An Innocent Fashion Read online

  With special thanks to HarperCollins and Trident Media Group,

  especially my editor, Hannah Wood, and my agent, Erica

  Spellman-Silverman; also to my parents, without whom this book

  would not be possible.

  dedication

  For Justine

  epigraph

  “Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?”

  —EDITH WHARTON, The House of Mirth

  contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  chapter one

  With all the tall buildings everywhere, you’d think it would be easier to kill yourself in New York City. The trouble was, to get to the top of one of them you’d have to live in it, or know someone who did. This seemed to be the trouble more generally: to get to the top of anything was just so difficult, and my biggest fear in growing up was that it would only become more difficult until it became impossible.

  Everywhere all those horrible, record-breaking high-rises; I could zigzag all around them and blink at them from below and even chat up their friendly doormen, but at the end of the day, when all I wanted was to jump off some gratuitous altitude, it was, “Hey, kid, who you here to see?”

  I finally understood why rich people paid a premium to live on a penthouse floor, adding another unfair advantage to the list that in my mind grew longer every day: if you could afford it, you got to kill yourself without a fuss. It made more sense to me than paying to see “the view” of New York City every day; I mean, if I was rich I’d pay not to see the view, with all those skyscrapers jutting up like a bed of nails.

  At the magazine people talked about suicide all the time, but usually they were referring to fashion suicide, which was like social suicide but much more serious. Fashion suicide was when somebody in the fashion world committed an error so egregious that they would never be welcome there again—a slipup caused by burnout or a temporary lapse of sanity. Depending on how you looked at things, the latter could alternatively be considered a restoration of sanity; either way, it was usually summed up as, “I can’t fucking stand this anymore.”

  A textbook example was that committed by the former fashion assistant—a doe-eyed trust-fund doll who one day last spring just stood up from her chair with a glazed look, and left. She didn’t even bother to take her bag with her, a $10,000 cast-off that came into her possession when the senior fashion editor pleaded, “Get this vile thing away from me—it keeps appearing on my desk.” To be fair, the bag was pretty vile—it was covered in distressed python scales and golden buckles the size of prison padlocks—but it was also a $10,000, yet-unreleased Versace runway sample, so she kept it. She kept it right until the end when, flaccid and shedding its horrible rotting skin, it wound up where the editor had dumped it in the first place. From there the assistant joined a convent, or a nonprofit—I’m not sure, but something with a redemptive ring to it.

  Other perpetrators of fashion suicide included another former assistant who quit her job to write a tell-all roman à clef about her famously diabolical boss, and a gay intern who charged a $15,000 Bergdorf shopping spree to the managing editor’s corporate card after he was made to work through his Christmas vacation. Neither of them would ever step foot in the office of a high-profile fashion magazine again, although the former did end up with a New York Times bestseller and the latter with a two-month vacation in a county jail in Westchester.

  It’s not as hard as you might think to actually walk out on Régine. After you’ve been there long enough, it feels like you’re just going across the street to grab a pastrami sandwich for lunch, even though you know you’re never coming back. Getting beyond the double doors is the hardest part. Once you’re past them, with the colossal video screen playing fashion shows on a loop behind you, with girl after leviathan girl on your heels, a nightmarish, never-ending procession of the chosen ones you’ll never be like, you finally do become like them. Rigid and unfeeling, you just walk, and you’re in the foyer, where two cream parlor chairs and a cream sofa border a cream coffee table with a single potted orchid—just a bright green calligraphic stroke, with its blossoms like snow-white moths who landed there and got stuck.

  I suppose if I’d wanted to, I could have just pressed Up at the elevators, popped out on the top floor and found a fire escape to the roof, but even disillusioned dreamers have their dignity. To jump off the Hoffman-Lynch building, that horrible behemoth of New York City architectural innovation, with its unprecedented vaults and soaring, hope-flooded windows, a staggering display of “harmony between old and modern” (according to the plaque in the foyer)—all to disguise the depressing white offices inside—well, no thank you. Who wanted to nose-dive into midtown traffic, anyway?

