The Clasp (18 page)

“Will you marry me?”

“Sure.” She shrugged.

He pinched her empty cup together with his and took her hand.

“Come with me now.”

“Nathaniel . . . come on, I have a boyfriend.”

“How true is that sentence? Scale of one to ten.”

“Hmmm.” She pretended to mull it over and then, finally, whispered in his ear, “Okay. Only because it's your birthday.”

T
he restaurant was a few blocks north of Times Square. It featured gold lettering and a curtain drawn across the lower half of the window. Victor stood, fixed to the sidewalk across the street. The façade of the place looked familiar. He was pretty sure his parents had once come here for an anniversary dinner. He got a clear visual of them toasting champagne, his dad cracking a caramel dessert dome with wood-splitting intensity. Victor found himself caught between embarrassment for them if it turned out the restaurant wasn't fancy and revulsion at Caroline and Felix if it turned out that it was.

He leaned into the shelter of an office building and lit a cigarette. The city was healthier these days. If people caught your eye when a cigarette was between your lips, their faces were less
Can I bum one?
and more
Your days are numbered
. He flicked the corner of Johanna's sketch back and forth in his pocket. He was ready to confess. He would tell Felix and Caroline everything. About that morning, about Felix's great-aunt and the Nazi with a heart of bronze, about the mystery château and, of course, what
they wanted from him most—the new location of Johanna's jewelry.

He sucked down the rest of his cigarette and cut against traffic. Inside, the restaurant was a sunken oval, like the dance floor of a cruise ship. There was a bowl of sweating peanut brittle, meant for departing patrons, a pair of tongs resting on top.

“Good afternoon, sir,” said the maître d'. “Do you have a reservation?”

Victor had forgotten Silas's last name. But then a blond figure stood, rising above the lunch crowd, her bare arm waving, jutting out of a conservative pink dress. Her other arm held a linen napkin to her crotch as if it were Eve's leaf.

“Never mind. I see them.”

Silas was in the midst of manhandling a lime wedge. He dropped the carcass in a glass of sparkling water and shook Victor's hand.

“Sit, sit,” said Felix, who had the polite, dazed look of someone who had experienced too much too fast.

Felix was too young to have played musical chairs with his family. Two months ago, this guy had two parents and a girlfriend and today he had no parents and one wife. Victor wanted to say,
I miss her too
, but that was absurd.

“I'd like to offer my condolences on the untimely demise of your mom.”

They looked at him as if he had just plopped a pound of herring on the table.

“Oh.” Felix waved at the air. “Thanks. It's . . . I'm happy you got to meet her.”

A waitress wearing a necktie approached the table, distributing menus and saying something about tilefish. Caroline unswaddled a basket of bread, popped a cheese puff into her mouth, and began chewing violently.

“Have we decided on drinks?” asked the waitress. “We have a stunning rosé.”

Stunning
, Felix mouthed to Victor.

Caroline ordered a rum and Coke, Felix a scotch and soda, Silas another sparkling water, Victor a minute. He was thrown, hearing Felix say “scotch,” the mix of German and Cuban at work in his pronunciation, remembering that it was because of Victor's failed mission to retrieve the bottle of Macallan that they were all here now. He had never been part of a domino effect before. He was more of a Jax man.

“How's the cat?”

“She's with Harvey.” Felix smiled warmly. “The groundskeeper.”

“That cat hates me,” said Caroline.

“Yes, well.” Silas cleared his throat. “If I may speak for the group—”

“Do you have to speak for them?” Victor cringed. “These are my friends.”

Caroline shot him a look. “There's nothing to be defensive about. He didn't mean it like that.”

“I'm not being defensive. If I am, I'm defending you.”

“So you admit you were being defensive.”

“Jesus, Caroline. Why don't you let Mr. Garter tell me how he meant it?”

“Gardner.”

“Caroline,” Felix pleaded, “there's nothing to get upset about.”

Victor tried to remain calm. “I don't know what anyone's talking about. Are those cheese puffs?”

“It's been a weird time,” said Felix. “We're all a little on edge. I haven't been sleeping.”

“Did you try moving to a different part of the house?”

“That's funny.” He grinned appreciatively. “My mom used to do that. You know, we just got the first round of wedding photos
back from the photographer and most of them have Johanna in them. Just, here, have this disc you paid for . . .”

Caroline reached for Felix's hand under the table.

“Victor,” Silas tried again, “we're not calling you to the principal's office here. We just don't want to leave any stone unturned. Pardon the pun.”

