Ping! “Shut up.”
Ping! “I did!”
Ping! “You never called, never wrote.”
Whoosh! The ball tinkered out of bounds. “I just—I was scared I had made a mistake . . .”
The office was the same place, but now somehow different.
When Sabrina told us to “get the trunks,” Dorian and I would leave the closet side by side, like we were heading to recess. When she said, “get lunch—ten minutes—fast!” we scurried out together before she could protest, and although half the time she caught up with us, crying in exasperation, “Not both of you,” her bubbling vitriol would always simmer at the sight of Dorian’s privileged face. We pinged back and forth with surprising ease, and soon it felt the way it always had: an electric charge between our rackets. I became determined never to miss a stroke, and began to hit harder. I didn’t want to beat him, though—I just wanted him to hit harder back, and to play him for as long as possible.
“It’s so hard—all the petticoats,” gushed Madeline one night over drinks, after she and I agreed to reconcile. She was showing me and Dorian a picture of her Mary Queen of Scots costume. “You don’t realize, but to play such a complex character . . .”
Dorian looked at me as Madeline rested her hands on his knee. There we were again—the three of us, the indomitable trio. Ethan St. James, and Madeline and Dorian in love as ever, yet although he held Madeline closer as she blathered on about grueling undergarments and “women back then,” it was me toward whom Dorian flashed a secret, knowing smile—Ping!
A few days afterward, a dozen uniformly sized boxes arrived in the fashion closet around one in the afternoon. A rakishly adhered orange sticker on the side of each read FOR IMMEDIATE DISTRIBUTION: It was the August issue, the first I had worked on when I arrived three months prior. I ran a blade across the top of the first box and opened the flaps to reveal Scarlett Johansson’s prominent pout. I shuffled through the pages, and for the first time I realized how significant a portion of the magazine was made up of advertisements. Previously, the pages of Régine had all seemed the same to me; whether they contained advertising or magazine content, it had all been glamour with a “u,” every woman and every dress as appealing as the last, as unanimous in their collective beauty as they were in their belonging to the same unreachable world.
Now, flipping past a hundred names that previously had been placeholders for this unreachable world—advertisements for Chanel and Balenciaga and Gucci and Fendi—I stumbled across the August It Girl shoot that I had worked on, and suddenly the world in Régine did not seem unreachable at all. In fact, as the It Girl in question was wearing off-white garments and accessories that my own hands had extensively handled—shoes I had crushed into packed trunks, handbags I had tossed into indiscernible piles—I realized for the first time that this world was already much closer than I thought.
Jane swept in just as I was coming across the fashion feature she had styled for that issue—“Darling!” she exclaimed. “Keep me company while I look over all these handbags that just arrived, come, come!”
I turned for one second, excited, then realized of course she was referring to Dorian, whom she was in the habit of pulling to her side for chitchat when she was in the fashion closet for an extended period. I tried hard not to eavesdrop as their voices floated through the racks (“. . . still enjoying Régine? . . . I spoke to your mother yesterday . . . we’re talking about Mykonos in the next few weeks . . .”).
To distract myself from this mildly irritating exchange, I flipped to Jane’s editorial, which was titled: “Guinevere: Queen of Rock & Roll.” Despite the relative simplicity of her personal style, it turned out that, between Edmund and Jane, she was the true genius. More and more, I was learning that fashion was a language, and that “practicing” it required a mastery of its grammar and vocabulary. Edmund’s stories were on the level of Dick and Jane—the best models in the best clothes, so what?—while Jane’s were, I don’t know, the Brothers Grimm or something, imaginative, drawing from a rich history of storytelling, with every model a character in a fantastical, fully articulated world. I would give anything to—
“—come on set this weekend?”
I perked up suddenly, like a bloodhound detecting a hot scent.
“This weekend?” Dorian replied.
“Yes!” Jane insisted. “You must come see the shoot!—it’ll be divine!”
Versace-clad Guinevere slipped right off my knee as the rest of their conversation faded away. Dorian basically said yes, he’d go. Jane basically said wonderful, she was so proud of him, and oh, look at this Dolce clutch, wasn’t it just delightful?
