An Innocent Fashion (5 page)

Unsure of what to say, I searched for a clue on her disobliging face, then admitted, “No, I . . . I've never heard of her.”

The fog was penetrated by a ray of complete bewilderment. “Never heard of Georgina St. James?” Her voice spiked. “Not to be rude, but how do you
not
know her? She's a major ‘It Girl' right now. She attends
everything
.”

I tried desperately to conjure up some appropriate response—but what? The tie that had bound us—Sabrina's mistaken impression that I was a member of a certain club, well-bred, with a sibling on the society circuit and derisory regard for the philistines with whom I was forced to “summer”—was suddenly severed.

Sabrina's eyes steeled upon my résumé as one, two seconds passed, then she pressed the folder shut. She crossed her legs, laid my folder against the top of her leather-sheathed knee, and began to lightly rock her high-heeled boot toward the glass doors. She clasped her hands, and a charm—a pair of interlocking C's, unmistakably Chanel—rattled on her silver bracelet. “So then—tell me about yourself,” she said, her enthusiasm replaced by the curtness of someone abandoned by her friends at a cocktail party and therefore obligated to make small talk with an unattractive stranger.

The flowery response that I had planted in my memory for this very occasion—
“I want to make everything more beautiful!”
—had utterly wilted in my head. “I majored in art history,” I said, “with a minor in classics. For a short while I had hoped to be an artist, but. . . .” Here I had been prepared to tell an amusing anecdote about the first and only drawing class I had ever taken, wherein my depiction of a bowl of oranges was mistaken for a grassy knoll by my professor (
“A nice landscape, Mr. St. James, but did you mishear the assignment?”
). In this very instance, however—when the only interest Sabrina Walker seemed to have in me involved my relation to an invisible timer in her head—self-deprecating humor seemed decidedly the wrong note. How could I possibly reveal to her now the intimate admission that all I'd ever wanted was to work at
Régine
, the dream-world that for years had made my life bearable?

She was glancing once more into the folder at my résumé—out of boredom, perhaps, or a renewed sense of duty—and chewing her gum with slow deliberation, each bulge of her jawline like the agonizing crank of a medieval torture device.

“I want more than anything to work here,” I ventured, sud
denly changing my approach. It was now or never; if she wasn't swayed by my background or my résumé, then my only hope was to impress upon Sabrina the sheer intensity of my passion. “Everyone I know from school—they're all off to law school, consulting firms. They think they're going to help the world, and they are, I guess, but to me—beauty is more important than all those things. When people are sad, lonely—they don't look to their lawyers or consultants.” I pointed to an issue of
Régine
that was laid out neatly on the cream coffee table. “They look to art, fashion—they escape into pictures. Working here, making the world beautiful, more bearable for those people—it's my dream.”

The effect of this appeal was a momentary pause, then the completion of Sabrina's transformation into a smoldering piece of dry ice. “When you refer to beauty,” she replied dully at last, “you mean our Beauty section? Like makeup, and skincare?”

I let out a little breath—the gasp of a little part of me, dying. My voice almost cracked,
“Yes, like skincare,”
just to save us both the trouble, but this seemed like an awful offense to the most sacred things in my life. “Not like beauty
products
. . . .” I croaked. “Like—I don't know . . .
beauty.
It's so much bigger than makeup—bigger than fashion.”

“
Bigger
than fashion . . . ?” Disapproval decorated every syllable. “Then what are you doing at
Régine
?”

“I—I want to be a fashion editor,” I replied, as the desperateness of my situation set in. “I just—I have so many ideas, so many worlds in my head. The only thing I want is to work here—to make them come to life.”

“That's ambitious,” she replied, with a skeptical arch of her brow.

“I know it won't be easy,” I rushed in, trying to predict
her thoughts. “I'm prepared to work my whole life—just for a chance—but that's all I want, to be here.”

