The Clasp (19 page)

H
e sped away from the restaurant, nervous that Caroline might chase after him, lumbering toward the town monster with her teeny tiny pitchfork. He needed to blow off steam before getting back on the subway. In the distance, he spotted the comforting yellow circle of the R train but he couldn't cope with being underground right now, praying for an express to pass just so he could catch a breeze. He needed air. Or as much of it as midtown Manhattan could provide. He had forgotten how physical lunch hour was, how much low-grade body-checking one was forced to perpetrate, how the sound of bus brakes pricked his ears.

Victor had never stormed out of anywhere before. He felt liberated, born again into the city with all the choices available to a grown man. And his first one would be to stop moving and find someplace to cool off. The two closest options were the Empire State Building and the New York Public Library. The lines at the Empire State Building would be teeming with tourists. To the library it was. Libraries tend not to attract crowds unless people want to set their contents on fire.

He merged with a group of chaperoned students as they opened their bags for inspection by an indolent security guard. Their voices echoed against the marble. Victor ascended the stairs to the main reading room and felt an immediate sense of calm. He hadn't set foot inside a library since his short-lived graduate school days. He had forgotten how soothing it was, how everyone in libraries moved in slow motion. There was an oaky antechamber with aisles of reference titles, wooden desks with boxy computers. Victor stationed himself by one of the unoccupied consoles.

When he woke up this morning, he had intended to rid himself of Johanna's sketch, physically and psychically. Whatever kinship he felt with it was part of an otherworldly weekend and, before that, part of an old European family and a war he had witnessed only in movies. It did not belong with him, in the blunt present. But then Caroline had come to him with her unamusing bouches, and he saw instantly how she did not deserve Johanna's secrets. Maybe Johanna's brain was cloudy and maybe it wasn't, but either way—she had picked him.

He unfolded the paper so that the top half of the necklace was looking out at a Chinese couple behind him. The teardrop in the stone looked especially weepy. He began trolling through the library's database. A rudimentary search like this made him feel like an Olympic figure skater slumming it at the Ice Capades. He took a pint-sized pencil from a container at the end of the table, along with some scrap paper.

He began by putting the inventory of available information into columns, narrowing and shaping it. The date on the page read 1883. It used the same French 1s as the place cards at the wedding. The remainder of the writing, however, would be illegible even to a French person. The words began with clear Ms, Cs, or Ts, only to be followed by the angled scribblings of a lunatic. There
was a number in the corner and a word he assumed was “carats.” Finally, there was a long series of numbers at the bottom (Early SKU numbers? The weight of the stones? A combination to a safe?) but they were cut off in the sketch. He could make out a 0 and the flat top of a couple of 5s.

“Okay.” Victor tapped his foot. “Nineteenth century, nineteenth century . . .”

He could attack the French scrawl later. For now, he just wanted to find something that resembled the necklace. Then, maybe, he could track down the original, find out who made it, find out where it was hiding. What kind of a person would have worn a necklace like this? He would assume royalty—but then wouldn't someone aside from Johanna know she had it? He began searching for “stones with shapes in them.” Turns out Kezia was, for once in her life, wrong. It was not “impossible” to carve a shape into the back of a stone. The late nineteenth century was rife with crosses and fleur-de-lis. Every era had its trends. Like social dental records. The more obscure, the easier to narrow down. And thanks to the maudlin mood of Johanna's necklace, he knew when it had been born (the Belle Époque) and where (northern France).

Victor squeezed the pencil nub until it dented his fingertips, filling out call slips. He felt righteous, doing his research at the public library instead of poking around on the computer he no longer had. He sat on the smooth benches of the cavernous room, waiting for his number to be called. Books in hand, he shuffled down the aisle between the desks. The books made a thud when he released them and a guy at the end of the table glared at him. Victor could see his screen. The mostofit logo hit him like a bat signal.

It had not occurred to him that people might use mostofit
ironically. But there was no way this fellow with the topknot and farmer's beard
wasn't
using mostofit as a personal statement. Victor smiled.

“
Pardon
,” said the guy, pulling his computer closer.

Okay, so he wasn't a hipster. He was just foreign.

