Loose Diamonds

by Amy Ephron

  Loose Diamonds

  . . . and Other Things I’ve Lost (and Found) Along the Way

  Amy Ephron

  Dedication

  for Alan

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  One: Loose Diamonds

  Two: The Birdman

  Three: Expensive Shoes

  Four: My Afternoon with Squeaky Fromme

  Five: Champagne by the Case

  Six: Labor Day

  Seven: Musical Chairs

  Eight: Staying

  Nine: Security Check

  Ten: Why I Quit Being Psychic

  Eleven: Post-Modern Life

  Twelve: Egg Cups

  Thirteen: My Filofax

  Fourteen: Nicknames

  Fifteen: Mistake Shopping

  Sixteen: A Love Story

  Seventeen: Banana Trees and Bougainvillea

  Eighteen: I Love Saks

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Amy Ephron

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  I always like the windows of antique jewelry stores that say, etched on the glass in old-fashioned letters:

  Estate Jewelry, Antiques, Loose Diamonds

  I’ve never bought loose diamonds but the idea of them appeals to me, sparkling stones that I imagine come wrapped in a velvet cloth. I also think “Loose Diamonds” would be a great name for a racehorse, not that I ever really aspired to own a racehorse but I imagine it would be fun especially if you had a horse that won. (Loose Diamonds is a lean ebony horse that runs as fast as the night.)

  Loose Diamonds has also always seemed to me a funny analogy for L.A.—an actress waiting for a part, a young woman who has a dream—as if they’re all looking for a “setting,” a permanent surrounding, in a town that’s all about impermanence. And yet, there is something unsettling about the notion of all those things running around loose.

  I like jewelry with settings, jewelry with history, jewelry that’s right for its time. It always upsets me when I walk into a jewelry store and there are antique settings for rings from which the stones have been removed. I can’t help but wonder where the diamonds have gone.

  Loose diamonds are never displayed in the windows of antique jewelry stores, only stones with settings, perfect pieces from different periods of time—a Victorian necklace with pale-blue iridescent opals and fresh pearls; a perfect Deco bracelet, industrial and moderne; diamond Cartier watches from the ’20s (or more recently the ’60s); beautiful hand-strung pearls, their origin beyond question—for sale to anyone who wanders by. Unless you asked, you wouldn’t know that in the back of the shop, quite often, settings have been broken down, the gold melted and sold for scrap, and the loose diamonds waiting for someone to come along who wants to give them a new permanent surrounding.

  They say that diamonds cut glass. I don’t know. I’ve never tried it. If you were to use glass as a canvas and diamonds as a tool, it’s always seemed like it would be a dangerous way to make art. (I believe in art for art’s sake but not if there’s personal risk involved.) Diamonds burn at a very high temperature, 6,442˚ Fahrenheit—for comparison’s sake, as we know, paper burns at 451˚ Fahrenheit—so, I’m not sure what kind of explosion would have to occur for a diamond to burn. Since diamonds are entirely made of carbon, they leave no ash, just CO2, as if they’ve vanished into thin air . . .

  One

  Loose Diamonds

  When I was eight, my friend Jenny and I invented a game. We’d both read The Secret Garden. Next door to my house was a ’20s Spanish house edged by a stone wall with an ornate iron gate, hidden from the street. One day, armed with silver spoons that we imagined we would use to dig up weeds and uncover baby crocuses, we unlatched the gate and sneaked into the garden next door.

  We weren’t prepared for what we found—it was like something you would find in a villa in Puerto Vallarta (not that either one of us had ever been to Puerto Vallarta). There were ornate hand-painted Mexican tiles set in patterns in the walls and a tiled terrazzo floor (not a silly lawn like we had next door) and a big fountain that was peaceful and magical, which we instantly deemed a wishing fountain. There were perfectly trimmed olive trees and cutouts in the walls with religious statues and concrete friezes, and it exuded the kind of peace and calm you would expect to find in the patio of an Italian church. And we felt like we’d discovered something.

  But there was also that little “rush” we felt when we opened the door of the garden and snuck in. That afternoon in the Caballeros’ garden is the closest I’ve ever come to breaking into a house (if it isn’t empty, that is, and there isn’t a “For Sale” sign on the lawn).

  Two years ago, my husband and I came home and our house was in a strange kind of disorder. All the papers on the desk had been thrown about. There was a black flashlight on one of the white linen couches in the living room. The fireplace poker was lying on the bed. But the house wasn’t trashed exactly and it took us a moment to realize (in fact, my son had been home for two hours and hadn’t noticed) that the computer was absent from the desktop and the doors to the little Chinese bedside cabinets were open and . . . empty and all of the jewelry boxes were gone. And inside them, every single piece of jewelry I had was also gone. Except the few things I’d worn out that night and a pair of aquamarine earrings and matching necklace from Tiffany’s that I’d carelessly left on the counter of the master bathroom sink.

