The Clasp

by Sloane Crosley

  When he woke up this morning, he had intended to rid himself of Johanna’s sketch, physically and psychically. Whatever kinship he felt with it was part of an otherworldly weekend and, before that, part of an old European family and a war he had witnessed only in movies. It did not belong with him, in the blunt present. But then Caroline had come to him with her unamusing bouches, and he saw instantly how she did not deserve Johanna’s secrets. Maybe Johanna’s brain was cloudy and maybe it wasn’t, but either way—she had picked him.

  He unfolded the paper so that the top half of the necklace was looking out at a Chinese couple behind him. The teardrop in the stone looked especially weepy. He began trolling through the library’s database. A rudimentary search like this made him feel like an Olympic figure skater slumming it at the Ice Capades. He took a pint-sized pencil from a container at the end of the table, along with some scrap paper.

  He began by putting the inventory of available information into columns, narrowing and shaping it. The date on the page read 1883. It used the same French 1s as the place cards at the wedding. The remainder of the writing, however, would be illegible even to a French person. The words began with clear Ms, Cs, or Ts, only to be followed by the angled scribblings of a lunatic. There was a number in the corner and a word he assumed was “carats.” Finally, there was a long series of numbers at the bottom (Early SKU numbers? The weight of the stones? A combination to a safe?) but they were cut off in the sketch. He could make out a 0 and the flat top of a couple of 5s.

  “Okay.” Victor tapped his foot. “Nineteenth century, nineteenth century . . .”

  He could attack the French scrawl later. For now, he just wanted to find something that resembled the necklace. Then, maybe, he could track down the original, find out who made it, find out where it was hiding. What kind of a person would have worn a necklace like this? He would assume royalty—but then wouldn’t someone aside from Johanna know she had it? He began searching for “stones with shapes in them.” Turns out Kezia was, for once in her life, wrong. It was not “impossible” to carve a shape into the back of a stone. The late nineteenth century was rife with crosses and fleur-de-lis. Every era had its trends. Like social dental records. The more obscure, the easier to narrow down. And thanks to the maudlin mood of Johanna’s necklace, he knew when it had been born (the Belle Époque) and where (northern France).

  Victor squeezed the pencil nub until it dented his fingertips, filling out call slips. He felt righteous, doing his research at the public library instead of poking around on the computer he no longer had. He sat on the smooth benches of the cavernous room, waiting for his number to be called. Books in hand, he shuffled down the aisle between the desks. The books made a thud when he released them and a guy at the end of the table glared at him. Victor could see his screen. The mostofit logo hit him like a bat signal.

  It had not occurred to him that people might use mostofit ironically. But there was no way this fellow with the topknot and farmer’s beard wasn’t using mostofit as a personal statement. Victor smiled.

  “Pardon,” said the guy, pulling his computer closer.

  Okay, so he wasn’t a hipster. He was just foreign.

  The book titles were long and barely in English. European Metalwork of the 19th Century. Renowned Gems from Lascaux to the Belle Époque. The Great Expositions: London’s Crystal Palace and the Parisian Palladium. Cabochon Construction: 700 Fine Jewelry Designs. Jet Black Jewels: Victorian Mourning Accessories. A Brief History of French Ornament. Under whose definition of “brief ”? That particular volume was more than two thousand pages. Within an hour, the titles bled together until his brain would have allowed for Claptrap and Poppycock: Pineapple Motifs in Norman Janitorial Society.

  Why couldn’t that Nazi have hidden something more up his chromosome, like a dueling pistol or a cool pocket watch? He could not get it up for treatises about the differences between rivières and parures. He could not pronounce these things. One particularly ornate piece was described as “a series of diamonds invisibly suspended from delicate sprays of rough-cut opals, the beveled ends of which fell at the nape of the neck.” He lacked the spatial imagination for this. And of all the centuries in all the countries in all the world, why’d his necklace have to fall into this one? Apparently, what software engineers were to California in the 1970s, fine jewelers were to France in the 1880s. And tracking down jewelry was not the same thing as tracking down a painting. So much of it went unsigned and undocumented. Without being able to read the handwriting on the sketch, it may as well have read, Congratulations, it’s a necklace.

