An Innocent Fashion (24 page)

Dorian had stolen my own dream. He'd gotten the life full of glamour and excitement, at least ten years sooner than I could even hope for, if it
ever
happened for me at all, because of things he hadn't even worked for—wealth, beauty, and a disposition whose sweetness could attract no enemies—while I prayed every
day for a chance at the smallest bit of it. And sure, if you want to know the truth? If I was him maybe I'd have done the same, just left and become fabulous and forgotten everybody. But the difference was that I
knew
that, if I was him, if I was the lucky one and he wasn't, at least I would say
sorry
. I knew I would turn around and say
something
, anything, to acknowledge the unfairness of it; that despite the obstruction of my silver spoon in my hand I would make some self-deprecating gesture toward those I had one-upped, to clear the air of that evil illusion that somehow I had earned it all.

Madeline at least had devoted herself to a higher cause. For every hour we spent together, she spent a dozen in solitude, poring over books that might help her change the world somehow. Even if in the end she never made a real change in the world at all—just chaired a high-profile charity, or funneled money into a leftist nonprofit—at the very least she was conscious of something outside of her immediate self. But Dorian never was. He was never conscious of anything except
living
his enchanted life, and something about knowing that, it just dug into me, as if all along Dorian had been a silver knife that, in my ignorance, I had allowed to pierce me, pushing deeper and deeper, until finally, the only thing to do was just rip it out for good and bandage up the wound with the tattered shreds of my own dignity.

After I realized all that, I was glad I would never see Dorian again.

Dorian is a brat
, I told myself. He was too beautiful, too rich; without Dorian it would be one less beautiful person standing between me and the life I believed was my birthright. When I applied for the internship at
Régine
, the thought thrashed viciously across my mind that maybe I should reach out to Edie,
Dorian's mother. To work at
Régine
was my truest dream, and I knew that to guarantee my internship there I only needed to ask for a single phone call from the woman whose face had countless times graced its pages. Edie Belgraves would have happily done me the favor, having on several occasions taken a superior liking to me (apparently I was the spitting image of her first high school boyfriend)—yet to gain any privilege with the utterance of Dorian's family name would be like balancing my life's dream atop a hollow house of cards. I preferred to build a shack from scratch, using my own incomplete deck, than to ever think of him again.

THE ELEVATOR DOOR SLID OPEN TO THE FOYER OF THE BELGRAVES'
private apartment. They owned the entire floor, and the one above. Despite the newly minted origins of their wealth—hundreds of exorbitantly paying fashion campaigns resulting in six-figure checks to Dorian's mother, combined with a fortune made in Silicon Valley by his stepfather—their decor spun an illusion of old money, with all the trappings of anyone with blue-blooded relations. We dripped rainwater onto a Persian carpet as Madeline sniffed at one of the potted palms, watering it with her swinging wet hair.

I fished in Dorian's pockets for the keys while he groaned and pressed his forehead against the toile wallpaper. Captured in a perennial pastoral bliss of fluttering aprons and swinging apple-bearing baskets, the French countrywomen were duplicated every three inches in the same arrangement, their bonneted faces always preferring the peaceful contemplation of produce and pillowing haystacks over us.

“Do you realize where we are?” Madeline whispered wondrously at the houseplant. “Dorian lives here!”

A click, and the door creaked into a grand entrance hall.

I reached for Dorian's waist, tore him away from murmured small talk with his Gallic neighbors. “We're home.”

It was quiet in the apartment. Light swirled in from the foyer like cream into black coffee. My eyes adjusted to the phantom before us: Edie, gazing out from a blown-up cover of
Vogue
. All around glowed ghostly eyes that belonged alternately to Dorian or to his mother. I had never realized how similar they both looked; the same timeless almond-eyed countenance, a beauty rooted in the finest sensitivities of both sexes. It made sense that Dorian and his mother had always been extremely close. Most people are, when they remind one another of themselves.

A majestic staircase loomed ahead, shadows from a curlicued wrought iron railing writhing like ivy over the marble steps. Dorian smacked his lips and seemed to regain a bit of his senses. “Do you think you can climb up yourself?” I asked. I gestured to the stairs and his knees crumpled beneath him.

I took a breath, and held my hands around his waist to steady him. The handrail was polished wood, but it felt like ice.

“Darling . . .” called Madeline from behind us, her voice echoing like a penny into an empty wishing well. “Darling, why don't you show Ethan your piano . . . ?”

Having already seen Dorian's piano a dozen times before, I rolled my eyes as she caught up to us at the foot of the stairs. With a tug at my arm, she cooed, “Before I met you, I'd never seen such a marvelous piano.” She gazed fawningly at me through crescent-moon lids—evidently, she thought I was Dorian—then
let me go, drifting back into the light like a ballerina who had forgotten her steps.

Dorian hung on, wringing his arms around my torso while I began to drag him up after me. His legs twitched in earnest, but his feet always missed the stair—after a few tries he just gave up completely, and it was like carrying a piece of furniture. Halfway up, I took another deep breath and leaned against the rail for relief. His whole body pressed obliviously against me and I wondered, as his heart beat serenely into my ribcage, if this had not been the state of our entire friendship.

“Come on, babe,” I urged, not realizing that I had adopted Dorian's habitual pet name.

“Are we—?” Dorian lifted his head up from me with a faded sense of recognition—he loosened his grip around my body and started to slip away. He was coming undone, like a loosely tied towel, and—
flash!—
his head rolled back and his Adam's apple caught the light with a bladelike glint. The stairs below us wavered. My body tensed as Dorian's whole weight rested over my arm, and with a strong heave I jerked him back onto me.

