SEVENTEEN

Kezia

I can’t breathe.” Rachel spun through the office, a whirling dervish in platform sandals. “It’s hot as a scrotum out there.”

The temperature in New York had been steadily rising before Kezia left for Caroline’s wedding. An official heat wave, more punishing than Miami and somehow worse in the open air of the Meatpacking District than anywhere else in Manhattan. Kezia could feel every stitch of her clothing, as if she had been slipped psychedelic drugs. And it wasn’t even June. She told herself that this was just a cold day in Calcutta and fantasized about October, about pumpkin-flavored things.

“Look at this, it’s disgusting.”

Rachel stopped in front of Kezia’s desk. She tore off her blazer and lifted her arm. Bits of black fuzz were caught like Spanish moss on armpit stubble.

“Don’t they know I don’t have a shower at work?”

“They?”

“God.”

Rachel adjusted her strapless jumpsuit. She lifted her necklaces as if they were contributing to her oppression. Rachel’s bulldog, Saul, sniffed at a heating pipe in the corner, exploring a new paint chip. The office was a loft space with painted-over pipes, crumbling exposed brick, and giant, old lead-paned windows—a health code violation at every turn. But the floors were blond and glossy, the desks Danish and cream. Saul’s leash dragged behind him as he sniffed for paint chips like a pig digging for truffles.

Eat it, Kezia thought.

“You want me to get him some water?” asked Marcus, the bookkeeper, crossing the loft and reaching for Saul’s leash.

The dog was missing his bottom teeth and was in a perpetual state of panting. Even for Saul, this was a particularly low tongue day.

“No, the vet says Saul’s supposed to have filtered water.”

“Your veterinarian told you that?” said Marcus.

Kezia looked forward, forcing her cheeks to stay level. Marcus was approximately twenty years Kezia’s senior, father of two girls, homeowner in Queens, recent installer of a Zen waterfall. In an office full of young women who seemed to get off on making panicked phone calls about missing samples (actually, Kezia knew they got off on it because she used to be one of them), Kezia liked Marcus the best. Sometimes she saw him as the embodiment of her former, kinder self, the last thread between her and her idealized version of herself. Which was a lot of pressure to put on a bookkeeper.

Rachel stood there, aerating her chest by snapping the jumpsuit elastic against it. Marcus went to pet Saul and the dog growled at him, a growl that sounded like a gurgle because of the missing-teeth issue.

“We had a wild dog break in through the back fence last summer and my youngest chased it away by screaming and waving her doll at him.”

“That’s ah-mazing,” Rachel said, widening her eyes at Kezia.

“They eat dog meat in Vietnam.” Marcus returned to his desk. “Chinese, cats. Vietnamese, dogs.”

Marcus had been working at the company seven months longer than Kezia. They were workforce Irish twins. But once Rachel picked up on the fact that Kezia would not burn her business to the ground if left to fill out order forms, she saw no reason to interact with both of them. Even in the face of a legitimate financial emergency, Rachel avoided calling Marcus. Kezia suspected Rachel was put off by the sound of banging screen doors, of oil in frying pans, of Marcus’s daughters playing in the background. Or of calling Queens period, her voice touching down in a borough that didn’t quite care enough about her.

“I should grab some water too,” said Rachel. “All my water is on the outside of me right now.”

On cue, an eavesdropping assistant in cowboy boots came skipping over with a freshly cracked bottle.

“You’re a lifesaver, Sarah.”

The assistant, Sophie, beamed. “Sarah” was close enough.

Then she skipped back from whence she came. Kezia attempted to stealthily peel back the tin on the yogurt she had brought from home. Liquefied, it spat up on her shirt like a baby. Her stomach jiggled a little as she wiped.

She knew she was thin for all of America, but she was an ogre compared with the girls who worked in this neighborhood. She had to actively resist staring at other women’s thighs as she walked to work each morning. Her test for body dismorphia went as follows: If she could lob a golf ball between the thighs of the woman walking in front of her, she felt jealous. If she could lob a bowling ball, she felt superior. A magazine had once told her she was supposed to say nice things to her body, to brush her self-esteem before bed. “Stand naked in front of a full-length mirror and tell yourself: ‘I have a good butt’ or ‘I have nice breasts.’”

“How was your vacation?” Rachel said, pulling her lips fiercely from the bottle.

“It was a wedding. It was only Miami and it rained the whole time.”

“Did you go to the thing at the Shore Club?”

“What thing?”

“Never mind. You should have told me you were going. I could have called Reginald and gotten you a rate at the Setai.”

Kezia didn’t know who Reginald was, nor had she heard of the Setai until the day after the wedding. And only then because it was located near the wedding brunch. Furthermore, Rachel knew exactly where she was going because Kezia had, in fact, told her and they had, in fact, spoken while she was there.

