An Innocent Fashion (13 page)

Now Blake enveloped our shoulders in a fraternal embrace. “Come on,” he said, pulling us toward a red velvet booth where no one was sitting. Madeline squeezed in so she could be in the middle of us, and we were greeted by a cocktail waitress who wore her hair in a bun, with a little wisp on the side dyed lilac.

As though she didn't always get exactly the same drink, Madeline pretended for the briefest second to consider her choice before eagerly clapping her hands together. “I'll have a martini! Boys, you'll have one too, right?” She gave Blake a little nudge. “Let's all of us have martinis—think how fabulous we'll look!”

“Bring mine on the rocks,” Blake said to the waitress. It was never any use resisting Madeline.

“On the rocks?” scoffed Madeline. “Three
real
martini glasses, please!”

The lilac-wisped waitress left, and as I traced her slinking figure through the crowd my eyes were drawn, moth-like, to a glow across the room. Beyond the shadow of a hundred heads bobbing, illuminated by a chandelier over his head, I saw him once again.

He was laughing. His head was tilted back, dashes of light falling over his face, like rain.

Dorian.

A stream of shadows passed in front of him, and he disappeared from view.

“Did you hear me, Ethan?”

I turned.

Blake leaned toward me. “Congrats on
Régine
, I said.”

I was startled, disoriented. “Oh . . . thanks.”

I was going crazy—I thought I could hear Dorian's laugh,
that
laugh, over the music, over all the voices, over Madeline, and Blake, and even over the sound of my own thoughts.

The waitress had returned. Madeline grabbed my arm. “Look at her, Ethan, how do you think she does it, balance all these glasses in the middle of a crowded room?”

Descending upon us, the waitress took one martini glass at a time from her silver tray and placed them carefully in front of us.

With a skeptical look at his drink in front of him, Blake said to Madeline, “I don't see why you prefer these to a normal glass. It's like they're designed to spill all over the place.”

“They look marvelous though,” mused Madeline. “I bet that waitress feels so chic, carrying them around all night on a silver platter. She's probably an actress, or a starving artist!”

I held my glass to my lips and gazed at the mirrored ceiling, savoring a sip.

“Not yet,” she chastised, raising her own drink to the light. “First, a toast.” Her eyes passing over me and Blake, she surveyed the room and, with an unexpected slop of her drink onto the table, seized her chest with one hand.

“What?” Blake asked.

A haunted look in her eyes, she bent forward and took a sharp, halted gasp, as though someone had stabbed her from beneath the table. “D-Dorian,” she stammered.

I turned. He was standing in front of us, and this time there was no mistaking him: Dorian Belgraves.

He seemed genuinely delighted. “Babe!” he exclaimed to Madeline.

“IthoughtyouwereinParis,” Madeline squeaked, her glass still in the air. “I'm just—” she choked. Her body quivered softly, as if an anesthetic had entered her veins. A slow clear river flowed over the side of her martini glass, down the length of her white arm.

“I just got back today—this morning!—I was going to call you both, I just—” He turned his face to me, his green eyes shining.

Everything was suddenly quiet, like we were inside a music box and someone had pressed the lid shut. I swallowed so hard I think the whole place heard.

“Ethan!” Dorian smiled and reached his hand to my shoulder. He was dressed as unassumingly as ever, in a plain white T-shirt and slim black jeans, his black shoes unlaced—yet he was the most captivating person in the room.

It was difficult to describe him without sounding grandiose, although anyone who had seen him just once would understand. Dorian could be conjured only in relation to great masterworks of classical sculpture. He didn't evoke any particular one so much as the collective weight of their timelessness, possessing features so perfectly aligned that carving them into stone would be only natural—to remind all future civilizations, once our cities had tumbled away and all that was left were strange, protruding relics and a silkscreen of numerical sequences in a stilted stream of digital consciousness, that something had once existed in the flesh that no digits could enumerate, that among mortals perfection had lived. Dorian was Tadzio while the rest of us were Aschenbachs.

