted a chance in this place. “These are the candidates I have for you. You can take them or leave them. It makes no difference to me.” Then he gestured at the watch he had fastened to my wrist. “It’s a nice watch, isn’t it?”
My hand was still resting on his lap. I felt the pulse run through his leg, imagined the blood pumping inside of him, and wondered if we were actually the same—just two ambitious young people, who under different circumstances, might even have been friends. I didn’t know much about George’s story. Perhaps he even had the same dream as me.
I took my hand back and gave a quiet rattle to my wrist. The words Louis Vuitton glittered over an ebony face, and I thought about what it would actually mean to own a watch like that—not to just wear it, but to have it in a drawer somewhere, to take it out once in a while and look at it, and know that I had money and power and everything I could ever want. I turned my arm to make the watch sparkle—it was hard, cold—then unclasped it, and laid it back on the table.
“I could never be like Régine,” I said, finally.
George returned the watch to its black velvet box. “Too bad.”
The closet door swung open.
George closed the box as Sabrina charged past us. “Boys,” she said over her shoulder. “There’s a Miu Miu glove missing. Black leather—came in with Jane’s L.A. trunks last week and they need it back today.”
George had kept the glove records the previous week. He opened his mouth—I thought, to inform her—but instead, he lied. “Ethan kept those records last week. He’ll find it by the end of the day.”
I rolled my eyes. “What time is your flight? Hadn’t you better leave right now?”
“Sorry,
Ethan. At least,” he patted me on the back, “it’s only a few more hours.”
And remarkably, as promised, it really was.
When the time came for George to go, I was cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by a hundred pairs of black gloves. It could have been that to locate the pair which resembled so many others required my full concentration, but I was almost certain George didn’t say a word of farewell to anyone, just took his bag and was gone for good. His parting gift to me was the folder full of people who could replace him, and the résumés were waiting for me around eight, after Sabrina left and all my work was done. By then the glove was found: It had never been missing at all, naturally, but pilfered without any notice by the fashion editors to examine at their desks. Now I could feel George’s minty breath lingering over me as I settled back on the carpet to sift through the pile of résumés.
My first prospective intern was Polina Nabokov, who had studied Agriculture at a trade school in Russia and was George’s idea of a joke, surely. I started a pile for résumés that constituted a flat-out no, then continued on.
Eric Mendelsonn had misspelled the word “fasshion” in his cover letter. No.
Jenny Kohler was “excited to learn all about the real world of supermodels, like my idol Naomi Campbell.” No.
Dorian Belgraves had—
I had to read it twice. Dorian Belgraves. The sight of his name slapped me hard across the face like an open palm. No. Absolutely not. I had never mentioned Dorian and my relationship to George, yet that was definitely a joke, to have included in my pile of Régine hopefuls the bane of my existence. My body shuddered at the thought of him. If I had any say in the matter, Dorian would never step foot inside the fashion closet of Régine, not when he had never expressed the slightest interest in being a fashion editor—and especially not to sit in the chair next to me. “Régine wouldn’t even care if everybody else in the world died,” George had said, and in that moment, I understood.
I folded Dorian’s résumé down the middle and started to rip it in half. Like Edmund, who expected every garment or accessory he disapproved of to vanish instantly from view, I never, ever wanted to see Dorian’s name again. Relishing a visceral satisfaction—riiiiip—my fingers got halfway down, then inexplicably could go no further. I had every intention to mince his resume to shreds then toss it onto the streets of New York, but my curiosity tugged my hand away: What did Dorian’s résumé even look like? I unfolded it cautiously and flattened it against the carpet, the hole in the center flapping like the gaping gill of a shore-washed fish.
His sophomore and junior years resembled my own. There was the Yale Daily News, for which we had both contributed weekly arts reviews; Sailing Team, which we thought we’d try, until we unwittingly capsized a two-man boat; Junior Class Council, which we were forced by Madeline to join (“Don’t you want to support all my causes at the monthly meetings?”). Then there was the gap that had come between us. Study Abroad, it read, with transfer credits from La Sorbonne—the line that represented our year apart, and the end of my love for Dorian.
He had never told us he was unhappy at Yale, never said he was applying to go study abroad or even mentioned La Sorbonne. He just left—and when he got there he ignored us, all of our calls and messages. This was before all the newspaper headlines at school, before that one pathetic e-mail, when for a brief but real moment at the beginning of senior year we were afraid something terrible had happened.
It was Madeline who called Dorian’s house in Paris. We couldn’t guess who would pick up—a maid, maybe—but we certainly hadn’t expected it to be his mother. Decades after Edie Belgraves had hit the peak of her beauty and fame, she was still nowhere close to settling down. She was always vacationing—St. Tropez, Cannes, the Hamptons—occasionally modeling, but for the most part basking in the fortune that her face, and her latest husband, had earned her. She was just like Dorian, eternally restless, and less likely to be in her own home than practically anywhere else in the world.
When she answered the phone she was delighted, and not at all distraught over the “something terrible” we had feared. “Why, dearest!” Edie exclaimed. If Dorian’s mother liked me, she adored Madeline. Having been raised and discovered in London, she maintained a view of the opposite side of the pond as quaint, and referred to Madeline as Dorian’s “sweet American girl.”
