The Clasp

by Sloane Crosley

  A gust of wind rushed through the trees. As if it were the cue she had been waiting for, the guide announced that the tour was over. She escorted the Italian gentleman into the library and encouraged everyone else to stroll around the grounds.

  “Just please be aware the château will close at six p.m.”

  She pronounced “just” like “jewst.” She also told them that if they were interested, the gift shop sold Impressionist calendars, postcards of the château, and copies of the short stories, including “The Necklace.” But Victor already had a copy. He didn’t need any more copies. He needed the real thing.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Nathaniel

  Your phone is cracked to shit.”

  “Sign of a life being lived.” He thumped the steering wheel. “I’m sure yours is totally intact. Just like your—”

  “Gross, stop it.”

  He had asked Kezia to read his texts aloud while he drove and gotten himself the world’s most exasperated secretarial service.

  “This one says, ‘what r u up to.’” She sighed. “Revelatory stuff from Emily B.”

  “Delete.”

  “This one says, ‘hiyah, hotness,’ and it’s from Emily S. What are you, running a reality dating show?”

  “I’m not the one who decided to name every girl in Los Angeles Emily.”

  “This one isn’t a text. You have a reminder to call the writers’ guild re: health insurance. Again, riveting. Do I have to keep going?”

  “If you want this car to keep going.”

  The phone vibrated. “Oh, this one just came in. It says, ‘How’s the putangé?’ From Percy. Aww, Percy. It must be one a.m. in L.A. What’s a poot-an-jay?”

  “Let me see that.” Nathaniel took the phone and glanced at it. “He means putang. He’s drunk.”

  As if to prove Nathaniel’s thesis, another text came in and Kezia read:

  “‘Ouvre le puntang!’”

  This was followed by a lone “f.” Followed by a “dotty.” Followed by another “dotty.” Followed by a “sorry. ducking iPhone.”

  Nathaniel laughed as she deadpanned each message. He had expected another “gross” but she began cackling maniacally, clutching her stomach over her seat belt, finishing with a whistle and an “Oh, that’s rich.”

  “What’s rich?”

  “Nothing, it’s just . . . you’ve got all your fancy friends convinced you’re out on the town in Paris, waking up next to ashtrays full of cigarette butts and naked ladies.”

  “Naked ladies don’t fit in ashtrays. And my friends aren’t fancy, they’re comedy writers.”

  “That’s worse! I know, I’ve met them.”

  “Who have you met?”

  “Percy. That guy Will. You. You all pretend not to be fancy. At least the actresses don’t have to pretend. It’s their job. But you guys are afflicted with want just like everyone else except you have the added burden of having to pretend you’d rather be home than at the Vanity Fair Oscar party.”

  “Wrong. I would love to go to the Vanity Fair Oscar party. It’s not a secret.”

  “Yeah, to me you’re saying this but to a celebrity who was already going and casually invited you? You’d say, ‘Sure, man’ and act like it wouldn’t make your entire life.”

  They fell silent. He hoped they would stay that way. She had jumped with unnerving ease from a couple of texts to the core of Nathaniel’s discontent. I HAVE COVETED EVERYTHING AND TAKEN PLEASURE IN NOTHING. He imagined the letters floating off Guy de Maupassant’s tombstone, swirling through the air and landing on Bean’s biceps. His abnormally small heart beat with annoyance.

  “All I’m saying is that if your friends, who think you’re gallivanting around Paris, could see you now, they might find this amusing.”

  She turned her palm up and gestured across the spotted windshield. There were fields of cows, their tails dangling like ropes. They each looked like they’d been given a screen door to swallow. She had promised him no cows. There were trees with knots of Spanish moss in them and hay bales covered in plastic, like giant marshmallows.

  “I have nothing to be ashamed of—I’m on a rustic road trip with a hot chick.”

  That shut her up. And it was true. That curvy little body, those buttery blue eyes, that insane hair. Every once in a while he would look over at her in the passenger seat and see her as if they had just met. Or see her as he saw her before he knew her, watching her diligently take notes at the front of the class. She rolled her eyes and opened her window. The wind whipped the top of her hair into a frenzy.

