The Clasp (23 page)

W
ere her eyelids really that much more diaphanous than Nathaniel's? A blare of rectangular light streamed directly onto their faces. Yet he slept soundly on his border of the bed, one representative of each appendage touching the floor. Her head hurt. She focused on the pain, waiting for it to give her more information, to tell her if it was originating from one temple or both. Both. Good. Not a migraine. Nathaniel had stolen the duvet. She slowly pulled it back, sliding it out from under his armpit. She watched the gentle slope of his nose, politely defying gravity, the mixed directions of his wheaty hair, the rouge crop of gray whiskers, the dimpled chin—asymmetrical so as to prevent it from too closely resembling an ass.

He snorted in his sleep and covered his eyes with his arm. She had to be at Claude the cloisonné manufacturer's office in an hour. She gathered her clothing for the day, mercifully unsoiled by exploding face lotion, and brought it with her to the bathroom. She didn't want to risk Nathaniel seeing her change, towel tented over her like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

She tried to work Grey and Paul's shower but couldn't figure out how to get the removable showerhead to stop and the overhead one to start so she just passed the silver baton from one hand to the other.

“I have nice breasts,” she said to the mirror as it cleared of steam.
“J'ai une bonne derrière. C'est totalement fucking ridiculous.”

She raised her arm and began speed-knocking on an invisible door. Were those the beginnings of dinner-lady arms? She leaned forward and looked at her eyes. Were they begging for some specialty cream? Inside the medicine cabinet, she found stretch-mark lotion and a box of paracetamol. She tried to read the box, to confirm that it wasn't a box of diuretics. Looked safe enough. There was Braille on the package. There was Braille on every box of everything in France. On the snacks she and Grey bought at the gas station, on the tissues, on the tea. Which led her to the only logical conclusion: Americans hate their blind people.

“Pancaaaakes,” Nathaniel muttered into the sheets when he heard her return.

“Maybe Paul will make you some crêpes.”

Nathaniel lifted his head, alarmed by the sound of someone who had been awake for hours.

“Do you know your head's being humped by a banana peel?”

“Ha-ha.” She touched her hat, a wide-brimmed Jane Birkin number that Rachel had given her last Christmas.

It was a nice gift but it wasn't her color. Being blond, she could get away with canary yellow from the neck down, but a hat put too fine a point on the source of clashing. She remembered thinking: I'd have to be in Paris to get away with this.

“Where are you going in that thing?”

“I have a meeting.”

“That's dumb.”

“I'm here for work. With a purpose. Not because Hollywood is too oppressively glitzy and I'm having a belated quarter-life crisis.”

“I blew past having a specific brand of crisis when I hit thirty.” He flipped over. “Now I'm just generally in crisis.”

“You?” she snorted. “Give me a break.”

“Hey, can I ask you something? Would you watch a show called
Surf 's Down
?”

“Hmm.” She tried to look like she was mulling it over. “Yes, I like it.”

“Crap.”

“Is that the name of a show you're working on?”

“No, it's the name of a show this douchebag is working on.”

“Then I hate it. It sounds like a laundry detergent. Okay, if Grey asks, I'll be back before dinner.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do all day?” He sat up, leaning on his elbows.

“It's Paris. Wander around. Let Paul take you on a gastro-tour of Paris. You know he's dying to. Go to a museum. Go read a book in the Luxembourg Gardens. Be a
flâneur
.”

“C'est quoi, ça?”

“Idling dandy.”

He ruffled his hair and the sheet slid down to the bottom of his torso. They had never shared a bed before. Standing there with her head cocked to one side, sliding in earrings, it was bizarrely intimate. He reached for his phone.

“Oh, God.”

“What?”

“
God
.” He scrolled.

“God what?”

“I just got an e-mail from Victor.”

“Finally!” She stopped moving. “What does it say?”

“Well, you can stop freaking out, because he's alive . . .”

“Did he tell you he lost his job?” She made a sock puppet gesture for the phone. “Let me see.”

“I'm reading.”

“Did he tell you he got in a fight with Caroline?”

“Here.” Nathaniel forked it over.

“What the fuck?” Kezia sat and let the phone fall in her lap. “What the
fuck
?”

“Don't ask me. He's the ward of your state, not mine.”

“This is from two days ago.”

“Whoops.”

“He blows me off and then he writes you?”

“And what's with the keeping it on the down low? Keep what on the down low? I hate it when people ask you questions so that you have to ask why they're asking. How long does it take for a dead hooker to decompose? No reason.”

“Who is this French person?”

“This French person,” Nathaniel snickered, “is like the French O. Henry.”

“Yeah, that doesn't help me.”

