12

Clive was somewhere in the building but it was unclear where. This was a problem because he had, for some ungodly reason, brought Chantal with him.

Errol yanked me inside by the collar. He pointed at the coffee bar and, sure enough, there she was, a vision in sustainable fashion. To the delight of the baristas, Chantal was ordering an oat milk chai latte as she chatted with Jin. She stood with one foot turned out, as only former ballet dancers and influencers do. Women who know their angles. Chantal’s neck was similar to Willis’s thighs in that it was its own jurisdiction. Some people have a mouth full of teeth, this lady had a neck full of vertebrae.

I had the faintest inkling she would be inside. When I shone my flashlight over the treacherous path to the inner sanctum, I noticed an empty little bottle of coconut water. Chantal did not strike me as the littering type, but she did strike me as the type to let things just drop out of her bag without realizing it. Like Oscar, Chantal seemed loose when it came to the physical world, at once obsessed with her body and divorced from it, the kind of person who claimed not to see outer beauty but whose life would be threadbare without it. Unlike Oscar, this was because Chantal used social media as a proxy for her soul.

“Lola!” she exclaimed upon seeing me. “Madame! How killer is this joint?”

She spun in a circle, as if appreciating a first snowfall. Her hair was pressed into beachy waves that fell over an asymmetrical top that looked as if she’d pried it off a gondolier. She also had on false eyelashes, the good ones that looked like they’d been clipped from the tip of a lynx’s ears. The only time I dared invite such apparati into my life was on Halloween, when my inability to operate them would pass for drunken application. But I could not compute her presence here. Chantal was in on the Golconda too? Et tu, Chantal? I couldn’t imagine her keeping this place a secret, holding it all in, signing an NDA. Reading an NDA.

She held one of the Golconda’s business cards in her hand, squeezing the edges, making the little folder talk.

“Ho-la, Lo-la,” said the folder, in a demonic voice.

I could count my interactions with Chantal on one hand, but both in person and online, she would claim to be “obsessed” with all manner of nouns, including me. How would an obsession with a scented candle or a hairbrush or a pair of socks work? Posters of the socks. Driving past the childhood home of the socks.

“Hi, Chantal,” I said. “How’ve you been?”

That was all I could muster. For one thing, I was self-conscious about the state of my appearance in her presence. For another, seeing Knox had hit me hard. I was unprepared to interact with anyone aside from Vadis or Jin. Plus, I needed to reserve my small-talk allowance. I already felt like I was blowing a “how’ve you been?” on her.

“Not as great as you!” she said. “Tell me everything. You’re such a mini-genius.”

It would take a regular-size genius to know if she meant my intelligence or my height.

“Do you have a McCarthy genius grant yet?” she asked.

“Not yet,” I said, trying to relax my face. “Still chipping away at that communism.”

Jin rolled her eyes, grabbed her tea, and retreated to the interrogation room.

“Later, Jen!” Chantal called.

Jin stiffened but didn’t turn around.

“So,” I asked her, “how goes the beauty business?”

The times I saw Chantal on my own, I felt like her parent. The times I saw her with Clive, I felt like their child. I suspected this was confusing for everyone involved.

“Oh my God, crazy busy. I need a second one of me. Or to become a literal octopus. One e-commerce site, two newsletters, a blog, endless TikToks, and three Instagram accounts is mental hospital time. I was just bitching about it to Harold.”

“Errol,” Errol said, not for the first time.

“Anyway, I’m in brand partnership hell. I have, like, no interns lined up for the summer, and I’m going to murder Kate Hudson. You don’t even want to know.”

“Chantal,” Errol explained, teeth clenched, “is waiting for Clive. So that they can go to the theater.”

I heard whispering in the distance. Two women were walking fluidly overhead, like a pair of doctors making rounds. They were draped in grays and egg-shaped silver jewelry. Finally, I recognized one of them. I’d seen her the night Vadis brought me here but hadn’t made the connection until now. Her photo appeared frequently enough in publishing trade magazines: Jeannine Bonner. Amos’s book editor. The one who’d suggested the restaurant, a night that seemed strangely distant now. One had to admire the scope of Clive’s efforts. I held my breath, wanting to observe Jeannine, an eagerness that proved to be one-way.

