The Clasp (4 page)

T
he island was a splotch on the map, as if the globe had started to get a tattoo but changed its mind. A neighboring mansion jutted out at the end of the bay, lights on, a gold tooth on a dark grin. There was a clap of thunder and children scrambled under tablecloths, trying on the thrill of fear. Phone in hand, Caroline's father tapped his thumb on the screen to confirm the storm. A National Weather Service chart enumerated the knot-by-knot differences between a tropical depression and a hurricane. According to the chart, they were in a depression.

“That sounds about right,” Victor mumbled.

Kezia smacked him on the arm with the back of her hand. How long had she been standing there? Normally he could smell her presence like sulfur from the ground.

“Play nice.” She threw a glance at his third Maker's-on-therocks.

“It's an open bar.” He flicked the stem of her wineglass. “Play at all.”

“I'm not the one who's miserable.” Her face hardened. “Granted,
the line between giddy and suicidal is hard to peg with you, but something is up. Shall we go by category? Job?”

Victor cleared his throat. First shot out of the gate.

“Love life? Apartment? Family? VD?”

“Are you drunk?”

“Maybe. But
you've
been avoiding everyone this entire wedding.”

“Where's your friend?”

“Who, Nathaniel? He's your friend, too. Even Olivia asked where you went. I've never heard Olivia ask why someone else isn't at a party in my life.”

“That's sweet, but I'm nowhere near you guys' table. I'm not Gumby.”

She swished her wine around her glass, creating a tiny whirlpool.

“Are you mad at me? Did I do something?”

“Not everything is about you.”

“So there
is
something. Is it a girl? I knew it. What's her name?”

“Shut the fuck up. Her name is Shut-the-Fuck-Up Johnson.”

“Oh, so she's black?”

He couldn't blame her for thinking the problem was a girl.

Imagine this scene, roughly a decade ago: Victor standing, intoxicated, outside her dorm window, after one of several holiday formals. (Back in high school, he had assumed that college would mark the end of dances and the cruelty that came with them. Maybe at a state school.) It was just before Christmas break and he could see his breath. He kicked plastic cups and glitter—the fun-torn earth—and threw handfuls of gravel at Kezia's window.

“What are you doing?” she asked from where she stood.

Which was next to him, side-by-side on the concrete path, arms crossed.

“Trying to get you to come to the window so you can tell me you love me.”

“I'm right here.”

“Yeah, I'm aware of that. But I don't particularly like the you that's right here. Because she just told me she doesn't love me back. Which is bullshit.”

“You're being dramatic.”

“I'm being real.”

“You're like a girl.”

“
You're
like a girl.”

“I
am
a girl!”

“Ah,” he waved his finger, “but not yet a woman.”

He was bloodshot, sweaty, and so very drunk.

“Victor”—she removed a bobby pin from her hair—“it's been four years.”

“Three and a half.”

“If we wanted to hook up with each other, we would have by now.”

“Who is this ‘we'?”

“You know . . .”

“What? Tell me.” He spun his hand in a circle. “We're in a sharing space.”

“Fine. What happens, in your mind, after tonight?”

Victor looked down. He didn't have to cross his eyes to see the tip of his nose. That always bothered him.

“Here, I'll start you off: You're drunk and you want to kiss me.”

“Not right this second, no.”

“And then what happens to our friendship after tonight? You think this is the cute story of how we got together? That we were best friends and then, senior year, you got lonely and thought,
hey, here's a vagina with a decent-looking head on top? That you badgered me into dating you? That's how you always imagined this would go with the girl of your dreams?”

“Of course not.”

“See?”

“I never wanted the girl of my dreams. I wanted you.”

“I can't believe this is happening.”

“And you are not just a vagina head girl.”

At this, the tension was temporarily cut. But he knew tension to be a supernatural creature that would heal back into fighting condition within seconds. He put his hand on her shoulder, both to steady himself and to level with her.

“You're pretending to be offended so that it's easier for you to dismiss this as one mistaken night.”

“Why would I do something like that?”

He wasn't going to plunge the knife in for her.
Because you don't feel the same way about me
.

“Victor, I know.” She put one of her hands over one of his. “I'm sorry.”

“Who's closer than we are? Who?”

“Victor . . .”

“Also, last semester you told Nat that
The Sweet Smell of Success
is your favorite movie and
I
introduced you to that movie.”

“It's Nathaniel. He's started going by the whole thing.”

“Since when?”

“I think he thinks people associate it with Hawthorne.”

“That's not even a good association. And he's not even a Jew, on a side note. But okay. You told
Nathaniel
that the only movie you've ever seen from the fifties happens to be your favorite when all your other DVDs have Laura Linney on the cover. But you know what? I don't even mind not being credited. That's how close we are.”

