R. Hernández - An Innocent Fashion

Ping! “I did!”

Ping! “You never called, never wrote.”

Whoosh! The ball tinkered out of bounds. “I just — I was scared I had made a mistake. ”

The office was the same place, but now somehow different.

When Sabrina told us to “get the trunks,” Dorian and I would leave the closet side by side, like we were heading to recess. When she said, “get lunch — ten minutes — fast!” we scurried out together before she could protest, and although half the time she caught up with us, crying in exasperation, “ Not both of you ,” her bubbling vitriol would always simmer at the sight of Dorian’s privileged face. We pinged back and forth with surprising ease, and soon it felt the way it always had: an electric charge between our rackets. I became determined never to miss a stroke, and began to hit harder. I didn’t want to beat him, though — I just wanted him to hit harder back, and to play him for as long as possible.

“It’s so hard — all the petticoats,” gushed Madeline one night over drinks, after she and I agreed to reconcile. She was showing me and Dorian a picture of her Mary Queen of Scots costume. “You don’t realize, but to play such a complex character. ”

Dorian looked at me as Madeline rested her hands on his knee. There we were again — the three of us, the indomitable trio. Ethan St. James, and Madeline and Dorian in love as ever, yet although he held Madeline closer as she blathered on about grueling undergarments and “women back then,” it was me toward whom Dorian flashed a secret, knowing smile— Ping!

A few days afterward, a dozen uniformly sized boxes arrived in the fashion closet around one in the afternoon. A rakishly adhered orange sticker on the side of each read FOR IMMEDIATE DISTRIBUTION: It was the August issue, the first I had worked on when I arrived three months prior. I ran a blade across the top of the first box and opened the flaps to reveal Scarlett Johansson’s prominent pout. I shuffled through the pages, and for the first time I realized how significant a portion of the magazine was made up of advertisements. Previously, the pages of Régine had all seemed the same to me; whether they contained advertising or magazine content, it had all been glamour with a “u,” every woman and every dress as appealing as the last, as unanimous in their collective beauty as they were in their belonging to the same unreachable world.

Now, flipping past a hundred names that previously had been placeholders for this unreachable world — advertisements for Chanel and Balenciaga and Gucci and Fendi — I stumbled across the August It Girl shoot that I had worked on, and suddenly the world in Régine did not seem unreachable at all. In fact, as the It Girl in question was wearing off-white garments and accessories that my own hands had extensively handled — shoes I had crushed into packed trunks, handbags I had tossed into indiscernible piles — I realized for the first time that this world was already much closer than I thought.

Jane swept in just as I was coming across the fashion feature she had styled for that issue—“Darling!” she exclaimed. “Keep me company while I look over all these handbags that just arrived, come, come!”

I turned for one second, excited, then realized of course she was referring to Dorian, whom she was in the habit of pulling to her side for chitchat when she was in the fashion closet for an extended period. I tried hard not to eavesdrop as their voices floated through the racks (“. still enjoying Régine ?. I spoke to your mother yesterday. we’re talking about Mykonos in the next few weeks. ”).

To distract myself from this mildly irritating exchange, I flipped to Jane’s editorial, which was titled: “Guinevere: Queen of Rock & Roll.” Despite the relative simplicity of her personal style, it turned out that, between Edmund and Jane, she was the true genius. More and more, I was learning that fashion was a language, and that “practicing” it required a mastery of its grammar and vocabulary. Edmund’s stories were on the level of Dick and Jane —the best models in the best clothes, so what? — while Jane’s were, I don’t know, the Brothers Grimm or something, imaginative, drawing from a rich history of storytelling, with every model a character in a fantastical, fully articulated world. I would give anything to—

“—come on set this weekend?”

I perked up suddenly, like a bloodhound detecting a hot scent.

“This weekend?” Dorian replied.

“Yes!” Jane insisted. “You must come see the shoot! — it’ll be divine!”

Versace-clad Guinevere slipped right off my knee as the rest of their conversation faded away. Dorian basically said yes, he’d go. Jane basically said wonderful, she was so proud of him, and oh, look at this Dolce clutch, wasn’t it just delightful?

Now I shattered my tennis racket against the concrete. Dorian, however, scarcely noticed me upon his return, and in fact he seemed to have forgotten altogether about our match: he slunk over to the pool on the other side of the chain-link fence and collapsed grandly into a cushioned seersucker chaise, running his fingers through his sun-kissed hair. Producing a martini out of nowhere, he began to sip as though he had just finished a tiresome task — a spot of polo or a lap in his private pool — while his whole body was caressed by the reflections of the water. I slammed the tennis court gate and stormed off over the lawn, while he called out in a casual tone, over his bronzed shoulder:

“Are you going to the shoot this weekend?”

“No,” I said, and began to disfigure a paper clip.

He held out his drink toward me — in real life it was just ginger ale, and scarcely a generous offering considering he could never finish a whole can by himself. The crooked straw fell cockeyed like a little umbrella. “But don’t you want to get experience?” he asked me.

I took a measured breath. “Of course I do, but Jane doesn’t want me to come.” I tossed the mangled clip into a corner and picked up the magazine that had fallen by my feet.

He took a slurp and tilted his head, as if trying to remember the capital of somewhere, or calculate an arithmetic problem, then said, “Sure she does. She just didn’t think of it.”

I shook my head. “She’s never asked me to come on set. It’s fine — I don’t care.”

“Of course you care. Don’t you want to go?”

“I mean, yes, I’d like to go, but—”

Dorian strode back to Jane’s side before I could say another word. I heard her say, “What is it, dear?” He leaned toward her and whispered something, then—

“Oh my goodness, is that all? Of course he can!” she said. Jane raised her voice and called out to me, “Yes, yes, of course you can, Ethan!” She stood on her tippy-toes and waved her little hand at me over the racks.

I unsurely raised my own hand in response, then Dorian was by my side.

“Does that mean.?” I began dumbfoundedly.

“She says you can come to the shoot this weekend.”

I yelped and I threw my arms around him. “Babe — you’re the best!”

Dorian shrugged, poking through the box of magazines while I clenched the back of his T-shirt in excitement. “You could’ve asked her too,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked over his back, my chin resting on his shoulder as my hands loosened.

“I mean, you work ten feet away from her. You shouldn’t be so scared of everything.”

I pulled away.

If consideration for the feelings of others was a line he straddled, Dorian suddenly took a gigantic leap across it onto the far side. “You used to be so free,” he said.

My jaw dropped, and the relief that soared through me — after all my bitterness, Dorian had at last proven his enduring sweetness — it just burst, like a hot air balloon that one moment was being elevated by a blue flame, then the next moment had gone sputtering down to the ground into a searing heap.