An Innocent Fashion (26 page)

IT WOULD HAVE BEEN EASY TO WRITE A PLEASANT REAL
estate description of Edmund's apartment:
Fabulously located in fashionable West Village, steps from Washington Square Park, NYU, and more. Convenient shopping and charming restaurants nearby. Doorman, gymnasium, and crown molding throughout
. What more?

The white-paneled lobby boasted a Baccarat chandelier and a remarkable echo. The doorman wore impeccably starched white gloves. The whole place smelled strongly of some flower—or rather, not any particular flower, but just “flowers,” a variety capable of no offense: Altogether, an airtight impression of generic luxury.

The impression ended abruptly when I turned the key to Edmund's apartment and was simultaneously assaulted by a dark figure and a startling decorating scheme. The black figure
lunged. I shielded myself with the door, saw him do the same, and realized the first feature in the foyer of Edmund's apartment was a full-length mirror, as ornate as a window in a Gothic cathedral, hanging on a zebra wall. The reason I could not say zebra
print
was because the room in question wasn't merely painted or wallpapered to look like zebra stripes, but covered from floor to ceiling with actual zebra, like someone had skinned a herd of them and sewn them together with all the stripes running in the same direction. I confirmed this with a shuddering touch—coarse, like horsehair.

I clicked the door behind me and wandered bewilderedly inside, my shoes echoing upon a shiny onyx floor. “Hello?”

Hoping to ward off any more surprises, I knocked against an open doorframe and poked my tousled head into the next room. Moroccan tapestries and Japanese silk wall scrolls. Orchids, calla lilies, birds of paradise. A Renaissance-style ceiling resembling a cloudy sky, complete with painted cherubs and precipitation in the form of a crystal-dripping chandelier. A Victorian camelback sofa, upholstered in purple velvet and covered with tufted leopard-print cushions; a big-screen plasma television and surround-sound speakers; Louis XIV-style chairs bordering a claw-foot coffee table; and a waxy gray wall-covering wafting upward from an untraceable breeze.

Puzzled by the gray wall-covering, I gave in to my temptation to touch it and thereafter resolved not to place a hand over anything unrelated to my designated responsibilities. It was an elephant skin—a dried-out
elephant skin
—and amid the churning of my stomach I wondered
if working at
Régine
make it somehow legal for Edmund to own endangered-animal skins.

Iconic fashion photographs hanging throughout—full-color,
framed in every iteration of gold curlicues—confirmed the apartment did not in fact belong to a taxidermist, and I ventured onward through a dizzying optical illusion of a hallway, its concurrent pink and white stripes painted in a head-splitting hexagonal pattern that was reflected infinitely in another full-length mirror.

The bedroom, in a shocking coral red, was no comfort at all. Magazines around the perimeter were piled to the height of a small person—leaning, crammed—and the floor was a black-and-white checkerboard, with the ceiling covered in a matching damask. Supervising the room was a huge Technicolor Buddha, painted with legs folded and eyes closed as he practiced his meditation during a Warholian acid trip. The one visual relief took the form of an ivory canopy that could be drawn shut over the bed, yet even that was cheetah print on the inside (although thankfully, it appeared, not sewn from actual cheetah skin). I couldn't fathom the underlying design philosophy, but took it as confirmation of Edmund's genius—a glimpse of which his diaries would soon miraculously grant me.

Replete with ornate fluting, his bookshelf was topped with a carving of Medusa, and her eyes bored through me as I poked innocently around for Edmund's diaries. I had expected them to be all together, lined up on a shelf or two, but very few of his books were lined up at all. Instead they were like the magazines on the floor—crammed into haphazard piles, their crevices stuffed with miscellany, everything in danger of spilling out if you removed a single book.

I found the first diary crushed like a bookmark between the pages of a Christian Dior coffee-table publication. Holding in the books above and below, I yanked it out and smiled as I ran my
fingers over the yellow satin cover, feeling a thrill at the thought of reading it. I laid it on the bearskin rug at my feet and found a second on a bottom shelf: Tiffany blue, bound in silk with gold-tipped pages, sandwiched between two decades-old copies of
Vogue Italia
.

