The Clasp (25 page)

He pointed at the rings. Kezia leaned in closer. Fourteen-karat gold men's rings, size 10. Two blood-red stones with few inclusions, one slightly more modern-looking than the other. She vaguely remembered that years ago it had been trendy for jewelers to melt pieces of foil on the backs of their diamonds to make them seem more brilliant. Below the rings, at the very bottom of the frame: 21 Westland Row, Dublin, Ireland. The address meant nothing to her. But deep in the stones of both rings she could make out the faintest hint of two shapes. They were two faces, a young man in the
modern ring and an old man in the vintage one. Then it hit her, the ghost of two weeks of freshman European Lit came bearing gifts:

“It's Oscar Wilde. These are Dorian Gray's rings!”

She wished Nathaniel were here for this, to see her get it right.

“Well done,” Claude said, his irritability burning off like a fog. “The French love Oscar Wilde. That is why we buried him here.”

“Uh-huh.” She fought a smile.

Oscar Wilde had no say in it. The French liked him and so they took him.

“They are from a book. Limited edition. For
les fanatiques
of jewelry. Not many customers for these types of secret jokes.”

“I guess not.”

“Anyway, look at this.”

Claude pulled a piece of metal from the polishing cloth in his hand. It was a skeleton of the Starlight Express clasp, a mock-up. There was the wire outline of a star, but it wasn't shooting anywhere just yet. Claude had modified the clasp from a flat rectangle to a soft-edged triangle. Kezia knew that this would immediately solve the mechanical problem, but she wondered about the enamel. Would gravity not cause it to run down the side? Would Claude have to torch-fire each one by hand? And how long would that take? And would Rachel murder Kezia while they waited?

“We spin them in the kiln slowly. Like a pig with an apple.”

“That sounds like a plan to me.” Kezia held the little prototype, relieved. “And one more quick thing . . .”

“What?”

Exasperation paced around the edge of Claude's voice. Claude was not unlike the enamel itself, softening and then hardening and then softening again. She needed him to stay soft for her next question, to push Rachel's words out of her mouth: “Can you have them ready in two days?” She chickened out. Instead, she pointed at the last necklace.

“What's this one?”

“This? This one is the most simple.”

The French town at the bottom of the page was unfamiliar. The diamonds were flawless and that sapphire was huge. The blue charcoal was perfectly even, filled into the borders of a 114-carat stone. It wasn't clear how this necklace would work in real life. An impractical object. Then she spotted a tiny shape at the center of the sapphire. A teardrop. Kezia took a step back.

“Guy de Maupassant. This is ‘The Necklace.' Jesus.”

“
Très bien
, Madeline!” Claude clapped his calloused palms together.

“A stone like that would belong in a museum.”

“Americans love that, no? To think of jewelry as a dead thing. This is why you keep the Hope Diamond next to your dinosaur bones.”

She blinked at him, dumbstruck. She looked back at the teardrop, fighting the impulse to reach out and touch it. Poor, poor Victor.

“Okay, so.” Claude brushed an unruly sideburn. “Here is what we will plan: A complete order of clasps with the new shape, yes? Looks better this way. More like real outer space. I can have them ready but not before Monday in the morning. This is the absolute best I can do.”

“That's perfect.” Kezia was ecstatic. “Thank you, thank you.”

She had actually pulled this off. She couldn't wait to call Rachel and let her know. Though, with the time difference in Tokyo, she would have to. Rachel was either asleep or getting drunk at some three-seat bar located beneath a manhole cover.

“You know, when it was released, the French papers hated it.”

“Hated what?”

“The story. ‘The Necklace.' They ripped it apart. In those days, they were printing short stories on the covers of the newspapers.
Can you imagine? Ballet reviews and short stories. Front page.
Autres temps
,
autres moeurs
. But when ‘The Necklace' appeared, some of the people, they burned their newspapers. Very good publicity for Maupassant, though not on purpose.”

“Why?”

“Because all press is good press, yes?”

“I mean why would anyone want to burn ‘The Necklace'? I thought it was supposed to be the world's most perfect short story.”

“Have you read it?”

She shook her head.

“Oh, it is unbearably sad.”

P
aul was busy at work, pillaging the ailing markets of small countries or whatever it was he did for a living. Grey had a gynecologist's appointment. Nathaniel was happy enough to attack Paris by himself. He pulled the comforter over the bed and selected a coffee pod for the espresso maker. He stood on the balcony, listening to church bells chime in the distance. Even the clouds looked French—louche wisps against a bright sky, not milk-fed Californian cumulonimbus.

On the street, the shops in the Marais were beginning to open, artful light fixtures turning on, all filled with items that would look good on Bean. He felt a little like Hemingway, weaving in and out of the Parisian streets. Here, he didn't mind being alone. Lately his social world felt more like a Chinese finger trap anyway. Paris would be good for him. He sat in a wicker chair outside at a café, dropping sugar cubes into his second espresso. He was feeling pretty pleased with himself until he heard a pair of American tourists behind him, beaming with gastronomical pride at having “totally crushed that bread basket.”

