An Innocent Fashion

by R. J. Hernández

  Now my father picked up, no doubt resembling more than ever the hairy coconut that I had labeled “dAdY.”

  “¿Oigo?” he grunted.

  I heard the familiar sounds in the background—the same rush of water over my mother’s hands in the kitchen sink; the same anchorwoman on the news, whose coiffure I was sure had remained unaltered through decades of local tragedy, all the stolen purses and dramatic pet rescues and sound bites including some Spanish variation of “I’ve never seen anything like it!”

  A smile broke out over my face. I opened my mouth, but no words came out. My father also didn’t speak, engrossed, surely, by some captivating screen graphic on the news. “. . . ahora les paso a Bárbara, en vivo en el parque, donde se informa de un árbol podrido que se ha caído a las ocho de esta mañana . . .”

  “Reynaldo,” my mother urged in the background, “who is it?”

  My father remembered me and sputtered, “¿Quién habla?”

  Silence hung in the thousands of miles between us, between me and my library books and flypaper ribbon and black beans for dinner; “¡Oye, cabrón!” and the click-clack of Lola’s nails on the laminate tile; wandering the sidewalks at dusk, dreaming of something more, something bigger. I had done it. I had escaped.

  Dorian’s hand dug into my hair from behind. “Who are you talking to?” he asked, grabbing his jacket from the back of his chair. “Let’s go!”

  I hesitated to find words for Reynaldo San Jamar, father of Elián San Jamar, who would become me, Ethan St. James, until—

  “Estoy tan contento, papá,” I said at last, and hung up.

  OUR FOOTSTEPS ECHOED AS DORIAN AND I CROSSED THE empty Hoffman-Lynch lobby.

  “Let’s go to a party!” I shouted. My sudden burst reverberated through the vast hall—“ . . . arty . . . arty . . . arty,” tumbling back toward us like a pitter-patter of invisible ping-pong balls strewn over the black marble.

  “Now?” he asked incredulously. “Aren’t you tired?”

  “Oh, come on!” I laughed, with a persuasive hand over his shoulder. “The one time I want to go with you to a party and you’re tired?”

  “I’m not saying I’m tired,” he backtracked, “I’m just—”

  “Then come on!” I squeezed my arms around his waist from behind and dove us into the revolving doors. Silence like a vacuum, before—thwack!—a million feet clip-clopping endlessly everywhere, and alarms blaring in the distance. “Please, Dorian! I feel—at the top of the world tonight! Like everything is going to be okay!”

  “Everything was always going to be okay.”

  I latched onto his arm, intoxicated by recklessness. “Please, please, please! Take me to the best party in Manhattan tonight!”

  He pretended to slump to the ground with exhaustion, but agreed at last with a winsome sigh. A streetlamp cast a glow over our faces as I pulled him toward the curb, and ten minutes later a cab had whisked us to the Meatpacking District, and dropped us off in front of a hotel called The Standard.

  Dorian paid the cabdriver—a fifty, but who was keeping track?—while diamond headlights soared down the West Side Highway beyond. I hopped out. The moonlight dribbled on the cobblestones, glistening like lemon juice on a road paved with oysters.

  “Come on,” he said, placing his hand on my back as we approached a line of at least fifty people. They were bobbing faintly, switching from one foot to the other as they checked their phones to pass the time, and I remembered—Dorian didn’t wait anywhere.

  The doorman was a black twentysomething in a tailored cherry-red suit. He was holding an idle clipboard against his body, inviting the whole front of the line to watch as he inspected his nails in the dim light.

  “Hey, Ivan.” Dorian tapped him from behind. “I’m going in.”

  “Oh, hey, Belgraves,” he greeted with a cool nod. “Go on. Some of your girls are here.”

  “Kaija?”

  “She’s pounding them back.” Ivan made a chugging motion with his hand.

  Dorian smiled. “See you later.” It was as unceremonious as if he was greeting his own roommate.

  Ivan looked at me as Dorian wordlessly took my hand, drawing me beside him. Ivan flipped foggily through the pages of his so-called guest list in his clipboard; with a flick of his wrist toward the bouncer, he said, “They’re good,” not marking anything off. Dorian squeezed Ivan’s shoulder and pulled me inside. The bouncer didn’t ask us for ID, and the last thing I heard was Ivan telling someone else, “Sorry, there’s a list tonight, you’re welcome to stand in line though.”

