15.
Many summers later, I returned to New York by train—this time as a wealthy woman, with Simon beside me across all that empty, painless air. We had taken the Palmetto from Savannah, then sauntered across Pennsylvania Station, with a man beside us to haul our bags and to find our taxi, saving us from that which bodily differentiates the rich from the poor: exertion. Still, neither the years nor our money had fixed the sweltering weather.
We stayed at The Plaza, taking turns in the cold shower before appearing for brunch with Joseph, whom we’d seen only a few times in the decades since his visit to Lyra. Unlike Simon, Joseph had grown less handsome with time: he had lost much of his hair, and his youthful muscle had devolved into extra weight, making him all the more uncomfortable in the heat. He spent half an hour with us, fanning himself miserably, all the while hunting for sport among the exotic ladies who seemingly had business at the hotel. Unaware of his brother’s distractions, Simon was working anxiously to convince Joseph of something: additional investment, yes, the equipment we need, from somewhere far away . . .
“But you’ve gotten nowhere with this scheme, in all this time, Simon. How long have you been digging in those waters? Thirty years?”
“That’s because we didn’t have the drills to go deep enough. The real stuff, I’m convinced, is out farther, and what we’re pulling up is just residue drifting with the currents. These new drills are revolutionary. No one in the history of mining has ever done this, Joe. This isn’t like oil.” Simon was pleading now. “We’re like the first men to walk in space. We’re trying to discover something that no man has ever held in his hands. These stones hold the secrets of—”
“This isn’t like walking in space. In space there are planets and moons. Down there, so far, it’s zilch,” Joseph replied. “Besides, they just found diamonds in the ocean off Africa. Father sent you to the wrong coast. Personally, I think he got fed a tall tale by that good ol’ boy Clarke. Next, they’ll find diamonds in the North Pole and we’ll still be digging around in a humid swamp. We’re not even in the game anymore, Simon.”
“But,” Simon began to protest, “this is my project. Father assigned it to me and not you for a reason. He told me—”
“You’re right, and the good news is, despite your own thick-headedness, you’ve come across something that might be more lucrative than we expected. My Yale boy—and I know how you love those Ivy Leaguers—has been studying that dust from the phantom jewels you sent up our way. He says there’s some medicinal use for it. We don’t need the darn gems whole at all!”
“Have you lost your goddamn mind, Joe?” Simon’s voice shook.
“Everyone here in New York says the future’s in pharmaceuticals. Specifically, for psychiatric treatment. Goddamn happy pills. Diamonds are the past. Who needs a diamond when you can swallow something that makes you feel like you’re made of money?”
“You can’t actually believe that the Caeruleum residue can be used for a useless pill!” Simon shouted.
“What the hell was that, Simon? Celery-what?” Joseph asked.
“It’s Latin for ‘blue.’ My trademark for the gem,” Simon said proudly. His gaze wandered dreamily out of the room, the way it used to at the piano. “It has the flair of the classical. I can see the ads already: ‘Eternal Caeruleum.’ ”
“You better leave the ads to us up in New York. Eternal Celery is no ‘A diamond is forever.’ ” They bickered some more, but the die was cast. “This is the last check I’m signing for your little folly,” Joseph announced, his eye resting on a redhead perched by the elevators, a younger, curvier doppelgänger of Deborah. She returned his gaze. Later, they would doubtless have an appointment.
“And one more thing—about all those people you’re still carrying on your payroll,” Joseph said. “Do you think your little sandcastle really requires hundreds of workers?”
“Mining is not easy work,” Simon insisted, descending from his recent blue-toned vision.
“All right, little brother. Enough interrogation. I’m starting to sound like our mother. Come out to Southampton this Friday, pay us a visit. I’ll get you the money by then. Besides, it’s always ten degrees cooler out there, I swear it.” Joseph stood up to leave, peering toward the lobby to ensure that the primary conquest of the brunch had not abandoned him.
“Southampton? What happened to Neponsit?” Simon asked, bewildered.
“Ah, we sold that years ago. Too much riffraff. I forgot to tell you—I’ve been dabbling a bit in real estate as well. You’d do well to diversify yourself, Simon—but I know you’re a romantic. Making money for money’s sake is for us vultures.”
As it was fated, we went to Long Island the following Friday, driving out of the humid, summer-sickened city into the fresh, green sleeping world beyond. From the window I hunted, the entire way, for that château beyond the trees I’d been to decades before. It was near dusk as we approached the valet in Southampton, and I looked on in wonder at the line of stunning cars before us. One day we’ll drive cars more beautiful than these, Gabriel had said, his arm locked in mine, as we shuffled toward that nervous valet all those years ago.
Joseph and Deborah’s home sat on four odd acres, edged against a colder, more apathetic Atlantic Ocean. The walls were all perfectly white, the surfaces too clean, and a pot of orchids set at the square center of every table. The hedges were trimmed all along the yard. There was nothing wild left. Even the ocean beyond the estate was disappointing, its view displayed there for all time with no oak or dune to veil it. The help attended to us from the service entrance, serving us tiny flecks of pastry with names they could hardly pronounce. The party, instead of beneath the twilight, was held stuffily in a tent. The crowd could not stop guffawing over the attending musician; I heard the ladies whispering that he was a great genius, a graduate of Juilliard, a soloist about to tour the globe. “He belongs in a department store,” Simon said of the pianist, jealously though astutely.
