The Clasp (6 page)

I
t lives!” exclaimed Meredith, standing at the top of her stairs as Kezia plodded up to her apartment. “We didn't think you were going to make it.”

Meredith and Kezia worked together at the fine jewelry company right after graduation. They had been paired together during a training program for new hires, touring facilities, laughing until they cried at unfunny private jokes about “loose pearls,” calling each other from their respective cubicles and asking, “Guess how many diamonds are on my desk right now? Just guess.” While Kezia had been impatient for more responsibility, Meredith had stuck it out as a merchandising analyst. In the four years since Kezia had left, Meredith had been promoted twice.

“This is new.” She touched Meredith's gold-link necklace.

She was a little out of breath and nearly yanked it for support.

Meredith hugged her. “Magpie, how I miss you.”

“Nice bling.”

Once a year, the company held a sale during which employees could purchase rejected prototypes or slightly flawed versions of
popular designs. Kezia recognized the necklace from a billboard above the West Side Highway. There was hardly a scratch on Meredith's version, but even if it had been dipped in acid and run over with a truck, Kezia couldn't afford it on what Rachel paid her.

“And this ring, too.” Meredith held out her hand. “Five-year-anniversary gift from corporate. It was this or a crystal paperweight. Even the men pick this.”

“The men?” Kezia handed her a bottle of wine in a paper bag.

“Right. Man. They hired one since you've been gone.”

“Well, it's really lovely.”

Inside, Meredith's husband, Michael, was wearing mint-green drawstring pants and opening a bag of frozen shrimp with a corkscrew. Michael beamed at her.

Kezia had almost canceled. She was inundated with work, and any detour between her desk and her apartment felt epic. But then the cleaning lady arrived and gave Kezia a knowing nod for being the only other soul in the office. She hated being there to be nodded at, in the society of the overworked and underpaid. Plus Michael, a third-year emergency room resident at Mount Sinai, had changed his shift to make dinner for them. This was a plan-keeping trump card that Meredith never hesitated to play.
Michael
has arranged for someone else to scrub the blood off a gurney tonight.
Are you sure you can't make it?

“Your place is so grown up.”

“Have you not been here yet?” Meredith looked to Michael to answer this. “That's so weird. Give yourself the tour. I have to pee and then I want to hear every ounce of Rachel Simone dirt you have.”

“Ah.” Kezia casually inspected the molding. “No such thing as a free lunch.”

“It's dinner.” Michael smiled from the open kitchen. “All bets are off. She's been looking forward to this all week.”

When she began working for Rachel, Kezia would still allow herself to be called in for interviews with competing companies. It was the professional equivalent of going to a strip club: look all you want but go home. And she always wanted to go home. This was back when Kezia loved her job, loved the learning curve, even loved Rachel in her own twisted way. Now that she wanted out, it was too late. Her association with Rachel Simone had calcified in the eyes of the industry—she couldn't remember the last time she had faked a midday dentist appointment.

Kezia walked around the apartment, a wide floor-through on the Upper West Side with built-in bookshelves and an office that had been painted a gender-neutral yellow. In the living room, there were framed LPs and art—a canvas with tiny naked people needle-pointed into it. There was a closet just for coats. Kezia's apartment had no subversive knitting and no closets. Only a corkboard monstrosity from IKEA. Oh, to have two incomes in one home. Like having two hairs coming out of one pore, but pleasant.

Meredith and Michael shouted at each other with the bathroom door between them, speculating about the location of an elusive carrot peeler. It was conversations like this that really punched Kezia in the gut. Love—reciprocal, romantic, real—would come or not come. The world was not subtle about telling single people what they were missing. That particular brand of want never took her by surprise. But to have an extended conversation about kitchen gadgets without it dooming a relationship to boredom? She had forgotten she wanted that until she witnessed it.

The matching bedside tables didn't help either.

“God, I miss you.” Meredith slapped her left hand on the table as they sat down to eat. “Tell me something about your fabulous life. Are you going anywhere fun?”

“I'm going to a wedding in Miami this weekend.” Kezia tried to sound hopeful.

“I love weddings.”

“Spoken like a married woman.”

“Don't be grouchy.”