  They came to a large highway sign with a cliff and some silhouetted birds on it. He perked up. Cliffs meant water and water meant beaches and beaches meant nude beaches. Something to upload home about.

  Kezia pointed. “Here, this should be good. Take this to Étretat.”

  After offering them anchovies and cream for breakfast, the woman who ran the guest house had directed them to Étretat, where she said there were beaches and “a nice view.” This was an understatement. Everything in town was crowded along the scalloped shores, the buildings all jockeying to get a better view of the ocean. Their thatched roofs were covered in silvery patches of lichen. The land rose sharply from the shore, giving the whole place the look of a recent earthquake.

  They parked and climbed to the top of one of the peaks, thistles scraping their legs. Kezia yanked her hat down as he walked closer to her, using the brim as a wind shield.

  “Will you look at that view?” She inhaled. “Don’t you get the feeling that there’s a matching set of cliffs in England?”

  “There are. The white cliffs of Dover.”

  “No, but like matching exactly. Like if you smushed England and France together they would fit like a puzzle.”

  A strong gust of wind came bursting from behind them and relieved Kezia of her hat. She had no time to grab it. The two of them just stood there, not even lunging as it sailed over the cliffs.

  “Oh . . . shit.” She laughed, her hair flying in all directions.

  “We can totally still get that.” Nathaniel peered down at the bobbing yellow dot.

  The sun was setting, peeking out from where the cliff split from itself and extended into the water like the trunk of an elephant. He now had an unobstructed view of Kezia’s neck, that pale parenthesis of the flesh.

  “Watch.” He fixed his eyes on the horizon.

  “What am I looking for?”

  “The green flash. This is what happens in Malibu. The second the sun sinks past the ocean, there’s a line of green.”

  He thought of the time he went to Malibu with Bean, thinking they could stay on the beach, watching the sun go down together. Instead they ran into her friends, who gave them mushrooms. They tasted like rotten cauliflower. He watched their blanket undulate while Bean disappeared behind a rock for an hour. He wasn’t sure who with.

  He watched Kezia watching the horizon. Below them came the sound of families stomping over gray and white stones. He could hear each distant step, as if they were fighting their way out of a gumball machine. Waves rolled out onto the shore, white crests crashing against the rocks and retreating. There were no naked sunbathers. No regular sunbathers. He knew, somewhere in the back of his mind, that the north of France would not live up to his tan-line-free fantasies. But he left Paris with her anyway.

  And so they stood, waiting for the sun to go away. Little boats were lined up on the shore like open pea pods. He felt his anxieties twirl away on the wind. So long as Nathaniel remained standing on that cliff, he could turn back the hands of time ten years and be whoever he was meant to be. So long as he stayed with his feet planted here, he wouldn’t have to face anything but a stretch of cobalt water. He could take his meals here, pee into the ocean, sleep standing up.

  “Well, that was disappointing.” She elbowed him in the ribs. “No green flash. Am I blind? I didn’t see it.”

  He hadn’t seen it either. But he also hadn’t been looking in the right directi
on.

  “Maybe we’re both color-blind.” He stretched.

  “Actually,” she said, “I think only men are color-blind.”

  “Whatever.” He lowered his arms and beat on his stomach. “Can we drink now, know-it-all?”

  Kezia considered the view, cocking her head back and forth like the seagulls.

  “Yes.” She hopped down and reached for his hand. “We can drink now.”

  His phone vibrated in his pocket. The uppercase B of Bean’s name hit him in the eye. The miracle of it—the time difference, the reception on top of a cliff, the fact that she would be calling and not texting—meant that somehow this trip to France was working in the indirect way he had hoped it would. He had won the game. All he had to do was pick up the phone and claim his prize.

  “Allons-y.” Kezia swiped at her cheek. “I’m eating my hair.”

  He stared at the screen until Bean’s name switched to the words “missed call.”