  No worse compliment than one with no adjective.

  He ran his finger along a bronze table lamp, warm from a full day of electricity. The bearded mostofit user had left. The library would be closing soon.

  “Where you at?” he whispered to the sketch.

  He leaned on his hand, pushing his glasses at a purposefully jaunty angle. Information that was never structured to be found. That was his pride and joy back when he had slivers of both. He tried to focus. In A Brief History of French Ornament, Victor read about a famous diamond called l’Étoile du Sud, a massive stone some slave girl yanked out of a Brazilian cave centuries ago. It was 125 carats, worth $20 million, and Cartier had it now. He consulted the credentials on Johanna’s necklace. Nineteen. Nineteen carats smushed into one stone. Something a celebrity would buy another celebrity. Not too shabby. Then he lifted the paper up and squinted: 114 carats. The side diamonds, the backup singers, were 19 carats.

  Victor closed the last book and stacked it with the rest. Wooden chairs scraped against the dark tile as people stood and packed up their bags. He wondered what Felix and Silas and Caroline were doing right now. Had they stayed at the restaurant after he left, Caroline feigning fullness while wolfing down the chocolate-covered orphan spleen that came with the bill? And then what? Had they seen the sights, ambled through Central Park, mourned the passing of the Plaza as they knew it? Did they have places to go or were they already barreling through the Midtown Tunnel, headed back to Miami? Probably that. What else were they going to do? They had come here for him.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Nathaniel

  Nathaniel opened his bedroom door, sniffing the hall like a prairie dog. The whole world smelled of tacos and beer.

  Particles drifted through the strips of daylight, tentacles of irritatingly chipper Southern Californian sun that cared not if you had a hangover. Meghan’s feet stuck out over the edge of his bed. He shut the door gently behind him, crept past Percy’s room, and sat outside. The neighbors had released their toddler, who loved nothing more than jumping on the backyard trampoline on weekend mornings. The light hit the flat heads of the cacti on the ground. Everything glared at him. The sound of that kid squealing glared at him. Hangover-induced synesthesia.

  He checked his messages. Mostly they were from friends in L.A., asking if the party was still going. One from an old colleague at the literary magazine where he used to work, calling on his way home from a book party, musing about the antiquated nature of voice mail in our time. There was a fruitless ass-dial—the sound of fabric being dragged over microphone holes. Last but not least, Kezia had called back. He could tell she was upset. Maybe it had something to do with being hung up on by Meghan’s vagina. More likely it was because Nathaniel wasn’t meeting her unreasonably high standards of friendship or, worse, We Need to Talk About Victor: Volume 12. Talking about Victor felt like being roped into a parent-teacher conference. Inside, Meghan was sleeping off her hangover, and here he was, outside, listening to Kezia as if she were real and Meghan was an illusion. Yet had he ever put his tongue or his penis or an inappropriate piece of technology inside Kezia Morton? No, no, and not that he recalled.

  “Hey, it’s me. Did you just hang up on me? I know you have guests to attend to or molest but call me. I leave for Paris in five seconds so I’m running around like a crazy person. I know you think I’m being dramatic but Victor—”

 
; He put the phone on his lap, keypad facing down. Then he took a deep breath and picked it back up.

  “Hey, it’s me. Did you just hang up on me? I know you have guests to attend to or molest but call me. I leave for Paris in five seconds so I’m running around like a crazy person. I know you think I’m being dramatic but Victor has been acting weirder than usual and avoiding me, which is unlike him. He was in a daze when I talked to him yesterday. And then today I called his number at work and some surly woman named Nancy picked up and said that Victor Wexler didn’t work there. And I was all, ‘This is mostofit?’ And she was all, ‘Yes, Victor doesn’t work here anymore,’ and then she started crying and told me she had been let go too, and then she said, ‘First they came for the socialists,’ and then she hung up on me. Anyway. It’s obviously not to the point where I’m going to bang on his door but just wondering if you’ve heard from our friend or if his face has been eaten by feral cats. Longest message ever. Happy birthday. Even though it’s not your birthday anymore.”

