“Yes, I know they speak English.”
Grey shot her a look like she didn’t have the first clue. Kezia couldn’t help but sound exasperated. The Paris-bashing was getting on her nerves. She really had been here before. She knew how to greet with kisses, how to jaywalk with confidence, which destinations were walkable and which weren’t. She knew to be selective when ordering “the special.” In New York, “the special” was the freshest thing on the chalkboard. In Paris, it could be whatever had been sitting in the fridge the longest.
Grey perked up momentarily when they stopped to get gas. She insisted Kezia accompany her into the glass structure while she paid. She wanted her to see “the best part about France.”
“The best part about France is in this gas station?”
Through the glass, Kezia could see prepackaged sandwiches and a poster of a girl giving head to an ice cream bar. Ten minutes later, she and Grey emerged with two cappuccinos made by an automatic dispenser, served in thin foam cups.
“Good.” Kezia blew and sipped and nodded.
“My obstetrician says I’m allowed to have one cup a day.” She smiled impishly. “Wine, too. French doctors are the second-best part of France.”
Since the apartment with the coffin elevator, Grey and Paul had found a more permanent residence in the Marais. Advertisements for Chanel and A.P.C. were stuck to the side of a Dumpster and even the Dumpster was cute.
“Paul says it’s like the West Village and the East Village had a baby.”
“So like the Village.”
“Here we are.” Grey pulled sharply on the steering wheel. “Voilà!”
The street was small and monochromatic from top to bottom. The stone of the buildings blended straight into the slate-colored sky. Delicate cuts of iron dotted the pierre de taille façades. Paul and Grey’s apartment was above a coiffeur and a store that appeared to be transplanted from Portland, Oregon, selling rompers and felt seahorses. Grey parked with a tire on the curb.
The new apartment, she warned Kezia, was smaller than the first. Oh, and they had to ascend some very narrow steps. Oh, and it was not advisable to lean on the railing.
“Got it.” Kezia smiled. “Now that you’ve kidnapped me, the truth comes out.”
As Grey helped her yank her suitcase from the trunk of the Peugeot, a woman in a sundress, sunglasses, and a slash of red lipstick rode by on her bicycle. No wonder Grey was so unhappy. Parisians were glamorously tattered and superior down to their tile grout. In New York, at least Kezia could go home, knowing that the most elegant person she passed that day was also pulling sweatpants out of her pajama drawer. French dressers only came with shallow lingerie drawers.
Grey turned the key to the apartment and kicked, disturbing an oriental runner that had to be kicked back into place. The smell of roast chicken, lemon, and rosemary came wafting from the kitchen and into the hallway where Grey flung off her shoes. Kezia followed her lead. Paul emerged, keeping his carcass-covered hands in the air as he hugged her. He always looked the same no matter what. Like a Ken doll.
“Bienvenue! How neat is this that we get to see you again so soon?”
“Pretty neat,” Kezia said. And she meant it.
It was like time-traveling back a decade, this much Paul-and-Grey exposure.
“Celery rémoulade?”
Atop a half-sized refrigerator were a series of plastic Arcs de Triomphe, lined up end-to-end so that they resembled their tchotchke cousin the Loch Ness monster. Beside the Arcs was a plastic trough of what appeared to be albino brains. Paul reached for it.
“It’s actually fantastic,” said Grey.
“Maybe later.”
“It’s also actually a vegetable. You know the French don’t believe in kale? Same thing with corn. There’s no corn in France right now.”
“That’s not right.” Kezia looked to Paul. “Can that be right?”
Paul shrugged. “There’s definitely no baby corn.”
“Is baby corn a staple of anywhere?” Kezia smiled and peeled the tracking sticker from her luggage. “I thought they figured out too much kale will kill you anyway.”
“I will give you fifty euros if you can find me a salad without a radish in it.” Grey shook the container of brains. “It’s all chicken and radishes. Fifty.”
“I can’t take your money, you guys.”
