The Clasp (29 page)

Then the boy would put his arm around her and say,
Aww,
pauvre petite. Because how could he give credence to her gripes? Unless, of course, he too grew up in a magical palace. In which case, fuck them both.

As the group crossed over a grass-filled moat, the guide stopped at a concrete bust.

She touched the bust's shoulder. “And this is the author Guy de Maupassant, the most famous resident of the Château de Miromesnil.”

Guy's bust looked in about as good a shape as Victor's face. Half the nose was lopped off (presumably a coincidence and not a nod to the syphilis), the right eye socket was chipped to bits, and years of Norman winters had given him the complexion of a meth addict. But of course he was still recognizable to Victor. The mustache, the square forehead, the round head that Guy claimed was
a result of the doctor having “given his skull a vigorous rubbing upon his emergence from the womb.” Guy would have seduced the teenage Ardurat girl, no questions asked.

“Monsieur?”
she called.

Lost in Guy's plaster pupils, Victor had lagged behind.

“
Monsieur
, there is a new tour every two hours if you would like to start from the beginning.”

“Oh no,” Victor called, scurrying to catch up, “I'm set, thank you.”

He wanted to get inside the house, not to start over. He looked at the open windows on the first floor. Did they stay open at night as well? Was it even possible to install a modern alarm system in a place like this? These seemed like inappropriate questions to ask.

“The château was designed to be a residential palace, so it was decorated in the style of Louis the Thirteenth. Please notice the windows are reminiscent of the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris. And can anyone tell me what is this?”

She pointed to a hazardous-looking spike coming up from the ground.

“
Un portaombrelli?
” ventured one of the wives. “For umbrellas?”

“
Un vibratore?
” giggled one of the boys, earning him a whack on the head.

“It is nailed to the ground, so it makes a poor vibrator,” the Ardurat girl deadpanned. “It was used to wipe horse feces off shoes.”

Victor was impressed. He had half a notion of what a vibrator was when he was her age and he certainly didn't know how to pronounce it in multiple languages.

She put her hand on a metal knob. “As we go inside, please notice that it is forbidden to take photographs inside the château.”

She looked hard at the middle-aged man until he met her gaze. If he wanted her to indulge in the history of Flanders, he was gonna have to put a lens cap on it.

The walls were covered in oil paintings, clamoring for space. A pair of century-old urns bookended the entranceway. But the marble floors made everything feel fresh and light. Atop a piano in the corner were pictures of the current residents—wedding photos, apple-picking shots, Christmas Day.

“Welcome to the entrance hall,” the girl recited. “First we go left, to the salon . . .”

Victor straggled behind, peering into the roped-off areas. Clocks with green marble columns resting on mantelpieces. Fat velvet armchairs with delicate legs. Wooden paneled walls “which came from a convent that was destroyed in the nineteenth century.”

“This antechamber,” said the tour guide's disembodied voice, “is English style and features Worcester soup bowls.”

The kids took pictures of the bowls. Just because they were told they couldn't.

“And now we come to the final room.” The guide ushered the group in a circle.

It was a perfectly round room with some delicate chairs with faded cushions, portraits of Guy de Maupassant, and framed letters written in the author's sloppy ink. There was a Louis XV writing table and a Louis XVI bureau and a Louis Umpteen Billionth chiffonier, which the guide explained “contained many drawers for storing gloves.” Everyone gathered, pressed to the walls. The Italian man raised his hand in the air, practically a heil.

“
Monsieur
, I will explain this room and if you have a question after, you can ask.”

“
Bene
,” he said and then, asking anyway, “And what about upstairs?”

His children were embarrassed but Victor was happy to ride the man's inquisitive coattails. After all, the guy had a point. There
were clearly other floors. One thing this world is lacking is ranchstyle châteaus.

“That floor is the private residence of my family. But this bedroom is a reproduction of where Guy de Maupassant was born. He was actually born in a tiny room upstairs. This is a part of the château not open to the public. It is the same shape.”

Victor looked at the ceiling, at the cracked molding. He had to get into that room. It was the only one that fit Johanna's third-hand description of a “round turret bedroom with a view of the flowers.”

The tour guide brushed past the length of the group and led them outside, swinging open a pair of glass doors. Victor was the last one out.

The grounds in the back of the château were more fairy-tale-like than the front. The grass was trimmed in a geometric pattern like a checkerboard. And there, beneath Guy's window, was a walled garden with rosebushes, pear trees, and grapevines growing up the walls, shading rows of artichokes. Victor had never seen artichokes on their stalks before. It hadn't occurred to him that they came like that. Aside from an overgrown tennis court, the view was unobstructed between the house and a twenty-foot-high brick wall that surrounded the property. That wall would be the death of him. The top was decorated with wrought-iron leaves— barbed wire with a smile.

