An Innocent Fashion (7 page)

George Beckett was as short and as round as a prize-winning pumpkin. Underneath a hardened shell of shiny orange hair—his white side part appeared chopped by a knife—his upturned nose assessed me for barely a second before he barreled away.

“Good to meet you!” I scrambled to catch up to the heels of his black oxfords.

George wore a dress shirt and trousers, all black. Despite this, he was Sabrina's physical opposite—pasty and white, the sole color on his face supplied by a bounty of freckles scattered like toasted nuts over his doughy cheeks. I was struck by the fact that, for a body of such Lilliputian proportions—I think he grazed five feet—his gait was astonishingly accelerated.

“This'll be my first time in the office,” I confided, as we approached the glass doors.

He turned slightly. His scrunched-up nose gave him the look of someone permanently in the midst of an objectionable odor. In a voice that was at once nasal and high-pitched, he said, “Great color scheme. You'll fit right in.” Then that nose commandeered a pucker of repulsion across his whole face.

I looked down at myself in my head-to-toe raspberry-pink suit, with a white shirt and striped purple necktie. After Sabrina's indictment of my thrifted garb, I had unwisely splurged on a new pair of shoes—plum velvet loafers, each embroidered with a lion's head in gold thread—although when I had dressed that morning, Sabrina hadn't been on my mind. The primary object of my bombastic efforts was my new boss, Edmund Benneton—my idol—who was always traipsing around to parties and fashion shows swathed in shades of ruby, amethyst, and citrine, his fingers glittering like Aladdin's cave of jewels.

I'd had a fever dream the night before about our first en
counter. In my dream I had been minding my own business, tending the flowers in some meadow—obviously—when Edmund rolled past me in a golden carriage. “
You there!
” he'd called out across a ripple of long emerald grass. He ordered the carriage to a screeching halt, and leapt out in breeches and leather lace-up boots, like some Don Juan on the cover of a historical romance paperback. “
Don't you look stunning!
” he proclaimed.
“How about I be your mentor, and help you get everything you want out of life!”
Naturally I demurred, and just as I was preparing to accept his invitation—to ride with him in his carriage into the sunset, toward a life full of photo shoots and exclusive events—a giant casserole dish fell from the sky, and we were instantly crushed.

Beep!
George now pressed his ID against the electronic reader.

“When we go through this door, you cannot speak,” he threatened. It was hard to take him seriously, with his little freckles and bright red hair.

He pushed open the glass door, and I prepared myself to enter the hub that had rocketed so many into the glittering cosmos of fame and beauty. A million years from now, when all the friends who loved me were gathered at a dinner party in my honor, I would recount this very moment. Edith Wharton would be sitting at one end of the table, and Edmund at the other. “Ethan used to see beauty everywhere,” my mother would whisper to Edith, reaching into her purse for the disintegrating remains of a flower garland I had made as a child. Ms. Duncan would be telling them the
Gatsby
anecdote, and then Patrick Demarchelier would say, “
He was the best editor in the world, always just—full of ideas!
” There'd be roses on the table—lavender and pastel yellow—and everybody would be drinking out of bone-
white teacups with Oriental dragons painted on the sides. “
When I entered Régine for the first time
,” I would say, my lips holding the attention of the entire room, “
everything was perfect at last.
”

At
Régine
, there would be none of the ugliness that I had spent my life trying to escape, first by losing myself in the pages of the magazine itself and later, as an art history major, through marble and oil paint. Here, people would all have sensitive eyes like mine. They would appreciate the beauty in life, and share my goal of making the world more beautiful.

I followed George through the glass door.

WHEN WE PULLED UP TO THE FRESHMEN GATE ON MOVE-IN
day, Yale was just like I'd imagined, with its turrets and wrought ironwork and stained glass windows and—

“Are you sure this is it?” my mother gaped. “This looks like—I don't know, a castle or something.”

“
No, mi amor,
” my father corrected, “is just
el famoso
Jail.” He laughed at his own joke and almost swerved into a parking meter.

Since the arrival of my crest-emblazoned acceptance letter in the mail, all interactions with my father had included some variation of this overplayed joke: When he attempted to pronounce Yale, his coarse Spanish accent produced “Jail” instead.

It was, I suppose, better for both of us than the icy curtain that had descended after his outburst against my ill-fated earring. At some point, he seemed to actually realize what that letter meant—I was leaving for college, far away, and those months would be the last time I would live with them. Furthermore, in the time he had been silently condemning me, I had been trying
hard to actually accomplish something. He had no true context for the significance of “getting into college,” let alone getting into Yale; nobody he knew had ever even
done
that, and Corpus Christi wasn't like any town in the Northeast, where every parent drew their child from the womb and then immediately enrolled them in college-prep exams while prodding them to acquire hobbies and passions and admissions-worthy “special skills.” Independent of him, I had done this “great” thing, and—most crushing to the pride he took in being the family breadwinner—he was no longer needed to provide for me. Yale was paying for everything. As a mixed-race boy from a small town, with SAT scores and accomplishments to rival anyone who had attended Hotchkiss or Horace Mann, my application was an easy case for a diversity-craving admissions panel.

“You excited,
cabrón
?” he had started asking me at dinnertime, reeling me into one of his sweaty embraces. “I hear dey have good food over der in Jail!”

Now my father said, “
Mira los
prisoners!” I didn't hear him through the wind coursing around my ears. Like a child, I had unbuckled in the backseat and thrust my head out of the window, an uncontrollable grin spreading over my face. I was dressed in a navy double-breasted suit, with an orchid pinned to my lapel, ready to introduce myself to the next four years of my life. The New Haven air cooled my cheeks, coursed through my hair, sent my silky open collar flapping around my neck.