Victor wanted to help Felix. He wanted to tell them everything. Now would be the time. He'd slap the drawing down on the table, tell them the story. Mystery solved. But watching Caroline sneer at him with an unusually naked degree of contempt, he felt the familiar resentments pulsing through his body. And so he lied.

“Listen, the idea of being integral to your caper appeals to me, it does. But I already told you I don't know anything. I know she sent you an e-mail mentioning me, but why would I know anything?”

Caroline shot Felix a look and he actively tried to avoid eye contact with her.

“Because, moron—you were effectively the last real conversation that Johanna had with anyone, which would be a coincidence if all her jewelry wasn't missing.
Sorry.
”

“You do not have the tone of a sorry person.” Victor sat back.

Felix tapped a spoon on the table. His hands were covered in blond hair that moved with the raising of his veins. It was now clear that it was he, and not Victor, who least wanted to be at this table. He had known that Victor was coming here to be ambushed.

The waitress returned with the drinks, carefully setting each one down.

“
You want to live like common people
,” Victor began to mumble-sing under his breath. “
You want to do whatever common people do . . .
”

“What?” Caroline gripped her salad fork as if she might, at any moment, invert it and stab him in the hand.

“Nothing.”

“Victor,” she said slowly and deliberately, “I know you.”

“Yeah, and I know you.”

“No, I mean I know. I
know
about you.”

He leaned both elbows on the table, wove his fingers together, and looked hard at her. And she looked hard at him back. All these years! Caroline knew he was a thief. She knew. She had gone through his desk drawer right in front of him, seen the evidence, shut the drawer. Caroline, who knew moderation in exactly no arenas, had decided to keep his secret. Granted, she was a WASP, a champion problem-ignorer. Still, how was such discretion possible in someone who had all the filtering capabilities of a squash racket? Maybe she just didn't want to upset the balance of their group.

“Am I missing something?” asked Felix.

You little shit
, Caroline mouthed.

The more murderous her expression became, the stronger his burst of confidence.

“Question, if I may. You guys have buried her already, right? I've only ever been to Jewish funerals. Not that many either. One grandfather and one incident with this kid in high school and an obscured stop sign—that was really sad, actually, but in that high school way where everyone's magically this guy's best friend, you know?”

Silence.

Victor found himself newly able to put in words, to himself, a sentiment that had been quietly boiling for a decade, since the one night he and Caroline hooked up, and that sentiment was this: he hated her. He hated her essence and her soul and her way of being in the world. He hated her tolerance of him as if he were a person to be tolerated and she were a person to tolerate others, as if he were part of her story, a glitch in her otherwise
ideal collection of collegiate pals. They were released into the real world the same day, were they not? Their existence was even. Actually, according to every book and movie ever, this was
his
story. She was a hotel heiress, for Christ's sake. What gave her the right to ask him questions, as if his life were her resource? He was not there to be part of her experience. She was there to be part of his.

Caroline twisted her napkin. “Victor, I'm going to ask you as nicely as I know how: Where the fuck is it?”

“Where the fuck is what?”

She pointed the fork above his eye line. “I'm gonna shave your eyebrows in your sleep.”

“What is happening?” Felix did not find eyebrow-shaving to be a proportional response to anything.

“Let's talk about the jewelry, Victor.” Silas was, astonishingly, still trying to keep this train on the tracks. “Are you sure she didn't mention anything to you? According to her will, Johanna had multiple pieces from the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Something like that.”

“Something like that.”

“It doesn't make a difference,” said Silas.

“It does to the people living in them, probably.”

“It doesn't make a difference because either way we can't locate them and, in addition to her e-mail, we were pointedly told Johanna showed you these items during the wedding.”

Caroline sat back and folded her arms. She looked like a canary-fed cat. Victor shook his head and exhaled.
Kezia
. Small human, big mouth.

“I know she was ill,” Felix piped in, “and sometimes would just kind of—I don't know—disappear into the past. I think that's where she went. But why would she say you knew where everything was when you didn't?”

The waitress returned to plop down shot glasses of green sludge. “Amuse-bouche. This is a frothy pea soup with a dandelion reduction.”

Caroline knocked hers back and slammed it down.

“Okay.” Felix sighed. “This is nuts. Kezia mentioned that Johanna showed you where she kept her jewelry and clearly she was misinformed. I mean, it would be ridiculous for her to show a relative stranger something like that.”

“That's it?” Caroline conferred loudly with her husband. “End of questioning?”

“I promise not to switch to a career in law, sweet pea.”

Silas rolled his eyes. “Don't.”

