R. Hernández - An Innocent Fashion

He had never told us he was unhappy at Yale, never said he was applying to go study abroad or even mentioned La Sorbonne. He just left — and when he got there he ignored us, all of our calls and messages. This was before all the newspaper headlines at school, before that one pathetic e-mail, when for a brief but real moment at the beginning of senior year we were afraid something terrible had happened.

It was Madeline who called Dorian’s house in Paris. We couldn’t guess who would pick up — a maid, maybe — but we certainly hadn’t expected it to be his mother. Decades after Edie Belgraves had hit the peak of her beauty and fame, she was still nowhere close to settling down. She was always vacationing — St. Tropez, Cannes, the Hamptons — occasionally modeling, but for the most part basking in the fortune that her face, and her latest husband, had earned her. She was just like Dorian, eternally restless, and less likely to be in her own home than practically anywhere else in the world.

When she answered the phone she was delighted, and not at all distraught over the “something terrible” we had feared. “Why, dearest!” Edie exclaimed. If Dorian’s mother liked me, she adored Madeline. Having been raised and discovered in London, she maintained a view of the opposite side of the pond as quaint, and referred to Madeline as Dorian’s “sweet American girl.”

When Madeline asked her what she had called to know — a very scared, roundabout, “ Where’s Dorian ?”—Edie thought it was adorable. “ You really are so good to check in on him! He just arrived at DeGaulle, safe as a pillow .” Like all the other well-compensated It girls of her set, Edie had taken a lot of drugs in the late eighties, and often said things that didn’t make sense, like “safe as a pillow.” “You know, why don’t you plan a visit? He’ll be staying with his father, my ex-husband — it’s a great apartment, and everything is better in Paris!”

“Dorian’s moved to P-Paris?”

Shortly after that were all the headings in the Yale Daily News , then Dorian’s one e-mail, and then, Madeline just blamed herself. She thought everything was her fault, that she had somehow driven him away with her grand notions of romance and commitment and devotion, in the spirit of Anna Karenina.

It always went back to a single incident, which she replayed every day like a train roaring down the same tracks, the rails settling deeper into the earth. They had been horseback riding in Montauk, Madeline sitting behind Dorian holding his chest, when she pressed her face into his shoulder and remarked innocently, “Wouldn’t you like to do this forever? I mean — for the rest of our lives together?” He gave the reins such a startled jerk that the horse bucked her right off into the grass, and he lost control and the horse went galloping away from her, and every time she told me the story the fall was harder and the horse was wilder and more “fateful,” and she would weep for longer at her own foolishness.

I tried to tell her it wasn’t her fault — Dorian was just being who he was — but she wouldn’t listen because, well, she was just Madeline, and she was just being who she was.

After about five minutes smoldering at Dorian’s name on his résumé, I realized I had been staring much too long at something that needed to be destroyed. I couldn’t rip it anymore, though. There was too much of my own life in it. Finally, I had to just place it to the side — this broken, paper version of Dorian — not in the No pile, or the Yes pile, or even the Maybe pile, but in a distinguished pile on its own.

“I WAS THINKING—” DORIAN CROAKED. HE SWALLOWED, AND against my own skin I felt a shiver run through his body.

It was the end of junior year. Classes were over. Finals week loomed ahead, and beyond it the rumor of summer on the horizon. In two weeks Madeline and I would each have our turn to stand on the porch of our gabled house, surrounded by luggage as a cab pulled up and we waved good-bye to Dorian and another year in college. I would fly to Corpus Christi, to my parents and Spanish television, and Madeline to Washington, DC, to an internship on Capitol Hill. Dorian would also go somewhere — he didn’t know yet — wherever rich, aimless people went to escape their rich, aimless lives.

Cool evening fog crept in through the crack of Madeline’s open bedroom window. A swirling canopy of marijuana smoke hung over our heads, while more sweet ribbons escaped from a joint mixed with lavender resting nearby on a crystal saucer. Dorian was lying on his back. He stared at the ceiling while Madeline and I lay pressed on either side of him, the three of us naked, our long legs all intertwining.

It had been over a year since our first experience together — that is, my first sexual experience ever — and it hadn’t ended there.

In the first weeks, our sexual experimentations were contained by the strict parameters of a general pattern: Dorian and I took turns pleasing and being pleased by Madeline, while between him and me there was no physical contact.

We could only guess at where her liberated sexuality had sprung from; although Madeline was politically open-minded, it had taken her nineteen years of life to find a boy she deemed worthy enough to touch her — and when she did, she found two. She loved us equally, and through our own brands of thrusts and panted utterances, we were able to love her back. Dorian was hard and fast, I was soft and slow, and each of us uniquely capable to reach some deep, essential part of her.

I felt only a passive longing to explore a similar closeness with Dorian. Sex was overwhelming enough with just Madeline, let alone the two of them combined at once, and I figured anyway he was scared, or nervous, or even silently unnerved at the thought of sex with another man.

Our arrangement manifested in this unbalanced expression of affections until one drunken night saw us accidentally aligned in a triangular formation, with my face between Madeline’s legs; Madeline’s between Dorian’s; and Dorian’s between mine. I felt his hair fall on my inner thigh; prepared myself to pull away. Then before I could rearrange myself, I felt the slow, tentative pressure of his fingers wrapped around me — then up and down — and then, his lips crossed the threshold that had loomed above us all that time.

After that, the doors of possibility were swung wide open, except for two important doors, which remained firmly shut. The first closed door was penetration between Dorian and me; we experimented with one another, and had sex with Madeline, yet beyond that, we never ventured. The second closed door was more unusual: throughout everything, Dorian and I never kissed. I tried plenty of times, once we’d reached a certain level of comfort, but every moment we came close he would bury his face in my neck, kissing my shoulders or my chest instead.

Now Dorian appeared to be in a trance, his lips barely moving as he murmured, “Do you think — we’ll be like this again?”

We had all just had sex, and had hastily wiped up before collapsing in Madeline’s bed.

Madeline sat up and propped herself onto one elbow, resting her golden head in her hand. “We still have a few weeks,” she said, tracing a circle around his belly button with her other hand. She rubbed her ankle against Dorian’s, her toes grazing the hairs on my foot. “Nobody’s leaving yet.”

“I don’t mean about summer. I mean, when we get old.” With a glazed look and his hands crossed over his chest, he looked like an embalmed corpse.

“People change so much when they grow up — they get so sad,” he said. “Do you think we’ll stay the same?”