An Innocent Fashion (35 page)

“Ask him,” he pointed at me. “He's an intern too.”

“Is he joking?” She turned to me. “Are you his agent?”

I shook my head, and she squinted back at Dorian: “You always were so
strange
.”

Makeup nudged Belinda to return to the Hair and Makeup chair.

“Are you still doing those little drawings?” she asked. Her floral chiffon miniskirt swayed as she pressed her knobby knee into the tufted chair. “He makes these wonderful little drawings,” she explained to Makeup, who was waiting for Belinda to make her face available once more. “They'll be worth a fortune someday. Still,” she turned back to Dorian, “I think you're crazy.”

“Please,” urged Makeup, “we have a lot of work to do.”

“Well, look at that face though!” Belinda faultlessly protested. “Don't you think he's crazy to give up modeling?”

Makeup indulged her with a hasty nod as Belinda slid back into the rusted chair with a creak. She crossed her legs into a lotus position and fanned out her skirt, wiggling her toes in her moccasin slippers. “How am I ever going to find a boyfriend when they're all crazy?” She finally settled in with a toss of her hair, pulling a copy of
Esquire
across the edge of the counter into her lap. She pointed to the cover, and informed us, “I'm shopping for boyfriends.”

Hair took another strand and began to weave it through a bobby pin like a complicated fishing fly.

“You ended things with Brandon, then?” Dorian asked, leaning against the back of the adjacent chair.

I stood beside him as Belinda laughed, revealing a gapped tooth which reminded me of Madeline. “Of course not. We're madly in love.” She shuffled through the magazine while Makeup lifted her chin. “I'm only seventeen though, and life ends at twenty-one. At least that's what my agent says, and my mom too—only she thinks it's thirty. I'm just thinking ahead, in case I have a midlife crisis and break up with him.”

Makeup had managed at last to touch her brush to Belinda's face when the model spun around. “Does anybody have any gum?”

An exasperated breath from Makeup; she crossed her arms and waited for Dorian to pull a Wrigley's peppermint package out of his pocket.

Belinda folded a piece into her mouth and flipped to the main fashion editorial, where Sean O'Pry was standing in a full suit on an unlikely precipice in the forest, seducing the camera
with eyes that required a sizable paycheck just to open in the morning. “What's your opinion of Sean O'Pry?” she asked.

Dorian peered over her shoulder and began to play with a bobby pin from the counter. “I thought you dated him already.”

“I thought so too once, after I read it in a magazine,” she recalled. “Do you ever think so too, about you, after you read it in a magazine?” Belinda looked up to rehearse a look of deep contemplation in the mirror, then to the detriment of Makeup's already much-strained patience, puckered her lips and tried out several angles of her chin. “We did live in the apartments though, for a short while.”

I'd heard of model apartments, where agencies set up their promising young talents who were trying to make it in the industry. The idea always reminded me of a sleep-away summer camp, where instead of just one attractive counselor (every camp had at least one counselor who everyone crushed over, and tried to corner in a canoe on some pond), they were
all
attractive counselors. Instead of summer days spent diving into lakes and telling ghost stories, they roamed New York City with a portfolio of their own photographs, attending auditions, casting calls, and later on, all the best parties, before crashing home to a tent they shared with the future face of Maybelline—which was staked on a hill across from the future faces of Gucci and Armani—while each of them wondered if they would “make it,” or if they would get sent back after the summer to Brazil or Poland or whatever perfect provincial gene pool they called home.

“How is your girlfriend doing?” she asked Dorian. “The civilian?” She looked up in the direction of Makeup's slanted brush and explained in a hushed voice, “His girlfriend's not a model.”

I was shocked to hear that Dorian had told anyone in Paris about Madeline.

“She's an actress now,” Dorian said. “Or well, she wants to be an actress.”

Belinda smiled, genuinely touched. “Wonderful! So she'll know what it's like. It's good to be with someone who knows what it's like.” She didn't explain what “it” was, exactly, but shut the magazine as Jane walked into the dressing room. Belinda pointed with a solemn shake of her head to the handsomely etched face on the back cover. “My biggest disappointment in life,” she said with a vivid sigh, and a curl of her slippered toes. “A total dream, until finally we hooked up, and I found out he had a spot on his—oh!” she exclaimed, at the sudden appearance of Jane's reflection in the mirror.

“Go on.” Jane grinned, placing her hands on Belinda's shoulders. “I'm dying to hear about your life's greatest disappointment.”

“It was just—” Belinda blushed. “You know how some people have a mole somewhere? Well, he did, only he had it on his—you know.” She pointed between Dorian's legs and made a little wiggling motion with her finger. “The size of a nickel.”

J
ane let the dress fall gently around Belinda's body, while Dorian held the model's Boudiccan red hair: helmet-sleek on top, then frizzy from the ears down, with an arrow-like part through the center. The back of the dress was designed to plunge to Belinda's lower spine, while the front was embellished from top-to-floor-length bottom with copper beads. The metal droplets chorused over the floor like a whispering cascade of holy water. Divine transformation.

