An Innocent Fashion (8 page)

“Careful!” Reaching out I caught a slender forearm, and the floating mirror swayed blindly toward safety. “Can I help you with that?”

My voice evidently was not the expected baritone. “Oh!” the mirror exclaimed, “I thought you were . . .” She poked her head out from behind the glass.

My heart, which had just a moment ago been racing, came to a halt, like a galloping horse suddenly digging its hooves into the
earth. My grasp on her arm reflexively tightened. The mirror's clawed feet pawed the hallway in a series of scrapes, then gave in at last with the crunching finality of wrought iron on stone tile.

The girl blinked her blue eyes, spread apart across exultant cheekbones. Her jaw was wide, almost square, with a shadowed cleft in her chin. A long, unbrushed tangle of thick blonde hair dangled like raw silk around her face.

My grip on her arm slackened. “I'm sorry.” I jerked my hand back toward my own body, where I struggled to find an appropriate place for it, and after patting the length of my suit jacket—I must have appeared to have lost something—I gulped, and jammed it awkwardly into my front pocket.

Her hands were on either side of the mirror. Her grip relaxed, and her palms slid down the length of the oval as she cocked her head and drew her gaze toward the orchid on my lapel. Her shiny lips split open like two halves of a ripe, pink fruit, and she burst into a laugh that filled the air with color.

Her eyes wandered next to the buttons on my suit. “Double-breasted!” she remarked. She had a small gap in her front teeth.

With a sidestep from behind the glass, she revealed herself in a toile-patterned sundress, with a knee-grazing skirt blossoming outward from a black satin bow around her waist. She extended her hand toward me. “I'm Madeline,” she said, the syllables falling like raindrops onto a lily pond.

“Elián,” I managed with a gulp, slipping my hand into hers. I was overwhelmed by the sensation of her pulse against my fingers.

“Ethan?” In the absence of her supervising grasp, the mirror pivoted absently on its hinge like an hourglass. A sudden flash, as the surface caught a sunbeam through the window.

“Did you say—Ethan?” she repeated. But downstairs the entryway door swung open, and suddenly voices were floating up
and down the steps again, all the
hellos
and
how are yous
, inquiries about names and hometowns—then someone was upon us: Daddy, or, as I'd come to learn, Mr. Dupre.

“Darling, you've gone up too far,” he informed her. With his tucked-in shirt and tasseled loafers, and his blonde hair swept neatly to the side over one ear, he was one of those “
locos
” who had earlier so amused my father. “This is the fourth floor. Your room is on the third.”

Madeline turned to him—her hand was still in mine—and started, almost accusingly, “But the Powells . . . I didn't . . . how was I to know?” Then a silly laugh.

He hoisted the mirror onto his chest. “Good morning,” he nodded at me, and faced downstairs.

Attempting a noble gesture, I broke the connection between Madeline's hand and my own. “Can I help you with that?” I asked, stepping toward her father.

But he didn't hear me as he concentrated on his labored descent. With a wordless wave to me, Madeline clattered down the steps behind him. She reached out for the mirror's edge, as though her halfhearted touch might alleviate the weight of it.

“I'll see you around?” I called after her.

She turned toward me and shrugged, before disappearing around the corner of the staircase, her footsteps echoing on and on away from me . . . and when I had come to my senses, my mother was calling, “Eliaaán!” and the whole landing smelled like elderflowers.

PAST THE GLASS DOORS AT
RÉGINE,
EVERYTHING WAS WHITE,
and everything was quiet. The air felt heavy—thick with an in
visible gas. I could sense the faint movements of human beings, tinkling as if they were insects trapped in jars.

I looked behind me as—
clang!—
the doors sealed me in.

George and I were at the beginning of a long passage, with cubicle walls on either side but no view of the people behind them. He heaved through the white hall as if he were walking on a conveyor belt, compensating for his middling stature with colossal strides, never looking back. I struggled to catch up, to breathe. In a lowered voice, he began reciting first-day fundamentals with the ceremony of a twelve-year-old boy giving a presentation in science class—some explanation of the earth's orbit copied verbatim from the Internet.

“Earth's orbit is the motion of the Earth around
Régine
, from an average distance of approximately 150 million kilometers away. A complete orbit of the earth around
Régine
occurs every 365.256363 solar days. On average it takes one month—an editorial cycle—for Earth to complete a full rotation about its axis relative to
Régine
magazine so that
Régine
returns to the meridian
. . . .

“Hey!” George snapped. “Are you getting this?”

“What?”

On one side the cubicles were replaced by a wall, displaying magazine covers in staggering, larger-than-life dimensions. Each frame contained a cover girl from my dreams, a modern Aphrodite, yet captivity had stripped away their collective power. They gazed out vacantly, a collection of nymphean specimens flattened out and pinned up behind glass for inspection.

“I
said
, we have to prepare for a run-through this morning.”

“What run-through?” My heart beat hard, like a captured butterfly—thrashing, confused. Where were all the glamorous people? The colors, the jewels—the outrageous outfits? All I saw was white walls.

“We'll have to do about thirty check-ins,” he said, “then organize everything, then—”

“Check-ins?” I asked hollowly.

A door.

“Welcome to the fashion closet,” George said, flinging the door open before him.

“Oh.” My hand flew to my mouth.