  We stepped into a dark elevator with a security guard in one corner, and I grinned with a hysterical brand of joy as Dorian said, “Top floor.”

  “Are you always on the list?” I asked.

  “You’re cute.” Dorian smiled. “There is no list. Ivan just holds a clipboard, and lets in people he knows or who are wearing high-end designers.”

  I laughed, and Dorian let go of my hand to check his phone.

  “We’ll meet up with Kaija inside,” he said. “You remember her, right? From my birthday?”

  Between the highlights of that sparkling night—Dorian passed out in my arms, and Madeline vomiting onto our cab door in the rain—Dorian’s friend Kaija had been a forgettable afterthought. Still, I answered with a half-attentive nod while trying to foist a smile on the hulking security guard. When he only stared at the wall ahead, I smiled wider, uncontrollably, until a neon pattern on the ceiling distracted me.

  The doors closed. As the elevator soared up, a slow, rain-like hum surrounded us. The steel walls trembled like a boiling kettle—then, reaching a whistling crescendo, shook like we had whooshed into a hurricane. The elevator paused, overwhelmed by thunderous bass, then the doors slid open like floodgates to let a tsunami of pounding music crash over us.

  Like an aquarium, a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows reflected an endless black ripple of human silhouettes, the tops of heads undulating like cresting waves. Dorian’s eyes sparkled. It was so clear, even in the sheer darkness, that the room was filled with people like him—beautiful people, important people. A wonderful thought splashed over me: maybe now, I could be like these people too. Gently, Dorian slid his hand under my arm, and we plunged in.

  Voices bubbled up past our ears. Like divers entering a school of fish, we passed through a sea of shimmering faces, everyone illuminated by distant city lights through the windows.

  I gasped at a famous face, pausing to look back. “Is that—?”

  Dorian glanced over and nodded, nudging me back into motion. “We can say hi later if you want,” he promised. At the bar, he approached a white spine in a dress with a see-through chiffon back. “Hey, babe,” he whispered into a diamond-studded ear.

  The spine jerked, a martini sloshing over the shiny bracelet on an oleander wrist. With sweeping annoyance the girl exclaimed, “Jesus, Dorian!”

  She looked like a movie starlet—not a modern one, who made scenes for paparazzi and starred in franchise trilogies—but one out of golden-era Hollywood, whose sultry gaze belonged in black and white. Her starlit face glowed with a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer luster, fanlike lashes brushed with black mascara. She stooped down a bit in her heels to let Dorian kiss her cheek, carefully holding one hand up toward an exotic red turban that, like a satin python, had coiled itself around her raven-haired head.

  “The situation’s dire,” she dully informed him. “It’s ten o’clock, and I’m not seeing things that aren’t supposed to be there.” Her voice was low and hoarse, like she had begun smoking Pall Mall cigarettes in the womb.

  “Calm down, it’s a Sunday for God’s sake,” Dorian said. He pulled me to his side. “Plum, this is my best friend from Yale I told you about—Ethan.”

  “Hello, friend from Yaaale.” She held out a hand like she was playing at being an aristocrat—and announced, wiggling her elegant fingers, “I’m Plum Bonavich.” She draped her arm around my shoulders and, enveloping me in sweet perfume, whispered loud enough
for Dorian to hear, “Now that we’re acquainted, I really must ask—do you know any Yale men in need of a wife?”

  I laughed, and Dorian said, “Don’t listen to her—she already has a full roster of male benefactors.” He poked at the girl beside Plum, who was busy dripping the last of her martini into her throat. “Hello to you too,” he said.

  With a fine swoop, the girl clinked the glass onto the marble bar and shuddered, “These drinks just never last a girl.”

  “Kaija, you remember Ethan, right?” Dorian asked her. She turned, and of course, I recognized her—not from his party but, like so many of his other friends, from a dozen magazines. In a loose-fitting white silk shirt and no bra, her small, pointed nipples attracted the most light in the whole room. Her skin was coconut brown, her teased hair like a palm tree’s fronds in the dark.

