An Innocent Fashion (40 page)

One minute I was massaging Madeline through a sweat-soaked silk blouse, and the next my fingers were pressed against her milky skin, the blouse strewn inexplicably to the side. Her lace bra was loose around her midsection, straps hanging to the side of her body. She cupped her hands over her breasts as I rubbed my thumbs in circles over her skin, smoothing away the imprint of her bra strap. She had a few freckles on her shoulder, stars in a white sky.

“Can I massage your face?” I asked.

She wordlessly rolled her golden head back over my shoulder. With her eyes closed to the ceiling, she relaxed her hands over her breasts and the sun fell through her slackened fingers.

I pressed my thumbs, lubricated by her perfume-like sweat, over her brow bone, and became aware of her skull beneath my fingers—her eye sockets and sloping cheekbones, the hinge where her mouth opened and closed. I contemplated which was more extraordinary: that strange, complex bone, or her skin, which draped perfectly over it like a veil.

“How magnificent you are,” I said, and rubbed my cheek against hers.

A laugh escaped her lips as she reached back with one hand and touched my head, her fingers weaving in and out through my hair.

I heard a hollow smack of saliva as Madeline's deep breath swelled in my ear: “I think—it's happening, darling.”

I let her words wash over me like a cool wave. It was happening. I lifted my head and announced, “We're rolling.” When nobody moved, I repeated a little louder, “We're rolling,” as my body tensed up and then relaxed. A waterfall of excitement rushed through me. Madeline squeezed my knee and leaned forward to let her bra fall finally away. With the side of her forearm draped over her naked chest, she reached for her silk blouse.

I couldn't control my body. Indian-style, I crossed my legs. I rubbed my palms together. I rocked forward and back, forward and back. Madeline and Dorian were so still, they could have been sleeping. I swallowed. When I couldn't take it—my legs were cramping up, I needed to move—I reached for the sofa's velvet arm and pulled myself up. My hands waved fresh air into the room from the window. It always happened like this, rolling on ecstasy—you took a pill or two, waited for something to happen, then—
bam!—
it was happening, and you were inside it, and pretty soon you were on your feet shouting, “
Guys! Let's go on an adventure!
”

Eyes flickering, Dorian stretched both hands toward me from the sofa. I pulled him into my arms. He fell onto my chest and wrapped his arm around my waist, then the three of us strung together and stumbled out into the late afternoon. Dorian led us with his guitar. Madeline hopped onto his back. We waved to Jack Dockendorf, and Cathleen Kwon, and Master Phillips from Pierson College. We waved to a man on the Skull & Bones stoop, and we waved to Oliver Munn.

“How was your summer?” Oliver asked.

“You smell divine,” Madeline replied. “Here's a song about the freckle on your lip.”

And we made one up.

Except for Ted Hamilton, who gave us a knowing look and said, “I told you! What'd I tell you?” nobody asked us if we were high. We were simply how they knew us to be
.

Soon the sun began to set, and we turned pink around the edges. Dorian was still carrying Madeline, and when we got to the center of Cross Campus the sprinklers had turned the grass spongy and wet.

Wanting a turn on Dorian's back, I tugged on Madeline's leg. “You're hogging him,” I said. Then I pulled too hard and the three of us tumbled onto the grass and didn't get up again.

The rest of the night we just stayed there. Friends were summoned through phone calls and wild gestures across the lawn, and by around eight o'clock the whole courtyard was alive, all of us laughing and playing guitar and massaging each other's backs. We glowed in the light from the vaulted windows. Someone brought a bubble machine. A security guard named Maureen popped a floating sud on her nightly patrol and said, “Isn't that nice?” while everyone passed around a thermos filled with iced Earl Grey someone had brought, and dipped their fingers into a pomegranate.

A FEW HOURS LATER, WE WERE ALONE AGAIN IN OUR UNBREAKABLE
trinity.

Dorian saddled up to me and wrapped his white arms around my neck. “Your turn,” he said. “You've been touching everyone else all night.” I laughed and said okay and laid back with my head on his knee, face toward the night sky, legs extended on the wet grass.

A few feet away, Madeline also lay down and recited from memory a line by William Blake: “The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee . . . my heart is at your festival . . . my head hath its coronal. . . . The fullness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all . . . ”

Dorian took off my glasses and placed them beside me. I blinked and looked up at him. His blurry hands descended upon my forehead, and above them I could vaguely make out his hair, blending with the dark sky. His fingers pressed into my skin. My blood rushed to fill every imprint they left, and soon my whole face was warm, tingling like a vibrating guitar string. He put his thumbs over my eyelids and gently stroked in an outward motion. He moved so slowly I thought he might have been distracted by something else.

“Isn't it amazing,” he whispered, “that two people can be so close—that one would let the other touch the most sacred part of them?”

I asked him what he meant.

“Your eyes,” he said. “They're the most important thing to you, and so vulnerable—yet I'm touching them, and you trust me completely.”

He caressed my lashes, and I didn't flinch.

“Do you remember how we met?” he asked.

I smiled at the memory of him with his sketchbook, asking to draw my portrait. “Of course—you made me take off my glasses. I was so nervous.”

“You shouldn't have been. You know I'd never hurt you, right?”

I yawned, eyes closed under his fingers. “You're so beautiful, Dorian . . .”

He leaned over, and I felt a lock of his hair tumble over my
face. “No,” he said, his cool breath on my cheek, “you are.” I heard the saliva bob in his throat. “You are so, so beautiful.”

I tried to open my eyes, but he cupped them with his hands, one on each eye.

“Don't look,” he said. “Just keep them closed, and say that you will always love me.”