  After the police and the police photographer arrived—it was 3 A.M. by now—I suddenly focused on the fact that the computer was gone from my desk. I dropped to my knees and screamed, as if I were praying, in true Hollywood fashion: “All I want is my spec screenplay back.” This rolled over the LAPD, who have clearly seen every hysterical meltdown known to man, and they just stared at me with glazed eyes.

  The police photographer called me the next morning, “I didn’t want you to think we were all insensitive,” he said. “I’m a Buddhist. But I can’t say that around the guys. And I’m praying for you.”

  His prayers (and mine) were heard apparently. Four days later, when a new computer had been installed, I checked my email and there was a message, the gist of which was:

  I think I may have bought a stolen computer; if you are, in fact, Amy Ephron, please let me know if there’s anything you want on it before I wipe the disc clean.

  After a somewhat complicated negotiation that involved begging, tears, and some version of a mild threat, or at least the implication that something really terrible would happen (to me, if to nobody else) if I didn’t get my work back, a disc with a copy of my hard drive miraculously “appeared” in our mailbox.

  But there was still the pesky part of the loss of all that jewelry; not the monetary loss, even though I’d never be able to replace it due to the price of gold, the scarcity of antique jewelry now, the precision of each of the pieces. But even if I could replace them, I could never replace the tangible memories that each piece held.<
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  The gold stud earrings my mother had given me when I’d first had my ears pierced, against her wishes. A conciliatory gesture in a way. As she said, “If I was going to do it, I was going to wear gold.”

  The ’20s marcasite-and-crystal bracelet, a deconstructionist masterpiece, that I wore religiously like a piece of armor in my early 20s, given to me by a comedy writer in New York who’d just been given a year-long contract, because writing could be a legitimate way to earn your keep.

  The pearls I never wore (I’m not really a pearl kind of girl), given to me by that guy in New York I was almost engaged to (until he, too, figured out, prompted by his mother, that I wasn’t really a pearl kind of girl).

  The thin, 18-carat Cartier bands from my first marriage. Of course, I didn’t wear them anymore, but I liked to know that they were there in a box where they belonged.

  The antique emerald and diamond ring my first husband gave me on the occasion of my second daughter Anna’s birth—not showy but (39 hours of labor later) hard-earned and which I’d promised Anna I would give her one day. Apparently not soon enough.

  Victorian opal earrings found like a piece of treasure on a Sunday morning at the Toronto jewelry mart on the pier. I never wore them in daytime. They were nighttime earrings. All of it gone.

  We weren’t alone. There’d been an epidemic of burglaries in L.A. Everywhere we went, someone said, “Oh, that happened to me.” Sherry Lansing and Billy Friedkin were suing ADT home security. Even retired judge Diane Wayne and her husband, Ira Reiner, who was the former district attorney of L.A., had been hit . . . Diane says the only thing she misses is one pair of Michael Dawkins earrings that were so comfortable she wore them every day. She says they weren’t particularly valuable. But she can’t replace them because they were silver and gold and he doesn’t make those anymore. I wonder if she misses them only because they were comfortable or if she misses them because she wore them every day, to dinner, to events for her children? She wore them when she was sitting on the bench, and they made her feel as if she was balanced and part of a functioning and protective society.

  I, however, was attached to each piece. (And even if I could replace them, I’m not the sort of person who goes out and gets a new cat.) The Elsa Peretti triple diamond bracelet on the delicate gold chain. The Elsa Peretti single diamond bracelet. And when you wore them together, it looked like you were wearing something. The beautiful gold necklace, 20-carat gold, multistrand, so that it looked almost like a delicate rope around my neck, falling just below the collarbone. The emerald-cut diamond and sapphire earrings . . .

  I never had big flashy diamond studs that sparkled from a mile away or a rock the size of the Ritz or an emerald cocktail ring, garish but impressive, but who would want them, even if you could? I mean, who came up with the theory that an engagement ring should equal 15% of your fiancé’s annual salary? (I tried to sell that one to my present husband, but it didn’t fly.)

  I never aspired to the Taylor-Burton diamond . . . I was always more the school of Mrs. Harriet Annenberg Ames, the original owner of the Taylor-Burton diamond, who wore it as a ring and put it up for auction at Parke-Bernet in New York in 1969 with this statement: “I found myself positively cringing and keeping my gloves on for fear it would have been seen, I have always been a gregarious person and I did not enjoy that feeling . . . as things are in New York, one could not possibly wear it publicly.” One could remark that the Taylor-Burton diamond was too big to wear on your hand and Elizabeth Taylor was right to have it made into a necklace, but I would probably add, “As things are in the world now, even if I could afford it, I would never feel politically correct with something of that value on my hand . . .”

