The plane was rumbling to a start beneath my feet, when to my amazement, Clara nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “That’s why we’re bringing some interns on board as staff—as assistants.”
I grabbed my chair with both hands. Through the blurriness I thought I saw a strange look on her face—a smile? It must have been a smile . . . and it dawned on me. I wasn’t going to Texas at all. I was going to work for Edmund, the foremost authority of my dream world. I leaped out of my third-class airplane seat and screamed, “Get me off of here!” and all of a sudden I was swearing my loyalty to Edmund again. If, as the emperor, he wanted to strut naked throughout the town, then who was I to stop him? The whole time I would point and say, “Look at those marvelous new clothes! The hat! The collar! How divine!”—no matter that the fantasy was a lie, and the townspeople wretched and stupid, and Edmund not marvelous at all but just a naked old man whose clown-like shortcomings everybody was afraid to point out.
Clara wasn’t firing me . . . she was hiring me. I shook my head in wide-eyed disbelief, as she bowed her head, a blonde curl tumbling delicately into her face. “Did you hear me, Ethan?” she asked.
“N—no,” I trembled, leaning toward her. “I’m sorry, I—I didn’t actually. I didn’t hear anything.” I wiped my sweaty palms against my pants and smiled a little, one nostril wheezing while the other crackled with dried blood. I wanted to hug Clara, but if I moved I would start screaming out—”I knew it! I knew it all along!”—so I gulped, and folded my clammy hands over one knee, over the pants that Clara, and Régine, had generously bestowed upon me several months ago, trying to project the dignified look that would befit a young man of my new status—an employee of Hoffman-Lynch, the best magazine publisher in the world, where I’d be paid to walk the halls that for years had seen some of the greatest visionaries in the industry rise to prominence and bask in the glory of Régine’s spotlight . . . and now it was my turn. My turn. “I’m sorry,” I told Clara, “I really don’t mean to be so quiet, I’m just—it’s such big news. What’s next? How do I start?”
“Well, like I said, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this. I’ve told you before that I have the utmost respect for your personal style, and I still think you have a hopeful future. It’s going to be tough finding a job in magazines, but maybe, you know, you’ll find a great position in PR, and of course, I’d personally be happy to write you any recommendations you need.”
“PR . . . ?” I trailed off. “Wait, what are you talking about?”
“Or anything you’d like, I don’t know. People who leave Régine find jobs in PR without much trouble, and I mean, you went to Yale, so . . .”
I closed my eyes and shook my head. “I—don’t—understand. Aren’t you hiring me to be Edmund’s new assistant? I thought that’s what you just said? That there’ll be no more unpaid interns and he needs an assistant—a real one, like on the masthead . . . with a salary,” I croaked.
“Well, yes, it’s a paid position, with a salary, and line on the masthead, but . . . I’m sorry, Ethan, really, but it’s just that we’re . . .” Clara paused, then started over. “Régine is hiring Sabrina to be Edmund’s new assistant.”
My jaw dropped. “Wait, what?” I could think of nothing worse than Sabrina profiting from a misfortune with my name on it. “But Sabrina is already an assistant. What will happen to . . .” I was shaking—horrified—couldn’t go on.
“There will be two—Edmund will have an assistant, and Jane will have her own as well. Jane has thought for some time now that Sabrina’s personality does not fit her editorial vision. She is looking for somebody more creative, with a background in art.”
I let this settle over me, as relieved as if I was standing in a parched field and it had started to rain.
Maybe I was supposed to end up with Jane, not Edmund! As Jane’s assistant, I would work every day with someone who shared my appreciation for beauty, true beauty—my heart’s purpose and the real reason for my desire to work at Régine.
“Can I apply to be Jane’s assistant?” I almost whispered. “Who can I talk to?” I thought of how Jane had described me last night: “Somebody with life in them!” I was perfect for her. We were perfect for each other. This journey couldn’t end here. It wouldn’t end here.
Clara took a deep breath.