Deborah, in a gaudy perfume, searched the scene for her husband like a panicky pigeon. Finally, her eyes landed on me, her lonesome sister-in-law. “Elle, you must try one of these vodka martinis. They are more slimming than wine, and far more fun. Wine just makes you depressed,” she said as if following a train of thought.
“Oh, are martinis all the rage in New York this month?” I said, feeling suddenly that I’d never been a New Yorker at all. New York was a truth beyond question only to those locked inside of it. “Well, call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer wine.”
“Oh, Elle, you’re adorable. At least we know Ray got his voracity for liquor from the Raniers and not you.” She chuckled, then turned her gaze beyond me to more interesting company.
Could this be the same magical Long Island I remembered? Joseph’s was the sort of party that makes life feel irreal. Beneath the chattering faces I saw cackling skeletons. As Simon passed from person to person in the tent, I sat nursing one glass of wine, then another. These people, I sensed, knew something about Simon that he himself couldn’t know—the way they smiled at him, once he spoke his name, nodding with familiarity, then made their apologies a dozen seconds too soon for polite disregard. Simon no longer belonged to New York. This society was for those whose money could never disappear. And ours had as a foundation only a phantom treasure.
At last Simon surrendered, returning to me.
“All these Yankees can go to hell,” he groused.
“Oh, and I suppose you’re a real Confederate now?” I said.
He looked at me more darkly than I had expected. “Did you speak to anyone at all tonight?” he asked. “You could try, Elle. See how these wives all wear their pearls and make conversation, too? They’re intellectuals.” He emphasized this last word like I didn’t know what it meant. “Down in Lyra, you used to be the life of the party. I don’t know what’s happened to you—”
“Time, Simon,” I replied. “Time’s happened to me, and to you.”
We emerged from the party early, back on the path toward the valet by nine in the evening. There was nothing above us, no tree shroud or mystical rosebush, nothing to shelter us from the oblivious New York sky. Simon hailed a blank-faced valet, a professional, not a boy blinking from fear.
“Excuse me, but aren’t you Mr. Ranier’s brother?” the valet asked.
“Fuck Mr. Ranier,” Simon muttered.
Without missing a beat, the valet removed an envelope from his shirt pocket. “Mr. Ranier entrusted me with this envelope for you. He told me to tell you it’s for that celery you two spoke about.”
Returning to the city—to that bestial August when the country was still at war in Vietnam—we spent our last day shopping along Fifth Avenue. How much did we spend? It didn’t matter to Simon. He had Joseph’s check in his breast pocket, and he still believed we were soon to uncover the wildest of fortunes, one that would finally be wholly our own. The crowd down the avenue moved slowly, pausing every few steps to stand in awe of the fashions in the shop windows.
“When we get those gems out from under that ridge, Joseph won’t know what hit him,” Simon went on, as if to himself—a sermon on blue and diamonds, starlight, star bright, completely unmindful of the human traffic swarming around us. It was too hot to jostle or push or walk any faster than everyone already was, so when the shirtless man approached us, we had no way to avoid him. His face came so close to mine, it seemed he might kiss me. And then, as soon as he passed, I found my purse was gone.
The country was full of men lately returned from the war, looking shaken and confused, and this one seemed to fit the part. His pants were ripped, his hair disheveled. Strangest of all, he didn’t run away; he seemed to have no intention of actually stealing my purse, only taking it and tossing it back and forth in his grimy hands. I felt, as I’ve often felt with the mad, that he was the recipient of some profound truth I would never know. “I can smell you, you know,” he shouted in a broken voice. “You think you can smell me. But I can smell you. You stink just like me! You stink!”
With that he threw my purse into the street, and all the contents poured forth from it. As we scrambled to draw up the strewn items, he jumped into the screaming crowd, disappearing and reappearing to me among their faces. “You all stink. The whole American soil stinks,” he yelled. “You know what you stink of? You stink like money. Money stinks worse than the shit out of your ass. Try and smell it. Put that dollar bill up your nose and see you don’t smell the scent of your own putrid souls.”
I could still hear his voice once we were safely inside The Plaza, cosseted by the lyrics of “Autumn in New York,” sung by a woman in a dazzling gold gown. I smelled something sour in the subtle perfume wafting through the lobby, there to invoke the impression of money itself and all it could buy: the illusions of safety, security, beauty, immortality. But money has only ever been that—a prosthetic, a mirage. It never did save my life.
“Elle, you’re shaking,” Simon said in the elevator up to our room. “You know, maybe Joe is onto something about these happy pills. What if we mentioned them next time we pay a visit to Madera? It couldn’t hurt if you tried something new. They seem to be very trendy here in New York.”