An Innocent Fashion (27 page)

“Ladies and gentlemen, and you, Ethan St. James, you're dead too.”

It was like this for one, two, three, four, five . . . days? Weeks? I honestly have no idea.

ONCE I ARRIVED AT
RÉGINE,
IT WAS ALWAYS THE SAME.

Somehow it was always me who ended up with the task of finding missing things in our overflowing closet. It was always something dreadfully obscure—either very insignificant (a missing pearl from a Chanel belt), very elusive (a pair of transparent plastic, fingerless Pucci gloves), or very generic (an unlabeled white crewneck Alexander Wang T-shirt, resembling every other unlabeled white crewneck T-shirt we had). Accessories were in
variably the worst: Finding a simple top hat from the Giorgio Armani collection involved sifting through about a hundred top hats we had received for a Charlie Chaplin-inspired couture story, looking frantically for the one that most closely resembled our check-in photograph while Sabrina pestered me every minute, “Armani! Armani! Armani!”

Because most of the accessories were unlabeled samples, I had suggested to Sabrina that we begin labeling everything, just writing the name of the designer on a piece of removable masking tape and slapping it somewhere we could easily see later. “You can't just put
ordinary tape
on haute couture,” she snapped. I considered proposing to her that we find a tape designed by Valentino.

My so-called “good eye,” on which I had so prided myself during my interview with Sabrina, became the bane of my existence, and although most of the missing things turned up after an hour or two of tedious searching, I felt like I was always looking for something I couldn't find.

I knew every morning when I stepped through the closet door, a familiar weight descending over me like a funerary shroud, that during the course of the day Sabrina would bark, George would scoff, Edmund would barge in, and the whole time in the background the fashion editors would gracefully loathe each other while Jane floated around, oblivious to it all.

I could see the truth now about Edmund. Of course the pictures he made were beautiful. He had every imaginable resource at his disposal—the best models and hair and makeup and clothes. He shot only the hottest, of-the-moment girls (“
Call Ford, I need the black girl with the gapped teeth
,” he'd say, or “
Who's this? I saw her at Karl's party and now she's shopping with Plum Sykes! Book her for tomorrow's shoot and cancel Natalia
.”). As far as I
knew, he had no true inspirations. His “inspiration boards” were just a random sampling of his favorite looks from the current collections, with a few shoes and handbags among them for good measure—everything chosen less for its aesthetic value than for its association with a brand name he liked.

My whole existence now felt like one of his diary entries:

            
Today I photographed in samples from Comme des Garçons Valentino Dries van Noten Fendi Max Mara Gucci Versace Tom Ford Christian Dior Michael Kors Miu Miu Alaïa and Giorgio Armani . . . Meanwhile Sabrina asked George did you see what Dorian Belgraves wore to Karl Lagerfeld's party while I continued looking for Armani and anyway it turned up on Will's desk but it didn't matter anyway because a call came in that Steven Meisel had to postpone the shoot we were prepping so everybody wanted their clothes back and I spent the rest of the day returning everything that had come in which I didn't even have the time to forget was Comme des Garçons Valentino Dries van Noten . . . Sabrina said Dorian Belgraves should do a shoot with his mother Edie . . . Fendi Max Mara Gucci . . . George said that was a brilliant idea . . . Dorian Belgraves Versace Dorian Belgraves Tom Ford Dorian Belgraves Christian Dior Dorian Belgraves Michael Kors Dorian Belgraves Miu Miu Dorian Belgraves Dorian Belgraves Dorian Belgraves

ON ONE FRIDAY OF AN INDISTINGUISHABLE WEEK AT
RÉGINE,
the editors sent me to pick up a package at the FedEx office.

There were two men waiting at the counter to assist me. The first man's name was Harvey, which I read on a tag on his shirt that said, HELLO, MY NAME IS HARVEY, and below it in smaller letters, PLEASE ASK ME ABOUT OUR MOVING KITS! The other man's name was Bert, and his tag was pretty much the same, except it said, PLEASE ASK ME ABOUT OUR BUY-TWO, GET-ONE DEALS ON SHIPPING TAPE!

