R. Hernández - An Innocent Fashion

But the Dupres appeared to be prepared for a portrait every moment: well-postured, with the slow-moving grace of glaciers.

I turned my head to a rustle of taffeta at the top of the staircase.

“Is that you?” exclaimed Madeline with a hint of surprise, as though she hadn’t in fact been expecting me. She had a way of making me feel like every moment was a revelation, as if the whole world teemed with blossom-ready buds that, if I went along with her, would have no choice but to divulge their fragrant secrets.

My eyes filled with the sight of her hovering between the chandelier and a cascade of shimmering marble, framed under a mahogany arch like a goddess in an Alphonse Mucha lithograph. She wore a pleated knee-length cocktail dress, bell-shaped and Oriental blue, with the chain of her quilted Chanel purse over her bare shoulder. Just-washed hair fell around her face, tousled and still damp. She rested her hand on the banister in a Greek contrapposto, then pointed her toe toward me, and descended slowly. When she had tiptoed halfway down, her grace was replaced with characteristic urgency as she beamed at me and ran clattering over the remaining steps.

I caught her at the bottom in a leap of outstretched arms and billowing hair, her taffeta dress crushed under my arms as I swung her in a half-moon swirl. When we were still she collapsed onto my chest and laughed.

“Anyone would think we’d been apart for years,” she said.

But really, it had only been a week ago that we’d walked together through a Gothic arch on Old Campus amid a stream of navy-blue caps and gowns, the two of us holding hands in the air — the champions of something — after four years of an unclassifiable kinship.

She separated from me, then spun around to ensure I’d got a good look. “Just look at us!” she exclaimed, as if somehow I too commanded the attention that followed her like a shaft of morning light.

“You look stunning,” I said.

Madeline kissed a corner of my eye and pulled me up the steps.

“Just look at us!” she repeated over the railing to her parents. The whole foyer fell away into gilded bas-relief, and when we were upon her bedroom door she pressed her knowing hand over the bag of marijuana in my blazer pocket, and smiled. The white door gave in, and we tumbled inside.

Golden trophies stood proud on every shelf, boasting eminence in horseback riding, ballet, and Model U.N., while the ivory floral-patterned walls were decorated with newly championed idols: Malcolm X over the nightstand and Che Guevara smoldering with purpose behind the lace bed canopy from Madeline’s girlhood.

The canopy rotated slowly as we fell onto the powder-blue sheets, faint lacework shadows playing on a bedside picture of the Dupres in front of the Eiffel Tower.

“Do you think your mother noticed the smell?” I asked, as my elbow sunk into the mattress and I began to pack my glass pipe over her sheets.

“Just spray it with cologne next time,” she suggested with a shrug.

The herby stench mingled in the air with the lingering aura of Madeline’s elderflower shampoo. I compressed the pillowy green buds into the pipe’s bowl with my thumb while she turned onto her side and draped her blonde head upon an extended arm.

“I hope I’ll have some brain cells left,” Madeline said. “After all those graduation parties, a lot of them just had a laugh and disappeared on vacation.” She added, “Woohoo!” which in her head must have been the sound of a brain cell on a road trip.

“Do you not want to smoke?”

“Of course I want to!” she swelled, and the next moment she was coughing into my shoulder. “You haven’t told me a thing about Régine ,” she said, waving away a cloud with one hand. “Are all the girls there prettier than me?”

“Please,” I rolled my eyes, raising the pipe to my own lips. “Nobody compares.”

She seemed dubious and, reminded of other beautiful women, sat back a little straighter. “They’re like in all the movies? Glamorous, and tall?”

We passed the pipe between us, and I told her all about Régine —about the glass doors and the white clothes and the steamer, with its mystical snakelike head and the glass container like a fishbowl. She laughed over Edmund saying, “ Who shoots a beautiful woman in plastic? ” and gasped with incredible sense of personal offense when I told her that Sabrina had called me “nothing.”

“Nothing?! Wait till you take her job, that whore!” She winced at her own word; Madeline considered herself a feminist and, in theory, hated put-downs against other women. “I’ll call her what I want,” she maintained with an impassioned firmness. “She’ll be lucky if I never run into her, or. Who cares about her! God, I’m so excited to introduce you now,” she changed the subject, “tonight, and every night from now on — I’m going to say, ‘This is Ethan St. James, and he works at Régine , and he’s going to be famous!’” We laughed as smoky ringlets unspooled before our faces like promises of fame and fortune, and for a little while she held my hand before, suddenly, she exclaimed, “I almost forgot! I have news too!”

“Another boyfriend for me?” I drummed my fingers on her bare knee.

“Nooo,” she scowled, brushing my hand off. “I’m done with that pointless game. You don’t know what a disappointment it is to find you someone, then have you dismiss them outright because they don’t know who Renoir is, or they bring you the wrong flowers on the first date.”

“Those were both horrible, plain boys,” I protested. “Car-nations? I don’t know how you ever thought—”

“You’re pickier than I am!” She shook her head, even though that was a lie. Then, on a note that, in her altered consciousness, seemed like an important segue: “You know, since graduation, I’ve decided to only eat peas. And drink champagne.”

“How unlike you,” I said with mild disinterest. It sounded to me like her normal diet.

“Yea, it’s an ethical thing. Animals, deforestation. ” Madeline coughed suddenly, eyes watering, then remembered, “My poor makeup.” She dabbed with her pinky finger at the corner of her sparkling eyelid.

“So what’s your news?” I asked. “The peas?”

She pushed at me and coughed again. “Oh come on, I can’t remember.”

I reached out before I could stop myself. “God, your fingers,” I breathed in awe. “They’re my favorite thing.”

She held out her fingers over my hand for inspection, then nodded in agreement. They were fingers made long and slender from a childhood of compulsory piano practice, which — never having had such a luxury as music lessons — I imagined as Madeline pounding Für Elise onto the keys and then pleading, “ Daddy, I’ve got it, now can we go to Central Park? ” to which he would reply, “ You missed a note, try again and we’ll see ,” and she’d give a pouty harrumph, and a rebellious stomp of her pink Mary Janes. Privileged fingers.

I took her hand in mine and felt her pulse through her silky palm.

The next moment had the inevitability of a setting sun. Outside a siren whistled through the night sky like a firecracker — then all was quiet as the bedroom blended like an oil pastel.

Madeline ran her hand up my forearm. She leaned forward. The bed creaked.

Her fragrance washed over me; a cool mist after a summer rain, diffusing the aroma of fallen fruit. My eyes closed. Reverberations left my chest and came pulsing back, as though my heart was submerged in water. Then her lips — her wet, familiar lips — were against mine.

The wave of silence rose up and filled the bedroom, lapping over my ears, and I was swimming.