Revealing in full her assessment of the situation, she looked like she was preparing to step around a puddle that was forming on the floor. “I'll be honest with you, Ethan,” she said slowly, “because you seem like a smart boy.” She observed me closely, as though she had earlier allowed a preconception to define my outer edges and was now filling me in. Her eyes passed with measured intensity over my suit, my shoes, my shaking hands, and when I thought she had finally met my gaze, I realized she was squinting at my unruly hair. “We hire two kinds of interns here. The first kind is what you'd expect anywhere, really—went to a decent college, usually majored in fashion or communications. We're very fair, and we'll take them from anywhere.” As an aside—“Well, no state schools, but anywhere else, as long as they're competent.”

She absently folded down the corner of my résumé. “They put in their time—a semester, or a summer—hard work, but in the end, they're grateful. I don't have to tell you that, for a career in fashion,
Régine
is the best name anyone can have on their résumé. They put it on the top in bold letters, and when we send them on their way, they end up in retail management, or public relations. Normal jobs, you know—and for the rest of their lives, they get to tell people—
they were here
.”

Sabrina's Chanel bracelet clinked as her hand paused over the page, and a moment was granted for my consideration of this generous scenario. She flapped my folder open and closed. “If what you want is what I just described, then by all means—I'm happy to end this interview, and I'll see you on Monday.”

I stared at her. I wasn't here because I wanted a line on my
résumé, or a recommendation for a job in retail. I was here because I wanted
everything
. “What is the second type of intern?” I asked.

Sabrina permitted herself to flap open my folder one last time. Then she shut it, the breeze stilled, and she returned to her previous pose: hands clasped in a kind of prim finality. “Well, some interns we intend to bring on staff. But they're a very special case . . .”

As Sabrina trailed off, I felt a blaze of irritation. In exactly what ways was I
not
a “special case”? Hadn't I gotten into an Ivy League school from the middle of nowhere, with zero advantages and almost every obstacle stacked against me? Didn't she realize I was the
definition
of a special case? I glared at her, and in the next second she rather suddenly filled the silence. “Did you know we're the only Hoffman-Lynch publication that doesn't accept applications through Human Resources?”

I shook my head, suspecting that Sabrina had already delivered this conciliatory speech to a number of intern rejects before me.

“It's true,” she continued. “We only hire from within. We used to work through HR, up on the seventeenth floor, but they kept sending the wrong types of people—HR handles all the magazines at Hoffman-Lynch, twenty-something titles, but some of the other magazines aren't as . . . discriminating as
Régine
. You understand, I'm sure—the qualities
Régine
seeks in a staff member are very hard to determine from a résumé. We can't just get anyone off the street, who can technically do a ‘job.' The perfect candidate has certain
other
qualities—they look
Régine
, they act
Régine
—they know
Régine
because they
are Ré
gine
. When they leave the office after a day at work, people need to be able
to say, ‘That's a
Régine
girl'—or boy, in your case. They have to be a person we can
groom
. We take them on as interns—special cases, you know—and when a position opens, it belongs to them. Because they belong. . . .”

Sabrina's hand fluttered open, like she was demonstrating for me the way her own delicate fingers
belonged
—or, perhaps, inviting me to appreciate her ring of diamonds encircling a shiny emerald. Draping one forearm over the upholstered arm of her chair, she dangled her hand over the adjacent glass side table. Her wrist was moving lightly in a circle, as if she had picked up a martini glass by its rim and was swirling around an olive inside. “I'd be happy to see you in the first category,” she conceded at last. I realized I had been holding my breath. “We'd give you this opportunity, as a minor endorsement of sorts . . . you'd work hard, and then we'd send you on your way. I'm just . . .” She kept toying with the invisible glass. “For some reason, I'm just not so sure . . . that you fall into the second category.”

My head raced through alternative interpretations of the words that had just left Sabrina's mouth, but there was nothing to interpret: Sabrina had declared me ultimately unsuitable for
Régine
. It was a judgment overwhelming in its offensiveness, yet she appeared so calm, so lovely reclining there, as though she had merely commented on the weather.

In a kind of stupefied daze, I shook my head. “I'm sorry, but—did I somehow give you the impression that I'm unqualified for this?”

