The Clasp

by Sloane Crosley

  “I should grab some water too,” said Rachel. “All my water is on the outside of me right now.”

  On cue, an eavesdropping assistant in cowboy boots came skipping over with a freshly cracked bottle.

  “You’re a lifesaver, Sarah.”

  The assistant, Sophie, beamed. “Sarah” was close enough.

  Then she skipped back from whence she came. Kezia attempted to stealthily peel back the tin on the yogurt she had brought from home. Liquefied, it spat up on her shirt like a baby. Her stomach jiggled a little as she wiped.

  She knew she was thin for all of America, but she was an ogre compared with the girls who worked in this neighborhood. She had to actively resist staring at other women’s thighs as she walked to work each morning. Her test for body dismorphia went as follows: If she could lob a golf ball between the thighs of the woman walking in front of her, she felt jealous. If she could lob a bowling ball, she felt superior. A magazine had once told her she was supposed to say nice things to her body, to brush her self-esteem before bed. “Stand naked in front of a full-length mirror and tell yourself: ‘I have a good butt’ or ‘I have nice breasts.’”

  “How was your vacation?” Rachel said, pulling her lips fiercely from the bottle.

  “It was a wedding. It was only Miami and it rained the whole time.”

  “Did you go to the thing at the Shore Club?”

  “What thing?”

  “Never mind. You should have told me you were going. I could have called Reginald and gotten you a rate at the Setai.”

  Kezia didn’t know who Reginald was, nor had she heard of the Setai until the day after the wedding. And only then because it was located near the wedding brunch. Furthermore, Rachel knew exactly where she was going because Kezia had, in fact, told her and they had, in fact, spoken while she was there.

  “Next time tell me where you’re going.”

  Her boss had a way of deftly racking up conversational credit, offering to pull strings long after all the puppets had been put away.

  “I don’t know why I didn’t say anything,” Kezia said, Saul panting at her feet.

  The dog’s dry tongue scraped against her skin, hoping her foot was a giant paint chip. She moved her toes behind her ankle to protect them.

  “Do you have a napkin on you?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  Rachel made the same face as Kezia did upon hearing of Reginald. The kitchen was a room she was supposed to have heard of, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She cautiously opened the fridge and poured something into her coffee.

  She frowned into her cup. “I hate it when soy does that.”

  The milk separated into algae-like blooms. It looked undrinkable.

  “My phone is ringing.” Rachel dug in her bag and held up the chiming device.

  She marched into her glass office. Saul trotted along after her, his abbreviated tail twitching, flaunting his white asshole. Marcus filled a bowl with tap water, set it down, and got back to work. They listened, along with the other employees and interns scattered around the loft, as Rachel attempted to defend the engineering behind a faulty necklace to a boutique in Chicago. It was a conversation Kezia had heard a lot of recently.

  Most of Rachel’s pieces were manufactured on the other side of the loft, a straight shot from Kezia’s desk. But the more major pieces, especially those with semiprecious stones or vintage milk-glass shards, were produced off-site. And something about the production of one of Rachel’s necklaces was causing the clasp to snap. A customer would idly touch her neck and poof: her necklace had vanished.

  Normally, these complaints would not be handled by the designer herself but things had come to a boiling point. The returns were becoming increasingly plural. As Kezia saw it, Rachel had three options:

  1. Blame the design (not an option).

  2. Blame herself (marginally more of an option).

  3. Blame Kezia (best option).

  The necklace was Rachel’s baby—her design—but she left the production details to Kezia. This put Kezia in the role of foster parent: She couldn’t take credit for the necklace’s creation, but she could be blamed for its destruction.

  An upbeat electronic noise came from her computer.

  What are u wearing? said an instant message bubble.

  Kezia concentrated on the pixels, unsure if there was more where that came from.

  This is Judson.

  Rachel was pacing intently around her office. Another bubble appeared.

  xo, bubble, Judson.

