An Innocent Fashion (12 page)

Madeline had never expressed the slightest interest in acting. As far as I knew, her life plan had been the same since our first class together: Attend Georgetown Law School after Yale and
then work toward election to the Senate, where she would wear a dress suit every day and commandeer the world to adopt her anarchistic politics.

Even though half the time her political science classes put her into a blind emotional rage (she had no shortage of biting words with which to castigate the “small-minded politicians” in power), she was convinced that “setting things right” in Washington was the cross-like burden of having sprung from a manger of privilege. She told me once she couldn't remember when her radical ideas had taken hold—just that she had always been a purist, and that since she was a girl she had observed the state of the world from afar and thought,
“This is a disaster, and it needs to be fixed, every ugly last bit of it.”
More than anything, she was determined not to be merely “humored,” and after a life of being patted on the head, had started wearing heels in an attempt to appear older and more put-together than she really was. When she ran every year for Yale's College Council, she made a concerted effort to wear blazers over her little dresses so that nobody could say she'd had the advantage of being “hot,” and once she had won, which she always did, the hours she spent practicing speeches in the mirror numbered in the dozens every year.

“What about Georgetown?” I reminded her.

Now she looked up at me with a sigh and said, “I just can't do Georgetown anymore. Everyone is too serious there—I'd lose all my enthusiasm before I got to the Senate.”

“Well—that is news,” I admitted.

Ahead of us in line, we overheard someone say, “I'm not here to party, I'm here to get fucked up. I'm like the Martha Stewart of getting fucked up.”

Madeline continued, “What I've decided to do—to try and
save the world, you know—is be an actress. Actresses are always saving the world. I'm going to gain millions of fans, and then I'm going to introduce my four-step plan . . . you remember my four-step plan?”

Madeline had a four-step plan for when she got to the Senate. The written record of it made frequent condemnation of “The Institution,” and delineated the restoration of human dignity through a rejection of “crass capitalistic infrastructures.”

“It'll take much less time than being a politician,” she said, “and anyway, no one listens to politicians.” She tugged at my arm. “What do you think? I know it sounds a little—” she implied some indeterminate adjective with a flick of her wrist “—but it's the only
surefire
way.” Perhaps contemplating the obvious illogic of this, she waited one second before rushing in again, “And before you say I don't know how to act—actors never know how to act anymore. The directors just edit the best parts in.”

“I guess I'll dress you for award shows then,” I permitted myself at last.

She turned her face up toward me and beamed. “I knew you'd like the idea! You make me so happy.” She threw her arms around me, and her small breasts pushed up hopefully against my chest.

“And you make me such a hypocrite,” I muttered, my arms encircling her waist. As though the scene in her bedroom had not unfolded only a half an hour prior, I lowered my face onto hers.

Her hand tightened on the back of my head.

When our faces floated apart and her eyes opened, I said, “Just one more,” and our lips met one last time before her mouth was hovering over my ear.

“I don't blame you for your . . . reservations,” she whispered.
We rocked there, side to side, our feet together and her hands around my neck like we were preparing for a slow dance. Then she held me at arm's length. “But you have to promise me one thing.” I could see the words churning in her head. “If, in a year, things between us are the same . . . if we haven't found anyone else, and we still love each other—which of course we will—then . . . you have to forget the past.” She held me by the forearms and with an impassioned shake said, “We'll both forget the past—those things that came between us—and we'll get married. Just one year, and . . .”

“A year . . . ?” was all I could say.

She knocked her little fist against my chest. “Like you'd do better than to marry me.”

“No, but give it five years, at least!”

“Oh, come on!” she implored. “We'll be dead in five years! And even if we're not, I won't be beautiful anymore, and you'll . . . No, it has to be a year. Then—I'll be an actress, and you'll be a fashion editor, and you'll see, I know you'll change your mind.”

“All right,” I agreed with a laugh. “I'll wear a white tuxedo.”