Upon detecting my indignation, Sabrina livened up. “I don't mean to upset you,” she equivocated grandly, with an expression so deliberately innocuous as to acquit her of all malign intent. “But with these things, I think it's important to be honest, don't
you? If I let you have certain expectations—for instance, that you stand a reasonable chance of becoming a fashion editor at
Régine
—well, that wouldn't be very considerate of me, would it?” The corners of her mouth turned up, with the wistfulness of a weeping willow branch caught in the wind, and in a second, my latent suspicions of her malevolence were confirmed.

“But, I'm
extremely
qualified,” I protested. “I—my whole life I—”

Sabrina gestured lightly toward me. “Who makes your suit, Ethan? In that lovely color.”

“What?” My disorientation was complete. “I—I don't know,” I replied. “It's just . . . thrifted.”

She pressed her lips together and nodded. “Thrifted?” she repeated with a feigned ignorance, as though to spare me the dishonor of my own admission. “I've never heard of them.” Then she slipped a finger under her Chanel bracelet and rotated it so the charm with the diamond logo was facing up. “I'm guessing your shoes too—‘thrifted,' right?”

I suddenly saw us from above, as a fly would see us if it was buzzing in a circle around our heads. I saw Sabrina's bracelet and her ring, the alabaster gleam of her white-blonde hair, her arms arranged gracefully over her lap—her skin polished and smooth, like pale, lacquered wood. Then I saw myself as she must have seen me, as some kind of clown in my outdated suit from the Salvation Army—too colorful, uncouth—with my scuffed-up shoes, and my lop of curly brown hair. An outsider who didn't know the language. She sat coolly back in the chair, as comfortable as if she was in her own home, while I . . . I was leaning forward like a bent antenna, my dignity betrayed by my total desperation.

“What did you say your parents do?”

This wasn't her fault—I knew I had brought it on myself, all of it—but did she have to be so cruel? She somehow must have known. Over one shoulder, perhaps, she saw my mother, rotund and reeking of Clorox; over the other, my father, covered in curly black hair, his brown, sweaty stomach hanging over his belt. “I don't know what that has to do with this,” I croaked.

“It has everything to do with this. Let's put it this way . . .” She began to balance her words like wooden blocks. “Have you ever tried to fit a piece of yarn through the eye of a needle?” She shrugged, and the tower teetered, then came crashing down. “It just . . . doesn't work.”

Her casual suggestion that, of all things, I should consider myself
a piece of yarn
—a common, homespun twist of unsophisticated fibers, too coarse, too unrefined to ever fit in at
Régine
—swung through me like a wrecking ball. It was an evaluation she had made in less than ten minutes.

Her chewing gum made a sickly sound as she relegated it slowly to a crevice between her back molars and crushed down. “I'm sorry—I can see this isn't going to happen,” she said. She pushed my résumé quietly toward me on the coffee table and stood up. Her pleated skirt rippled all around her, like a pond whose surface had been momentarily disturbed, and was now returning to untouched stillness. “We'll be in touch.”

“I—what?” No. It couldn't end like this, not after how far I'd already come. My dream was slipping away like life from a dying body, intravenous tubes dripping and a monitor above the bed blinking, TRAGEDY! TRAGEDY!

I fumbled to my feet behind her, knowing that if I didn't stop Sabrina Walker, I was never going to hear from her again.
My entire future hung in the balance of the next moment. We stood two feet away from each other. She smelled like a particular kind of smoker, the kind who tried unsuccessfully to temper the evidence of cigarettes with perfume and ended up smelling like a flower that had tumbled into an ashtray.

“Can I meet with Edmund himself?” I blurted.

She let out an incredulous guffaw. “Don't be absurd! After Ava Burgess, Edmund Benneton is the most sought-after person at
Régine
, which makes him the second-most sought-after person in the fashion industry.” Then, in a tone that was, for the first time, not veiled with some calculated affectation: “Do you think he cares about an intern?!” She added offhandedly, with undisguised satisfaction, “I'm sorry, but try
Teen Régine
. I have work to do.”