As I gathered them all up in every size and shape, in shades of coral and mustard and azure blue, I learned that Edmund also collected greeting cards. Tucked into books and diaries and crannies all around I found a dozen cards, always blank on the inside, and paired up with the unused envelopes.
Happiness is a journey, not a destination
. . .
To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world . . . Life is not about finding yourself, it is about creating yourself.
Some of them were in other languages (
La vie ne vaut d'être vécue sans amour
), and they made me wonder if he bought them on his travels, thinking,
“That would make a nice card for John Galliano,
” then returned home and forgot about them? Or did he buy them for himself, because, well, he just liked feel-good quotes in calligraphic fonts?

I noticed another blue diary on the nightstand. In total, there were four more diaries in its various drawers; one covered by a pile of pills, with no container in sight, and another guarded by a flaccid wind chime, which like Edmund's peaceless Buddha alluded to his vague interest in a New Age aesthetic. For good measure, since the diaries seemed to be everywhere, I decided to check the bathroom—and was unsurprised to find two there, resting in a pearly magazine rack. The bathroom was in fact pearl-themed: It contained a pearl-studded mirror and a bathtub shaped like a giant oyster, presumably so Edmund could pretend to be the pearl in the middle.

I took it as further confirmation of his genius, all these di
aries hidden in the corners of his apartment like Easter eggs. When I thought I had almost all of them—surely a few still lurked—I knelt on the bearskin rug with all of them fanned out around me like a parasol, and took a breath.

The first diary. I opened it—winced.

Edmund's handwriting somehow contained greater menace than Charles Manson's scrawl, and it was while trying to discern his near illegible scratches that I came close to thinking he and
Régine
and everybody must all have been playing a huge joke on me.

            
Carla came to the city today she is so fat I can't believe anybody could look so bad in Alaïa we went to dinner—

It stopped there. I turned the page to see if it continued—that couldn't be all—but it never did, and in fact the next time he had written was twenty pages later, in a different colored ink:

            
Today we went to Indochine for dinner I had the salmon the Times said it was their best dish I sat with Coco Rocha Raquel Zimmerman Edie Campbell FeiFei Sun Daria Strokous Joseph Altuzarra and Georgina St. James Coco Rocha was wearing a Vera Wang chiffon dress and Miu Miu open-toe ankle boots Raquel Zimmerman was wearing a Louis Vuitton plaid cropped jacket and skirt and Marni platform heels Edie Campbell was wearing a Rodarte sweater and sequined skirt with lace overlay and Giuseppe Zanotti boots FeiFei Sun was wearing a Nina Ricci lame jacket Céline tapered pants and Jil Sander boots Daria Strokous was wearing a Marc Jacobs polka-dot jacket Dries Van Noten silk blouse Proenza Schouler macrame skirt and
Chanel kitten heels Joseph Altuzarra was wearing an Yves Saint Laurent suit and Ferragamo shoes and Georgina St. James is going through a divorce so I don't blame her for wearing head-to-toe Dillard's or something.

That was it. There were no sketches or inspirations, no anecdotes or stories, no reference to his editorial work at all.

I fumbled for another diary from the pile—
Karlie Kloss wore Christian Dior
—then another—
Chanel Balenciaga Versace
—then another, which was empty except for one word in the middle—
open-toe
—just
OPEN-TOE
in the middle of the page, in the middle of the diary, constituting the entirety of the book's revelations.

I began in anguish to flip through more and more pages, desperate to find something, anything, of value. But there was nothing, just a ramble of designers and famous people; a running tab of names, names, names without any punctuation, except for the end of some long passages where his ink had bled into a kind of mottled period, as though the exercise had exhausted him and he could barely lift his pen to prevent an aneurysmal inkblot.

My bottom lip trembled.

It had been one thing to slowly recognize the bland truth about everyone else at
Régine
—but Edmund too?