She could. She would. Happily. Paul had struck it rich at a hedge fund years ago and parlayed this experience into other lucrative ventures with an impressive deftness. He had joined Caroline and Olivia in the ranks of people indelibly set for life.
“Oh my God!” exclaimed Grey. “We forgot to discuss this Victor situation!”
His name made her senses perk up. Victor was the silent reason she was standing here now, arguing about vegetables.
“Caroline called, freaking out because I guess she and Felix had lunch with Victor.”
“In New York? When was this? Is he okay?”
Grey smiled. “You care a lot about Victor all of a sudden.”
“I’m just confused, that’s all. I thought they were coming here.”
“Honeymoon’s off.” Paul looked solemn. “Felix’s mom died.”
“Oh my God. When?”
“Sunday night, apparently. They were all packed to go and then? Elle mange les pissenlits par la racine.”
“And in the middle of all this, Victor apparently stormed out of the restaurant after threatening Caroline or something.”
“He threatened her?”
“Well, he recited the chorus to ‘Common People.’”
“The Pulp song? That makes no sense.”
“I know.” Paul shook his head. “I don’t think of Jarvis Cocker as particularly menacing, myself.”
“No, I mean, why? Since when does Victor leave a free lunch? Or be a dick to the bereaved? And why would they get on a plane to New York when they were supposed to get on a plane to here? And why have lunch with Victor at all?”
She had so many questions and a hunch that they all had the same answer. “Caroline doesn’t really like Victor.”
“That’s mean,” Grey scolded.
“It’s not mean, it’s true.” Kezia yawned, the “u” in “true” widening her mouth.
“Tired?” Paul asked. “You must be absolument fatigué avec décalage horaire.”
“I’m okay. Where do I put this?”
She lifted her suitcase slightly off the ground.
“In your room . . . where we have a surprise for you!”
Paul and Grey linked arms and grinned. Kezia momentarily stopped speculating about Victor’s whereabouts, his face replaced with an image of a basket of cheese and outlet converters. Maybe some of those macaroons Caroline used to have shipped to her.
“You’ll either love it or hate it,” said Paul.
“Those are my two options?”
“Yes,” Paul said. “It’s the Howard Stern of surprises.”
“I think she’ll love it.” Grey winked at Paul, who winked back.
“That’s cute. You guys are having a joint seizure.”
“Go on.” Paul gestured with his shoulders as he washed chicken from his hands.
“Kaaaaay.” She walked toward her bedroom, eyeing them both.
She opened the door to a perfectly made bed and a couple of nightstands (the same kind Meredith and Michael used). There were folding closets with a Céline bag hanging from the knob. A not-yet-assembled crib leaned against one of the walls. Nothing to see here, folks. Just a room. Unless the Céline bag was for her. Grey was nice; she wasn’t that nice.
Kezia shrugged and put her luggage down, feeling for the zipper. There were no surprises and certainly no pistachio macaroons. What there was, however, was unwelcome moisture inside her bag. One of her travel bottles had exploded on the plane.
“Shit,” she said, sniffing for the offending tonic.
She needed to know what to be upset about. Depending on the vial, she was going to be pissed that she�
�d lost the contents or pissed that it had leaked on the outfit she planned on wearing to Claude Bouissou’s factory tomorrow.
“Fucking shit,” she muttered and sniffed.
“You don’t sound excited to see me,” came a male voice.
She yelped, falling backward over the corner of the bed. The closet doors opened from the inside to reveal a cackling Nathaniel.
He crossed his arms over his chest and fell backward onto the mattress, trust-test style. His hair stayed flopping after his body was still. She could hear Paul and Grey chuckling in the living room.
“Do you have a kiss for Daddy?” He snapped his eyes open and grinned.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
He rolled over and looked up at her. “Well, now you really don’t sound excited.”
TWENTY-NINE
Victor
Victor found himself standing on a square of sidewalk on the lower end of the Upper East Side, examining a flag that read “fi:af.” In smaller type was printed “French Institute/Alliance Française.” He suspected it was the French impulse that caused the design confusion and the American one that caused the immediate explanation. Yesterday’s research had provided him with a few clues but libraries were like doctors: it was time to see a specialist.