Where, moments ago, there had been an ordinary seventeen-year-old girl—beautiful perhaps, but ultimately mortal, with her half-chewed fingernails and roughed-up knees—there now stood among us an angel.

All around her hovered a reverential silence, as even the garment racks seemed to lean toward her in anticipation of a heav
enly utterance. Sabrina hung beside me, her shoulder almost touching mine, both of us poised in suspense like two un-rung bells. It was the closest she and I had come to harmony.

“Ethan,” I heard.

For some reason, I was nervous, shaking a little. I just—couldn't believe it was real, that Belinda had become what I had always dreamed about, the woman in the magazine. She was Jane's vision: the apparition of an actress who fell asleep at curtain call and, one hundred years later, woke up, brittle and rusted in a dilapidated theater. But now she was my vision too, and that of every other person whose mind drifted away while poring over the pages of a fashion editorial, all of us carrying into our dreams these beauties who never moved, never breathed, yet somehow glowed with the promise of another world, tiptoeing on the thread of spider's silk that separated the real and the imagined.

“Ethan, darling,” Jane repeated. She reached out toward me as she lifted the hem of Belinda's dress from the floor. “Can you pass me my apron?”

The apron dangled off the garment rack. It was faded and fraying, with a lint roller in one pocket and a plastic box of safety pins in the other, fringed by black rubber clamps. I strung it over Jane's head, and she removed a small clamp, which she used to clip the waistline of Belinda's dress.

She stood back, withdrew a crinkled hair from Belinda's moistened lips; a palm on the seraph's naked spine, she asked, “Ready, love?”

Belinda nodded without a word. Even she felt the hallowed magnitude of her own presence. She stumbled, then reaching for Jane's shoulder, admitted with a whisper, “The dress is heavy.”

Extending her arm for support, Jane lifted the clinking
train, and side by side they inched toward the stage door. Hair and Makeup followed closely behind, flanked by photo assistants like altar boys, so that together we formed a procession down the bloodred aisle.

As Jane positioned Belinda on the stage, the photographer fired a test flash: a beep, and the theater was awash with white light.

“Tyler, can you turn up the fill light?” the photographer asked, and one of the altar boys twiddled with a light behind Belinda's head.

A computer screen by the photographer's side displayed the images his camera captured. Eventually, after Belinda had flowed through a stream of poses, there would appear on the screen the unedited image that millions of eyes around the world would see, an image that might trickle into their subconscious, and in some small, untraceable way, affect the course of human culture.

Belinda waved at us with an uncomfortable look. Jane was stooped over the photographer's chair, and didn't notice.

“What is it?” I called over the aisles.

She pointed pleadingly with a copper nail toward her face, like she was at the dinner table and had accidentally bitten into something she was allergic to. I traveled down the aisle to her, the crunch of dead insects underfoot.

“Mm—my gum,” Belinda moaned. “I forgot to spit out my gum.”

“Is that all?” I held out my hand like a cup.

“You're sure?”

I insisted with a nod. Aiming to preserve her lipstick, she pinched the wad between her teeth and pushed it out with her tongue.

“Oh,” she gushed with relief, and licked the inside of her mouth.

“We're ready,” the photographer said, and a flash filled the theater once more.

I exited his frame, and paused at the end of the aisle; stared at the gum in my hand—putrid pink, like a masticated balloon. I looked up at Belinda.
Flash!
Down at my hand.
Flash!
This was it.
Flash!
My dream was so close, I could feel it in my very
hands
. I looked toward the crew. The light was flashing over and over now, a shatter of lightning over Belinda's head.

Nobody was watching me.

I popped Belinda's gum into my own mouth. It was still sweet, and I laughed to myself.

AFTER THE SHOOT, WE RETURNED TO
RÉGINE
TO UNLOAD THE
trunks.

“Go home,” Jane said. “It's Sunday night. You can do all that tomorrow.”

Dorian wiped an imaginary layer of sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. “Wait up for me,” he said to me, sprinting to the bathroom as Jane disappeared with a smile into her office.

I sat in my chair and stretched my legs out, lightly rotating side to side as I stared at the ceiling. I could hear Jane typing—punching her keyboard slowly, one letter at a time, like she was playing whack-a-mole with a single finger. The only other noise was the mouselike squeak of my chair.

Faintly, from all the way down the hall outside, Jane's voice called out, “Dorian? . . . Ethan?”

I stopped turning, passed all the racks, left the fashion closet, and approached Jane's door. “Hi,” I said, resting a hand against the metal doorframe.

With one hand she stretched her white ceramic mug out toward me, and with the other she covered her mouth, yawning. “Can you please make me a tea, darling? I'm falling asleep, but I want to finish this proposal.” She pinched her fingers together in front of her face and shut one eye—“A little bit of honey.”

I stepped out with her mug into the quiet hallway, and the overhead lights flickered on to illuminate my path to the kitchenette. The office was serene, humming, and it filled me with a strange sense of peace to imagine all the chairs tucked into desks on the other side of the cubicle walls, like children in their beds. When I returned to Jane's office I rapped lightly on the door and entered, steadying the mug as I remembered our first encounter in the women's bathroom.

