The Clasp

by Sloane Crosley

  The omelet man artfully released a yellow oval onto Sam’s pile of food. He cradled it like a newborn baby.

  “There are starving children in the Sudan,” Kezia reprimanded him.

  “There are full children in the Sudan too, racist. I’m going to go be around people who love me. Where’s Olivia at?”

  Victor laughed. “Olivia doesn’t love you.”

  “You guys don’t know anything about South American society. This is their way. This is their mating ritual. All cold attitudes and hot Brazilian bodies . . .”

  “Venezuelan.”

  “Whatever, Kezia.”

  From the other side of the pool, Olivia snapped her head toward them, her dark eyes shooting daggers at Sam as he approached. She was in her element, bikini made almost entirely of interlocking metal rings, speaking rapid-clip Spanish with Felix’s elderly relatives. She took her feet out of the pool and stood on the stone border, preparing herself for humiliation.

  “How do you say, ‘This is the child for whom I babysit,’ in Spanish?” Kezia put her glasses back on.

  “Este es mi idiota.”

  “Close enough.”

  “So you want to hear a funny story? I slept in Johanna’s bed last night.”

  “I’m sorry?” She made a visor of her hand.

  “The mother of the groom.”

  “I know who she is.”

  “Well, more on the bed than in it.”

  “Oh my God, start from the beginning.”

  Victor reveled in her curiosity. If there was one thing he wasn’t, it was mysterious. If there were another thing he wasn’t, he’d probably tell everyone right away, owing to his lack of mystery.

  “I hate outdoor showers,” Kezia said when he was through.

  “There’s one more thing.” He lowered his voice. “There’s this necklace, except it’s not there.”

  “Huh?”

  “If I describe a necklace to you, would you be able to identify it?”

  “As what? As not a bracelet?”

  “No, like, would you be able to tell me if Felix’s mom is just kind of nutty and German or if she has something famous that belongs in a museum? And is German.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I’m not a professional gemologist. Even if I were, it’s not the same thing as being a doctor. I can’t write prescriptions over the phone based on what you tell me.”

  “Your doctor does that?”

  “Everyone’s doctor does that. Why, does she have the Hope Diamond in her closet or something?”

  “Kind of,” Victor whispered.

  “The Hope Diamond is in the Smithsonian.” Kezia matched his whisper.

  “You know how people got their possessions seized during Nazi-occupied France?”

  “People as in Jews?”

  “Kezia, she has a secret safe—like a treasure chest—in her bedroom.”

  “I knew it! I knew you were poking around her bedroom! What the fuck is wrong with you? Honestly, you should be asking yourself this at least three times a day.”

  “I wasn’t, I—”

  Kezia was looking at Nathaniel, who was lounging poolside, arm behind his head, irritatingly insouciant, what looked to be a screenplay propped against his knees. A girl in a tight T-shirt offered him a menu and his response made her laugh.

  “Kezia—” Victor tried to focus her.

  She snapped away from Nathaniel. “Hey, Indiana Jones. Don’t be weird. It’s a necklace.”

  “Actually, it’s just a picture of a necklace.”

  “A nonexistent necklace! Even better.”

  “But it’s huge, with diamonds and a big blue emerald in the middle.”

  “That’s a sapphire.”

  “And there’s a weird teardrop in the center of the stone, cut right into it.”

  “Into the back of the stone itself ? That’s impossible.”

  “And it’s French but Johanna is German. Isn’t that odd?”

  “Why would that be odd?”

  A group of kids marched past, smacking one another with pool noodles.

  Victor lowered his voice. “Because of the Nazis.”

  “You have heatstroke.”

  They fell silent. Victor did his best not to appear disappointed or drag his feet in the sand. There was an electric exit sign wired to the trees behind them, and beyond that, different-colored beach umbrellas that marked the end of one hotel and the start of another.

  “I guess Felix’s mom could be a Nazi. They all could. We could be at a very hospitable Nazi wedding.”

  “Forget it. I thought you’d be interested.”

  He beat the soles of his shoes together.

