The Clasp

by Sloane Crosley

  Any place that is not the site of one’s anguish can function as a church, but the mall was more than an escape. The walls understood him. Let the a cappella groups and the mice have the campus chapel. The mall was full of real people living real lives like the ones he grew up with. This was who he was—a boy from the suburbs. College had spent four years confusing him, making him question himself, making him yearn for more, but the mall winked at him.

  I see you, said the candle kiosk, I see your soul.

  He began walking there every morning. He made no purchases. He didn’t like talking to anyone, and buying things usually required talking. Instead, he liked to watch the punk kids who misunderstood the meaning of the word defacing the pine needle garlands. Or to let his eyes linger on the girls who came to the jewelry counter and sat fidgeting while they waited for a stranger to drive a needle through their earlobes. What kind of a person doesn’t hold perfectly still while getting her flesh pierced? The kind of person who undergoes minor surgery at a store that sells gag vomit, he guessed.

  One time he spotted Emily Cooper trying on shoes at Steve Madden, shoving her polished toes into boots and circling a bench.

  Another time, Caroline picked him up on the side of the highway. She put her hazard lights on and leaned across the passenger seat. Victor could see down her shirt, past her bra to the little rolls over her jeans.

  “Hey, little boy,” she said, putting on a Transylvanian accent, “vhant some candee?”

  “Oh, hi.”

  “Nice day for a stroll. Kind of.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Where are you coming from at this hour?” She looked left and right over her shoulder for effect. “The Rib Cage?”

  He scratched the back of his head. He didn’t like stopping in the dry side-of-the-highway grass. The day before, he had come across a dead deer and had to sprint over its hooves, a knife between fingers.

  “It’s cold.” Caroline pushed a button beneath the steering wheel. “Get in.”

  He pulled at the handle of her Jetta and moved a couple of empty potato chip bags aside. She was coming from Boston, where she had been for her grandmother’s eightieth-birthday party. She called her grandmother Pup-Pup.

  “What’s your excuse?” She slapped her overhead mirror shut.

  “Just taking the air.”

  “On the side of the interstate? We live on a campus full of trees.”

  Victor shrugged.

  “Well, glad to see you out and about. We were worried you were going to give yourself a vitamin D deficiency.”

  “Scurvy.”

  “Whatever.”

  The first time Victor stole something, it was the morning after the 100 Days Party. Held precisely one hundred days before graduation, the party demanded its attendees arrive dressed in the profession they saw themselves occupying as an adult. Half the men came dressed as pimps. Meanwhile, it seemed the nation’s hospitals would no longer need to concern themselves with a slutty nurse shortage. Streeter Koehne came dressed as Jane Goodall and Sam Stein as her chimp. Kezia came as an embalmer.

  She lowered her sunglasses. “I’m Karl Lagerfeld.”

  She drank Jack Daniel’s from a Diet Coke can and wore a white shirt unbuttoned to her navel. Glimpsing that particular sliver of flesh made Victor’s heart stop. Boobs were great, sure. He had nothing but the deepest admiration for and fantasy life regarding Kezia’s breasts. But the skin that covered her ribs and hips . . .

  “How can you see in those things?” Victor touched her sunglasses.

  “Stop, you’ll smudge them.”

  They didn’t speak at all over Christmas break. He didn’t want to call, couldn’t bring himself to call. This was their first interaction since the night outside her dorm. She wasn’t outright ignoring him, but she wasn’t glad to see him either. He wanted to ask her if she would come outside and watch him smoke or do a lap around the party. Nathaniel came up and slung a tweed-covered arm around her, removed his pipe, and let his hand dangle.

  “Tell me again.” He played with the lapel of her jacket. “Why are you someone who already exists? You’re not going to be a specific person that’s already out there after we graduate. Unless you kill that person and wear his skin like a suit.”

  “I don’t plan on being a murderer when I grow up.”

  “So then your outfit is kind of stupid.” Nathaniel had his hand on the nape of her neck now. “Cute, but stupid.”

  “What about Streeter?” Kezia pouted. “Or Sam! Look at Sam!”

  “Different,” said Nathaniel. “Sam actually will be an ape by this time next year.”

  Sam, who had clearly put a dent in the bag of molly he brought with him, was sneaking up behind Olivia, pretending to consume bugs from her hair.

  “‘Be yourself.’” Nathaniel put his weight on her shoulder. “‘Everyone else is already taken.’ Oscar Wilde.”

  Victor couldn’t compete with this floppy-haired Bartlett’s on legs. He liked to think that if Nathaniel had any conception of his feelings for Kezia, he would lay off. But Nathaniel was too much of a good-time guy to discuss it with, even if Victor wanted to discuss it. Which he did not.

  “I’m going to head out, you guys.”