  Victor had lost his job. So what? He would live. Would she leave that kind of message about Nathaniel on Victor’s voice mail if the situation were reversed?

  He picked waxy leaves from a bush and folded them in half, cracking them while he played with his phone. Shamefully, he had Bean on Google Alert. Though he didn’t need to—Google Alert was like methadone, meant to wean him off proactively searching for her name. Apparently she had attended a movie premiere last night.

  To distract himself, he pulled up Deadline and began half-heartedly scrolling through posts like IFC TO AIR JOHNNY DEPP HOME VIDEOS, ABC SNAGS OFFICE BUDDY DRAMA, and KITTEN THUNDERDOME GETS PILOT. Then he stopped scrolling.

  There, in a tiny box, was a picture of Not Jack Nicholson. His name was Luke and not only was he fucking Bean with Nathaniel’s condoms, he was a TV writer.

  Nathaniel had not been vigilant about preparing for jealousy and the post hit him hard. This Luke person had just sold a pilot about surf instructors in Venice Beach, produced by a director of The Wire, with two A-list actors already attached. Nathaniel could not summon his usual ability to tamp down covetousness with realism (most pilot scripts never got made). As if all this weren’t bad enough, as if he didn’t already want to crack open his phone, remove the picture, and stomp on it, Surf ’s Down had been sold to Lauren, yesterday’s lunch date. There was a picture of her as well, a headshot of her looking off to the side as if posing for her middle school yearbook.

  The screen door banged behind him. Percy appeared, flopping into a chair. He put one leg up on their tattered table and wiped his nose on his undershirt.

  “Bahhhhh,” he baritoned with his head back.

  “Indeed,” Nathaniel agreed.

  “So. Meghan. I’m not the worst housemate in the world, am I?” Nathaniel wished he remembered more of last night. In his experience, girls who looked like Meghan never did more than they had to in bed but she was like a human flipbook. He vaguely remembered being the one to put a stop to her head-bobbing, to the vibrating sensation of her moaning, to drag her up to face him. She was going to be there for hours otherwise.

  “My birthday’s next month.” Percy’s eyes were closed. “I want twins.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Oh hell.” Percy sat up with a jolt. “I just realized something. In ten years, a threesome will be nothing. It will be totally standard. We’ll want quintuplets. But you’re not allowed to fantasize about quintuplets now because the fertilization science is too new so you’re automatically fantasizing about banging seven-year-olds.”

  “You should write that down.”

  “I should. Hold up, I’ll be right back.”

  Nathaniel felt like he had vertigo. He needed someplace for his mind to go that wasn’t Surf ’s Down location scouts trolling Abbot Kinney.

  He could hear Percy inside, exchanging morning greetings with Meghan. She was gathering her toiletries from the bathroom, shutting off the possibility of morning sex by putting on shoes. By tonight, she would be back in her house in Philadelphia, gazing at her popcorn ceiling, sleeping with her aid-worker boyfriend, who she was probably going to marry. Nathaniel envied her for doing Los Angeles in moderation. She had absorbed enough of it—professionally, socially, sexually—to have it lift her mood and give her a glamorous sheen back home. No RATINGS RAT RACE! for Meghan. He wanted to get out of here, too. Suddenly and desperately.

  Last night Meghan had informed him that she wasn’t going to pursue modeling if all she could land was twice-a-year catalog work. She had already started looking into law school. Her boyfriend’s sister had gone to Rutgers and liked it.

  “Where is that again?” Nathaniel had asked.

  “It’s in Camden, New Jersey.”

  “Isn’t that, like, the most dangerous place in America?”

  She had looked languidly around the yard at the agents and the producers, at the cap-sleeved production assistants and the open-flanneled comedy writers who loved them, taking it all in before speaking.

  “Is it?”