  I thought her hand was moving toward mine to shake, but instead she buried it into Dorian’s hair. “What’s going on here?” she said. “You gave up on modeling, and now you gave up on combing your hair?”

  Plum turned to provide her opinion. “That’s what’s wrong with the world these days. Nobody checks their hair anymore.”

  Dorian swatted Kaija away. “Just so you both know, I’ve been working all day.”

  “So? Other people have to look at your hair, you know. It’s not enough to be beeeautiful.” She squeezed Dorian’s cheek and shook it like a dog with a toy.

  “It’s not even artfully disheveled,” Plum added.

  “You try to walk into a club with us looking like that, and we’ll just leave you on the street, and throw martinis at you from the window—and anyway,” said Kaija, poking Dorian in the chest, “you want to talk work—guess who had to laugh for ten hours straight?”

  “One of those fun photo shoots?” Dorian guessed.

  “Mario was photographing, of course.” She rolled her eyes. “‘Just have fun, girls! Have fun!’ he says over and over. Puts you in the worst mood—you get bunions from trying to tap-dance for him.”

  “Don’t blame Mario for your big feet,” said Plum.

  “I don’t have ‘big’ feet,” Kaija snapped, pantomiming a quote-unquote with her parrotlike fingers. “I’m almost seven feet tall, for God’s sake, of course I have slightly bigger feet.”

  “What are you, a ten?”

  “An eleven,” Kaija waved dismissively. “Anyway these Bazaar people should know by now. They bring the tiniest shoes—they think we’re all Chinese or something.”

  “You’re so stupid,” said Plum. “That was in ancient China.”

  Kaija shrugged, raising her hand over the bar. “I don’t need a comeback when you’re wearing that hat.”

  “For the last time, it’s a headwrap, and it’s custom-made,” she said, pointing to the red satin coil on her head. “It was four thousand dollars.”

  “You should put a price sticker on it,” I suggested.

  Plum considered this, teasing herself with the twirl of an olive-ornamented toothpick before her heavily lashed eyes. Evidently discovering an insight on the surface of the olive, she slid the toothpick into her mouth and closed her eyes with momentary relish. “You’re right,” she said with the shrug of a vaulted eyebrow. “Everything should have a price tag.” She tossed the toothpick into her martini and clinked it down against the bar. “It would make life much more honest.”

  “I think you’ll be honest enough in two seconds when that martini hits you,” said Dorian. “Didn’t your therapist ask you to watch your partying habits?”

  “Partying? Who’s partying?” With an upraised hand toward the bartender, she pushed herself in front of Kaija and clanked her diamond-braceleted wrist. “Champagne?” she asked us, before turning back to the bar: “Four glasses of Veuve Clicquot, please.”

  We had been in possession of our champagne flutes for five seconds before Plum pressed Dorian, “Well, don’t just stand there while all the bubbles die out!”

  “What’s the matter, Dorian?” Kaija asked. “Don’t you like champagne anymore?”

  “Relax, both of you,” said Dorian. “What are you getting so excited about?”

  Plum’s palm fell open, as though divulging to him a matter of common sense. “What is there to get excited about, if not champagne?”

  “It’s the fourth state of matter,” said Kaija.

  “After solids, liquids, and cocaine,” added Plum, who then remembered—“Oh!” She reached into her clutch—it looked like Valentino—and pulled out an amber bottle of prescription pills. “These aren’t bad either.” She jangled the contents in Kaija’s face and popped the top off with a polished, merlot-colored nail. “Here,” she said. Kaija stuck out her hand to catch a tiny orchid-pink droplet in her palm. Plum gave one to Dorian and held my wrist as she shook the bottle. “You can take two, since you’re new,” she smiled.

  “What are these?” I asked.

  She shrugged and said, “I don’t know,” before tossing one between her scarlet lips and chasing it with champagne.

  “Don’t forget about work tomorrow,” Dorian warned.

  “Shut up. Do you even know me?” I scoffed. “Or have you already forgotten what a couple of reckless youths we are?”

  “Of course I know you—which is why I’m saying—”

  Exulting in Dorian’s reservations—it felt amazing to be irresponsible!—I nudged the pills onto my tongue and swallowed them down with a stream of bubbles, not feeling a thing. “Cheers!” I held up an empty glass, and the girls clinked.