Even half-blind, I could tell something was wrong. She started fiddling uncomfortably with her skirt, and she must have felt a twinge of guilt, or pity, or something—because she couldn’t look me in the eye. Instead her eyes focused on the door, while my own clung to her lips. I saw a mirage of hope shimmer over them, then—
“I’m afraid that position is already taken.” She swallowed. “Régine is hiring Dorian to be Jane’s new assistant.”
She reached forward and placed her hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Ethan,” she said. Then with a helpless shrug, she stood up, and left me there alone.
TOMORROW MARKED THE START OF JUNIOR YEAR. MADELINE and Dorian were sprawled on the sagging Victorian sofa in our living room while I sat on the floor—all of us exchanging stories from our summer vacations apart, waiting for the ecstasy to take effect.
It was a sunny summer day—one of those by which we would measure all other summer days: blood flowing with sweat through our veins as we gazed at each other through heavy-lidded eyes, intoxicated by ourselves.
Dorian hung his arm around my neck. As in every place where our limbs crossed—Madeline’s hand on my shoulder, Dorian’s leg on her knees—a pool of slick sweat was beginning to drip between us. Moist, mismatched pillows moaned beneath our weight, while a futile breeze blew through the open bay window. A glass saucer glistened beside my feet, having moments earlier passed between our sweating fingers. We had all reached in—the pills were robin’s egg blue—and swallowed together on a count of “One—two—three—forever young.”
I had only swallowed one tab, even though we’d each bought two. I always planned to “hold on” to a second pill, to take when the first was wearing off. I also always changed my mind.
No matter how many times I’d done ecstasy, I always worried that the effects just wouldn’t hit me. That maybe this time, this batch—fifteen dollars a pill, and “explosive,” according to Ted Hamilton, who had been selling to us from his dorm since freshman year—would have the same effect as a daily multivitamin. I was terrified that, like Blake and his lager-blooded Pi Phi brothers, who required entire kegs to feel merely “buzzed,” I would one day have taken too many drugs, and would never be able to get high again—the precursor to the more serious fear I would eventually feel at Régine, that I’d reached the highest level of joy that was permitted in a single life, and God, or the President, or whoever kept track of these things, would say to me, “Now, now, you’ve had enough” and I would never feel happy again.
Now I slipped the second pill in the oyster-like crevice between my gum and my bottom lip where, thanks to my prestigious education, I knew it would dissolve into my bloodstream fast. Madeline was telling us about her summer vacation in Nice. I gazed beyond her at a poster of Frida Kahlo on the far wall, crowded by eighteenth-century botanical drawings of flowers. Names like Trillium grandiflorum curled all around her braided head in the heat.
“. . . and I guess I just believed him . . .” Madeline was saying. “Anyway, it turned out fine, because I’d never seen a green motorcycle before, and . . .” She blinked, forgetting what else. “Will you give me a back massage?” she asked me.
The sun in her blue eyes, she unstuck herself from the couch to join me on the floor. I edged backward to make room for her, while a drop of sweat fell from the tip of her nose. She sat between my legs; hung her head forward, sweeping her dampened gold hair to one side, and I lowered my hands upon her spine.
Above us, Dorian strummed a guitar, his latest hobby. He began to sing. I whistled through parched lips, and Madeline patted her own knee to the lumbering beat.
Rock me mamma like the wind and the rain,
One minute I was massaging Madeline through a sweat-soaked silk blouse, and the next my fingers were pressed against her milky skin, the blouse strewn inexplicably to the side. Her lace bra was loose around her midsection, straps hanging to the side of her body. She cupped her hands over her breasts as I rubbed my thumbs in circles over her skin, smoothing away the imprint of her bra strap. She had a few freckles on her shoulder, stars in a white sky.
“Can I massage your face?” I asked.
She wordlessly rolled her golden head back over my shoulder. With her eyes closed to the ceiling, she relaxed her hands over her breasts and the sun fell through her slackened fingers.
I pressed my thumbs, lubricated by her perfume-like sweat, over her brow bone, and became aware of her skull beneath my fingers—her eye sockets and sloping cheekbones, the hinge where her mouth opened and closed. I contemplated which was more extraordinary: that strange, complex bone, or her skin, which draped perfectly over it like a veil.