When Madeline asked her what she had called to know—a very scared, roundabout, “Where’s Dorian?”—Edie thought it was adorable. “You really are so good to check in on him! He just arrived at DeGaulle, safe as a pillow.” Like all the other well-compensated It girls of her set, Edie had taken a lot of drugs in the late eighties, and often said things that didn’t make sense, like “safe as a pillow.” “You know, why don’t you plan a visit? He’ll be staying with his father, my ex-husband—it’s a great apartment, and everything is better in Paris!”
“Dorian’s moved to P-Paris?”
Shortly after that were all the headings in the Yale Daily News, then Dorian’s one e-mail, and then, Madeline just blamed herself. She thought everything was her fault, that she had somehow driven him away with her grand notions of romance and commitment and devotion, in the spirit of Anna Karenina.
It always went back to a single incident, which she replayed every day like a train roaring down the same tracks, the rails settling deeper into the earth. They had been horseback riding in Montauk, Madeline sitting behind Dorian holding his chest, when she pressed her face into his shoulder and remarked innocently, “Wouldn’t you like to do this forever? I mean—for the rest of our lives together?” He gave the reins such a startled jerk that the horse bucked her right off into the grass, and he lost control and the horse went galloping away from her, and every time she told me the story the fall was harder and the horse was wilder and more “fateful,” and she would weep for longer at her own foolishness.
I tried to tell her it wasn’t her fault—Dorian was just being who he was—but she wouldn’t listen because, well, she was just Madeline, and she was just being who she was.
After about five minutes smoldering at Dorian’s name on his résumé, I realized I had been staring much too long at something that needed to be destroyed. I couldn’t rip it anymore, though. There was too much of my own life in it. Finally, I had to just place it to the side—this broken, paper version of Dorian—not in the No pile, or the Yes pile, or even the Maybe pile, but in a distinguished pile on its own.
“I WAS THINKING—” DORIAN CROAKED. HE SWALLOWED, AND against my own skin I felt a shiver run through his body.
It was the end of junior year. Classes were over. Finals week loomed ahead, and beyond it the rumor of summer on the horizon. In two weeks Madeline and I would each have our turn to stand on the porch of our gabled house, surrounded by luggage as a cab pulled up and we waved good-bye to Dorian and another year in college. I would fly to Corpus Christi, to my parents and Spanish television, and Madeline to Washington, DC, to an internship on Capitol Hill. Dorian would also go somewhere—he didn’t know yet—wherever rich, aimless people went to escape their rich, aimless lives.
Cool evening fog crept in through the crack of Madeline’s open bedroom window. A swirling canopy of marijuana smoke hung over our heads, while more sweet ribbons escaped from a joint mixed with lavender resting nearby on a crystal saucer. Dorian was lying on his back. He stared at the ceiling while Madeline and I lay pressed on either side of him, the three of us naked, our long legs all intertwining.
It had been over a year since our first experience together—that is, my first sexual experience ever—and it hadn’t ended there.
In the first weeks, our sexual experimentations were contained by the strict parameters of a general pattern: Dorian and I took turns pleasing and being pleased by Madeline, while between him and me there was no physical contact.
We could only guess at where her liberated sexuality had sprung from; although Madeline was politically open-minded, it had taken her nineteen years of life
to find a boy she deemed worthy enough to touch her—and when she did, she found two. She loved us equally, and through our own brands of thrusts and panted utterances, we were able to love her back. Dorian was hard and fast, I was soft and slow, and each of us uniquely capable to reach some deep, essential part of her.
I felt only a passive longing to explore a similar closeness with Dorian. Sex was overwhelming enough with just Madeline, let alone the two of them combined at once, and I figured anyway he was scared, or nervous, or even silently unnerved at the thought of sex with another man.
Our arrangement manifested in this unbalanced expression of affections until one drunken night saw us accidentally aligned in a triangular formation, with my face between Madeline’s legs; Madeline’s between Dorian’s; and Dorian’s between mine. I felt his hair fall on my inner thigh; prepared myself to pull away. Then before I could rearrange myself, I felt the slow, tentative pressure of his fingers wrapped around me—then up and down—and then, his lips crossed the threshold that had loomed above us all that time.
After that, the doors of possibility were swung wide open, except for two important doors, which remained firmly shut. The first closed door was penetration between Dorian and me; we experimented with one another, and had sex with Madeline, yet beyond that, we never ventured. The second closed door was more unusual: throughout everything, Dorian and I never kissed. I tried plenty of times, once we’d reached a certain level of comfort, but every moment we came close he would bury his face in my neck, kissing my shoulders or my chest instead.
Now Dorian appeared to be in a trance, his lips barely moving as he murmured, “Do you think—we’ll be like this again?”
We had all just had sex, and had hastily wiped up before collapsing in Madeline’s bed.
Madeline sat up and propped herself onto one elbow, resting her golden head in her hand. “We still have a few weeks,” she said, tracing a circle around his belly button with her other hand. She rubbed her ankle against Dorian’s, her toes grazing the hairs on my foot. “Nobody’s leaving yet.”
An Innocent Fashion Page 24