“I'll take it,” Jane said, reaching out. The surface of her fingers reminded me of wrinkled tomato skins.

I had never been in Jane's office. Like a museum, the walls brimmed with pictures. Neighbors included a kabuki princess and Jacqueline Kennedy; a Botticellian saint and Isabella Blow; all coexisting, in clean simple frames, on a wall of global inspirations. As I was leaning over her desk, I thought to myself that this was the most alone I had ever been with Jane, and noticed behind her one of my favorite Impressionist paintings: a bonneted woman in a blue frock, peering up from a book while her daughter gazed through a gate into a cloud of smoke.

Absentmindedly, kind of to myself, I murmured, “I love Manet.”

“Hmm?” She cupped the mug with both hands through the handle and brought it to her lips.

“Oh, sorry—I just, I love that Manet painting,” I said.

She glanced over her shoulder to remind herself what was hanging there. “Oh, yes. Everybody thinks it's Monet.”

“Really? They're so completely different.”

“Most people don't have a very good eye, I'm afraid,” she said. “They see blotches and they think, ‘Impressionism! Must be Monet!,' like every painter was the same.” She shrugged and took a sip.

“My favorite's Manet,” I confided. “Of the Impressionists, at least.”

Her screen saver flickered to life, illuminating a face etched with soft lines, and I caught myself. “Actually, I'm sorry, I know you're working. I don't mean to distract you.”

She brushed one hand dismissively through the air. “Don't be silly! You think I wouldn't rather talk to you about Manet than stare at a screen that can't talk back? I hate computers. I'm waiting for the day they all crash, so I can practice my cursive again.”

I laughed out loud—it was exactly the kind of thing that Madeline would say.

“How old are you? You've probably never even heard of cursive writing,” she sighed. “I take it you like art then? Manet's one of my favorites too, by the way.”

She peered at me, and it was the first time I'd seen her eyes so close: blue, but unlike mine—my right eye, at least, which swirled like water, constantly searching—hers seemed calm, like air.

I laughed in spite of myself. “Like art? It's why I'm at
R
égine
at all.”

She took off her glasses and folded them like dragonfly wings in her hand. “Of course you like art! I remember you on your first
day—in your bright, wonderful suit.” She smiled, and the wrinkles around her mouth spread like pond ripples.

“That was inappropriate.” I blushed, remembering my conversation with Clara. “I didn't mean to offend anybody, I just—didn't know.”

“You didn't offend anybody,” she shook her head. “Not me, at least. I saw you and my heart jumped up. I thought to myself—at last! Some color! Somebody with life in them! I know what they told you—about rank, and rules, and to be fair—it's true. But is it right? No. The world can't make progress without risk.”

Across the room, a rocking bamboo fountain on the windowsill went
kerplunk!
The stone basin filled with water, as elsewhere in the room an invisible clock ticktocked closer and closer to nightfall.

“Ethan—” She toyed with the corner of a paper on her desk. “Would you be interested in helping me prep my next shoot? Brainstorm ideas, pull inspiration references—art, fashion—all of that?”

“I—” My heart leaped into my throat.

Kerplunk!
went the fountain.

“Yes.” I swallowed, nodding vigorously. “Yes, that would be—that would be amazing.”

She smiled. “I'm glad. Go on then,” she said, motioning to her work. “We'll talk soon.”

Kerplunk!

I rushed toward the door. “Thank you,” I whispered, hands prayerfully clasped against my chest. I closed her door behind me, and stumbled into the fluorescent glow of the hallway. Reentering the fashion closet I whispered, “Dorian!” but he was still in the bathroom.

Jane's words cycled over and over in my head as I paced the room—could it be that the creative director of
Régine
had just invited me to work on her next project? I passed the shelves and the garment racks and the desks, unable to contain my excitement. This was it! Jane's proposal represented the beginning of a new chapter at
Régine
.

I wanted to shout, “
I made it! I'm making it—it's happening!
” I wanted to shout it to Dorian and Madeline. I wanted to shout it to George, and to Edmund; to Clara, who had choked up when she told me success was possible for an outsider, and to Sabrina, who had compared me to a piece of yarn, unsuitable to fit into the needle of my improbable dream. I wanted to shout it to Ms. Duncan, who had believed in me, and apologize for doubting her. I wanted to shout it to all the people in my life, everyone I had ever met. The crowd of faces multiplied in my mind's eye—a ballroom full of teachers and friends, advocates and adversaries alike—when suddenly a spotlight shone over two faces. I wanted to shout it to my mom and dad.

I scrambled for the phone in my book bag, and dialed the same digits that, almost twenty years ago, I had practiced on a worksheet in kindergarten. There had been lines for practicing my address and phone number, with space for a drawing of my house.

“If anything ever happens,” Mrs. Sanchez had said, as she handed out the assignment, with her hair braid like a thick black rope against the back of her paisley dress, “it's important to always be able to reach Mommy and Daddy.” And the next day my worksheet was all filled in, with a drawing of a gray rectangle labeled “mY HoUs,” and a couple of fruits in the front yard.

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.