  Kezia assessed herself. Today she had put on a silk tank, pajama-looking pants, a series of toggle-clasped bracelets, and a long necklace of ribbons and nickel-cast squid tentacles from Rachel’s first line. Though not required to wear Rachel Simone jewelry, she was encouraged.

  Pants. Kezia pressed send.

  U mean only pants? haha, Judson shot back instantly.

  I’m at work, so . . .

  In actuality, “only pants” was not a terrible guess. Kezia could see a dark bra through a junior designer’s crop top. Another girl wore an outfit that had seemingly been shredded by rival wolf packs. Meanwhile, inside Rachel’s office, the debate with the Chicago store was heating up. Rachel invoked her full name, preceded by the word “the” and followed by the word “brand.”

  “I am sorry you feel that way,” she said insincerely.

  Kezia caught a commiserate eye roll through the glass wall.

  “. . . but to imply faulty manufacturing over such a small percentage of . . . of course I stand by everything we produce but I hope you can understand why I don’t wholly share in your . . . True, but you’re not calling Cartier. These are one-of-a-kind pieces. Look, have you ever had an heirloom tomato?”

  There was a silence.

  “Well, it looks deformed but you still eat it.”

  The upbeat noise was back: Catch you on the flip side, beautiful.

  The flip side of what?

  “Overpriced?” Rachel shouted into the phone. “Overpriced!”

  Marcus looked at Kezia and shrugged. The girl in the ravaged outfit clicked her pen.

  Rachel’s jewelry was, on the whole, overpriced. Especially this particular line. Huge silk necklaces with uncut crystals dangling from them, each one more expensive than the next, culminating in the exorbitant Starlight Express necklace. But the line was receiving a deluge of accolades from the press. The trade magazines quoted Rachel saying things like “I like to draw my inspiration from the minutiae of large-scale structure.” One photo shoot featured Saul, shot from behind with a pile of necklaces hooked over his tail. Rachel liked it so much she had the photo blown up and framed behind the toilet. Marcus had to pee into the barrel of Saul’s butthole. If word got out that the Starlight Express was breaking, it would be bad for everyone.

  Kezia would be removing the Chicago store from the database by day’s end.

  “Special K!” Rachel opened her office door and Kezia scurried in.

  “That’s my most favorite name in the world.”

  Rachel shut the door behind them and looked out through the glass.

  “I’m pretty sure I wasn’t followed,” Kezia whispered.

  Rachel put her hands over her face and dragged her fingers down as she spoke.

  “How many of these things are fucked up?”

  “The Starlight Express? I wouldn’t say they were ‘fucked up.’”

  “There’s no need to defend their honor to me. My name’s on them. I’m allowed to be mean to them.”

  “In that case . . . somewhere in the range of all?”

  “All?”

  “Well, yeah. Cassie came in to shoot them for the line sheets last week and we couldn’t even get the clasps to lie flat in order to photograph them. I think all of them have the same problem from the same vendor—Claude Bouissou in Paris—it’s endemic to the clasp itself.”

  “Endemic.” Rachel rolled the word in her mouth like a marble. “It’s the weight, isn’t
it? I knew this would happen with the big crystals, but they look like nineties prom jewelry when they’re small. I’d have Sarah run up to Forty-seventh Street to just get the clasps fixed if I thought that would work.”

  “That won’t work.”

  “You know what? Cloisonné was a bad choice.”

  She drew the word out as she pronounced it. The clasp of the necklace was too good for the rest of the necklace. Kezia had tried to stop Rachel, but Rachel had refused to listen.

  The clasp was enamel but not just any enamel. Cloisonné— specialized French enamel made by hand in an old-world factory, using an expensive technique rivaled only by the Chinese, who used to cover whole flower vases in cloisonné. The Chinese, clearly, had more patience than the French, who had perfected it for jewelry. Kezia would go blind doing what these jewelers did, covering a metal surface with hundreds of wire shapes, then filling each enclosure to the brim with crushed pigment. Even at her old job, they didn’t use cloisonné. Too expensive and too slow. A clasp like that was slumming it on the Starlight Express.