  Then he took Kezia’s hand and they thumped down the cliff on a path of crushed shells. The path leveled off into a small boardwalk of gelato vendors tying up their umbrellas for the night. It was getting chilly. He could see her little blond arm hairs sticking up.

  “Here.” He removed his jacket.

  She held the jacket in her fist. He stared at it, flopping across her body as she chatted, the zipper swinging between them.

  “Aren’t you going to put that on? That’s what they’re for.”

  “Oh.” She shook it by its collar. “I thought you wanted me to hold it for you.”

  “Moron.” He stretched the jacket behind her until she put her arms in.

  Nathaniel was stung by her reaction—that she would not recognize basic gentlemanly behavior from him if it were right in front of her face. Worse, that she wouldn’t be remotely upset by the lack of it. He had made her expectations for him low on purpose. Because he didn’t need to feel obligated to this person from his past who came swooping into town every few months with the express purpose of making him feel bad about himself. But the danger of her wanting nothing from him struck him harder than the danger of her wanting everything.

  FORTY

  Victor

  He could hear the paper burn on his cigarette as he inhaled. It was dead quiet at 11:15 p.m. and it was only getting deader. The silence was a kind of weather itself, blanketing the château in stillness. In a letter to his doctor, after Guy had really begun losing his shit, he wrote: “We are mere playthings for this deceiving and whimsical organ, the ear. Movement causes a particular tiny flap of skin in our ear to quiver, which immediately transforms into noise what is in reality only a vibration. Nature itself is silent.”

  Almost.

  There were a few dogs on the property, medium-sized things of indeterminate breed that the Ardurats kept in outdoor cages. They made a colossal amount of noise in the early evening, barking at every winding-down château activity. They barked at the Italians leaving, at the gate shutting, at the cars backing out. They barked in anticipation of the Ardurat girl walking across the lawn with a sack of kibble in her arms. They stress-barked at her mother, just as much the embodiment of American Gothic in real life as in her photo, when she slammed the door to the family’s kitchen. They stopped barking after dinner, soothed by the TV glowing from a room on the third floor. Once the room had gone dark, Victor could barely make out the breathing lumps of their bodies from where he hid—which was inside the garden shed, spying from behind a thin pane of glass.

  He took a long drag, just to hear the paper crackle under his nose, inhaling the earthy air of drying herbs. Then, for absolutely no reason, an entire rack of garden trowels and shears came crashing down, smashing a terra-cotta pot in their wake.

  He waited for the dogs to go off.

  “Louise!” Mr. Ardurat poked his balding head out the window. “Ta gueule!”

  The dog offered her counterpoint.

  “Non! Non! Ta gueule, Louise!”

  During the tour, Victor learned the château was split into dozens of rooms (originally designed to keep the heat in during winter). Until now it had been difficult to pinpoint the master bedroom and the residential portion of the château. But now he saw where it was, happily far from his turret. He put the cigarette out carefully, grinding the butt with his shoe, slung his duffel across his chest, and poked his head around the corner of the shed.

  At first he stayed low, crouching down over the grass as if avoiding laser sensors. Then he just stood upright, walking steadily as he approached the house. He thought of college, of how he used to have lies prepared in case he got caught stealing. What would be the lie here? His car broke down at the front gate and he needed to use the phone? How did he get this far onto the property? How did he get over the moat? It was covered in grass, but still—a moat.

  Victor ran his fingers along the mortar. He squinted and looked up. Unless the Nazi soldier had moved the necklace again without telling Johanna’s aunt, it was still behind a brick somewhere in that turret. The only way in was through the window. He chewed on the skin around his cuticles.

  His hand shook as he placed it on a trellis. The insanity of what he was about to do skittered across his brain like a roach running under his kitchen stove. And like spotting a roach, he had two choices: (a) acknowledge it and crush it or (b) reason that he could just as easily have not seen it.

