An Innocent Fashion (28 page)

“I'M LEAVING,” GEORGE ANNOUNCED TO ME THE NEXT MORNING,
without glancing up from his computer screen.

I yawned, and unbuttoned my suit jacket to take a seat. “Okay. Leaving where?”

“Leaving
R
égine
,” he said. “Today is my last day.”

My chair let out an astonished squeak beneath me. “You're kidding me,” I gaped. I was roused to full attention. “That's . . . huge.”

“I knew you would be devastated,” he said
,
as he tidied up a stack of papers with his fat fingers. “Just keep the tears to a minimum.”

I laughed at him as a wave of unexpected delight rose inside me.

“Here,” he said, holding out a densely stuffed manila folder with both hands. “Sabrina doesn't want to be bothered with hiring interns again, so this weekend I got started finding a replacement. These are some résumés we had on file, plus some I got after I placed an ad on the Hoffman-Lynch website last week.”

“This is—
amazing
,” I said, flabbergasted. “You're not joking, are you?”

“Have I ever ‘joked' with you? Take it,” he said, and shoved the folder into my hands.

“This is so sudden! What happened? I mean—is everything okay?”

“Okay? Of course it's okay.” He gave me a strange look, which transmuted into a knowing laugh. “Oh. You didn't hear? I'm being promoted.”

The folder almost fell out of my hands like a brick. “Wait—what?”

“They're hiring me at British
Régine
.”

All the glee that had sparkled like a burst of confetti the moment prior now sunk with a whoosh to the carpet. Of course he had been promoted.

“It's in London,” George added. “They needed a new assistant there.”

“I know where British
Regíne
is,” I snapped. A lump formed in my throat as I dropped the folder onto the desk. “You got . . . a real job then?” I asked meekly.

“In two months, I'll be on the masthead there.” His chin was resting in his pudgy palm, as he began double-clicking on his files, deleting them one by one to prepare his computer for the next person.

Sabrina was elsewhere in the office, and the fashion closet was dead silent. I stared at my desk for some sign of what I should be feeling, but the only thing there was a diamond-studded Louis Vuitton wristwatch.

Did this mean . . . .
What
did this mean?

George turned and began to say something, but I couldn't hear him over my own thoughts.

How had George gotten a job? If George was as bad as I thought—unoriginal and rude, with brownnosing as his only distinguishing skill, then how—
how?
—had he gotten a job? Before me! At British
Régine
, of all places! That was almost better than working at American
Régine
—he'd get a dream job
and
a whole new life in London, while I . . . well, what about me?

I was wearing Dior, for the love of God! Not to mention that I had gone to Yale, and I had even changed my name, my entire identity, to escape the looming threat of failure—yet how could it be that I might
still
fail, that no matter what I'd done, or what
I did, I could live the rest of my life never becoming the person I so desperately wanted to be?

Did this mean that to make it in the world I had to be—like
George
?

“Did you hear me, Ethan?”

I could only stare at my hands on my lap.

“I'm trying to tell you that you should schedule interviews for new candidates by Wednesday. Jane and Edmund will both be shooting stories next week, so you should train the new intern while the office is quiet.”

“I don't understand
,
” I blurted, almost choking on the words. “Why? Why would anybody choose you?”

“Oh, calm down,” he said. “You should just be happy you won't see me anymore.”

A tear burned in the corner of my eye. George wasn't even rich, or beautiful. At least those reasons I vaguely comprehended, even if they were unfair.

He glimpsed my wounded face, as I tried to swallow the emotion that was welling up in me. “God, you're pathetic,” he said.

“It just doesn't make any sense,” I said, shaking my head. “Between the two of us, it's me whose been paying my dues, slaving away while you . . .”

He rolled his eyes. “You think that because you've been interning for a few months, you've paid your dues? Some people work for
years
for the job they want.”

“Like you?” I scoffed, my misery crystallizing into scorn.

“I know how lucky I am,” he said. “But maybe if you weren't such a self-pitying brat, you could
learn
something from me.”

