The Clasp (17 page)

Could you be any prettier, girl?

You look exactly the same. Fuck you. xoxo

Amazeballs!

Heeeeere's Johnny.

I want to lick this face, bring it to me in Ohio.

Um . . . is that who I think it is in the pic w/u?! Doin' Akron proud.

Why yes, Anna from Akron, it is who you think it is. There she is, Bean, the prettiest girl to slink through the halls of your high school, with different-colored eyes and not a deep thought to rub between them. She's “lookin'” coy and “wearin'” the fedora of Jack Nicholson. And there, tattooed along a bicep that promised to keep its shape forever, are the words “I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself,” pulled off a farm-to-table menu in Marfa, Texas, that pulled it from D. H. Lawrence.

He was tempted to click “Add to Family.” Just to be psychotic.

If his old friends only knew. They assumed success in all fields for him.

Nathaniel pocketed a matchbox from an unused ashtray. Then he pocketed the whole ashtray. On the way out, he clumped down the marble steps and turned on his phone. Twelve missed calls and several thumb scrolls' worth of texts? All he had done had been born, not won a Golden Globe. Something was wrong. A few of the texts were from Kezia and Sam but more “call me”
than “happy b-day” in nature. The closest he got to a “happy birthday” was Percy with a “planzzz 4 tonight?”

He ignored Kezia.

was in mtg
, he texted Sam,
whats up?

Victor got robbed. They took everything but his bed.

he ok?

yeah. All his shit's gone tho.

man. sucks.

What else was there to say? Had they not all just been together in Florida, this was the kind of information that wouldn't have trickled west for another month.

gotta go
, wrote Sam, as if they were actually speaking.

gay
, Nathaniel typed back.

Two actors, a character actor and a famous one, sidled up behind him.

“Blood pressure,” said the character actor as they all squeezed into the elevator. “Blood pressure is the silent killer.”

“I thought carbon monoxide was the silent killer.”

“No way,” said the character actor, pressing the button, “it's blood pressure.”

A moment of silence passed in the padded cell of the elevator. As the door opened, a guy and a girl were waiting, eyes still adjusting from the brightness outside. Nathaniel recognized the girl instantly. The actors looked her up and down.

Bean. Bean wore a wifebeater and a shark-tooth necklace that pointed to her pelvic bones. Her hair was up, exposing the quail feather tattooed on the right side of her neck. This was not Jack Nicholson accompanying her. But beyond that rudimentary process of elimination (one man down, four billion to go) lay an indiscernible wasteland of collarless leather jackets and five o'clock shadows. Not Jack Nicholson was probably in a band. Probably a folk jam band called something like Not Jack Nicholson. Not
Jack Nicholson lived in Venice with his dog and his vintage guitars, drinking slow-drip coffee, selling photos of homeless people in Airstreams to rich people in refurbished Airstreams. Not Jack Nicholson talked trash about the DP on his independent film. Not Jack Nicholson hated West Hollywood. He liked simple. Simple. And yet he always found himself over here, dragged from his bungalow to a free sushi dinner.

The actors exited the elevator, glancing briefly at Bean's ass. Nathaniel put his glasses on and moved swiftly. The ashtray in his pocket just barely grazed her.

“Ow,” she muttered, rubbing her wrist.

He kept walking before she had a chance to recognize or not recognize him.

M
other of Fuck, I'm calling them!”

Victor had yet to release the phone from his hand. “Hello?” came a mystery voice—male, professional, confused. “Is this Victor Wexler?”

He had forgotten how to handle this situation. The problem of not knowing who was on the line, much like the problem of dialing the wrong number, was in danger of extinction.

“And who may I ask is calling?”

My mom can't talk right now, she's in the shower.

“I'm looking for Victor Wexler.”

Victor caved. “This is he.”

“Victor, this is Silas Gardner. We met at Caroline and Felix's wedding.”

He tried to picture a Silas. All he saw was corn pipes and barn raisings.

“I believe we met in the bathroom,” Silas said, trying to help.

Got it. Aviators. Explosive diarrhea. Got it.