“We’re seeing Hamlet,” Chantal piped in, waiting for a reaction, perhaps one that would indicate if she was in for a tragedy or a comedy.

“And,” Errol continued, “for some reason, Clive decided to come here first and she just had to come in with him. Just had to. Would. Not. Take. No. For. An. Answer.”

“I’ve been dying to tour Clive’s wellness center! This is exactly what this neighborhood needs. You would not believe how many clients I have who live around here, who have to go to SoHo just to get cupped.”

“The wellness center,” I said, meeting Errol’s pleading eyes.

“Gwyneth Paltrow is going to shoot jade eggs out her eyeballs when she sees this,” Chantal continued. “Do you realize how thirsty this city is for a natural integration and intersection of spirituality and creativity? Why should we leave Burning Man in the desert?”

“Because of the sand?” Errol asked.

“Clive’s a genius,” Chantal decided, no qualifiers for him.

Vadis emerged from the interrogation room, immersed in a text until she saw Chantal. She forced a smile, screwing the corners of her lips into her cheeks. Chantal was to Vadis as Amos was to Zach, a souped-up version of her most cherished powers. In Vadis’s case, this was a combination of urban bedouinism and a six-figure follower count across four social media platforms. But right now, it was panic, not jealousy, that I saw flash across Vadis’s face. Chantal asked who was going to give her an impromptu tour. She promised not to post any photos.

“Top secret,” she said. “Roll out social during the soft open. I get it. Clive keeps saying it’s a wreck. It doesn’t look like a wreck!”

I stared up at the chandeliers long enough for the bulbs to leave imprints behind my eyelids, floaters that drifted up and to the left.

“I’m just concerned about time,” said Errol. “What time’s the play?”

“That’s true,” said Vadis. “There’s no time.”

Her tone was gratingly deferential.

“No worries,” Chantal said. “You do your thing, girl. Lola will show me around.”

Chantal linked her arm around mine, sliding it in there like an eel. She didn’t know I was the subject of an experiment. She also assumed the endgame went something like “clear your pores, stabilize your mood.” Vadis tried to crush me with her eyes but I ignored her. Chantal assumed I had the run of the place, and who was I to correct her?

“It would be my honor,” I said, walking toward the garden with Errol trailing closely behind us.

“We’re not gonna shoplift,” I assured him. “Your hundred-pound geode is safe.”

“There’s a crystalarium in here?” Chantal asked brightly.

“Where did you get that shirt?” I asked, turning my attention to her. “I’m obsessed with it.”

Errol skipped ahead of us and offered to take over. His explanation of a garden rang true enough. Here is where the Golconda grew flora with “ayurvedic properties” to be used for everything from “olfactory assists” to, well, garnish. He tacked on that the garden was a physical demonstration of how the natural could be filtered through the man-made and come out natural again. A living demonstration of the laundering of energy. It all sounded very wellness-forward indeed. Chantal must’ve thought so too because she kept closing her eyes, letting the words refresh her like a hydrating mist.

“Is that true?” I whispered to Errol as Chantal paced around the birds of paradise.

“It’s a garden,” Errol hissed, “with plants.”

“You’re good.”

His explanation of the interrogation room was equally convincing. Chantal came from a world of Reiki healers and chakra realignments, so explaining that the equipment was there to achieve some kind of higher physical state was an easy sell. She picked up one of Jin’s suction cups and stroked her face with it. I wondered if it had been cleaned since last I’d licked it.

“Sweet map,” she said, pointing at the wall and spinning back out the door.

We heard the phrase “chic sculpture” and followed her into the atrium.

“It’s an elevator,” I said.

“Does it work?”

“No,” said Errol, surprising even himself.

I looked at him. He mouthed, “I don’t know.”

