R. Hernández - An Innocent Fashion

“A year.?” was all I could say.

She knocked her little fist against my chest. “Like you’d do better than to marry me.”

“No, but give it five years, at least!”

“Oh, come on!” she implored. “We’ll be dead in five years! And even if we’re not, I won’t be beautiful anymore, and you’ll. No, it has to be a year. Then — I’ll be an actress, and you’ll be a fashion editor, and you’ll see, I know you’ll change your mind.”

“All right,” I agreed with a laugh. “I’ll wear a white tuxedo.”

She beamed and swelled up to her tippy toes as her phone vibrated in her Chanel handbag. “Let’s get reckless tonight — just drunk and free, to celebrate. I don’t know, adulthood, everything!” Madeline reached into her bag to take a call from our friend Blake, who was meeting us inside. “One second,” she told him, and she winked at me. She ducked beneath the velvet rope onto the sidewalk, one finger pressed against her ear to hear better.

A black car pulled up. The driver came out and motioned to the security guard at the door, who nodded as the driver held up three fingers and opened the car door. I saw through the marble-like black window a single glint: an eye, or an earring. Then, as promised, there were three of them, sunglass-shrouded faces bowed, and in the time it took for a murmur of speculation—“ Is that? Who? ”—their long shiny legs had sliced through the velvet rope and they disappeared inside like knives into a kitchen drawer.

It was only another second before two more people skipped the line — sort of came at it from the opposite direction and didn’t even say anything to the bouncer, just stood there for a moment and waited for him to notice them. The first one was a model, for sure. She was taller than everyone by at least a head and, in a plain black motorcycle jacket, making no effort to impress. She wasn’t a celebrity, but I felt like I had seen her face around, or at least like I could have seen her face around — she was just that type.

Behind her unapologetic mass of teased-out hair, a boy’s face emerged.

I had to catch my breath. It was a face I knew almost better than my own: those bottomless eyes, those lips which were always parted on the edge of all the pain and pleasure in the world. I saw the rush of Frisbees over the campus lawn and felt the accidental brush of warm skin, heard laughter echoing off the flagstone paths of the Old Campus quad.

The bouncer said something to him and he sort of smiled and shrugged, hands in his pockets. The next minute he vanished, just another shiny thing, into the shadows.

Madeline swooped back under the velvet rope beside me. “I haven’t told you, you look so attractive tonight,” she said, tracing her hand over the lapel on my green blazer. Then—“What’s wrong?”

I could barely bring myself to say it after the events of the past hour. “Dorian,” I said, and now the name felt vulgar on my lips. “I think I just saw Dorian.”

She stiffened like a board. “Dorian-is-in- Paris ,” Madeline said loudly, pounding each word like a piano key. She glowered meaningfully, then struck a high-pitched key, and she tinkered off, “Don’t bring him up again!” She glared at me, then looked away, and didn’t move.

I put my arm around her shoulders, remembering the grievous shape of them when Dorian left us. She had been draped like a shroud over my knees — head down, her hands pressed into her face, gobs of saliva and mucus swinging through her fingers and her spine heaving as she tried to suffocate herself in the folds of her dress, moaning, “Dorian’s gone. Dorian’s gone. ” Her tears had soaked through my pants.

“I’m sorry,” I said to her. “I guess I just. have him stuck in my brain now.”

“Well, unstick him please,” she replied, giving my hand a firm squeeze, “before he ruins our night.”

In front of us now a girl was yelling, “Are you fucking kidding me? We’ve been waiting in line for fifteen minutes, and you didn’t ask any of those other people for ID or any thing.” She turned to her three girlfriends, hoping with a look of outrage to gain their solidarity.

None of them moved to her defense, and the bouncer just waited. In a dress the shape and color of mashed potatoes, the girl looked like a helping of Thanksgiving dinner. Her thick fleshy legs were pink like uncooked turkey, and each one disappeared into a high heel without ever turning into an ankle.

I got a sickening feeling, predicting an unsavory end.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the bouncer said, “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” She had made his job easy. Now he didn’t even have to lie to her.

“You have to be kidding,” she protested. “You have to be fucking—” She swiveled, unbalanced, toward her three friends. “Come on!” One of them looked like her — too big, tottering around like a drumstick — but the other two were reasonably good-looking and probably knew they could get into the club if they stayed. They looked at each other regrettably as their friends swooped huffily under the velvet rope, and after a brief lingering, followed.

The gaggle of girls in front of us swelled to fill the space.

“Together?” the bouncer asked them. “Do you have a party name?”

Between violent gum-chomping, one of the girls said “Bruno,” in a loud Russian accent and flipped over her skinny wrist with a harmony of clinking bangles. The bouncer stamped their over-accessorized wrists while the security guard unclipped the velvet rope and skimmed their foreign IDs.

“Should we just say ‘Bruno’?” I whispered harriedly to Madeline.

“Oh, just look at us,” Madeline hushed me. “We don’t need Bruno.”

“He with you?” the bouncer asked Madeline.

Our entry was authorized by a red stamp in the shape of a Gothic cross. I heard a sheepish voice behind us whisper, “Can we still get in? We’re not really with them.” It was the friends of the Thanksgiving dinner duo, pointing to their blundering friends trying to catch a cab.

Madeline grabbed my wrist and rushed me ahead through a black hallway that throbbed like an artery. Two guards in black suits and bowler hats were posted there by a dark curtain. Tossing her arms up extravagantly, she cried, “Open up, boys!” and the curtains parted with a dance-like swing of black fringe. “Oh, how diviiiiine !” Madeline laughed.

On one side of the room, a congregation of plush velvet booths facilitated the clinking of liquor-filled glasses between crossed-legged guests; on the other, an empty cabaret stage rose up from the shadows, awaiting the abuse of some inebriated high-heeled feet. Beautiful women hung drunkenly on the arms of eligible bachelors, and everyone was gulping gossip and champagne, overflowing. As accident and design pressed their bodies together, perspiration pushed the perfume out of their pores and the intertwining notes of fragrance burst up above us like fireworks. The ceiling was a mirror — a distorted, murmured re-telling of the scene below. Through it everything happened not once but a million times, reflected in every bead of sweat and glossy lip.

I thought once more of the fat girls outside, plodding around like somebody’s dinner, trying hopelessly to catch a cab, and I felt the strangest pang of guilt for getting inside the club. Everyone everywhere pulsed Glamour! Heat! Sex! and it almost didn’t seem fair that, on a Monday night, so many bodies could be stolen from the cold corners of the world and rounded up in this sophisticated furnace. I remembered my own face — my own ordinary face, with its plain, boyish angles — that, without the tortoiseshell frames and the youthful mop of hair and all of my style (which really, was just another word for effort) could not compare to what I saw around me, and thought, Did I somehow fool the doorman, or am I really in possession of a physical beauty formerly unbeknownst to me? Was it just the place, the lighting, or did every person in here pulse with the seductive carnality of an animal heart? Suddenly I had the urge to check a mirror just in case, by passing through that black curtain, I had transformed, become a hundred times more handsome.