With one hand on the banister, I adjusted him across the front of my chest and tightened my grip around his waist. He buried his face into my neck. He snorted. Snored. We swayed for a moment there and I gazed up into the darkness, which like a black hole in a recurring dream felt both terrifying yet familiar. Then he fastened his arms around my body once more
—
hugged me, really
—
and we continued upward into it.

The whole time Madeline lingered behind us, a hand holding onto the banister and the other conducting an invisible orchestra as she swayed from side to side with her eyes closed, a concerto trapped inside her head by her wet blonde hair. “Boys . . .” she called out musically. “Why don't we all go on a double date this weekend?”

“Who'd be my date?” I grunted, as I lugged Dorian over the final step.

“Me,” she said.

“What about Dorian?”

She tossed a limp-wristed hand in the air. “Both of you would be my date,” she yawned. “That'd be the double part.”

Dorian's bedroom was pitch-black, but I still knew it like my own. With a final effort I heaved my charge facedown onto the middle of his four-poster bed. He fell with a cushioned thud, and I crumbled like a demolished building onto his fifteen-hundred-count sheets, just as Madeline's forehead cracked conclusively against the bedpost and she bewilderedly mumbled something about Dorian's piano.

I ANSWERED THE PHONE.
“RÉGINE.”

“Edmund needs a reservation.” I failed to recognize the voice amid a hectic background of New York traffic.

“Er, sure,” I replied, reaching for a notepad as a distant car alarm filled in my ear. “I'm sorry, who's calling?”

“It's me,” he said, and I realized with horror that I was on the line with Edmund Benneton, who had inexplicably referred to himself in the third person. From my end, a sharp intake of breath; I swelled with embarrassment, back straightening as though Edmund was suddenly right there, ominously slapping a ruler against his palm. “I'm so sorry—” I began, but he ignored me and yawned. “Is this the redhead?”

“No,” I replied, “it's Ethan . . . black hair.”

He considered this—perhaps trying to remember me—then prodded, “What are you wearing?”

I glanced down at my gray Dior suit, which I had now worn every day for two weeks.

“Not maroon, I hope.” He took a long, audible drag off a cigarette, and sighed, “I hate maroon . . . Can you make my reservation?”

“Of course,” I gushed, like a tidal wave hitting a city, “yes, yes, I—”

“Good. Somewhere well-reviewed, and new.” He puff-puffed once more, and specified: “New in the past six months. Make sure it's below Fourteenth Street—eight o'clock for two people, under Edmund Benneton. You can confirm to my personal e-mail.”

The words were still forming on my tongue when he hung up on me. I sat there at the edge of my seat, scribbling furiously while murmuring to myself, “Well-reviewed. New. Eight o'clock. Below Fourteenth.”

I brandished the note in the air like Charlie Bucket with his golden ticket as the significance of the moment descended upon me: This was it. This was my big break. A seemingly insignificant task, but I had guzzled enough Horatio Alger Kool-Aid to know that a few favors here and there, and pretty soon I'd have worked my way up the ladder. I would be traveling the whole world with Edmund, going to photo shoots and helping him dress all the top models, and—

“Who was that?” asked George, fat fingers pressed around a carrot stick.

“Er—” I had a vague idea of what would happen if George learned I had intercepted an assignment from Edmund. “Nobody,” I lied, “just Jenny from HL Group.”

“She's so loud, I could hear her from over here,” he crunched.

I stood up with an abrupt scrape of chair casters against the carpet. “I'm going to use the bathroom,” I announced in a flat voice.

I enclosed myself in a stall, and began to scroll on my phone through restaurant reviews
.
Without much time to waste, I settled on the first restaurant I found that fit his description, a Spanish-Japanese fusion restaurant in the West Village that was only three months old, boasting a series of “unclassifiably succulent” squid dishes according to the
Times
. Good enough for me. It certainly sounded extravagant, like one of those places nobody really enjoyed but that sophisticated people raved about while drinking musty wine and making superior remarks: perfect for Edmund.

On my return to the fashion closet I ran into Sabrina, who was strolling to the kitchenette with an unprecedented air of amusement. Like a Homecoming Queen upon recent acquisition of some third-period gossip, she passed me with a spring in her stilettoed step and her eyebrows elevated by malicious pleasure.

“Who's
D
?” she asked.

I didn't know what she was talking about, until a moment later I found my desk nearly swallowed up by a monstrosity of hydrangeas.

“Somebody has an admirer,” George remarked dryly, “although I can't imagine who.”

Thank you for last night
, the card read, in a familiar, near-illegible scrawl.
Love ya, D
.

I gulped, feeling as though Dorian had violated a restraining order I had issued against him. He wasn't allowed to come near here. The fact that Dorian had found a way to invade my life at
Régine
—with his Trojan horse of colossal flowers, the best that money could buy, surely—well, I ripped up the card into tatters
over the wastebasket and, before the last shred had fluttered to the bottom, dunked the bouquet upside-down after it. It sunk with a tremendous thud, and the underside of the vase sparkled cheerfully with cellophane.

AT AROUND EIGHT O'CLOCK THAT MORNING I HAD WOKEN UP
at Dorian's apartment with a hand around my waist, and sunlight on my face.

I had awoken in this same manner almost one year ago, when for my twenty-first birthday, we all dropped acid in Edgerton Park, on a grassy, unnamed hill that thereafter none of us could find again. We danced all night like hand-holding paper figures in a Matisse collage, then crumpled to sleep in the grass. I remember being the first to wake up, finding Madeline's arm draped around my chest and watching, through one half-open eye, the sun threading quickly through the blades of grass, casting an intricate glow over all the earth's edges like an endless spool of white Spanish lace.