He skipped the big cathedrals, Sacré-Coeur and Notre Dame. Didn't look like he was missing much. The lines were too long for him to think anyone could get a spiritual experience inside. Not that he was looking for one. He went back and forth over the Seine. He leaned over the Pont des Arts to watch boats glide beneath his feet. All of it—his birthday party, Lauren, Luke, and Bean—seemed so far away. He assured himself that this was right, that this was why people left home, for a little perspective. But something was amiss. His life seemed dumb after just one day away from it. Was it healthy to dismiss one's entire existence so quickly? He didn't think so. He shook his head and walked south.

He stopped at an English-language bookstall on the Quai Voltaire. His eye was immediately drawn to a paperback of Maupassant short stories with Guy's mug—deep-set eyes and bushy mustache—rendered in such a blurry fashion, the cover looked more like a Rorschach test than a face.

“Speak of the
diable
.”

He picked up the book, remembering the conversation he and Victor had after that day in class. He touched his head. He could still feel the scar from when Streeter's French boyfriend pushed him into some girl's spiked bracelet, could still see Victor waiting to drive him back to campus after he was all stitched up. What would Victor want with Guy de Maupassant now? Nathaniel felt the slightest crack open up, that of an alternate reality in which Victor was the same reasonably normal person he knew freshman year. If
that
Victor thought the necklace from “The Necklace” was real, maybe it was. The remote possibility of this truth struck a chord of excitement inside him.

On the back of the book, in addition to the standard fare about a famous story, was the tidbit that Guy was buried at
Montparnasse, where his epitaph read: “I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing.” How well this sentiment aligned with his old friend. Though Nathaniel wondered if it had not come to describe him as well. He debated buying the book for Kezia but decided against it. Instead he bought a wannabe Graham Greene thriller—the story of a man who goes missing from an embassy in sub-Saharan Africa and stages his own kidnapping for reasons of personal finance only to find himself actually kidnapped, caught in an international terrorist sting. It was terrible. He sat in the Jardin du Luxembourg, flipping to the back cover. “coming soon as a major motion picture.” The copyright page read “2003.”

“
Au contraire
,” Nathaniel said to the book.

The gardens were dotted with pigeons and manicured shrubbery. In the distance he spotted a couple of underage girls in bikini tops, tossing coins into the Medici Fountain.
Make a wish, petites filles.
Nathaniel lifted his phone. First uploaded photo of the trip (aside from his boarding pass, used to inform the general population of his departure).

Tonight he would make sure he and Kezia went out. He had asked Percy for recommendations since Percy, in closer proximity to global exclusivity than Nathaniel, always seemed to know of the new boutique hotel and underground bar. There was some lounge in the seventeenth that apparently looked like a living room and had an ironic disco ball and Chloë Sevigny had sprained her ankle dancing there last month. And David Lynch had recently opened a fetish club down the road. For now, he took a desultory path back from whence he came, checking out plaques where Victor Hugo slept and Voltaire ordered a steak. He went into the taxidermy shop, Deyrolle. There was a room full of bugs, their crispy wings pinned inside display boxes. The rest of it looked as if the Museum of Natural History were in the midst of cleaning
out its closet—a haphazard cocktail party of lynxes and penguins and giraffes. If Los Angeles, with its youthful obsessions, made life feel like death, then Paris made death feel like life.

He turned on his heel and walked through the sixth, looking through the windows of Café de Flore, trying to imagine James Baldwin looking back. He couldn't. He was eyeing the girls strolling around Saint-Germain-des-Prés when a petite figure with an overpowering yellow halo stuck out to him. He followed the halo at a steady pace, like a character from the crappy thriller.

“
Belle derrière
,” he said, ducking into a doorframe.

Kezia turned around, scanning for culprits. She was about to keep walking when Nathaniel stepped out into the street, put his hands in his pockets, and whistled.

She put her hand on her chest. “You have
got
to stop sneaking up on me.”

“Where are you coming from?”

“That jewelry factory I was telling you about.” She pushed her hat up and rubbed at the red indent on her forehead. “Claude Bouissou's.”

“Claude.
Claude
. Does he look like Gerard Depardieu?”

“Very much, actually. But gay.”

“But?” Nathaniel raised one eyebrow.

“Gerard Depardieu is not gay.” She swiped him on the arm. “He's just French and hates the government. Anyway, I have good news and bad news. Here, let's pull over.”

She took his hand and led him into a square of town houses, each the color of an organic chicken egg. They stood in the shade of a gnarly oak.

“So what's your news? Even though you haven't even asked
me
about
my
day, which was awesome. I almost bought a dead stuffed orangutan. Rather, I considered being a person who debates buying a dead stuffed orangutan.”

“Claude figured out a way to fix the clasps for Rachel's necklace and I can pick them up on my way to the airport Monday.”

