The Clasp (7 page)

S
ophomore year was a real sweet spot for everyone. None of them had roommates anymore, which gave them new means of expressing themselves, individual spaces in which to say
This is who I am when unfettered by a stranger's Ansel Adams posters.
They knew one another well, but not so well that they were sickened by the sight of one another. There were still a couple of stones left to be unturned, either in the form of new classmates or eccentric sides to those already known. Nathaniel, especially, hit his stride. He grew an inch, started lifting weights, and declared himself a literature major. It didn't take him long to figure out that he was like a unicorn in the lit department: a straight, good-looking male who could debate the best translation of
The Master and
Margarita
, and then return to his room to play
Call of Duty.
Was it gilding the keg party lily to regale girls with his nonexistent concentration in French literature? Maybe.

One Saturday night he was hitting on Streeter Koehne, who had recently decided to stop wearing bras and start wearing white tank tops. Streeter was going through a self-serious phase that
required her to speak exclusively of public policy in Uganda. Here they were, in the middle of the type of college party he liked best (loud, crowded, and the only themes were “inebriation” and “sex”), but there would be no getting her onto lighter topics. Streeter who had, that very week, seen a bat in her dorm shower and run screaming, half-naked, down the hall. A live animal! Nudity! Slapstick! No? Nothing? If he couldn't lighten her up, his only option was to outdark her.

“God, you're right. But it's difficult to look at another nation's problems through the prism of our own. I mean, even on a cultural level that's true. You read Balzac or Flaubert in French and it's a whole different experience. You just don't get that kind of understanding about the French perspective, reading it in English.”

“You've read Balzac in French?”

She landed somewhere between doubtful and impressed.

“Well,” he whispered confidentially, “I only made it halfway through
Lost Illusions
. But who doesn't love
Madame Bovary
?”

He had made it halfway through nothing. He was auditing one class in French literature. But college was a time of fantastic self-absorption and no one cared enough to call him on this bullshit, even Streeter.

“Nat, I had no idea you spoke French.”

One nipple was pronounced and the other wasn't. Was one warm and the other cold? The feminist embodiment of inefficiency: One nipple doesn't know what the other is doing.

“You should meet Pierre.”

“Huh?”

Streeter waved at a short guy in the corner who was sporting a camel hair coat and the unmuddled features of a European person.

Where the hell was Victor? Victor was like a human portal when you needed one most. He was always the way out of a conversation (small portal) or a whole party (large portal). Before
Kezia pushed him to the brink of insanity, before he hit his depressive groove, back when Victor was just dabbling in casual melancholy . . . he was fun. Or at least amusingly honest and steadily deadpan. It was like having Rod Serling from
The Twilight Zone
host your life for you. Victor's skepticism about the entire college experience was endearing when he still participated in it, still went out, still made pithy comments about the rich kids, still made late-night runs to the diner. Somewhere deep down, Nathaniel thought, this guy is having a good time despite himself. Just as somewhere deep down, Nathaniel was having a mediocre time despite himself.

But right this second Victor had his own problems. He was off in the corner, looking frightened while a freshman with dyed black hair and spiked cuffs tallied up her piercings for him. Nathaniel could hear bits of the conversation over the music.

“What
about
my vagina?”

“That's where all your other piercings are. I sensed that you wanted me to guess and so I guessed. Is that not accurate?”

The freshman looked really annoyed now.

“I like your bracelet.” Victor was making an effort.

“I made it from the tips of parking lot traffic spikes.”

“I should go check on him,” Nathaniel said.

“You're such a good friend.” Streeter nodded, as if it were people like them who would one day solve the world's problems.

She was on her own in that regard. Meanwhile, Pierre was shouldering his way through the crowd, coming toward Nathaniel and looking displeased. Probably because Nathaniel was looking more classically all-American with each passing day and they both knew that Streeter would sleep with him under the right circumstances.

Nathaniel hopped on Victor's back, licking his cheek, nearly knocking him over.

“Get off me!” Victor threw his elbow backward.

The freshman took a step back, repulsed by roughhousing.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry.” Nathaniel turned to her. “He hates it when I get near his ears. I just love this man so much, I can't contain my emotions.”

Victor stood still, pupils fixed on Nathaniel as he squeezed his mouth into a fish face. When he removed his hand, Victor wiped his cheek.

“Am I interrupting something?” Nathaniel slung his arm over Victor's shoulder.

“No.” Victor looked at him plaintively. “Have you seen Kezia?”

“Kezia who?”

“Because of all the Kezias roaming around campus.”

“Nope.” Nathaniel stuck a finger in his beer. “Why is this mostly foam?”

He wasn't sure why he lied. He had seen Kezia on his way to the bathroom earlier, talking with a girl named Edith who grew root vegetables in her closet. Kezia seemed invested in the conversation. He didn't think she had noticed him. Then she winked at him as he passed, a lid slowly moving down a clear blue eye. But that was the extent of it. What was important now was finding Victor a mate for the night. And one for himself, of course, but it had been a busy few weeks—Nathaniel could store up hookups like a woodland creature shoving nuts into his cheeks. Except the other way around.

As he scanned the party for someone who wouldn't draw satanic symbols on Victor's chest while he slept, he felt a firm tap on his back. At least he assumed it was a tap until his body registered a shove.