The book titles were long and barely in English.
European Metalwork of the 19th Century
.
Renowned Gems from Lascaux to the Belle Époque
.
The Great Expositions: London's Crystal Palace and the Parisian Palladium
.
Cabochon Construction: 700 Fine Jewelry Designs
.
Jet Black Jewels: Victorian Mourning Accessories
.
A Brief History of French Ornament
. Under whose definition of “brief ”? That particular volume was more than two thousand pages. Within an hour, the titles bled together until his brain would have allowed for
Claptrap and Poppycock: Pineapple Motifs in Norman Janitorial Society
.

Why couldn't that Nazi have hidden something more up his chromosome, like a dueling pistol or a cool pocket watch? He could not get it up for treatises about the differences between rivières and parures. He could not pronounce these things. One particularly ornate piece was described as “a series of diamonds invisibly suspended from delicate sprays of rough-cut opals, the beveled ends of which fell at the nape of the neck.” He lacked the spatial imagination for this. And of all the centuries in all the countries in all the world, why'd his necklace have to fall into this one? Apparently, what software engineers were to California in the 1970s, fine jewelers were to France in the 1880s. And tracking down jewelry was not the same thing as tracking down a painting. So much of it went unsigned and undocumented. Without being able to read the handwriting on the sketch, it may as well have read,
Congratulations, it's a necklace
.

No worse compliment than one with no adjective.

He ran his finger along a bronze table lamp, warm from a full
day of electricity. The bearded mostofit user had left. The library would be closing soon.

“Where you at?” he whispered to the sketch.

He leaned on his hand, pushing his glasses at a purposefully jaunty angle. Information that was never structured to be found. That was his pride and joy back when he had slivers of both. He tried to focus. In
A Brief History of French Ornament
, Victor read about a famous diamond called l'Étoile du Sud, a massive stone some slave girl yanked out of a Brazilian cave centuries ago. It was 125 carats, worth $20 million, and Cartier had it now. He consulted the credentials on Johanna's necklace. Nineteen. Nineteen carats smushed into one stone. Something a celebrity would buy another celebrity. Not too shabby. Then he lifted the paper up and squinted: 114 carats. The side diamonds, the
backup singers
, were 19 carats.

Victor closed the last book and stacked it with the rest. Wooden chairs scraped against the dark tile as people stood and packed up their bags. He wondered what Felix and Silas and Caroline were doing right now. Had they stayed at the restaurant after he left, Caroline feigning fullness while wolfing down the chocolate-covered orphan spleen that came with the bill? And then what? Had they seen the sights, ambled through Central Park, mourned the passing of the Plaza as they knew it? Did they have places to go or were they already barreling through the Midtown Tunnel, headed back to Miami? Probably that. What else were they going to do? They had come here for him.

N
athaniel opened his bedroom door, sniffing the hall like a prairie dog. The whole world smelled of tacos and beer.

Particles drifted through the strips of daylight, tentacles of irritatingly chipper Southern Californian sun that cared not if you had a hangover. Meghan's feet stuck out over the edge of his bed. He shut the door gently behind him, crept past Percy's room, and sat outside. The neighbors had released their toddler, who loved nothing more than jumping on the backyard trampoline on weekend mornings. The light hit the flat heads of the cacti on the ground. Everything glared at him. The sound of that kid squealing glared at him. Hangover-induced synesthesia.

He checked his messages. Mostly they were from friends in L.A., asking if the party was still going. One from an old colleague at the literary magazine where he used to work, calling on his way home from a book party, musing about the antiquated nature of voice mail in our time. There was a fruitless ass-dial—the sound of fabric being dragged over microphone holes. Last but not least, Kezia had called back. He could tell she was upset. Maybe it had
something to do with being hung up on by Meghan's vagina. More likely it was because Nathaniel wasn't meeting her unreasonably high standards of friendship or, worse,
We Need to Talk About Victor: Volume 12
. Talking about Victor felt like being roped into a parent-teacher conference. Inside, Meghan was sleeping off her hangover, and here he was, outside, listening to Kezia as if she were real and Meghan was an illusion. Yet had he ever put his tongue or his penis or an inappropriate piece of technology inside Kezia Morton? No, no, and not that he recalled.

“Hey, it's me. Did you just hang up on me? I know you have guests to attend to or molest but call me. I leave for Paris in five seconds so I'm running around like a crazy person. I know you think I'm being dramatic but Victor—”

He put the phone on his lap, keypad facing down. Then he took a deep breath and picked it back up.

