“…How are things with you, by the way?” Jeffrey asked.
“Swell. You?”
“I’m going to a disco not long after this.”
“You most certainly are not, buster. Not in those clothes! The tabloids will have a field day. I can see them now—celebrity fashion disaster! That is one picture I do not want in my collection.”
“You have a collection?”
“As is necessary for my work.”
Joachim rarely sounded this aloof. He must really have been enjoying himself.
Jeffrey laughed and wondered, if he were to invite Joachim out to eat, where they would go. This was New York, so the Plaza Hotel? The Conrad? The Sofitel? The Grand Hyatt? There was only one answer when it came to Paris: the Ritz on the Place Vendôme. Oh, how he wished he could take the person on the other end of the line to dinner.
No sooner did that thought cross his mind than Joachim said, “You know, I wouldn’t mind having company for supper.”
“…Sorry?”
“So long as my company doesn’t mind something off the McDonald’s one-dollar menu. I’d love to catch up. It’s been too long.”
It was like Joachim had read Jeffrey’s mind. He was baffled. This felt like a magic trick gone wrong, as if he’d put a ball in one of several upside-down cups and moved them around only for the ball to pop out of the wrong cup. A seemingly impossible mistake. A mistake he knew better to indulge in.
Joachim, as ever, rolled with Jeffrey’s silence and tried to laugh it off. “Just kidding.”
Jeffey could play along, but it would cancel out the failed magic trick. It was the right thing to do, he knew.
And yet his mouth moved on its own. “Oh, not at all. You just surprised me, because I was thinking the same thin—”
Before he could finish his sentence, his phone lit up with an incoming call from his private secretary. Not his work phone, either. His cell. That signaled an emergency.
Jeffrey took a deep breath of the New York night and made his voice sound cheerful. “Sorry. Duty calls. I have to run.”
“Go do what you gotta do. I’ll send you those Hermes photos.”
“Thanks. Talk to you soon.”
In seconds, he switched lines and adopted a practiced harsh tone. “Hello?”
His secretary’s greeting was perfunctory at best before he cut to the chase. Jeffey listened attentively, waited just long enough to make it seem like he’d taken a pull from a cigarette, and asked the simplest of questions: “…When you say he moved the money, how many dollars are we talking? No…yen?”
Jeffrey’s smile gradually widened as he listened to the answer delivered in his secretary’s detached, professional tones. Excellent. He’d never felt happier. Never more alive.
After a final thank you, Jeffrey hung up and looked out beyond the balcony to the city below. His smile broadened. “So you’re alive after all,” he murmured. “I’m very glad to hear that, Richard.”
He pulled up his schedule on his phone to rearrange his upcoming appointments. It was time to work backward and plot his next course of action. Time to add it to his already flawless, already impregnable public presentation.
In the shadow of the seedy club, Jeffrey slumped across the “Ritz’s” dining table. Meanwhile, Joachim, dressed in sportswear and high heels, coiled around a silver pole running from the ceiling to the floor. Only after he finished his stretches and a planned routine for the club did he notice his audience’s complete lack of attention. Reluctantly, he left the pole and came over to the table.
“’Scuse me, sir. You gotta move. We’re closing.”
Jeffrey didn’t respond.
“Really, what’s gotten into you? You’ve been acting like a zombie all day.”
“…Something happened to me. You know that scene from Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair?”
“I’ve never read it.”
“…Well, something very, very good happened.”
“If this is good, I hate to see what bad looks like.”
The sympathy in Joachim’s voice when he said, “Must’ve been tough, whatever it was,” elicited a weak smile from Jeffrey. Joachim didn’t say another word but slid a McDonald’s Coke, the beverage of choice for tonight’s meal, over to Jeffrey. Jeffrey took a small sip before flopping back over the table.
The good news was that the cursed gemstone was not so cursed after all. It was only a phantom hatred, a father’s tender love for his son gone wrong. The present-day Claremont family’s emotional squabbles, tangled disputes, and petty quarrels were and had always been utterly meaningless.
It was starting to get hard to breathe. Jeffrey lifted his head and gazed up at the chandelier, but by now Joachim was back on the pole. Both he and Jeffrey were well versed in pretending not to notice things.
Joachim struck a pose at the end of his routine, to a smattering of applause. He took a bow and rejoined Jeffrey at the table. When Jeffrey still didn’t seem to be in a talkative mood, Joachim whispered, “Does this have something to do with that one thing? The pride thing?”
“Yes,” Jeffrey admitted at length.
Businessman and financial influencer Jeffrey Claremont’s active social media account had recently made the oddest post. “Love or money? My family chooses people who choose love. They make me proud.” Much speculation ensued, even a blogger suggesting too much work had made Jeffrey go off the deep end, but Jeffrey refused to explain himself and the post was eventually buried by newer photographs and videos. Now, Jeffrey himself wondered what had possessed him to post that. He must have just wanted to get the message out there, he supposed. Yes, a message to the young Japanese man he barely knew, the one he’d had his secretary run a background check on. Yes.
He forced himself to sound casual. “I guess it’s sort of related. Really, though, just slightly. I’m a little emotional, but it’s not a big deal or anything.”
“How did the outfit work out? You know, the jacket I picked to match the brooch you talked about wearing. I wanted something you could wear for lots of sightseeing after a long flight.”
“It was perfect. I wore it the whole time we toured London, and I didn’t have a single complaint.”
Joachim felt like a hand smoothing down the most ruffled part of his soul. Jeffrey didn’t understand why this dancer—this dancer who never seemed to get any richer, no matter how much money Jeffrey threw at him—could offer such a healing hand. All he knew was that this man had fished an unGoogleable nobody from a pool, thrust him into a bathrobe, and poured hot apple juice into him. Almost like a certain someone rescuing a different Claremont from a pack of drunkards.
Joachim didn’t remark on the unnaturally long silence that followed. Instead, he gave Jeffrey a helpful, sisterly look. “Can I get you anything to drink? I have OJ today.”
“I’m fine. I’m more of a Coke guy anyway. Did you know it’s even good for the common cold?”
“…You know, anyone would choose love if they had the option. The problem is, we don’t always get to make that choice.”
At that, the words rushed up and out of Jeffrey’s thoughts. When the time came to set his love for one brother against the other, why, oh why, had he not made a calmer, more rational decision? Even looking back on it made him want to die, but there was no point, because that would never let him go back in time and undo the past. Nothing would. He had chosen to live on, buried as he was under his own rhetorical questions, but it was such a thankless task. He had to live on, knowing what he had done. He truly regretted that he had never burned down the house with the diamond locked inside. And how…
“…Hey, Joachim?”
“Mm-hmm?”
“…So, can I ask…”
“Speak up. I can’t hear you.”
“…Can I ask when you had your first crush?”
“Why are you asking?”