An Innocent Fashion (21 page)

“Don't say anything—never mention it,” she said. “You can thank me when you make it in life. Send me flowers. I'm a Southern girl, so I love a nice bouquet.” She smiled, and in the obscure light, I noticed a strange mark above her right eye. It was the closest I'd ever come to her, and now I could clearly see a scar from her hairline to the top of her cheek, slicing right through her eyebrow. The fine highlight of the raised skin was the only
evidence of it; blended in by the same brown foundation on the rest of her smooth, poreless face, the gap in her otherwise exquisitely groomed eyebrow filled in with a perfectly matched pencil, yet—there it was when she tilted her head in the shadows, a fine glimmer, like something had slashed her deeply. Whatever it was that had hurt her, it was a wonder it hadn't taken out her eye, and I shuddered, realizing that even perfect Clara was just a person, covered in skin that could be broken by scars she could never fully hide.

Her voice punctuated the silence, in a register I hadn't heard before: obscure, unrehearsed. “You know . . .” she trailed slowly, “like I've said, you're not the only outsider here.” She placed her hand on my shoulder. “Some of us have come very far, and take it from me—if your dream is to make it in this world . . . it
is
possible to do it.” Like the boughs of an overripe tree, her words were heavy with meaning.

Clara glanced sidelong at the rack, then at the floor. Her mouth opened cautiously, and she seemed to be on the cusp of an important caveat. “The thing you must know is . . .” she unburdened herself at last, with a look bordering on desolation. “Sacrifice is at the heart of every dream.” She continued to gaze at the carpet, at the shoes and the crates and the shelves, all shrouded in shadow. “Nothing we want in life comes without sacrifice, and you realize this as you grow up. I did. We all did.” She looked up at me now. In the darkness, I had the impression that her densely mascaraed eyelids were two flickering black wings.

“It is a lovely style you have,” she lamented. A mournful pang continued to weigh down her buoyant lilt. “I regret that you should have to change it, but—I always tell myself, for every thing I loved which I have given up in life, there was something
that I gained.” She reached out and touched the knot of my tie. “Sometimes I know that it's a lie, but—it's what I tell myself. And this is what you must tell yourself too.”

I felt her delicate fingers tighten around the knot, shift it slightly one way, then back, and remain poised there. “Tell yourself every day. Otherwise, one day you'll turn, and you won't recognize your dream, or yourself, or—” She had choked on her own saliva.

“I'm sorry,” she smiled nervously, and swallowed. Even in the dimness, her mouth was perfect lipstick-red; for the first time I saw the resemblance between lipstick and the greasepaint of a clown's smile, both of them a well-plotted deceit. “I've said enough.” Clara patted an imaginary spot of lint off my turquoise suit and took her hand back. She straightened up, and the familiar, white smile followed, with a sweet incline of her blonde head. “Now wait here, and come out when you are ready—and please, remember what I've told you.”

She slipped out, and it was as though nothing at all had happened between us.

I FOLLOWED CLARA'S INSTRUCTION'S PRECISELY—
wordlessly hung the garment bag by her desk, then passed through the fashion closet door in my new designer outfit. I sat down without a rustle, and reached toward the keyboard. The gray sleeves flashed with strange unfamiliarity over my wrists, and for a second I mistook my hands for another's.

In her cubicle, Sabrina was eating cottage cheese for breakfast, one hand on a plastic spoon, the other on her computer mouse.

“Did you just get Anna's e-mail?” George was asking her.

“
Anna Swanson?” She chewed absently. “Why does that name sound familiar?”

“She was the PR girl at Saint Laurent last season, remember? She kept nagging you for their velvet hangers back.”

Sabrina gulped, and I could hear her scrape her plastic cup for another spoonful. “Ugh, so annoying. Why is she asking for job opportunities?”

“They fired her. She gained a lot of weight.”

Sabrina stopped chewing. I heard a reluctant gulp, and a rustling whoosh as she tossed the cottage cheese into her trash bin. “I thought her dad was the president of something,” she finally said, and trying to satisfy her hunger, pried open the plastic lid of her iced latte with a click and took a long
gulp-gulp-gulp
.

