R. Hernández - An Innocent Fashion

At midnight, the lights flickered off through the entire floor. Thereafter, they’d only come on again if I activated the motion sensor, which required me to stand up and wave my arms like I was directing an airplane to land. Everything was a dark blur between two and eight in the morning, at which point I stapled the paper copies and clicked Send on the digital version.

Dorian arrived an hour later to find me snoring over my computer keyboard. “Morning, babe.”

I peeked through one eye to find him smiling there beside me and turned my head the other way, praying he was only a bad dream. Surely when I woke up, I would find somebody else there — anybody but him. Five more minutes, five more minutes , I thought, but I could feel his eyes on my back and couldn’t squeeze mine tight enough to black out the whiteness of his smile in my head.

“You look like you rolled out of bed.”

“I wish,” I groaned. I started to prop myself up, but was met with resistance from my heavy head. My face rolled back toward the ceiling, and the fluorescent lighting burned through my half-closed lids.

“Wait a second,” said Dorian. “You didn’t stay here overnight, did you?” He leaned toward me, then reeled back, which I took to mean that I needed a shower. “You know, I can help you with whatever you need. It’s not fair for you to do all that work by yourself.”

“Yeah,” I croaked, “next time we’ll have a sleepover by the photocopier.” I bobbed up long enough to wordlessly point to the pile of garment bags on the floor and he had enough sense to end the conversation.

If I thought the morning was bad, the rest of the day got only worse. With every hour that passed — slowly, like rain passing through hard layers of scorched earth — my body slumped lower and lower, until finally I decided to stand. I knew that if I sat down I would fall asleep, so for a couple of hours I paced back and forth, waiting for Dorian to do all the work while I saved all my energy to look busy when Sabrina came into view. I disappeared constantly into the kitchenette for coffee, where I prompted frequent throat-clearing from behind me by staring too long at the buttons on the coffeemaker. When I arrived back to the closet, my cup was always empty again, and would tumble out of my fingers into a growing pile in the trash. Help Hoffman-Lynch Reduce Waste! the trash can pleaded, and every time I snorted with a demented sense of gratification.

Dorian struggled in earnest to engage me, but, unlike Day One, I now had no trouble ignoring him. I was being spectacularly like the figurative Régine, and I wasn’t even trying.

Finally, he said to me, while I was staring at a tortoiseshell button on a Max Mara coat, “I wouldn’t take the credit.”

I made a grunt-like sound, unintelligible even to myself.

“For helping you,” Dorian clarified. “If you need help with Edmund’s assignments, I wouldn’t steal the credit. if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

I blinked at his face. His expression contained the overwhelming comfort of familiarity, and also of truth: Dorian was nothing more and nothing less than me, had nothing more and nothing less than what I wanted for myself. If we were switched I would have done as he had done, and I would do as he did.

I had known this all along. It was the thing that hurt the most.

“Have I changed, Dorian?” I murmured.

He was cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by black lace lingerie. He quietly bent his head, and draped a French lace garter belt on his knee. “No,” he lied. “What do you mean?”

“I’m really afraid. I’m afraid I’ll never be happy again.”

Dorian looked up at me as I crumpled beside him. My knees hit the carpet with a deadening thud. I swayed, and he caught me with the grace of Mary in a Pièta. He didn’t say anything. I dug my head into his chest and he put his arms around me, and we remained there, wordless, for five minutes.

“TELL HER I’M NOT HERE!” SABRINA YELLED.

“Sabrina’s not here.?” Dorian ventured, with a hopeful glance toward the phone. Like me, he was a terrible liar. I could see him squirm as the person on the other line retorted in the familiar way, something like, “ But I just heard her yell at you. ”

“Is that Jenny from HL Group?” I asked.

He nodded. His green eyes widened, reflecting light from the computer screen.

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t worry about her,” I assured him. “She’s always pestering for their Cavalli clothes back.”

“Well, what do I say?” he mouthed, holding the receiver to his chest. “She talks so fast.”

“You know what I do?” I confided, “I tell them I’m going to transfer them—”

“To whom?” he whispered urgently, as Jenny from HL Group’s voice spiked over the receiver.

“To anybody: Sabrina, Jane, the Queen of England, whomever, then — I just hang up.” I took the phone from him and interrupted her. “Hi, Jenny, let me transfer you.” Click! I pressed the button, and then passed the receiver back to Dorian. “See,” I said, straightening my back. “Now don’t pick up when she calls back.”

Dorian stared at me.

I straightened my shoulders and shot him a defiant look—“What!?” My pose reeked of affectation — this was the “new me,” who sat up straight and hung up on Jenny from HL Group.

The next second, the two of us had deflated like balloons and were laughing aloud.

“Hey!” came Sabrina’s voice. “What’s going on over there?” She sounded like a police officer knocking on the windshield of a couple of teenagers’ hot-boxed car, and suddenly, my entire life seemed to have reached such an unprecedented level of ridiculousness that I began to laugh even more.

“ Hey! ”

I reached over to cover Dorian’s mouth with my hand, and when that only made us both laugh harder, I realized I had never laughed at Régine .

“Do I have to come over there?” Sabrina threatened, and that’s what really set me off — that after all my delusions about the grand purpose of my postgraduate life, I was surrounded now by dresses and handbags and high-heeled shoes, and had to answer to a crazy person whose own dreams probably involved e-mail correspondence with the PR girl from Prada. And on top of everything, who should be sitting next to me but Dorian — the bane of my foolish existence? The whole thing was so tragic, so funny, that my hysteria hit fever pitch. I was a broken weather vane, swinging in every direction.

I had no idea why Dorian should find this funny, but he was in hysterics too, and that made me laugh even more — to think that together we were the dumbest pair in the world, and combined with Sabrina, the dumbest people in any room, ever .

Probably too hesitant to confront Dorian — Jane’s favorite — Sabrina never acted on her bluff, and it took about five minutes for me and Dorian to settle down. When we finally did, I realized my hand was still covering Dorian’s mouth. I lifted it away from his lips, and my palm glowed with his saliva.

DORIAN HAD BEEN EGGING ME ON SINCE HIS ARRIVAL, PASSING one tennis ball after another into my court, while I just fumed in the center with my arms crossed and let them tut-tut-tut toward the unloved corners of the fence.

In a moment distinguished by the completeness of my own stupidity, I finally raked up my racket from the concrete and thwacked the ball back with all my strength.

Ping! “Tell me more about Paris,” I demanded.

Ping! “It was beautiful, and dull.”

Ping! “That’s all?”

Ping! “I missed you and Madeline.”

Ping! “Shut up.”