Like a slow-moving washing machine, my stomach churned as the truth about him became sickeningly apparent. Even with all the patterns and the colors screaming for attention, the apartment was like the bags under Edmund's eyes: sagging, tired. In the middle of his huge flashy bedroom, his satin-covered, queen-size bed was collapsed in its center like a broken lung, and everywhere the stacks of magazines leaned against each other for relief.

Edmund Benneton wasn't a genius. He was a sham. He was
tired, washed out, relying on twenty-four-karat bells and whistles to sustain his reputation as a “creative” while all along living in sleepless fear of his inevitable undoing. My idol—
Régine
—my dream—it was all a sham.

How far I thought I'd come from poring over
Régine
at my mother's nail salon, dreaming of an escape—only to realize that this was exactly the same.

My arm gravitated onto my lap as the pages flipped over my thumb and the diary finally slipped away from me. I turned and noticed the bear's entire head was still attached to the bearskin rug I was sitting on. It had two glittering glass gemstones for eyes—and suddenly, I couldn't be there anymore. I scrambled in a panic to my feet, excavated a hole on a bookshelf with a swoop of my hand, and shoving, shoving, began to cram the diaries there, patting them in, a worthless row of bleak, colorful spines—pressed the bottom of my hand to my nose—sniffled, with one last, unbelieving glance around me, at Buddha, and Medusa, and cried out.

EVERY DAY THEREAFTER I DESCENDED INTO THE SUBWAY
like a buoy being dragged underwater.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are delayed because of train traffic ahead of us.”

One day an old woman with a head scarf spat phlegm into a corner of the train car. She hacked loudly while a wall of people pressed against me, trying to place inches between themselves and her. Someone cleared his throat loudly to remind her that her behavior was inappropriate, but she took it as a sign there was more phlegm in her own and continued to expectorate.

One day two black kids hollered at everybody to “Stand back, stand back, ev'rybody, it's
showtime
.” They blasted hip-hop from a handheld radio and started to do handstands before passing around a baseball cap for cash tips. When the train jolted to a stop, one of them accidentally kicked a baby stroller with his Nikes and they escaped onto the platform with dollar bills fluttering behind them.

One day two Asian women got into a fight when one of them bumped a cartful of lettuce heads against the other's cart of onions. But after a minute I wasn't sure if they were mad or if they just knew each other and were talking very loudly in Chinese while pointing in each other's faces.

One day the overhead voice said, “Stand clear of the closing doors, please”—the doors rung
ding-ding!
to close, then bluff
i
ng, rung
ding-ding!
to close again—then
ding-ding!
and
ding-ding!
and
ding-ding!
and “Stand clear of the closing doors, please,” then
ding-ding!
“Stand clear of the—”
ding-ding!
“Stand clear—”
ding-ding!
and everyone was looking around for whoever was holding the door open
ding-ding! ding-ding! ding-ding!
and it was a lady with an enormous suitcase who clearly did not fit into the subway car
ding-ding!
and I wanted to scream
STAND CLEAR OF THE FUCKING DOOR, PLEASE!
If I wasn't entitled to be happy or successful, wasn't I at least entitled to get home without being stuck in this miserable underground hell with you and your suitcase?
Ding-ding!

Every day, between all the setbacks, the same woman lent her cheerful but unconvincing voice to the overhead subway speakers—“
Next stop, Fourteenth Street
—
Next stop, Astor Place—Next stop, Bleecker Street
.” When she said it, it was as if she was teaching the stops to a child with learning difficulties—
FOUR-teenth Street,
AS-tor Place, BLEE-cker Street
—and I wondered if she was proud of herself for stifling the quality of my life, a life that became increasingly more pathetic with every commute. How old was she and how long had her voice been filling the subway trains? Did she live in New York, and if so, did she come onto the subway and tell people, “That's me, that's my voice”?

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are delayed because of train traffic ahead of us.”

Maybe she was poor and destitute and wore rags, and when she tried to tell people it was her voice on the loudspeaker they all thought she was another crackpot.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you are getting sadder and more pitiful every second.”

Maybe she was just like me, and when she heard her own voice, she thought,
“God, this is so all so exhausting.
”

“Ladies and gentlemen, it's never going to go away.”

Maybe she was already dead.