An Innocent Fashion (10 page)

She was so vulnerable—hands flailing, cheeks flush with the heat of philosophical passion—that, before I could help myself, it was my own hand flying in the air, and the words came spilling out.
“She's right, you know.”

The spectators snapped in the unexpected direction of my seat. I hadn't spoken much in class before, still accustoming myself to the expressive intellectual atmosphere of college; it was all so unlike my listless hometown that I spent most of my time just listening to everyone else.

“It's not like she's making this up,” I said now. “There's loads
of precedent for these ideas—think of everybody from Plato to Kant, and nearly every Renaissance poet—they all held beauty up to the highest order of truth. Every great thinker has agreed—human life is nothing without the aesthetic experience. Arts, culture . . . they're not frivolous at all if without them there's no meaning. And if realizing the aesthetic potential of human life is a basic need, and a government has a responsibility to meet the basic needs of its people, then culture should be at the heart of governmental policy . . . Beauty—”

My voice cracked. Madeline was finally looking straight at me, her eyes shining out of the blur of other faces. Before I had even planned the words, I heard myself share my own conviction aloud: “Beauty moves the whole world.”

Professor Pemberton tapped his flat hands on the round table. “Very good, everyone. I think we all know now which two among us will be starting a revolution,” he smiled. “But alas, Ethan and Madeline, I'm afraid to inform you—the Romantics have already beaten you to the punch, and you're almost two centuries late to join them.”

A light ripple of laughter diffused the tension, which rose upward through the air to the crown molding. The professor took the opportunity to herd us back inside the perimeter of our selected texts, and for the rest of the class, I finally had no doubt that Madeline was looking at me. A few times, I had the courage to look up; I tried to be quick, to catch her gaze, but she was always quicker, and the moment my eyes reached hers they were met with a rustling of golden hair and a sudden devotion to the chalkboard, as if her life depended on the memorization of what was there.

After class: the rattling of pens and notebooks into bags.
Madeline took an especially long time packing up her things, neatly organizing her materials—pens, papers, sticky notes—first into a well-orchestrated square on the table. She kept her face glued to the pile, as though she hoped somebody might tap her shoulder so that she could look up in surprise, and utter a startled, “
Oh!
” through her plump lips and the gap between her white teeth.

I started toward her, building up the courage to restore communication between us, when like a thumb over the lens of a camera, Grant Goodwin invaded my view.

“I hope you're not upset,” he said, his voice filled with chivalrous détente. “Here, can I help you?” he offered, and reached toward the pile she had so painstakingly tidied up before her.

Caught staring, I forced my head to swivel downward like I had dropped something on the floor.

“Oh, it's all right,” Madeline said to him, with a disappointed drop in her voice. I crossed the threshold of the classroom, my strides as regimented as a soldier's, and her words were drowned out by my harried footsteps against the marble floor.

I SPENT TWENTY MINUTES WAITING IN THE LINE AT FEDEX,
stuck behind a balding head that resembled the swirling eye of a hurricane. I spent ten minutes waiting for them to retrieve the package, then another twenty in traffic, and by the time I had returned to the
Régine
office with the Alexander McQueen package, I was ten minutes late for the run-through.

Standing by a table of accessories was Edmund Benneton,
Régine
's fashion director and my personal idol. In a royal blue
cape and a matching turban like some great maharaja, I recognized him even from behind.

Sabrina and Clara were crowding around him, along with a male and female editor I hadn't met yet. Behind a fortress of clipboards, they all slanted over his shoulders in an attentive formation, pens poised like bayonets. Edmund was staring at a hat on the table, arms crossed over his chest, drumming jewel-encrusted fingers over his silk sleeves.

I came up slowly behind them, trying to catch Clara's eye so that I could discreetly hand the box off to her. “
It's extreeeemely important
,” she had said. “
Don't even photograph it, just bring it straight to me
”—and that was what I was trying to do.

“We thought we could add a couple of ‘new' designers this time,” Clara was suggesting, finger-miming quotations on the word “new.” “Nothing too wild, just—you know, to give you a slight edge.”

“A slight . . . edge?” yawned Edmund. “What for . . . ?” He was distracted by his contemplation of the wall—a pause of several seconds—then roused by the recollection of an important fact, which he repeated with the drowsy half-conviction of a bedtime epiphany. “I don't like new designers.”

“No, of course not,” Clara gently agreed, but, wooing him into wakeful clearheadedness, continued, “though you know sales at
Bazaar
have been creeping up on us—it's all their new stylists, they're taking everything in new directions.”

A cantankerous harrumph. “I don't care about the
new
anything,” he grumbled, tightening his arms across his chest as the blue silk gleamed beneath the pressure. “The new designers, the new stylists—they last a year and then they all flunk out.” With a superior smirk, he peeked out over his upturned nose; when
nobody corroborated his assertion, he let out a petulant sigh and conceded to ask, “Who are they, anyway . . . ?”

Clara's finger flicked into the air, then recoiled.

“Well, who are they?” he repeated, this time with a tinge of suspicion. “Who are these new stylists you think I should be concerned about?”

Still nobody answered, and it felt wrong to be eavesdropping from only two feet behind them so I chose that moment to whisper, “Your McQueen box,” and held it out toward Clara.

Everybody turned to me at once, wide-eyed faces pulled back in shock. Sabrina's own expression wavered on outrage, as though I had in fact climbed onto a table and revved a chainsaw in the air. If there was anyone who should have been surprised, though, it was me, because I found myself staring for the first time at the visage of Edmund Benneton.

