An Innocent Fashion (22 page)

I never got headaches, so I didn't even know how many to take.

I turned the bottle over to read the warnings.
Misuse could lead to serious side effects, including stomach pains, and in rare cases—death.
I blinked, and wiped a bead of sweat from my brow. The summer heat was the worst in the bathroom, where it got trapped, making it difficult to know after a hot shower whether my body was wet from water or sweat. Right now I kind of felt like that—unsure of what was stuck to my skin. The bottle suggested two aspirin pills, but it didn't seem that I was having a two-aspirin kind of headache. I gulped down three and called back Madeline.

“But you promised,” she replied, sounding on the verge of tears.

We argued for ten minutes until finally I said, “Fine, I'll go, but only for half an hour,” and she replied, “Good, because I'm already in a cab to your apartment and will be there in fifteen minutes.”

WE MADE ONE REVOLUTION THROUGH THE CROWDED LATE-NIGHT
lounge before I pulled at her and said, “Well, I guess Dorian's not here.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” she scowled. “This is his own party.”

Bossa-nova notes flowed upward from speakers toward a red ceiling, mirroring the ripple of the aquarium walls. Rectangular slabs of polished wood made low-lying tables between sofas upholstered in flax linen, and everywhere white orchids rose out of modern blown-glass vases. Despite the tight guest list at the door, the room was at capacity—nobody else from Yale, just fashionable shadows from his many other lives, whom Dorian evidently counted as his friends.

His first word to us both, like a rope bridge tossed over a vast precipice, was, “
Babe!
”

A drink in one hand, Dorian was lounging behind a table adorned with tumblers and Belvedere bottles. He was surrounded by silhouettes, illuminated from overhead by a red sconce which caused a shadow on his lips, as if a butterfly was resting there. He swooped to his feet—the butterfly flew away—and as he hopped cheerfully over other people's sandals and high heels and polished oxfords, he gave the impression of a young acrobat trying his luck on the tightrope.

I steeled my will against him; remembered the mental promise I had made to myself. No matter what happened tonight, no matter how charming or beautiful Dorian was, I wouldn't forgive him, wouldn't forget that he had abandoned us, that he was no more my friend than any person whose shoulder I bumped on the subway.

He came closer, in a white T-shirt and tuxedo pants, having never quite learned how to dress up. With every step I became surer of the inevitable next thing: his bright, effortless smile, and the complete annihilation of my feeble defenses. I knew the trap ahead—I knew it by heart—yet I was returning to it, like a ghost haunting the site of his own demise.

I had the urge to turn around, to simply push through the glamorous crowd that had gathered in his honor and escape, panting, into the night. Madeline, however, was holding my hand and practically dragging me toward him.

“Babe!” he said once more, when he was almost close enough to touch us. The word sent a jagged spike through me, like a rumble charted on a seismograph, which plummeted on recollection that Dorian called everyone “babe.” He had done it all through college in that playful tone of his, an exclamation over monkey bars and swings—
Babe, babe, babe!
If you didn't know
him, you would just assume he really liked you and wanted to play; then, if you were as unlucky as we were to fall in love with him in the sand pit, you later learned that it meant nothing. Sure, maybe he did like you, but in the end your friendship was just one of the many games that preoccupied his roving, amusement-powered life, and you were no more special to him than a daisy he had enjoyed looking at, or a song that made him want to dance—one that he would turn off when he got bored or heard a new one he liked better. Madeline seemed to have forgotten about all this as she closed in on him now.

He kissed her lips while she regarded him with the reverence of a pious Sunday school girl. She was a fool. I knew, and Dorian knew too—anybody who
knew
her knew—that she was just one of those women who would sooner pardon a hundred unpardonable blows before admitting her bruised body to a hospital. He enveloped me next, and I remained as hard as a pillar while he was soft and warm and familiar, like a favorite blanket on a winter night.

“You look great,” Dorian whispered, his low, penetrating voice coaxing out the reluctant longing in me. His breath smelled like gin and tonic as he kissed me with unhurried sentimentality on the cheek—soft lips, hovering too long, too innocently: I tightened my jaw, and he let me go at last. “It's really great to see you, babe,” he whispered with heart-wrenching earnestness as he took my hand and squeezed it. He smiled.