“Are you trying to screw my girlfriend?” asked Streeter's agro French import.

“No,” Streeter objected, “Nathaniel speaks French. He read
Madame Bovary
in French.”

“Ah, tu parles français? Vraiment?”

“Oui.”

“On y va, alors.”

Nathaniel combed his brain for a single sentence in French. He didn't have the words for anything biting or even diffusing. He had read but one entire book in French, a trove of dirty expressions at a friend's parents' house during middle school.

“Vas te faire foutre!”

He was too busy being pleased that his pronunciation had landed to realize he was about to get shoved again. This time, he lost his balance, falling backward into the freshman. She lifted her arms to protect herself, scraping Nathaniel's scalp with her traffic spikes. The whole party was watching. Streeter escorted Pierre back to her dorm, presumably to comfort him with her one hard nipple. Nathaniel touched his head. His fingertips were immediately covered in blood. Some drunk premed student was at his side, parting Nathaniel's hair and offering to “stitch him up” right there. It was ridiculous to bleed so much for no reason. Nathaniel played it off—“Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch!”—but he wondered if he needed a tetanus shot. Humiliation: what a salve for pain. Someone should just bottle Embarrassment, sell it next to the Advil, make a fortune.

He walked with purpose to refill his beer, pumping the keg until the last set of eyes were off him. He touched his head again, hoping that blood wasn't trickling down his forehead.

“You okay?” asked Victor.

“Hey, can I ask you a favor?”

“Sure.”

“Are you okay to drive me to the hospital?”

Nathaniel bowed, quickly, to display the severity of his injury. He could feel the wetness without touching it.

Victor nodded. They got into Nathaniel's car, where Nathaniel dug around in the armrest for tissues or napkins—anything to apply pressure to his head.

“Damn.” He inspected his scalp in the side mirror. “She really got me.”

The hospital was small and close to campus. The emergency waiting room was mostly full of elderly locals with the flu or something painful trapped in their eyes. Nathaniel read a pamphlet about type 2 diabetes while Victor checked them in.

He returned, pile of forms in hand. “Here.”

“‘Reason for visit.'” Nathaniel began writing: “Scalped . . . by . . . jewelry.”

Filling out the forms, he had a sense of his youth. No medications or surgeries or infections. No history of allergic reactions or chronic ailments. Just an uninterrupted pencil line drawn vertically down the “no” boxes, signed, and left on the ledge of the nurse's station. After about five minutes, Victor cracked. He began silent laughing.

“I know.” Nathaniel was laughing too. “Shut up, I know.”

“Have you read a single piece of French literature?”

“Only the same thing you have.”

“What?” Victor looked perplexed. “Oh,
that
?”

Nathaniel had only had one class with Victor, a freshman primer on European literature. This was a topic so ludicrously broad, the syllabus felt more like an around-the-world drinking game. They covered a country a week. In this corner, representing All of Irish Literature, with the combined liver panels of a whiskey distillery: James Joyce's “The Dead” and Oscar Wilde's
The
Picture of Dorian Gray
. And in this corner, chain-smoking and representing All of French Literature: Albert Camus's
The Stranger
and Guy de Maupassant's “The Necklace.” Their professor, a Voltaire scholar in the middle of a nasty divorce (rumor had it her husband of twenty years had left her for a Proust T.A.), trudged through the class. One time she fell asleep at her desk while a student was speed-reading from
Death in Venice
. German literature fell before a long weekend.

Kezia Morton was in their class for the first two weeks. At that point, Nathaniel knew her primarily as the girl who roomed with the hotel heiress. He hadn't really noticed her as her own entity until that class but he was amused watching her, clearly not a reader, sitting right up front, furiously taking notes on literature as if it could be learned like physics. Victor also took note of Kezia, but he was way ahead of Nathaniel. The two of them were already friends. They would convene in the hall, walking out of the humanities building together and chatting. Then one day she didn't show. She had dropped the class, having apparently transferred to the equally sweeping Art History in America.

Too bad for her—she missed one of the more uncomfortable sights Nathaniel had ever seen.

They were sitting in the sparsely populated classroom, waiting for their professor to weave together whatever threads of sanity that pulled her from her office to the classroom each afternoon. It was France week. They had all read “The Necklace” over the weekend. “The most famous and tragic short story in the history of French letters,” read the syllabus. This struck Nathaniel as a slight exaggeration, not that he could propose a better candidate.

It was the story of a pretty-but-poor woman who is constantly distressed over her circumstances. One day her husband procures an invitation to a fancy party and instead of being psyched, she falls into a depression because she doesn't have any jewelry to
wear. At the husband's suggestion, she borrows an expensive necklace from a rich friend. The wife has a grand time at the party while the husband sits, bored, in the corner. When the wife gets home, she realizes the necklace has fallen off. So the husband goes back out into the cold and combs the banks of the Seine, looking for it. He comes up empty-handed and goes into debt to pay for a replacement necklace. The ruse works but as a result the woman takes extra jobs, burning away her youth as a maid. Then, in the final scene, she runs into the rich friend while walking in a park. The rich friend doesn't even recognize the woman at first, she looks so tattered. She wants to know what the hell happened. So the woman tells her the entire story, proud that her scheme worked. The rich friend then breaks the news to her that the necklace was fake. The woman has wasted her life for nothing.