An Innocent Fashion (18 page)

My unsubtle transgression stood erect with deviant pride, an accidental invitation. A frantic wriggling of bodies followed. Madeline's skirt whooshed onto my foot and got kicked away.

Then, a hole of blackened memory.

Then, a flash of remembrance. The two of them were buttressed like a steeple over my plank-stiff body: Madeline nearest me, with her knees straddled around my legs, and Dorian shadowlike behind her. The moonlight silhouetted their upraised bodies. Dorian cupped her breasts from behind, and leaned his head over her shoulder to kiss her. Their faces merged. Her spine arched as he pressed against her—and then, a small gasp.

He entered her from behind; the bed was rocking below me, and they were rocking above. I observed them with awe. When Madeline remembered my body beneath her, she bowed her head onto me.

Wet lips: I was engulfed in warmth.

Her suspended breasts jiggled over my thighs as Dorian held her against his thrusts. My fingers found Madeline's hair and my head rolled back into the pillow, and the clearest memory of all
was the ceiling above us—obsidian black, except for a silver triangle of light from the window, like an Edward Hopper painting.

The next morning, I awoke to find Madeline draped on top of me. Dorian lay peacefully nearby, Adonis in repose, and I remember thinking that, in all the night's flashing stages, Dorian had tried not to touch me, or even look at me.

That was our first winter with Dorian. There was one more after that, then—gone.

Dorian had never meant to hurt us—that was the one thing at least we could be sure of—but you just couldn't expect the most beautiful person in the world to stay in one place, or be loyal. He didn't mean anything by it, or realize he had done something wrong; he was just being himself, flitting throughout the world, and how could we disparage him for that when we had celebrated this kind of transience, challenging each other every day to be more carefree, celebrating new lengths traveled in the name of personal liberation? We idolized the Beats, and the Lost Generation, and the Impressionists, everyone who banded together to achieve a goal that had the outward glow of shunning convention. Fitzgerald and Hemingway were favorites for rejecting the American rat race to write novels by the sparkling Seine—and the restless Kerouac most of all.

Like all of them, Dorian had just gotten up and left, no apologies. He barely reached out when he got to Paris, and when he did for the first time, after several weeks of agonizing silence, it was laughable in its oblivious, impersonal nature: an e-mail with no subject reading simply,
miss u guys!!!

Madeline didn't even know if they were broken up.

I forbade Madeline to reply, promising never to speak to her again if she did. She obeyed, while bemoaning the unfairness of
it: For her the thought of being all alone—no me, no Dorian—she couldn't handle it. Eventually after that single e-mail—no phone calls, or letters, or anything more to suggest that the relationship we had all shared deserved greater effort—he apparently just forgot about us.

MADELINE AND I STOOD THERE HUGGING IN THE FITTING
room until, at last, she stiffened up a bit, and said, “You know, when a baby is born without the ability to feel pain, it dies within a year.”

She told me this in a voice that was vaguely defiant, and before I could ask her what that meant, she had released me from my embrace and was hastily dressing herself in her own clothes.

I stood there bewildered as she tossed the curtain open.

“Who can blame Dorian, right?” she spouted nonsensically to the air, “when everybody in the world just disappoints each other,” and I had no hope of following her polluted stream of consciousness.

Giving the salesperson every reason to believe we had been in a fitting-room tryst, she stormed off as though I had said the wrong thing to her while we were having sex on the bench in there. I took a deep breath as she left with the back of her own dress unzipped, flapping open.

Appearing not the least bit like an invalid, she practically dumped the Lanvin dress on the salesperson's head, deciding, “I'll have it in the next size down,” even though she had barely tried it on to begin with. At ten feet away, she turned back to me, terrified I might have left.

I stood there among all the things she had left in my care—
her patent leather Céline bag and classic little Hermès scarf, and the pearl-buttoned Marchesa cardigan on the floor beneath me.

“Won't you please come with me to buy shoes before they close?” she asked, coming toward me. She glanced guiltily at all her things. I began to scoop up the cardigan as she delivered her best approximation of an apology in her stricken state. “I'm—nervous.” She gulped, and of course, I knew it was true. In general, Madeline was a little foolish, but not like
this
. Dorian had unhinged her.

I always knew it would be like this, when Dorian came back. A feverish pitch in the air, excitement and fear. It was our destiny—the destiny of people entangled.

With her purse over my shoulder, I took her hand. She squeezed it as we descended on the escalator to the second floor.

DORIAN HAD BEEN TWENTY MINUTES LATE WHEN I INITIALLY
laid eyes on him the first day of sophomore year.

I was sitting toward the back of the classroom—a small wood-paneled auditorium, with rows of desks all curved like half-moons toward an amphitheatric stage. It was dark, except for a projector blazing a tunnel of spectral white light from behind, specks of dust swirling in and out with fatalistic indifference.

The class was Introduction to European Art; the professor, young and handsome, impressing upon us with his serious baritone the significance of the ancient Greeks.

The door opened.

Light flooded the room like a deep breath of air into a lung. Dorian stood there as the golden inhalation rose upward; then he
slowly pressed his back against the door, and the room returned to darkness with a reluctant sigh. His entrance would have gone less noticed had he simply taken a seat, but on catching sight of the projected image he was drawn to it with a moth-like transfixion. His profile illuminated, Dorian stared at the close-up of a marble Apollo from the fourth century BC—and it was as though he was looking at a picture of himself. My own eyes traveled with hovering fascination between them: Dorian shared with Apollo the essence of every feature. The same curved lips and sublimely cantilevered nose; the same bright, hopeful eyes, gazing blindly into a blazing sun.