I smiled foggily back. The only thing I could think to do was stay completely still, afraid that my body would betray me, that I would throw my hands around him and moan, “
I missed you so much.
” Madeline saved me from an inevitable collapse by pulling him toward the sofa. She was holding his hand like nothing had
ever happened, while I silently resented that, like a coat of paint over a graffiti-desecrated wall, she was willing to simply bury the ugly marks he had made on us both. I had made a terrible mistake. I had known it would happen this way, and yet I had let it happen: I was
letting
it happen.

They approached the sofa, and I followed them like a puppy on an invisible leash.

“Are these your model friends? Hello,” Madeline interjected forcibly, making a visible swinging spectacle of Dorian's and her locked hands. “
I'm Madeline
.”

It was too loud for anybody to hear. Dorian's friends smiled blithely at us from the couch before returning to hushed conversations with each other. I surveyed their silhouettes, recognizing the frizzy-haired one from outside the club where I first saw Dorian in New York—Penny, who last season had been the face of Givenchy and various other campaigns. Beside her sat the current face of Dolce & Gabbana, then Versace, and then the English girl who had starred with Naomi Campbell in an Alexander McQueen campaign. They all slid to the side to make room for us while we stepped over their shoes, which like the monthly accessories feature in
Régine
seemed to illustrate the latest trends: rhinestones, Western-style fringe, and the dusty pink color that, after appearing in the latest Prada collection, was being emulated everywhere.

I ended up next to Dolce & Gabbana, with Dorian sitting between me and Madeline. The sofa was the enveloping kind—too comfortable—with any illusions of a fast exit dashed, or rather swallowed up, by its plush linen cushions.

“Have a drink,” Dorian said as he leaned forward toward the ice bucket. He poured Belvedere into two tumblers, and topped
them off with orange juice—a generously inverted ratio, which at our prestigious university we had learned was prerequisite for a distinguished evening.

Madeline winked at me over Dorian's back as he poured, but before I could respond with an expression of discomfort she looked away, unable to tolerate a moment in Dorian's presence when she was not fully absorbed in exultation of him. Dorian handed us each a drink and settled back in the seat.

“Are all your friends from Paris?” Madeline asked in a loud, hollow voice, like a “cool” mother fishing for details about her son's new friends whom she suspected of introducing him to sex, drugs, and other forks off the straight-and-narrow path.

“From shows,” he nodded, picking up his own drink, a gin and tonic which had begun to leave a sweaty moon-shaped puddle on the glass table. “I'm done with modeling though—I quit yesterday.”

“Done? You only just started,” she protested, with a startled clink of her own glass.

“Yeah, but I'm tired of it. I want to be creative again.”

I rolled my eyes. It was the one thing that could be counted upon in human nature, that every person should set out to prove their weakest virtue. Beautiful people always wanted to be more talented than they really were, and talented people more beautiful. Despite his constant attempts to be the exception, Dorian would always prove the rule—as would any person who tried to challenge fate.

“Don't get me wrong,” Dorian rushed in, “it kept me busy. They call it Fashion Week, but it's more like a whole month—there's one in London, Paris, Milan—each one's a week, plus castings before. I mean, I was barely going to class. I would go to
auditions with all my French homework, and practice pronunciation in the makeup chair at shows—everything was crazy—and still the whole time I was so bored.”

“Isn't it fun though,” gawked Madeline, “meeting people, wearing all the clothes?”

