Cult Classic(61)

“Anyway. The idea was that the Classic would be like a man blizzard. Like the painting. Your life imitating art. An exquisite corpse of sorts.”

“A corpse of sorts?”

“But we gotta step on it a bit. Or step off it, rather. We’re gonna have time for exactly one more subject.”

“What does that mean?”

“Only one more Lola lovah!”

Clive started to strut down the hall, calling after Chantal. But I lunged for him, grabbing at his jacket. He moved like he was shaking off a beggar, surveying the material for signs of disruption.

“Clive!”

“I thought you’d be relieved. You’re not even part of this, remember?”

“I—I am relieved. I just thought the point of this was that I was supposed to have time to come to terms with the past. What if I’m not, like, cooked? What if it, I don’t know, grows back?”

“I don’t know what to tell you. Cook faster? You want to be done before your fiancé gets back. Which is when?”

“Two days from now.”

“Well, my advice would be to take a night off anyway. Your package is almost complete. And you don’t look so good.”

Did I feel the completeness of my package? I planned to tell Boots about approximately none of this, to put it in a box as Willis had done with me and as I had done with the ephemera of every single man I’d ever dated. I could do it. I could lie about these weeks for the rest of my life, about how they’d made my head spin and only managed to confuse me more than I was before I started. I envisioned myself as a ballerina on a stage in the moments after a performance; her chest moves like a hummingbird but she conceals all other evidence of her effort.

“It’s not my fault,” Clive continued, “that you’ve dated, like, a billion people.”

“Sometimes I think it is.”

He looked wounded. Clive’s eyes inspired an assumption of soulfulness the same way the weight of his hand on a shoulder gave off an air of empathy. But these were physical traits that had little to do with his actual personality.

“You can be a real piece of shit, you know that?”

“And yet,” he said. “And yet.”

Chantal stopped ahead of us. She called to Clive, waving her phone in the air like a flare. A car was waiting for them outside so we all filed out, gingerly, through the rotted chamber of the lobby. The atmosphere made it feel like we were a team, but we were a team only from here to the door. Chantal tiptoed past her bottle of coconut water but did not pick it up. Vadis and I watched her fold herself into the car, tucking the light load of her legs inside while Clive went around.

“You can always pull out,” he yelled, his head poking over the opposite side of the car. “Free will!”

Then he mimed punching himself in the face.

Vadis and I kept standing there, as if seeing them off on a steamship. Their brake lights stuttered through traffic and disappeared.

Who had I forgotten about? Who was coming? I felt exposed as I had not before. Then I realized it was because I was exposed. My left hand was bare. I lifted the hand to examine it, front and back, as if one side would produce a better result than the other. I rubbed my thumb against the base of my ring finger, back and forth like a cricket, trying to wrap my head around what I wasn’t seeing. Whose finger is that?

“Vadis,” I said. “My ring.”

My hand was shaking, the adjoining fingers in a state of sympathy shock.

“What? Oh my God.”

She grabbed my hand but I pried it away. I wanted an unobstructed view in case the ring magically returned, as if I could make it appear if I concentrated hard enough. Or maybe, if the members of the Golconda concentrated hard enough, they could will it back onto my hand.

“Inside,” I mumbled, tourniqueting one hand with the other.

“Okay,” Vadis said. “It’s okay. Remain calm. We’ll look for it when we go back in. God, I hope you didn’t lose it in the fucking vestibule.”

I visualized us shining our lights over the floor, resting them on some rat with its snout jammed into the band. We probably wouldn’t be able to spot it even then, the stone was so dull.

“Don’t worry, Lola, we’ll find it.”

This was the Vadis I loved. Emergency Vadis. Your one phone call from a Thai prison. Much as I appreciated her reassurances, I knew we would never find it. All of Clive’s acolytes and all of Clive’s investors could not put the ring and me back together again. Because I remembered now: I’d heard the tinkle of the thing going down the drain as I washed my hands. It was all that goddamn soap. Foiled by hygiene. In the moment, I assumed the sound was coming from farther down the trough, from one of Chantal’s bracelets banging against the faucet as she shared her thrill at seeing Hamlet, a play “translated from the Danish.” Shakespeare and Soren J?rgensen could have a grave-rolling contest.

“What do we do?” I asked Vadis, beside myself.

“We call a twenty-four-hour plumber. We see if they can snake the pipes or whatever the reverse of that is. Suck the pipes? Blow the pipes? Maybe it got stuck like Baby Jessica.”

“A ring is smaller than a baby,” I said, a revelation.

“Here, I’ll look one up. See? Here’s one with ‘lightning fast’ response time. What’s quicker than lightning?”