R. Hernández - An Innocent Fashion

“We did things,” Madeline sniffled into my neck.

I breathed into her hair, and sighed. She was shaking beneath my arms, and her naked skin felt as smooth as the first time we had done “things” together.

IT HAD BEEN FEBRUARY OF SOPHOMORE YEAR, AND THE three of us had gotten especially drunk at an Around the World party, due in large part to our inspired first encounter with Goldschläger. “There’s real gold in it?” Madeline had exclaimed. Twenty-four karat, we were told, and the next minute Dorian and I were fighting Madeline for the last shot glass: “ What have we been missing our whole lives? ” The rest of the night was like a pulsing light — occasionally vivid, mostly dark. The first flash of memory was the three of us at Dorian’s off-campus apartment, stumbling into his shadowy bedroom.

In the platonic sense, we had all already slept together many times. While I was still a virgin, Madeline and Dorian had been dating since November, and had been having sex since Christmas, which for both of them had been an enormous development. Although I initially hesitated to insinuate myself into their relations, my reservations had been suppressed all along by their endorsement of their more salient perspective: They were a couple, yes, but we were also a trio. Thus, every moment of free time they weren’t having sex was spent triply conjoined with me. We spiraled through parties and ballets and operas — the same cycle of diversions which had always swept up Madeline and me, enhanced now by our ancillary plus one — then we all three wound up in bed together, an innocent pile of snores and tangled limbs.

After our excursion that night into twenty-four-karat liqueur, we entered Dorian’s apartment to find out he had left the heater blasting in his daylong absence. We moved through a suffocating cloud of vapor, the windowsills puddled with dripping condensation. I jerked open the bedroom window, while Madeline heaved against the bedpost, gasping, and Dorian began to unburden himself: his Burberry trench in an indiscrete heap, followed by an airborne sweater, dress shirt, T-shirt, a farcical series of flying shadows. He was kicking off his shoes, wriggling out of his pants, and then, somehow — Dorian was naked.

I had never seen Dorian naked before.

Before that night, intervening layers of clothing had allowed our slumbering bodies a sexless distance. Now, my arousal at the sight of his naked body was swift, absolute.

The next thing I remember is falling backward onto Dorian’s sheets— puff! — like I was preparing to make a snow angel. Madeline swooped onto me, leaving a trail of kisses from the top to the bottom of my chest as though she was planting seeds there with her lips. The natural progression: a tug on my underwear. I must have uttered some futile murmur of embarrassed dissent — the elastic clung momentarily to my erection — then I popped right out.

My unsubtle transgression stood erect with deviant pride, an accidental invitation. A frantic wriggling of bodies followed. Madeline’s skirt whooshed onto my foot and got kicked away.

Then, a hole of blackened memory.

Then, a flash of remembrance. The two of them were buttressed like a steeple over my plank-stiff body: Madeline nearest me, with her knees straddled around my legs, and Dorian shadowlike behind her. The moonlight silhouetted their upraised bodies. Dorian cupped her breasts from behind, and leaned his head over her shoulder to kiss her. Their faces merged. Her spine arched as he pressed against her — and then, a small gasp.

He entered her from behind; the bed was rocking below me, and they were rocking above. I observed them with awe. When Madeline remembered my body beneath her, she bowed her head onto me.

Wet lips: I was engulfed in warmth.

Her suspended breasts jiggled over my thighs as Dorian held her against his thrusts. My fingers found Madeline’s hair and my head rolled back into the pillow, and the clearest memory of all was the ceiling above us — obsidian black, except for a silver triangle of light from the window, like an Edward Hopper painting.

The next morning, I awoke to find Madeline draped on top of me. Dorian lay peacefully nearby, Adonis in repose, and I remember thinking that, in all the night’s flashing stages, Dorian had tried not to touch me, or even look at me.

That was our first winter with Dorian. There was one more after that, then — gone.

Dorian had never meant to hurt us — that was the one thing at least we could be sure of — but you just couldn’t expect the most beautiful person in the world to stay in one place, or be loyal. He didn’t mean anything by it, or realize he had done something wrong; he was just being himself, flitting throughout the world, and how could we disparage him for that when we had celebrated this kind of transience, challenging each other every day to be more carefree, celebrating new lengths traveled in the name of personal liberation? We idolized the Beats, and the Lost Generation, and the Impressionists, everyone who banded together to achieve a goal that had the outward glow of shunning convention. Fitzgerald and Hemingway were favorites for rejecting the American rat race to write novels by the sparkling Seine — and the restless Kerouac most of all.

Like all of them, Dorian had just gotten up and left, no apologies. He barely reached out when he got to Paris, and when he did for the first time, after several weeks of agonizing silence, it was laughable in its oblivious, impersonal nature: an e-mail with no subject reading simply, miss u guys!!!

Madeline didn’t even know if they were broken up.

I forbade Madeline to reply, promising never to speak to her again if she did. She obeyed, while bemoaning the unfairness of it: For her the thought of being all alone — no me, no Dorian — she couldn’t handle it. Eventually after that single e-mail — no phone calls, or letters, or anything more to suggest that the relationship we had all shared deserved greater effort — he apparently just forgot about us.

MADELINE AND I STOOD THERE HUGGING IN THE FITTING room until, at last, she stiffened up a bit, and said, “You know, when a baby is born without the ability to feel pain, it dies within a year.”

She told me this in a voice that was vaguely defiant, and before I could ask her what that meant, she had released me from my embrace and was hastily dressing herself in her own clothes.

I stood there bewildered as she tossed the curtain open.

“Who can blame Dorian, right?” she spouted nonsensically to the air, “when everybody in the world just disappoints each other,” and I had no hope of following her polluted stream of consciousness.

Giving the salesperson every reason to believe we had been in a fitting-room tryst, she stormed off as though I had said the wrong thing to her while we were having sex on the bench in there. I took a deep breath as she left with the back of her own dress unzipped, flapping open.

Appearing not the least bit like an invalid, she practically dumped the Lanvin dress on the salesperson’s head, deciding, “I’ll have it in the next size down,” even though she had barely tried it on to begin with. At ten feet away, she turned back to me, terrified I might have left.

I stood there among all the things she had left in my care — her patent leather Céline bag and classic little Hermès scarf, and the pearl-buttoned Marchesa cardigan on the floor beneath me.

“Won’t you please come with me to buy shoes before they close?” she asked, coming toward me. She glanced guiltily at all her things. I began to scoop up the cardigan as she delivered her best approximation of an apology in her stricken state. “I’m — nervous.” She gulped, and of course, I knew it was true. In general, Madeline was a little foolish, but not like this . Dorian had unhinged her.