  “It’s not even midnight,” Nathaniel offered in tepid protest, shaking powder from Kezia’s hair. “You really do smell like a baby stripper.”

  “How would you know?” She put her hand on her hip, widening her shirt gap.

  As Victor left, out of the corner of his eye, he watched Nathaniel preparing to give her a piggyback ride. He could probably sleep with her tonight and they’d both think of it as a friendly series of nude niceties and go right back to being friends. Robots.

  He couldn’t sleep. He tried to will himself into a state of unconsciousness, punishing his body with mummified stillness. He masturbated, but not like he meant it. At 8:35 a.m. he got up to take a piss and then that was that. He was up.

  By 9:00 he found himself on the familiar route. By 10:00, security had opened the entrance. Inside, at a couple of the higher-end stores, teenage girls squatted down and fiddled with locks at the base of glass doors. Victor could see their thongs, hear the sound of metal reverberating within layers of glass. Toward the end of the corridor was a store called Modern Man. It sold solar-powered remote-control chargers, circulation-enhancing socks, and digital coin sorters. Victor nodded at a sales associate who chatted on the phone and didn’t seem to sense anything abnormal about Victor’s presence. I could rob this guy blind, thought Victor. He ran his fingers along the glass shelves with casual inquisitiveness. The sales associate didn’t look up.

  “Because it’s not my problem,” he said into the phone.

  Then he said it again and again, like conversational sandbags.

  “Because it’s not my problem. Because it’s not my problem. Because it’s not my problem. You tell her I said. Because—no, because it’s not my problem.”

  The guy brushed past Victor on the way to the stockroom. Had Victor been in a different frame of mind, he would have passed this off as idiocy. Behavior to be judged but not punished. Instead he took it personally. Victor wasn’t a threat to the store. He wasn’t a threat to anyone. Just look at him. Were those pajama pants? Why yes, yes they were. He circled around the display cases, letting himself get a static shock when he touched their edges. This place that had been a source of such comfort for so many months was turning on him, making him feel as good as invisible. On a shelf in front of him were a series of Italian nesting cups and a jump drive that had a digital display of the Dow Jones.

  Victor was afraid of breaking the cups.

  He had never shoplifted before, having either not considered it or considered it the purview of teenagers and celebrities. Yet he knew what to do as if he had done it a thousand times before. Prepare a response if caught. Pretend the object is something you have lost. You think, “Oh, there that is,” and put it in your pocket where it belongs. You are not taking it, so muc
h as taking it back. It was always yours. Then you walk out the same way you walked in.

  By the time Victor got back to campus, the plug portion of the jump drive had imbedded in his palm. Victor dropped it in his desk drawer.

  The only time he confronted it again was when Caroline insisted on bringing him soup after he came down with the flu. She lived for this kind of Florence Nightingale crap. She never struck Victor as particularly nurturing but she wanted credit for the act. She sat at the edge of his mattress, struggling to cross her legs, resting the back of her hand on his forehead as if trying to convince them both they were in another century. When she tried to take his temperature in a more technologically advanced fashion, Victor feverishly gestured at his desk, thinking a thermometer might be lurking in there. Caroline crammed the jump drive into his mouth.

  He clamped down, but things were going to get suspicious when it didn’t produce a reading.

  She twisted it around. “This is a weird-looking thermometer.”

  “It’s not.” He coughed. “It’s not a thermometer.”

  “Huh?” She leaned on the open drawer. “Oh my gosh, what is all this stuff?”

  She picked through his stash, which had become just varied enough to be suspicious. There was a church key, some magnetic “chip clips,” a nose-hair trimmer, gel insoles, a portable can opener, a collapsible tire pump, a chrome tape dispenser, a neoprene eyeglass case, and a set of Chinese reflexology balls.

  He knew the shame of the drawer, the possibility of repercussions, should hit him hard, but the fever gave him a woozy layer of remove so that even when she made eye contact with a couple of price tags, he remained calm. Nothing to see here, folks! Just a man and his portable can opener.

  “You boys and your toys.” She pushed the drawer closed.

  Eventually Caroline left and Victor stopped sweating, cooling down in his sleep. He had the kind of epic dreams made possible only by total exhaustion. He woke up starving—for food and for community. In the dining hall, next to the fro-yo machine, he apologized to Kezia and she to him.

  “So we’re okay?” she asked.

  He said that yes, they were. He tried to mean it. It seemed to everyone that he would come around, fall in line, meld back into the larger whole just as Olivia had done the year prior. That he could teach himself to be less hurt, to be less publicly aggrieved, to not rock the boat before it set sail into the real world, leaving the more unsavory events of college in its wake. He would try.

  FIVE

  Kezia

  It 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.

  “Alway
s 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.