She beamed and swelled up to her tippy toes as her phone vibrated in her Chanel handbag. “Let's get reckless tonight—just drunk and free, to celebrate . . . I don't know, adulthood, everything!” Madeline reached into her bag to take a call from our friend Blake, who was meeting us inside. “One second,” she told him, and she winked at me. She ducked beneath the velvet rope onto the sidewalk, one finger pressed against her ear to hear better.

A black car pulled up. The driver came out and motioned to the security guard at the door, who nodded as the driver held up three fingers and opened the car door. I saw through the marble-like black window a single glint: an eye, or an earring. Then, as
promised, there were three of them, sunglass-shrouded faces bowed, and in the time it took for a murmur of speculation—“
Is that? Who?
”—their long shiny legs had sliced through the velvet rope and they disappeared inside like knives into a kitchen drawer.

It was only another second before two more people skipped the line—sort of came at it from the opposite direction and didn't even say anything to the bouncer, just stood there for a moment and waited for him to notice them. The first one was a model, for sure. She was taller than everyone by at least a head and, in a plain black motorcycle jacket, making no effort to impress. She wasn't a celebrity, but I felt like I had seen her face around, or at least like I
could
have seen her face around—she was just that type.

Behind her unapologetic mass of teased-out hair, a boy's face emerged.

I had to catch my breath. It was a face I knew almost better than my own: those bottomless eyes, those lips which were always parted on the edge of all the pain and pleasure in the world. I saw the rush of Frisbees over the campus lawn and felt the accidental brush of warm skin, heard laughter echoing off the flagstone paths of the Old Campus quad.

The bouncer said something to him and he sort of smiled and shrugged, hands in his pockets. The next minute he vanished, just another shiny thing, into the shadows.

Madeline swooped back under the velvet rope beside me. “I haven't told you, you look so attractive tonight,” she said, tracing her hand over the lapel on my green blazer. Then—“What's wrong?”

I could barely bring myself to say it after the events of the past hour. “Dorian,” I said, and now the name felt vulgar on my lips. “I think I just saw Dorian.”

She stiffened like a board. “Dorian-is-in-
Paris
,” Madeline said loudly, pounding each word like a piano key. She glowered meaningfully, then struck a high-pitched key, and she tinkered off, “Don't bring him up again!” She glared at me, then looked away, and didn't move.

I put my arm around her shoulders, remembering the grievous shape of them when Dorian left us. She had been draped like a shroud over my knees—head down, her hands pressed into her face, gobs of saliva and mucus swinging through her fingers and her spine heaving as she tried to suffocate herself in the folds of her dress, moaning, “Dorian's gone . . . Dorian's gone . . .” Her tears had soaked through my pants.

“I'm sorry,” I said to her. “I guess I just . . . have him stuck in my brain now.”

“Well, unstick him please,” she replied, giving my hand a firm squeeze, “before he ruins our night.”

In front of us now a girl was yelling, “Are you fucking kidding me? We've been waiting in line for fifteen minutes, and you didn't ask any of those other people for ID or
any
thing.” She turned to her three girlfriends, hoping with a look of outrage to gain their solidarity.

None of them moved to her defense, and the bouncer just waited. In a dress the shape and color of mashed potatoes, the girl looked like a helping of Thanksgiving dinner. Her thick fleshy legs were pink like uncooked turkey, and each one disappeared into a high heel without ever turning into an ankle.

I got a sickening feeling, predicting an unsavory end.

“I'm sorry, ma'am,” the bouncer said, “I'm going to have to ask you to leave.” She had made his job easy. Now he didn't even have to lie to her.

“You have to be kidding,” she protested. “You have to be fucking—” She swiveled, unbalanced, toward her three friends. “Come on!” One of them looked like her—too big, tottering around like a drumstick—but the other two were reasonably good-looking and probably knew they could get into the club if they stayed. They looked at each other regrettably as their friends swooped huffily under the velvet rope, and after a brief lingering, followed.

The gaggle of girls in front of us swelled to fill the space.

“Together?” the bouncer asked them. “Do you have a party name?”

