The Clasp (11 page)

“Superman doesn't die from kryptonite.”

“What?”

“It should go: A man is lying sick next to a rock. Who is he and why is he ailing?”

She kept kissing. “Yeah, but people are never sick in riddles. That's not how the riddle universe works.”

The reflexive tightness had morphed into a reflexive wetness. She took his hand, ready to show him. But he fought her.

“Tell me. How does the riddle universe work?”

“I . . . they've all hung themselves from dry ice or been shot in card games.”

“So?”

“So I'm not trying to argue. It's just that riddles are very black and white. Black, white, and read all over, if you know what I mean.”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“A newspaper. A newspaper is black and white and read all over.”

She stroked his chest but Judson, oblivious to the biological turn of events, wouldn't let it go. The riddle was misleading. Just like this evening. She could read his mind: All he wanted was to have a good time at Caroline and Felix's wedding, definitely get drunk, maybe get laid. He was thinking: I should have gone home with the Magic Cherry Stem Bridesmaid. Yes, Judson, you should have. Here's a riddle: Who do you take back to your
hotel room? The weird pale girl in the shift dress or the one with the butterfly tramp stamp inked on the same longitude as her belly button?

But that was the thing with riddles. The answers never seemed obvious in retrospect but the questions did.

V
ictor had not moved an inch in his sleep. He woke to what sounded like the Ocean Sounds setting on a noise machine. The morning waves were faint, coming from the other side of the house, peppered by the guttural hecklings of tropical birds. His jacket was cool from drool. Gone was the cat, replaced by a wheeze in his chest. He sat up, scanning the room for a device that would tell him the time. Instead he found Felix's mother, Johanna, sitting beside him.

“Oh, shit.” He fumbled for his glasses.

“Come here often?” she said, amused by her own joke.

Victor shot up, glancing down to make sure his pants were zipped, that he hadn't inadvertently exposed himself. He often woke with his hand resting on his crotch. It would migrate there in the night like a dog seeking heat.

“Here.” Johanna handed him his glasses.

She had changed into jeans and a white shirt with ruffles down the front. The mother-of-the-groom jewelry had been put away in
exchange for a gold chain that ended somewhere in her mom cleavage. She looked like a woman you'd see in the supermarket, never suspecting she'd come home to
this
. When she slapped Victor on his cheek, which she did and pretty hard, he could see the looseness of her skin over the side of her bra.

“Up you go.”

“I am so sorry, Mrs. Castillo.”

“Did you enjoy yourself last night?”

It made him uncomfortable to watch an older woman, leaning back, asking him if he had enjoyed himself. She used to snuggle up with a hairy Cuban man in this bed. He looked out the window. Had Kezia really left with that walking can of hairspray?

“You're a strange boy.” She scrunched her face at him.

“I don't mean to be.”

“Do you have a lot of friends?”

“That's a personal question.” Victor cleaned his glasses on his shirt.

“Not if you have a lot of friends.”

He could sense Johanna trying to recall the dossier that Caroline had surely given her. Nathaniel would be the one officiating her son's wedding. Paul would only want to talk finance and home design. So who was the likable goofball, Victor or Sam? She had thought it was Victor. Now she could see she had been mistaken.

“I can call a cab back to the hotel,” he offered.

“You can call for one,” she said, laughing, “but it won't come here. It's okay. Rest. We were debating if we should wake you up.”

“We?”

“Felix and his new bride. They spent the night in the junior bedroom.”

“Is that the one with the bathroom with the wooden stall attached to it?”

Had he had diarrhea in the honeymoon suite? Typical.

“We can all go over to the brunch in an hour.” Johanna glanced at her wristwatch. “Caroline thought I should kick you out,” she confided, “but I'm fine with sleeping in a guest room. I don't need to sleep somewhere specific. Such a big house. Sometimes I like to sleep in a different room. I like waking up to a different ceiling.”

She was lost in thought, looking at the picture of her late husband and Wilbur.
Some pig
. Victor found himself hoping for something selfish: to love someone for so long that when that person died, he was the primary person to whom people offered condolences.