  Then again, access to the convenient heights of the Hoffman-Lynch rooftop was almost certainly a privilege denied by my limited-access ID, which read INTERN and didn’t include a photograph of my face or even my name.

  One way or the other, I knew I needed to get out.

  I would have jumped off the roof of my own walk-up apartment, but the building was only four stories tall, and I’d heard once you had to do it from a minimum of six stories if you hoped to actually die. This wasn’t so much a mental note I had made for this occasion as one of those tidbits that stuck inexplicably in a person’s head for years, like the fact that tongue prints were as unique as finger prints, or that Napoleon had been five and a half feet tall. It made logical sense, too, that you’d want to jump from somewhere high; if you jumped out of any old window, you could just end up with a broken leg, or else, maimed for life—either way, worse off than you’d been in the first place.

  That’s why I went to my boss’s house, because he was rich and living The Dream in a fifteen-story Fifth Avenue co-op with a gym and classical molding throughout.

  WHEN I ARRIVED AT EDMUND’S APARTMENT BUILDING, I SAID “Hello, Horace” to the doorman, because even though I was about to kill myself, it wasn’t his fault, and I’d always liked him.

  “Welcome, Mr. St. James!” Horace wore a gold-trimmed hat like a ship’s captain, and round glasses like mine. Unlike me, Horace was as portly as a fully suited watermelon and stood there all day with his hands resting on the top of his stomach. It was a shame I’d never live to be that old; all my life I’d been slender, and it would have interested me to know what it felt like to swell up like a balloon in my old age. “You’re all wet,” he informed me.

  I almost didn’t believe him, and glanced sharply up behind me. The whole sky was swirling like the mist in a crystal ball. Gray clouds moaned like a chorus of captured souls, while the thunder laughed, and all around, the deluge tried to drown them out with a dull roar.

  You know you’re concentrating very hard on the matter of killing yourself when you don’t even notice it’s the end of the world outside. With a sudden shiver, I wrapped my arms around myself and noticed the puddle I was spreading over the marble floor. The mosaic that read 25 FIFTH AVE sparkled under my feet, while all around me tinkered raindrops like diamonds off a broken necklace.

  “Need a towel?” Horace offered.

  I said no, thank you, and he handed me a square brown box, the size of a pastry container. “Here’s a package for Edmund.” He pushed PH on the elevator for me. “Come see me on your way out. I’ll lend you an um
brella.”

  I smiled sadly at him, knowing it would be the last time, and for a moment, I closed my eyes and thought, Wouldn’t it be better to just tell Horace everything? Surely he would understand. He would lay my head on his stomach, pet my wet mop of hair with his gloved hand, and tell me, “There were times I thought I wouldn’t make it either, plodding around in this wool suit in the middle of a sweltering summer, but in life you just have to keep fighting.”

  It’d be a nice alternative to dying, I thought, opening my eyes—just as the elevator doors concluded otherwise, and closed.

  EDMUND’S MAID HAD HER BACK TO ME WHEN I STEPPED INTO the foyer of his apartment.

  “Hola, Rosita,” I said as she dusted a coffee table tome on Linda Evangelista, to which my boss Edmund had written the foreword. I gently set down Edmund’s package on the table beside Linda’s apathetic visage, and Rosita hefted herself around to greet me.

  “You wet, E-tan!” she gasped, despite my frequent insistence that she not trouble herself over the pronunciation of my name. Like a brown-skinned Lady Liberty leading the revolutionaries, she swirled her feather duster in the air and waggled over. “Lay me get you towel.”

  I raised a hand to stop her. I was soaked through, but to inconvenience Edmund’s underpaid maid was the last of my dying wishes. My own mother cleaned houses for a living, and on top of that, what good was a towel to me now when awaiting my momentary arrival was Edmund’s roof and my long, wet plummet down? For that matter, what good was any more effort at all spent in the service of my ill-fated body? In the course of my foolhardy life, enough energy had already been wasted providing for my lowly human needs—warmth, comfort, and all the pointless rest of it.