“Guy de Maupassant. He wrote
Bel Ami
and a couple of famous short stories. One about a fat French whore and, of course, ‘The Necklace.'”

“I don't know it.”

“Yes, you do. You probably read it in some anthology that also had ‘The Lottery.'”

“I don't know ‘The Lottery,' either.”

“Have you always been functionally illiterate?”

“Don't be an asshole.”

“Seriously, I could have sworn we went to the same college. And you've never read ‘The Lottery'? Really? It's like
The Hunger Games
only shorter and better. This town gathers and draws names from a hat and eventually you find out it's to see who they'll stone to death.”

“Thanks for ruining the ending.”

“It's ‘The Lottery'! Guess what happens at the end of
Titanic
? Just guess.”

“I know a shit-ton of things that you don't know, Mr.
Saluta
torian.”

“‘The Necklace' is about this woman who's on the cusp of French society and her husband gets her an invitation to a party and she's a real bitch about it because she doesn't have any jewelry
to wear. So she borrows a priceless necklace from her rich friend, but when she goes to take it off at the end of the night, poof: it's gone.”

Kezia gasped.

“See? Famous story. It's, like, the world's most perfect short story. Anyway, the woman tells her friend that she broke the clasp and needs to get it repaired.”

“I deeply empathize with this person.”

“But what she actually does”—Nathaniel was almost giddy— “is buy a replacement necklace. And it ruins her life because she has to pay it off by becoming a chimney sweep or some shit.”

“Why didn't she just tell her friend she lost it?”

“I don't know.”

“Because any woman who could afford a necklace like that would have had her jewelry insured.”

“I have no idea. I'm not fluent in jewelry.”

“Really? That's weird because I could have sworn we went to the same college.”

“
Anyway
. I didn't write it and it's a million years old. It's famous for the twist ending. The last line is the rich lady revealing that the necklace was fake.”

“Oh, that's the saddest thing I've ever heard.”

“Probably not. Dead puppies are sadder. Dead puppies all tied up in string. Victor knows the story, too. It was in that class you dropped out of. Oh! And then Henry James published a tribute short story to the original but it's about a fake necklace that turns out to be real. All very confusing. Why do you look extra pale?”

Kezia reached up and touched her throat, playing with the chain she had just put on, putting it in her mouth, letting the metallic taste seep into her tongue. What exactly had Victor told her? Something about a diamond necklace with a big sapphire that he thought was an emerald?

“Because of the necklace.”

“Huh?”

“He wants to know if the real necklace is real.”

“The real necklace is fake. Unless you're talking about the Henry James story, in which case the fake necklace is real. Actually, all of the necklaces are fake all of the time because all of the stories are fiction.”

“That's why Caroline wanted to have lunch with Victor. Because I told her what he had told me, about what Felix's mom showed him. I didn't realize. That's why he needed a new passport. That's, oh
shit
—”

“What?”

“Nothing. It's too long a story but maybe don't reply to him yet. Or do. Or, no, don't. I have to go. We can talk about this when I get back.”

“Okay, Mom.”

Kezia left the apartment, bunching the runner in the front hall, keeping her head down on the narrow steps. She had been half-listening to Victor's babblings on the beach. What was he going on about? Johanna had Nazi war crime spoils underneath her bed?
There's this necklace, except it's not there.
She paused on a landing. The riddle universe was black and white: So how does a necklace exist but not exist? How is it fake and real at the same time?

If anyone was supposed to watch out for Victor, she was. She was falling down on the job. Though one thing that was always true of Victor was that he didn't have much follow-through. The idea of him getting curious and staying curious was pretty much impossible. He was probably in Sunset Park right now, watching some shark documentary or whatever it was that Victor watched, eating noodles, forgetting the necklace, forgetting her.

T
he flight from Porto to Paris was only two hours, but given the thinnest amount of upholstery, he fell asleep. He dreamed that he had arrived at the Château de Miromesnil in the dead of night, via a carriage that was outfitted with a jet propulsion engine and a tricked-out combustion chamber. Victor had never dreamed in steampunk before. The château was surrounded by a thickly wooded forest. The dark cloak of the night gave one the sense that the property was endless and full of ghosts. The only sounds were those of horses exhaling and brougham carriage wheels rolling over gravel.

“We're here,” Kezia said, a bemused smile on her face.

She was driving the coach.

“You'd better take this with you.” She tossed him his duffel bag. “Just don't get sand everywhere. It looks like someone smashed a board game timer in there.”

Victor nodded. When he got to the front door, it was locked. He jiggled it. There was a light rap on the other side and Victor looked up to see Matejo, wearing a beret.

“Where's your key?”

