R. Hernández - An Innocent Fashion

George raised his arms, and I let the box slide into his dumbfounded custody, where it bounced against his bulging stomach like a spoon upon bread pudding.

“Come on, boy,” Edmund said to me as I stepped off the ladder, careful not to graze George, who was staring at me with a mixture of menace and confusion. Edmund snorted, a deep hoglike snort, and with a swaggering lean wrapped his arm around my shoulder and drew me into a conspiratorial meander away from George.

He opened his mouth, and his saliva made an unsticking sound. “You should know, the next time you make me a fruit salad, the one thing I hate more than cherry pits is cherry stems .” He halfheartedly waggled a skeletal finger in my face before lowering his voice to a hoarse whisper—“Now listen carefully, because I am trusting you with a very important matter. “I’m leaving you the key to my apartment this afternoon,” he began, and my heart started to race.

That I should be entrusted with the key to Edmund’s home! My stomach leaped into my throat. This was it! After only a few weeks of bland servitude, I would be put to work on something meaningful. I prepared myself to accept the challenge — of selecting clothes, researching story concepts — and felt my own worth brimming as the notes of his overripe cologne swelled in my nostrils.

“See, I keep a collection of diaries,” Edmund continued. “Some of them are five, ten years old — just notes, musings — all my creative output. Over the years, with my schedule, you know — they have reached a state of. ” The jewels on his fingers glittered like a pinwheel as his hand conjured words with a revolving motion. “Creative. disarray. so — what I need is somebody to organize them — to just find the ones that come first, and put them all in order. Do you think you can do that?”

I nodded fervently as his words settled in my head and I realized that Edmund — a man I barely knew, yet who was interwound so intricately with my dream of success — had extended to me his vote of utmost confidence. If I had any doubt that his request represented the rare and unusual solidarity between us, it evaporated when Edmund smiled at me. I looked up to reciprocate, but his teeth were brittle and yellow, the posts of a rotting fence, and to linger over the sight of them ruined the moment — so I looked off to the side of him, away from his ugly teeth and his receding hairline and his sagging everything, and smiled at the air around him.

He patted my back and separated from me, his capelet whooshing over my back. Then he received a phone call, answered “HELLO” like a hearing-impaired person, and torpedoed distractedly away.

“What was that ?” demanded George, as the door shut behind Edmund. George wore a gray blazer today, and we almost matched.

“I–I messed up one of his inspiration boards,” I said, trembling with excitement. I was a terrible liar, and pretended to engross myself with an invisible hair on my pants. “He was reprimanding me.” I plucked it away and stole an upward glance to see if I had convinced him.

“But how does he even know your name?”

I shrugged, with an expression as dumb as I could muster. George furrowed his pale eyebrows and then, for the first and last time, Sabrina did me a huge favor.

Having been occupied with Clara and the other editors throughout Edmund’s visitation, Sabrina called over her cubicle now—“George! Have you heard of Madeline Dupre?”

I froze at the unsettling mention of my best friend’s name within the halls of Régine .

“No,” George replied. “Is she e-mailing us?”

“She’s dating Edie Belgraves’s son. It’s online, I’ve just — never heard of her.”

George turned his head away from me, distracted, while I grabbed the box of hats from him and scurried up the ladder once more.

IT WOULD HAVE BEEN EASY TO WRITE A PLEASANT REAL estate description of Edmund’s apartment: Fabulously located in fashionable West Village, steps from Washington Square Park, NYU, and more. Convenient shopping and charming restaurants nearby. Doorman, gymnasium, and crown molding throughout . What more?

The white-paneled lobby boasted a Baccarat chandelier and a remarkable echo. The doorman wore impeccably starched white gloves. The whole place smelled strongly of some flower — or rather, not any particular flower, but just “flowers,” a variety capable of no offense: Altogether, an airtight impression of generic luxury.

The impression ended abruptly when I turned the key to Edmund’s apartment and was simultaneously assaulted by a dark figure and a startling decorating scheme. The black figure lunged. I shielded myself with the door, saw him do the same, and realized the first feature in the foyer of Edmund’s apartment was a full-length mirror, as ornate as a window in a Gothic cathedral, hanging on a zebra wall. The reason I could not say zebra print was because the room in question wasn’t merely painted or wallpapered to look like zebra stripes, but covered from floor to ceiling with actual zebra, like someone had skinned a herd of them and sewn them together with all the stripes running in the same direction. I confirmed this with a shuddering touch — coarse, like horsehair.

I clicked the door behind me and wandered bewilderedly inside, my shoes echoing upon a shiny onyx floor. “Hello?”

Hoping to ward off any more surprises, I knocked against an open doorframe and poked my tousled head into the next room. Moroccan tapestries and Japanese silk wall scrolls. Orchids, calla lilies, birds of paradise. A Renaissance-style ceiling resembling a cloudy sky, complete with painted cherubs and precipitation in the form of a crystal-dripping chandelier. A Victorian camelback sofa, upholstered in purple velvet and covered with tufted leopard-print cushions; a big-screen plasma television and surround-sound speakers; Louis XIV-style chairs bordering a claw-foot coffee table; and a waxy gray wall-covering wafting upward from an untraceable breeze.

Puzzled by the gray wall-covering, I gave in to my temptation to touch it and thereafter resolved not to place a hand over anything unrelated to my designated responsibilities. It was an elephant skin — a dried-out elephant skin —and amid the churning of my stomach I wondered if working at Régine make it somehow legal for Edmund to own endangered-animal skins.

Iconic fashion photographs hanging throughout — full-color, framed in every iteration of gold curlicues — confirmed the apartment did not in fact belong to a taxidermist, and I ventured onward through a dizzying optical illusion of a hallway, its concurrent pink and white stripes painted in a head-splitting hexagonal pattern that was reflected infinitely in another full-length mirror.

The bedroom, in a shocking coral red, was no comfort at all. Magazines around the perimeter were piled to the height of a small person — leaning, crammed — and the floor was a black-and-white checkerboard, with the ceiling covered in a matching damask. Supervising the room was a huge Technicolor Buddha, painted with legs folded and eyes closed as he practiced his meditation during a Warholian acid trip. The one visual relief took the form of an ivory canopy that could be drawn shut over the bed, yet even that was cheetah print on the inside (although thankfully, it appeared, not sewn from actual cheetah skin). I couldn’t fathom the underlying design philosophy, but took it as confirmation of Edmund’s genius — a glimpse of which his diaries would soon miraculously grant me.

Replete with ornate fluting, his bookshelf was topped with a carving of Medusa, and her eyes bored through me as I poked innocently around for Edmund’s diaries. I had expected them to be all together, lined up on a shelf or two, but very few of his books were lined up at all. Instead they were like the magazines on the floor — crammed into haphazard piles, their crevices stuffed with miscellany, everything in danger of spilling out if you removed a single book.