My voice escalated: “Learn what? You're
horrible
.”

“Lower your voice, if you know what's good for you.” He slid
a stick of peppermint gum onto his tongue and tossed the foil wrapper into the wastepaper basket. “Remember, I'm the one that's leaving. You'll still have to make it work here, day in and day out, until you've proven you're more than a pitiful slave.”

I cemented my teeth together and looked away.

“Now listen to me, Ethan St. James,” he chewed. His gum made a sickening smack as he moved it contemptuously from one side of his mouth to the other. He leaned in toward my face while I glared at the
Régine
logo on my screen. The veins in my throat bulged. The smell of artificial mint filled my nostrils. The hair on the side of my head tingled as his mouth hovered by my ear. He opened his lips, and I heard the slow unsticking of saliva as they parted over my earlobe.

“Grow the fuck up. You think I'm so different from you? That I'm here on a free ride, like Sabrina, and everybody else? We're both playing the same game. Except for you—” he leaned back in his chair “—you're just a child. You show up on the first day with all your colors like this is kindergarten, wanting everybody to think you're so special—”

“That's not true,” I interjected. My voice was hoarse. “You don't even know me.”

“There you go, thinking you're so
unique
all the time, when really what you want is the exact same thing I want—the same thing everybody wants. You don't realize, you're just a clone of everybody here—a less competent clone.”

I gritted my teeth and repeated, “You—don't—
know
—me.”

He leaned back a little and laughed.
“
Is that so? I can tell you everything about you in two seconds.” He rolled his chair next to mine—
tap!
—and grabbed me by the wrist. I winced as he stretched out my palm and pretended to read it like a fortune-
teller. “You want to be the center of attention,” he said
,
as he poked his finger into my flesh. I remained still as he prodded one spot after another on my unflinching hand. “You want to get ahead. You want to be loved. You want to be noticed.” Then he traced his finger slowly in a full circle around my palm. “You want to be a beautiful person . . . and be surrounded by beautiful things . . . and have a
beeeaaauuuutiful
life,” and to hear him say that word, “beautiful,” which in fact
had
ruled my entire life—it suddenly seemed like a terrible, sinister thing, and my fingers curled like the petals of a dying flower. “Don't pretend you're above all that,” he said. “Don't pretend, because at the end of the day, you're a person just like the rest of us.”

My shoulders fell slack. I gazed at my fingers twitching in George's hand.

He picked up the Louis Vuitton watch resting by my keyboard, and slowly brought it into his own lap. “Remember when I asked you to get that pointless book from the library—how you didn't ask questions?” He unclasped the watch. “You just did it.” George began to slide the Louis Vuitton watch onto my wrist. “And after that, the book sat there all day. And the next week, after I made you lug a hundred trunks, while I just sat here arranging gloves, I asked you to take it back to the library. And you still did it. That's why I'm going to London to get paid as a fashion assistant, and you're staying here to work for free, photographing handbag check-ins.”

He turned my naked wrist up to shut the clasp—
click!

“See, what you don't understand is, your degree doesn't matter,” he went on. “Your interests don't matter.
You
don't matter. You think anyone cares what you know or what you like or what you
feel
? There are a million nobodies like you—
individuals, whatever. You really think you're the only one? That you're special? We all have lives, you know—‘personalities.' Clara and Will, Christine and Sabrina,” he rattled, “all of them, and me. But at the end of the day, it's not their names at the top of the magazine. It's not your name or my name—it's
Régine
. And that's how all those people get to be here, because they know that when they're here, they're not Clara or Will or Christine or Sabrina. They're a
grown-up
woman named Régine, and you know what?—Régine might be beautiful on the outside, but on the inside, she wouldn't even care if everybody else in the world died.”

I was silent. I thought of Clara and Will and Christine, forced to gather around a plate of cupcakes for Clara's birthday—tense, mistrusting, each of them hiding a knife behind their back in case one of the others moved too quickly. I thought of Clara, dressing me in acceptable neutral shades
.
“
This is simply the world we live in, my dear
,” she had said.