A few more members—two women and a man—exited from behind the garden. No one I recognized this time. They were like Oompa Loompas, these people.

I decided to throw in a few questions of my own, just to make Errol squirm. Like, say, what the fuck was the point of a full coffee bar before the “soft opening”? And was it not wasteful to hire not one but two baristas? Errol deftly pinned this on Clive’s attention to detail. Chantal put her hand on her heart as if compulsion and consideration were the same thing.

“And what’s the room behind the garden?” she asked, pointing.

“Huh?”

“I heard a door slam behind the garden.”

“Supply closet,” Errol spat out.

“I have to pee,” I said, raising my hand. “May I be excused to pee?”

“No, you may not.”

“I have to go too,” Chantal said, pressing my arm to her side. “Harold, can we have the hall pass?”

“Oh, can we, Harold? Please?”

She pouted. Then I pouted.

Errol begrudgingly gestured down the hall opposite the meditation room. But he couldn’t very well follow us into the stalls. Instead, he watched for as long as he could, like a parent waiting to give his children over to a yellow bus. I heard him dart back into the interrogation room when our backs were turned, presumably to find Vadis. Or hide any open files on my exes. It was sloppy for Clive to have brought Chantal here, having lied to her about what this place was, and then leave her unattended.

I’d never pissed in the Golconda before but I was not surprised to see the bathroom was impeccably designed with tiles artfully splashed on the floor in pomegranate bursts. The wallpaper had zebras floating across it, and a communal sink, a trough framed by vases filled with birds of paradise. Chantal placed her phone on the ledge beneath the mirror. So many followers and invitations, so much fabulous ease, were just a password away. As we washed our hands, I felt the need to scrub harder and longer than her, to lather my forearms with soap, thereby subliminally transmitting an air of superiority.

As we left, I suggested a shortcut back and told her to follow me. She tittered with delight. We rounded the hall behind the elevator and scuttled past it. I could still see through the glass, but the brass wheels, frozen in place, impeded my vision. I hoped the same was true for Errol, who I could just make out, pacing in the atrium, waiting for us to return. I took Chantal’s hand, crouched down, and rushed past him.

Finally, I thought.

No one seemed to have a problem explaining to me, in unsolicited detail, how the technical portion of the program worked, how the Golconda were delving into my life, moving people around like chess pieces. It was the meditative portion—what the members were actually doing when they came here—that remained a haze. Did all these people really just come here to sit and think about me because Clive had convinced them to? It was time to find out.

But behind the garden was just a curved wall, covered in white wallpaper with a silver bar pattern, like a minimalist interpretation of the Magritte painting. There was no sign of a door. And yet both Chantal and I had heard the sound of a door. This was confounding to me but completely logical to Chantal.

“Ha!” she exclaimed, as if the wallpaper had told her a joke. “Clive really does think of everything.”

She pressed on one of the silver bars, which, as it turned out, was the door handle, and pulled the door open.

“We have the same thing in our guest bathroom. It drives the housekeeper insane.”

I let Chantal go first while I kept a lookout. She leaned her head in at the same pace Rocket liked to employ while stalking a toy mouse. I could tell it was bright behind the door, because Chantal squinted. I strained to hear oms, but all I caught was the hum of an air-conditioning unit. I did, however, see the edge of a piece of furniture in the corner, what looked like a white duvet cover on the corner of a bed.

That’s all I got before Clive pushed the door into our faces and slammed it.

“Babe!” Chantal scolded. “You nearly took my skin off.”

Clive and I both flinched at the specificity of the image. Standing beside him was a scowling Vadis. His heavy.

Clive apologized for disappearing. He was uncharacteristically unkempt. His bright eyes were bloodshot, half-moons of overworked skin beneath them, his five o’clock shadow looking as if it’d been there since 4 a.m. He clearly thought that he would be at Chantal’s side, but something had kept him preoccupied. His expression was familiar. I’d seen it when I caught him on the phone in the atrium the other night and the morning, years ago, when he explained that he could no longer keep the magazine on life support. It would die no matter what he did.

