I stiffened with surprise, and had to look away.
“We’ll go on Saturday,” he implored. “Just you and me—I won’t even tell Madeline, or she’ll be hanging off me the whole time.”
In that moment there was so much pressure inside of me to simply say: “Yes, let’s just forget the world, and forget anything ever happened between us—God, I missed you.” But I knew—I knew that the second I caved in to Dorian, it would all be over. This wasn’t college. In the real world, we would never be equals, and if I let him, he would easily—unknowingly—crush me and everything I had ever dreamed of, which was everything he already had.
Be Régine, Be Régine, BE RÉGINE!
I forced my eyes back to the screen, my retinas sizzling as I concentrated on a single burning pixel. “Dorian . . .” I made myself say. “I need you to do me a favor.” I dragged a blank document pointlessly in and out of a desktop folder labeled Fashion News. “Can you get me this volume from the archives library?” Not meeting his eyes, I scribbled down the first combination of months and a year I could think of, a period of no significance whatsoever: Jan–Mar 1975.
His confusion over the sudden change of topic transmuted into a slow nod. “Um, okay.” He let go of my shoulder and, in a dejected fog, raised a scoop of rice to his mouth.
I pressed the yellow sticky note onto one finger, and held it between him and his next spoonful.
“Right now?” he asked.
I nodded seriously. “Right now.”
He put down his Styrofoam tray.
I turned thanklessly back to my screen, and he returned with the volume twenty-five minutes later.
“Do you know where my lunch went?” he asked as he handed it to me.
“I’m sorry, I had to throw it away—Sabrina hates Indian food.”
“Really?” he said in a hushed tone that only I could hear. “That’s so strange—who doesn’t like Indian food?”
He was right—who didn’t like Indian food?—but I remained silent, and at the end of the day, I made sure Jan–Mar 1975 was still unopened, rotting like a hardbound carcass between us.
chapter nine
You look dashing,” Dorian greeted me the next day.
I rolled my eyes and sat down, pretending to be engrossed by my computer—a task made difficult by the fact that my screen was still warming up.
“I missed you and all your suits, babe,” he went on.
“Can you not call me that?” I turned to him with a scowl. Today I would spare him no dignity. I had spent most of the previous evening sitting on my mattress in the lotus position, sweating and begging the universe profusely. “Please make him go away, make him go away . . . just—make something terrible happen to him.” And after that I looked up quotes by Machiavelli on my phone, and tried to recall my one reading of The Art of War.
I was proud of myself when the phone rang a moment later, and I got to utter my first real words of the day to him. “Get it,” I ordered, as though to a dog.
“Hi, this is Dorian.”
I gawked at him open-mouthed and hissed, “‘This is Dorian?’ This is not your private line and they are not trying to call you! You’re supposed to answer, ‘Régine’—just one word, simply, professionally—”
For some reason—I think because I had startled him—Dorian reached toward the phone to press a random button, and suddenly, Edmund Benneton’s voice came spewing out of the speaker.
“—HEAR ME I AM LOCKED OUT!”
“Edmund!” I replied in a panic, trying to muffle the horrible screech of his voice with a pair of hands over the speaker.
“ETHAN, I AM LOCKED OUT! I FORGOT MY WALLET, AND I’M EXHAUSTED, AND THESE IMBECILES WON’T LET ME IN!” He turned away from the speaker and shouted to the security guard, “DON’T YOU KNOW WHO I AM? YOU ARE GOING TO BE SO SORRY—”
Sabrina was flying toward us, waving her hands. “Turn that off!” she shouted.
“IamsosorryEdmundIwilltalktosecurityrightnow,” I said to him and hung up the phone.
“Ethan, are you crazy? What is wrong with you?” Sabrina glared fiercely at me, towering over the desk with her hand on her waist, her elbow bent at a right angle.
Dorian popped up like a daffodil. “I’m sorry, Sabrina, that was my fault. It was my first time answering the phone.”
My eyes flashed over to her, then back to Dorian, then back to Sabrina. I prayed for her to say something like, “Don’t let it happen again, Dorian”—“Please Universe, please Universe, please”—but I knew . . . Dorian was special. Dorian could do no wrong. Dorian was friends with Jane. How could Sabrina say anything to Dorian? Even if she secretly despised him, all she had to do was look at him, and any ill will would melt away like snow on a spring day.