“It's good to make little changes,” Johanna continued. “Look at the cat. He can say: I have had such a full day—I ate a tin of fish
and
I woke up on a pile of laundry!”

He liked the idea of Johanna's hair crunched against a new surface every night, running around, marking her own house with naps.

“Anyway.” She examined one of her buttons. “I am glad you had a nice time. You just want to give your child something he'll remember.”

“Barring blunt-force trauma, I can't see how either of them will forget.”

“What is ‘blood-first trauma'?”

“It means conked on the head. It means they'll remember the wedding.”

“Oh. It's funny. Memory is funny, you know? I remember Felix in that photo, the one with the blowfish, and I remember thinking: Will today be the first day he remembers? Will this be the formative experience?”

“Felix turned out all right.”

“What is your earliest memory?”

Victor could think of nothing. He was unaccustomed to being asked such candid questions about himself. Certainly not by his family members, who were not pensive by nature, and certainly not by his friends, who seemed to feel Victor was pensive enough without prodding.

“You should shower outside.” She bounced off the bed with surprising agility. “The pressure is very good.”

“I can shower back at the hotel,” he said, unsure if this was true since, last he checked, the bathroom was locked.

“It's cedar and flagstone,” she said, settling the argument.

Rich people had a thing for outdoor showers. They needed to reconnect with nature. Victor, who had the occasional roach problem, knew just how unnecessary this was. If you do nothing, nature will reconnect with you. Only people safe in the knowledge that their moments of roughing it are fake and their moments of comfort are real get a kick out of standing on a rock and fiddling with a corroded knob.

He got up and Johanna froze, staring over his shoulder. His gaze merged with hers as they looked back at the bedspread. A silver key glinted on the fabric. Victor had forgotten to put it back in the shell. Then he had slept on it.

“You would not make a very good Princess Pea.” Johanna tossed the key in her hand. “Did you manage to open the drawers with this?”

“I—I was just playing with it before I passed out,” he said, ashamed. “Sorry.”

“You were snooping. You shouldn't snoop,” she said flatly.

“Not unless you're going to do it effectively.”

She placed the key in the shell and moved to the side of her dresser. It hadn't occurred to him to access the drawer through
the side, but that was the point. She felt for a seam in the wood, moving her nails along a crack. Then she paused and lifted the chain from inside her shirt to reveal a small gold key at the end.

“I wear this all the time.”

Victor tried not to imagine how warm that key must be.

She strummed the row of drawer fronts. “These are for show.”

She shook the dresser, tilting it so that Victor could see the drawers rattle in a synchronized fashion. They weren't separate but a row of fake drawers, the same as beneath the kitchen sink in his apartment. Johanna backed herself against the wall and removed a long metal box until she was practically stabbing herself in the gut with it. She gestured at Victor to come over and have a look.

“You don't have to show me what's in there,” Victor said.

She was probably making a big deal out of a small deal. Like how his grandfather used to slip him five dollars and tell him not to spend it all in one place.

“Why? Are you a thief ?”

“I just don't want you to feel like I was going through your things.”

“But you were going through my things.”

She unlocked the drawer with the key still attached to her neck, like a businessman getting his tie stuck in the office shredder. Victor wasn't sure what to expect. Gold bricks? Rare cigars? Passports from twelve different countries, each with her photo? She cracked open a black satin case on its tiny hinges.

He was not a jewelry person. As a heterosexual male, his interest in jewelry was confined to female body piercings and the vague dread of one day sacrificing two months' salary for an engagement ring. But he was not a blind person either. Inside the case were necklaces and lockets, strings of pearls that looked like they had been bought by the yard off the world's most
expensive spool, jade brooches, pins with scarabs and cartouches, emeralds as dark as the bottom of a well, earrings the size of tribal earlobe expanders. It was like looking into a pirate's chest.

She winked at him. “Not bad, huh?”

He had heard rich people brag about their wealth plenty. Caroline, in particular, turned false modesty into an art. But it was charming to hear Johanna do it, as if she had won her life on a fluke. It's how he hoped he would behave if he were in her shoes.