Dorian smiled. “I missed you both so much this year,” he said. A lock of dark hair fell from behind his ear as he lovingly reached for Madeline's hand.

My whole body tensed and I clenched my teeth, biting hard. The next thing I knew the front of my body was warm. Dorian seemed to notice first, then Blake. Madeline tore her eyes from Dorian and shouted my name. With horror on her face she flailed instinctively with one hand, caught like Jacqueline Kennedy by the suddenness of the bullet.

I didn't notice anything at all. All I could see was Dorian. He was still touching my shoulder, and holding Madeline's hand, the three of us connected like nothing had ever happened between us. I couldn't move. I stared at him. He stared back, his lips parted in shock, while I tried my best to die right there—to stop breathing, to extinguish myself so that the vision of his face would be my last. I hadn't realized my eyes had craved him so much.

The discomfort of something wet made me break away. I followed a dripping sensation on my leg to a spill on the table, where my glass was toppled over into a shiny martini pool. The glass was broken along the rim, and when I realized there were no shards on the table, I felt them like masticated crystals on my tongue.

I reached my fingers to my lips, and when I pulled them away, they were soaked with blood, and I realized—I had bitten my martini glass.

GEORGE WAS WAITING FOR ME WHEN THE ELEVATOR DOORS
opened, in a black dress shirt with gray trousers stretched over his huge thighs.

“Hey, George!” I panted. I had just raced from the subway station at 42nd Street. “How are you?”

He didn't seem to hear me. “Start time around here is nine o'clock,” he replied.

“It's nine now.”

“Which means if you're not here by eight forty-five—” he continued, swiping his ID card with a fling of the glass door “—you're late.”

I shook away the mild feeling of dread shivering across my
skin as I entered
Régine
at George's heels. Despite him, it was going to be a good day—a
great
day. I had made it in one piece to my dream job, and had even managed to match my jacket to my socks. I checked my breath: Before fumbling for my apartment door I had even washed my liquor-saturated mouth. I was already a raving success.

George and I passed through the same hallway as the day before—cubicles buzzing, cover girls smoldering—then the enormous-seeming white door loomed before us and we entered the fashion closet. Even though it was only Day Two, for some strange reason I already felt like I was “back” at
Régine
, as though I'd been coming to work here for years.

“What did you do last night?” I asked George, still hoping to establish a friendly rapport.

He turned to me as Sabrina's head came into view, and replied with undisguised irritation, “Why do you dress this way?”

“What way?” I laughed. My royal blue blazer was covered with small pink polka dots.

“Seriously, your clothes—they give me a headache,” George said, shaking his head as we took our seats. “Are you planning to dress this way every day?”

“Are you?” I responded, before I could help myself.

He rolled his eyes and started checking his favorite blog. “Whatever, it's you they're going to talk about. And not in the way that you want.”

Still clouded by the haze of alcoholic stupor, I couldn't figure out how George presumed to know what I wanted. In lieu of a response, my eyes absently followed the cursor across his screen as he scrolled around over a series of attractive faces from some party the night before.

A face appeared just long enough for the memory of last night to jab me in the stomach. “Dorian,” I blurted with a start, and leaned instinctively toward him.

“Who?” George scrolled back to Dorian's white smile. “Oh, Dorian,” he said knowingly. “He's a model—Edie Belgraves's son. He walked a ton of shows last season in Paris, and I hear he'll probably get offered a Burberry campaign.”

I almost choked with laughter: that George was telling
me
about Dorian Belgraves. To everyone else he was the Dorian who had just “walked a ton of shows,” but to me he was the Dorian who had ruined everything. He had ruined Madeline, and senior year, and the worst part was—it had all been my fault. I slowly fell back into my chair, and let the reality swoop over me like a crumpling funerary shroud: Dorian was back from Paris.

Last night, Blake had helped me stop the bleeding in the bathroom. There had been only one men's bathroom in the nightclub, and even though I was able to spit out most of the glass it took about thirty minutes just to get one piece out from the corner of my lip. By the time we were finished there was a line and the only reason nobody said anything to us was because I was still bleeding, and holding a bunch of paper towels to my face like a pulverized bouquet of white and red flowers.