Harvey was black, Bert was white, and both had more wrinkles than a prune or a golden raisin. When I handed Harvey the sticky with my tracking number, he said to Bert, “Hey, Bert, you remember how to log off this? I don't want to lose my place,” and I noticed that he had been playing solitaire on the computer.

“You just gotta . . .” Bert said, as he slowly stretched his arm out toward Harvey's mouse, in a movement reminiscent of tai chi. He couldn't quite get to it with Harvey in the way, so he said, “Wanna move that way, Harvey?”

And Harvey said, “Sure, Bert,” and inched his stool to the side, while trying to remain perched on top of it.

“I'm sorry to rush you,” I broke out, “but can you please hurry?”

They blinked at me, like
What's the rush?
and
How fast do you think we can go anyway?

Hoping to inspire a sense of urgency, I added, “It's for
Régine
.”

“What's
Régine
?” they asked together.

I started to take a breath. “It's a fashion magazine,” I disclosed. “A very important fashion magazine.” Bert's hand hovered over the computer mouse; they had progressed from moving slowly to not moving at all.

“Just—
please!
” I begged with a motion toward Bert's arthritic hand. The screen remained frozen on Harvey's solitaire game.

“A fashion magazine, huh?” Bert prodded. “Do you get to see a lot of women? Like supermodels?”

Harvey looked over and asked me, “That why you got on that nice getup?” referring to my Dior suit from Clara that, being the only understated outfit I owned, now constituted my daily wardrobe. Like a scorekeeper at a ping-pong game, his gape alternated between his computer screen and my suit. My suit won his favor and he altogether gave up any attempt to track my package. “Where could I get a suit like that?” he asked.

Bert seemed interested in the answer as well. Together, they shifted toward me and propped their elbows on the counter, like they expected me to tell them a bedtime story.

“You could go to Bergdorf Goodman,” I offered unhelpfully.

“Do you get to see a lot of women?” Bert asked me a second time.

“No.”

“You mean you've never worked with Claudia Schiffer?” He turned a little to Harvey. “You know, I asked Claudia Schiffer on a date one time.”

“You ain't serious,” Harvey scoffed. He warned me, “Don't listen to Bert. He's just old.”

“I swear,” Bert insisted. “I used to be a busboy at an Italian restaurant—was wipin' up some minestrone soup when she came in. She was with another lady, but I wasn't interested in her. Went right up to Claudia and gave her my phone number on the back of somebody's receipt.”

“What you think Claudia Schiffer gonna do with you?” Harvey laughed.

“I was real good-looking then, Harvey! Didn't have a busted leg. I said to Claudia Schiffer, ‘
Now ma'am, I don't mean to intrude on your dinner, but I gotta tell you, you even prettier in real life than in the magazines.
' She took my number and said ‘
Thank you
' like
a real lady, didn't make me feel bad or nothin'. Never called, though. She was like my fish that swum away. Ever heard that?” he asked me. “Or maybe it's the one that goes, you feed a fish once, you feed him just once, but you feed a fish twice—”

“I—I'm sorry,” I said, getting serious, “but I really, really need this package, like—
now
.”

Bert squinted, like he wasn't certain what package I was referring to.

“Look,” I said, leaning forward, “I'm not technically allowed to tell you this, but you seem like nice guys, so . . . this package I need—” I pointed at the number on my sticky note “—it's actually for
Claudia Schiffer
.”

Bert's and Harvey's eyes widened.

“You kiddin'!” Bert said.

“Nope, I'm not, and she really needs it this second, so—”

Bert got to clicking—I could tell he was trying very hard to concentrate—and the next minute he burst, “One thirty-four!”

“One thirty-four?” asked Harvey.

“Claudia's package is in truck one thirty-four! Now what you waiting for? Take the feller out back!”