  PART THREE

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Kezia

  When Grey learned that Kezia was coming to Paris, she and Paul insisted on putting her up. Apparently the wedding had shaved a couple of years off their casual estrangement. Kezia had forgotten how this conversation went. When Grey insisted, you had to go along with it. You just had to. Not because she was cool like Olivia or pushy like Caroline but because you got the sense that you would break her heart if you argued. In college, if you didn’t want to borrow a dress she wanted you to borrow (because the dress dragged on the ground due to the fact that its rightful owner was eight feet tall), you still managed to walk across campus twenty minutes later, dress folded over one arm.

  “And I’m picking you up at the airport,” Grey beamed through the phone.

  There were few cities left on the planet where this offer wasn’t an extreme one.

  “That’s madness. I’ll expense a cab. Or take the Métro.”

  “The RER from the airport is disgusting.”

  “I’m sure it’s been done.”

  “You have to touch the doors to open them. And pull down the seats. And push to exit. Paris is a whole city of latches and buttons. Nothing here is automatic.”

  Kezia was beginning to understand the French propensity for xenophobia.

  “Do you not take the Métro every day?”

  “I bring a tub of hand sanitizer,” she said. “You know the French use the Métro as a urinal? Also, you’ll have bags.”

  Grey was always polite, but this was more desperation than politeness. Right or wrong, Kezia was not permitted to have opinions about Paris and she realized why: She was participating in a city from which Grey herself felt shunned.

  “One bag but fine. Thank you. How long have you guys been there, anyway?”

  “It’ll be seven months next week.”

  “Are you making friends? How are the other reindeer treating you?”

  “Oh, totally. We have lots of friends.”

  “See? Parisians warm up once they realize you’re not a dipshit.”

  “Oh well, no, obviously we don’t have any French friends.”

  Grey’s social circle consisted exclusively of fellow expats. So it wasn’t only that her French never improved, but that her French know-how never improved. Vocabulary you can teach yourself, but know-how is osmotic. She had no real reason to interact with actual, living French people. Or, for that matter, dead ones. Their first apartment, paid for by Paul’s firm for three weeks, was a clean, soulless flat overlooking Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Paul liked to stumble through the cobblestone hills, hoping to smack into Chopin during his “Easter egg hunts of the damned.”

  “You’ll love where we live now. Our old apartment was creepy. The elevator was the size of the coffins across the street. You know, sometimes I thought I heard construction or, like, woodpeckers. And then I realized it was the sound of lettering being carved into the headst
ones.”

  “Dark.”

  “French graves are super tacky, you know. They’re covered in plastic flowers.”

  “Yeah, but they have Cézanne and Truffaut and Descartes. Tout les cartes.” “So?”

  “So I think they’re secure enough as a nation to use plastic flowers. I mean, they have a billion years of history; they can do what they want with it.”

  “But that’s the thing!” Grey was screaming now. “They get to pick and choose what’s sacred. It’s not like America, where everyone dresses high/low but it’s up to you which shirt is Chanel and which sweater is Zara. There’s a right answer here, I’m telling you. It’s more like—oh, you bought your soap in bulk? Intéressant. Or oh, you paid thirty euros for this teakettle? It’s so original. But they keep all the answers in a locked vault and then they toss the key into the Seine. Okay, I have to go, Paul wants to go to a thing at the Pompidou. See you Monday.”

  Grey was standing outside her car, waiting for Kezia at Arrivals. The last time Kezia had been in Charles de Gaulle, she had been preoccupied with smuggling a bag full of elk bones back to New York. According to Rachel, if customs stopped you, they merely confiscated your contraband and sent you on your way. Smiling tightly at a Roissy security guard, Kezia felt a retroactive shudder for what might have happened.

  “And they all speak English,” Grey ranted as they merged onto the highway, “every last one, even the bag ladies—but they pretend they don’t.”

  The bark of a Virgin Radio DJ became louder once Grey closed their windows. The ads were lightning fast but Kezia caught an enthusiastic one for mostofit (“moose-to-feet!”). It had been a while since she had seen or heard of Victor’s (apparently former) employer. Maybe mostofit was like Friends. Big in France for all eternity.