Now I shattered my tennis racket against the concrete. Dorian, however, scarcely noticed me upon his return, and in fact he seemed to have forgotten altogether about our match: he slunk over to the pool on the other side of the chain-link fence and collapsed grandly into a cushioned seersucker chaise, running his fingers through his sun-kissed hair. Producing a martini out of nowhere, he began to sip as though he had just finished a tiresome task—a spot of polo or a lap in his private pool—while his whole body was caressed by the reflections of the water. I slammed the tennis court gate and stormed off over the lawn, while he called out in a casual tone, over his bronzed shoulder:
“Are you going to the shoot this weekend?”
“No,” I said, and began to disfigure a paper clip.
He held out his drink toward me—in real life it was just ginger ale, and scarcely a generous offering considering he could never finish a whole can by himself. The crooked straw fell cockeyed like a little umbrella. “But don’t you want to get experience?” he asked me.
I took a measured breath. “Of course I do, but Jane doesn’t want me to come.” I tossed the mangled clip into a corner and picked up the magazine that had fallen by my feet.
He took a slurp and tilted his head, as if trying to remember the capital of somewhere, or calculate an arithmetic problem, then said, “Sure she does. She just didn’t think of it.”
I shook my head. “She’s never asked me to come on set. It’s fine—I don’t care.”
“Of course you care. Don’t you want to go?”
“I mean, yes, I’d like to go, but—”
Dorian strode back to Jane’s side before I could say another word. I heard her say, “What is it, dear?” He leaned toward her and whispered something, then—
“Oh my goodness, is that all? Of course he can!” she said. Jane raised her voice and called out to me, “Yes, yes, of course you can, Ethan!” She stood on her tippy-toes and waved her little hand at me over the racks.
I unsurely raised my own hand in response, then Dorian was by my side.
“Does that mean . . . ?” I began dumbfoundedly.
“She says you can come to the shoot this weekend.”
I yelped and I threw my arms around him. “Babe—you’re the best!”
Dorian shrugged, poking through the box of magazines while I clenched the back of his T-shirt in excitement. “You could’ve asked her too,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked over his back, my chin resting on his shoulder as my hands loosened.
“I mean, you work ten feet away from her. You shouldn’t be so scared of everything.”
I pulled away.
If consideration for the feelings of others was a line he straddled, Dorian suddenly took a gigantic leap across it onto the far side. “You used to be so free,” he said.
My jaw dropped, and the relief that soared through me—after all my bitterness, Dorian had at last proven his enduring sweetness—it just burst, like a hot air balloon that one moment was being elevated by a blue flame, then the next moment had gone sputtering down to the ground into a searing heap.
Of course, it was no big deal for him. Did he really think that, without the advantages of wealth, beauty, and supermodel parentage, the ten feet between me and the creative director of Régine was any less than a chasm of a thousand miles?
/>
“Are you okay?” he asked. This was perceptive, for him.
“I’m stepping out,” I said. “Tell Sabrina that Clara sent me on a coffee run.” I rose toward the door without so much as my wallet or phone, and left Dorian dumbfounded behind me.
“Hey, wait a minute—” he started. The side of his chair cracked against the desktop as he trailed after me through the closet doors. “I didn’t mean to make you mad, I just—”
I pretended not to hear him as I marched with the leaden austerity of a soldier toward the foyer doors. It was the first time I’d traveled the halls of Régine like I truly belonged there, indifferent to everything but my own singular passage.
“Ethan, I’m sorry, I don’t want to upset you,” he said. I witnessed the rare appearance of several heads sticking out of cubicles in Editorial to frown at us.
The glass doors reflected us both with polished indifference as Dorian reached for my arm.
“I can’t have this conversation with you right now,” I said. I opened the door, somehow expecting him to stay on the other side of it—but of course, he followed me into the elevator lobby.
“I’m sorry, I just—I thought you’d want to go to the shoot, and—”
The veins in my neck bulged as I spun around, and spat, “I do want to go!”
He leaned back a little. “So if you want to go, what’s the problem?”
I slammed the Down button on the elevator. “Nothing, Dorian—you don’t get it.”