“Victor.”

“I don't have the option to shorten my name, you know. I'd sound like an extra in
The Godfather
. Which you probably haven't seen either.”

“Victor!”

“What?”

“It's one degree outside and you're not wearing shoes.”

This was true. He was barefoot. He couldn't remember why. There was the slightest chance he had dropped his shoes in a recycling bin filled with grain alcohol.

Across the dark quad, Grey and Paul were walking home from the formal, arms linked in an alabaster pretzel. They were always poised to be the couple in their class who made it on the outside, a regular Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman. Grey waved. But Paul, who recognized male defeat when he saw it, slapped his girlfriend's arm down and kept them on course. A sentiment of barely audible confusion left Grey's mouth. Paul whispered in her ear. Whatever he said, it was something Victor would never want to hear.

“Them,” Kezia said softly.

“What about them?”

As much as he abhorred the idea of witnesses to this humiliation, when Grey and Paul vanished, they took the implied parallel of coupledom with them.

“They're closer.”

“Fuck you,” he offered.

“Oh, okay.”

“Maybe don't mock me.”

“You know what? Maybe don't be so mockable!”

“You're cruel.”

“And you're having a temper tantrum.”

“Fuck you. You, who are fucked!” he shouted. “You . . . bitch.”

He sprayed her face in spit, saw it glisten on her cold nose under the path light. He towered over her, pointing. His finger was too close to her face but he couldn't move it. Three and a half years of frustration had gathered in his fingertip. He wanted to poke her in the eye. She saw that. Which was almost the same as going ahead and poking her in the eye.

“Don't say another word to me.” She looked down at the glitter.

Then she dialed a code into the metal box attached to her dorm and let the heavy door shut behind her.

Down the slope of the lawn, the lights of the library flickered off. Everything was dark except for the overhead path lights. He slumped against an oak tree. Next thing he knew, it was morning. Blackbirds were chirping and some freshman girls were jogging, wearing the hoodies of their high school track teams. He walked home, shivering, picking rocks from between his toes.

“Mwah!!”

This was from Emily Cooper, inked on his dry-erase board. She signed it so that the “y” of her name morphed into a heart-shaped balloon.

“Time wounds all heels!” Caroline had written, in her own bubble script.

They must have been on their way to Sunday brunch in the dining hall (ready-made eggs Benedict with Hollandaise shell, served in heated trays). They must have knocked. He hadn't heard. He was popping Xanax and washing it down with Robitussin. Even for a twenty-one-year-old with a peer-condoned drinking problem, he was sleeping late. How many people had Kezia told?

For a week he avoided human contact, skipping class, microwaving his meals, pretending he was being held hostage. He appeared often enough, flip-flopping down the hall in shower
sandals a size too small for him. But that was about it. He slept through parties of familiar voices in the hall. His strongest relationships were with a thirty-pack of Bud Light, a box of frozen burritos, and a slow-to-load site called wetfucks.com.

Eventually, Kezia came calling.

“Victor!” She knocked. “Victor! Victor?”

There was no way he was opening the door for her. For four years, during that endless string of nights calling itself “college,” he had dreamed of nothing but her voice, calling his name in ecstasy. Now he heard her say it in pity. He stayed very still while she knocked, lifting the tab of a beer can in slow motion. He watched the crack at the bottom of the door, waiting for the shadow of her feet to pass.

His guy friends began to stir. Initially they assumed he could clean up his own mess. But now real time had passed, a line had been crossed, and opportunities for casual heroism revealed themselves.

“Golf on Sat,” wrote Paul, “driving early a.m. lmk.”

Victor had never once expressed an interest in golf.

“Diner run, asswipe,” added Nat
haniel
.

Sam bypassed the dry-erase board entirely and wrote across Victor's door in permanent block letters: “Good luck beating that rape charge.”

Then the notes stopped.

Then the knocks stopped.

Then another week passed.

People gave up on him.

One insignificant Wednesday, Victor emerged from his room like a groundhog. He woke up, stretched, and beat the crumbs from his mattress. He felt like Forrest Gump, deciding to get up and go, to escape his pain.

When he made it from his dorm room to the west entrance of
campus undetected, he felt exhilarated. Like a prison break. People had already started to leave for Christmas, a holiday that was acknowledged but not a rocket ship launch in the Wexler household. The problem was there wasn't anywhere to go. There are “college towns” with independent bookstores and coffee shop tip jars that say things like “alms for the pour.” But their college town was economically depressed. It was a whaling hub in its heyday, a couple of centuries ago, and it had been auditioning industries ever since. The current residents seemed unaware that a college was in their midst. Even the professors lived on campus.