She wasn't being grouchy. She loved Meredith. She wanted her to be happy. But she was allowed the occasional conversational revolt. The last time they hung out, for example, Kezia had refrained from explaining that asking a single woman if she wants kids is like asking a one-armed man if he'd like to play tennis. She had said nothing when Meredith started referring to Michael as “M” within a week of meeting him, nothing when she typed “Is this dumb?” and sent Kezia a picture of herself in a bathtub full of M&M's on Valentine's Day. Actually, she had said something. She'd said, “Peanut is a classy touch.”

“Maybe there will be hot single men there.” Michael piled food on her plate.

“Always true.”

“Whose wedding?”

“Caroline Markson.” Kezia smiled.

“Oh.” A smirk bloomed over Meredith's face. “The roommate.”

“Who's Caroline Markson?”

“Like the Markson hotels,” she explained to Michael.

Meredith had never met Caroline, but she had heard enough stories about Kezia's bawdy freshman roommate. Meredith knew Caroline only as a cartoon character. Which wasn't markedly different from knowing her in real life.

Michael patted Kezia on the shoulder. “In that case, I'm sure it will be a simple, understated affair.”

“Anyway.” Meredith waved away the topic. “You have yet to
tell me the worst possible story you can think of about Rachel Simone. I promise to only tell no one, three people max.”

“She's not that bad. She has her moments.”

Moments of smacking me in the face with flora for no reason.

“
Please
,” Meredith whimpered, “this is a person who makes casts of tampons and turns them into earrings. You have to spill. I'm so boring now, I have to live vicariously through you.”

Of all the terrible things married people say to single people, this was top five.

“Only the light-flow tampons,” Kezia mumbled.

“Sto-ry-time,” Michael clapped, “sto-ry-time.”

“She calls me ‘Special K' sometimes.”

“That's not a story, that's a sentence.”

“Okay, okay. Uncle.”

Kezia regaled them with a personal favorite. The scene: A fall fashion week party held on the roof of the Standard, dense with fancy people and accessories editors with ostrich feathers sticking out of their heads. The action: Rachel yelling at the editor of the French fashion magazine hosting the party, reaming him out for including her necklaces in the “Toss It” column of their latest issue.

“Do they do columns like that?”

“Nope. Never have. Rachel thought he was someone else. And when he calmly pointed this out to her, there happened to be a
Women's Wear Daily
reporter standing right there. So without skipping a beat, Rachel turns to me and says, you owe me twenty bucks. She explains that she and I were just having a discussion about how fashion isn't as vicious as it used to be and everyone's so nice and that apparently
I
bet her that she wouldn't tell off the host of the party for no reason. She actually stood there with her palm out.”

“What did you do?!”

“I told her the truth. I didn't have any cash. The reporter called it performance art and referred to me as Rachel's
assistant
.”

“Oh my God, she's insane.”

“But brilliant,” Michael said. “We don't have people like that.”

“Yeah.” Meredith gave him an affectionate eye roll. “That's because you have neurosurgeons.”

“Neurosurgeons are infamously boring.”

“Now,” said Kezia, “your turn to tell me something terrible about work so that I don't feel bad about leaving.”

“You remember how it is. Everything I do is planning and waiting for approval to plan. I spent this morning preparing insurance forms. The grass is always eighteen-karat on the other side, Magpie.”

She toasted Kezia's glass. Kezia knew what she meant. It's why she left. But she had forgotten the level of foresight applied to precious stones, the precise production of items that weren't, say, lacquered pen caps. She missed feeling as if she were a part of something concrete and not one woman's vanity project run amok.

“What else can I tell you?” Meredith mused. “I got nothing. Oh, Debbie and that creepy guy from the copy center got secretly engaged. Which only made me go back through my mind and wonder if every time we sent her to get something copied, they screwed on the copy machine. Literally, I can think of nothing else.”

Michael put his hand on her knee. “Mer, tell her about the emeralds.”

“Oh
yes
, the emeralds.”

She shot herself in the temple with her finger and made a little exploding sound.

“But you can't tell anyone. There's an emerald shortage because you know how emeralds come from Colombia? Well, Colombia
is apparently letting some Marxist guerrilla drug lords run the country. The United States is not psyched about
that
and so now everyone's freaking out because there's an embargo on emeralds. Not, like, kunzite. Emeralds. People are gonna notice. That's why I don't have any other gossip for you. Because I've been in nonstop meetings about the emeralds.”