“Yeah, I guess I don’t.”
“Nothing is fair, Dorian!” I half-shouted. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to go! I’m supposed to show up,”—I slapped my hand into my palm—“and work hard,”—slap!—“then things are supposed to happen for me!”—slap!—“When is my life going to start? It’s like—nobody cares one bit about me, and then you show up, and—” I threw my hands up “—you don’t even care about this job! You don’t care about—anything!—but you still get everything!”
“Well . . . Jane just knows me, so you shouldn’t take it personally that she asked me—”
“It’s not about Jane! It’s not even about you, it’s just—” I pressed my palms to my temples and walked away.
“I don’t know what you want from me. I was just trying to help.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“Well,” Dorian shrugged, “it looks like you kind of do.”
I spun around—“Just shut up!” If anybody could hear me through the glass, I didn’t care. “Don’t you get it? I can’t just waltz into her office and say, ‘Hey Jane, I love your work, want to take me on set with you?’”
“Why not?” he asked.
The elevator arrived.
“Can you just—leave?” I pointed in the other direction. “Sabrina is going to—”
He clip-clopped into the elevator after me while I crossed my arms against my chest and glared at the small television. At Hoffman-Lynch, they had been embedded in all the elevators to inform everyone of the company’s newest programs and awards and million-dollar acquisitions.
“Did you know Hoffman-Lynch Publications recently won number one—?”
I was grateful for someone else stepping in the elevator with us, a tight-lipped woman I had never seen before. As I had come to expect at Régine, she didn’t acknowledge our presence—although the pinch around her lips softened considerably at the sight of Dorian.
I thought her presence had finally silenced Dorian, but he prodded, “Where are you going anyway?”
The elevator doors closed. “I don’t know,” I snapped.
“You don’t know where you’re going?”
“No.”
He laughed. “Well, I guess, now that we’re already out of the office—let’s go get falafels.”
I gaped at him openly. “Are you playing with me right now?”
The woman in the corner glared, the lines around her mouth hardening once more, like a lattice crust on an apple pie. I leaned toward her to glare back. “What are you looking at?” I demanded.
With a suddenly fearful glance, she turned to her phone while I devoted myself to mentally destroying her outfit—stupid black blouse! stupid black skirt! stupid black heels! How dare she disapprove of me, while she stood there in her sickening Régine uniform—unoriginal and colorless, probably purchased at too high a price tag for the sake of blending seamlessly into this ugly place, this bulwark of adulthood and dullness and routine—How dare she?
The elevator arrived at the ground floor with a ping! and the woman escaped before the doors had separated all the way.
“So are we getting off? Seriously, I’m kind of hungry.” He took one step over the threshold of the elevator and looked back at me. “If you don’t want to, then I’ll just go. I can bring you a grape soda.”
He knew I liked grape soda.
A small crowd of people peered expectantly into the elevator—holding sushi containers and organic juices and low-calorie snacks—eyebrows raised, as if I was wasting their precious time. Stupid faces. Stupid clothes. They were all so stupid.
Dorian pulled me out by the hand while they poured in like ants filling a colony. “They’re all so stupid, aren’t they?” he said, echoing the voice inside my own head.
I snorted, and let out a slightly hysterical laugh.
“What? It’s true,” he said.
I walked over to my proverbial racket, which in the wake of my tantrum lay sad and splintering on the tennis court; picked it up; and with a whoosh, returned the ball into the hopeful air.
Ping! I said, “You’re going to be the end of me, you know.”
Ping! “I know.”
I LIFTED MY BAG ONTO MY CHEST, RIFLING FOR THE ADDRESS that I had nearly committed to memory the night before. It was six and there was an early morning chill, the sun lingering sleepily behind the cover of a hundred skyscrapers, a teenager beneath an impenetrable fortress of parent-hindering bedsheets.