“That’s okay,” Chantal said, adding, coyly, “So what’s behind Door Number One?”

Clive offered a half-coherent explanation about logistics that were causing him grief. Something about how you should never put your fate in other people’s hands when they have their wallet in yours. I could tell he was lying about something. But Chantal dropped it. Just like that, she turned a dewy cheek. I could see what it was he saw in her. She knew when to tease him, when to compliment him, how to parse out her own upset so that he listened when a crisis arose but never felt the burden of girlfriend maintenance. I had no faucet like that, not with Clive, not with Boots, not with anyone. It was a point of pride. It had also never gotten me what I wanted, not once.

As we walked back toward the entrance, Vadis feigning interest as Chantal explained how she lost followers every time she appeared to be “taken,” Clive hung back with me and whispered.

“Who’d you see?”

“Knox.”

“The guy who decked you?”

“That’s Phillip.”

“I always liked Phillip.”

“You would. Knox is the librettist with mommy issues.”

“Oh, right. We won an ASME for that issue.”

“Clive.”

“Anyway, we have a teensy problem. But maybe it’s a good problem. And maybe not so teensy. Entirely up to you.”

“You say ‘free will’ and I swear to God, I will slap you in a synagogue.”

“I’m getting some pushback from a couple of key investors.”

“What’s their problem? Aside from a stunning lack of moral instinct.”

“I—we—may have bitten off a tad more funding than we’re prepared to chew on the projected timeline, so we need to press pause before we can explore another round of packages.”

“What do you need rounds of funding for?”

He arched his back like he wanted to crack it.

“They just want to see more proof that this is working. Money people have no vision, you know this. You thought the magazine biz was bad? Try the real world.”

“I never thought it was a ‘biz.’”

“Anyway. The idea was that the Classic would be like a man blizzard. Like the painting. Your life imitating art. An exquisite corpse of sorts.”

“A corpse of sorts?”

“But we gotta step on it a bit. Or step off it, rather. We’re gonna have time for exactly one more subject.”

“What does that mean?”

“Only one more Lola lovah!”

Clive started to strut down the hall, calling after Chantal. But I lunged for him, grabbing at his jacket. He moved like he was shaking off a beggar, surveying the material for signs of disruption.

“Clive!”

“I thought you’d be relieved. You’re not even part of this, remember?”

“I—I am relieved. I just thought the point of this was that I was supposed to have time to come to terms with the past. What if I’m not, like, cooked? What if it, I don’t know, grows back?”

“I don’t know what to tell you. Cook faster? You want to be done before your fiancé gets back. Which is when?”

“Two days from now.”

“Well, my advice would be to take a night off anyway. Your package is almost complete. And you don’t look so good.”

Did I feel the completeness of my package? I planned to tell Boots about approximately none of this, to put it in a box as Willis had done with me and as I had done with the ephemera of every single man I’d ever dated. I could do it. I could lie about these weeks for the rest of my life, about how they’d made my head spin and only managed to confuse me more than I was before I started. I envisioned myself as a ballerina on a stage in the moments after a performance; her chest moves like a hummingbird but she conceals all other evidence of her effort.

“It’s not my fault,” Clive continued, “that you’ve dated, like, a billion people.”

“Sometimes I think it is.”

He looked wounded. Clive’s eyes inspired an assumption of soulfulness the same way the weight of his hand on a shoulder gave off an air of empathy. But these were physical traits that had little to do with his actual personality.

“You can be a real piece of shit, you know that?”

“And yet,” he said. “And yet.”

Chantal stopped ahead of us. She called to Clive, waving her phone in the air like a flare. A car was waiting for them outside so we all filed out, gingerly, through the rotted chamber of the lobby. The atmosphere made it feel like we were a team, but we were a team only from here to the door. Chantal tiptoed past her bottle of coconut water but did not pick it up. Vadis and I watched her fold herself into the car, tucking the light load of her legs inside while Clive went around.

“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 Jørgensen 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.