He walked through the double doors, holding one open for a woman wearing a neck scarf and pushing a stroller. A septuagenarian with a full head of gray hair sat mindlessly eating Pringles and watching the French evening news on a big-screen television. He probably comes here every afternoon, thought Victor. A hospice nurse read a tabloid magazine, looking up when the man munched too loudly. How nice it would be to be homesick for a place, Victor thought, to feel tethered to France just because one happened to be French. He rarely, if ever, longed for suburban Boston and was not, when confronted with the scent of clam chowder or Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, made moony.
“Do you guys have a library in here?”
“Second floor.” A security guard pointed at a directory nailed to the wall.
“Awesome!” Victor slapped the security desk.
The guard raised an eyebrow. In the past forty-eight hours, Victor had developed the swagger of someone who had no idea what he was doing but who had made a real commitment to doing it.
Victor hopped off the elevator. He supposed you could call this a library. The whole place, all rooms visible from where he stood, was peppered with blond desks and soft blue carpet that still had vacuum marks. It looked like a preschool before the children came. Three chic middle-aged ladies with crocodile accessories shared a copy of Paris Match. On the cover were European football stars and their big-breasted girlfriends.
Beneath a CENTRE DE RESOURCES sign sat a librarian with a high shelf of red hair, looking bored in beige.
“Excusez-moi, mais est-ce que vous—”
“Est-ce que tu, est-ce que tu,” the man corrected him.
Victor widened his eyes. Listen, Conan, he thought, you’re lucky I got that much out. Any French acquired after seventh grade has been gleaned from Daft Punk.
“Right. Oui,” said Victor. “I was wondering, avez-vous les livres dans, um . . . dans . . .”
He didn’t even know how to say “jewelry” in French.
“Um . . . avez-tu une livre avec les mots du baubles?”
“Baubles?”
He pointed at the Paris Match ladies and drew a line around his own neck. Also the gesture for I’m going to kill you later.
“Ah, les bijoux! All right,” the librarian said in perfect English, looking Victor up and down. “What exactly are you looking for?”
He had a thick Southern accent. Mississippi, maybe. Victor tried to reconcile the jump.
“I’m not looking for a specific title. Do you have a jewelry section?”
He put his hand on his hip. “Not sure what we have, darlin’, but it’ll be here.”
He stepped out from behind his desk, motioning to Victor to follow him.
“Everything on fashion and design should be on these top two shelves. There’s a stepladder in the corner but you can reach those, can’t you? How tall are you?”
“Six feet four.” Victor cast his eyes downward. “I’m not really looking for books on French fashion. More historical texts.”
“Oh, texts,” said the librarian, as if it were the most unusual word he had ever heard, “you won’t find those here. We’re not a research library. We’re all current press and literature. You know, basically just a bunch of random French crap.”
Victor wondered how anyone ever was employed anywhere.
“I’ll look. Since I’m here.”
“Holler if you need anything.” The librarian winked.
Victor pulled out a chair, disturbing the vacuum marks. He sat between hanging racks of newspapers, the seams of Le Monde and Le Figaro wrapped around wooden poles, hanging like laundry. Conan was right about the lack of historical texts. There was only one bookcase for littérature and it boasted four copies of Madame Bovary, one copy of Les Misérables, and one illustrated copy of Les Misérables. The DVD rental section was more extensive. Victor got up. He found the ancient black Dell computer in the corner and started clacking away on the sticking keys. They had computers like this in the reception area of mostofit. Model IIIs. Apple IIes. Commodore 64s. Fossils encased in glass, lest their obsolete cooties contaminate the air.
He keyed in his search using arrow keys.
• Bijouterie (2 Titles)
• Joyaux (2 Titles)
• Manifestations Culturelles (2 Titles)
They were all the same two titles. Two large photo books, one on Cartier and one on a company called Lalique. His parents owned a Lalique vase. He had accidentally cracked it in half as a child while practicing self-taught karate in the dining room. His legs had grown too fast for his brain.