The professor leaned against the podium, hands clasped over his dark Italian suit. “Very attentive,” he said to Dorian. “Please redirect your attention to a chair.”

But Dorian's eyes remained on the picture, engrossed as if he were standing alone before a frame at a museum. The professor rapped on the podium. Dorian snapped out of it, staggered backward upon the first row, and fell into a seat, where the only view of him was the back of his dark brown hair.

“
That's the supermodel's son,
” I heard someone whisper behind me, and I immediately made the connection. Everybody had heard of him: Dorian Belgraves, son of the celebrated Edith Belgraves—just “Edie” in the magazines and the society columns—a model who two decades earlier, had made her fortune as one of the most photographed faces of her generation. Dorian evidently had transferred to Yale as a sophomore, trailed by a stream of rumors. In some bubbling accounts he was violent or addicted to methamphetamines; in others, running away from academic probation and/or a sex tape with a fellow socialite. The reports were dubious—famous mother or not, no Ivy League
college could accept a student under such circumstances—yet they persisted in light of Dorian's well-documented flickering through the New York society circuit.

Despite the precedence of this reputation throughout campus, however, for most of September he ambled along by himself. He always looked like he had been abruptly roused out of bed—his Grecian locks in a wavy tangle and his book bag spilling off his shoulder as he tossed around the half-chomped fruit that was his breakfast. He liked to draw, or was studying fine art, or something, because he always carried a large sketchpad under his arm. He sketched in unlikely places—on the roof of Davenport Hall, or the terrace of the Pierson Library with his feet dangling through the railing. I caught him once sitting cross-legged in a fountain with the water sparkling right over his head, fully clothed except for his bag and shoes, which were spared in a tumble nearby.

My interest in him was piqued—although it was not greater than my hesitation to approach him—and a week later, I spotted him once more. I was lingering alone after a lackadaisical brunch in Pierson Dining Hall, absently dipping my fingers into a bowl of cranberry granola while I waited for Madeline to finish her Intro to Public Policy seminar, and semi-purposefully reviewing notes for an exam on human evolution.

Dorian didn't notice me at first, just sat by himself at the adjacent table and began to peel a clementine. He leaned back in his chair with his long legs stretched out, like a shepherd napping against a tree trunk, flicking specks of clementine rind like confetti onto the sketchbook on his lap. When he had finished, he scooped the shreds into a napkin and propped up the sketchbook between his lap and the table's edge, proceeding to draw a subject on the wall behind me.

In a white crew neck shirt and blue jeans, he listened to music through a pair of headphones while I contemplated from afar the contradictory elegance of his slouch. This, I would learn, was one of Dorian's many charms: He could collapse his body anywhere and give the impression that he had been deliberately posed by some great artistic master. His gaze flickered up beyond me, then returned with diligent preoccupation to his upraised pad, back and forth, back and forth, as he occasionally took a bite of a clementine segment, juice trickling down his forearm. After a few minutes, Dorian's attention wandered onto me.

My eyes were drawn straight to Dorian's mouth, full with cupid-like sweetness. He lowered his sketchbook in full recognition of me, and my whole face burned with embarrassment. Swiveling toward my study notes, I pretended to engross myself in primates and bipedalism while, at the edge of my vision, I saw him rise up from his table. I cursed myself, and placed the blame for his departure on my indiscreet stare—but the next moment Dorian was peering over me, book bag dangling on his forearm.

“Can I draw you?” he asked, sketchbook pages fluttering.

I peered up without breathing. A chandelier aligned above his head to form a gold crown, and it was easy to picture him as a prince who had climbed out of one of the stained-glass windows in Sterling Memorial Library and ambled over for a snack.

“I was copying the painting of that guy over there,” he pointed to Abraham Pierson over the mantle, “but you're way better-looking.”

I felt my blush ripen into a deeper shade as he confirmed his corporeality with another juicy bite of clementine. He turned up his wrist to wipe a trickle from the corner of his lips, then leaned in, his face swooping right in front of mine.

“Wow!” he exclaimed. His green eyes blinked inches away
from my own, and the scintillating smell of citrus washed over me. “Are your eyes . . . ?”

“Yea, they're—different colors.”

“That's amazing,” he said, with greater fascination than I felt was deserved by any aspect of my humble appearance. “I've never seen that before.”

Our intimate proximity brought me within earshot of his headphones. “Are you listening to Puccini?” I asked.

He nodded, and his face withdrew from mine. “You like him?”

I laughed outright. “I love Puccini.
Madama Butterfly
was my first opera.”

He pulled his headphones down around his nape, his fingers still wrapped around his half-eaten clementine. “Then how about this?” Resting his knee on the seat opposite me, he fiddled with a volume button in his pocket; “O Soave Fanciulla,” Rudolfo and Mimi's duet from Act One of
La Bohème
, crescendoed. “You'll let me draw you, and I'll put Puccini here so we can both listen.” He unslung the headphones from his neck and dropped them onto my tray with a grin. “Unless—I don't know, are you studying for something?”

“
Not really. I just . . .” I was flattered, but confused by his choice of artistic subject. Between the two of us, wasn't it his face which deserved immortalization?

“Then you'll do it!” he filled in, and swung himself into the chair before me. “You don't have to do anything,” he promised, “except be still.” He turned to a new page in his sketchbook and remembered, “Oh—! I'm Dorian!”

His outstretched hand was like an anatomical study, his smooth, broad-knuckled fingers sticky with clementine juice.

“We have a class together, you know,” I informed him, as our hands met and he gave mine a vigorous shake. “Intro to European Art, with Pericles Lewis.”