“Probably not.” Victor sat back down on the bed.
“Ella Fitzgerald and Edith Piaf coming from the radio, little cars putting around with their round headlights like the eyes of snakes. Notre Dame, still covered in soot. The day I arrived, I walked from the train station to my aunt’s apartment by myself. I was so proud. I was also dressed like a German. Socks up to here, no scarf, sweater ten sizes too big, and my hair pulled back like this—”
She combed her fingers through her hair, giving herself a temporary facelift.
“That’s what that picture is from.” She nodded at the photo of herself outside the café. “I hadn’t unpacked my trunk when my aunt marched me out of the house, to La Samaritaine, to buy me a dress and shoes. I remember suggesting that she go through my luggage first because my mother would be unhappy if my aunt wasted money buying me something I already owned. She just looked me up and down, you know, like a bubble in the wallpaper that needed to be popped, and said, “I don’t think we’re in danger of that, ma bichette.”
“So wait—she was all French?”
“No, she was half German. Everyone in this story is at least a little bit German.”
“Oh.”
“It was still . . . unfashionable to be German in France. But my aunt was French in every way that counted. She loved Paris so much. She took me to see every museum, though there wasn’t one on every corner as there is now. She showed me the sites from a glass-roofed bus. She bought me pastels on the Quai Voltaire and we’d sit in the Tuileries and sketch the statues. But I knew her favorite activity was to be by herself, playing with her jewelry. She was a widow by then, alone in this big apartment—I think of her a lot these days, with Diego gone, what that must have been like, to be in that space without her husband. Sometimes, at night, I spied on her from across the courtyard. My French was so bad. Granuleux, she called it. Plus I had no friends in Paris except for an older lady. So when night fell, I think we were in the same boat. Or two separate lonely boats. I’d see the lightbulb go on in her closet and watch her remove this wooden box from the top shelf. She’d sit on her bed in her nightgown with her legs splayed out like a girl and paw through her jewelry.”
“What was she looking for?”
“What do you mean?”
“Was she organizing it?”
Johanna shrugged. “Same thing I am looking for when I show you my collection. These are a woman’s museum, curated by memory. I know girls like their sparkly things, which is how love often starts, from the outside. But then it finds its depth. Imagine the feeling you have when you look at a painting. You think of who made it and how, where it’s been, what the value of the painting is to the world and what its value is to you personally, how powerful it becomes when those values overlap.”
“I hate that feeling, actually.”
“Me, too.” She smiled. “I like to think that no one else understands my favorite art except for me and the artist.”
“And you want everyone else out of your gallery.”
“Exactly! But with jewelry, you do not have this problem. Imagine you can poke your head through the canvas of Monet’s water lilies and put them around your neck. You can rub them when you’re nervous or bite them in your teeth. Imagine you can lay them over your heart, know that people who are dead and gone have laid them over their hearts. Jewelry is as alive as whomever it touches. Its purpose is the reverse of a painting: it is a blank canvas that gets filled by the person who wears it, not the person who made it.”
“Like a mood ring.”
“A moonstone?”
“No, like a . . . never mind. Go on, sorry.”
“So one day in early August, I see a boy my age, maybe a few years older, handing out flyers at a bookstall. I never went through a phase where I didn’t like boys. Never.”
Victor smiled and wiped at the layer of cat hair on his pants.
“He was passing out flyers for a show in the ninth and I convinced my aunt to take me. First she said it wasn’t safe at night, then she said there were too many hills and steps, then she said she didn’t like music—and that’s when I knew she was running out of excuses. She didn’t want me going alone so we went together, but we couldn’t find the place. We kept circling back over the same cobblestone bends. I insisted we look just a little longer. I wanted to play at being an adult, at sitting at a bar and listening to French music as if I could understand a whole line of it. But it was getting dark. She was tired. I looked at her flushed face, the zipper on her skirt twisting forward as she walked, and I saw her age for the first time. So we gave up and hailed a taxi.
“When we got home, I knew right away that something was wrong. The key turned too easily in the lock because the door wasn’t locked. I remember knowing. My aunt was in every molecule in that apartment and the molecules had been absorbing someone else while we were out. Somehow—I have no idea how—she knew to go to the breakfront, where she kept the sterling silverware. She flipped open the velvet maze of slats. It was empty. Except for the knives. They lay there, as if nothing had happened. Later, the police explained that these were professional thieves. Apparently, you can’t melt down knives. They are nickel at the core, not silver. Useless.
“While my aunt surveyed the apartment, I tiptoed to my room. I climbed up on my bed and kept my eyes low so she wouldn’t see me spying. The wooden box was already on her bed with all the drawers open. The same part of her that turned into a little girl when all her jewelry was there had a little girl’s reaction when it was gone. She punched her fists against the mattress. She paced back and forth in front of the window. I became frightened. She threw a glass lamp out the window. Lunged it into the courtyard. A couple of lights went on in the other apartments below. I became embarrassed. I also knew this was my fault. If I had not dragged her to see some green-eyed boy, this never would have happened.”
