R. Hernández - An Innocent Fashion

I closed my eyes. The doors whirred open and people clambered in, continuing despite me or Dorian or Madeline to live their lives. They crowded closer and closer at each stop until finally, at Union Square, their pressure was too great, and the distance between me and Dorian was forced to close. We pressed together. I melted onto him, resting my cheek on his shoulder, feeling the relief of a liberated cramp.

He stared over me at the tunnels rushing outside the window, while I glanced around the subway car without my glasses. With everything out of focus — all the balding heads, and cell-phone-illuminated pores, and pleather straps peeling off shapeless fake Louis Vuitton bags — it was like a Goya painting. The masses shifting their world-weary weight, their helpless heads lurching as the train dragged them haltingly to hell. The hands were the most sublime part — grasping, outstretched, clinging hopelessly to the train’s cold metal poles, everybody looking like they were about to plummet into the Inferno.

Only one lady reading a book, her palm pressed elegantly against an overhead bar, fingers fanned out like she was drying them at the nail salon, retained any dignity whatsoever, and I thanked her quietly on behalf of human civilization.

ANYWAY, SABRINA DIDN’T NOTICE ANYTHING BETWEEN ME and Dorian. I wanted to warn her that I wouldn’t be able to see today before she had me trying blurrily to discern Prada from Pucci, but there was no time, and she didn’t seem to care, exploding, “Just — get to your desk! Everybody needs their samples back — I’ve already done Prada, Dior, and Oscar — I need you to pull Kors and Vuitton right away — like, in the next five minutes — then check the e-mails I forwarded to you for the rest.”

Dorian and I moved together in the direction of our desks. We bumped each other as we crossed toward our respective seats, and he stiffened, glancing at the carpet, uttering his first word to me since the train — a tremulous, “Sorry.”

“Not you, Ethan.” Sabrina held out her hand to stop me. “Clara needs to speak with you.” She scissored with a stocking-clad snip-snip-snip toward the editors’ cubicle and I followed her out of the closet like a miscreant being led to the principal’s office. “He’s right here, Clara,” Sabrina announced, and with a cutting swish of her skirt left my side.

“ Eeeeethaann .” Clara swiveled her chair around to face me. “Hello, my darling. Please follow me.” She rose, nudged her hand politely against my arm, and hastily wafted down the hallway like a sweet-smelling smoke ring.

My stomach flopped. No doubt Clara was obligated to reprimand me on my tardiness. My mind stumbled through an obstacle course of pleas: Today had been the first time! It was only for thirty minutes! and even— Dorian was late too! We arrived at a door I had never entered before, and when Clara opened it I realized we were inside the conference room.

The conference room was where all the important people had their meetings. It was where they sat around discussing how many issues reached how many people, and how many of those people were female or divorced or college-educated, and whether they got their issues on the newsstand or by subscription, and, in the end, how could they get more people to buy it? It was where they discussed how to redo florals once again for spring and whether Gwyneth’s baby would make her too fat to do a February spread, and I was perplexed that Clara would bring me here to tell me that I shouldn’t be late again.

No sooner had the door closed than she expounded, in an uncharacteristically dull voice, “Someone has sued the Hoffman-Lynch Corporation.”

Her silk skirt glimmered as she tucked it hastily beneath her to sit, while I felt blindly for a chair of my own.

“Do you know what that means, Ethan?” she asked sharply.

The bristle in her voice made me miss the seat. “I’m sorry, I just—” I began to explain about my glasses.

“That means Hoffman-Lynch is being charged with violating labor laws — misrepresenting their internship program to take advantage of young people — people who want a chance at the fashion industry.”

I tried to process this, but my only takeaway was relief that Clara’s displeasure had been provoked by something other than me.

“It’s a Bazaar intern,” she scathed. “Some state-schooled brat — she says she was treated like a slave or something just because, I don’t know, they had her making copies while she had a stomachache,” she flapped her hand around like a dying brown bird “—I mean, please, what does anybody expect when they sign up for these things? Summer camp? Of course it’s hard, but you’ve never felt exploited , have you?”

Having under Edmund’s workload personified the dictionary definition of “exploited,” I struggled to conjure up any level of support for this outright fallacy.

With a sigh, she remembered herself and straightened up, patting away some imaginary wrinkle on her skirt. “The bottom line for you is. ”

I blinked at her blurry face.

“. they’re taking away all our interns.”

My neck cracked. “Taking. away.?”

“For legal reasons,” she explained, “Hoffman-Lynch is dismissing all unpaid interns.” She paused, then added, “Effective immediately.”

In a moment when I should have felt shock, passive acceptance descended over me like a Caravaggioesque fog. It was like the ending of a movie I had seen many times before, which every time I hoped would turn out different, but never did: in it I was boarding the Texas-bound red-eye flight that would take me away from my happy ending; crossing from the Jetway onto the plane with my eyes lowered in shame and my potential folded up in my suitcase, silently praying for the plane to crash and deliver me from my misery.

As the terror of my inevitable homecoming stirred in the deepest part of me, I blurted—“Who will assist Edmund?”—clinging to some nonexistent tatter of hope. “Edmund — he can’t do anything himself! I mean — what I mean is, he’s a genius, so. won’t he still need someone to assist him?”

The plane was rumbling to a start beneath my feet, when to my amazement, Clara nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “That’s why we’re bringing some interns on board as staff — as assistants.”

I grabbed my chair with both hands. Through the blurriness I thought I saw a strange look on her face — a smile ? It must have been a smile. and it dawned on me. I wasn’t going to Texas at all. I was going to work for Edmund, the foremost authority of my dream world. I leaped out of my third-class airplane seat and screamed, “ Get me off of here! ” and all of a sudden I was swearing my loyalty to Edmund again. If, as the emperor, he wanted to strut naked throughout the town, then who was I to stop him? The whole time I would point and say, “ Look at those marvelous new clothes! The hat! The collar! How divine! ”—no matter that the fantasy was a lie, and the townspeople wretched and stupid, and Edmund not marvelous at all but just a naked old man whose clown-like shortcomings everybody was afraid to point out.

Clara wasn’t firing me. she was hiring me. I shook my head in wide-eyed disbelief, as she bowed her head, a blonde curl tumbling delicately into her face. “Did you hear me, Ethan?” she asked.

“N — no,” I trembled, leaning toward her. “I’m sorry, I–I didn’t actually. I didn’t hear anything.” I wiped my sweaty palms against my pants and smiled a little, one nostril wheezing while the other crackled with dried blood. I wanted to hug Clara, but if I moved I would start screaming out—” I knew it! I knew it all along! ”—so I gulped, and folded my clammy hands over one knee, over the pants that Clara, and Régine, had generously bestowed upon me several months ago, trying to project the dignified look that would befit a young man of my new status — an employee of Hoffman-Lynch, the best magazine publisher in the world, where I’d be paid to walk the halls that for years had seen some of the greatest visionaries in the industry rise to prominence and bask in the glory of Régine ’s spotlight. and now it was my turn. My turn . “I’m sorry,” I told Clara, “I really don’t mean to be so quiet, I’m just — it’s such big news. What’s next? How do I start?”