Outside the fashion closet, I could hear Sabrina buzzing to them, and the copy machine humming, and everybody's cubicle-encased hearts beating in the same mechanical rhythm, slow and calculating. Grown-up. Soulless.

“You think I hate you, and that I actually
like
Sabrina?” he laughed. “You know how she even got that position, right? She's best friends with Ava Burgess's daughter. No fashion experience, no credentials—never worked a day in her life, for a job both of us would kill for. But you know what . . . ? I can't do anything about that, and neither can you.” He pointed in the direction of Sabrina's desk. “If you were in Sabrina's chair, it'd be you I would pretend to like—but you're not.”

I stared at Sabrina's empty cubicle.

“When I'm gone,” George said, “someone else will sit here, and I'd suggest you take advantage of them. Learn your lesson: Be more like Régine.” He pointed to the folder full of résumés
—
all the people who wanted a chance in this place
.
“These are the candidates I have for you. You can take them or leave them. It makes no difference to me.” Then he gestured at the watch he had fastened to my wrist. “It's a nice watch, isn't it?”

My hand was still resting on his lap. I felt the pulse run through his leg, imagined the blood pumping inside of him, and wondered if we were actually the same—just two ambitious young people, who under different circumstances, might even have been friends. I didn't know much about George's story. Perhaps he even had the same dream as me.

I took my hand back and gave a quiet rattle to my wrist. The words
Louis Vuitton
glittered over an ebony face, and I thought about what it would actually mean to own a watch like that—not to just wear it, but to have it in a drawer somewhere, to take it out once in a while and look at it, and know that I had money and power and everything I could ever want. I turned my arm to make the watch sparkle—it was hard, cold—then unclasped it, and laid it back on the table.

“I could never be like Régine,” I said, finally.

George returned the watch to its black velvet box. “Too bad.”

The closet door swung open.

George closed the box as Sabrina charged past us. “Boys,” she said over her shoulder. “There's a Miu Miu glove missing. Black leather—came in with Jane's L.A. trunks last week and they need it back today.”

George had kept the glove records the previous week. He opened his mouth—I thought, to inform her—but instead, he
lied. “Ethan kept those records last week. He'll find it by the end of the day.”

I rolled my eyes.
“
What time is your flight? Hadn't you better leave right now?”

“Sorry, Ethan. At least,” he patted me on the back, “it's only a few more hours.”

And remarkably, as promised, it really was.

When the time came for George to go, I was cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by a hundred pairs of black gloves. It could have been that to locate the pair which resembled so many others required my full concentration, but I was almost certain George didn't say a word of farewell to anyone, just took his bag and was gone for good. His parting gift to me was the folder full of people who could replace him, and the résumés were waiting for me around eight, after Sabrina left and all my work was done. By then the glove was found: It had never been missing at all, naturally, but pilfered without any notice by the fashion editors to examine at their desks. Now I could feel George's minty breath lingering over me as I settled back on the carpet to sift through the pile of résumés.

My first prospective intern was Polina Nabokov, who had studied Agriculture at a trade school in Russia and was George's idea of a joke, surely. I started a pile for résumés that constituted a flat-out no, then continued on.

Eric Mendelsonn had misspelled the word “fasshion” in his cover letter. No.

Jenny Kohler was “excited to learn all about the real world of supermodels, like my idol Naomi Campbell.” No.

Dorian Belgraves had—

I had to read it twice.
Dorian Belgraves.
The sight of his name
slapped me hard across the face like an open palm. No. Absolutely not. I had never mentioned Dorian and my relationship to George, yet that was definitely a joke, to have included in my pile of
Régine
hopefuls the bane of my existence. My body shuddered at the thought of him. If I had any say in the matter, Dorian would
never
step foot inside the fashion closet of
Régine
, not when he had never expressed the slightest interest in being a fashion editor—and especially not to sit in the chair next to me. “
Régine wouldn't even care if everybody else in the world died
,” George had said, and in that moment, I understood.