“You can’t actually have thought that.”
“Of course I thought that. I was interfering with my parents’ marriage and then they sent me to Paris because I was interfering with their divorce. You have no idea what it is to feel like you’re always in the way.”
“I can guess.”
“Anyway, after a while I walked down the hallway. She had splashed cold water on her face. She took me by the hand and led me into her bedroom, where she opened her jewelry box. It was like a beehive with all the bees missing. That’s when she handed me that sketch.”
Victor looked at Johanna’s dresser and back at her. The morning light was becoming more pronounced and he was starting to feel the secondary realities of a hangover: a sour stomach, an aching thirst.
“A lifetime of jewelry,” Johanna continued, “and this sketch was all that was left.”
“Where did it come from?”
“Before she met my uncle, she had a secret love affair. She was living in occupied Paris during the war and fell in love with a German soldier who was teaching at a school for officers’ children in Normandy. He had come down for the weekend with friends— Paris was an abandoned and skittish place. The Germans had their own guidebook to it, warning soldiers not to get too taken in by the food. They were intruders but, you know, my aunt was also half French and making a life there. She had a job, doing some kind of secretarial work, and she and the soldier met on the street like in the movies. She dropped a bunch of papers. He helped her pick them up. They were nearly married.
“The night of the burglary was the first I’d heard about any of this. Even my mother never knew. She was very judgmental, so to hear that her sister was in love with a . . . a . . .”
“Nazi.” Victor gulped.
Johanna adjusted herself in the window.
“Yes, technically.”
“Technically?”
He didn’t want to gum up the works with semantics but was being “kind of ” a Nazi not like being “a little bit” pregnant? You own one dish with a swastika, you might as well buy the full set.
“Well, I don’t think he killed a
nyone. He wasn’t an officer and he wasn’t raiding homes. He taught at a school for German children.”
Victor bit his tongue.
“The school was in a château somewhere in Normandy,” she continued, “a château that belonged to a French family who moved into a smaller house on the property.”
“That was generous of them.”
“Victor.”
She hadn’t said his name before. He didn’t realize she knew it. It sounded like someone else’s name, tripping off her tongue.
“I’m Jewish.”
“Yes, I know that.” Johanna gave him a look that was both shameful and leveling. “And they were not. And that is why they moved to a different house on the property. By the time the Germans had set up the school, all the valuables had been stolen or confiscated. One day the soldier went on an errand to the cellar and spotted a pouch behind one of the dusty wine bottles. According to my aunt, he opened it and inside was a necklace and that drawing.”
Johanna nodded at the drawer.
“He knew how much my aunt loved jewelry. So he showed her the drawing and promised to give her the necklace as soon as he felt he could take it.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“I know.” Johanna didn’t flinch at the cursing and Victor didn’t apologize for it. “Apparently his main concern was that his superiors would take the necklace during a security check. And no, it did not occur to him or to my aunt to give it directly to the family. What can I tell you? They were imperfect people. And who knew if it even belonged to the family, if they knew it was there? It was ancient. He shoved it in the pouch and hid it behind a brick in his round turret bedroom with a view of the flowers. I remember that part because it sounded like a princess trapped in a tower.”
“A Nazi princess.”
“Yes, a Nazi princess. Either way, that was that.”
“Sorry—what was what?”
“They continued their romance. But by then it was 1944. The war had come to the château’s front lawn, the allied troops invaded, and my aunt never saw the soldier again. Maybe he was taken to an internment camp, maybe he starved to death in the forest. No one knows. Her first love had vanished along with any clue to where the necklace might be. She never knew where the school was. She only saw him in Paris.”
“But . . . I mean, how many châteaus were turned into schools during World War Two?”
“You’d be surprised.” She shrugged. “These things are not public record, not so easy to just plug into the computer.”
“But maybe Felix could help you track it down.”
“Felix doesn’t know about the necklace. He’s very sensitive about anything having to do with Nazi heritage.”
“How uptight of him.”
“And who knows if it’s still where the soldier hid it? I don’t even know his name. And it is not mine to claim.”
“But shouldn’t it be returned?”
“To whom?” Johanna smiled, familiar with this particular conundrum. “It was never missing.”
Victor had heard of objects like this before—Fabergé eggs and copies of the Declaration of Independence, whose fate was to bide their time and hope. They were not stolen like kidnapping victims. They were more like the infirm elderly who have slipped in their own homes and now must wait in the dark for someone to find them.
“Come,” Johanna commanded, seeming to recall her own omertà on the subject. “This is a boring topic for a young man who needs to bathe and eat.”
“I don’t think it’s boring.”
She went over to the drawer and locked it. Without her blocking the window, Victor had a clear view of the tropical pastiche of palm fringe and blue water in the distance. It was disorienting to be in present-day Florida again.
“I will escort you down the hallway.”
“Straight passage just outside this door?”
“A joke!” She stroked the center of his nose with her finger. “So you are the funny one.”