  She threw him a bone. “I am. Sorry, I’m just cranky in the mornings.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s always morning somewhere.”

  “Okay, this,” she sighed theatrically, “this is why we don’t hang out anymore. I say I’m sorry, I’m sincere with you for a minute, and you call me a cunt.”

  “I most definitely did not. And the reason we don’t hang out anymore is that you’re too cool for your old friends. Make new friends and keep the old, one is silver and the other’s gold. Hemingway said that.”

  “That’s the Girl Scouts’ motto, jackass.”

  “Oh, sorry, I’m not Nathaniel.”

  “What does that have to do with anything? You know, everything’s easy for everyone and tough for you, right? How could that be? We’re not all Olivia and Caroline. The rest of us weren’t born privileged. Nathaniel figured it out. I figured it out. Even Sam figured it out.”

  “Sam owns one pair of pants.”

  “The point is you choose to think we’re all better off than you.”

  Most of the time Victor had to talk himself into thinking he was better off not being her boyfriend. Other times it came quite naturally. She started to say more but they had company. The newly minted Mrs. Castillo approached, wearing an orange tunic with a starfish on it. Felix shadowed her, carrying a plate of pastries.

  “I think we’re headed out,” he said. “Paris awaits.”

  Caroline grabbed Kezia’s hand. “I’m so excited. We’re going to stay at the Plaza Athénée and then head to the South of France with Paul and Grey.”

  “You guys are double-dating on your honeymoon?”

  Victor looked to Kezia, hoping their argument could be resolved by presenting a united front against this new, very worthy subject: four of their friends stuck in a car together in a foreign country.

  “We are.” Felix drove the corners of his mouth into his cheeks.

  “What time is it?” Caroline twisted Felix’s wrist.

  Felix offered up the pastries. “Here, everyone have a Franzbrötchen.”

  Balls of pastry dough were curled up on the plate like shar pei embryos. They smelled of cinnamon, a scent out of place on the beach. They all just stood there, holding the sticky treats between their fingers.

  “They were my mom’s favorite when she was a kid.”

  “And your mom grew up in Germany?”

  “Yeah.” Felix laughed.

  “And she never lived anywhere else?”

  “Ignore him.” Kezia licked the side of her Franzbrötchen. “He has sunstroke.”

  FIFTEEN

  Victor

  Will you shove this in your bag?”

  Kezia handed him a hair dryer, which she had brought with her but that somehow refused to fit back into her bag. They had spent a few minutes alone together in the hotel room. During the night, housekeeping had unlocked the bathroom, revealing standard bathroom fare: lotion, shampoo, soap, no toothpaste. Victor took the soap, she took the shampoo. Now they sat in the back of a cab, her carry-on in a mound between them, Victor envious of the real-world to-do list tugging at her thoughts.

  “What happened to the car service?” he asked, cranking down the window.

  “I can fudge. I just can’t fudge round-trip.”

  “I ate too much this weekend.” She
touched her stomach. “Hey, I’m sorry if I was mean before. You can tell me about your mystery necklace now. Really.”

  “It’s okay.” He rested his forearm in the sun. “Never mind.”

  Once they were at the gate, Kezia’s group number was announced before his. She slung her things over her shoulder and joined the strategically shuffling masses.

  She smiled. “See you on the other side.”

  He consulted his ticket: 39E. Last row, middle. Now God was just laughing at him. Kezia was next to a window, texting as he passed. Victor folded himself into his seat, putting in headphones and opening the in-flight magazine. He flipped to the airports-of-the-world page. They looked like robotic bugs. He shuffled his legs before takeoff, intentionally ramming his knees against the empty seat in front of him. As if warning his own body, saying, Here, knees, in case you get curious later, this is how far you can go. Above his head, a flight attendant punched his duffel bag into submission.

  He looked across the aisle while the plane gathered speed, lolling his head toward the window as it gulped up the Miami coastline. He saw the long white tails of motorboats in the water. Daytime comets. His hearing got cloudy. A businessman next to him was engrossed in a combative typing streak. On his other side, a pimpled teenager in a Yankees cap crossed his arms and shut his eyes. Victor unlatched his tray table.

