“Do they do columns like that?”
“Nope. Never have. Rachel thought he was someone else. And when he calmly pointed this out to her, there happened to be a Women’s Wear Daily reporter standing right there. So without skipping a beat, Rachel turns to me and says, you owe me twenty bucks. She explains that she and I were just having a discussion about how fashion isn’t as vicious as it used to be and everyone’s so nice and that apparently I bet her that she wouldn’t tell off the host of the party for no reason. She actually stood there with her palm out.”
“What did you do?!”
“I told her the truth. I didn’t have any cash. The reporter called it performance art and referred to me as Rachel’s assistant.”
“Oh my God, she’s insane.”
“But brilliant,” Michael said. “We don’t have people like that.”
“Yeah.” Meredith gave him an affectionate eye roll. “That’s because you have neurosurgeons.”
“Neurosurgeons are infamously boring.”
“Now,” said Kezia, “your turn to tell me something terrible about work so that I don’t feel bad about leaving.”
“You remember how it is. Everything I do is planning and waiting for approval to plan. I spent this morning preparing insurance forms. The grass is always eighteen-karat on the other side, Magpie.”
She toasted Kezia’s glass. Kezia knew what she meant. It’s why she left. But she had forgotten the level of foresight applied to precious stones, the precise production of items that weren’t, say, lacquered pen caps. She missed feeling as if she were a part of something concrete and not one woman’s vanity project run amok.
“What else can I tell you?” Meredith mused. “I got nothing. Oh, Debbie and that creepy guy from the copy center got secretly engaged. Which only made me go back through my mind and wonder if every time we sent her to get something copied, they screwed on the copy machine. Literally, I can think of nothing else.”
Michael put his hand on her knee. “Mer, tell her about the emeralds.”
“Oh yes, the emeralds.”
She shot herself in the temple with her finger and made a little exploding sound.
“But you can’t tell anyone. There’s an emerald shortage because you know how emeralds come from Colombia? Well, Colombia is apparently letting some Marxist guerrilla drug lords run the country. The United States is not psyched about that and so now everyone’s freaking out because there’s an embargo on emeralds. Not, like, kunzite. Emeralds. People are gonna notice. That’s why I don’t have any other gossip for you. Because I’ve been in nonstop meetings about the emeralds.”
Even if Kezia wanted to betray Meredith’s confidence, no one she worked with would care about an emerald shortage. The point of Rachel’s jewelry was to take the mundane and turn it into beauty. Whereas the point with precious stones was to design in service to their beauty. Apples and diamonds.
“I miss it.”
“No, you do not.” Meredith laughed.
“Maybe I just miss the regularity.”
“That is why God made dried fruit. Speaking of which, Michael, do we have dessert?”
“Oh, yeah.” Michael got up and headed to the freezer. “I churned mango ice cream.”
“You churned it?”
He leaned into the container. “Actually, I overchurned it.”
SIX
Victor
He devoured a breakfast burrito while running to catch the 9:15 a.m. out of LaGuardia. He was like an anaconda with legs, inhaling faster than he ran. The toilet on the plane was out of order. Once in Miami, he calculated that he had approximately ten minutes to evacuate his bowels and board the ferry to the wedding. He flung open the hotel room door, took one look at the king bed with its studded headboard, and didn’t know what to feel.
Upon realizing that neither he nor Kezia were invited “with guest,” they decided to book a room jointly. The last he’d seen of her was over a month ago, just before he lost his job. She bought them beer and he helped her install an air-conditioning unit in her bedroom, crushing his hands in an effort to keep it from falling onto the street. The following day, they broke off from a larger e-mail chain about the wedding, her name popping up in his inbox like a reward.
Two beds? she typed.
Yeah . . . don’t want you getting handsy.
She skipped the joke. U need my credit card info?
He put the cursor out of its blinking misery with You can get me back.
He had no business putting the room on his card.