There must have been a hundred trucks in the lot. Harvey murmured to himself as he scoured the lot for the right one. “Two fiddy-four . . . that ain't it . . . Two fiddy-three . . . that ain't it . . . Two fiddy-two . . . that ain't it . . . we must be in the two-hundreds!” he exclaimed. “Follow me! I know where your truck is!” I followed him through the maze—he was sort of hobbling—and he began once more, “One thirty-nine . . . that ain't it . . . One thirty-eight . . . that ain't it . . .” until at last, “Here it is!” he shouted, with a paralyzed finger in the air, and I breathed an incredible sigh of relief. “Help me up, will ya?”

I held out my hand so he could scramble onto the back,
and he initiated a wrestling match with a large red lever. When after a struggle, which I could tell was intense from the bead of Harvey's sweat that spattered onto my face, it appeared he had emerged victorious, Harvey began to spool up the steel door, then—
SLAM!
—an ungodly crash sent me reeling backward against the hood of another truck.

“
HOLY MOTHER OF JESUS DID YOU SEE THAT?
” yowled Harvey. “That thing almost sliced my fingers clean off!”

“Wait, what?” I cried.

“Looks like the spring in this truck just gave up! Door weighs about a hundred pounds, and without the spring, it just slams shut!”

Bert had joined us limping at our side—poor, confused Bert, who had no hope of understanding my predicament—and, like the spring of their van that had just inexplicably burst, I just . . . burst.

“ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND THAT MY FUTURE DEPENDS ON THIS PACKAGE? IF YOU THINK I'M GOING TO END UP LIKE YOU, CONTENT WITH MEETING CLAUDIA SCHIFFER AT A RESTAURANT WHILE I CLEAN UP OTHER PEOPLE'S SLOP, THEN YOU ARE FUCKING CRAZY!”

Five minutes later, I was holding a package from Chanel on my lap, and I was in a taxi en route to
Régine
.

M
adeline answered the phone just as I was preparing to give up. “Darling!” she exclaimed.

The sounds of a fine restaurant filled my ear: A clatter of dishes and glasses and voices, over the playing of a string quartet.

“I was wondering when you'd finally call me back. Dorian and I are always trying to invite you places, but you never
—
” She let out a little yelp of surprise, then humming to a companion, marveled, “Mmm, that's delicious.”

“Madeline, listen to me, I—”

“I'm sorry, darling,” she chewed. “Is everything okay?”

“No,” I declared, “Everything is not okay.” I lay tangled up in bedsheets with my head upside down off the mattress, a wounded victim in a Goya etching. “I'm going crazy—
Régine
, New York,
everything is just driving me crazy.” I hastily sat up in bed and locked my arms around my knees. Under its four-foot ceiling, my room felt like a solitary confinement cell as I rocked back and forth, demented. Was this where I was living now? Where was I? What was I doing here?

She held the phone away from her ear and asked her waiter for a lemon wedge. “Darling, can I call you back? They just brought out the entrées and—”

“Madeline, I'm not kidding—if you don't come hold me right now, I swear I'm going to die.”

“Why are you being so
dramaaaatic
?”

“I'm not being dramatic! I'm serious . . . I need help,” I whimpered, at the precipice of tears.

She made a drowned-out remark to her companion. I heard the scrape of a chair against the floor. Conversations droned rising and falling like mixed radio signals as she traveled through the room, then—“Okay,” she said at last, and she must have withdrawn to the bathroom, because a door shut and—silence.

I thought I recognized the echo of a lipstick tube popping open. “Why don't you meditate?” Madeline suggested. “That used to always help you.”

“I can't concentrate.”

“Just
close
your eyes, I promise.”

I covered my eyes with my hand, and squeezing hard, counted, “One . . . two . . .”

“That's better,” Madeline said, gently smacking her lips together. “Just take a deep breath . . .”

Three. Four.

“. . . picture us luxuriating in the grass, laughing and drinking wine . . .”

Five. Six.

“. . . passing around oysters and caviar, while the sun shines and violins play all around . . .”

Seven. Eight.

“. . . just breathe, and imagine it all in your head—”

“I don't want it to be in my head!” I blurted. “Why can't things be real?!”

“Ethan, relax!”

“Really though—what do I have to do to make it real?”