  He leaned forward and slowly removed a piece of paper from his back pocket, gently unfolding it beneath the tray table. He tried to flatten the crease mark so that the white of the paper wouldn’t break through to the blue in the middle.

  This morning, Kezia had looked him in the eye and told him he was the only one of their friends who couldn’t “figure it out,” that he was passively letting his life happen to him. Was that so? Well, this sketch didn’t just fall into his pocket, did it?

  While Johanna was lost in a photograph of her aunt, Victor, like the vial of slime he was, chose to act. Pretend the object is something you have lost, that it was always yours. You lost it in error. You are coming back to get it. You are not taking it, so much as taking it back. Then you walk out the same way you walked in.

  “A4: Collier de saphir et diamant avec larme,” read the wording at the bottom of the paper.

  Larme. Tear? This was all the wording he could read. The rest of it was cut-off or faded French script. He straightened his arms to take in the whole picture. He blurred his eyes until it was a bunch of dots with one big blue dot in the middle.

  He had taken action. He had made a decision, albeit a probably terrible one. Many years ago, he had avoided being caught for his petty crime streak for no reason other than fate had taken pity on a first-time offender. No one in his life knew what he had done. But fate had done precious little for him since. So maybe it owed him this. Maybe it chose Victor and Victor alone to hear Johanna’s story. Maybe this necklace had always been his.

  PART TWO

  SIXTEEN

  Nathaniel

  He tripped over unanticipated luggage when he walked into his house. Fully tripped. He could hear Percy laughing in his room. Nathaniel got up and punched the door. He had just gotten off a plane, needed to sleep before his lunch meeting tomorrow, and was in no mood for one of Percy’s surprise Friend in Town visits. Percy was, by far, the most popular not-actually famous person he knew. Lucky for Nathaniel in the abstract, but often inconvenient in the specific.

  “Quit that racket, son!” Percy shouted. “Oh, hey! Okay if my buddy borrows your car tomorrow?”

  Unlike Percy, Nathaniel worked from home. Which meant that Percy’s surprise F.I.T.s felt closer to surprise arranged marriages. Nathaniel padded down the hall where he made out the outline of a body on the sofa, snoring under a blanket. He padded back.

  “Fuck no.” He gave the door a bang. “I have a meeting.”

  “Fine. Selfish. But keep it down. People are trying to sleep.”

  “Asshole.”

  “You love me long time,” Percy cackled.

  “Blow me.”

  “No homo.”

  The next morning, Nathaniel was awake with nerves. He had been practicing his pitch for weeks, engrossed in his notes over the weekend even. It had been a long time since Dude Move. He needed to get back into a writers’ room.

  He made himself coffee and walked down the hall, remembering that once he got to the end of it, a former fraternity brother of Percy’s would be asleep on the couch. But lo and behold: The F.I.T.’s feet were dangling off the armrest—and they were long and dainty with polish on the toes. Which meant two things were true: First, she was a she. Second, she wasn’t hooking up with Percy, because she was sleeping out here.

  Minutes later the F.I.T. was standing on the patio, drinking the fresh pot of coffee he had made for himself, wearing only boy shorts and an open men’s button-down. She was an aspiring model from Philadelphia. Nathaniel was barely tall enough for her. But he knew he had a shot. He was a handsome guy. Good hair. No belly. He had recently invested in facial toner.

  “What do you call these?” The F.I.T. pointed at the cacti dangling from a beam.

  Her shirt stretched up, exposing the majority of one breast, stopping just shy of the nipple. She studiously examined the cacti.

  “Air plants.” Nathaniel tucked his lip between his teeth. “That’s it?”

  “I don’t think there’s another name for them.” He cleared his throat. “Succulents?”

  “They are so cool,” she said. “I love them. I wish I could cover my bedroom ceiling with them. I have one of those popcorn ceilings.”

  “I wish I could cover your bedroom ceiling,” he said.

  “I don’t get it.” She smiled generously at him. “Do you guys have soy milk?”

  “Maybe in the fridge?”

