The Clasp (3 page)

Finally came all of humanity. He was becoming an old man— oversensitive to street traffic, muttering snide comments to people who were not self-aware enough for his liking. Office workers were champion public walkers, but the middle of the day was for brand consultants, tourists, and nannies. Though . . . the Hassidim he liked. Be it out of religion or common sense, they moved quickly, never touched anyone, and made sure that no one ever touched them. When Victor did leave the house, he would watch Hassidic couples in their wigs and their hats and their sensible footwear and he would be jealous. Not only were they conscientious walkers, he bet they were never bored with their lives. There was always something they could glean from the Old Testament, some kind of meaning. They could be repressed homosexuals or misogynist assholes or run-of-the-mill nose-pickers, but at least they had a reason to wake up in the morning.

P
aranoid about traffic as usual, she found herself at the airport gate at 7 a.m. with an hour to kill. She took little adventures away from the waiting area: bathroom run, magazine purchase, futile inquiries about a business-class upgrade she couldn't afford. Victor was on a later flight but she wondered if she might run into Olivia Arellano or Sam Stein. She wasn't close enough with either of them anymore to know. When she texted Olivia, a stranger replied with a “wrong # sorry.” Kezia wasn't much tighter with the bride. She and Caroline hovered in distant-friend brackets, conscious of their past (they were freshman-year roommates) but strangers in the present. And whose fault was that? Kezia's, probably. She had shed college like a snake.

Once in Miami, she followed her driver as he pushed an empty cart toward the parking garage, using a folded paper sign like an oven mitt. The sign was impressively misspelled. Moytrin instead of Morton. He pushed the hooded crosswalk button. It was hard to believe these buttons were affiliated with actual change.

“Are you sure you don't want me to get that?” Her driver gestured at her bag.

The bag dug into her shoulder but she knew she would expend more energy removing it than holding on to it for another minute. She also clutched a garment bag with multiple dress options hooked to the plastic hanger inside.

“I'm fine, thank you.”

Her company's car service was so abused by her boss, every Rachel Simone employee fudged this little luxury. The same obliviousness that caused Rachel to look quizzically at completed tasks, as if she herself had not assigned them, caused her to gloss over charges from cities she hadn't been to.

“What brings you to Miami?” The driver tossed her luggage into the trunk.

“Just fun.”

She hated being asked about her plans by strangers. The worst were hairstylists who yammered as they yanked at her curls, asking her about her “big plans” for the evening. Who had taught them to do this? Usually she was getting her hair done for a first date and the question embarrassed her. Sometimes she tried to teach them a lesson by replying with: “Funeral.”

“What's Kezia?”

“Huh?”

“What's your name, Key-zee-ah?”

“It's Kezia, with a soft ‘e' like a fez, not a key.”

“Yeah, but what is it?”

“Oh,” she sighed. “It's from the Bible. After God takes everything away from Job, he gets his family back and one of the new daughters is called Kezia.”

The driver nodded solemnly. She knew what he was thinking. But she didn't hail from religious stock. Her parents just liked the name. The closest she had come to hearing the Bible mentioned
in their house was when another object was
like
a Bible. A phone book or a diner menu.

“You eat pork?” he asked, once they were ensconced in air-conditioning.

“Umm, yeah.”

She may have been the least Jewish-looking person streaming out of the terminal. As a human demographic, she looked like she had just come from a Celtic sprite convention. But there was something about her appearance—wan, maybe, a curly blond Wednesday Addams—people were always offering her gluten-free vegetarian options when she didn't ask for them.

“I know a place that has the best Cuban sandwiches in Miami. The best. And reasonable prices, too. If you like good food, you can go.”

No
,
I hate good food.

Her driver presented a ticket to a woman at the garage gate. They shared a joke and she waved them through.

“You wanna write this down?”

“I would,” said Kezia, “but my phone's broken.”

She pushed the pimple on her chin, the one with its own area code, causing a painful throbbing. She could see it in the reflection of the window. It changed her profile, that's how big it was.

“You like live music?”

Also something I hate
.

“I'm here for a wedding.”

“Oh, no.” He shook his head. “You have to stay longer than that.”

It amazed her how the people most likely to understand the concept of business travel—bellhops, drivers, waiters—seemed the most in the dark about the degree of control she had over her time in their city.

Her phone vibrated in her pocket. Her driver stiffened and Kezia feigned shock at the device's miraculous recovery.

“Hi, Rachel.”

A voice came through the speaker hole. It was pert and flowing as if it had been going for hours and Kezia was only now tuning in.

“Where are you again? You're in Orlando, yeah?”

“It's my wedding weekend, remember?”

“Where are the Barney's purchase orders? I come in here on the weekends and I can't find anything.”

“You come in on the weekends?”