“Next time tell me where you’re going.”

Her boss had a way of deftly racking up conversational credit, offering to pull strings long after all the puppets had been put away.

“I don’t know why I didn’t say anything,” Kezia said, Saul panting at her feet.

The dog’s dry tongue scraped against her skin, hoping her foot was a giant paint chip. She moved her toes behind her ankle to protect them.

“Do you have a napkin on you?”

“In the kitchen.”

Rachel made the same face as Kezia did upon hearing of Reginald. The kitchen was a room she was supposed to have heard of, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She cautiously opened the fridge and poured something into her coffee.

She frowned into her cup. “I hate it when soy does that.”

The milk separated into algae-like blooms. It looked undrinkable.

“My phone is ringing.” Rachel dug in her bag and held up the chiming device.

She marched into her glass office. Saul trotted along after her, his abbreviated tail twitching, flaunting his white asshole. Marcus filled a bowl with tap water, set it down, and got back to work. They listened, along with the other employees and interns scattered around the loft, as Rachel attempted to defend the engineering behind a faulty necklace to a boutique in Chicago. It was a conversation Kezia had heard a lot of recently.

Most of Rachel’s pieces were manufactured on the other side of the loft, a straight shot from Kezia’s desk. But the more major pieces, especially those with semiprecious stones or vintage milk-glass shards, were produced off-site. And something about the production of one of Rachel’s necklaces was causing the clasp to snap. A customer would idly touch her neck and poof: her necklace had vanished.

Normally, these complaints would not be handled by the designer herself but things had come to a boiling point. The returns were becoming increasingly plural. As Kezia saw it, Rachel had three options:

1. Blame the design (not an option).

2. Blame herself (marginally more of an option).

3. Blame Kezia (best option).

The necklace was Rachel’s baby—her design—but she left the production details to Kezia. This put Kezia in the role of foster parent: She couldn’t take credit for the necklace’s creation, but she could be blamed for its destruction.

An upbeat electronic noise came from her computer.

What are u wearing? said an instant message bubble.

Kezia concentrated on the pixels, unsure if there was more where that came from.

This is Judson.

Rachel was pacing intently around her office. Another bubble appeared.

xo, bubble, Judson.

Kezia assessed herself. Today she had put on a silk tank, pajama-looking pants, a series of toggle-clasped bracelets, and a long necklace of ribbons and nickel-cast squid tentacles from Rachel’s first line. Though not required to wear Rachel Simone jewelry, she was encouraged.

Pants. Kezia pressed send.

U mean only pants? haha, Judson shot back instantly.

I’m at work, so . . .

In actuality, “only pants” was not a terrible guess. Kezia could see a dark bra through a junior designer’s crop top. Another girl wore an outfit that had seemingly been shredded by rival wolf packs. Meanwhile, inside Rachel’s office, the debate with the Chicago store was heating up. Rachel invoked her full name, preceded by the word “the” and followed by the word “brand.”

“I am sorry you feel that way,” she said insincerely.

Kezia caught a commiserate eye roll through the glass wall.

“. . . but to imply faulty manufacturing over such a small percentage of . . . of course I stand by everything we produce but I hope you can understand why I don’t wholly share in your . . . True, but you’re not calling Cartier. These are one-of-a-kind pieces. Look, have you ever had an heirloom tomato?”

There was a silence.

“Well, it looks deformed but you still eat it.”

The upbeat noise was back: Catch you on the flip side, beautiful.

The flip side of what?

“Overpriced?” Rachel shouted into the phone. “Overpriced!”

Marcus looked at Kezia and shrugged. The girl in the ravaged outfit clicked her pen.

Rachel’s jewelry was, on the whole, overpriced. Especially this particular line. Huge silk necklaces with uncut crystals dangling from them, each one more expensive than the next, culminating in the exorbitant Starlight Express necklace. But the line was receiving a deluge of accolades from the press. The trade magazines quoted Rachel saying things like “I like to draw my inspiration from the minutiae of large-scale structure.” One photo shoot featured Saul, shot from behind with a pile of necklaces hooked over his tail. Rachel liked it so much she had the photo blown up and framed behind the toilet. Marcus had to pee into the barrel of Saul’s butthole. If word got out that the Starlight Express was breaking, it would be bad for everyone.

Kezia would be removing the Chicago store from the database by day’s end.

“Special K!” Rachel opened her office door and Kezia scurried in.

“That’s my most favorite name in the world.”

Rachel shut the door behind them and looked out through the glass.

“I’m pretty sure I wasn’t followed,” Kezia whispered.

Rachel put her hands over her face and dragged her fingers down as she spoke.

