An Innocent Fashion (32 page)

IN MY APARTMENT, BELOW MY FOUR-FOOT LOFT BEDROOM,
the kitchen light was on.

I flicked it off, not wanting to arouse my roommates' suspicion, although on looking back, it would have appeared less strange for me to be holding a knife in the light (I could have been cutting anything—a pepper, a tomato) than in the dark. Trying to find the knife drawer, I felt around the shadowed countertop and my hand grazed the cutting board and the brittle rind of an orange, which had been left out.

I touched the side of the counter; a cold drawer handle. An uncanny shudder crawled over my neck, as if I expected to reach into the drawer and find a hand there waiting for me
.
Instead, my fingers fell upon a steak knife. Its predictably serrated edge—one spike after another, its power ruled by order—gave me comfort. The remaining contents of the drawer consisted mostly of ordinary, harmless dinner knives with rounded tips. They were all different sizes and designs, collected over the years from a shifting cast of tenants and never traded out for a new set. I groped around until I found the one I was looking for: the paring knife, small and pointed.

I wrapped my fingers around the plastic handle and just held it inside the drawer, perfectly still for at least a minute. My behavior had no precedent. I had never cut myself as a teenager, and honestly, I had never even thought about it before. I must have been staring at my screen saver, or commanding Dorian
to complete a task, when my self-hatred flipped a switch in me, and I remembered that when other people felt miserable, they sometimes cut themselves. The idea had gotten under my skin. I figured that if it made those people feel better, maybe it would make me feel better too. But even now, I wasn't sure I wanted to do it. As far as I could tell, I was just fumbling around in the dark, trying somehow to feel better.

My doubts about life were what made me hate myself the most. I'd never had so much
doubt
. I used to feel so sure of everything—sure that the world would bend to me, like I'd been promised; sure that, as the aphorism dictated, all I had to do in life was “be myself” and wait for the rewards. Trying to “be myself,” however, had almost resulted in my disqualification from my own dream, and that other gem—“work hard”—had lately seemed more and more laughable. Once you were through with those tenets, there was little in the way of common wisdom that could be trusted.

If I hadn't been so embarrassed, I would have called Ms. Duncan, my high school English teacher. She had taught me that excellence assures success, and my supposed excellence had gotten me gratefully through college. But what if, in the real world, excellence was replaced in value by money, beauty, social power—all the gifts I didn't have, whose importance I had wrongly believed could be circumvented by the loophole of my own merit?

How had everyone else done it? It was no secret that Jane Delancey had been an ordinary shopgirl at Barneys, back on Seventh Avenue, when she was discovered by Ava Burgess. The newly promoted editrix-in-chief, had been seeking fresh talent for her growing fashion team when she simply took a liking to Jane while buying a veiled hat for her upcoming thirtieth birthday party. It turned out the two had the same birthday—Ava was a year older—
and two weeks later, Jane was filing Ava's papers, two
years
later, Jane was masterminding Ava's photoshoots; and that was it. It was your typical rags-to-riches story, with no plot twists along the way. The rise to the top had been similarly untroubled for Edmund, who had once been a Hoffman-Lynch postal boy. How he went from that to fashion director—well, who knew? But if he and Jane could get there from selling hats and passing out the mail, anyone should be able to do it, especially with an Ivy League degree. After all, wasn't that the purpose of having one—so you could trade it in for a seat at your dream job, with your name in italics on a silk cushion?

I wasn't like Dorian or Madeline, who could retreat into their parents' wealth while they loafed their way through Plans A, B, C, and ever after until they found something that “fulfilled” them and gave them an illusion of independence by the age of thirty. No: I was on borrowed time as my savings disintegrated like a Christmas wreath left up too long. Once upon a time the four thousand dollars that I had saved up in college had seemed so substantial, as though it could support me for a hundred years; now, between rent and food and the other costs of scraping by, the amount in my bank account had dipped into three digits, and was quickly plunging lower and lower. If I didn't make it work somehow—
fast
—then I would be back to Texas where I had started, where it would be like I had never even come close—to anything.

Every day when I woke up I told myself:
Today is going to be the day you make something happen
—but I didn't know how, and nothing ever did happen, except my dread encroaching evermore, like the tide over the deck of a sinking ship.