Between violent gum-chomping, one of the girls said “Bruno,” in a loud Russian accent and flipped over her skinny wrist with a harmony of clinking bangles. The bouncer stamped their over-accessorized wrists while the security guard unclipped the velvet rope and skimmed their foreign IDs.

“Should we just say ‘Bruno'?” I whispered harriedly to Madeline.

“Oh, just look at us,” Madeline hushed me. “We don't need Bruno.”

“He with you?” the bouncer asked Madeline.

Our entry was authorized by a red stamp in the shape of a Gothic cross. I heard a sheepish voice behind us whisper, “Can we still get in? We're not really with them.” It was the friends of the Thanksgiving dinner duo, pointing to their blundering friends trying to catch a cab.

Madeline grabbed my wrist and rushed me ahead through a black hallway that throbbed like an artery. Two guards in black suits and bowler hats were posted there by a dark curtain. Tossing her arms up extravagantly, she cried, “Open up, boys!” and
the curtains parted with a dance-like swing of black fringe. “Oh, how
diviiiiine
!” Madeline laughed.

On one side of the room, a congregation of plush velvet booths facilitated the clinking of liquor-filled glasses between crossed-legged guests; on the other, an empty cabaret stage rose up from the shadows, awaiting the abuse of some inebriated high-heeled feet. Beautiful women hung drunkenly on the arms of eligible bachelors, and everyone was gulping gossip and champagne, overflowing. As accident and design pressed their bodies together, perspiration pushed the perfume out of their pores and the intertwining notes of fragrance burst up above us like fireworks. The ceiling was a mirror—a distorted, murmured re-telling of the scene below. Through it everything happened not once but a million times, reflected in every bead of sweat and glossy lip.

I thought once more of the fat girls outside, plodding around like somebody's dinner, trying hopelessly to catch a cab, and I felt the strangest pang of guilt for getting inside the club. Everyone everywhere pulsed
Glamour! Heat! Sex!
and it almost didn't seem fair that, on a Monday night, so many bodies could be stolen from the cold corners of the world and rounded up in this sophisticated furnace. I remembered my own face—my own
ordinary
face, with its plain, boyish angles—that, without the tortoiseshell frames and the youthful mop of hair and all of my
style
(which really, was just another word for effort) could not compare to what I saw around me, and thought,
Did I somehow fool the doorman, or am I really in possession of a physical beauty formerly unbeknownst to me?
Was it just the place, the lighting, or did every person in here pulse with the seductive carnality of an animal heart? Suddenly I had the urge to check a mirror just in case, by
passing through that black curtain, I had transformed, become a hundred times more handsome.

Madeline had spotted our friend Blake—tall, Herculean, head poking up above the crowd. His prince-like black hair escaped from under a baseball cap, and he wore a gray suit jacket over a white linen shirt. She waved toward the back of his head, advancing toward him with me in tow.

Blake turned, exclaiming, “What the fuck is up!” He couldn't have known to turn around, but Madeline had a way of being detected by other good-looking people in crowded rooms. He hugged me, and his familiar laugh resounded with all the comfort of his jockish self-assuredness.

I'd met Blake during the first weeks of freshman year, before my friendship with Madeline had been properly kindled. I was reclining against a tree trunk reading
Swann's Way
for my Intro to Narrative course, when his wayward football plummeted straight into my spectacled face. I clonked to the grass (“
like a puppet
,” he later said) and woke up an hour later at the Yale Hospital, with Blake hulking above me, his guilt-ridden countenance dripping sweat onto my face from above.

Madeline kissed Blake's cheek, and held on to the lapels of his jacket. “Can you believe it, all of us in the
real
world
together?”

On my insistence, Madeline and Blake had gone on a single date not long after my broken nose had healed. This was before the complications of my advancing self-awareness, when, still under the assumption that I was gay, I saw nothing wrong with setting up Madeline on a date with someone else. The next day I was treated to two entertaining accounts of an evening deemed unsatisfactory by both parties (“
All she wants to talk about is antiques
,” and “
He didn't know who
Wordsworth
was
”).