The so-called closet was larger than my house in Texas, with shelves on one side and garment racks on the other—and almost everything inside as white as snow. Along the long wall to the right, floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with every kind of white shoe imaginable—white stiletto heels, white chunky heels, white kitten heels, white closed-toe flats, white open-toed flats, white ankle boots, white calf-length boots—all white like the shelves they were resting on, so that if you looked very quickly you might think the shelves were only filled with shadows. In front of the shelves were several white folding tables covered with accessories, grouped in an orderly manner by type: hats and handbags and scarves and belts, with gloves and jewelry laid out in velvet-lined trays.

On the opposite side were rows and rows of garment racks. Hanging from the outermost rack were a hundred white, long-sleeved dresses in every texture—chiffon, lace, silk, leather, wool, even snakeskin—arranged from the shortest to the longest and spaced at even intervals, silver hangers protruding from the vast whiteness like the mechanical parts of a giant machine I was now inside.

Through my astonishment I managed to ask, “Is this just where they keep all the white clothes?”

“No, you idiot,” George rolled his eyes. “Edmund is styling an all-white-themed fashion story. Obviously. Haven't you ever been in a closet before?”

Gaping all around, I followed George to the left through a gap between the garment racks, which like a hole in a fence revealed a new space, much smaller than the one before. He stepped over a mountain of garment bags and shopping bags on the floor and said, “We sit back here.”

Shaped like an L along the interior of the corner was a long workstation: a slick white desk, two Mac computers with matching
Régine
desktop wallpaper, and two black leather office chairs on silver casters. A stiff black leather tote on the first office chair marked George's work area; an adjacent unclaimed seat marked mine.

Beneath overhead cabinets, the wall that defined our workstation was covered by a canvas bulletin board. A dozen sheets of paper were pinned up with clear tacks, listing the addresses of every fashion showroom in New York City, alongside reminders such as:

Hats and headpieces must be returned in their original boxes.

Manolos must be returned by RUSH messenger.

Embellished shoes must be packed with tissue paper.

Givenchy must be returned in original packaging, including Givenchy-brand hangers and garment bags—NO generic.

“Hey,” said George. “We have a lot to do. Put your bag down and come
on
.”

I barely heard him. What I did hear was the muted whisper of office life: fingers trickling over keyboards, telephone calls clicked to voicemail.

I became suddenly aware that this was, after all, an
office
, and that offices were where adults went every day, and that now, since I was an adult, this was where I would go every day too. My head, always floating in some cloud or another, whooshed down to earth. I felt my feet connecting solidly with the floor, and I
realized that twelve stories of steel and glass separated me from the pockmarked concrete face of Manhattan, and somewhere below that rumbled the earth's core, churning fiery magnetic sludge like the rotating belly of a concrete pump and drawing everything toward it, including me, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

The clouds were far away now, and drifting farther, taking everyone with them: Edith Wharton, and Ms. Duncan, and my Yale friends, all waving down forlornly from an increasing distance, painted figures on a chapel ceiling that was being ripped up and away from me by a crane in the sky.

“
Hey!
” George urged once more, snapping his fingers in my face.

“Wake up,” George snapped. “Edmund will be here in two hours for the run-through.”

The mention of Edmund Benneton made me come to my senses. I was going to meet my idol! I looked around and took a deep breath through the heavy air, taking stock: I had my own desk, my own computer, my own chair . . . I worked at
Régine
now. This was my dream, right?

For the first time I noticed Sabrina's workstation adjacent to our own, partially obscured by a cubicle wall. Sabrina wore another all-black outfit and was poised primly before her keyboard, her back erect against her chair.

“Hi, Sabrina,” I waved, having pledged my determination to erase the negative impressions of our first meeting.

She ignored me, her telephone handset squeezed between her ear and a black silk-covered shoulder as she typed an e-mail while speaking with pointed irritation into the mouthpiece. “Yes, I've been on hold for five minutes already, isn't there anybody who can help me before I decompose? This is
Régine
. We're
calling to schedule a shipment to Paris, pick-up will be tomorrow evening, for overnight delivery by eight o'clock the next morning. No, Pacific time,” she scoffed. “Of
course
eight o'clock European time. Fifty trunks total, including hatboxes. How much is one-way? Two hundred dollars a trunk? Yes, I just told you, we have
fifty
trunks.” She rapped the butt of her pen against her desk like she was sending an urgent message in Morse code.

George interrupted my eavesdropping with a sharp, “Ethan!” He motioned to a monstrous heap of black garment bags and shopping bags by his feet, kicking the garment bag on top with the pointed toe of his oxford. “All of these bags need to be checked in. You unpack and I'll photograph,” he said, holding up a small digital camera.

My wordless blink-blink served as enough of a tip-off.

“For God's sake,” George rolled his eyes again. “We borrow pieces from the latest designer collections for every photoshoot,” he explained. “We need a record of every piece that enters this room, so we photograph each thing when it comes in, and when it goes out. Open that bag,” he commanded.

“Goes out? You're sending this all back?” I pointed at the racks all around us, flanked by the wall of shoes.

“No,” he corrected. “Now that you're here,
we'll
send it all back.” He gestured impatiently for me to open the garment bag which was on top of the heap on the floor.

I unzipped and had barely exposed a sliver of the dress inside before George identified the contents: “Valentino.” He reached into the bottom of the garment bag and pulled out a clear plastic drawstring bag—the kind sold full of water and fish at pet stores—except, instead of somebody's pet, there was a pair of glittering white stilettos swimming at the bottom.

I hadn't seen anything so beautiful worn in real life by anyone,
ever
.

George arranged the white stilettos on the floor to photograph—one shoe standing upright, the other on its side, to capture the shape of the heel—while I lifted up the dress for a closer look: head-to-toe white floral lace, with a charmeuse lining and a crystal-embellished bodice.