“How magnificent you are,” I said, and rubbed my cheek against hers.
A laugh escaped her lips as she reached back with one hand and touched my head, her fingers weaving in and out through my hair.
I heard a hollow smack of saliva as Madeline’s deep breath swelled in my ear: “I think—it’s happening, darling.”
I let her words wash over me like a cool wave. It was happening. I lifted my head and announced, “We’re rolling.” When nobody moved, I repeated a little louder, “We’re rolling,” as my body tensed up and then relaxed. A waterfall of excitement rushed through me. Madeline squeezed my knee and leaned forward to let her bra fall finally away. With the side of her forearm draped over her naked chest, she reached for her silk blouse.
I couldn’t control my body. Indian-style, I crossed my legs. I rubbed my palms together. I rocked forward and back, forward and back. Madeline and Dorian were so still, they could have been sleeping. I swallowed. When I couldn’t take it—my legs were cramping up, I needed to move—I reached for the sofa’s velvet arm and pulled myself up. My hands waved fresh air into the room from the window. It always happened like this, rolling on ecstasy—you took a pill or two, waited for something to happen, then—bam!—it was happening, and you were inside it, and pretty soon you were on your feet shouting, “Guys! Let’s go on an adventure!”
Eyes flickering, Dorian stretched both hands toward me from the sofa. I pulled him into my arms. He fell onto my chest and wrapped his arm around my waist, then the three of us strung together and stumbled out into the late afternoon. Dorian led us with his guitar. Madeline hopped onto his back. We waved to Jack Dockendorf, and Cathleen Kwon, and Master Phillips from Pierson College. We waved to a man on the Skull & Bones stoop, and we waved to Oliver Munn.
“How was your summer?” Oliver asked.
“You smell divine,” Madeline replied. “Here’s a song about the freckle on your lip.”
And we made one up.
Except for Ted Hamilton, who gave us a knowing look and said, “I told you! What’d I tell you?” nobody asked us if we were high. We were simply how they knew us to be.
Soon the sun began to set, and we turned pink around the edges. Dorian was still carrying Madeline, and when we got to the center of Cross Campus the sprinklers had turned the grass spongy and wet.
Wanting a turn on Dorian’s back, I tugged on Madeline’s leg. “You’re hogging him,” I said. Then I pulled too hard and the three of us tumbled onto the grass and didn’t get up again.
The rest of the night we just stayed there. Friends were summoned through phone calls and wild gestures across the lawn, and by around eight o’clock the whole courtyard was alive, all of us laughing and playing guitar and massaging each other’s backs. We glowed in the light from the vaulted windows. Someone brought a bubble machine. A security guard named Maureen popped a floating sud on her nightly patrol and said, “Isn’t that nice?” while everyone passed around a thermos filled with iced Earl Grey someone had brought, and dipped their fingers into a pomegranate.
A FEW HOURS LATER, WE WERE ALONE AGAIN IN OUR UNBREAKABLE trinity.
Dorian saddled up to me and wrapped his white arms around my neck. “Your turn,” he said. “You’ve been touching everyone else all night.” I laughed and said okay and laid back with my head on his knee, face toward the night sky, legs extended on the wet grass.
A few feet away, Madeline also lay down and recited from memory a line by William Blake: “The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee . . . my heart is at your festival . . . my head hath its coronal. . . . The fullness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all . . . ”
Dorian took off my glasses and placed them beside me. I blinked and looked up at him. His blurry hands descended upon my forehead, and above them I could vaguely make out his hair, blending with the dark sky. His fingers pressed into my skin. My blood rushed to fill every imprint they left, and soon my whole face was warm, tingling like a vibrating guitar string. He put his thumbs over my eyelids and gently stroked in an outward motion. He moved so slowly I thought he might have been distracted by something else.
“Isn’t it amazing,” he whispered, “that two people can be so close—that one would let the other touch the most sacred part of them?”
I asked him what he meant.