“Why don't you just—”

“I
caaaaannn'ttttt.
”

“Well there's no use comforting you when you're like this. Remember what you used to always say—the world's just a reflection of our minds, and you can accomplish anything if—”

“I don't believe in that anymore,” I wailed at my cheerfully striped sheets.

“Oh, for God's sake, darling, we haven't even been out of college for three months yet.”

Madeline's invocation of the pet-like “darling” was suddenly as irritating to me as Dorian's “babe”: a frivolous, hollow word, full of indiscriminating intimacy.

“Of course you'd say that. You don't have to work for anything!”

I heard a sharp gasp, and the whip of her lipstick into the bag. “Not that you'd know,” she muttered bitterly through clenched teeth, “but I have been working
very
hard on my auditions.”

“You don't even
care
about acting.”

I heard her fumble with the lock on the bathroom door. “I'm going back to dinner.”

“Fine. What is it anyway, a bucket of caviar?”

“Foie gras,” she spat, and the door finally swung open, letting all the voices in. “It's Dorian's treat. I'll tell him you send your love.”

ALMOST THREE MONTHS AGO, MADELINE HAD BEEN ON AN
outdoor stage with eleven others, distinguished by her on-campus political efforts and radiant hair, while my peers sat alongside me in a sea of white lawn chairs, everyone in blue graduation robes and matching mortarboard caps. Behind us our parents craned their necks, eagerly clutching video cameras and signs that read,
CONGRATS GRAD
! while light fell through the trees like sunbeams through a cathedral dome. If you were the religious type, you could have said that we appeared blessed.

My own parents were in the audience, exhausted from their red-eye the night before, and probably flabbergasted to at last be playing some role in my life. Over the past four years, obligatory summer vacations in Corpus Christi had constituted the main patches of our threadbare relationship, as during the school year I rarely called them, and two times I had escaped a Christmas homecoming by accepting holiday travel invitations with the Dupres instead. The summer after freshman year I had entertained the idea of backpacking by myself through Europe, only to discover the prohibitive reality of transatlantic plane fare, and ruefully accept my inevitable three-month sentence back home. With the fierce singlemindedness that would become the hallmark of every summer thereafter, I worked several jobs and barely saw my parents at all, as I furiously stockpiled funds for my eventual big move. Ambition had disinherited me from them—until I woke up that morning on graduation day to find
my mother ironing my ceremonial gown, and almost cried at the tragic realization of what her presence meant.

Now an old man was on the stage, talking for a long time. I didn't know who he was or why he should be there—maybe nobody else did either, and we were all just letting him talk out of politeness—but regardless he sure did
talk
. In fact, he talked like it was the last time he would ever talk to anyone, like he was afraid that when he was done he might just turn over and die, because truly he covered every single topic: Hard work and responsibility, dreams and passion, the “true meaning” of practically every complicated matter, it seemed, including love and friendship. To be honest, I didn't hear anything at all, just gazed at his withered lips on the projector screen, waiting in anguish for him to finish. Every word was a step closer to the end, another brick off the wall that for all of eternity had separated us from our independence, our true purpose in the world. In my mind the wall was crumbling lower and lower with every anecdote and cliché and quote, every invocation of a historical hero and every “
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said
,” until beyond the pile of rubble we could finally see a whole cloudless sky and another sun burning brighter than the one behind us. One of us had climbed the remains of the wall in graduation robes, and dropped to the other side—then the rest of us were swarming upward together, climbing and pulling on each other's robes, yelping with delight at discovering the mystery that still awaited on the other side, and when I had almost reached the top—all around, the wall was still flowing downward, I finally got to see. An endless field of rippling gold rye, and everybody spilling into it, rushing toward the new sun . . .

Beside me, Blake laughed at something the old man said. I looked up, watching the passage of a single cloud in the sky. Its
slow, dutiful movement away from the sun eliminated the last doubts that we had been singled out in the world for eternal brightness.

Finally, the man paused. Then, maybe because I thought his speech was over—I saw the glimmer of gold beyond him—I listened to his next words, which I repeated to myself every day thereafter.