  There was definitely not any soy milk in the fridge.

  “Out here everyone’s so mean to soy.” Her countenance collapsed. “It’s like an almond invasion, where everything is made of almonds.”

  “That’s exactly how I imagine the almond invasion going down.”

  “But soy’s still gotta be better for you than milk milk, right? Have you ever had Brazil-nut milk? I made it myself once. It’s so creamy. Better than hemp.”

  “How do you make it?” He spoke to the back of her thighs as she leaned into the open fridge, describing the straining process in pointless detail.

  This F.I.T. had two “go-sees” concurrent with Nathaniel’s lunch, but she would be his “best friend forever” if she could borrow his car. She smelled like berries and sex. If this was the scent her pores emitted, her pussy probably tasted like pie.

  “No problem,” he told the thighs.

  SEVENTEEN

  Kezia

  I can’t breathe.” Rachel spun through the office, a whirling dervish in platform sandals. “It’s hot as a scrotum out there.”

  The temperature in New York had been steadily rising before Kezia left for Caroline’s wedding. An official heat wave, more punishing than Miami and somehow worse in the open air of the Meatpacking District than anywhere else in Manhattan. Kezia could feel every stitch of her clothing, as if she had been slipped psychedelic drugs. And it wasn’t even June. She told herself that this was just a cold day in Calcutta and fantasized about October, about pumpkin-flavored things.

  “Look at this, it’s disgusting.”

  Rachel stopped in front of Kezia’s desk. She tore off her blazer and lifted her arm. Bits of black fuzz were caught like Spanish moss on armpit stubble.

  “Don’t they know I don’t have a shower at work?”

  “They?”

  “God.”

  Rachel adjusted her strapless jumpsuit. She lifted her necklaces as if they were contributing to her oppression. Rachel’s bulldog, Saul, sniffed at a heating pipe in the corner, exploring a new paint chip. The office was a loft space with painted-over pipes, crumbling exposed brick, and giant, old lead-paned windows—a health code violation at every turn. But the floors were blond and glossy, the desks Dani
sh and cream. Saul’s leash dragged behind him as he sniffed for paint chips like a pig digging for truffles.

  Eat it, Kezia thought.

  “You want me to get him some water?” asked Marcus, the bookkeeper, crossing the loft and reaching for Saul’s leash.

  The dog was missing his bottom teeth and was in a perpetual state of panting. Even for Saul, this was a particularly low tongue day.

  “No, the vet says Saul’s supposed to have filtered water.”

  “Your veterinarian told you that?” said Marcus.

  Kezia looked forward, forcing her cheeks to stay level. Marcus was approximately twenty years Kezia’s senior, father of two girls, homeowner in Queens, recent installer of a Zen waterfall. In an office full of young women who seemed to get off on making panicked phone calls about missing samples (actually, Kezia knew they got off on it because she used to be one of them), Kezia liked Marcus the best. Sometimes she saw him as the embodiment of her former, kinder self, the last thread between her and her idealized version of herself. Which was a lot of pressure to put on a bookkeeper.

  Rachel stood there, aerating her chest by snapping the jumpsuit elastic against it. Marcus went to pet Saul and the dog growled at him, a growl that sounded like a gurgle because of the missing-teeth issue.

  “We had a wild dog break in through the back fence last summer and my youngest chased it away by screaming and waving her doll at him.”

  “That’s ah-mazing,” Rachel said, widening her eyes at Kezia.

  “They eat dog meat in Vietnam.” Marcus returned to his desk. “Chinese, cats. Vietnamese, dogs.”

  Marcus had been working at the company seven months longer than Kezia. They were workforce Irish twins. But once Rachel picked up on the fact that Kezia would not burn her business to the ground if left to fill out order forms, she saw no reason to interact with both of them. Even in the face of a legitimate financial emergency, Rachel avoided calling Marcus. Kezia suspected Rachel was put off by the sound of banging screen doors, of oil in frying pans, of Marcus’s daughters playing in the background. Or of calling Queens period, her voice touching down in a borough that didn’t quite care enough about her.