He went for the bathroom. The door was locked. Never before had he encountered such a problem. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kezia’s open suitcase, discarded dress options on the bed. She had come and gone.
The irony here was that if Victor had put himself up on his own, it would have been at a motel. A place with a name like the Sea Monarch Lodge that would smell of death but would also feature a communal toilet in the hall. Could he shit off the balcony? It’s not as if the shit would have his name stamped into it. Frankly, there would be nothing in the consistency of his intestines that would mold into letters right now.
“Where have you been?” Kezia scolded him as he came off the elevator bank.
She was standing with a group of wedding guests, milling about, waiting for the bus that would take them to the ferry that would take them to the Castillos’ island. The rest of their friends had gone on without them.
She looked him up and down. “You look like a hobo.”
He had forgotten to pack socks.
“You clean up nice,” he said, inching away from the noxious fart he released as the bus lumbered forward. “Hey, did you lock the bathroom door?”
“No. What a weird question.”
Victor moved determinedly toward the main house, which was shaped uncannily like a wedding cake—four tiers with Spanish-style arches and cement lion heads spewing water into tile basins. Who builds a house with four levels on the hurricane highway of the Atlantic? He chalked it up to a symbol of Felix’s family’s wealth, one that said: We genuinely don’t care if the top half of this thing gets blown off.
He located a bathroom on the third floor where he could defecate in peace. He slammed the individual stall door and dropped his pants, his belt buckle smacking the ground in time with his first abdominal squeeze.
“This your first postcollege wedding?”
In his digestive haste, Victor had failed to realize he had company. A man—a neighbor or a cousin—was speaking to his legs.
“Sorry?” Victor clenched.
“Is this the first set of people to get married from your graduating class?”
He was twenty-nine, not twenty-four. Still, he was flattered by the assumption of popularity, by the idea that he would keep tabs on the other 669 people in his graduating class. But he needed to focus on the task at hand. He squeezed his bowels in a violent push and flushed at the same time, the noise of the toilet diminishing the extended riff of his asshole.
“Because they’re not all like this,” the cousin warned as they washed their hands in parallel sinks.
Victor smiled. “I’ll keep my hopes down.”
“Good man.” The cousin patted him on the shoulder.
Victor could feel the face of his enormous watch.
The cousin leaned toward a window. “Looks like it’s going to open up soon.”
Then out the door he went, the way Victor had come in. Keeping his hopes down would not present much of a challenge. One of Victor’s few areas of expertise was how to keep his hopes no higher than a human ankle.
SEVEN
Nathaniel
Sophomore year was a real sweet spot for everyone. None of them had roommates anymore, which gave them new means of expressing themselves, individual spaces in which to say This is who I am when unfettered by a stranger’s Ansel Adams posters. They knew one another well, but not so well that they were sickened by the sight of one another. There were still a couple of stones le
ft to be unturned, either in the form of new classmates or eccentric sides to those already known. Nathaniel, especially, hit his stride. He grew an inch, started lifting weights, and declared himself a literature major. It didn’t take him long to figure out that he was like a unicorn in the lit department: a straight, good-looking male who could debate the best translation of The Master and Margarita, and then return to his room to play Call of Duty. Was it gilding the keg party lily to regale girls with his nonexistent concentration in French literature? Maybe.
One Saturday night he was hitting on Streeter Koehne, who had recently decided to stop wearing bras and start wearing white tank tops. Streeter was going through a self-serious phase that required her to speak exclusively of public policy in Uganda. Here they were, in the middle of the type of college party he liked best (loud, crowded, and the only themes were “inebriation” and “sex”), but there would be no getting her onto lighter topics. Streeter who had, that very week, seen a bat in her dorm shower and run screaming, half-naked, down the hall. A live animal! Nudity! Slapstick! No? Nothing? If he couldn’t lighten her up, his only option was to outdark her.