“You are the best and the brightest,” he told us, with more soaring conviction than I had heard in my entire life. “Full of new ideas, and great promise. From this day forward, the entire world will bend to you, like flowers to the light.”

I STARTED BY CONTEMPLATING THE ASPIRIN.

Misuse could lead to serious side effects,
the bottle promised
, including stomach pains, and in rare cases—death.
Besides that, it didn't offer any clues, like how many one should take to achieve said death, or what constituted a “rare case.”

I rattled the bottle; considered the cinematic weight of the moment. If this were some Cannes-worthy drama, I knew exactly where they should pan the camera, what kind of lighting would be just right. I poured the contents onto my palm and began lining up the pills along the edge of the porcelain sink. One, two, three, four . . . ten. Ten pills. I couldn't conceive that ten tiny pills would have any effect beyond giving me a stomachache. With one fluid motion, I scooped them back into my palm like a handful of colorless M&M's. Together they were so small compared to the rest of me
—
if I decided I was serious, I'd have to get another bottle, at least.

I wondered if, to achieve my intended outcome, I should take
them the way someone normally took aspirin? Just pop them in my mouth, two by two, like animals into Noah's Ark, until I was safe from the flood inside my head? Maybe it was a better idea to just eat them: grab a handful, toss them in my mouth at once, and chew them up like a chalk salad.

I tried to think of anybody I knew who had killed themselves. Adults always made it seem like suicide was some kind of epidemic, like kids were doing it all the time, but the only person I sort of knew who had killed himself was Alvin Baker, and the coroners weren't even sure if he had done it on purpose. They had found him in his dorm room in Berkeley Hall, where he'd overdosed, like Marilyn Monroe. The autopsy report was withheld for days and I remember that week hearing terrible rumors that there might have been a murder. It was wrong of us to talk about him while he was dead; nobody really knew him, but of course when something like that happens, it's all, “
He used to shower on our floor
,” and “
I had Psych with his roommate
,” although you couldn't really blame us all, because, well—how often did anything happen in real life that was like something on TV? The strangest part was how his parents acted—they didn't cry at the wake. But I guess when something terrible like that happens, it's hard to say how anyone should react. Later it went around that Alvin had intentionally overdosed on Ritalin, but ultimately, who knew?

Alvin Baker had been a science major, so I'd never crossed paths with him. I do remember that on the afternoon before his funeral I had been walking home from class when the marching band came out of nowhere into Cross Campus, and started playing songs by The Beatles. They did that kind of thing all the time at Yale—the pep squad, or the Pundits, or whomever, would just get together and make a commotion outside; the point is, it was so common for the marching band to be out on a beautiful
autumn day, playing “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” that I didn't think twice about it. Nobody was dancing, so I dropped my bag, threw my hands in the air, and did a cartwheel. People could be so infuriating sometimes—here was the marching band playing a great song, and everyone around them just trudging along like some kind of funeral procession. It made me crazy. I danced beside them and made a huge scene.

I felt an arm reach out from the procession. “Hey, Cecily,” I said. We'd had a class together the year before—Intro to Evolution, or some requirement—but I didn't know her very well. “Why isn't anybody having fun? This is great!”

“It's for Alvin,” she replied. “He died, remember? They're playing his favorite songs.”

After that I could barely stand up straight. Moments like that, they sting you like a slap in the face.

Now I was teetering there in the bathroom, thinking about Alvin, when he appeared to me. Except for his picture in the
Yale Daily News
, I had never known what he looked like, but in that moment I saw his face. He wore glasses and a plaid shirt, and he was rolling his eyes, shaking his curly-haired head at me. “
Fuck you
,” Alvin Baker said. “
You put those pills back and cut the bullshit
.”

I poured the pills back in the bottle and wiped my hands against my shirt. The pills had gotten soggy in my sweaty palm and left a white residue.

The bathroom heat seemed more excruciating than it had been all summer. I took off all my clothes and sat on the lid of the toilet. My pores filled up with sweat. I thought of Edmund, and grew a little faint.