“Welcome! Welcome!”
yelled face-painted upperclassmen, herding awestruck tenderfoots to their residential dorms.
“If you're in Calhoun dorm, come with me! Branford, come with me! Davenport! Pierson! Berkeley!”

I couldn't breathe. I was like an orphan who had been disap
pointed on every Christmas morning of his life, only to be confronted this year by a mountain of presents grander than he'd ever dreamed of.

All around, there were people just like me—odd ones, outsiders. A black father, photographing Wife and Daughter's first tread through the hallowed gate; an Asian girl, calling for her dad to help unload an armchair. One Indian family consisted of at least twelve well-wishers in tunics and saris, crying and clasping their hands together. The beneficiary of their profuse affection was a ponytailed girl in a Yale cable-knit sweater who beamed visibly with relief, like a crab who had outgrown her shell and was finally clattering toward a roomier arrangement.

There were all the white families too. Mostly New Englanders, all of them cut out of some preppy catalogue, the mothers with their pearls and their headbands and the sleeves of their dainty sweaters tied over polo shirts; the fathers with monogrammed dress shirts tucked neatly into pleated khakis; a coordinated mélange of summertime colors—pink and tangerine and azure blue—like a fete of colorful umbrellas gathered on a beach in Nantucket. These were the “old money” families, from a class I had never known—families with stock portfolios and black cards and sprawling legacies of personal worth, with memberships at golf clubs and an ancestral claim to passage on the
Mayflower
. For their progeny, today was a preordained rite of passage, the culmination of a lifelong debate over whether they would choose Yale like Daddy, or Princeton like Mother, or maybe pull a radical stunt and end up at Harvard in the footsteps of loony, lovable Uncle Charlie.

Once we had parked, my father couldn't get enough of them. “
¡Mira estos locos!
” he exclaimed, drunk with bewilderment, and
my mother had to scold him for pointing openly at all the white people. Having never traveled beyond Texas or New Mexico, she seemed frightened by all the banners and turrets. She held on to my father's arm in a daze, while I ran ahead of them into the swarming courtyard.

I could scarcely tell what was happening. From the car to my dorm was a blur of green lawns—I couldn't believe how
green!
—but somehow I knew exactly where to go, and when I arrived at the dorm entryway, the door was vaulted and the stairway was stone and the windows leading up the tower (yes,
tower!
) were stained glass, and I realized this wasn't just a dream, but that every day, from this day forward, I would pass through that vaulted door, and climb that stone stairway, and pass those stained glass windows, and when I got to the top there would be a door—
my
door—and inside would be
my
room, full of
my
things, and
my
beautiful new life.

I was jostled by faces moving up and down the stairs, shouting, “
Hello! Hiya! How's it going! What's your name! Where are you from!
” every voice an affirmation of community, of friendship, of you and me and us together, every moment a handshake and a set of white teeth and a new friend, exclaiming, “
I'm Charlotte! I'm Nick! I'm Fatima! James! Cecilie! Francisco! Jessica!
” like hands raised in the air in a collective declaration:
We're here! We did it! We're together now, and we will never be sad or alone or unhappy again!

Amid the faces were the things getting dragged, exchanging hands, or going
clonk! clonk! clonk!
on the steps—a lamp and a bookshelf and some pillows and an armchair and another lamp and more pillows and a box full of books and a picnic basket and an ironing board and a cage with a parakeet squawking,
“Mildred! Mildred!”—all of things we brought to make this place belong to us.

The transport of my own belongings to my dorm suite was a process quite unseen by me. One moment I had flung open the door to an empty common room, greeted by the sight of a stone fireplace; the next, my parents had appeared with my suitcases and my rolled-up art posters and my potted calla lily, which was already swaying on the mantle.

“What do you think of this here?” my mom asked, holding up to the mahogany-paneled wall my poster of John Singer Sargent's
Portrait of Madame X
. I didn't look up, but ran to the bathroom and dementedly proceeded to test the faucets—open and close—thinking,
My water! My sink! My bathroom!
as the water guzzled out in abundance.

“Elián . . . ?”

I flew back into the common room, where my mother remained with her flabby arm upraised, defenseless Madame X curling dejectedly onto her brown, ponytailed head. Across from the Gothic triptych of arched windows my father had collapsed into a lump onto the pile of suitcases, and was yawningly picking at a back molar with his finger.

“Looks great!” I shouted with a half-glance at my mother, while I poked my head in and out of closets and made a full pointless revolution around the common room.

I just wanted to go outside and smile and nod and shake more hands and collapse onto the feet of one of the noble bronze men standing prim and poised throughout campus, whose job it was to remind us that if we did it right, one day we too could be immortalized forever on a pedestal.

I rushed to a corner, crossing my arms over my chest, and
tried with a deep breath to collect myself. I paced to one side of the common room, then the other, then back, then glanced out the window and, throwing my hands in the air, I bolted out of the suite door—a whole world to explore!—and crashed straight into a mirror.

“It's about time, Daddy,” rang out a voice behind the mirror, as resonant as a tap on a wineglass, followed by a “Hear! Hear!” in a crowded ballroom.

It was an antique standing mirror, a white oval frame fastened by a wrought iron pivot to a dainty pedestal. Aside from my own reflection, the only visible sign of a human presence was a pair of feet below, sheathed in patent nude Ferragamo ballerina slippers, each with a chunky one-inch heel and matching grosgrain bow on the front.

“Why do you always let the Powells trap you?” came the voice. “It's all money talk with them—brokers and blue chips . . . it makes me want to just—” the voice faltered under her reflective burden, “—
scream
.” This last word resounded as the bearer of the mirror teetered like the poor, unpracticed cousin of world-bearing Atlas. My reflection swerved toward me. With a clatter of heels, the patent-sheathed feet staggered dangerously backward near the landing's edge
.