I stood there breathing heavily while the refrigerator hummed. In one of my roommates' bedrooms, I heard a sitcom
on TV. The laugh track sounded like something shattering over and over, a vase that kept on getting broken and put back together again.

I pulled out the knife abruptly from the drawer and held it straight by my side, taking giant, harried steps to the bathroom. With a deep breath, I pressed my back against the door; locked it, and raised the knife to the fluorescent light. Having used it before to open the stitched pockets of my Dior suit, I knew the edge was a little dull. I pressed its tip against my wrist and slowly twisted, trying to draw blood. My skin puckered, like the navel of an orange. I slackened my grip, unsure now if I really wanted to do it. For some reason, I was remembering a movie I had seen in which a class full of Japanese schoolkids had been made to kill each other. They were dying left and right, and every time one of them got stabbed or shot or hacked at with an axe, the blood would come shooting out like a red geyser. My own blood raced now at the thought. I imagined every drop in me like a sperm cell in a Sex Ed video, except instead of swimming happily toward an egg, they were in a panic, trying desperately to escape my knife. I didn't blame them; if I were a drop of blood, I wouldn't want to go geysering all over the place either.

Still holding the knife, I reached into my pocket for my phone, where Madeline's name was in my speed-dial menu. Madeline would know what to do. She hated blood. She hated anything that hurt people—animals too. She always tried to be vegetarian, and would succeed for a few weeks only to be tempted by foie gras or some other “irresistible” favorite.

The screen read M
ADELINE
D
UPRE
.

The letters of her name were as meaningless as those on a label for canned ham. I couldn't call her, I just—couldn't. What would I say? And what would she say? And she'd be busy anyway.

The phone sort of tumbled out of my hand, clattering to the tile floor at my feet. I was too paralyzed to pick it up. In the back of my head, I thought of something I had heard once, either in real life or on the Internet:
“All you need to do to be happy is to start smiling. Just lift up the corners of your mouth, and that's it, you're happy.”
It seemed like as good an idea as any—I mean, what did I have to lose?—but trying just made the corners of my mouth quiver. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I wasn't smiling but I wasn't frowning either, because I couldn't feel my face at all.

I started thinking about all the sad characters I knew from books. I thought of Esther from the
The Bell Jar
, and how she had dealt with things, but then I couldn't remember if she had gotten better or if she had just killed herself by the end of the book. That made me think of the boy from
Brave New World
, who definitely did kill himself by the end—he hung himself, which was too horrifying a notion to even momentarily entertain—and Romeo and Juliet, and Ophelia, and pretty much everybody in Shakespeare. Now that I really considered it,
everybody
sad in great literature seemed to kill themselves by the end. It was, like, the only thing to do.

To my blood's relief, I put down the knife on the edge of the sink, then I rifled through the medicine cabinet as I had done before. If I truly wanted to kill myself, I could swallow more than just aspirin. Not that I wanted to, but—if I did want to, I could basically eat everything that was in there. Surely, something would have to happen. A person just couldn't mix up all those chemicals in his body and
not
have something happen to him, right?

I began to line up all the bottles, just to
see
—just in case, one day, I went through with it. Just in case I ever wanted to
go through with
anything
. The most powerful thing I recognized was Midol. I began pouring out the pills from every bottle—one after the other along the edge of the sink—and then my roommate Veronica knocked on the door.

“Ethan?” she asked. “I'm sorry, do you think I can take a shower? I'm meeting Jonathan for dinner in an hour, and I'm so gross from all this heat.”

I didn't answer at first. I just stared at the trail of pills I had made—little droplets the color of bone and oleander and cloudy skies. My favorite ones were the faint purple of a fresh bruise, and they cured indigestion.

“Ethan?”

“Hi,” I croaked. I cleared my throat. “Yeah—sure,” I said. “Give me—two minutes?”

I poured them all back into the Midol container and stuck it in the cabinet, tossing the empty containers in the trash. Reconsidering, I scooped up all the bottles and returned them to the shelf, empty.

Then I tucked the paring knife in a groove beneath the medicine cabinet and went upstairs to sleep.

THE NEXT DAY DORIAN WAS WEARING A BASIC GRAY T-SHIRT
from Alexander Wang.

