R. Hernández - An Innocent Fashion

“Now?” he asked incredulously. “Aren’t you tired?”

“Oh, come on!” I laughed, with a persuasive hand over his shoulder. “The one time I want to go with you to a party and you’re tired?”

“I’m not saying I’m tired,” he backtracked, “I’m just—”

“Then come on!” I squeezed my arms around his waist from behind and dove us into the revolving doors. Silence like a vacuum, before— thwack! — a million feet clip-clopping endlessly everywhere, and alarms blaring in the distance. “Please, Dorian! I feel — at the top of the world tonight! Like everything is going to be okay!”

“Everything was always going to be okay.”

I latched onto his arm, intoxicated by recklessness. “ Please, please, please! Take me to the best party in Manhattan tonight!”

He pretended to slump to the ground with exhaustion, but agreed at last with a winsome sigh. A streetlamp cast a glow over our faces as I pulled him toward the curb, and ten minutes later a cab had whisked us to the Meatpacking District, and dropped us off in front of a hotel called The Standard.

Dorian paid the cabdriver — a fifty, but who was keeping track? — while diamond headlights soared down the West Side Highway beyond. I hopped out. The moonlight dribbled on the cobblestones, glistening like lemon juice on a road paved with oysters.

“Come on,” he said, placing his hand on my back as we approached a line of at least fifty people. They were bobbing faintly, switching from one foot to the other as they checked their phones to pass the time, and I remembered — Dorian didn’t wait anywhere.

The doorman was a black twentysomething in a tailored cherry-red suit. He was holding an idle clipboard against his body, inviting the whole front of the line to watch as he inspected his nails in the dim light.

“Hey, Ivan.” Dorian tapped him from behind. “I’m going in.”

“Oh, hey, Belgraves,” he greeted with a cool nod. “Go on. Some of your girls are here.”

“Kaija?”

“She’s pounding them back.” Ivan made a chugging motion with his hand.

Dorian smiled. “See you later.” It was as unceremonious as if he was greeting his own roommate.

Ivan looked at me as Dorian wordlessly took my hand, drawing me beside him. Ivan flipped foggily through the pages of his so-called guest list in his clipboard; with a flick of his wrist toward the bouncer, he said, “They’re good,” not marking anything off. Dorian squeezed Ivan’s shoulder and pulled me inside. The bouncer didn’t ask us for ID, and the last thing I heard was Ivan telling someone else, “Sorry, there’s a list tonight, you’re welcome to stand in line though.”

We stepped into a dark elevator with a security guard in one corner, and I grinned with a hysterical brand of joy as Dorian said, “Top floor.”

“Are you always on the list?” I asked.

“You’re cute.” Dorian smiled. “There is no list. Ivan just holds a clipboard, and lets in people he knows or who are wearing high-end designers.”

I laughed, and Dorian let go of my hand to check his phone.

“We’ll meet up with Kaija inside,” he said. “You remember her, right? From my birthday?”

Between the highlights of that sparkling night — Dorian passed out in my arms, and Madeline vomiting onto our cab door in the rain — Dorian’s friend Kaija had been a forgettable afterthought. Still, I answered with a half-attentive nod while trying to foist a smile on the hulking security guard. When he only stared at the wall ahead, I smiled wider, uncontrollably, until a neon pattern on the ceiling distracted me.

The doors closed. As the elevator soared up, a slow, rain-like hum surrounded us. The steel walls trembled like a boiling kettle — then, reaching a whistling crescendo, shook like we had whooshed into a hurricane. The elevator paused, overwhelmed by thunderous bass, then the doors slid open like floodgates to let a tsunami of pounding music crash over us.

Like an aquarium, a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows reflected an endless black ripple of human silhouettes, the tops of heads undulating like cresting waves. Dorian’s eyes sparkled. It was so clear, even in the sheer darkness, that the room was filled with people like him — beautiful people, important people. A wonderful thought splashed over me: maybe now, I could be like these people too. Gently, Dorian slid his hand under my arm, and we plunged in.

Voices bubbled up past our ears. Like divers entering a school of fish, we passed through a sea of shimmering faces, everyone illuminated by distant city lights through the windows.

I gasped at a famous face, pausing to look back. “Is that—?”

Dorian glanced over and nodded, nudging me back into motion. “We can say hi later if you want,” he promised. At the bar, he approached a white spine in a dress with a see-through chiffon back. “Hey, babe,” he whispered into a diamond-studded ear.

The spine jerked, a martini sloshing over the shiny bracelet on an oleander wrist. With sweeping annoyance the girl exclaimed, “Jesus, Dorian!”

She looked like a movie starlet — not a modern one, who made scenes for paparazzi and starred in franchise trilogies — but one out of golden-era Hollywood, whose sultry gaze belonged in black and white. Her starlit face glowed with a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer luster, fanlike lashes brushed with black mascara. She stooped down a bit in her heels to let Dorian kiss her cheek, carefully holding one hand up toward an exotic red turban that, like a satin python, had coiled itself around her raven-haired head.

“The situation’s dire,” she dully informed him. “It’s ten o’clock, and I’m not seeing things that aren’t supposed to be there.” Her voice was low and hoarse, like she had begun smoking Pall Mall cigarettes in the womb.

“Calm down, it’s a Sunday for God’s sake,” Dorian said. He pulled me to his side. “Plum, this is my best friend from Yale I told you about — Ethan.”

“Hello, friend from Yaaale .” She held out a hand like she was playing at being an aristocrat — and announced, wiggling her elegant fingers, “I’m Plum Bonavich.” She draped her arm around my shoulders and, enveloping me in sweet perfume, whispered loud enough for Dorian to hear, “Now that we’re acquainted, I really must ask — do you know any Yale men in need of a wife?”

I laughed, and Dorian said, “Don’t listen to her — she already has a full roster of male benefactors.” He poked at the girl beside Plum, who was busy dripping the last of her martini into her throat. “Hello to you too,” he said.

With a fine swoop, the girl clinked the glass onto the marble bar and shuddered, “These drinks just never last a girl.”

“Kaija, you remember Ethan, right?” Dorian asked her. She turned, and of course, I recognized her — not from his party but, like so many of his other friends, from a dozen magazines. In a loose-fitting white silk shirt and no bra, her small, pointed nipples attracted the most light in the whole room. Her skin was coconut brown, her teased hair like a palm tree’s fronds in the dark.

I thought her hand was moving toward mine to shake, but instead she buried it into Dorian’s hair. “What’s going on here?” she said. “You gave up on modeling, and now you gave up on combing your hair?”

Plum turned to provide her opinion. “That’s what’s wrong with the world these days. Nobody checks their hair anymore.”

Dorian swatted Kaija away. “Just so you both know, I’ve been working all day.”

“So? Other people have to look at your hair, you know. It’s not enough to be beeeautiful. ” She squeezed Dorian’s cheek and shook it like a dog with a toy.