“Hope you guys had a nice time at the wedding.”

Silas was still confusing Victor for someone who kept tabs on his peers.

“So listen, Victor, I am sorry to bother you. I know this is a bit unorthodox.”

“Calling people is unorthodox?”

Come to think of it, it was. Victor never called anyone for anything, not even Kezia.

“For what I'm calling for it's unorthodox.” Silas was fumbling with paper. “I got your number from Caroline. Is this an okay time to talk?”

Victor heard cursing as Matejo threw freezer-burned hamburger patties from his fire escape below. They sounded like bells when they hit the pavement.

“Now works.” He took a stealthy pull of whiskey.

“I'm an estate and probate attorney in real life.”

Victor sat up straight.

“There's been an incident in the family.”

“Are Caroline and Felix okay?”

“They're fine.”

“Oh, phew. Wait, you mean my family?”

“No, I don't know your family.”

“Obviously.” He stifled a burp.

“I have some sad news. I believe you met Felix's mother, Johanna.”

Victor got up and turned off the air conditioner. The silence of the room surprised him.
Ting
,
ting
,
ting
went the patties. Silas didn't have to tell him. The truth of what had happened, though still unspoken and abstract, orbited close by.

“Johanna had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. She was diagnosed a couple of months before the wedding. I don't know how familiar you are with cancer but . . .”

“I had an uncle with skin cancer.”

“I see.”

“He had a mole on his back that got huge but they removed it. He's okay now.”

“I'm glad to hear it. With Johanna, well, once it's in the lymph nodes, it moves quickly. It was a pretty rare cancer.”

Even the Wexler family cancers were subpar cancers. Victor was distracted, watching an old beer bottle on his table. An ant crawled down a cigarette filter toward a pool of stale beer and all Victor could think was: She was dying while this still life was in the making. Dying when he bought the beer at the bodega, dying when he opened the ones before it, dying—of cancer, no less—while he smoked the cigarette, dying as he left for the wedding where he'd meet her, dying as he slept on her bed on the second-to-last night she would spend on this earth. Because of him, she spent it in a guest room. There was an odd weight to his role here.

Silas continued, a lawyer's diligence regurgitating a doctor's expertise. Victor looked at the pants again.

“Caroline and Felix have delayed their honeymoon for the funeral. Victor, I'm sorry to lay this on you, but I'm calling you because I'm acting as executor of Johanna's will and, as far as we know, she was of sound mind and body up until the end.”

“People really say that?”

“Yes, that's how you say that.”

All of this was so foreign to him. Victor's last living grandparent had stopped doing so back in college. He was not fluent in death documents. But Johanna was. That would explain the intermittently vacant look in her eye. Victor had assumed she told him her story because she wasn't all there, because she was a woman whose confessional filters had widened with age. But she knew what was coming and felt like sharing a secret. And she liked him.

“The night after the wedding,” Silas continued, “she sent me an e-mail with a few logistical concerns. Most of it had to do with tax rollouts. I didn't look at it right away because, frankly, I didn't know I'd need to. And I don't check work e-mails on the weekend. It's terrible for you.”

“I don't check work e-mails on the weekends either.”

“I read an interview with Arianna Huffington about it and I've never looked back. Anyway, at the end of this e-mail is a note regarding her jewelry, saying that when the family needs to know where everything is, we should ask you.”

“You're shitting me,” he mumbled. “I didn't realize she knew my last name.”

“She barely knew your first. But may I assume that you're the only”—Silas pulled up the e-mail and read—“‘Caroline's tall friend, good listener, V-something, with the nose'?”

Silas's watch face smacked against his desk as he put his hand down.

“That's me. I'm the one with the nose.”

Victor could feel all his organs trying to exit his throat. Did the Castillos suspect him of stealing? His defenses were quick to hold his organs in place: How dare they. How dare they come down from their gilded perch and lean on Victor, of all people, for information. Where was the trust? Even the
truth
wasn't so bad. It's not as if he had taken any jewelry, only one picture of one piece of jewelry.