“He owns Poland Spring,” George said.

She must have finished her beverage, as she tossed the cup into the trash with her cottage cheese, ice rattling. “Is that all? I thought it was something luxury.”

“No, but do you know how many people drink Poland Spring? That's like all the water coolers in America. Can you imagine owning
water
?”

“We should go out for drinks with Geneva Chapman,” Sabrina said, presumably triggered by the subject of water to contemplate less sober libations.

“From Prada PR?” he asked. “Have you ever met her?”

“No, but after enough e-mails, you feel like you do. Her e-mails don't have spelling mistakes, and she gets back to you in five minutes. I feel like she'd be really put-together, and know the best places for a martini.”

“How about the Chanel PR girl, your
faaavorite
?”

“Oh please. I bet she'd like, try to roofie herself or something,” Sabrina scoffed, “and then she'd wake up the next morning and e-mail me ten times to return the pearl collar we never requested.” She paused. “She's probably really pretty, though. Chanel only hires like, really pretty girls.”

George asserted that,
like,
Régine
was pretty much the same as Chanel, so like, you're really pretty too, Sabrina
, and then—
Were you wearing that before?

“I said,” George repeated to me, “were you wearing that before?” He eyed me suspiciously. Weren't you wearing, like, purple or something?”

Sabrina looked over at me. “Is that . . . ?” she began.

“Dior,” I replied.

THAT EVENING, I HUNG THE GARMENT BAG FROM AN EXPOSED
pipe which ran across my four-foot-high tin ceiling. The pipe was a water line, which unintentionally supplied ambient waterfall sounds when my roommates showered; it was also where my clothes hung, the estimation of a closet in my unequipped habitation. I crawled toward the rest of my clothes now—red, pink, sky blue, a rainbow of thrifted hues which for years had supplied the outermost layer of my colorful identity—and pushed them all toward the far side end of the pipe, relegating my past to the shadows with a single shove and one last whimper of squeaking hangers, swinging blithely in unison.

I placed an empty hanger in the middle of the naked pipe, and began to undress. Brown Louis Vuitton shoes, gray Dior suit, black Armani dress shirt. My body relaxed as the air rushed
over my skin. At no point in the day had my skin dared to make direct contact with the interior of my new suit; my reluctance to damage its silky lining had yielded seven hours with my elbows raised (consequently, a box of gloves spilled over George's head and also a number of innovative poses).

Kneeling bare, in my underwear and socks, I inhaled deeply, uninhibited at last. I hung up my new outfit: folded the pants, buttoned the shirt, patted the shoulders of my jacket; placed the shoes neatly below.

I thought of the younger me, who read fairy tales in bed and stole flowers from the neighbors' yards, all the time dreaming of another world. If only he could see me now, with these beautiful things, this beautiful life ahead of him.

I shuffled on my knees to unzip the garment bag, which had facilitated the out-of-office smuggling of my turquoise suit. I pulled out my illicit embroidered loafers first, then my flowered shirt and wrinkly necktie, and finally my boldly hued jacket: nondescript, unbranded. I hung it with a sigh beside its gray Dior replacement.

In transit, the turquoise pants had crumpled to the bottom of the black garment bag. “
That Ethan is dead
,” Clara had said, and indeed, it appeared that I was staring at a body bag—my corpse had just crumpled to the bottom and melted right through it, leaving only a splash of color as a form of identification. The next instant I had a vision of myself at Clara's desk, tailored in designer clothes from head to toe, my unruly hair clipped beyond recognition, my back straight like there was a wire holding me up—and all around pictures of shoes and handbags, and sitting right next to me, my two faceless coworkers, whom I sat beside for eight hours a day yet barely
even knew. “
Your beeeeaaauutiful dream
,” they cooed, their eyes rolling like colossal white pearls.