“What a great shirt,” Edmund said to him, as he trotted past in a head-to-toe zebra print ensemble, including black-and-white zigzag pony-hair shoes. Fresh from a vacation in Majorca, he was in fine spirits, having just made a lavish fuss over some “missing” zebra cufflinks.

If before I had feared that Edmund might start to favor
Dorian by giving him assignments, the truth was worse: He started to favor Dorian while still giving me the assignments.

“Ethan, I need you to do some research for me. A very special assignment. I'm sure you will enjoy it. Wish I could do it myself,” he briefly entertained, “but you know, there's never any time. I'll need every instance of Spanish influence you can find in the work of Oscar de la Renta between 1950 and 1970. Go through all the archives and make copies of every example there is, even advertisements, and don't leave anything out,” he instructed before warning me, “I'll be able to tell if you skipped over any parts.”

“Okay,” I helplessly agreed. “When do you need this by?”

“Tomorrow morning, first thing please,” he said as he tried to grab at something on his tongue—a hair, perhaps, from his own shoe.

I grimaced. Edmund had already assigned me another project for “tomorrow morning, first thing please,” involving the arbitrary reorganization of his portable music library to reflect a
chi
-enhancing suggestion in his feng shui book. “Honestly I don't know if all that will be possible before tomorrow,” I said. “Jane's trunks are being shipped out tonight, and I've already got your music library before—”

The slamming door cut me off.

“Do you need any help?” Dorian asked, as he sipped a juice box and came up with a poem for the back of his lunch receipt. I smoldered silently at his stupidity. “How far have you gotten with the music library?” he asked. Dorian had always feigned ignorance of flourishing hostilities, believing that with a fumigatory smile they would shrivel like a weed and cease to encroach on his good spirits. This was one thing about him that had infuriated
Madeline, who loved to water any cracks in the ground with her full attention.

“It's fine,” I said. I would sooner die of exhaustion in that bleak office than ever accept Dorian's help.

“We only lend out two at a time, sweetheart,” the librarian notified me as I stood at the checkout counter buried behind a wall of brick-like archival books. Her white bob peeked over the top: “I suppose I can let you take three, but you'll have to put some of these back.”

“It's for Edmund Benneton,” I explained.

“Oh, I'm sorry, dear,” she said. I couldn't be sure if the apology was for not realizing I worked for Edmund, or because, as someone who worked for Edmund, I just deserved one. She pointed to a glass dish full of candies on the checkout counter, and offered up a wan, conciliatory smile. “Here, have a gumdrop.”

With each year broken up into four volumes, twenty years of
Régine
was eighty volumes in total—about two shelves' worth of hardcover books, and a great deal for the librarian to part with. With some reluctance, she let me pile up a rolling cart—and, after helping me and my perilous tower onto the elevator, waved regretfully at me as the doors closed between us.

When Dorian and Sabrina had left the closet for the day (“
Good luck!
” he said. “
Don't touch
anything,” she said), I was still combing through 1952. It turned out Oscar de la Renta's repertoire contained more instances of Spanish influence than the King of Spain's bedroom; by the time I was finished with a volume, the sides were fringed with stickies.

At about 1956, the nighttime cleaning lady came around, wearing a mint-green uniform dress with a Peter Pan collar. For someone charged with taking out the trash, she was quite exotic—
tall like an Indian palm tree, with olive skin and grape-colored lips—and I took a momentary break to wonder if at Hoffman-Lynch even janitors had an advantage if they were beautiful. Pushing a cart full of cleaning supplies, she swayed around replacing all the trash bags so that in the morning they could get stuffed again with coffee cups and yesterday's trends. She eventually waved good-bye, like an Arabian princess boarding her jet for the next stop on a world tour, and by 1959 it became clear I wasn't going home that night. To flip through a single year of
Régine
—including features, fashion editorials, and endless advertisements—took about half an hour, if I did it fast. I had no choice but to turn every page. From the impeccable lists he kept in his diaries, I knew Edmund would notice if I had skipped something. If I neglected so much as a single “imperative” moment—a flamenco-inspired swimsuit in July 1964, a matador cape in August—he could easily turn his full attentions to Dorian.