The Clasp

by Sloane Crosley

  “Kezia . . .”

  “The labor is taking forever. You have this encouraging grin and she has sweaty tendrils of hair on her face. You grip her hand. And then presto—you have this baby and you’re so happy. God, I’ve never seen you so happy. There’s so much happy coming out of you that, even though my heart is breaking because I’m a fucking wall now, I have no choice but to be happy for you. You’re crying, the baby is crying. You tell your wife she’s a trouper. Then she asks you what sex the baby is. There are no doctors in the room. It’s just the three of us. But I am hardening. I’m not your friend anymore—I’m the wall. You examine the baby to see what sex it is. I can’t speak, I can’t move. You don’t know I’m there. My organs are part of the plaster. By the time the dream ends, my eyes and ears are crushed. I can’t hear you say if it’s a boy or a girl.”

  Kezia swallowed as quietly as she could. She could hear early morning crows, screaming at the new day. A tractor puttered down a dirt road. There was a sharp squeak of Nathaniel’s mattress as he pulled back his quilt and moved across the chasm between their beds. She stiffened in anticipation.

  “Kezia.” He leaned in close.

  “We are friends,” he reassured her, after a long silence.

  “I know that.” She nodded, grateful he could not see her expression.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Victor

  Seagulls squawked overhead when he arrived in Dieppe. Victor was comforted, watching their stiff wings employ the minimum amount of torque required for soaring, their voices among the most unappealing of the bird kingdom. It reminded him of home. Home home. Summers in Cape Cod, throwing bits of bread at them, easily relinquishing whole rolls when they came too close. The architecture here reminded him of home as well: seafood restaurants and row houses with octagonal windows facing the water. Even the sound of boats in the Dieppe port, creaking up and down against their ropes and chains, was familiar. He took a moment, standing where the bus had dropped him off, luxuriating in the universality of waterfront towns.

  Then he felt his face and remembered that he was very far from home indeed. But delightfully closer to Johanna’s necklace.

  Dieppe, upon closer examination, wore its seediness proudly. There was a sex shop with blow-up dolls and a French maid’s outfit that, he supposed, considering the context, was just a maid’s outfit. There was a convenience store with automated doors, and the smell of rotten fruit wafted out each time someone passed by. Some of the octagonal windows were broken, exposing the lace curtains inside to the elements. If Rouen—home of the overpriced street crêpe—was harboring violent drug dealers, he wasn’t compelled to wander farther afield in Dieppe. Still, he reasoned it was better to be here, exploring this exotic grime, than depressed by the familiar grime of Sunset Park.

  He sat on a metal traffic post. The post ahead of his was covered with stickers in various states of disrepair. There were stickers for locksmiths and local bands and one in a shape Victor would have recognized had this whole city been bombed: the mostofit.com logo. Back home, these stickers were faded, remnants of a promotional blitz gone bust. Here they were pristine and read: #1 MOTEUR DE RECHERCHE DE LA FRANCE!

  Typical.

  But had he not been glaring at the sticker, he might not have spotted the one beneath it with a picture of a bicycle and an address he recognized as the street he was on. He consulted the number on the post and then backed up to get a more panoramic view. Victor couldn’t believe his luck. The bicycle rental was only €4/day, and for him? €2. Why? Because the girl manning the shop cut him a deal. And she put away the clipboard stacked with contact information forms, as if Victor had transcended something as pedestrian as a form. And then she winked at him. Victor credited his bruised face for all of this.

  According to the map, there was a bike trail that stretched all the way from Paris to London (with a ferry in between). Victor could hop on, hop off, and be at the château by the afternoon.

  He cranked the seat up and took a couple of stabs at getting his feet in pedaling position. He had always meant to buy a bike but every bike in his neighborhood seemed to meet the same fate: lock left around the pole like a horseshoe. He put an extra bottle of water in his duffel and smiled, his busted lip stretching and cracking. He was so close now. He started down the trail, stopping to check for signs that he was headed inland. A couple of bikers in professional gear came whizzing past, looking like human hinges. They shouted at each other in what sounded like Swedish.

