R. Hernández - An Innocent Fashion

“How is your girlfriend doing?” she asked Dorian. “The civilian?” She looked up in the direction of Makeup’s slanted brush and explained in a hushed voice, “His girlfriend’s not a model.”

I was shocked to hear that Dorian had told anyone in Paris about Madeline.

“She’s an actress now,” Dorian said. “Or well, she wants to be an actress.”

Belinda smiled, genuinely touched. “Wonderful! So she’ll know what it’s like. It’s good to be with someone who knows what it’s like.” She didn’t explain what “it” was, exactly, but shut the magazine as Jane walked into the dressing room. Belinda pointed with a solemn shake of her head to the handsomely etched face on the back cover. “My biggest disappointment in life,” she said with a vivid sigh, and a curl of her slippered toes. “A total dream, until finally we hooked up, and I found out he had a spot on his — oh!” she exclaimed, at the sudden appearance of Jane’s reflection in the mirror.

“Go on.” Jane grinned, placing her hands on Belinda’s shoulders. “I’m dying to hear about your life’s greatest disappointment.”

“It was just—” Belinda blushed. “You know how some people have a mole somewhere? Well, he did, only he had it on his — you know.” She pointed between Dorian’s legs and made a little wiggling motion with her finger. “The size of a nickel.”

Jane let the dress fall gently around Belinda’s body, while Dorian held the model’s Boudiccan red hair: helmet-sleek on top, then frizzy from the ears down, with an arrow-like part through the center. The back of the dress was designed to plunge to Belinda’s lower spine, while the front was embellished from top-to-floor-length bottom with copper beads. The metal droplets chorused over the floor like a whispering cascade of holy water. Divine transformation.

Where, moments ago, there had been an ordinary seventeen-year-old girl — beautiful perhaps, but ultimately mortal, with her half-chewed fingernails and roughed-up knees — there now stood among us an angel.

All around her hovered a reverential silence, as even the garment racks seemed to lean toward her in anticipation of a heavenly utterance. Sabrina hung beside me, her shoulder almost touching mine, both of us poised in suspense like two un-rung bells. It was the closest she and I had come to harmony.

“Ethan,” I heard.

For some reason, I was nervous, shaking a little. I just — couldn’t believe it was real, that Belinda had become what I had always dreamed about, the woman in the magazine. She was Jane’s vision: the apparition of an actress who fell asleep at curtain call and, one hundred years later, woke up, brittle and rusted in a dilapidated theater. But now she was my vision too, and that of every other person whose mind drifted away while poring over the pages of a fashion editorial, all of us carrying into our dreams these beauties who never moved, never breathed, yet somehow glowed with the promise of another world, tiptoeing on the thread of spider’s silk that separated the real and the imagined.

“Ethan, darling,” Jane repeated. She reached out toward me as she lifted the hem of Belinda’s dress from the floor. “Can you pass me my apron?”

The apron dangled off the garment rack. It was faded and fraying, with a lint roller in one pocket and a plastic box of safety pins in the other, fringed by black rubber clamps. I strung it over Jane’s head, and she removed a small clamp, which she used to clip the waistline of Belinda’s dress.

She stood back, withdrew a crinkled hair from Belinda’s moistened lips; a palm on the seraph’s naked spine, she asked, “Ready, love?”

Belinda nodded without a word. Even she felt the hallowed magnitude of her own presence. She stumbled, then reaching for Jane’s shoulder, admitted with a whisper, “The dress is heavy.”

Extending her arm for support, Jane lifted the clinking train, and side by side they inched toward the stage door. Hair and Makeup followed closely behind, flanked by photo assistants like altar boys, so that together we formed a procession down the bloodred aisle.

As Jane positioned Belinda on the stage, the photographer fired a test flash: a beep, and the theater was awash with white light.

“Tyler, can you turn up the fill light?” the photographer asked, and one of the altar boys twiddled with a light behind Belinda’s head.

A computer screen by the photographer’s side displayed the images his camera captured. Eventually, after Belinda had flowed through a stream of poses, there would appear on the screen the unedited image that millions of eyes around the world would see, an image that might trickle into their subconscious, and in some small, untraceable way, affect the course of human culture.

Belinda waved at us with an uncomfortable look. Jane was stooped over the photographer’s chair, and didn’t notice.

“What is it?” I called over the aisles.

She pointed pleadingly with a copper nail toward her face, like she was at the dinner table and had accidentally bitten into something she was allergic to. I traveled down the aisle to her, the crunch of dead insects underfoot.

“Mm — my gum,” Belinda moaned. “I forgot to spit out my gum.”

“Is that all?” I held out my hand like a cup.

“You’re sure?”

I insisted with a nod. Aiming to preserve her lipstick, she pinched the wad between her teeth and pushed it out with her tongue.

“Oh,” she gushed with relief, and licked the inside of her mouth.

“We’re ready,” the photographer said, and a flash filled the theater once more.

I exited his frame, and paused at the end of the aisle; stared at the gum in my hand — putrid pink, like a masticated balloon. I looked up at Belinda. Flash! Down at my hand. Flash! This was it. Flash! My dream was so close, I could feel it in my very hands . I looked toward the crew. The light was flashing over and over now, a shatter of lightning over Belinda’s head.

Nobody was watching me.

I popped Belinda’s gum into my own mouth. It was still sweet, and I laughed to myself.

AFTER THE SHOOT, WE RETURNED TO RÉGINE TO UNLOAD THE trunks.

“Go home,” Jane said. “It’s Sunday night. You can do all that tomorrow.”

Dorian wiped an imaginary layer of sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. “Wait up for me,” he said to me, sprinting to the bathroom as Jane disappeared with a smile into her office.

I sat in my chair and stretched my legs out, lightly rotating side to side as I stared at the ceiling. I could hear Jane typing — punching her keyboard slowly, one letter at a time, like she was playing whack-a-mole with a single finger. The only other noise was the mouselike squeak of my chair.

Faintly, from all the way down the hall outside, Jane’s voice called out, “Dorian?. Ethan?”

I stopped turning, passed all the racks, left the fashion closet, and approached Jane’s door. “Hi,” I said, resting a hand against the metal doorframe.

With one hand she stretched her white ceramic mug out toward me, and with the other she covered her mouth, yawning. “Can you please make me a tea, darling? I’m falling asleep, but I want to finish this proposal.” She pinched her fingers together in front of her face and shut one eye—“A little bit of honey.”

I stepped out with her mug into the quiet hallway, and the overhead lights flickered on to illuminate my path to the kitchenette. The office was serene, humming, and it filled me with a strange sense of peace to imagine all the chairs tucked into desks on the other side of the cubicle walls, like children in their beds. When I returned to Jane’s office I rapped lightly on the door and entered, steadying the mug as I remembered our first encounter in the women’s bathroom.