  She couldn’t have known this, of course, as she hurried away toward Edmund’s linen closet and its supply of gold-trimmed sheets. If she had known what I was about to do, Rosita would have considered me luxuriously spoiled. When she looked at me, she saw someone like Edmund, “un americano rico.” How self-indulgent for someone like me to want to kill myself—shining with the glimmer of privilege and youth, yet unable to bear my insignificant troubles—while everywhere people like her toiled for a tiny measure of the advantages I had inherited at birth.

  The truth was that I was a lot more like Rosita than she would ever have guessed. If, like a piece of jewelry, I had been inspected through a microscope—my surface scratched for some telling signifier of my value—my appraiser would have shaken his head, pursed his lips, and silently grouped me with the cubic zirconia. Fortune had spared me all telltale signs of my inherited otherness, but my mother was the child of an unlikely military marriage in New Mexico—white-skinned with dark brown hair, fathered by a buffalo soldier—while my father was Mexican. His face was brown and leathery, stubble crawling across it like an army of black ants. By some fortuitous celestial oversight, my own face betrayed neither my heritage nor, incidentally, my age—except for my chin, which was punctuated by a prickly row of elliptical black hairs. I had dark, wavy hair and a childish face; an obligatory outburst of teenage hormones had manifested itself as a fashionable growth spurt, leaving me tall and lean, but otherwise the halfhearted advances of a reluctant puberty had left me with a perennially boyish appearance.

  In exchange for these considerable courtesies, I was marked by one single visible exception to ensure I would never forget I was the progeny of disharmony: mismatched eyes, each pupil encircled by different-colored orbs, one blue, one brown. They were existential eyes, large and searching, a pair of happy and sad theater masks—both sides of humanity, whose only common behavior was to blink open and closed. My heterochromatic eyes were a harmless irregularity that nature had installed in me as reminder of my bastard status, but nothing I couldn’t hide behind a pair of horn-rimmed glasses—another testament to the power of fashion. In the end though, what did fashion matter? I stood there now in a designer suit gifted to me at Régine while Rosita wore an apron, yet I was the one who wanted to die.

  The first time I met Rosita I had been delivering lilac and periwinkle hydrangeas to Edmund’s apartment. “Hola,” she had said. My instinctive reply was like a rumble from a volcanic crater that for many years had remained dormant, “Hola, señora, ¿cómo está?”

  “Ay, qué bien hablas,” she had replied in surprise over the waft of her duster. I paused, and remembered myself. “I learned Spanish in grade school,” I lied through an American accent. Unlike my Spanish-speaking forebears, who had relished in the dramatic confluences of their romantic mother tongue, I had for years forced my words into the unromantic security of American pronunciation. To certain ears it was dull and un-sensual, but to mine it covered up the secret of my inferior heritage.

  Now Rosita draped a towel fringed with gold over my wet back like a cape, and smiled. She reminded me of Walita, my grandmother on my father’s side—with the same crinkled black eyes embedded like warts in a weathered vegetable, and wiry white hair sprouting from a brown scalp.

  “¿De dónde eres, Rosita?” I had never sought to learn much about Rosita before. Now that she was the last person I’d ever talk to, she seemed suddenly to occupy an important role in my life, and it seemed fit that I should at least know something about her.

  “Soy mexicana,” she replied. I smiled, and a nervous laugh escaped me. Like an unfaithful Catholic who doubts for a lifetime before pleading on his deathbed, “God! Forgive me!” I fell upon Rosita with a sigh, and a hug as warm and close as if I had known her my entire life. Rosita accepted my embrace without an inquiry or a moment’s hesitation, as though to her it was the most natural reaction in the world. She rubbed my wet back as I took a deep, comforting breath of her cheap perfume.

  Then, with a sad smile, I stepped away and proceeded to the roof.