FOURTEEN
Victor
Victor felt as if he were intruding as he approached the back of the Raleigh. This was the pinnacle of self-doubt, considering he had the bride, the groom, and the mother of the groom in tow. But this was the problem with meals that lasted for hours. The digestive and social rhythms were off. Some people were finishing their breakfasts while others stood, holding virgin plates. He tweezed his gaze, trying to pluck out his friends. A gazelle-like presence of indiscriminate hair color flowed toward them. Grey. She wore a striped dress that, because she was pregnant, made her look like an optical illusion. Paul followed behind her, hands in his pockets. Sam made his way over as well, sporting a Knight Rider shirt, dark at the armpits.
“Bonjour!” Grey sideswiped every cheek.
“Do you mind?” Johanna put her hands on Grey’s collarbone and shifted the clasp of her necklace so that it was once again invisible.
“Make a wish,” she commanded.
Grey shut her eyes tightly and touched her midsection dramatically.
“Victor passed out in my mother’s bed!” Felix blurted out with glee.
Grey’s eyes snapped open.
“I wasn’t in the bed,” Victor clarified.
“Asshat.” Sam snorted and waved a wet celery stalk in Victor’s face. “You kicked her out of her own bed? Ha-ha. Asshat.”
“I need coffee,” Victor announced.
The sand scorched his bare feet as he moved away. A line of tropical foliage separated the Raleigh’s backyard from the public beach. Errant orchids drooped from curved branches. Seaweed pods were scattered on the ground from last night’s storm. There was a man manning an omelet station and another one mixing something not-of-this-hour calling itself a “dragon daiquiri.” He seemed especially vexed by a female figure in white jeans.
“Miss, I’ll mix that for you in just a moment.”
“You don’t have to mix anything.” Kezia gripped a pitcher of watermelon juice. “I’m just going to grab this glass.”
She reached into a plastic crate filled with warm drinking glasses.
“Having a good morning?” Victor ducked under a branch as he approached.
She jumped. “Jesus!”
She smelled like peppermint. As did everyone. It must have been the hotel body wash. He tried to crush the image of her and Judson, lathering each other up.
“You’re smiley.” She raised an eyebrow. “And this outfit looks familiar.”
“Oh.” He looked down. “It’s not what it looks like.”
“Did neither of us go back to the room last night?”
She grinned what was surely a postcoital grin of her own. People who had just had sex had an annoying habit of assuming everyone around them had just had sex. Which was also, coincidently, what people who were not having sex assumed. She shifted her focus to a series of small bowls. Some were piled with macadamia nuts, others with white stones.
“See this?” She picked up a stone. “This is unnecessarily confusing.”
“They have faith in your ability to not eat rocks.”
“They don’t even think I can pour juice for myself.”
She took off her sunglasses and wiped the bridge with her shirt, revealing a strip of flesh Victor did not like to think of Judson touching. Or licking. Or ejaculating on from a great distance just to prove he could.
“Where’s your boyfriend?”
“Judson,” she said slowly, “had an early flight back to Dallas.”
“Dallas?” Victor clenched his teeth. “Of course, Dallas.”
“Have you ever even been to Dallas?”
“Obviously not.”
Sam approached them, his plate piled high with danishes, bacon, and thick slices of pineapple. He was growing a mustache. Victor could tell he wanted to scratch it by the way he kept schemingly stroking his upper lip.
“What are we talking about?”
Sam wrapped a piece of pineapple in a blanket of bacon.
“Nothing,” said Kezia. “
How can you eat like that in this heat?”
“Oh, I get it. We’re talking about Judson.”
“Seriously?” She tossed up her hands. “Do you people work for hotel security?”
“Dude, I would fuck that guy. And I don’t even like, you know . . .”
“Men?”
“Douchebags, but sure,” Sam conceded. “Judson looks like a lifeguard. Like an evil lifeguard whose whistle summons the devil.”
Victor wondered if he had ever known such joy.
“He’s like a waxed Burt Reynolds,” he chimed in.
“Or the fuck’s that guy’s name from that movie? ‘You’re shit and she knows you’re shit blahblahblah.’”
“Andrew McCarthy?” Victor squinted.
“James Baldwin?”
“It’s not James Baldwin.”
“It’s James Spader, dipsticks.”
“Spader!” Sam clenched his teeth. “So does it?”
“Does what what?” Kezia took a sip of her hard-won juice.
“Does his whistle summon the devil when you blow on it?”
“You’re being disgusting.”
“You’re the one who’s being disgusting. I’m asking you a legitimate question about whistles.”
“She didn’t sleep with him!” Victor smiled. “You didn’t sleep with him. What are we dealing with? Everything but?”
“I’m not in seventh grade.”
“You performed oral sex in the seventh grade?”
“Shut up, Samuel.”
A chunk of meat tumbled from Sam’s mouth and onto the breading of the sand.
“You should find a place to sit down and eat that.”
“I’m waiting for my omelet.”
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