“You're getting married?” The driver spoke into the rearview mirror. “I know the best—”

“No.” Kezia gestured at her phone, the international symbol for
What is this attached to my ear?

“No, you don't know where the spring '14 POs are?”

Rachel's English bulldog, Saul, barked in the background. Kezia hated the dog with that quiet seething shame-hate normally set aside for hysterical newborns.

“If they're not in the folder, they're in the metal drawers under Marcus's desk.”

“Marcus the bookkeeper?”

“The very same.”

“You have a boyfriend?” asked the driver, brazenly.

“I'm sorry,
what
?” Kezia snapped.

“Oh, am I bothering you?” asked Rachel.

“I have a very chatty escort at the moment.”

“Tell him to fuck off. You have to ride these people like a horse if you want to get anywhere.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Oh my God, I think someone put the Barney's ones in the Colette folder. How hard is the alphabet? And who files Bon
Marché under M like it's a person? Oh wait, I'm looking at this upside-down. This all makes sense now. Never mind.”

“You should go out in Miami,” the driver tried again, “find a boyfriend, right?”

A miniature Chinese lantern swung fitfully from the rearview mirror.

“Have you told him to fuck off yet?”

“Not in the five seconds since you asked me,” Kezia hissed.

“Sounds like you should,” said Rachel.

“Sounds like you should,” said the driver.

“Saul, no paint chips, no!” Rachel screamed and hung up the phone.

Kezia sighed and cracked open a half-pint bottle of water. She lowered the car window. The warm air collapsed on her lap.

“Miami-Dade,” the driver reported back to his dispatcher. “Code Four. Over.”

Code Four? A bitch who hates live music?

“Fifteen more minutes to your hotel.”

“Thank you,” she said, more sincerely than she had said anything else.

It was a little late to make it up to him, tonally. He was just trying to be friendly, to do his job, and she could feel herself being cold. But she couldn't make it stop. Rachel was rubbing off on her. Too much time working for this ludicrous woman and her eponymous company had tightened the springs of Kezia's impatience triggers. She found herself increasingly unable to downshift to the basic niceties of human contact for the same reason she didn't want to let go of her heavy bag. She was just going to have to pick it up again.

This wedding marked the first time she had boarded a plane for
personal reasons in years. As the people who worked for Rachel Simone Jewelry hit their respective Rachel thresholds and quit, Kezia found herself the most senior employee. She did it all. She was the one who went to the earring-back wholesalers in New Jersey, the gem shows in Tucson, the JCK trade show in Las Vegas where the air smelled of disinfectant and the steady light made it impossible to tell what time it was.

It wasn't always this way. After college, she had taken a few classes at the Gemological Institute of America and scored a job working in the quality management department of a major fine jeweler. But at a company like that, where half one's salary goes to an unspoken prestige tax, upward mobility was political and impossible. After three years, she left to be a bigger fish in Rachel's independent pond. And in the muck of that pond she had stayed. It wasn't only that Kezia missed the perks of her old company (they, too, participated in JCK, though they were part of the couture show at the Wynn, where their booth was filled with orchids), she missed working with jewelry that had actual gemstones in it.

Rachel was a resourceful designer. Allegedly inspired by the seventies and eighties, her cuffs were made from smashed milk glass and reclaimed cement pipes, her cocktail rings were lace-covered resin and petrified rat teeth. Questionably a midget, Rachel wore pants that brushed the floor and vests and the occasional skinny tie. It was a commitment to this general
Annie Hall
aesthetic that helped make her jewelry lines a success. Because, actually, a lot of people wanted to live in
Annie Hall
. They simply lacked the mental fortitude to maintain the fantasy when not within ten yards of the movie. Unfortunately, Rachel was also Rachel.

The day before Kezia left for Florida, Rachel came into the elevator after her. She had removed a dogwood branch from an urn in the lobby and began smacking Kezia on the head with it.

“See? This doesn't hurt, right?”

Kezia blinked when the petals came near her eye. “No, it doesn't.”

The week before that, they were waiting at the crosswalk outside a church on Seventh Avenue, where a homeless man lay slumped on the steps, holding a cardboard sign.

“I feel like Sharpie should sponsor the homeless.”

“Ha,” Kezia said.

“Really. If I ever need a Sharpie to jot something down, I'm just going to ask a homeless person. Or do you think it's one long-lasting marker they use and they just take turns passing it around?”

The week before
that
Rachel had asked Kezia not to wear perfume to the office, beginning her request with the formality of “I know this sounds insane but . . .”

Kezia braced herself, considering the number of unheralded insane things that passed Rachel's lips each day.
I know this sounds insane but I've just killed a man in the stairwell and stuffed him with cotton candy and could use your assistance threading it through his ocular cavity.