“I'm coming to New York tomorrow with Caroline and Felix. Are you free to have lunch with us so we can get to the bottom of this? Sometimes it helps just to listen to any interaction you had with the deceased. We might be able to pick up on details you deem irrelevant. Unless, of course, you do know what she's talking about.”

“I . . . no.”

“It will take us some time to comb the house more thoroughly than we already have but all the safes have been inventoried . . .”

Safe
s
! Plural! Matejo would die.

“Anyway, we'd love to hear more about that night, more of anything she may have shared with you. I wanted to get you thinking about it.”

There was no catalyst required.
All
Victor could think about was Johanna's story—her aunt's story, really. About Paris in the fifties, about the mysterious château and the missing-but-not-missing necklace.

“I was pretty drunk.”

“You're welcome to have your own representation present if that would make you feel more comfortable.”

“Because I was drunk?”

“Because Johanna's collection is worth about what the Hope Diamond is worth.”

“The Hope Diamond is in the Smithsonian.”

He got up and began to pace, brought the beer bottle over to the sink and ran the faucet. The water hit the trough of a dirty spoon and splashed all over him.

“Crap.”

He put the bottle under the tap, drowning the ant. He wanted to admit what he'd done. How the hell was he going to get through a lunch pretending to be clueless, when the only conversation he recalled
not
about jewelry was about outdoor showers?

Victor smacked the faucet shut. A swirl of ash water drifted down the drain. His mind raced, ping-ponging from thought to thought. They didn't know where to look. Her own family. Forget the necklace, they didn't even know about the drawer. But even if
he told them, what would they do? The key was buried around Johanna's neck.

I wear this all the time.

They could always crack the dresser, drop it out the window like rock stars in a hotel suite. But Victor was pretty sure that thing belonged in a museum, too.

I
n the corner of Nathaniel's darkening backyard stood a Mexican man in a baseball cap, stone-faced, manning a metal cart. A stepped-down section of the cart featured a gas burner, dedicated to warming tortillas. This was Percy's brainchild, the linchpin in Nathaniel's thirtieth surprise birthday celebration. It was the nicest, most sincere thing Percy had ever done for him. The Mexican man had been there since before sunset but now it was 10 p.m. and the line was steadily five people deep—a sight Nathaniel much preferred to the alterative, when they were outnumbered by overripe lemons on the ground.

It was his house so he couldn't show up too late. Though he did try. He had a vague feeling Percy was cooking something up, so instead of calling a car after lunch, Nathaniel strolled along the curve of Sunset, moving only slightly slower than traffic. He walked to the Chateau Marmont, where he nodded with a sense of purpose at the valets and took a seat in the velvety den. The Chateau was pleasant during the day. Like a movie star without her makeup on. Nathaniel picked up a copy of the
New York
Post
, and peered over the pages as guests approached the reception desk. They eyed him for signs of fame. Not a bad way to kill an hour on his birthday.

Los Angeles had taught him what New York had failed to teach him. The cure for loneliness isn't socialization, it isn't a thousand “what are you up to?” texts—it's
more
loneliness. Reaching out to people wouldn't eradicate feelings of inadequacy. Quite the opposite. All those with full, successful lives wanted was time to themselves, a reprieve from the demands of popularity and work. The trick was to act like you were being pulled in every direction.

His phone buzzed again, but this time his heart thudded at the formation of the letters: Bean. She had known it was him in the elevator. She knew he had ignored her on purpose. How would he explain? He opened the text.

Hey stranger. What's the name of the condoms u use? Thin/Swedish
maybe? Haha. srsly lmk! x

He sat back and put the newspaper over his face.

“It's weird.” The F.I.T. gestured at the Mexican man with her Solo cup. “He's just standing there with his fajitas.”

The F.I.T. had a name and her name was Meghan and Meghan was perplexed by the taco man. Hence her referring to his serving “fajitas,” when they were clearly not fajitas. Nathaniel understood. Fajitas sounded like less of a stereotype. But he had lived in L.A. long enough to become inured to the city's blatant racial divides, to realize that if you are an unstaffed “TV writer,” the man coming to your rental house to ladle beans is most definitely pulling in more cash than you.