Sabrina’s eyes flickered between us. “Ethan—”
I raised my head toward her stern face.
“Show poor Dorian how to take calls,” she said, before returning to her desk.
Poor Dorian? No two words had ever been so laughably ill-matched. It wasn’t my fault “poor Dorian” had never answered a phone, but I choked back the words and ran downstairs to let Edmund into the building.
When I returned without Edmund—he had gotten fed up, and left to smoke a cigarette—Dorian was utterly wrong to confide in me, with a smirk, “You have to admit, that was pretty funny. I’ve known Edmund since I was little, and he’s the most ridiculous, washed-out—”
I snapped, “Edmund is our boss—not to mention a genius,” even though I had come a long way from thinking Edmund was any kind of genius at all.
A messenger had just dumped a pile of Dolce & Gabbana garment bags on the carpet, where they waited to be checked in.
“Here, take that camera,” I instructed. The camera was closer to me, but I pointed and made him reach for it. My seat was also closer to the garment bags, but I made him reach for those too.
I sat back in my chair and watched him, like a Beverley Hills housewife observing her Adonic pool boy. Despite everything, Dorian was what I would most choose to look at in the world—more so, I hated to admit, than any painting by Klimt, or Monet, or anyone. His back faced me as he dragged the garment bags over, and even though there was nothing extraordinary about this, somehow every movement of Dorian’s body was a new fold in a complicated origami.
When he finally looked up, it gave me strange satisfaction to watch the shadows on his face shift like sand dunes, and when he cocked his head, awaiting further instruction, it gave me stranger satisfaction still to say, “Garment bags will now be your responsibility. From now on, any time you see a garment bag enter the closet . . .”
TWO YEARS AGO, DORIAN BOUGHT ME A PAIR OF TWELVE-HUNDRED-DOLLAR women’s shoes just to make me laugh and agree to join him at some ridiculous cross-dressing party. Harboring deep reservations over attending events at frat houses, I had joked I would only go with him and Blake to Delta Kappa’s annual so-called Drag Ball if I could wear designer high heels—but alas! I had no money! And so I would have to skip the event. Dorian held me at my word and two days later handed me a lavender Bergdorf Goodman bag containing a box of rhinestone-covered Louboutins and a note: No excuses now!
Per Blake’s instructions, we arrived early on Fraternity Row to “get ready.” It was six o’clock on Saturday—an hour marked by the smuggling of cheap liquor into the dorm rooms of underage co-eds intent on exceeding the debauched precedent set the weekend prior. Blake greeted us at the Greek-lettered door in thigh-baring metallic shorts and a pink lace bra, tossing his hairy, muscular arms in the air with a guiltless splash of Pabst Blue Ribbon onto the front steps.
I hugged him and got tangled in his long black synthetic wig. “Mary Magdalene!” I cried out with a laugh. The wig was a relic from the previous Halloween, when Blake and I had floated around campus in bedsheet robes informing people that we were “the two Marys, the Virgin and the Prostitute—but you have to guess which is which.” In attempting once more to look like a female, he had again succeed
ed in resembling an overgrown cactus, his muscles bulging under his prickly body hair.
As we entered, the half-caved-in door dragged over the floor and we were promptly greeted by a cloud of Bob Marley and marijuana smoke. Johnny Russell waved from a withering leather loveseat, wearing only a gold bodysuit as he sat with his thick thighs spread in casual confirmation of the many whispered speculations about the size of his endowment. I smiled back, then forced myself to look away while Stephen, the Yale football quarterback, sat similarly wide-legged nearby having lipstick applied to his bearded face by Stan, the defensive linebacker. I only knew this because Blake said, “That’s Stephen, the quarterback, and Stan, the defensive linebacker.” The sight of it was almost quaint, the linebacker holding his friend’s jaw with a blokeish hand, concentrating with furrowed intensity on coloring inside the lines.