  A celestially themed wonder, the necklace had been a problem from the day they received their salesman samples. Beneath the enamel stars (which were chipping, for some reason) was an intricate box tongue mechanism that double-shut with magnets. There was just so much to break.

  “They were a fortune to make, too.”

  “I know,” said Kezia.

  “Also, what are you wearing?” Rachel twisted her face.

  “That’s the question of the hour, huh? A shirt.”

  “You look like you’re going to a funeral.”

  “That’s because more than twenty percent of my body is covered.”

  “Someone’s being a little sassy for someone who’s dressed like she’s going to a funeral.”

  “Fine. About the clasp, I don’t have a magic wand. I wish I did. No one knows that necklace better than I do. I mean, almost no one.”

  Rachel sat in her chair, turning Saul’s ear inside out, examining the pink.

  “What you really know is these snotty, temperamental fine jewelry people.” She sighed. “Do we think there’s a chance that our friend in France caught on to the fact that we dodged his minimum?”

  “It’s possible.”

  Actually, it was definite. To create a custom part from Claude Bouissou required a minimum order of 400 units. Otherwise it wasn’t worth it for him. But, successful as Rachel was, she couldn’t afford to take that bet. So she got around the minimum by placing a large order (about 150) of “samples” with the understanding that she would come back for more. But she never did.

  “And do we further think that Claude Bouissou is not prioritizing Rachel Simone because of this?”

  Sometimes Kezia felt that Rachel got into this business only to fulfill her lifelong dream of referring to herself in the third person.

  “Fuck Claude Bouissou.” Rachel leaned over her computer, furiously clicking the mouse. “Fuck the fish face I have to make just to pronounce his name. Who are our other vendors here?”

  “Here, in America?”

  “Yes, here.”

  Kezia couldn’t think of a single domestic cloisonné manufacturer.

  “Maybe we should lose the enamel and go with something simple instead.” She shrugged. “I can get barrel-screw clasps quickly.”

  “Too fourth-grade.”

  “Spring rings?”

  “Too nautical.”

  “Lobster claws?”

  “Too fishy.”

  “Round toggles?”

  “Derivative.”

  “Belt hooks?”

  “Does it look like I’m running a Claire’s to you?”

  Saul and Rachel growled at her in unison.

  “Rachel, no one in this city and no one on this continent specializes in cloisonné and if they do, they’re all going to be too slow or they’re not going to want to . . .”

  “To what?”

  “I think they want to know their work is going to end up on a diamond choker. Trust me, I used to work with these people.”

  “Good for you.” Rachel tapped her nails against her desk. “Then you should know exactly who to call. This is a nightmare. I have to be in Tokyo in two days.”

  A bead of sweat inched down the back of Kezia’s leg, picking up speed at the knee. Cold day in Calcutta, cold day in Calcutta. Saul put his chin on a pile of freshly photocopied papers.

  “Would you just look at him?”

  Saul’s tongue protruded from the side of his mouth like a dangling earring.

  “He has a face for radio.”

  “You have no soul.”

  Kezia pointed her thumb at the door. “I’m gonna go now.”

  “Fuck Tokyo. Fuck France, too.”

  “I’ll try my best to fuck all these places.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Victor

  Victor returned to find his apartment as he had left it. Blinds not closed because he did not have blinds. Clothing inside out, mugs in the sink filled with water—a feeble tribute to future cleanliness, a gesture against chaos. The coffee table was crowded with beer bottles and cigarette butts. Maid’s day off.

  He dropped his bag on the floor and went to take a piss, holding down the flusher for the extra twenty seconds his toilet required. He threw out a warped magazine from some uneventful week in March. He needed artificial ventilation. He climbed over his bed and pressed the button on his air-conditioning unit. Nothing. His father always said that these contraptions were smart enough to break the moment their warranties expired but never smart enough just to keep working. Annoyed, Victor went to open the second narrow window in his bedroom but it was wide open already.