  When Victor began climbing, his fear was more centered around the dogs’ barking than his back breaking. He shifted his duffel with every vertical foot, keeping it from banging against the wall. Then came a moment of pure mortal fear, the exact pull that raised him from I will probably break my ankle if I fall to I will definitely break my neck if I fall. Finally, he reached the protruding top ledge of a long window frame, thick enough for him to stand on. The trellis stopped just before the second-floor window. He felt the ledge with his fingers. He tested the branches to see if they would hold him but there was no way to complete the test without putting his full weight on them. Instead he took a deep breath and flung one leg up onto the ledge, letting the other dangle, grunting as quietly as he could while he lifted the rest of his body.

  He caught his breath. Clouds rushed over a full moon. Below him, he could see rows of snapdragons dividing artichokes and cauliflowers from each other. He could see the little guest house the owners of the château must have crammed into during the occupation. Had the Nazi soldier, the sensitive soul that he was, ever climbed out here to get this view? Had Guy? Probably not. They were both too busy having love affairs to climb out on ledges.

  The window, Victor thanked God, was open. It squeaked loudly on its hinges when he pushed it. He quickly rolled onto the floor, duffel first, expecting to land in Guy’s old bedroom. But he must have climbed at a slight angle in the dark and he popped into the hallway outside the bedroom.

  Fuuuuck, he mouthed.

  He wiped his pants and looked down the winding staircase. He could see the tops of gold poles and velvet ropes. A grandfather clock ticked at the end of the hallway. As Victor’s eyes adjusted, he saw a hallway table covered in typical hallway table fare: mail, pads of paper, school supplies, eyeglass cases. The air up here was different from the mausoleum on the ground floor. People lived here.

  Victor poked his head back out the window, craning his neck to get his bearings. The door to his right was the door to Guy’s old room, it had to be.

  His heart thumped. He put his ear to the door and placed his hand against it, as if checking for fire. Who breaks and doesn’t enter? Who indeed. The doorknob, host to a millennia of dings and scratches, gave easily as he turned it.

  It wasn’t even locked.

  FORTY-ONE

  Kezia

  Ouvre la porte.” Kezia yanked on the passenger door.

  “Do you have the keys?”

  “Oh, ha-ha.” She used her hand to hold her hair out of her face. “Hilaaarious.”

  “I’m serious.” Nathaniel turned out his pockets.

  She felt a
panic swell in her throat. Many of life’s little unfortunate events could be met with immediate acceptance—like Rachel’s flying hat—but two in one hour seemed like a lot to ask. She tried her door again and peered into the curved glass to see if keys could be found . . . and then what? She didn’t see any wire hangers in this parking lot, and if she had, Nathaniel would have made an entirely different joke about them.

  “I don’t have them, I swear.”

  She shot him daggers over the roof. The car was the control in this experiment. Home base. More reliable than her partner, certainly. Her brain made the rounds, inspecting the rest of her organs: Stomach, low. Bladder, full. Heart rate, up.

  “Goddamnit!” She kicked the tires.

  “Kezia.”

  “I can’t believe you lost them. Now we’re going to have to hike all the way back up there. They could be anywhere. You had, like, one job and you’re too busy texting random skan—”

  “Did you try my jacket pocket?”

  His lips curled more smugly than usual. She put her hands in both pockets, until she felt Grey’s Eiffel Tower–shaped key chain. She got into the car, wordlessly leaning over to unlock his door. He sat in the driver’s seat and plucked the keys from her open palm.

  “Oh, thank you, Nathaniel,” he said. “Thank you for being my chauffeur. I’m sorry I accused you of being an imbecile, Nathaniel. I’m sorry I live my life waiting for others to mess up and then turn everything into a character assassination, Nathaniel.”

  “I’m not sorry,” she said to the visor mirror. “I’m sure you’ve done something over the years that warranted that. Consider it retroactive.”

  They went to three different hotels, including one with a neon outline of the cliffs above the door, but they were all booked. It was the start of summer. Peak tourist season. Even the hostels were full. It was an especially humbling sensation to pass backpackers on the road, packs stuffed higher than their heads, and feel envious of whatever lice-infested cotton ball they called a bed.