Even if Kezia wanted to betray Meredith's confidence, no one she worked with would care about an emerald shortage. The point of Rachel's jewelry was to take the mundane and turn it into beauty. Whereas the point with precious stones was to design in service to their beauty. Apples and diamonds.

“I miss it.”

“No, you do not.” Meredith laughed.

“Maybe I just miss the regularity.”

“That is why God made dried fruit. Speaking of which, Michael, do we have dessert?”

“Oh, yeah.” Michael got up and headed to the freezer. “I churned mango ice cream.”

“You
churned
it?”

He leaned into the container. “Actually, I overchurned it.”

H
e devoured a breakfast burrito while running to catch the 9:15 a.m. out of LaGuardia. He was like an anaconda with legs, inhaling faster than he ran. The toilet on the plane was out of order. Once in Miami, he calculated that he had approximately ten minutes to evacuate his bowels and board the ferry to the wedding. He flung open the hotel room door, took one look at the king bed with its studded headboard, and didn't know what to feel.

Upon realizing that neither he nor Kezia were invited “with guest,” they decided to book a room jointly. The last he'd seen of her was over a month ago, just before he lost his job. She bought them beer and he helped her install an air-conditioning unit in her bedroom, crushing his hands in an effort to keep it from falling onto the street. The following day, they broke off from a larger e-mail chain about the wedding, her name popping up in his inbox like a reward.

Two beds?
she typed.

Yeah . . . don't want you getting handsy.

She skipped the joke.
U need my credit card info?

He put the cursor out of its blinking misery with
You can get me back.

He had no business putting the room on his card.

He went for the bathroom. The door was locked. Never before had he encountered such a problem. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kezia's open suitcase, discarded dress options on the bed. She had come and gone.

The irony here was that if Victor had put himself up on his own, it would have been at a motel. A place with a name like the Sea Monarch Lodge that would smell of death but would also feature a communal toilet in the hall. Could he shit off the balcony? It's not as if the shit would have his name stamped into it. Frankly, there would be nothing in the consistency of his intestines that would mold into letters right now.

“Where have you
been
?” Kezia scolded him as he came off the elevator bank.

She was standing with a group of wedding guests, milling about, waiting for the bus that would take them to the ferry that would take them to the Castillos' island. The rest of their friends had gone on without them.

She looked him up and down. “You look like a hobo.”

He had forgotten to pack socks.

“You clean up nice,” he said, inching away from the noxious fart he released as the bus lumbered forward. “Hey, did you lock the bathroom door?”

“No. What a weird question.”

Victor moved determinedly toward the main house, which was shaped uncannily like a wedding cake—four tiers with Spanish-style arches and cement lion heads spewing water into tile basins. Who builds a house with four levels on the hurricane highway of the Atlantic? He chalked it up to a symbol of Felix's family's wealth, one that said: We genuinely don't care if the top half of this thing gets blown off.

He located a bathroom on the third floor where he could defecate in peace. He slammed the individual stall door and dropped his pants, his belt buckle smacking the ground in time with his first abdominal squeeze.

“This your first postcollege wedding?”

In his digestive haste, Victor had failed to realize he had company. A man—a neighbor or a cousin—was speaking to his legs.

“Sorry?” Victor clenched.

“Is this the first set of people to get married from your graduating class?”

He was twenty-nine, not twenty-four. Still, he was flattered by the assumption of popularity, by the idea that he would keep tabs on the other 669 people in his graduating class. But he needed to focus on the task at hand. He squeezed his bowels in a violent push and flushed at the same time, the noise of the toilet diminishing the extended riff of his asshole.

“Because they're not all like this,” the cousin warned as they washed their hands in parallel sinks.

Victor smiled. “I'll keep my hopes down.”

“Good man.” The cousin patted him on the shoulder.

Victor could feel the face of his enormous watch.

The cousin leaned toward a window. “Looks like it's going to open up soon.”

Then out the door he went, the way Victor had come in. Keeping his hopes down would not present much of a challenge. One of Victor's few areas of expertise was how to keep his hopes no higher than a human ankle.