  It occurred to Victor that he had stumbled—homeless, beaten, and broke—into a rich person’s leisure activity. If his parents had a little more money and a little less aversion to physical fitness, he could see them taking a bike trip from London to Paris, his mother rewarding herself with pastries, his father with beer. They would love this. There were blackbirds and the occasional butterfly. He loved it, too. He felt a kind of giddy freedom with the air pushing against his skin as he rode. He couldn’t remember the last time “giddy” was in his emotional repertoire and certainly not as a result of being in nature. For the briefest of moments, his greatest fear in life was that a butterfly would get caught in the spokes of his bike.

  Vast fields were separated by rows of trees and dotted with apple trees, pink and heavy. The cows blinked flies from their eyelashes. The wind pushed through the trees, a soft applause coming from the grass.

  He stopped to knock his packet of cigarettes against a handlebar. It was unnerving, looking out at the open field, knowing that he could never stop here and smoke a cigarette in 1941. He would not be “moved to another house,” as the château owners had. He would be murdered or taken to a concentration camp and murdered. Well, I don’t think he killed anyone. Johanna’s aunt’s Nazi had taught children. The most innocent job one could have for the most evil organization in history. Did that absolve him? Victor was pretty sure it did not. There was a reason Felix was never told about his great-aunt’s love life. The Nazis were not a group the world let off on technicalities. And yet, if this particular Nazi had never existed, Victor would still be back in New York, pointlessly sweating, listening to Matejo chuck frozen meat products out the window.

  Time to keep moving. His back wheel was wobbling. He squeezed the tire. He dismounted and crouched down, holding the cigarette in the side of his mouth, scanning for holes.

  A lady in a moth-eaten fleece and a plaid headscarf passed, stopped, and turned around. She had a wire basket full of dead rabbits attached to her seat.

  “Je peux vous aider?”

  He probably could have used some aide, but the tire didn’t appear to be punctured. The chain was tight. Perhaps it was something to do with the spokes. Whatever it was, he was not interested in getting closer to the limp brown bodies in her basket.

  “Tourville-sur-Arques?”

  “Ah, oui.” She pointed at a curve in the trail. “Quatre kilometres à peu près.”

  Victor thanked her as she pedaled off, rabbit feet vibrating between the wires of her basket. He pedaled a few feet. The bike was missing some shock absorption but the wheels obeyed the squeeze of the brakes. He felt every rock in his groin, so he rode the rest of the trail hovering above the seat, swerving to avoid root systems. Eventually the path carried him straight to a little wooden sign, an arrow with letters carved into it. It was the right number of letters and it started with a “T.” He sped up, pushing his glasses on the swollen bridge of his nose, almost enjoying the pain. TOURVILLE-SUR-ARQUES.

  The town of Tourville-sur-Arques was more of a street. If he stood in the middle of it and screamed, all the residents could hear him. Probably a very effective means of census-taking. In the distance, old war towers stood like giant pepper mills. Homes with identical lawns spoked off the main drag. There was a boulangerie and an auto school.

  He came to a bronze statue of Guy de Maupassant, standing skeptically on the town’s one roundabout. Victor tried to see up Guy’s nose, but his nostrils were blocked with bronze. He looked confident and clever wi
th a well-combed mustache. No signs of the botched suicide.

  “Do you see, François?” Guy had said to his valet, blood dripping from his neck, as François caught him in his arms. “Do you see what I have done? I have cut my throat. This is a case of absolute madness.”

  Victor hadn’t factored in how suspicious it would be to roll up to a château on foot. No one is “just in the neighborhood” of a château. Fortunately, with the bike by his side, there was only a layer of splashy spandex separating him from the competitive racers he had seen on the trail. A blanket of pine needles covered his path. They made the sound of a tiny army marching as Victor walked over them. The path twisted onto a private dirt road with a wide mound of wildflowers down the center. Clearly this was the less-traveled-by entrance. He came to a round stone church and froze upon seeing a deer, about fifteen feet away from him. Its ears flickered. Suddenly, the sound of voices in the distance startled them both and the deer sprang off.