It was my first time at a frat house, although that night it was revealed I was inexplicably one of the best among them at beer pong, and thereafter I became a semiregular visitor. Every surface of the place looked sunken in, like the brothers had made a ritual out of smashing everything up. Squashed beer cans poured out of a crumpling trash can in the living room. A littered hallway led to a fridge plastered with magnets from various Yale sports teams, mixed with cheerful alphabet letters spelling, BLESSED BE IMMANUEL KUNT.
Johnny reached up from the loveseat to pass me a bong stained with pink and red lipstick, and after Dorian and I took a hit we left for the bathroom, to get dressed. Coughing, Dorian rattled out a duffel bag full of women’s things: stockings and bras and fake nails and a tube of velvet red Chanel lipstick, among various other essentials he had pilfered from Madeline.
Madeline would have murdered Dorian if she’d learned that he had poured her belongings onto a surface crusted with decades of hangover vomit. She would never join us for Drag Ball herself, maintaining as I had that the whole affair was too “boorish”—although really she was probably just afraid to confirm that her boyfriend looked better in stilettos than she did. She was content to let Drag Ball be the one thing we did without her (“Just you boys,” she’d said, with a nose wrinkle and a dismissive flicker of her hand) while she made an attempt to inspire jealousy by gushing about her dinner plans at Union League Café with “sophisticated” Chelsea Macintosh, whose father was in the Senate but was herself as boring as a piece of paper.
“What great taste in shoes,” I exclaimed as I tried on the ostentatious high heels Dorian had gifted me. “You have a knack for women’s footwear.”
He shoved me from his perch on the edge of the bathtub, and I slid down the door while I laughed at my legs splayed out before me on the blackened bathroom tile. The hilarity of my embellished feet was rivaled only by the straggly brown hairs on my knobby, pale legs—a testament to my Latino origins that I now compared to Dorian’s own comparatively hairless skin. The year before I had gotten the idea to wax my legs, hoping to achieve the appearance of smoothness that was Dorian’s physical birthright; the attempt had involved a single “Fun & Easy” at-home body wax strip and an anguished yowl heard across the block, resulting in my reluctant acceptance of my body’s hirsute condition and a solemn oath to avoid all grooming products involving temperatures above 125 degrees Fahrenheit.
Now I braced myself against the shag-carpeted toilet and rose slowly up, marching back and forth past the splintered mirror. “I don’t know what Madeline complains about. I could practically run a marathon in these.”
“You can’t even run a marathon in sneakers,” grunted Dorian, as he tangled himself up in a pair of fishnet tights.
I raised my fists, boxer-style, to my face and pretended to kick him. My ankle wobbled, and Dorian, still sitting, caught me in his arms.
“Would you ever want to be a woman?” he asked suddenly.
He cradled me like a long and lanky child. “It depends. Would you break up with Madeline, and fall madly in love with me?”
Dorian ignored me and gazed at the faint trace of a Yale football logo on the vinyl shower curtain, bleakly overpowered by a crisscross of un-scrubbed splatters. “I think life would be easier as a woman,” he mused. “If a woman can’t decide on what to do with herself in life, then she just has kids, and everybody thinks she’s accomplished enough.”
“Only if they’re married,” I said, encircling his neck with my arms. “It’s a full commitment.”
“Well then, I guess I’d get married, and become a housewife.”
“You would hate that!” I declared. “You can barely keep still as it is. Imagine hanging around a big house all day—you’d kill yourself.”
“Then I’d have a nanny,” he said, “so I could do other things.”
“A nanny?” I cried. “Then what would be the point of having kids if you wouldn’t even take care of them?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he shrugged, “it’d just buy time. I’d have eighteen years at least before I had to make any big decisions again, and nobody would think I was being lazy.”
“Don’t let Madeline hear you,” I said, as I sat up on his lap and clicked my high-heeled toes together. “I’m guessing you wouldn’t breastfeed either? Just pass them to the nanny?”
“No—I would breastfeed,” Dorian said. He placed a self-conscious hand over his nipple. “Maybe I’d like it—being needed by someone. Don’t you think I’d be good at it? Playing board games, and reading picture books, and—”
“. . . and cooking, and cleaning, and all those other things that housewives do?” I added. “You would be terrible at that.”