“How was your TV meeting?”

“Good. You should grab a plate.”

Meghan shook her head and held her hand against her stomach, informing him of her impending “avocado baby.” She was wearing the same men's shirt as this morning but with the ends tied in a knot around her ribs. She was backlit by the lights in the kitchen, where people inside were admiring Percy's wall of superhero lunch boxes. The down on her skin looked like some delicate nature photography of a peach. Her waist was the kind of waist his grandmother would pinch without warning and demand to know how she fit all her organs in there. But Meghan's gallbladder was not of concern right now, so long as her vagina was vagina-sized.

Sweet and safe as she seemed (she lived in Philly, who was she going to tell about his struggles?), he did not feel like opening up to her. It wasn't worth it, even with her standing here in his backyard, pressuring him for the details of his lunch as if it were both of their first days on the job. He resented the communal attitude.

“My meeting was as productive as possible,” he said. “You know how these things go.”

“Yeah, I do. It was impossible to get a straight answer out of my agent after my first go-see because I obviously don't have the look they wanted—I knew it when I walked in—but my agent didn't want to hurt my feelings. Does that ever happen to you? People are so nice that you're not sure if you're being rejected?”

Nathaniel could hear Lauren now, saying how much she adored his writing.

“Anyway.” Megan twisted her hair around her finger. “Thank you for lending me your car. I didn't even hit anything!”

“I appreciate that.”

“Were you surprised tonight?”

“Not really.” He put his finger to his lips. “Don't tell Percy.”

In a lawn chair behind him, Percy was telling his favorite story
about the time he was trapped in traffic on the way to work and had to pee so badly, he reached for an empty Coke bottle and unzipped his pants . . . which was how he discovered that urine has a high oxygen content, because his dick got stuck. He stabbed the bottle with a ballpoint pen, spraying piss all over his pants. Once on the lot, he ducked into a bathroom and splashed himself with water, making up some story about an exploding pipe. For Percy, any experience that afforded him the opportunity to make a Chinese pee-pee joke was a good experience.

Behind him, up the slope of the yard, sat a UTA agent named Eric Goldenberg. He looked thirty-four but was twenty-four, maybe even younger. He wore pocket squares and loafers and dropped so many names, the only verbs Nathaniel picked up on were “signed,” “left,” and “fucked.” Just a stream of proper nouns holding the fucks together.

“I was all, sorry to follow the fuck-up,
Ridley
, but this is my fucking job.”

It seemed everywhere Nathaniel went, there was some kid vying to be the director's unlikely voice of reason.

Two women came prancing over to him: the writer for a recently-picked-up series about a fruit stand business and her lead actress, a girl named Stacey with a pinky nail of an IMDB page. The writer, Ava, he knew by media presence only. But Stacey he had met. Stacey was a friend of Bean's.

“She's my boss now.” Stacey giggled and leaned her elbow on Ava's shoulders.

“I am! I am totally the boss of you.” Ava vibrated her lips as she pushed air out of her cheeks. “Anyway, we came over here to say—”

“—to say happy birthday to Nathaniel, who is officially old.” Stacey smirked.

“Well, yeah, that, obviously that.” Ava spat a wad of gum into the grass,
his
grass.

A gangly music manager with whom Nathaniel often competed for the same women darted past with a girl chasing him. The music manager held her phone in the air.

“Colin, you dick!” The girl ran after him, jumping for her phone.

“@KidRock doesn't give an @fuckingshit if you tweet at him!” Colin shouted.

“But also!” Ava had Meghan by her shoulders. “Also we came to tell
you
—what's your name?”

“Her name's Meghan.”

“She can speak for herself, Nathaniel,” said Stacey.

Ava put on her best Lectures at LACMA voice. “Meghan, you are so pretty. And not in an accessible way but in a really intimidating way. Like, we were intimidated to come over here. But that's exactly why we bit the bullet. Because if women aren't going to appreciate one another, who will? Women in Hollywood need to own their looks instead of being shamed if they aren't beautiful or
a
shamed if they are.”

“Thanks,” Meghan said to the ground.

“Who's ashamed to be beautiful?”