  A tour. Of course, a tour! The château grounds were not just passively open to the public like a park. Victor could take the official tour. He could case the joint. He slid his bike between the church and a pile of firewood. Then he ran through the woods, downgrading to a brisk walk as he slipped onto the path. He waited until the guide’s back was turned before approaching the tour group. The group was Italian but the guide was speaking English. She was all limbs with a swaying ponytail that brushed her back as she walked.

  “We are going to make a right around these bushes and the château will come into view.” She spoke to her flock over her shoulder. “The structure has undergone four centuries of owners. It was first built in 1590 on the remains of a castle destroyed during a war between Flanders and the kingdom of France.”

  “What is Flanders?” asked an Italian man around his father’s age.

  The others snapped photos with their phones.

  “It was a country. It is now part of Belgium.”

  “When was it a country?” asked the Italian man.

  Two of his offspring looked annoyed but the guide was accustomed to this.

  “Until about 1800.” She kept walking. “Now, le plus important thing to look for on the façade of the château is the different colors of brick. This is because—”

  “But for how long was Flanders a country? When did it start and why did it stop?”

  The tour guide turned around, flinching at the sight of Victor’s face, but soldiering on. She had wide-set eyes, a tundra of a forehead, and a mouth better acquainted with lip balm than lipstick. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen, sixteen tops. Victor felt a splash of shame for having studied her body through his one good eye.

  “Sir, maybe after the tour we can spend time in the château library and discover more about the subject of Flanders. Or perhaps I can ask my mother. It’s okay?”

  The Italian man nodded, happy to be taken seriously. Victor shifted to the front of the group to get a better look at the girl.

  Or perhaps I can ask my mother.

  He recognized that long nose, those wide-set eyes. He had seen pictures of this girl’s mother in a faraway library, in a different hemisphere on what felt like an entirely different planet.

  The château, a giant brick confection, appeared as they rounded the corner. Yellow light clung to the grand lawn, fighting bedtime, warming the bricks and the wrought-iron gate. The sun glowed orange through the trees. And there, on the upper left-hand corner, was the round turret with a view of the flowers. He could just see little German kids in their little German uniforms, chasing one another around the front lawn.

  The Ardurat girl called this place home. One day she would bring a boy home with her. Victor could practically hear the sound of tires slowing to a roll.

  This is where you grew up? the boy would ask.

  Ouais. But it’s not what it looks like. You’re isolated and strangers are clomping through your house all day long asking stupid questions, and who do you think cleans the horse stables?

  Then the boy would put his arm around her and say, Aww, pauvre petite. Because how could he give credence to her gripes? Unless, of course, he too grew up in a magical palace. In which case, fuck them both.

  As the group crossed over a grass-filled moat, the guide stopped at a concrete bust.

  She touched the bust’s shoulder. “And this is the author Guy de Maupassant, the most famous resident of the Château de Miromesnil.”

  Guy’s bust looked in about as good a shape as Victor’s face. Half the nose was lopped off (presumably a coincidence and not a nod to the syphilis), the right eye socket was chipped to bits, and years of Norman winters had given him the complexion of a meth addict. But of course he was still recognizable to Victor. The mustache, the square forehead, the round head that Guy claimed was a result of the doctor having “given his skull a vigorous rubbing upon his emergence from the womb.” Guy would have seduced the teenage Ardurat girl, no questions asked.

  “Monsieur?” she called.

  Lost in Guy’s plaster pupils, Victor had lagged behind.

  “Monsieur, there is a new tour every two hours if you would like to start from the beginning.”

  “Oh no,” Victor called, scurrying to catch up, “I’m set, thank you.”

  He wanted to get inside the house, not to start over. He looked at the open windows on the first floor. Did they stay open at night as well? Was it even possible to install a modern alarm system in a place like this? These seemed like inappropriate questions to ask.