Victor watched closely as the tour guide opened every door with a key and locked each one behind her. Each flick of her wrist, an extinguishing of hope. He tried, subtly, to open other doors. There would be the slightest movement at the top but the bottom remained fixed, held in place by spikes that ran into the ground. Even the cellar door had an industrial-sized padlock on it. But the walls would not allow Victor to leave and sneak back onto the
property at any point. If he was going to make a move, he was going to have to stay here and hide to do it.

A gust of wind rushed through the trees. As if it were the cue she had been waiting for, the guide announced that the tour was over. She escorted the Italian gentleman into the library and encouraged everyone else to stroll around the grounds.

“Just please be aware the château will close at six p.m.”

She pronounced “just” like “jewst.” She also told them that if they were interested, the gift shop sold Impressionist calendars, postcards of the château, and copies of the short stories, including “The Necklace.” But Victor already had a copy. He didn't need any more copies. He needed the real thing.

Y
our phone is cracked to shit.”

“Sign of a life being lived.” He thumped the steering wheel. “I'm sure yours is totally intact. Just like your—”

“Gross, stop it.”

He had asked Kezia to read his texts aloud while he drove and gotten himself the world's most exasperated secretarial service.

“This one says, ‘what r u up to.'” She sighed. “Revelatory stuff from Emily B.”

“Delete.”

“This one says, ‘hiyah, hotness,' and it's from Emily S. What are you, running a reality dating show?”

“I'm not the one who decided to name every girl in Los Angeles Emily.”

“This one isn't a text. You have a reminder to call the writers' guild re: health insurance. Again, riveting. Do I have to keep going?”

“If you want this car to keep going.”

The phone vibrated. “Oh, this one just came in. It says, ‘How's
the putangé?' From Percy. Aww, Percy. It must be one a.m. in L.A. What's a poot-an-jay?”

“Let me see that.” Nathaniel took the phone and glanced at it. “He means putang. He's drunk.”

As if to prove Nathaniel's thesis, another text came in and Kezia read:

“‘Ouvre le puntang!'”

This was followed by a lone “f.” Followed by a “dotty.” Followed by another “dotty.” Followed by a “sorry. ducking iPhone.”

Nathaniel laughed as she deadpanned each message. He had expected another “gross” but she began cackling maniacally, clutching her stomach over her seat belt, finishing with a whistle and an “Oh, that's rich.”

“What's rich?”

“Nothing, it's just . . . you've got all your fancy friends convinced you're out on the town in Paris, waking up next to ashtrays full of cigarette butts and naked ladies.”

“Naked ladies don't fit in ashtrays. And my friends aren't fancy, they're comedy writers.”

“That's worse! I know, I've met them.”

“Who have you met?”

“Percy. That guy Will.
You
. You all pretend not to be fancy. At least the actresses don't have to pretend. It's their job. But you guys are afflicted with want just like everyone else except you have the added burden of having to pretend you'd rather be home than at the
Vanity Fair
Oscar party.”

“Wrong. I would love to go to the
Vanity Fair
Oscar party. It's not a secret.”

“Yeah, to
me
you're saying this but to a celebrity who was already going and casually invited you? You'd say, ‘Sure, man' and act like it wouldn't make your entire life.”

They fell silent. He hoped they would stay that way. She had
jumped with unnerving ease from a couple of texts to the core of Nathaniel's discontent.
I HAVE COVETED EVERYTHING AND TAKEN PLEASURE IN NOTHING
. He imagined the letters floating off Guy de Maupassant's tombstone, swirling through the air and landing on Bean's biceps. His abnormally small heart beat with annoyance.

“All I'm saying is that if your friends, who think you're gallivanting around Paris, could see you now, they might find this amusing.”

She turned her palm up and gestured across the spotted windshield. There were fields of cows, their tails dangling like ropes. They each looked like they'd been given a screen door to swallow. She had promised him no cows. There were trees with knots of Spanish moss in them and hay bales covered in plastic, like giant marshmallows.

“I have nothing to be ashamed of—I'm on a rustic road trip with a hot chick.”

That shut her up. And it was true. That curvy little body, those buttery blue eyes, that insane hair. Every once in a while he would look over at her in the passenger seat and see her as if they had just met. Or see her as he saw her before he knew her, watching her diligently take notes at the front of the class. She rolled her eyes and opened her window. The wind whipped the top of her hair into a frenzy.

They came to a large highway sign with a cliff and some silhouetted birds on it. He perked up. Cliffs meant water and water meant beaches and beaches meant nude beaches. Something to upload home about.