“How many of these things are fucked up?”

“The Starlight Express? I wouldn’t say they were ‘fucked up.’”

“There’s no need to defend their honor to me. My name’s on them. I’m allowed to be mean to them.”

“In that case . . . somewhere in the range of all?”

“All?”

“Well, yeah. Cassie came in to shoot them for the line sheets last week and we couldn’t even get the clasps to lie flat in order to photograph them. I think all of them have the same problem from the same vendor—Claude Bouissou in Paris—it’s endemic to the clasp itself.”

“Endemic.” Rachel rolled the word in her mouth like a marble. “It’s the weight, isn’t it? I knew this would happen with the big crystals, but they look like nineties prom jewelry when they’re small. I’d have Sarah run up to Forty-seventh Street to just get the clasps fixed if I thought that would work.”

“That won’t work.”

“You know what? Cloisonné was a bad choice.”

She drew the word out as she pronounced it. The clasp of the necklace was too good for the rest of the necklace. Kezia had tried to stop Rachel, but Rachel had refused to listen.

The clasp was enamel but not just any enamel. Cloisonné— specialized French enamel made by hand in an old-world factory, using an expensive technique rivaled only by the Chinese, who used to cover whole flower vases in cloisonné. The Chinese, clearly, had more patience than the French, who had perfected it for jewelry. Kezia would go blind doing what these jewelers did, covering a metal surface with hundreds of wire shapes, then filling each enclosure to the brim with crushed pigment. Even at her old job, they didn’t use cloisonné. Too expensive and too slow. A clasp like that was slumming it on the Starlight Express.

A celestially themed wonder, the necklace had been a problem from the day they received their salesman samples. Beneath the enamel stars (which were chipping, for some reason) was an intricate box tongue mechanism that double-shut with magnets. There was just so much to break.

“They were a fortune to make, too.”

“I know,” said Kezia.

“Also, what are you wearing?” Rachel twisted her face.

“That’s the question of the hour, huh? A shirt.”

“You look like you’re going to a funeral.”

“That’s because more than twenty percent of my body is covered.”

“Someone’s being a little sassy for someone who’s dressed like she’s going to a funeral.”

“Fine. About the clasp, I don’t have a magic wand. I wish I did. No one knows that necklace better than I do. I mean, almost no one.”

Rachel sat in her chair, turning Saul’s ear inside out, examining the pink.

“What you really know is these snotty, temperamental fine jewelry people.” She sighed. “Do we think there’s a chance that our friend in France caught on to the fact that we dodged his minimum?”

“It’s possible.”

Actually, it was definite. To create a custom part from Claude Bouissou required a minimum order of 400 units. Otherwise it wasn’t worth it for him. But, successful as Rachel was, she couldn’t afford to take that bet. So she got around the minimum by placing a large order (about 150) of “samples” with the understanding that she would come back for more. But she never did.

“And do we further think that Claude Bouissou is not prioritizing Rachel Simone because of this?”

Sometimes Kezia felt that Rachel got into this business only to fulfill her lifelong dream of referring to herself in the third person.

“Fuck Claude Bouissou.” Rachel leaned over her computer, furiously clicking the mouse. “Fuck the fish face I have to make just to pronounce his name. Who are our other vendors here?”

“Here, in America?”

“Yes, here.”

Kezia couldn’t think of a single domestic cloisonné manufacturer.

“Maybe we should lose the enamel and go with something simple instead.” She shrugged. “I can get barrel-screw clasps quickly.”

“Too fourth-grade.”

“Spring rings?”

“Too nautical.”

“Lobster claws?”

“Too fishy.”

“Round toggles?”

“Derivative.”

“Belt hooks?”

“Does it look like I’m running a Claire’s to you?”

Saul and Rachel growled at her in unison.

“Rachel, no one in this city and no one on this continent specializes in cloisonné and if they do, they’re all going to be too slow or they’re not going to want to . . .”

“To what?”

“I think they want to know their work is going to end up on a diamond choker. Trust me, I used to work with these people.”

“Good for you.” Rachel tapped her nails against her desk. “Then you should know exactly who to call. This is a nightmare. I have to be in Tokyo in two days.”

A bead of sweat inched down the back of Kezia’s leg, picking up speed at the knee. Cold day in Calcutta, cold day in Calcutta. Saul put his chin on a pile of freshly photocopied papers.

“Would you just look at him?”

Saul’s tongue protruded from the side of his mouth like a dangling earring.

“He has a face for radio.”

“You have no soul.”

Kezia pointed her thumb at the door. “I’m gonna go now.”

“Fuck Tokyo. Fuck France, too.”

“I’ll try my best to fuck all these places.”