  Over the next ten minutes our group did a magnificent—albeit effortless—job of attracting new members. First were two girls, definitely models; both blonde, and in the dark nearly identical in black leather jackets from the same Alexander Wang collection. One of them pushed Kaija trying to get the bartender’s attention, and when Kaija turned to make a fuss (“Can’t you see I’m standing here?”), it turned out they were all signed with IMG agency, and immediately became friends (“Oh my God, if I have to shoot for Bazaar again I’ll kill myself.”). After that, we were joined by a stylist I recognized from a cover story in WWD. At about five feet, he overcompensated with pink hair and a dozen forceful anecdotes about the celebrities he had worked with (regarding his cover shoot with Nicki Minaj for Elle that month: “She kept wanting her boobs to show, and I was like, ‘Bitch, cover yourself, this is Christian Dior!’”). The designer of an emerging label came up to thank Plum for wearing her dress to a CFDA event the week before, and finally a swarm of male models started trying to pair themselves off with the girls.

  All along Dorian introduced me to passing faces as his best friend. I grasped at a lot of hands, and pecked a lot of cheeks, buoyed above the crowd by my continuous incredulity until one of the male models seemed to express an interest in Dorian. Possessing within the too-small circumference of his head the most extreme qualities of the male ideal, the model seemed to me an exaggerated package: inflamed lips and flowing chestnut-brown hair, thick brows and emerald eyes slanted exotically in a face as tan and square as a cardboard box.

  “Who are you with?” he asked Dorian, referring either to his modeling agency, or whether he was single.

  “Nobody,” Dorian said casually, then clarified, “I’m not a model.”

  I was sure he hoped the model would express surprise that despite his own model-worthy looks, he had chosen some nobler path. But the cardboard box just said, “You could get signed—you have a good face,” which I guess was his idea of a come-on. Dorian changed the subject with some charming comment about the cityscape through the window (“It’s very Van Gogh, no?”) and as I watched the box struggle to form a response, I was reminded why I shouldn’t be so hard on Dorian. Beautiful people were never required by society to be smart, and for being one, Dorian was practically a genius.

  I had started to lose track of their enlightened conversation when I got distracted by a queasy feeling and had to close my eyes. I felt my heart strike against my chest like a drumstick—kaboom, kaboom, kaboom�
��and I heard Plum count, “One—two—three—four,” and when I opened my eyes she was staring at her fingers, concentrating very hard. “Four,” she repeated. “This is her fourth divorce.” She blinked hard, then I blinked hard, then somehow we were no longer by the bar but passing into the next room, onto a dance floor full of lights and bobbing heads. Next to my ear, someone said, “I never accept a drink unless it’s spiked,” and somebody else said, “Tequila brings back memories of not having memories,” and then I think Kaija said to no one in particular, “If all of us liked each other, we would have nothing to talk about,” but I didn’t see her lips move so I wasn’t sure it was her, and after that I lost track of who was saying what and whether any of it was even being said to me, and all the voices became a blur.

  “. . . have so much trouble typing with my fake nails . . . if it feels comfortable, then you shouldn’t wear it . . . why fat people think black will make them skinny? . . . everyone is texting me . . . I need to go to the bathroom, there’s the hottest guy over there . . . don’t you hate it when your roommate’s sweater doesn’t fit? . . . out of lobster at Indochine, I was forced to get the filet mignon . . .”

  The next time I looked around, a swimming pool had been unveiled in the middle of the room, while a burlesque queen was dancing on an adjacent platform. In a black bustier and fishnet stockings, she resembled a French courtesan at a funeral, her white-blonde hair held up in a towering bouffant by a spiderweb of ornate black pins. Slowly unfastening her corset, she let it slide to her feet, and stalked back and forth in her high heels like a black-cat shadow on Halloween, before, suddenly—she leaped over the pool.

  Catching hold of an upholstered leather swing I hadn’t seen, she went swooshing through the air like a nude pendulum, heels gleaming behind her. Her white fingers rippling over the water, she perfumed the air with the scent of chlorine; then swinging back and forth, back and forth, she began to splash.