  “The château was designed to be a residential palace, so it was decorated in the style of Louis the Thirteenth. Please notice the windows are reminiscent of the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris. And can anyone tell me what is this?”

  She pointed to a hazardous-looking spike coming up from the ground.

  “Un portaombrelli?” ventured one of the wives. “For umbrellas?”

  “Un vibratore?” giggled one of the boys, earning him a whack on the head.

  “It is nailed to the ground, so it makes a poor vibrator,” the Ardurat girl deadpanned. “It was used to wipe horse feces off shoes.”

  Victor was impressed. He had half a notion of what a vibrator was when he was her age and he certainly didn’t know how to pronounce it in multiple languages.

  She put her hand on a metal knob. “As we go inside, please notice that it is forbidden to take photographs inside the château.”

  She looked hard at the middle-aged man until he met her gaze. If he wanted her to indulge in the history of Flanders, he was gonna have to put a lens cap on it.

  The walls were covered in oil paintings, clamoring for space. A pair of century-old urns bookended the entranceway. But the marble floors made everything feel fresh and light. Atop a piano in the corner were pictures of the current residents—wedding photos, apple-picking shots, Christmas Day.

  “Welcome to the entrance hall,” the girl recited. “First we go left, to the salon . . .”

  Victor straggled behind, peering into the roped-off areas. Clocks with green marble columns resting on mantelpieces. Fat velvet armchairs with delicate legs. Wooden paneled walls “which came from a convent that was destroyed in the nineteenth century.”

  “This antechamber,” said the tour guide’s disembodied voice, “is English style and features Worcester soup bowls.”

  The kids took pictures of the bowls. Just because they were told they couldn’t.

  “And now we come to the final room.” The guide ushered the group in a circle.

  It was a perfectly round room with some delicate chairs with faded cushions, portraits of Guy de Maupassant, and framed letters written in the author’s sloppy ink. There was a Louis XV writing table and a Louis XVI bureau and a Louis Umpteen Billionth chiffonier, which the guide explained “contained many drawers for storing gloves.” Everyone gathered, pressed to the walls. The Italian man raised his hand in the air, practically a heil.

  “Monsieur, I will explain this room and if you have a question after, you can
ask.”

  “Bene,” he said and then, asking anyway, “And what about upstairs?”

  His children were embarrassed but Victor was happy to ride the man’s inquisitive coattails. After all, the guy had a point. There were clearly other floors. One thing this world is lacking is ranchstyle châteaus.

  “That floor is the private residence of my family. But this bedroom is a reproduction of where Guy de Maupassant was born. He was actually born in a tiny room upstairs. This is a part of the château not open to the public. It is the same shape.”

  Victor looked at the ceiling, at the cracked molding. He had to get into that room. It was the only one that fit Johanna’s third-hand description of a “round turret bedroom with a view of the flowers.”

  The tour guide brushed past the length of the group and led them outside, swinging open a pair of glass doors. Victor was the last one out.

  The grounds in the back of the château were more fairy-tale-like than the front. The grass was trimmed in a geometric pattern like a checkerboard. And there, beneath Guy’s window, was a walled garden with rosebushes, pear trees, and grapevines growing up the walls, shading rows of artichokes. Victor had never seen artichokes on their stalks before. It hadn’t occurred to him that they came like that. Aside from an overgrown tennis court, the view was unobstructed between the house and a twenty-foot-high brick wall that surrounded the property. That wall would be the death of him. The top was decorated with wrought-iron leaves— barbed wire with a smile.

  Victor watched closely as the tour guide opened every door with a key and locked each one behind her. Each flick of her wrist, an extinguishing of hope. He tried, subtly, to open other doors. There would be the slightest movement at the top but the bottom remained fixed, held in place by spikes that ran into the ground. Even the cellar door had an industrial-sized padlock on it. But the walls would not allow Victor to leave and sneak back onto the property at any point. If he was going to make a move, he was going to have to stay here and hide to do it.