Kezia pointed. “Here, this should be good. Take this to Étretat.”

After offering them anchovies and cream for breakfast, the woman who ran the guest house had directed them to Étretat,
where she said there were beaches and “a nice view.” This was an understatement. Everything in town was crowded along the scalloped shores, the buildings all jockeying to get a better view of the ocean. Their thatched roofs were covered in silvery patches of lichen. The land rose sharply from the shore, giving the whole place the look of a recent earthquake.

They parked and climbed to the top of one of the peaks, thistles scraping their legs. Kezia yanked her hat down as he walked closer to her, using the brim as a wind shield.

“Will you look at that view?” She inhaled. “Don't you get the feeling that there's a matching set of cliffs in England?”

“There are. The white cliffs of Dover.”

“No, but like matching exactly. Like if you smushed England and France together they would fit like a puzzle.”

A strong gust of wind came bursting from behind them and relieved Kezia of her hat. She had no time to grab it. The two of them just stood there, not even lunging as it sailed over the cliffs.

“Oh . . . shit.” She laughed, her hair flying in all directions.

“We can totally still get that.” Nathaniel peered down at the bobbing yellow dot.

The sun was setting, peeking out from where the cliff split from itself and extended into the water like the trunk of an elephant. He now had an unobstructed view of Kezia's neck, that pale parenthesis of the flesh.

“Watch.” He fixed his eyes on the horizon.

“What am I looking for?”

“The green flash. This is what happens in Malibu. The second the sun sinks past the ocean, there's a line of green.”

He thought of the time he went to Malibu with Bean, thinking they could stay on the beach, watching the sun go down together. Instead they ran into her friends, who gave them mushrooms. They tasted like rotten cauliflower. He watched their blanket
undulate while Bean disappeared behind a rock for an hour. He wasn't sure who with.

He watched Kezia watching the horizon. Below them came the sound of families stomping over gray and white stones. He could hear each distant step, as if they were fighting their way out of a gumball machine. Waves rolled out onto the shore, white crests crashing against the rocks and retreating. There were no naked sunbathers. No regular sunbathers. He knew, somewhere in the back of his mind, that the north of France would not live up to his tan-line-free fantasies. But he left Paris with her anyway.

And so they stood, waiting for the sun to go away. Little boats were lined up on the shore like open pea pods. He felt his anxieties twirl away on the wind. So long as Nathaniel remained standing on that cliff, he could turn back the hands of time ten years and be whoever he was meant to be. So long as he stayed with his feet planted here, he wouldn't have to face anything but a stretch of cobalt water. He could take his meals here, pee into the ocean, sleep standing up.

“Well, that was disappointing.” She elbowed him in the ribs. “No green flash. Am I blind? I didn't see it.”

He hadn't seen it either. But he also hadn't been looking in the right direction.

“Maybe we're both color-blind.” He stretched.

“Actually,” she said, “I think only men are color-blind.”

“Whatever.” He lowered his arms and beat on his stomach. “Can we drink now, know-it-all?”

Kezia considered the view, cocking her head back and forth like the seagulls.

“Yes.” She hopped down and reached for his hand. “We can drink now.”

His phone vibrated in his pocket. The uppercase B of Bean's name hit him in the eye. The miracle of it—the time difference,
the reception on top of a cliff, the fact that she would be calling and not texting—meant that somehow this trip to France was working in the indirect way he had hoped it would. He had won the game. All he had to do was pick up the phone and claim his prize.

“
Allons-y
.” Kezia swiped at her cheek. “I'm eating my hair.”

He stared at the screen until Bean's name switched to the words “missed call.”

Then he took Kezia's hand and they thumped down the cliff on a path of crushed shells. The path leveled off into a small boardwalk of gelato vendors tying up their umbrellas for the night. It was getting chilly. He could see her little blond arm hairs sticking up.

“Here.” He removed his jacket.

She held the jacket in her fist. He stared at it, flopping across her body as she chatted, the zipper swinging between them.

“Aren't you going to put that on? That's what they're for.”

“Oh.” She shook it by its collar. “I thought you wanted me to hold it for you.”

“Moron.” He stretched the jacket behind her until she put her arms in.

Nathaniel was stung by her reaction—that she would not recognize basic gentlemanly behavior from him if it were right in front of her face. Worse, that she wouldn't be remotely upset by the lack of it. He had made her expectations for him low on purpose. Because he didn't need to feel obligated to this person from his past who came swooping into town every few months with the express purpose of making him feel bad about himself. But the danger of her wanting nothing from him struck him harder than the danger of her wanting everything.