It was pretty much over after that. When Blake and I returned to the table, I had expected to find Madeline and Dorian intertwined like lovers in a Fragonard painting—as rose-cheeked as ever, without sin or common sense.

It was much worse than that.

Madeline and Dorian were gone, and I knew that could only mean one thing: She had left with him. Stupid, pathetic,
lovesick Madeline, who spent all of senior year pining over the loss of Dorian, had—after only thirty minutes in his exulting presence—gone home with
him
, the truest bane of her existence, her one true love, and the greatest tragedy of her young life. Now the priceless thing that was already teetering on a ledge had been shoved over, and the only hope was that it might fall through the air forever, instead of shattering. Blake knew it as well as I did, even though he had never been as close to Dorian as me and Madeline. He offered me a gin and tonic as a consolation, and a second, and soon, well—

This was the bad thing about Madeline, that for all her declarations of rebellion, she was (and this was why we were so compatible) just a girl who had read too much Jane Austen—a dreamer. A romantic. A fool like me. She would easily give everything up for a marriage certificate, for a life with Darcy in a renovated Victorian house, and children with golden hair to brush, and who was I to deny her that? To feel jealousy or despair that she would choose this over me, and in signing her name on the dream document, steal Dorian, my other truest and most cherished love in the world?

“
Boys!
” Sabrina's voice startled me from the other side of her cubicle wall. “They're shooting in-house in the small studio next door today, so we are going to have to move all the trunks we're storing there into the photo closet.”

I was vaguely amused at her use of the word
we
, wondering if she aimed to aid the cause by moving an empty hatbox.

She stood up for a brief second to glare at us over the cubicle wall—qualifying her instructions with, “
Now
.” She wore a black headband, and a black pleated dress with silver buttons and a white pointed collar. I met her blue eyes as she lowered herself back into her seat, then popped back up like an ember. She smol
dered there, tight-lipped; her eyes narrowed, and she began conspicuously eyeing my outfit up and down, so that I would have no doubt that she was doing it—and even though I barely knew Sabrina Walker, I could hear the rattle of a hundred insults tumbling, like the numbered white balls in a Powerball lottery, in her shiny glass brain.

“How
bright
,” she spat at last
,
and I'd never known such a wonderful word could sound so much like a curse.

Ten minutes later, while I was pushing the trunks around, a similar thing happened with Clara, the senior fashion editor. “
Clooooset!
” she sang, in what I came to learn was her preferred method of greeting us all at once. “I need someone to prepare all of Edmund's inspiration boards for the white-theme shoot.” She was daintily kicking a white Roger Vivier pony-hair pump with the side of her black Manolo when she noticed me.

She betrayed her own politeness with a sudden cock of her head toward me, twitching like a platinum-blonde bird on a telephone wire. Her erratic movement culminated in a stare, and her eyes seemed to fill up with the polka dots on my suit. She nudged herself back, and visibly swallowing a comment, struggled to disguise her gawk with a justifiable pretense. With an effort, she addressed me, “
Ee
-than? It's Ethan, right? . . . Can you please bring me a hard copy of Edmund's references on eleven-by-seventeen paper, with six images per page, and captions numbered from beginning to end?” She sounded a little winded.

I guess that's when I realized George was right: With all of my bright patterns, I looked a little out of place.

I had very little time to reflect on this, however, as I was rushed onto the next thing following the disappearance of Clara's heel through the closet door.

“Okay, so yesterday was
nothing
compared to what we have to do today. All that stuff we checked in—that was just the half of it,” George said.

Squeezing through a barely navigable channel between the tightly crowded garment racks, I wasn't sure where the other “half” of the clothes was supposed to go.

“This morning, we'll get in the rest of the deliveries . . . Then this afternoon we'll pack the clothes into trunks . . . And then
tonight
we'll ship it all out,” he finished. “The delivery people will be here to pick up at nine o'clock.”