I smiled and grabbed his wrist—tried to pull his hand away.

“Please,” he insisted. “It's important to me.”

I ran my fingers up the length of his wrist. “Of course I love you, silly.”

“You always will?”

“Yes.”

“No matter what happens?”

“What's going to happen?”

“Nothing,” he promised. “Nothing's going to happen.”

IT REALLY WASN'T DORIAN'S FAULT. IT WASN'T ANYBODY'S
fault, but it definitely wasn't Dorian's. I knew Dorian hadn't come into
Régine
to ruin my life—he was too pure, too good. He was too much like me. I didn't even blame anyone for choosing him over me: this was just the world we lived in. I knew that when they told him he got the job, his first reaction would be joy, unbridled joy—he wouldn't think about salary or being on the masthead. He'd think,
Wow, my first job! Everyone will be so proud! And I'll get to see Jane every day—and Ethan! Wait—what will happen to Ethan?
I knew how bad he would feel, I just
knew,
and I couldn't bear to see the look on his face, so—I just stood up and left.

I remembered the assistant who'd also just stood up and left, abandoning her expensive python bag on her desk. Maybe she too had left to tumble off a roof, and maybe in fact, she eventually did.

“WELCOME, MR. ST. JAMES!” HORACE, EDMUND'S DOORMAN
bellowed. “You're all wet . . .”

Edmund's roof was black with hardened tar. Rainfall never seemed so much like suicide—every raindrop jumping off a cloud, with a long plummet to the earth.

I knew my life wasn't bad—not if you looked at it from a certain angle, if you thought the important things in life were food and a roof. If you thought about things that way, then sure, I was a fool and selfish, because other people had much worse lives than I did.

It wasn't really about that, though. It wasn't about
Régine
, either.

“
What are you so scared of?
” Dorian had asked me once, and I think that's what it was about; although, right then, I wasn't scared of all the normal things. I wasn't scared of what would happen if I tumbled a hundred stories, the rain kissing my back. I wasn't scared of hitting anything on the way down—a satellite or an open window or a gargoyle—or crashing through a windshield, all the glass twinkling around me. I wasn't even scared of the most likely thing: hitting the concrete, a surface so hard that the entire city had been built upon it.

I didn't know why, but I wasn't scared of those things.

What I was scared of—at least, what I
think
I was scared of—was everything else. I was scared of growing up. I was scared of
compromising. I was scared of never living up to the dream I'd had; scared that everything good had ended already, and that I could never get it back. That no song would ever be as good as Pachelbel's “Canon in D,” no book as good as
The Age of Innocence
, no taste as good as oysters with Madeline, and nothing at all as good as being high with her and Dorian. Everybody always said first loves are the hardest to get over. My first loves were flowers, and Yale, and the fantastic vision of my future life—what more? I could jump or not—life was already over.

Maybe not life. But the best parts of life—the dream—it was all over.

It had ended several months ago, when Clara had explained to me that, due to the unwritten rules of the world, I must trade my turquoise suit for gray; except what she had really been saying, which only now I understood, was, “
You have been inducted, by no choice of your own, into this world, and to live in it you must sacrifice your joy.
”

The “world,” of course, wasn't
Régine
. The world was simply adult life, and there was no escaping it.

I didn't believe that anyone at
Régine
, or anywhere, chose unhappiness; they didn't choose to be cruel or unkind, or to lose their enthusiasm for life. Neither did I truly believe that anyone I'd met that summer was actually a bad person—not George, or Edmund, or even Sabrina. Like everyone else, they had simply signed a contract. They had spaces to fill and boxes to check, and a dotted line to sign every night when they went to bed.

Everyone did—except I didn't want to. If I agreed to stay in this world, I knew I'd be fighting forever—all the rules, all the nonsense
,
a system that long before my birth had already been
built to contain me. It was a system I had no control over, so much bigger than me or any dream I had.

And even if, like in Madeline's political dream, we lived to see the system fall—as if it was a concrete structure that had been built around us that we could physically demolish—there was still the biggest system of all, which was
time
. We could never escape time. Time made us age, and age made us fearful, and in order to feel safe, we built up the very concrete structure that imprisoned us.

I could change my name, and my clothes, and the way I behaved, yet under time's dark shadow, I would never see the light.

On top of this, I knew that love between me and Madeline and Dorian would die. It had already begun to die, and without it, I wasn't sure what I would do. How I could possibly live knowing that the people I loved would no longer love me, knowing that life would wedge itself between us? The blindness of youth obliterated for us the differences that adults saw—money, and beauty, and power. Now we were beginning to see too, and soon we would never be the same again.

If I went back home, most likely I'd end up doing nine to five in an office somewhere, with none of my dreams coming to fruition and all of my best years just memories. Sure, there'd be some good things—the laughs I got at the annual company party, the friendly secretary named Pamela, her desk covered with pictures of her labradoodle dressed in bonnets and crocheted mittens. I'd keep sticky tabs full of watercooler jokes on my computer, and I'd meet a lover through a friend of a friend—someone with okay hair, and an okay sense of humor—and we'd have okay sex with the lights off. Maybe I'd go on a few trips, and get married, and who knew? Who cared?

Maybe, compared to death, a mediocre life was somehow “better,” but something told me it just—wasn't for me. None of it was. I'd heard of people who'd had near-death experiences—a car hit them or something, and later, when they could neither walk nor speak except through a respirator, while everyone was thanking God for saving them, they were rasping through the respirator, “
I just knew it wasn't my time. I could feel, it wasn't my time to go
,” like everybody had a “time.” For me, it was the exact opposite.