“Oh, get off!”
“And what about sex?” I added, and yanked at the back of his hair.
“What about it?”
“You’d have to have sex with a man. How else would you be planning to make babies?”
He considered this with a far-off look, then suddenly clutched his stomach. “You’re right,” he cringed. “I could never let anybody inside of me.”
“How about inside here?” I poked him in the belly button.
“Stay away,” he warned, and reached for my wrist.
“Why? Maybe you’d like it, if you had some practice,” I laughed, jabbing him once, twice, three times in the stomach.
Dorian wrestled me onto his chest from behind and pinned me into a headlock. “How’s this for practice?” He bit my ear and pretended to rip it off, while I squirmed and kicked and sent Madeline’s lipsticks clattering over the scum-encrusted tile.
IN MY APARTMENT, BELOW MY FOUR-FOOT LOFT BEDROOM, the kitchen light was on.
I flicked it off, not wanting to arouse my roommates’ suspicion, although on looking back, it would have appeared less strange for me to be holding a knife in the light (I could have been cutting anything—a pepper, a tomato) than in the dark. Trying to find the knife drawer, I felt around the shadowed countertop and my hand grazed the cutting board and the brittle rind of an orange, which had been left out.
I touched the side of the counter; a cold drawer handle. An uncanny shudder crawled over my neck, as if I expected to reach into the drawer and find a hand there waiting for me. Instead, my fingers fell upon a steak knife. Its predictably serrated edge—one spike after another, its power ruled by order—gave me comfort. The remaining contents of the drawer consisted mostly of ordinary, harmless dinner knives with rounded tips. They were all different sizes and designs, collected over the years from a shifting cast of tenants and never traded out for a new set. I groped around until I found the one I was looking for: the paring knife, small and pointed.
I wrapped my fingers around the plastic handle and just held it inside the drawer, perfectly still for at least a minute. My behavior had no precedent. I had never cut myself as a teenager, and honestly, I had never even thought about it before. I must have been staring at my screen saver, or commanding Dorian to complete a task, when my self-hatred flipped a switch in me, and I remembered that when other people felt miserable, they sometimes cut themselves. The idea had gotten under my skin. I figu
red that if it made those people feel better, maybe it would make me feel better too. But even now, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it. As far as I could tell, I was just fumbling around in the dark, trying somehow to feel better.
My doubts about life were what made me hate myself the most. I’d never had so much doubt. I used to feel so sure of everything—sure that the world would bend to me, like I’d been promised; sure that, as the aphorism dictated, all I had to do in life was “be myself” and wait for the rewards. Trying to “be myself,” however, had almost resulted in my disqualification from my own dream, and that other gem—“work hard”—had lately seemed more and more laughable. Once you were through with those tenets, there was little in the way of common wisdom that could be trusted.
If I hadn’t been so embarrassed, I would have called Ms. Duncan, my high school English teacher. She had taught me that excellence assures success, and my supposed excellence had gotten me gratefully through college. But what if, in the real world, excellence was replaced in value by money, beauty, social power—all the gifts I didn’t have, whose importance I had wrongly believed could be circumvented by the loophole of my own merit?
How had everyone else done it? It was no secret that Jane Delancey had been an ordinary shopgirl at Barneys, back on Seventh Avenue, when she was discovered by Ava Burgess. The newly promoted editrix-in-chief, had been seeking fresh talent for her growing fashion team when she simply took a liking to Jane while buying a veiled hat for her upcoming thirtieth birthday party. It turned out the two had the same birthday—Ava was a year older—and two weeks later, Jane was filing Ava’s papers, two years later, Jane was masterminding Ava’s photoshoots; and that was it. It was your typical rags-to-riches story, with no plot twists along the way. The rise to the top had been similarly untroubled for Edmund, who had once been a Hoffman-Lynch postal boy. How he went from that to fashion director—well, who knew? But if he and Jane could get there from selling hats and passing out the mail, anyone should be able to do it, especially with an Ivy League degree. After all, wasn’t that the purpose of having one—so you could trade it in for a seat at your dream job, with your name in italics on a silk cushion?
An Innocent Fashion Page 26