  No, I never could compete on a carat-to-carat basis, but what I did have was an extraordinary collection of exquisite pieces. The silver-and-black beaded choker, the Piaget watch . . . And the loss of all of it was tangible and unsettling. I found myself panicking if I put my cell phone down and couldn’t remember where it was, or scribbled a number on a piece of paper that I then misplaced, or took my wedding band off in the kitchen and couldn’t find it in the morning on the bedside table.

  What was wrong with me anyway? I felt bereft, like a spurned lover or an abandoned child. And I resolved that I would never let myself feel that way again. I was done. No more emo. No more jewelry as armor, jewelry as protection, jewelry as memory, jewelry as a tangible way to hold on to someone. From now on, I would simply not care. I would have a layer of reserve, withhold my attachment. From now on, whatever jewelry I would accrue would simply be an accessory.

  And even though my husband instituted “the jewelry replacement plan,” which was terribly sweet of him, I generally wear only tiny gold wires in my ears and my wedding ring, unless we’re going out.

  Eighteen months later, a message was left on our answering machine. “Detective Dan Schultz, LAPD. We have recovered a load of jewelry. There’s some possibility it might belong to you. Call me please . . .”

  And even though I didn’t think any of it could belong to me, my heart sort of skipped a beat.

  I’d seen the report on the news. Burglar draws a treasure map and leads detectives to a jewelry cache. Treasury dug up by the 118 Freeway . . .

  It was some sort of Talented Mr. Ripley kind of thing.

  He was a strange character from a rich family; methodical, meticulous, sometimes he even cleaned up the houses he broke into so it would be days before someone realized they’d been hit. And part of the thing was the “rush” he felt when he broke into somebody’s house.

  As Detective Longacre of the LAPD’s Commercial Crimes Division explains it, they caught him “by luck and by golly” (his words, not mine). He’d rented a storage unit. In California, if you are six months behind in your rent at a storage unit, the owner of the facility has the right to auction off the contents of your box. They opened the box a crack so bidders could get a glimpse of what was inside and someone saw some gold coins and offered three hundred dollars. And they opened the box and found millions of dollars’ worth of jewelry and firearms, including a sapphire necklace that had once belonged to Eva Perón and a Degas ballerina painting. The thing is, the storage facility had auctioned off the wrong box by mistake—they’d meant to open the box next door . . . Once it was open and they saw the guns, they had to call the LAPD.

  The other thing they found inside the storage unit (and this is where it gets a little strange) was a computer, and on the computer was a fairly sophisticated program that’s used to create “a.k.a.’s.” And that’s how they found him. He’d used his own photograph in multiple identities he’d created, disguised, made-up, redone, different hair colors, facial hair, etc. . . . and nobody knows quite why. It was almost as if each burglary had to have a complicated disguise.

  Detective Longacre broke the image down (this is as close as LAPD gets to CSI) on a facial recognition database and generated a “generic” APB. In other words, they didn’t know his name but they had some idea of what he looked like and they generated a “Wanted” poster. A few months later, when he got careless and was apprehended during a burglary in progress in Encino, a West Valley cop ID’d him from the poster.

  They linked him to so many burglaries, he was facing 15 years, so his lawyer called up and said, “Do you want to know where he buried the rest of the jewelry?”

  The thief drew a detailed map from memory, so precise that it was chilling—three different aerial vie
ws, from above, lower, and then dead-on, with exact measurements: Highway 118, 0.75 meters from the fence, 0.7 meters underground, almost eerie in their accuracy and detail. On the other hand, if I’d buried 14 million dollars’ worth of jewelry, I’d probably want to remember where I put it, too.

  The cops didn’t believe him. But sure enough on the first shovel, they dug it right up.

  We have recovered a load of jewelry. There’s some possibility it might belong to you . . .

  The viewing wasn’t quite like what we thought it would be. We imagined vast quantities of jewelry laid out on velvet cloth . . . Instead there was a three-ring binder with photos that was passed around. The meeting room at the Van Nuys Police Station looks like a high school cafeteria circa 1968. The victims sat on benches hunched over chipped Formica tables. The jewelry was in bunches in little manila envelopes stored in big brown boxes and if you thought something might belong to you, they would bring the envelope over for inspection. None of it was mine.

  That night we went out to dinner with my friend Wendy and her husband. The moment we sat down, Wendy pushed a little silver box across the table. I opened it, and inside were two Hershey’s Kisses and a tiny antique platinum-and-diamond tennis bracelet. It was really pretty. “It belonged to my mother,” she explained.

  I put it on and suddenly I felt like I was attached to something. I wear it all the time now, like a piece of armor on my wrist. And I hold on to a time when jewelry was passed down and small trinkets were treasured and garden gates were left unlatched and probably, if we’d tried it (although we never would), the glass door to the patio had been left open, too.