“I am sorry I can't help,” Victor said, genuinely sorry for Felix but also figuring they'd locate Johanna's stash eventually. “But you should be home doing whatever people do when they lose a parent. And if I can speak candidly—”

“Can you?” Caroline said.

“—part of me is interested in staying for lunch because I'll bet they have an insane lobster roll here. But part of me knows it's the cockroach of the sea.”

“Victor, you're not smart enough to act this dumb!”

She threw up her hands and groaned. With a sweeping gesture, she managed to swat Felix's highball glass and her water glass to the floor. The bases of the glasses remained intact while their heads exploded into shards. Victor followed one of the shards as it spun, a high-speed Ouija planchette.

“Sorry,” she mumbled.

“Yeah, I'm gonna go now.”

“Then go,” Caroline scoffed.

“Victor,” Felix offered, “the last thing we wanted to do was offend you.”

“The last thing you wanted was for me to take offense, Felix. It's okay, but it's different.”

On the way out, Victor grabbed a piece of peanut brittle. No tongs. Like a fucking cowboy. His chosen brittle was stuck to a larger chunk of collateral brittle, but he shoved the whole thing into his mouth like an ice shelf.

I
do love Percy's lunch boxes.” Meghan pointed as they walked through the kitchen.

The lunch boxes were an affected element of Percy's existence, of the house's existence. They struck Nathaniel as childish. And they were childish. They were lunch boxes.

He punted his bedroom door, which was already slightly open. Meghan laughed and waltzed in ahead of him. He tossed his phone on the ground and it rang almost immediately, as if the tossing had caused it to go off. Nathaniel saw it was Kezia but he was distracted by Meghan, who picked up his special pillow, taking note of the cord dangling from it.

“Is this a sex toy?”

The phone kept ringing.

“Key-zi-ah.” Meghan plucked it from the ground. “What nationality is that?”

“It's Kez. Like fez. And: Uptight.”

Nathaniel should have let it go but he grabbed the phone and spoke quickly.

“Hey, what's up.”

“Nice greeting. I called to wish you a happy birthday.”

He pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at the screen.

“It's not my birthday anymore,” he whispered.

He didn't want Meghan reconsidering her birthday-based logic.

“Well, fuck me for caring. Are you having a party?”

“Sort of. Percy's having a party and I'm invited.”

“Who's all there?”

She had met a friend or two of his during her trips to L.A. but not enough that answering this question would matter.

“Is that guy Will there?”

“He was.”

“Is he still with that girl?”

Why was she asking about people she hardly knew? Maybe she was asking if there were girls at the party. Yes, there were girls at the party. She was being weird, even for her.

“Are you out? It's three a.m. Do you know where your Kezia is?”

“So now I'm yours.”

“It's a joke.”

“Oh. Go slow. I'm tired and not as old and wise as you. I'm home. I'm leaving for Paris the day after tomorrow because I need to meet our vendor about one of the major pieces in the spring line or I'm totally screwed and Rachel's in Tokyo so I—”

Meghan grabbed the phone. She held it so that Nathaniel could speak into it. With her other hand, she unzipped her shorts. Nathaniel had not given much thought to her underwear before this moment but, seeing that she was wearing none, he realized he'd been expecting white cotton.

“Kezia.” He stretched his neck toward the receiver. “I gotta go.”

“Wait, wait, I want to talk to you about Victor.”

“What
about
Victor?”

“I'm worr—”

Meghan grabbed his shirt with surprising force and yanked him toward her. He could taste the beer and floral balm on her lips. But he could also hear the faraway voice of Kezia say “Victor” and “depressed” and “the edge.” This was nothing new, nothing that needed addressing. Kezia didn't want to fix Victor, she wanted to be congratulated for wanting to fix Victor. Probably because she felt guilty for never fucking him.

“Your friend sounds like Charlie Brown's mom,” Meghan said.

“She sounds like that all the time.”

Meghan reached down and into his boxers, wrapping her hand around him and tugging at weak, uneven speeds. Then she took a giant step back. She put the rounded corner of his phone up her vagina, rocking it from front to back, connecting it and disconnecting it from a strip of trimmed pubic hair. She pushed the phone up her as far as it would go before it became unrealistic to continue.

He was aroused but conflicted: he'd dropped that phone in various parking garages a minimum of three times this week.

“Kezia, I'll call you tomorrow!” he shouted.

Meghan removed the phone, wiped it on her hip, and tossed it on a pile of laundry in Nathaniel's closet. As they fell into bed together, separating long enough for him to kick off his underwear, he glanced at the light of the screen to make sure Kezia had hung up.