Of course, I had seen him in countless pictures, always swirling about in a cape or a fur coat, but I had never seen his face so close before. Compared to the others, Edmund seemed the least distressed by my interruption, but only because he appeared too tired to muster any expression at all—so unbearably, painfully, wretchedly
tired.
He wasn't much older than forty, yet he had deep frown lines around his mouth and a perpetually worried crease above his brow. On his forehead, beneath the folds of his turban, glistened a layer of sweat as slick as if he'd just rubbed on an ointment, and all I could do was stare at the incredible bags under his eyes: two swollen gray folds like plastic bags full of septic fluid.

“Who are you?” he asked, although he seemed to lose interest the moment the words left his dry, papery lips. I thought I saw his eyelids fall as they capitalized on a stolen moment of silence,
while each pore in his loose skin seemed to gaze down like a prisoner through a barred window.

I opened my mouth to reply, but Clara flicked her hand between us—a sort of delicate distraction. She smiled nervously, like I was her toddler and my cries had just interrupted an important dinner. “Don't mind him,” she said, with a laugh so forced it reminded me of a girl with a finger in her throat, trying to vomit. “He's . . .”

“He's nobody,” Sabrina filled in. As if trying to inflict an electric shock, she clamped a hand over my shoulder then, not wanting to be associated with me, tore it away.

With a hopeful gesture toward the shoes, Clara invited them all to resume consideration of other matters, and they turned away except for Sabrina, whose head directed me to the back of the closet with a nudge so severe I thought her neck might crack.

I stood there for a second in silence. Even in my most pathetic childhood moments I had never been called “
nobody.
” I wanted to shrivel into a fetal ball like the big baby I evidently was, but instead my feet moved inexplicably toward the back of the closet, one dead weight in front of the other.

The small Alexander McQueen box suddenly weighed a hundred pounds. I let it tumble out of my hands onto the floor by George's feet and fell into my chair.

“You're late,” George said cheerfully, popping a mint into his pasty mouth.

I groaned, and propped my forehead in my hands on the desk.

“What?” he asked innocently. “I'm sure they're not mad. I mean, I'd have thought from the way you just went up to them that you were all best friends—you, Edmund, and the rest of the gang.” He pointed to my shoes. “Go ahead now, why don't you kick back and make yourself at home while you're at it?”

I turned my head up. For an indeterminate number of minutes, I stared at my screen saver—the
Régine
logo twirling blithely about—and when I regained my senses, George was opening the McQueen package, running the box cutter over the top with his pinky out. I had a twisted vision of George slicing his hand, gushing blood all over the
Régine
closet floor. Would the editors stop to help? Or would the run-through continue while Sabrina exiled George to the bathroom before he could stain any of the white clothes?

“These won't work,” Edmund was saying now, “this plastic. Who thought that was a good idea?”

I peered at them through a gap in the garment racks.

“It's Lucite,” explained the male editor I hadn't yet met, a blond man in his thirties who I'd soon learn was Will, the associate fashion editor.

Sabrina swiped the offending tray of accessories from Edmund's view and laid it to the side.

“I need quality,” Edmund said, ignoring him. “
Not
plastic. Who shoots a beautiful woman in plastic?”

I cringed a little at his directness. If before Edmund had given the impression he might fall asleep at any moment, now he was skimming along fast. He seemed to have remembered that there was an office waiting for him, and that the sooner he finished the sooner he could fall asleep in it.

He stared at a tray full of gloves I had laid out earlier and snapped, “I need gloves. Why aren't there any gloves?”

“These are all the ones in white from the Fall-Winter collections,” Sabrina assured him. “If you'd like, I can bring you a bigger selection from our archives.”

“Yes, what are they doing there, Susan? Please get them.”

“Of course, Edmund.”

“Susan?”
I whispered to George, mystified. “He doesn't know her name?”

Sabrina, otherwise known as Susan, had taken two steps in the direction of where the archival gloves were stored when Edmund's voice punctuated the air. “Susan,
where
are you going? Stay here.”

“Of course, Edmund.”

“You know better than to just walk off like that in the middle of my run-through.”

Sabrina mumbled an apology, while I struggled to decide on a train of thought; obviously I was amused to see Sabrina relegated to such an insignificant realm of Edmund's consciousness, but I was also slightly horrified that he would forget the name of someone who worked so closely with him. I turned it over in my head, and decided that because Edmund was a genius didn't mean I should expect him to be perfect; he was required by his job to remember a million names, so why should I villainize him for forgetting one?

“Can we not get anything better?” remarked Edmund, who was now bent over the shoes like a fishing pole over a pond.

I heard Sabrina emit a faint “Ow!” as he flung a pair of needle-nosed pumps over his shoulder.

He was on his feet again. “Is there anything else they can have on their heads?” He poked through the assortment of hats which had been laid out for his perusal. Suddenly, he was seized with inspiration: “THIS. This is it.” He raised up an article from the table with two fingers, for all to see. From my occluded view, it was just a piece of limp fabric—like a soggy piece of cheesecloth. “We need more like this. It's perfect. Just imagine it with Look Fourteen from the Marc Jacobs collection, and the thigh-high Ferragamos in patent leather.”

The editors scribbled furious notes, nodding fervently. “You're absolutely right,” gushed Christine, the other associate fashion editor, who resembled Clara in every way except for the fact that she was white.

“I do
looooove
that,” Clara sang.

I watched Will hastily replicate the formless “hat” on his clipboard with a stream of epiphanic scribbles. “I totally understand your vision now,” he said. (After the run-through, my own investigation of the captivating headpiece resulted only in confusion, as I remained convinced it was a piece of cheesecloth which had accidentally ended up there.)