They ignored him and so he gave it another shot:

“Also she doesn't live in Hollywood. And she's a model for a living.”

“So?” Stacey sprayed Nathaniel's face in antagonism. “So am I.”

“So are you what?”

“A model.”

“When did you model?”

“I've done some modeling.”

“Nat, you staffed anywhere?” Ava asked, as if her one-in-a-million show had given her Midas's green light to use at will.

“I'm pretty swamped right now . . . but I'm open to it.”

“Wait.” Stacey gestured at Meghan. “I want to get back to the matter at hand. Nathaniel, you don't think your friend needs peer affirmation?”

“Huh? I'm only suggesting that she is lovely and it should come as no surprise that other people have noticed before you two. If you hear Bob Dylan play guitar at a party and you say, ‘Hey, that kid's got something,' that's funny, right? Because it's Bob Dylan.”

“That doesn't mean I don't need to be told.” Meghan sided with the girls. “Everyone needs to be told.”

“Yeah,
Nathaniel
.” Stacey ran her fingers through her hair.

“Why are you saying that as if it's not my real name? I just compared Meghan to Bob Dylan. How am I the asshole? Meghan, you know I think you're pretty.”

“Gee, thanks.” Meghan rolled her eyes as the others laughed.

Then she reached for his hand and squeezed it hard. This was all he had to do instead of lending her his car and indulging her ridiculous questions about coyote attacks? Pay her a direct compliment? It never would have occurred to him.

“Anyway,” said Ava, “I'm on my way out. I have Soul Cycle at the butt crack. You don't have to come, Stace.”

“No, I'll go with you.”

“Are you sure? Stay. Stay if you're having fun.”

“No, I'll come. Happy birthday, Nathaniel.”

Stacey kissed him on the cheek. He watched them exit the party, giggling, hugging, lamenting their inability to spend more time with people they made no effort to spend time with over the past two hours. How long until Ava's fruit stand series got terrible
ratings, followed by conflicting network notes, followed by infighting, followed by a viral GIF of Stacey performing fellatio on a ripe banana? Could he skip to that part?

“Hey.” Meghan tossed her hair. “You want to see something?”

“I always want to see something.”

She stroked the screen of her phone, mumbling, “Where is it?” Her face really did look stunning, lit by the tiny screen. She cued to a photo of herself, naked, a tiger blocking her ass. An actual tiger. Then she launched into a story about a trip she had taken with her boyfriend, an environmental aid worker, to a Nigerian wildlife reserve.

“Is he still in the picture?”

“The tiger?”

“No, not the tiger.”

“Oh.” She looked at the grass. “He travels a lot for work.”

“So do you.”

“Yeah, but I can't be like, ‘Hey, stop building wells in Bangladesh, it's annoying.'”

“What you do is important, too. Ask Stacey and Ava.”

“Being decent-looking, you mean? Yeah! I'm just like this, you know.”

She stepped back and put her arms akimbo.

“We're all just like this, baby.”

New people arrived, streaming in from the side yard and carrying beer. There were producers' assistants, personal assistants, second assistants. The occasional minor comedian or indie musician showed, having been coaxed into coming by Percy. It made him nostalgic for the East Coast, to see the whole show through Meghan's eyes.

“You know I think they're full of shit, right?”

“Sorry?”

“I was just fucking with those girls. The idea of women who
stipulate that all women be on the same team or face some kind of feminist excommunication is a fascist trend. Like, if I'm critical about a woman, I'm catty or a bitch. Automatic. But okay, if I hate cilantro—and I do, it tastes like soap—do you think that means I'm jealous of cilantro?”

“No, I do not.”

“Do you think I have a hidden anti-cilantro agenda?”

He shook his head back and forth.

“Of course not. I just don't like it. But everyone has to keep her mouth shut unless she has something nice to say. It's why I had to call my agent today and
make
her tell me I didn't book the job. I'm telling you, that brand of feminism is turning women into toddlers.”

“Oh my God.”

“And that those girls would pull the girl power card based on my
appearance
, of all things . . . it's superficial and counterproductive.”