“Sure,” he admitted, “the first couple of days it's great, but then you realize it's the same thing every day, and all anybody wants from you is your picture. If I thought nobody took me seriously before—well, over there nobody cares what I have to say about anything. Backstage is always loud and chaotic—hair dryers going, people barking into headsets. Interviewers come around from all the magazines, and yell the same questions at me—‘
Dorian Belgraves! Enjoying Fashion Week so far? How do you like following in your mom's footsteps?
' It's like, what am I supposed to say to them? ‘
Hi, I'm my own person, and can we talk about something else?
'”

He rolled his eyes and went on, “If they think they're being really clever, they'll know about Yale, so they'll say, ‘
How do you like being a
smart
model!
' and they just laugh like it's the funniest thing they've heard all day. They just—assume we're all stupid, when really, I mean they're the ones that are. Let me put it this way—my best friend through it all—”

I gave myself away with an upward glance, curious to hear about the “best friend” who had replaced me and Madeline in Paris.

“—he has a PhD in microbiology, though nobody ever asks him about it. He has a really ‘commercial' look, so he gets a lot of department-store jobs—big billboards and stuff—he told me, ‘
Don't sweat it. Just nod and smile, pretend they're right about you—at the end of the day, it's a job. You get paid, go home—everybody wins
.'” Dorian swirled around his gin and tonic. “For him, it makes sense, but why do I need the money? If I'm going to do it, it has
to be for something else. I have to
want
to, but at this point I'm afraid there's nothing I actually want to do.”

He gulped, lifting his drink to his lips. “I'm not like you guys, who always had a Path,” he reminded us, and took a deep, ice-clattering swig.

I rolled my eyes once more. Second only to Dorian's own self-amusement—an undertaking that, like a winter fire, required endless fueling—these were Dorian's two all-consuming passions: rejecting the idea of a life “Path,” and reminding everyone that he was too special to have one.

I almost made a joke to draw attention to this point, but then Dorian's voice wavered. “Except you know, maybe one day . . .” He trailed off on this hopeful note, his voice getting a little high at the end, and smiled—the familiar, all-comforting smile, which had always confirmed the uprightness of the world but somehow now seemed to shake at the corners—and for once it occurred to me that maybe Dorian actually
wanted
a life Path.

He glanced up to find Madeline just staring at him with a placid smile. She seemed not to have heard anything at all he had said.

“I have been making art again, though,” he said. He reached into the back pocket of his pants and pulled out a wallet-sized sketchpad. “I think—I want to be an artist after all.” He turned to an ink drawing on the first page, of a long, gaunt face, with sad, all-seeing eyes, and a barbed chin resting on a skeletal hand. “Guess who?”

“I don't know,” Madeline shrugged, “but he sure is ugly.”

“It's me . . .” Dorian explained, his voice dropping off with a dejected echo. “It's a self-portrait.”

“What?!” she balked. “But it's . . .” Madeline gulped. “You always had such a—unique drawing style.”

Madeline, of course, hated Dorian's drawings, although she would never bring herself to admit it to him. She thought they were crude while, ironically enough, I had always liked them. They reminded me of the work of Egon Schiele, an Austrian protégé of Gustav Klimt who drew everyone with long, sad faces and atrophied limbs. Coming from Dorian, they seemed unexpectedly flawed and heavyhearted, qualities misaligned with the vision of Dorian that Madeline wished to have, as he was her champion of vitality and unmarred goodness.

Dorian turned the page. A receipt fluttered out like a pale dead leaf. Madeline picked it up off the floor and crumpled it up, tossing it into a tumbler which was pooling with melted ice.

“Wait!” he rushed in, saving the receipt with a scoop of his tapered fingers into the tumbler. “That's not trash.” He shook off the drenched receipt and flattened it against his knee. “See, I've been writing poems on the backs of them. Like—art poems. If it's a receipt for cheesecake, I'll write about cheesecake. If it's for soda, then . . .”

“That's clever,” Madeline half-consciously mused, her head on his shoulder.

I lost interest and stared at a bead of water that was trembling on the handle of the silver ice bucket, while in the background Dorian unironically recited a poem about Chinese takeout. After five minutes, Dorian had closed his sketchpad and Madeline was asking about Dorian's mother, proving once more how much like a middle-aged woman she could sound.

“She and David got stuck in Milan,” Dorian said. “Mom got sick, too many martinis at some Gucci event—said she couldn't get on a flight in time for the party.” Dorian's hand fell on my forearm. “They were actually with Jane Delancey—have you met her yet, babe?”