  Had he left it like that? He had a rule with the elements. That rule being: they were out there and he was in here. He tried to close the window but the frame was bent.

  He wanted to be curious about the cause but the reality of what was happening—what had already happened and thus could not be altered—was setting in.

  Victor turned around to confirm his computer, Xbox, speakers, printer, cable box, and television were missing. He crossed over to his desk and TV stand, as if to make sure these items were not covered in invisibility cloaks.

  In their haste, the thieves must have knocked out the cord to the air conditioner. Sensing this would be his last bit of control for a while, Victor was unhurried in his movements as he plugged the unit back in. The low rumbling of a fan belt commenced and he stood in front it, listening, not getting cool. He wondered if his neighbors had been hit as well. Victor would be perversely comforted to know that other people were violated. Being burglarized in isolation felt a little too reminiscent of being laid off in isolation.

  He needed to shower. He flung back the shower curtain to confirm he still had a bar of soap. Check. The knob squeaked as he twisted it on. Should he even go to the cops? It would take hours and they would ask him timeline questions he couldn’t possibly answer. He had been gone for two days. He couldn’t identify anyone or anything except the odor of rotting dairy coming from his refrigerator. Still, there were things to be grateful for. It was daylight when he returned home, which meant he had time to psychologically reclaim his space before nightfall. Had he had more possessions to his name, he might have felt a more extreme sense of violation. But most of the things he owned weren’t even his—old furniture from when his parents renovated their den, stuff from thrift shops, Nathaniel’s Norton Anthology of English Literature, which Victor used to decimate roaches.

  He got out of the shower and padded to his kitchen. The enthusiastic press release regarding his dismissal from mostofit was wrinkled and splattered with sauce. He opened his silverware drawer. All knives accounted for. He checked the cabinets. Baking soda, cereal, Tostitos . . . and a half bottle of Jameson. At least they left him that much. And at least Victor’s unemployment checks had started rolling in, so he could replace the TV. His mind perked up at the idea of getting a bigger one. But it collapsed when he w
ent to turn his computer on.

  No computer to be turned.

  He grabbed the cereal and sat on his sofa. A mass “best wkend EVER xo” text from Caroline was waiting, unopened on his phone. He shook the box of cereal, trying to make nut clusters appear.

  There was a knock at the door. Victor nearly hit the ceiling.

  “Vic-tour! Victour, you home?”

  It was Matejo, his downstairs Dominican neighbor, who never failed to pass Victor without informing him that he had heard loud music or footsteps, always tacking on “but I don’t mind.” “Live and let live!” was an expression Matejo had come up with. “To each his own!” Another idiom from scratch. It was the most manipulative form of noise complaint Victor had ever witnessed— Matejo was stockpiling neighborly goodwill for the weeks his entire extended family visited.

  Victor yanked a shirt off a wire hanger in his closet and held the damp towel around his waist.

  He opened the door. “Hey, how’s it going?”

  The chain lock had been gone when Victor moved in, its base still sloppily screwed to the wall like a mezuzah.

  “Is everyone okay in here?”

  “It’s just me, Matejo. Yeah, I’m fine.”

  Matejo’s pupils bounced in shaky circles, exploring the world over Victor’s shoulder.

  “Just seeing . . .” Matejo let his voice shrink.

  “They got you, too, huh?”

  “Victour, it’s a disaster.” Matejo scratched his neck. “My safe got taken.”

  “You have a safe?”

  “Had. I had one of those personal home safes. They say you can’t just lift it but these guys lifted it. I had a warranty but guess where it is?”

  “In the safe.”

  “My wife thinks it’s an inside job. She says she knows it’s my sister’s kid. I don’t know how he’s gonna play at opening it. I guess you could get a chain and a truck and open it like that.”

  “I guess.”

  “But where’s he gonna get a truck? Kid doesn’t have a license. Not that he did this. But my wife says he’s at that age, you know?”