Being alive meant having one thing after another happen to you. It was impossible to understand—to grapple with, to digest, to drink deep and swallow—all of them. This was no water from a faucet. These were things happening, happening, happening one after the other, every one of them too big for me, all of them forming a muddy stream I was swept up in and borne away on. By the time I looked up, I was already being washed out to sea on this wave of things I couldn’t possibly swallow in their entirety.
Maybe I was a little tired.
I stood at the entrance of the jewelry exhibit, still reeling. The room was dimly lit, and I caught a glimpse of security cameras. My body didn’t feel as heavy as when I had visited the British Museum’s jewelry exhibit, so I must not have been too exhausted.
An array of rings arranged in a multilayered spiral greeted my eyes. Rings, rings, rings. The centermost diamond ring drew my gaze as easily as if a tour guide had directed it there, and innumerable rings radiated out from that. They were arranged by color, not variety. Clear diamonds, colored diamonds, pale aquamarines, opals, moonstones, star sapphires, florites, tanzanites, blue sapphires, jades, peridots, emeralds, garnets, corals, carnelians, star rubies, padparadscha sapphires, spinels, red rubies… Oh my. Oh my God.
Rings from every era, of every size, were jumbled together. They were all so different, it was harder to find points of comparison. I was spellbound. I felt like I could hear someone saying to me, Isn’t this beautiful?
Meanwhile, in real life, a group of little girls ran past my knees, squealing to each other about how pretty it was. They spoke in French, and I wondered if they were siblings. Two years ago, I wouldn’t have known what they were saying.
Gemstones were beautiful.
I was grateful I still had a soul that could find the beauty in them. In the blinding brightness of confusion, of despair, of being really and truly at my wits’ end—that’s where I found the silhouetted figure of a kind man. And the loneliness deep within him.
Stones were beautiful. The sort of thing that made me appreciate just having them. Just them being there meant the world to me.
I walked through the rest of the dim, quiet exhibit. It was like a library of gemstones extending as far as the eye could see. A diamond tiara made up of finely detailed roses. A necklace featuring a ship made of horn-shaped baroque pearls and lapis lazuli, supposedly a good-luck charm for seafarers. A transformation bracelet made of rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. A necklace of enamel and moonstone designed by a figurehead of the art nouveau movement.
The jewelry pieces weren’t just laid out in uniform rows. Some pieces were positioned at head height for the viewers to see their reflections in the glass case wearing startlingly beautiful jewelry. The further I explored, the more I came to appreciate that idea. Every piece was of unbelievable quality. Some were, naturally, gifted to the museum by the royal family or aristocrats as a token of goodwill, but literally everything else was the kind of item that would never have been caught dead in any of the jewelry shops around here. The proceeds from selling just one could have paid for a house to be built from scratch.
It amazed me to imagine how much effort went into each and every piece. It felt like a waste, but at the same time, some part of me envied the people who put in all that effort. Beautiful things never die, as Saul once said. Putting your blood, sweat, and tears into something eternal was, in some sense, maybe the same thing as living forever—eternal life in one of the largest and most famous museums in the world.
The two little girls from earlier giggled together. “There’s more jewelry here! And here! And over there!”
In every jewel and piece of jewelry lived the souls of their miners, jewelers, goldsmiths, gem cutters, artisans, financiers, gifters, and giftees. I couldn’t see them. I didn’t have ESP, like most people. But that didn’t change the fact that gemstones were beautiful. Beautiful things existed exactly as they were, unchanging. Even when a person passed on. Even when a love ended. There they remained, those beautiful things.
After walking, walking, and walking some more, I found a place to collapse. I settled down on this backless bench and, before I realized what I was doing, nodded off like I had done countless times before on the Yamanote line. Yikes. This wasn’t Japan, so falling asleep in public was like asking to have your stuff stolen. Worse, it made trouble for the museum staff.
I told myself I had to get up, because I had to get up and go back. I stood up, staggered, and—stopped short when a person behind me caught me by the belt loop.
“Get your act together.”
That was Japanese. Impeccably pronounced Japanese. Spoken in a tender voice, as lissome as running water. But how?
“Richard? What are you doing here?”
Was this a dream? No, it was real. When I turned, there was Richard in the flesh on the opposite side of the bench. He nodded in greeting, if an exasperated greeting.
“You will fall if you stand up so suddenly. Sit.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
I brushed past my embarrassment and asked what happened to Henry and Jeffrey. Did everything go okay with the ring?
Richard smiled and shook his head. “I fear I have just received a complete and utter rejection, and I thought it advisable to seek out comfort from a bosom companion.”
My stomach twisted, but Richard still looked annoyed with me, so I tried my very best to hide how I felt. What was with me? Why was I so emotional?
“Were you listening to us…?”
“No. Deborah sent me a message. ‘A kind fairy led me to the V&A to meet a one Mr. Seigi Nakata. I found him to be an exceptional person.’”
“…A kind fairy…”
“One I shall have to treat to yum cha as thanks, I am sure.”
If Richard knew all that, then there was no point in hiding anything anymore. I took a deep breath. “Hey, so…Richard.”
“Yes?”
“Um, you know…”
“What is it?”
“I…”
I felt like I was going to cry. It was complete and utter self-pity, and the rational part of my brain told me to cut it out. But the emotional part pleaded that I wanted to cry, so I thought I could allow myself a single tear. It trickled from my right eye down my cheek.
“I don’t know if…I’m capable of doing right by you.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I used to think…I could give anything a shot if it was for you. That’s been my motto this whole time, and I want to keep trying hard for you. It’s just…”
That was all just to make me happy. It was making it all about me, me, me.
So maybe…
“I wonder if maybe…I haven’t been doing the right thing all along. All this ‘I’m doing it for you’ crap—that’s all an excuse to hide the fact that it’s for me. For what I want. I’ve just gotten really, really good at telling myself excuses. And if so…”
Then I could never live with myself.
Repairing things with Deborah wasn’t the only way Richard could be happy. That line of thinking was too similar to Octavia’s—using my desire to see a happy ending to justify forcing other people to fit my definition of happiness. No, that was cruelty.
All the same, another chance with Deborah was clearly one form his happiness could have taken.