R. Hernández - An Innocent Fashion

The whole time he kept on talking; his idea of “catching up” with me. He had never talked so much. He talked so much I felt like a piece of luggage at the airport going round and round on the carousel, eluding him whenever he tried to run up and take me. To uphold Régine ’s policy of institutionalized restraint had never seemed so impossible: I tried with concerted effort to ignore him outright, but was foiled repeatedly by my own nature, responding every time with the fewest words I could manage without feeling like a complete jerk. On several occasions, I was so determined to maintain my uncharacteristic taciturnity that I had to stand up and pretend to use the bathroom. In the end, he probably didn’t think I was trying to ignore him at all, just that postgraduate life had instilled in me a bladder problem.

Around lunchtime, Dorian took a break to buy falafels and rice from the Halal cart down the block. To my devastating lack of credit, I couldn’t bring myself to yell at him the way that George had to me (“ Don’t you know Sabrina hates Indian food? You can’t just eat Indian food ,” he had once said), and in fact, I almost said yes when he asked me if I wanted some.

“Is everything okay?” he finally asked on his return, spooning jasmine rice into his mouth.

I didn’t reply.

All of a sudden, in a rare moment of lucidity, he seemed to recognize the tremendous outline of what was wrong between us — the colossal iceberg under the surface. He shuddered “Oh!” with a look of uncharacteristic intensity and, laying aside the Styrofoam tray, gulped and grabbed my shoulder. He looked like a child who had wandered off for miles only to discover that nobody had followed him. “I—” he stammered, a pinch of desperation between his brows. If he didn’t say the right thing now — right now — he knew he was going to lose me forever.

I swallowed. This was it. He had caught up to me on the revolving belt and was about to grab me, but I would never let him. “I am Régine, I am Régine, I am Régine,” I repeated to myself, straining to remain fixated on a file folder on my computer screen.

“Do you want to go to a few museums this weekend?” he asked. “Your favorite painting — we can go see it.”

My favorite painting depicted a redheaded Greek princess named Danaë, sleeping, with her legs curled up against her chest and her long hair trickling around her shoulders like a bough of orange seaweed. It was by Gustav Klimt, and it wasn’t even in New York. If Dorian couldn’t even remember that much about me, then he was so far away from me he would never, ever catch up. I squinted at him. I should have been devastated, but I had been for a whole year. Now I breathed a sigh of relief. It was true, then. He didn’t know me anymore.

“My favorite painting is a Klimt, Dorian,” I said, twisting a paper clip between my fingers. “It’s in Vienna .”

“Oh, I know!” he said with an eager shake. He was still holding my shoulder, eyes pleading. “It’s on limited exhibition in New York,” he explained. “At the Neue Galerie.”

I stiffened with surprise, and had to look away.

“We’ll go on Saturday,” he implored. “Just you and me — I won’t even tell Madeline, or she’ll be hanging off me the whole time.”

In that moment there was so much pressure inside of me to simply say: “ Yes, let’s just forget the world, and forget anything ever happened between us — God, I missed you .” But I knew — I knew that the second I caved in to Dorian, it would all be over. This wasn’t college. In the real world, we would never be equals, and if I let him, he would easily — unknowingly — crush me and everything I had ever dreamed of, which was everything he already had.

Be Régine, Be Régine, BE RÉGINE!

I forced my eyes back to the screen, my retinas sizzling as I concentrated on a single burning pixel. “Dorian. ” I made myself say. “I need you to do me a favor.” I dragged a blank document pointlessly in and out of a desktop folder labeled Fashion News . “Can you get me this volume from the archives library?” Not meeting his eyes, I scribbled down the first combination of months and a year I could think of, a period of no significance whatsoever: Jan — Mar 1975 .

His confusion over the sudden change of topic transmuted into a slow nod. “Um, okay.” He let go of my shoulder and, in a dejected fog, raised a scoop of rice to his mouth.

I pressed the yellow sticky note onto one finger, and held it between him and his next spoonful.

“Right now?” he asked.

I nodded seriously. “Right now.”

He put down his Styrofoam tray.

I turned thanklessly back to my screen, and he returned with the volume twenty-five minutes later.

“Do you know where my lunch went?” he asked as he handed it to me.

“I’m sorry, I had to throw it away — Sabrina hates Indian food.”

“Really?” he said in a hushed tone that only I could hear. “That’s so strange — who doesn’t like Indian food?”

He was right — who didn’t like Indian food? — but I remained silent, and at the end of the day, I made sure Jan — Mar 1975 was still unopened, rotting like a hardbound carcass between us.

You look dashing,” Dorian greeted me the next day.

I rolled my eyes and sat down, pretending to be engrossed by my computer — a task made difficult by the fact that my screen was still warming up.

“I missed you and all your suits, babe,” he went on.

“Can you not call me that?” I turned to him with a scowl. Today I would spare him no dignity. I had spent most of the previous evening sitting on my mattress in the lotus position, sweating and begging the universe profusely. “Please make him go away, make him go away. just — make something terrible happen to him.” And after that I looked up quotes by Machiavelli on my phone, and tried to recall my one reading of The Art of War .

I was proud of myself when the phone rang a moment later, and I got to utter my first real words of the day to him. “Get it,” I ordered, as though to a dog.

“Hi, this is Dorian.”

I gawked at him open-mouthed and hissed, “‘ This is Dorian? ’ This is not your private line and they are not trying to call you! You’re supposed to answer, ‘ Régine ’—just one word, simply, professionally—”

For some reason — I think because I had startled him — Dorian reached toward the phone to press a random button, and suddenly, Edmund Benneton’s voice came spewing out of the speaker.

“—HEAR ME I AM LOCKED OUT!”

“Edmund!” I replied in a panic, trying to muffle the horrible screech of his voice with a pair of hands over the speaker.

“ETHAN, I AM LOCKED OUT! I FORGOT MY WALLET, AND I’M EXHAUSTED, AND THESE IMBECILES WON’T LET ME IN!” He turned away from the speaker and shouted to the security guard, “DON’T YOU KNOW WHO I AM? YOU ARE GOING TO BE SO SORRY—”

Sabrina was flying toward us, waving her hands. “ Turn that off! ” she shouted.

“IamsosorryEdmundIwilltalktosecurityrightnow,” I said to him and hung up the phone.

“Ethan, are you crazy? What is wrong with you? ” Sabrina glared fiercely at me, towering over the desk with her hand on her waist, her elbow bent at a right angle.

Dorian popped up like a daffodil. “I’m sorry, Sabrina, that was my fault. It was my first time answering the phone.”

My eyes flashed over to her, then back to Dorian, then back to Sabrina. I prayed for her to say something like, “Don’t let it happen again, Dorian”—“ Please Universe, please Universe, please ”—but I knew. Dorian was special. Dorian could do no wrong. Dorian was friends with Jane. How could Sabrina say anything to Dorian ? Even if she secretly despised him, all she had to do was look at him, and any ill will would melt away like snow on a spring day.