8
Gemma had thirty days to vacate her apartment. She didn’t have any idea where she was going to find something as affordable. Her studio was a unicorn that she’d gotten through the NYSD student center. Now that she’d graduated, she was on her own.
She hadn’t realized, until faced with eviction, how buffered she’d been within the NYSD community. Her professors had been surrogate parents, her friends surrogate siblings. Now, with everyone either back to hometowns or hunkered down looking for jobs or already paired up with roommates, she was faced with a real problem to solve, without a safety net.
“I would offer to let you crash with me but that probably wouldn’t be the best idea. Considering,” Sanjay had said when they discovered the notice.
Sanjay shared a Brooklyn town house with his two older sisters, Daksha, a cellist, and Prishna, a med student. During the months of their relationship they rarely spent time there because the two women were always practicing or studying. And after the New Year’s Eve disaster, his sisters definitely weren’t her biggest fans.
Sanjay had taken her to a New Year’s Eve party at his friend Monica Del Mar’s apartment in SoHo. Also in the photography program, Monica was a tall brunette with attention-grabbing piercings. She bragged, a lot. Gemma had always found her irritating but it didn’t matter—she’d be with Sanjay, and wherever they went it felt like they were in their own little universe. They’d been together for over a half a year, and for the first time, Gemma was in a relationship with someone who was her best friend. They had passion without drama—something she previously believed to be impossible.
Monica Del Mar lived in a loft on Greene Street. Her parents got the apartment through an artist’s grant back in the 1970s, a time when artists could actually afford to live in SoHo. The space was cavernous, with big pillars the only dividing marks in the open living space.
The party had a DJ table and serve-yourself bar filled with bottles and bottles of vodka and tequila and trays of Jell-O shots. The latter, ultimately, did her in. Gemma did a few, felt nothing, and then within ten minutes was wasted. That’s when she saw Noam.
Sophomore year, Noam Levy had been the only classmate who shared her nearly obsessive interest in metalwork. Gemma had originally enrolled in NYSD planning to focus on gemology. It was, after all, her namesake. But she soon found herself just as enthralled with metals. There was something endlessly fascinating about the way metal and its alloys behaved, and how she could manipulate that behavior to create something new. And really, what was a stone without the setting? For Gemma, the ring itself—be it gold or platinum, silver or bronze, pure or plated—was as interesting as the gem it framed. The first time she made a necklace chain from scratch, a basic loop-in-loop, she felt like she’d invented the wheel.
Gemma and Noam could talk for hours about the science behind metalwork, how heat from the torch forced the crystals of metal to move apart. He was a master at forging; in his hands, a hammer was as precise an instrument as a scalpel. His hands were equally skilled on her body. They had sex more than once in a studio after hours, their bodies connecting wordlessly and perfectly, like a well-orchestrated solder.
But a few months into their relationship, Noam changed. He stayed up all night creating intricate metal sculptures that he was convinced would be displayed at the Whitney Biennial. He didn’t go to class and they stopped having sex. After not hearing from him for a few days, she went to his apartment and learned from his roommate that Noam’s mother checked him in to a psychiatric hospital. He was bipolar and had stopped taking his meds.
The sighting at the party was the first time she’d seen him since he took a leave of absence from school. Through the haze of alcohol, she couldn’t process it. Instead of seeing her ex-boyfriend, someone from the past, she was jolted right back to the headspace she’d been in when she last saw him. Since they hadn’t had a fight or a proper breakup, there was no closure. Even though she was happy with Sanjay, in the back of her mind Noam was still an open wound. And when he leaned forward and kissed her, she let him. It felt natural. It felt like . . . a punctuation mark. And if their hostess, Monica Del Mar, hadn’t seen them from across the room, that’s all it would have been. But then Monica told Sanjay.
Now, sitting alone in her apartment four months later, she was still paying the price.
Her phone rang, a number she didn’t recognize.
“Hello,” she said, standing up from her workbench for the first time in hours. Her back ached, and her thumb was turning black and blue from where she accidentally hit it with a hammer. Still, she’d gotten in a full day of metalwork; she had to replenish her stash of necklace chains for her Old New York collection. They were distinct, thicker than a typical necklace chain. Some were oval-link chains, some more industrial-looking edge link. All were finished with her signature lobster-claw clasp with GEMMA engraved in script.
“Hello, may I speak to Gemma Maybrook?” a female voice asked.
“This is Gemma.”
“Gemma, my name is Sloan Pierce. I work at Whitmore’s Auction House in the jewelry department. I believe you were at the Pavlin & Co party last week?”
“Um, yes. I was.”
“I noticed you because of your question about the Electric Rose. It seems we share an interest in it. Do you have time to chat over a cup of coffee?”
Gemma’s first instinct was to say no; the call violated her sense of privacy, her strong desire to stay under the radar when it came to her connection to the Pavlins. But maybe this woman was willing to tell her what Elodie Pavlin had not been: where to find her mother’s ring.
“Sure,” Gemma said. “Let’s talk.”
Elodie hated meeting with the accountants. Numbers didn’t lie; no matter how brightly the showroom glittered, the health of the company was determined by the spreadsheets and executives on the top floor. And today, the news was not good.
“That’s two bad quarters in a row,” her accountant said.
“I’m not an accountant, but I’m quite capable of counting to two,” Elodie said dryly. “There’s no need to panic. We’ve already seen a bounce from all the party publicity.”
But the problem, she knew, was that they couldn’t throw a party every day. It wasn’t just about two bad quarters; Pavlin & Co was losing its allure. Maybe it was time to reinvent the brand, the way her grandfather had in the 1940s, or the way her father had commanded the market in the mid-nineties. But Elodie wasn’t creative; she knew her best bet was to lean into their deep history. It was the one thing the flavor-of-the-month jewelers couldn’t compete with. She also knew the best way to do this was to move forward with the auction of the Pavlin Private Collection.
“You need to do more,” her accountant said.
Yes, she did. That’s why she was headed to Provincetown.