“The fashion team is the first to arrive and the last to leave,” Jane had said to me and Dorian. “There may be glamour in the pictures, but never in the call time.” She had warned us both not to sleep in, although more useful advice would have been about getting any sleep at all. Like a piece of wood, I had lain petrified all night with my eyes open, afraid that if I fell into a slumber it would be too deep, and then when I opened my eyes it would be noon, and I would be late for the shoot and Jane would never ask me to come on set again and I would get cast out from Régine before I ever got to the good part. In between periods of anxious bed-rumpling I’d mapped out the journey from my apartment to the photoshoot location not once or twice but five times, each time recalculating the time to get there so that I was sure to give myself enough leeway. Now it seemed that, despite all this, I was at the wrong address.
Jane had said it was a theater, but this didn’t look like any theater I’d ever seen. There was no marquee, no ticket booth, not even a sign—just a stronghold of plywood boards hedging the entire structure like brambles around Sleeping Beauty’s castle. My fingers combed through a jumble of pens and crumbled receipts at the bottom of my bag until finally I found the address on a little note that had got stuck in the pages of The Stranger, which I had been trying to read in short bursts on the subway with limited progress.
The paper said, 5 Beekman. I stared up at the boarded wall, where a continuous grid of fading wheat-pasted posters bubbled up like decaying snakeskin. Above guerilla advertisements for coconut water juice boxes and Lana del Rey’s Born to Die album, a spray-painted scrawl alleged that I was, in fact, standing at 5 Beekman. I turned around. The street was quiet and gray, teeming along the edges with the rosy blush of an impending sunrise. Two boys were unloading a white van. They were lanky and tall—scruffy, wearing band Ts and skinny jeans—and after they slammed the back door of the van, they approached carrying large nylon bags and wheeling a hefty black trunk between them.
“Are you here for the Régine shoot?” I asked.
“This
way,” they said, pointing to a plywood board that, like several others, was guarded by Lana Del Rey. She offered only jaded disinterest as the board swung open on a hinge, and when I followed the boys, the one in a Nirvana shirt said, “The actual front door’s been closed for like, fifty years.”
We entered a hallway illuminated by a dangling, flickering light. Having plunged through a tarnished ornamental wreath in the ceiling, it twirled in the middle of the hall from an exposed cable, encased in a brass cage that cast its prism-like shadow against a concrete wall. Gravity had decreed a similar fate for a musty damask wall-covering lying puddled below.
Ahead of me the boys creaked open a door. My heart stopped.
Blood velvet flowed as far as the eye could see—an endless ripple of plush red chairs. On either side, three gilded balconies were tiered like sand dunes, overlooking a shrouded stage. A tech crew was busy rigging a constellation of steel bars before the stage, like an empyrean jungle gym.
The first one gestured to the scaffolding. “Is the model going to be sitting up there?”
“They want to shoot her from above,” the other replied.
I caught my breath, clasping my hand over my mouth. Like an old-time movie projection, a reel flickered across my mind: a woman gliding across the stage like a billow of burning gossamer. Not two hours later, she was real, and her name was Belinda.
Belinda had red hair. She had freckles on her face and arms. She was six-feet-two-inches tall, and wore a size 9 1/2 shoe, according to the list of measurements in the black FORD-embossed portfolio she carried in her yellow Chloé handbag. Incidentally, she was also the current face of a half-dozen major fashion campaigns, including Valentino and Lanvin, and except for one occasion at the airport when I asked Joan Didion for the hour, Belinda was the first famous person I had ever really talked to. She was also seventeen years old.
Dorian, of course, knew Belinda from Paris—although at first he didn’t recognize her slender neck.
She was sitting in a tufted red velvet chair, one of eight spaced at even intervals along the counter of a wooden vanity, surrounded by rusted, dust-caked mirrors—the remains of an antiquated dressing room, repurposed now by Regine’s Hair and Makeup artists. On one side of Belinda, Hair had laid out his blow-dryer, straightener, texturizing shears, thinning shears, clippers, squirt bottle, big brushes, small brushes, combs, hair razors; on the other, Makeup had arranged her eyeshadow, foundation, powder, concealer, mascara, eyeliner, brushes as bushy as a mustache and as thin as a single whisker, and miniature bottles of pigments in every shade, coral red and tangerine, Tiffany blue and alabaster white.
An Innocent Fashion Page 28