“Hey, it's me. Did you just hang up on me? I know you have guests to attend to or molest but call me. I leave for Paris in five seconds so I'm running around like a crazy person. I know you think I'm being dramatic but Victor has been acting weirder than usual and avoiding me, which is unlike him. He was in a daze when I talked to him yesterday. And then today I called his number at work and some surly woman named Nancy picked up and said that Victor Wexler didn't work there. And I was all, ‘This is mostofit?' And she was all, ‘Yes, Victor doesn't work here anymore,' and then she started crying and told me she had been let go too, and then she said, ‘First they came for the socialists,' and then she hung up on me. Anyway. It's obviously not to the point where I'm going to bang on his door but just wondering if you've heard from our friend or if his face has been eaten by feral cats. Longest message ever. Happy birthday. Even though it's not your birthday anymore.”

Victor had lost his job. So what? He would live. Would she
leave that kind of message about Nathaniel on Victor's voice mail if the situation were reversed?

He picked waxy leaves from a bush and folded them in half, cracking them while he played with his phone. Shamefully, he had Bean on Google Alert. Though he didn't need to—Google Alert was like methadone, meant to wean him off proactively searching for her name. Apparently she had attended a movie premiere last night.

To distract himself, he pulled up
Deadline
and began half-heartedly scrolling through posts like
IFC TO AIR JOHNNY DEPP HOME VIDEOS, ABC SNAGS OFFICE BUDDY DRAMA
, and
KITTEN THUNDERDOME GETS PILOT
. Then he stopped scrolling.

There, in a tiny box, was a picture of Not Jack Nicholson. His name was Luke and not only was he fucking Bean with Nathaniel's condoms, he was a TV writer.

Nathaniel had not been vigilant about preparing for jealousy and the post hit him hard. This Luke person had just sold a pilot about surf instructors in Venice Beach, produced by a director of
The Wire
, with two A-list actors already attached. Nathaniel could not summon his usual ability to tamp down covetousness with realism (most pilot scripts never got made). As if all this weren't bad enough, as if he didn't already want to crack open his phone, remove the picture, and stomp on it,
Surf 's Down
had been sold to Lauren, yesterday's lunch date. There was a picture of her as well, a headshot of her looking off to the side as if posing for her middle school yearbook.

The screen door banged behind him. Percy appeared, flopping into a chair. He put one leg up on their tattered table and wiped his nose on his undershirt.

“Bahhhhh,” he baritoned with his head back.

“Indeed,” Nathaniel agreed.

“So. Meghan. I'm not the worst housemate in the world, am I?” Nathaniel wished he remembered more of last night. In his experience, girls who looked like Meghan never did more than they had to in bed but she was like a human flipbook. He vaguely remembered being the one to put a stop to her head-bobbing, to the vibrating sensation of her moaning, to drag her up to face him. She was going to be there for hours otherwise.

“My birthday's next month.” Percy's eyes were closed. “I want twins.”

“That's all?”

“Oh hell.” Percy sat up with a jolt. “I just realized something. In ten years, a threesome will be nothing. It will be totally standard. We'll want quintuplets. But you're not allowed to fantasize about quintuplets
now
because the fertilization science is too new so you're automatically fantasizing about banging seven-year-olds.”

“You should write that down.”

“I should. Hold up, I'll be right back.”

Nathaniel felt like he had vertigo. He needed someplace for his mind to go that wasn't
Surf 's Down
location scouts trolling Abbot Kinney.

He could hear Percy inside, exchanging morning greetings with Meghan. She was gathering her toiletries from the bathroom, shutting off the possibility of morning sex by putting on shoes. By tonight, she would be back in her house in Philadelphia, gazing at her popcorn ceiling, sleeping with her aid-worker boyfriend, who she was probably going to marry. Nathaniel envied her for doing Los Angeles in moderation. She had absorbed enough of it—professionally, socially, sexually—to have it lift her mood and give her a glamorous sheen back home. No RATINGS RAT RACE! for Meghan. He wanted to get out of here, too. Suddenly and desperately.

Last night Meghan had informed him that she wasn't going to pursue modeling if all she could land was twice-a-year catalog work. She had already started looking into law school. Her boyfriend's sister had gone to Rutgers and liked it.

“Where is that again?” Nathaniel had asked.

“It's in Camden, New Jersey.”

“Isn't that, like, the most dangerous place in America?”

She had looked languidly around the yard at the agents and the producers, at the cap-sleeved production assistants and the open-flanneled comedy writers who loved them, taking it all in before speaking.

“Is it?”