“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?”
“Light.”
“Lola, on the off chance we don’t find it, it was an accident. He’ll forgive you. I mean, I forgive you already! And sorry but … must I be the one to say what we’re all thinking?”
“What are we all thinking?”
“It wasn’t hideous hideous, but…”
“He’s not going to mind. That’s the problem. He won’t mind and it will be easy to say it fell down a sink. The sink at a restaurant, our own sink, it really won’t matter. It’s insured and he’ll never know how strange it is that it fell off now, and he won’t know that I’m bad and he’s good and I’m a liar and he’s not and he’s healthy in the head and I’m sick in the head. And it wasn’t hideous.”
“Isn’t hideous. It’s not gone yet.”
I leaned against the doors and started to cry. This object that had felt so peculiar on my body for so long seemed, without question, like the most beautiful of its kind.
13
I held my arm above my head in the ceaseless glow of our bedroom, moving my bare hand through the morning air as if through water. I couldn’t sleep. I felt numb. A 24-hour plumber did, indeed, arrive at the scene. Not at lightning speed, but within two cigarettes and a whiskey soda from the bar down the street. But our hopes of him unscrewing the pipes were quickly dashed. The building was too old, the pipes too embedded. There was no way to address the problem in isolation; he’d have to rip out half the wall. As Vadis and I escorted him out, tipping him for this late-night evaluation, my legs drifted beneath me. I offered him a coffee. He looked at his watch, then again at me.
In the moment, I was devastated by the loss of the ring. I felt its closeness, like it could so easily not have happened. This was what I kept repeating to Vadis, a broken incantation, a spell that wouldn’t cast. But during the long walk home, I accepted the course of events, converting them to memory. The ring had fallen into a time and place marked by surrealness, a time and place that I had difficulty delineating as “the present,” so that now the loss of the ring felt as if it had happened to someone else.