The “no perfume” rule was upsetting because Kezia didn't wear perfume. She sniffed her armpits—just soap and deodorant and a hint of body odor.

“Is there a scent you'd prefer?” Kezia asked, lamentably.

“Christ.” Rachel scrunched her nose. “Smell like nothing. Smell invisible.”

T
he morning haze had yet to burn off. It was the hour at which Los Angeles feels most like San Francisco. Nathaniel went for a run around the reservoir, kicking up sand, watching women in the dog park. He ran back up the hill, too, the whole way.

A month ago, after years of extolling the health benefits of a life in L.A., something inside his body had turned on him. He felt fatigued no matter how much he slept or how much hot yoga he did. Sometimes he experienced shortness of breath just walking across a studio lot. He was about to turn thirty, not fifty. So he went to a nutritionist in Inglewood, who told him to incorporate more zinc in his diet and drink more water. Then he went to an energy healer, who told him more or less the same thing, but tacked on some meditative breathing exercises. Then he went to a kinesiologist, who suggested he keep both his legs elevated above his heart whenever possible. Especially when in the shower.

“Even when in the shower?”

“No,” said the kinesiologist, “especially.”

It all worked for a while, but then one day he was sitting at home, legs up, trying to work, and his vision blurred. The page of dialogue he had just written transformed into impenetrable chunks of black squiggle. His heart started racing like a hummingbird's. That's what he told the cardiologist, who told him that if that were true, he'd be dead.

“Super dead,” he clarified, “twelve hundred beats per minute.”

Then the cardiologist told him that a whale beat would also be cause for concern (six beats per minute) and that giraffes have a second heart in their necks. Apparently, he was leaning toward veterinary medicine before switching to humans.

The cardiologist conducted the usual tests for abnormalities. It wasn't a palpitation. It wasn't an arrhythmia. It wasn't a panic attack, either. Well, Nathaniel could have told him that. He didn't have an office job or a mortgage or kids to panic about, just the steady pressure of being one of Los Angeles's two million aspiring TV writers. As many as a whole day's worth of hummingbird heartbeats.

No, Nathaniel's heart appeared to be a dutiful muscle, opening and shutting its valves firmly. So what was it, then? At long last, his second electrocardiogram came back, bearing the gift of a diagnosis: Nathaniel had an abnormally small heart.

“For a guy in the prime of his life, you have an abnormally small heart. It's not serious, you're not going to keel over. But it could explain the sudden, uneven heart rate and the lightheadedness. Do you smoke?”

Nathaniel shook his head.

“Do you exercise?”

He thought it was clear that he did. He was a naturally slim person but a belly would appear on his abdomen if he did nothing
to deter it. He had been very successful in keeping it at bay. Still, the doctor told him that he needed to get his heart rate up more often.

“That's why athletes have huge hearts,” he said, removing his stethoscope.

Nathaniel considered the drug and sex scandals that plagued professional athletes. He started to say it, sitting there in his underwear, “they're not known for their huge hearts.” Then he thought better of it. This doctor had chosen the most symbolic specialty in all the medical profession. He'd probably had it with otherwise intelligent people conflating medicine and symbolism. Nathaniel was no different. He knew that if he had received the opposite diagnosis—that of a
swelled
heart, bursting out of his chest—he would have told anyone who would listen. He would have used it to gain access to the sympathies and beds of women especially. Not that he needed the assistance, but man: what a deal-sealer.

He would have used it to win back the attention, if not the affection, of Bean, a painfully attractive but mediocre actress who had blown him off months ago. Bean was so hot, in one night he went down on her four times and cooed at photos of her new pet rabbit
in between
.

He ran faster up the hill. No matter how fast he ran, his diagnosis felt more like a verdict. He couldn't escape the symbolism. He had not loved a member of the opposite sex in approximately ever. Maybe he never would. And it wasn't just humans for which he lacked passion. His love for a life of writing and literature, once fueled by an intense, gut-level admiration of stories and novels, was now fueled by the external forces of fame and wealth. He confused competition with love and because everyone in Los Angeles was equally as confused, he felt totally sane.

Now he was going to doctors because his heart knew what his mind didn't.

He stood next to the refrigerator, refilling his water from the door and panting while his housemate, Percy, went back and forth from the kitchen with a plate of eggs. Nathaniel stood there, sweating, watching Percy add more hot sauce with each trip.

“Or you could take the bottle with you.”

“When do you leave again?”

“Tomorrow.” Nathaniel put his glass down.

“And whose wedding is this?”

“You don't know her. Girl from college.”

“Kezia?”

“No, random chick. You don't know her.”

“Nonsense. I know everyone,
old man
.”

Percy went back to watching a movie in the living room. Some screener that displayed its screener status every five minutes. Old man? Nathaniel realized that, in addition to the heavy panting, he had been touching his lower back. So he stopped.