“Goody.”

“You should be happy for me even if what's making me happy doesn't directly relate to you. It's called friendship.”

“You're thrilled, I'm thrilled, we're all thrilled. Especially”— he twirled her against her will—“since we can celebrate tonight and go out to this restaurant Percy told me about that has some sick private club in the back. Why are you not psyched? You're the only person in the world who finds out she gets to spend the weekend in Paris and looks constipated about it.”

“That brings me to the bad news . . . Victor.”

“If you don't mean as-in-Hugo”—he squeezed his eyes shut— “I swear, I am going to scream like a little girl.”

Nathaniel had bad days all the time, days when no one could get hold of him, days when he felt like he had no roots. But one had to suck it up and be part of society.

“Don't scream,” she said. “Inside voices.”

“We're outside, sister.”

She explained to him what she had seen in Claude's office and, before that, what Victor had told her on the beach after Caroline's wedding. She had moved from casually suspicious to formally suspicious. And now she had formulated a theory: Victor had lost his job and the majority of his possessions, had seen something in Felix's dead mother's bedroom, had mistaken a page of a coffee-table book for a historical document, and was on the loose somewhere in France.

Nathaniel cocked his head at her.

“He's allowed to go on vacation,” he said, unsure if he was defending Victor or himself, “he's a grown person. He's like a giant, actually.”

“Yeah, but think about that e-mail he sent you. And he was
asking me about passport stuff and I'm telling you: I think he's looking for the necklace.”

“Well. Maybe it's real.”

“It's not. Look.”

She showed him pictures of the drawings framed on Claude's wall, widening her fingers on the screen. He had to admit, those photos painted an unfortunate picture for Victor. But he still wasn't sold.

“Okay . . . Let's think about this logically. Just as a fun thought experiment. Victor has not been responding to your efforts at communication. So instead of deducing that he is ignoring you for any number of reasons,
you
choose to think he's run away. But then, lo and behold, he e-mails me.”

“And has lunch with Caroline.”

“You're only proving my point. In the face of this proof of life, are you comforted? No, why would you be? Empirical evidence of Victor being Victor actually causes you
more
distress. The guy cuts the decade-long stream of unrequited affection for two seconds— two seconds—and you lose your mind. Why don't you call the police if you're so concerned?
Officer
,
help
,
it's been over forty-eight hours since my friend stopped paying attention to me
.”

“You done?”

“I went to a park today. Victor wasn't there. So we're narrowing it down.”

She groaned and backed away from him, pacing around the tree, one foot in front of the other like a dancer. Her dress swished around her knees. For a moment, he thought she might just walk away from him. He would probably wind up following her. She knew the way back to the apartment better than he did.

“Haven't you ever stolen anything?”

“I stole an ashtray from Soho House last week.”

“That was on the tip of your tongue, huh?”

“Well, I'm not proud but I'm not ashamed. It just happened. You?”

“I illegally smuggled a suitcase full of fossilized elk bone into the United States.”

“What up,
Broke Down Palace
.”

She puffed out her cheeks, releasing them in a sputter.

“I guess my point is that you never really know until you ask, even with people you've known forever. I really think Victor thinks the necklace in that story is real and he's going here to get it.”

She handed Nathaniel her phone again. He made a hood of his hand. He saw a château made of pink brick and a million windows, vines dripping down from the corners of the roof, and some very pointy iron gates.

“Understated.” He handed the phone back.

“That's the address on the sketch. It's only a three-hour drive.”

“No.”

“It'll be gorgeous.”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“People take tours of châteaus all the time!”

“Yeah, old people. Bored people. Do not look at me like that. Stop it.”

“I already texted Grey and she said we could borrow the car. I can barely drive but you can. You drive all day. You love it.”

“So? I'm not your chauffeur.”

He came to Paris to party. To let loose in a country that didn't conflate his professional track record with his social track record. He was looking forward to steak frites at La Perle or Café Charlot, to staying up all night with a model on the roof of Hotel Amour. Sure, he also came to gather his thoughts, but he had just spent a day leaning on bridges and sitting on benches. He didn't have any thoughts left in need of gathering.

“Will you think I'm a bad friend if I say something?”

“I've known you for ten years—I'll think you're a bad friend either way.”

“So what if Victor's in France? I'm doing the exact same thing and half of L.A. isn't running around, putting out an APB on me. Let the man drink his wine and have his affairs with fat milkmaids.”

“Do you really think that you running away from home and Victor running away from home are the same thing?”

Nathaniel did a quick mental slide show of his existence with Victor. Victor, drinking alone in his dorm room senior year. Victor, sulking around their apartment on a Sunday, eating cereal out of a bucket. Victor, retreating to his bedroom in a way that suggested defeat, not deference, when Nathaniel brought a girl home. Victor, just last week, sitting at the edge of the wedding tent, looking glum as fuck.

No, they were not the same.