As I kneeled there in my loft, dizziness overtook me. My stomach turned and my head swayed side to side, and I felt myself falling as if in slow motion. My arms reached out around the turquoise suit, hugging it like a person begging for forgiveness, then the weight of my body pulled the jacket off the hanger—
crack!
—and I fell forward into a lump, face buried in its turquoise folds. I lay there in silence, eyes shut, breath teeming in and out of my nostrils, while the feeling continued to flow through me—the feeling that I was falling, falling . . . falling . . .

It was a feeling I'd had only once before in my life, after the first time I rolled on ecstasy. We'd all done it in East Rock Park, steeped among evergreens and a great lake—me and Madeline and Dorian, also Blake and his then-girlfriend Kim, and a few other consorts from our enchanted circle. On ecstasy the whole world was pregnant with poetry—just one little pill, and then suddenly it was eyes wide open, everybody bursting from their chests, and each little unappreciated thing around us like a perfect word in some transcendental scripture. We danced swaying under the moon, buzzing like fireflies with a single night to live; took off our shirts and rubbed each other's skin all night, while overhead the branches of the trees murmured about all the creatures of the earth silently aching for love. Time was a throbbing heart we were inside, and consciousness a fever dream of skin and sweat and damp kisses and our collective breath leaving our bodies like the sigh at the end of a full, contented life.

Then they all fell asleep, and for me, the plummet came.

It was exactly what Ted Hamilton had cautioned us about
when he sold us the pills in his dorm: “
You'll get high, then you'll come down hard
,” he'd said, “
like a depression
.”

Only it was more than just depression, more than just the typical sad thoughts that filled my head and then swiftly moved on. If you've never done ecstasy, and you don't know the feeling, well—it's your whole body, a swooping feeling, like you're in an elevator spinning downward, only there's no end, and you realize that for your entire life there's been something holding you together and now it's falling through you, flowing downward, not in a cathartic way but in a hopeless, never-ending way, and the world you loved will never be the same because you see it now through a gray lens and everything is sharp, and you notice the details, the cracks, the whole gray world made up of flaws and ugliness, and you can't breathe and you think
, I'll never have it again
,
I'll never be happy again
, and when you look around nobody is there to comfort you, to save you, and you realize: Nobody cares and you're all alone, and you'll always be alone forever, and it makes you want to walk away, just walk away until you die, but—you can't because your cell phone is in Madeline's purse and if you missed an exam tomorrow you'd be in trouble and anyway the party you've been planning is next week and on top of everything you're hungry, and thinking all these stupid, sad thoughts about your stupid, sad, futile life makes you plummet farther down, down, because you realize you couldn't walk away if you wanted to because you're trapped, you're a human being and you're trapped in the web of your own body and the web you've made for yourself connecting to all the other bodies.

That's kind of what it felt like as I lay there, clinging to my former self, with nowhere to go but forward. The thought flashed
through my mind that clearly this felt wrong—this dream felt
wrong
—yet, how could it be, if all my life I had dreamed it? And if it
was
wrong, what else in the world was there for me?

I WOKE UP TO THE SMELL OF BURNING TOAST.

I swallowed hard and sat up, my head grazing the Dior blazer. The fabric was so elegant. Elegant and cold.

“Hey!” I called cloudily in the direction of the ladder. “Is everything okay . . . ?”

My roommate Veronica replied from downstairs, “Sorry! Yeah—I just can't—figure—out . . .” A metallic rattle and a low moan. “My God, this toaster is
complicated
.”

Even though we lived together, I didn't see Veronica much. Having just graduated from the same class at Cornell, she and her boyfriend Jonathan were both consultants. Whom they consulted, and on what matters, I had no idea, but they were never home, and spent the entirety of their free time at dinner or drinks or Sunday brunch (otherwise
talking
about dinner or drinks or Sunday brunch).

Evidently giving up, I heard Veronica shut the bedroom door behind her—a sign that she and Jonathan were settling down for the night, after returning from dinner while I had snored in a heap several feet above them.

I felt around for my cell phone. Six mixed calls from Madeline. I remembered at once: Dorian's birthday party.

For a moment, I pressed my fingers against my eyes once more. I stumbled down the ladder and to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom; pulled out the bottle of aspirin; began to brainstorm excuses for why I couldn't go with her to Dorian's party.