R. Hernández - An Innocent Fashion

I ended up next to Dolce & Gabbana, with Dorian sitting between me and Madeline. The sofa was the enveloping kind — too comfortable — with any illusions of a fast exit dashed, or rather swallowed up, by its plush linen cushions.

“Have a drink,” Dorian said as he leaned forward toward the ice bucket. He poured Belvedere into two tumblers, and topped them off with orange juice — a generously inverted ratio, which at our prestigious university we had learned was prerequisite for a distinguished evening.

Madeline winked at me over Dorian’s back as he poured, but before I could respond with an expression of discomfort she looked away, unable to tolerate a moment in Dorian’s presence when she was not fully absorbed in exultation of him. Dorian handed us each a drink and settled back in the seat.

“Are all your friends from Paris?” Madeline asked in a loud, hollow voice, like a “cool” mother fishing for details about her son’s new friends whom she suspected of introducing him to sex, drugs, and other forks off the straight-and-narrow path.

“From shows,” he nodded, picking up his own drink, a gin and tonic which had begun to leave a sweaty moon-shaped puddle on the glass table. “I’m done with modeling though — I quit yesterday.”

“Done? You only just started,” she protested, with a startled clink of her own glass.

“Yeah, but I’m tired of it. I want to be creative again.”

I rolled my eyes. It was the one thing that could be counted upon in human nature, that every person should set out to prove their weakest virtue. Beautiful people always wanted to be more talented than they really were, and talented people more beautiful. Despite his constant attempts to be the exception, Dorian would always prove the rule — as would any person who tried to challenge fate.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Dorian rushed in, “it kept me busy. They call it Fashion Week, but it’s more like a whole month — there’s one in London, Paris, Milan — each one’s a week, plus castings before. I mean, I was barely going to class. I would go to auditions with all my French homework, and practice pronunciation in the makeup chair at shows — everything was crazy — and still the whole time I was so bored.”

“Isn’t it fun though,” gawked Madeline, “meeting people, wearing all the clothes?”

“Sure,” he admitted, “the first couple of days it’s great, but then you realize it’s the same thing every day, and all anybody wants from you is your picture. If I thought nobody took me seriously before — well, over there nobody cares what I have to say about anything. Backstage is always loud and chaotic — hair dryers going, people barking into headsets. Interviewers come around from all the magazines, and yell the same questions at me—‘ Dorian Belgraves! Enjoying Fashion Week so far? How do you like following in your mom’s footsteps? ’ It’s like, what am I supposed to say to them? ‘ Hi, I’m my own person, and can we talk about something else? ’”

He rolled his eyes and went on, “If they think they’re being really clever, they’ll know about Yale, so they’ll say, ‘ How do you like being a smart model! ’ and they just laugh like it’s the funniest thing they’ve heard all day. They just — assume we’re all stupid, when really, I mean they’re the ones that are. Let me put it this way — my best friend through it all—”

I gave myself away with an upward glance, curious to hear about the “best friend” who had replaced me and Madeline in Paris.

“—he has a PhD in microbiology, though nobody ever asks him about it. He has a really ‘commercial’ look, so he gets a lot of department-store jobs — big billboards and stuff — he told me, ‘ Don’t sweat it. Just nod and smile, pretend they’re right about you — at the end of the day, it’s a job. You get paid, go home — everybody wins .’” Dorian swirled around his gin and tonic. “For him, it makes sense, but why do I need the money? If I’m going to do it, it has to be for something else. I have to want to, but at this point I’m afraid there’s nothing I actually want to do.”

He gulped, lifting his drink to his lips. “I’m not like you guys, who always had a Path,” he reminded us, and took a deep, ice-clattering swig.

I rolled my eyes once more. Second only to Dorian’s own self-amusement — an undertaking that, like a winter fire, required endless fueling — these were Dorian’s two all-consuming passions: rejecting the idea of a life “Path,” and reminding everyone that he was too special to have one.

I almost made a joke to draw attention to this point, but then Dorian’s voice wavered. “Except you know, maybe one day. ” He trailed off on this hopeful note, his voice getting a little high at the end, and smiled — the familiar, all-comforting smile, which had always confirmed the uprightness of the world but somehow now seemed to shake at the corners — and for once it occurred to me that maybe Dorian actually wanted a life Path.

He glanced up to find Madeline just staring at him with a placid smile. She seemed not to have heard anything at all he had said.

“I have been making art again, though,” he said. He reached into the back pocket of his pants and pulled out a wallet-sized sketchpad. “I think — I want to be an artist after all.” He turned to an ink drawing on the first page, of a long, gaunt face, with sad, all-seeing eyes, and a barbed chin resting on a skeletal hand. “Guess who?”

“I don’t know,” Madeline shrugged, “but he sure is ugly.”

“It’s me. ” Dorian explained, his voice dropping off with a dejected echo. “It’s a self-portrait.”

“What?!” she balked. “But it’s. ” Madeline gulped. “You always had such a — unique drawing style.”

Madeline, of course, hated Dorian’s drawings, although she would never bring herself to admit it to him. She thought they were crude while, ironically enough, I had always liked them. They reminded me of the work of Egon Schiele, an Austrian protégé of Gustav Klimt who drew everyone with long, sad faces and atrophied limbs. Coming from Dorian, they seemed unexpectedly flawed and heavyhearted, qualities misaligned with the vision of Dorian that Madeline wished to have, as he was her champion of vitality and unmarred goodness.

Dorian turned the page. A receipt fluttered out like a pale dead leaf. Madeline picked it up off the floor and crumpled it up, tossing it into a tumbler which was pooling with melted ice.

“Wait!” he rushed in, saving the receipt with a scoop of his tapered fingers into the tumbler. “That’s not trash.” He shook off the drenched receipt and flattened it against his knee. “See, I’ve been writing poems on the backs of them. Like — art poems. If it’s a receipt for cheesecake, I’ll write about cheesecake. If it’s for soda, then. ”

“That’s clever,” Madeline half-consciously mused, her head on his shoulder.

I lost interest and stared at a bead of water that was trembling on the handle of the silver ice bucket, while in the background Dorian unironically recited a poem about Chinese takeout. After five minutes, Dorian had closed his sketchpad and Madeline was asking about Dorian’s mother, proving once more how much like a middle-aged woman she could sound.

“She and David got stuck in Milan,” Dorian said. “Mom got sick, too many martinis at some Gucci event — said she couldn’t get on a flight in time for the party.” Dorian’s hand fell on my forearm. “They were actually with Jane Delancey — have you met her yet, babe?”

“I’m sorry, what?” I had graduated from my examination of the ice bucket to the ice cubes in my tumbler. There appeared to be frozen raspberries in the middle of them.