“I don't have it.”

“Oh, Vic-tour.” Matejo pulled a gold chain from beneath his shirt.

It was Victor's own set of spare keys to his apartment. Except there was something slightly off about these keys, about the muted sound they made against the glass. Matejo explained that he had gone straight to the locksmith after Victor left and made thousands of sets. All out of paste.

“But why are they all made of paste?”

“Porque estas chaves são falsas e elas nunca foram reais, meu irmão. Porque o que você está procurando não pode ser encontrado em casa. Porque—”

“Come on.”

“You are the only one who is locked out. Everyone else is inside already.”

Over Matejo's shoulder Victor could make out the shadows of everyone he had ever known. They were all preparing for a party, going back and forth across the foyer at a purposeful but unhurried clip, like stagehands sweeping across the set of a play, moving furniture between acts.

And then he was in Paris.

He flipped open his passport and appreciatively examined the stamp.

Victor had to ask about five separate people where he could purchase a train ticket. Not for the Eurostar, a name familiar to him because he recalled his classmates who studied abroad being given ten-country passes by their parents—but a northbound commuter train. This fruitless crowd sourcing made him uneasy, a clear indication that his plans were unusual. After all, if a foreign person had approached him at JFK and asked how to get to the subway, he wouldn't have known.

The ticket kiosk was tucked at the end of a whitewashed corridor. He waited behind a young couple and their baby. The baby looked too old to be wiggling around in a plastic stroller meant for a large doll. The sling of its butt practically touched the ground. The mother crouched down and whispered at her with lots of sharp, cutting sounds in an Eastern European language Victor couldn't identify.

“
Une pour Dieppe, s'il vous plaît
.” Victor spoke into the holes in the Plexiglas when it was his turn.

“Not Dieppe,” the uniformed woman said without looking up.

“
Pour Dia-
eep?”

Dieppe was the closest French hub to the château, close enough for him to bike or, if things got particularly bad, walk. The only information Victor knew about Dieppe was that it was located on the top of this corset-shaped country and the last stop he could take on public transportation from Paris.

“No service to Dieppe today, monsieur.”

There were €31.50 trains to Dieppe. He knew this. They left every hour, which struck him as frequent by American rail standards.

“But . . . I looked at the schedule.”

“Do you have a reservation?”

He had attempted to make a reservation before he left but this proved impossible—a poorly structured, confounding series of drop-down menus and month-long rail passes and “no trains found for your selected journey,” until the only trip the website would allow him to purchase was a one-way ticket to Hamburg.

“If I had a reservation there would be trains?”

“Non.”
She shook her head, tearing her eyes away from her screen. “No trains to Dieppe.”

“Everywhere or just here?”

“I do not understand.”

More would-be passengers had formed a queue behind him, making the ticket lady uneasy.

“Do you have another destination?”

“This is my destination. Is there somewhere else I can go
dans cet
airport?”

Normally Victor had patience for this sort of thing. But the maneuvering around the airport beneath the blink of halogen, moving his bag to a dorsal position as he joined the rushing tributaries of people, their voices reminding him that this was also the gateway to Africa and Asia, it was overwhelming. Surely, even great men like Guy and his fellow nineteenth-century artists faced such logistical snafus—but they remained undocumented. Their biographies never read, “In 1883, Claude Monet moved to Giverny but he arrived a day later than planned and got in an epic screaming match with his landscape architect.”

“What if I lived in Dieppe?”

“Vous habitez Dieppe?”

The ticket lady had no way of knowing how vital it was that Victor forgo the city of lights for Dieppe—the Buffalo of France. He knew the French had a reputation for this, for withholding answers until the asker was either sufficiently tortured or exactly three minutes had passed. Whichever came first.

“There is a problem with the signal on the tracks today. You must go to Rouen first and then transfer to a new train. Follow the signs of RER—see?”

She pointed at a blue circle in the distance behind him, her fingernail hitting the glass in a way that reminded him of his dream.

“Take RER to Gare du Nord, transfer to Gare Saint-Lazare by Métro, take the train to Rouen and then transfer to Dieppe,
d'accord
?”

He nodded. Great. He needed to get into Paris so that he might get out of it.

He had not expected to be so instantaneously infatuated with Paris, quite literally, from the ground up. He knew the Métro did not inspire enthusiasm in the people who rode it daily, but he could feel the pull of the city each time the train stopped to admit a new flock: blue-haired French ladies with cheekbones parallel to their temples, smartly dressed gay men in wire glasses, bald black men with sweatshirts he couldn't read, men in turbans and suits, housewives and businessmen, private school students, elderly Algerian ladies, impossibly beautiful girls in drawstring tops, middle-aged ladies wearing black as if it were bright red. One of the impossibly beautiful girls smiled at him. Victor nearly looked over his shoulder, bewildered that her gaze would stop at his face. She got off at the next stop, turning her head back as she walked along the platform.