“God, you’re right. But it’s difficult to look at another nation’s problems through the prism of our own. I mean, even on a cultural level that’s true. You read Balzac or Flaubert in French and it’s a whole different experience. You just don’t get that kind of understanding about the French perspective, reading it in English.”
“You’ve read Balzac in French?”
She landed somewhere between doubtful and impressed.
“Well,” he whispered confidentially, “I only made it halfway through Lost Illusions. But who doesn’t love Madame Bovary?”
He had made it halfway through nothing. He was auditing one class in French literature. But college was a time of fantastic self-absorption and no one cared enough to call him on this bullshit, even Streeter.
“Nat, I had no idea you spoke French.”
One nipple was pronounced and the other wasn’t. Was one warm and the other cold? The feminist embodiment of inefficiency: One nipple doesn’t know what the other is doing.
“You should meet Pierre.”
“Huh?”
Streeter waved at a short guy in the corner who was sporting a camel hair coat and the unmuddled features of a European person.
Where the hell was Victor? Victor was like a human portal when you needed one most. He was always the way out of a conversation (small portal) or a whole party (large portal). Before Kezia pushed him to the brink of insanity, before he hit his depressive groove, back when Victor was just dabbling in casual melancholy . . . he was fun. Or at least amusingly honest and steadily deadpan. It was like having Rod Serling from The Twilight Zone host your life for you. Victor’s skepticism about the entire college experience was endearing when he still participated in it, still went out, still made pithy comments about the rich kids, still made late-night runs to the diner. Somewhere deep down, Nathaniel thought, this guy is having a good time despite himself. Just as somewhere deep down, Nathaniel was having a mediocre time despite himself.
But right this second Victor had his own problems. He was off in the corner, looking frightened while a freshman with dyed black hair and spiked cuffs tallied up her piercings for him. Nathaniel could hear bits of the conversation over the music.
“What about my vagina?”
“That’s where all your other piercings are. I sensed that you wanted me to guess and so I guessed. Is that not accurate?”
The freshman looked really annoyed now.
“I like your bracelet.” Victor was making an effort.
“I made it from the tips of parking lot traffic spikes.”
“I should go check on him,” Nathaniel said.
“You’re such a good friend.” Streeter nodded, as if it were people like them who would one day solve the world’s problems.
She was on her own in that regard. Meanwhile, Pierre was shouldering his way through the crowd, coming toward Nathaniel and looking displeased. Probably because Nathaniel was looking more classically all-American with each passing day and they both knew that Streeter would sleep with him under the right circumstances.
Nathaniel hopped on Victor’s back, licking his cheek, nearly knocking him over.
“Get off me!” Victor threw his elbow backward.
The freshman took a step back, repulsed by roughhousing.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Nathaniel turned to her. “He hates it when I get near his ears. I just love this man so much, I can’t contain my emotions.”
Victor stood still, pupils fixed on Nathaniel as he squeezed his mouth into a fish face. When he removed his hand, Victor wiped his cheek.
“Am I interrupting something?” Nathaniel slung his arm over Victor’s shoulder.
“No.” Victor looked at him plaintively. “Have you seen Kezia?”
“Kezia who?”
“Because of all the Kezias roaming around campus.”
“Nope.” Nathaniel stuck a finger in his beer. “Why is this mostly foam?”
He wasn’t sure why he lied. He had seen Kezia on his way to the bathroom earlier, talking with a girl named Edith who grew root vegetables in her closet. Kezia seemed invested in the conversation. He didn’t think she had noticed him. Then she winked at him as he passed, a lid slowly moving down a clear blue eye. But that was the extent of it. What was important now was finding Victor a mate for the night. And one for himself, of course, but it had been a busy few weeks—Nathaniel could store up hookups like a woodland creature shoving nuts into his cheeks. Except the other way around.
As he scanned the party for someone who wouldn’t draw satanic symbols on Victor’s chest while he slept, he felt a firm tap on his back. At least he assumed it was a tap until his body registered a shove.
