R. Hernández - An Innocent Fashion

My shoulders fell slack. I gazed at my fingers twitching in George’s hand.

He picked up the Louis Vuitton watch resting by my keyboard, and slowly brought it into his own lap. “Remember when I asked you to get that pointless book from the library — how you didn’t ask questions?” He unclasped the watch. “You just did it.” George began to slide the Louis Vuitton watch onto my wrist. “And after that, the book sat there all day. And the next week, after I made you lug a hundred trunks, while I just sat here arranging gloves, I asked you to take it back to the library. And you still did it. That’s why I’m going to London to get paid as a fashion assistant, and you’re staying here to work for free, photographing handbag check-ins.”

He turned my naked wrist up to shut the clasp— click!

“See, what you don’t understand is, your degree doesn’t matter,” he went on. “Your interests don’t matter. You don’t matter. You think anyone cares what you know or what you like or what you feel ? There are a million nobodies like you — individuals, whatever. You really think you’re the only one? That you’re special? We all have lives, you know—‘personalities.’ Clara and Will, Christine and Sabrina,” he rattled, “all of them, and me. But at the end of the day, it’s not their names at the top of the magazine. It’s not your name or my name — it’s Régine . And that’s how all those people get to be here, because they know that when they’re here, they’re not Clara or Will or Christine or Sabrina. They’re a grown-up woman named Régine, and you know what? — Régine might be beautiful on the outside, but on the inside, she wouldn’t even care if everybody else in the world died.”

I was silent. I thought of Clara and Will and Christine, forced to gather around a plate of cupcakes for Clara’s birthday — tense, mistrusting, each of them hiding a knife behind their back in case one of the others moved too quickly. I thought of Clara, dressing me in acceptable neutral shades. “ This is simply the world we live in, my dear ,” she had said.

Outside the fashion closet, I could hear Sabrina buzzing to them, and the copy machine humming, and everybody’s cubicle-encased hearts beating in the same mechanical rhythm, slow and calculating. Grown-up. Soulless.

“You think I hate you, and that I actually like Sabrina?” he laughed. “You know how she even got that position, right? She’s best friends with Ava Burgess’s daughter. No fashion experience, no credentials — never worked a day in her life, for a job both of us would kill for. But you know what.? I can’t do anything about that, and neither can you.” He pointed in the direction of Sabrina’s desk. “If you were in Sabrina’s chair, it’d be you I would pretend to like — but you’re not.”

I stared at Sabrina’s empty cubicle.

“When I’m gone,” George said, “someone else will sit here, and I’d suggest you take advantage of them. Learn your lesson: Be more like Régine.” He pointed to the folder full of résumés — all the people who wanted a chance in this place. “These are the candidates I have for you. You can take them or leave them. It makes no difference to me.” Then he gestured at the watch he had fastened to my wrist. “It’s a nice watch, isn’t it?”

My hand was still resting on his lap. I felt the pulse run through his leg, imagined the blood pumping inside of him, and wondered if we were actually the same — just two ambitious young people, who under different circumstances, might even have been friends. I didn’t know much about George’s story. Perhaps he even had the same dream as me.

I took my hand back and gave a quiet rattle to my wrist. The words Louis Vuitton glittered over an ebony face, and I thought about what it would actually mean to own a watch like that — not to just wear it, but to have it in a drawer somewhere, to take it out once in a while and look at it, and know that I had money and power and everything I could ever want. I turned my arm to make the watch sparkle — it was hard, cold — then unclasped it, and laid it back on the table.

“I could never be like Régine,” I said, finally.

George returned the watch to its black velvet box. “Too bad.”

The closet door swung open.

George closed the box as Sabrina charged past us. “Boys,” she said over her shoulder. “There’s a Miu Miu glove missing. Black leather — came in with Jane’s L.A. trunks last week and they need it back today.”

George had kept the glove records the previous week. He opened his mouth — I thought, to inform her — but instead, he lied. “Ethan kept those records last week. He’ll find it by the end of the day.”

I rolled my eyes. “ What time is your flight? Hadn’t you better leave right now?”

“Sorry, Ethan. At least,” he patted me on the back, “it’s only a few more hours.”

And remarkably, as promised, it really was.

When the time came for George to go, I was cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by a hundred pairs of black gloves. It could have been that to locate the pair which resembled so many others required my full concentration, but I was almost certain George didn’t say a word of farewell to anyone, just took his bag and was gone for good. His parting gift to me was the folder full of people who could replace him, and the résumés were waiting for me around eight, after Sabrina left and all my work was done. By then the glove was found: It had never been missing at all, naturally, but pilfered without any notice by the fashion editors to examine at their desks. Now I could feel George’s minty breath lingering over me as I settled back on the carpet to sift through the pile of résumés.

My first prospective intern was Polina Nabokov, who had studied Agriculture at a trade school in Russia and was George’s idea of a joke, surely. I started a pile for résumés that constituted a flat-out no, then continued on.

Eric Mendelsonn had misspelled the word “fasshion” in his cover letter. No.

Jenny Kohler was “excited to learn all about the real world of supermodels, like my idol Naomi Campbell.” No.

Dorian Belgraves had—

I had to read it twice. Dorian Belgraves. The sight of his name slapped me hard across the face like an open palm. No. Absolutely not. I had never mentioned Dorian and my relationship to George, yet that was definitely a joke, to have included in my pile of Régine hopefuls the bane of my existence. My body shuddered at the thought of him. If I had any say in the matter, Dorian would never step foot inside the fashion closet of Régine , not when he had never expressed the slightest interest in being a fashion editor — and especially not to sit in the chair next to me. “ Régine wouldn’t even care if everybody else in the world died ,” George had said, and in that moment, I understood.

I folded Dorian’s résumé down the middle and started to rip it in half. Like Edmund, who expected every garment or accessory he disapproved of to vanish instantly from view, I never, ever wanted to see Dorian’s name again. Relishing a visceral satisfaction— riiiiip —my fingers got halfway down, then inexplicably could go no further. I had every intention to mince his resume to shreds then toss it onto the streets of New York, but my curiosity tugged my hand away: What did Dorian’s résumé even look like? I unfolded it cautiously and flattened it against the carpet, the hole in the center flapping like the gaping gill of a shore-washed fish.

His sophomore and junior years resembled my own. There was the Yale Daily News , for which we had both contributed weekly arts reviews; Sailing Team, which we thought we’d try, until we unwittingly capsized a two-man boat; Junior Class Council, which we were forced by Madeline to join (“ Don’t you want to support all my causes at the monthly meetings? ”). Then there was the gap that had come between us. Study Abroad , it read, with transfer credits from La Sorbonne — the line that represented our year apart, and the end of my love for Dorian.