In one bolt, he thought, he could undo everything, forgo his mission, follow the signs to
sortie
, catch up with the girl, mail the sketch to Felix with an explanation, and forget all about Guy de Maupassant. But he was determined to stay focused. He could almost guess Guy's reaction. No need to go following the first girl on the Métro. “Women are like pigeons,” Guy wrote. “It's never just the one that comes pecking.”

So Victor boarded the train at Saint-Lazare.

He didn't realize he was sitting backward until the train began to move. He saw people smoking in the open spaces between cars. So far France was making good on its promise of public smoking. Victor pulled down his duffel from the overhead racks and shoved his passport and Johanna's sketch in his back pocket.

He whacked a big green button and the door slid open. It was mostly men and one woman. The woman muttered something the moment Victor pulled up, glaring at him and heading back to her seat.

“She thinks it's too crowded,” explained her companion, lighting a new cigarette with the butt of the old.

FUMER TUE
, shouted his cigarette pack. It had to shout here, in France, where Victor had clearly landed among his compatriots in vice.

“How did you know I was English?”

“You are American, no?”

“How did you know I spoke English, I meant.”

“Do you not?” the man said, not unkindly.

“You live in Rouen?” Victor asked just as the man inhaled.

“Ouais.”
He turned his head to push smoke into the whipping air. “On Place des Carmes, west of République. You know it?”

“No, sorry.”

“Our apartment looks down into a little waxing spa. It is wonderful. I see all of the legs and hear none of the screaming.”

He gave Victor a friendly smack on the arm, lurching across the shifting metal plates at their feet.

“She does not like when I look.” He nodded in his girlfriend's direction.

Victor looked out on the blur of flat-roofed row houses, highways with little cars and soundproof barriers that gave way to cordoned rectangles of farmland, bound at the edges with rows of spindly trees. Occasionally the legitimate countryside encroached in waves of green that lasted for seconds.

“I've never been to Rouen, actually.”

He had not yet said the name of the city aloud, but he knew he was putting too much guttural muscle into the “R.” He sounded like a talking cartoon baguette.

“Ah! You must see the whole thing. There is a church Monet painted three hundred times.”

“That's a lot of times. But I'm going to Dieppe.”

“Dieppe is a shithole. You cannot go to Dieppe from Rouen.”

“I'm sure it'll be a letdown, but maybe”—Victor brightened at the truth of his suggestion—“I can come to Rouen on the way back.”

The two other smokers hovering in the wings, two men in pinstripe suits, tossed their butts overboard and went back inside. The sliding door freed a wall of stale train air.

“No, I mean to say you cannot go. It is Thursday today. No trains to Dieppe on Thursdays, I do not think. I have not been in years. Because it is a shithole.”

“No, no.” Victor could feel the glitter of panic. “The schedule . . .”

He patted his pockets for the train schedule he had grabbed at Saint-Lazare but it was back at his seat. He knew he might bump up against logistical problems but he thought he had already paid his dues. Even when he first sat on the train, an irate teenager had done a nice job of harshing his treasure-hunting high and emasculating him by kicking him out of his seat.

“Is it orange?”

“What?”

“Is the paper for which you are looking orange?”

“Maybe.”

“That is the holiday schedule. You will take a bus. But I will be surprised if more of the buses are leaving today.
Compris?
”

All it took was one guy who sounded like he knew what he was talking about to override the entire French rail service.

“Do you know where the bus station is?”

“Maybe ask the conductor—you say this too,
conducteur
?— when you exit?”

“Thanks. Thank you.”

The guy said his goodbyes, pointing for a moment at Victor to ask if he had his lighter, only to feel the lump in his own shirt pocket.

“Do not worry.” He smiled warmly. “'Twill be okay.”

Victor shook his pack of cigarettes to see how many he had left. He supposed he didn't have to keep such close count now. Where there were bus terminals, there were alcohol and nicotine vendors. He held the door, watching the long strips of grass zoom beneath the train. Had he been in Portugal this morning? He had barely slept since the day before yesterday and not particularly well in the decade prior to that. He inhaled deeply, visualizing the oxygen hitting his red blood cells.
'Twill be okay.
The thought of spending the night in Rouen, paying for a hotel he couldn't afford when he could have just paid for a hotel he couldn't afford in Paris, made his head spin. What would Guy do? he thought. Probably find a prostitute to sleep with in Rouen and not worry about it.