  OUR HOUSE IN CORPUS CHRISTI, TEXAS, WAS A GRAY ONE-STORY rectangle with a flat, faintly caving roof. The front lawn resembled a piece of bread: brown, with patches of pale green mold, bordered by strips of crumbling concrete like a gray crust. The chain-link fence sagged in the middle, from when Tío Domingo crashed his Jeep on the Cuatro de Julio. Every day after school, when the bus dropped me off at home, my mother would greet me and then press her shoulder against the metal to make it stand again. For a few seconds, the fence obeyed; then my mother turned around and it slumped right back, like a child awaiting a moment of parental distraction to stick his tongue out.

  My mother, Alicia, was never ashamed of what we had. On the contrary, she was proud of our unremarkable home and, as a cleaning lady by trade, determined to lavish it with the best of her domestic expertise. Three times a week she scattered fertilizer over the dead lawn with the hopefulness of someone pushing vitamins down the throat of a corpse. Inside, she dusted and scrubbed and polished. Yet the dignity of my childhood home was precluded by its very makeup: shag carpets, faux-silk curtains, vinyl tiles, and a racket of rightfully marked-down beige-toned wallpaper. We had stripes in the hall and fish in the bathroom, then in the living room, woefully misprinted flowers—a hundred daisies with their middles missing, each empty ring of petals gazing at the grainy television like a floating, unblinking pupil.

  Around dinnertime every day, a pair of white lights would beam through the curtains in my bedroom.

  “Elián!” my mother would call to me. Her collection of trinkets and figurines, shored up from dollar stores, garage sales, and the Salvation Army, rattled on shelves throughout the house—miniature cuckoo clocks paired with angel-shaped candles, ceramic kittens with polyresin replicas of the Crucifixion.

  The truck door would slam and, with a manly declaration of his appetite, in barreled my father Reynaldo, who owned a flailing family construction company and an ever-proliferate number of sweat glands. He would always kiss my mother, who giggled as his mustache tickled her, then peel off his shirt and drape it around his neck like a sweat-drenched horseshoe.

  “¡Cerveza, corazón!” He collapsed mightily at the head of the kitchen counter, and at the sight of me, bellowed “¡Oye, c
abrón!” The next moment I would be swept up in his rancid embrace, helplessly tumbled into a thicket of curly black chest hairs.

  My mother would swing open the refrigerator door for a Corona, flypaper ribbons whooshing overhead. Suspended, crisscrossed, across the ceiling like party streamers, they ensured an untimely end for any festivity-seeking trespassers, who got stuck like raisins on a sticky bun and suffered slowly among my mother’s rooster-themed placemats, dishtowels, and refrigerator magnets.

  “Dame un beso, cabrón,” my father would say, patting his damp, stubbly cheek for a kiss. For many years I thought “cabrón” meant “son,” or some other term of endearment, until I found out it meant “motherfucker”—alternatively, “male goat”—the knowledge of which I could hardly bear. To be fair, I knew my father meant it with affection—although I could never fathom why, in relation to me, his affection should be best encapsulated by the invocation of a farm animal.

  When my mother plodded out with dinner—a normal day meant chicken or pork with rice, chili, and tortillas—my father would put me down and slap my behind. Then, if my mother was near enough, he’d slap hers too. I always shuddered at this. The gesture wasn’t cruel, or even unloving—it was just like cabrón, my father’s rudimentary way of showing affection—and my mother seemed to enjoy it. Usually, she pretended to be offended: “¡Ay, Reynaldo!” she would scold, before teasing him with a wink.

  My father loved my mother—he never cheated or raised a fist. By anybody’s standards in Corpus Christi, that should have been enough, as even in my youngest years I knew about divorce, and that in other families love was scarce. Yet I was always struck—as I was by the jagged outward contour of my entire life—by the inelegance of my parents’ love, by its crudeness, its vulgarity.

  I had no reason to think it should be any different. After all, nothing in Corpus Christi was very beautiful or interesting. The local high school resembled a fortress, with the brown, corrugated walls of a high-security penitentiary; the mall, situated over a cavernous concrete parking lot, was anchored by a beef jerky outlet. The most popular hangout was a bottomless BBQ pit, complete with a drive-through, its windows filled with neon signs and sun-faded photographs of coleslaw and sloppy joe.