“Your eyes,” he said. “They’re the most important thing to you, and so vulnerable—yet I’m touching them, and you trust me completely.”
He caressed my lashes, and I didn’t flinch.
“Do you remember how we met?” he asked.
I smiled at the memory of him with his sketchbook, asking to draw my portrait. “Of course—you made me take off my glasses. I was so nervous.”
“You shouldn’t have been. You know I’d never hurt you, right?”
I yawned, eyes closed under his fingers. “You’re so beautiful, Dorian . . .”
He leaned over, and I felt a lock of his hair tumble over my face. “No,” he said, his cool breath on my cheek, “you are.” I heard the saliva bob in his throat. “You are so, so beautiful.”
I tried to open my eyes, but he cupped them with his hands, one on each eye.
“Don’t look,” he said. “Just keep them closed, and say that you will always love me.”
I smiled and grabbed his wrist—tried to pull his hand away.
“Please,” he insisted. “It’s important to me.”
I ran my fingers up the length of his wrist. “Of course I love you, silly.”
“You always will?”
“Yes.”
“No matter what happens?”
“What’s going to happen?”
“Nothing,” he promised. “Nothing’s going to happen.”
IT REALLY WASN’T DORIAN’S FAULT. IT WASN’T ANYBODY’S fault, but it definitely wasn’t Dorian’s. I knew Dorian hadn’t come into Régine to ruin my life—he was too pure, too good. He was too much like me. I didn’t even blame anyone for choosing him over me: this was just the world we lived in. I knew that when they told him he got the job, his first reaction would be joy, unbridled joy—he wouldn’t think about salary or being on the masthead. He’d think, Wow, my first job! Everyone will be so proud! And I’ll get to see Jane every day—and Ethan! Wait—what will happen to Ethan? I knew how bad he would feel, I just knew, and I couldn’t bear to see the look on his face, so—I just stood up and left.
I remembered the assistant who’d also just stood up and left, abandoning her expensive python bag on her desk. Maybe she too had left to tumble off a roof, and maybe in fact, she eventually did.
“WELCOME, MR. ST. JAMES!” HORACE, EDMUND’S DOORMAN bellowed. “You’re all wet . . .”
Edmund’s roof was black with hardened tar. Rainfall never seemed so much like suicide—every raindrop jumping off a cloud, with a long plummet to the earth.
I knew my life wasn’t bad—not if you looked at it from a certain angle, if you thought the important things in life
were food and a roof. If you thought about things that way, then sure, I was a fool and selfish, because other people had much worse lives than I did.
It wasn’t really about that, though. It wasn’t about Régine, either.
“What are you so scared of?” Dorian had asked me once, and I think that’s what it was about; although, right then, I wasn’t scared of all the normal things. I wasn’t scared of what would happen if I tumbled a hundred stories, the rain kissing my back. I wasn’t scared of hitting anything on the way down—a satellite or an open window or a gargoyle—or crashing through a windshield, all the glass twinkling around me. I wasn’t even scared of the most likely thing: hitting the concrete, a surface so hard that the entire city had been built upon it.
I didn’t know why, but I wasn’t scared of those things.
What I was scared of—at least, what I think I was scared of—was everything else. I was scared of growing up. I was scared of compromising. I was scared of never living up to the dream I’d had; scared that everything good had ended already, and that I could never get it back. That no song would ever be as good as Pachelbel’s “Canon in D,” no book as good as The Age of Innocence, no taste as good as oysters with Madeline, and nothing at all as good as being high with her and Dorian. Everybody always said first loves are the hardest to get over. My first loves were flowers, and Yale, and the fantastic vision of my future life—what more? I could jump or not—life was already over.
Maybe not life. But the best parts of life—the dream—it was all over.
It had ended several months ago, when Clara had explained to me that, due to the unwritten rules of the world, I must trade my turquoise suit for gray; except what she had really been saying, which only now I understood, was, “You have been inducted, by no choice of your own, into this world, and to live in it you must sacrifice your joy.”
The “world,” of course, wasn’t Régine. The world was simply adult life, and there was no escaping it.
An Innocent Fashion Page 33