“These are ancient.” She gestured at the emeralds. “Your great-great-great-great-grandmother could have bought them.”

“No, she couldn't have.”

Victor had no way of knowing this. Maybe he was descended from rich dukes and duchesses. But someone in his family would have mentioned something by now. And they would have kept mentioning it at every Passover for the past three decades.

“I kept everything in a safe but moved all my jewelry to my bedroom after Diego died. I like having it near me when I go to sleep. Besides, it always struck me as a little criminal, keeping jewelry like this in a cold box. You know what I mean?”

“I don't know much about jewelry.”

“You don't need to know about something to see how special it is.”

He couldn't wait to tell Kezia about this. Kezia, who would have one of two reactions: (a) gasp as Victor described the Holy Grail for any jewelry lover or (b) tell him it's nice that he was impressed, but anyone who didn't know what the hell they were looking at would be.

Johanna snapped the case shut. He felt jarred by his inability to see her stash, followed by a discomfort at his own jarring by ladies' jewelry being taken away. Maybe he was just upset by the idea of all of this being taken away. Every minute that passed was
a minute that brought him closer to cold pizza breakfasts in Sunset Park.

Johanna began shifting the drawer back into place.

“What's that?” Victor spotted a folded piece of paper in the back.

“Oh, that . . .” She looked at it as if she, too, were seeing it for the first time.

She watched him unfold it. It was a faded drawing. On the bottom was the same type of writing as on the seating cards from last night, a delicate cursive. In the center was a necklace with a fist-sized blue stone hanging from a V of diamonds and multiple cords of pearls. It was more of a neck brace than a piece of jewelry. It would obscure the nationality of whoever wore it. More diamonds formed a tight wreath around the blue stone, as if creating a protective circle of worship. And cut at the very center of the stone, barely visible, was the shape of a teardrop.

They examined the page like lost tourists studying a map. When he brought it closer to his face, he realized the script was in French. He had been expecting German.

“Cool,” Victor said because he didn't know what else to say.

“Nifty” was something else he said, unfortunately. “Is it in here?”

“The necklace? No.” She smiled ruefully and dropped the paper back in the drawer. “In spirit, maybe.”

“Or in France? This is French, yeah?”

“Yes, somewhere in France. One likes to think. I hope to see it before I die.”

Victor had no response to this. He feared reminding her of mortality, feared she would suddenly remember her husband, feared his own hubris in thinking he had ever distracted her
enough to forget. He was left to shut the drawer while Johanna walked slowly over to the window.

“I've had that sketch for a very long time.”

She was starting to sound like a vampire:
Yes
,
but how long have you been seventeen?

“My mother still has a Michael Dukakis campaign mug.”

She turned from the window to shoot him a look, a quicksilver shift in facial muscles that startled him. He wondered if maybe she had dementia, the way she kept looking at him as if for the first time. But then she gathered herself and leaned on her palms on the sill behind her, her shoulders rounding.

“I never talk about this.” She smirked, wrinkles springing from the corners of her eyes. “You've been to Paris, yes?”

Victor shook his head.

“Really?”

Her surprise comforted him. Everyone at this wedding looked at him like he never left the house. It was nice to have just one person assume that he did.

“Well, I don't have to sell you on Paris. But you must go. There is no place like it. The bridges and the parks, the museums, the cafés you can sit in for hours, and then, at night, the Seine making the reflection of the lights wiggle. And there's always a landmark. It's impossible to get lost. Unless you want to. Diego and I used to go every year on the first weekend in May.”

“That's this weekend.”

“I know that.” She smiled. “He knew all the restaurants, I knew all the hidden corners. We made a good pair. I used to show him the apartment where I lived as a girl—it had this beautiful courtyard with a rosebush and a bench everyone used to tie their bicycles to—and he'd always pretend to see something new each time. He'd say, ‘Oh, look, they put plants on the sill' or ‘I never
noticed how many window panes there are.' I think he thought I would be disappointed if we didn't see something new. But I didn't care. I went out of habit, a selfish little pilgrimage to my childhood.”