“Are you trying to screw my girlfriend?” asked Streeter’s agro French import.
“No,” Streeter objected, “Nathaniel speaks French. He read Madame Bovary in French.”
“Ah, tu parles français? Vraiment?”
“Oui.”
“On y va, alors.”
Nathaniel combed his brain for a single sentence in French. He didn’t have the words for anything biting or even diffusing. He had read but one entire book in French, a trove of dirty expressions at a friend’s parents’ house during middle school.
“Vas te faire foutre!”
He was too busy being pleased that his pronunciation had landed to realize he was about to get shoved again. This time, he lost his balance, falling backward into the freshman. She lifted her arms to protect herself, scraping Nathaniel’s scalp with her traffic spikes. The whole party was watching. Streeter escorted Pierre back to her dorm, presumably to comfort him with her one hard nipple. Nathaniel touched his head. His fingertips were immediately covered in blood. Some drunk premed student was at his side, parting Nathaniel’s hair and offering to “stitch him up” right there. It was ridiculous to bleed so much for no reason. Nathaniel played it off—“Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch!”—but he wondered if he needed a tetanus shot. Humiliation: what a salve for pain. Someone should just bottle Embarrassment, sell it next to the Advil, make a fortune.
He walked with purpose to refill his beer, pumping the keg until the last set of eyes were off him. He touched his head again, hoping that blood wasn’t trickling down his forehead.
“You okay?” asked Victor.
“Hey, can I ask you a favor?”
“Sure.”
“Are you okay to drive me to the hospital?”
Nathaniel bowed, quickly, to display the severity of his injury. He could feel the wetness without touching it.
Victor nodded. They got into Nathaniel’s car, where Nathaniel dug around in the armrest for tissues or napkins—anything to apply pressure to his head.
“Damn.” He inspected his scalp in the side mirror. “She really got me.”
The hospital was small and close to campus. The emergency waiting
room was mostly full of elderly locals with the flu or something painful trapped in their eyes. Nathaniel read a pamphlet about type 2 diabetes while Victor checked them in.
He returned, pile of forms in hand. “Here.”
“‘Reason for visit.’” Nathaniel began writing: “Scalped . . . by . . . jewelry.”
Filling out the forms, he had a sense of his youth. No medications or surgeries or infections. No history of allergic reactions or chronic ailments. Just an uninterrupted pencil line drawn vertically down the “no” boxes, signed, and left on the ledge of the nurse’s station. After about five minutes, Victor cracked. He began silent laughing.
“I know.” Nathaniel was laughing too. “Shut up, I know.”
“Have you read a single piece of French literature?”
“Only the same thing you have.”
“What?” Victor looked perplexed. “Oh, that?”
Nathaniel had only had one class with Victor, a freshman primer on European literature. This was a topic so ludicrously broad, the syllabus felt more like an around-the-world drinking game. They covered a country a week. In this corner, representing All of Irish Literature, with the combined liver panels of a whiskey distillery: James Joyce’s “The Dead” and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. And in this corner, chain-smoking and representing All of French Literature: Albert Camus’s The Stranger and Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace.” Their professor, a Voltaire scholar in the middle of a nasty divorce (rumor had it her husband of twenty years had left her for a Proust T.A.), trudged through the class. One time she fell asleep at her desk while a student was speed-reading from Death in Venice. German literature fell before a long weekend.
Kezia Morton was in their class for the first two weeks. At that point, Nathaniel knew her primarily as the girl who roomed with the hotel heiress. He hadn’t really noticed her as her own entity until that class but he was amused watching her, clearly not a reader, sitting right up front, furiously taking notes on literature as if it could be learned like physics. Victor also took note of Kezia, but he was way ahead of Nathaniel. The two of them were already friends. They would convene in the hall, walking out of the humanities building together and chatting. Then one day she didn’t show. She had dropped the class, having apparently transferred to the equally sweeping Art History in America.
The Clasp Page 5