The books were wrapped in plastic, Dewey decimals on their spines. According to the first one, Cartier was founded in 1847 but it didn’t start making anything close to Johanna’s necklace until the 1920s, well after the date on the sketch. The book name-checked big jewelers of the time: Lemonnier, Baugrand, and Mellerio. None of them had signed his sketch. But the drawings themselves, rendered avec crayon, looked so much like Johanna’s— same yellowish brown paper, same descriptions scripted at a jaunty angle.
The Paris Match ladies returned their reading material, silently making their decision to leave. Victor looked at his phone. His stomach spun like an empty cement truck, but he still didn’t want to go home. If he stayed away for long enough, he could trick himself into thinking he was coming back to his apartment after a hard day’s work.
He looked again at the sketches in the books. Why couldn’t Johanna’s necklace be one of these? Boom: mystery solved, life gotten on with. He was lost in a picture of aquamarine earrings, thinking vaguely of Kezia’s eyes, feeling foolish for making the connection, when something caught his attention at the bottom of the page. It was a Moscow address, a store or a house near Red Square. Victor slid his chair closer to the desk. Then he started feverishly flipping through the pages. The numbers at the bottom of each sketch were not a weight or a price or some catalog code. They were street addresses. All of them.
Having scrutinized a blinding amount of these drawings, he could begin to fill in the blanks on his own. The arch of a 0 and the flat tops of 5s were easy enough, but now he could contextualize the whole string of numbers: 76550. The rest was still unintelligible, either cut off or scribbled into oblivion. On his phone, he searched for “76550,” “necklace,” “address.”
Nothing.
He added “France” and “19th century.” Still nothing.
“76550 necklace address France 19th century jewelry” got him more nothing.
“76550 necklace address France 19th century jewelry shiny shiny fuck fuck” got him an impressive index of Victorian sex toys.
The necklace, with its single teardrop, was mocking him, mocking his alleged knack for data sleuthing. He
shook his head. Circumstance left him no choice . . .
Victor approached Conan the Librarian. “Hi. I could use your help.”
“Château.” He rolled his eyes as he looked at Johanna’s sketch. “It obviously says château.”
“Really?” Victor gingerly took it back.
“Anything else I can do for you?” Conan leaned on his elbows, swooping his eyes across Victor’s shoulders.
Victor shook his head. “I’m good, I’m just gonna—”
Victor pointed at the computer console.
He pulled up the library’s browser. Replacing the “shinys” and the “fucks” with a “château” got him an article from the French version of Town & Country, a story about private, single-family-owned French châteaus.
There was a slide show of châteaus from five separate regions of France: Burgundy, Brittany, Rhône, Upper Normandy, and somewhere outside Nice with a river that ran straight under the château itself. The owners of that château were sitting in a rowboat, oars up, twisting to face the photographer. Victor clicked through to the Upper Normandy one. The couple, standing against a brick wall shaded by a pear tree, forced smiles that did little to disguise their true feelings about being photographed for a magazine: They were the French version of American Gothic. Instead of a pitchfork, the man was holding a fistfull of radishes, mud still fresh on the ends. The woman looked somber. She had wide-set eyes, a long nose, and a haircut Victor recognized from seventies sitcom reruns. The husband was balding, and had one of the more perfectly round faces Victor had ever seen. Behind the wall stood a red brick structure, featuring dozens of windows, some cranked open. Victor scrolled down to the caption:
Cela pourrait sembler être le mode de vie idéal, mais l’entretien n’est pas une tâche facile pour ces familles. Étant donné le grand nombre de demeures classées au Patrimoine historique dans les campagnes françaises, même des familles telles que les Ardurat (voir photo cidessus de la famille dans le jardin du château de Miromesnil, ville natale de Guy de Maupassant) doivent s’en remettre à l’État, qui prend en charge 20 pourcents des coûts d’entretien. Toutefois, afin de recevoir ces 20 pourcents, les Ardurat doivent garder une partie de leur maison ouverte au grand public pour des visites de groupe.
The Clasp Page 18
