When Ann gets out of the cab in Carl’s tuxedo jacket, she does not immediately enter Tiffany and Company; she reconnoiters in Trump Tower next door where she wanders seemingly without purpose through the lofty pink lobby suffused with yellow light, stopping to watch the water fall down the golden wall of the atrium to the feet of the bistro diners below. It drops sonorously into a shallow pool bright with quarters and dimes, pennies being now insufficient to buy wishes. In all the glistening, opulent surfaces Ann is offered endless reflections of herself, she sees herself even in the sheen of the floor and in the polished sides of the escalator whose stairs revolve endlessly under a cage of bars that buttresses the skylight. The stairs make a chewing sound like teeth grinding and gnashing, and Ann hesitates before traveling below ground level to the rest rooms.
Behind the stall door she stands in the cool metal sanctuary and inhales deeply, taking a moment of privacy. She doesn’t have her camera bag with her, but she doesn’t need it. The new shoes, which she bought at Barney’s, running quickly through the departments so no one would notice her bare feet, are rubbing savagely, already making a blister on her left heel. She bought the first pair she slipped on her dirty feet; she should also have taken the bewildered salesman’s suggestion that she make a stop in the hosiery department, but she just pressed the money into his hand and left, not waiting for change.
Watching herself walk now from the bathroom, she considers her reflection in the mirror at the end of the corridor. The new shoes’ black patent leather shine and gold buckles do somehow complete her eccentric outfit of Carl’s clothing and make it all work. But heading upstairs on the escalator, she catches one of the narrow heels in the metal tread of a rising stair. Panicking, she twists her ankle as she frees her foot. The shoe is stuck for a moment as the stair flattens and disappears at the top, and then pops free.
A man bends down to pick up the shoe, holding it out to Ann. Thank you, she thinks to say, but only manages to accept it silently from his hand. She limps to a bench. The leather is torn on the heel, but that is all. She eases the pump back over the blister. It doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t mean anything, she says to herself over and over; still, it takes some moments to pull herself together.
Ann limps through the tower’s atrium, looking at the contents of display cases, reading a framed menu for a restaurant somewhere above. She touches one of the trees that springs from the holes cut in the stone floor and is surprised by the feel of life in its leaves and bark. The plants are flawless specimens, so perfect she assumed they must be artificial, and the atrium itself is a pleasant place, one where she could linger for some time, watching as the shining brass doors of the elevator part and disgorge passengers, close again on another load. But Ann has no business here other than to collect herself, and so she walks, finally, out of the glass doors.
The few steps of sidewalk between the exit from Trump Tower and the entrance to Tiffany’s are bright, the late summer sun bouncing harshly up from the cement to her eyes. A fur activist wearing a sandwich board with the words “Prisoner of Greed” and a photograph of a bloodied lynx caught in a trap tries to thrust a pamphlet into Ann’s hands but she turns away, feigning interest in Tiffany’s window dressing.
Ann has gazed into the store’s windows many times. En route to Bergdorf’s, just across the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh, she has hesitated before the squat temple of jewels. Like miniature stages, Tiffany’s marble-framed windows are outfitted with gold curtains which, when parted, reveal a ring, a bracelet, a diamond. The whole commerce of sex, all the frank and brutal equations of desirability, is distilled in a diamond; just as surely as coal is squashed by the weight of centuries until its black mud yields what will be a glistening, many-faceted stone.
The store’s glass portal revolves heavily under the statue of a man who bears a great clock on his shoulders, as if to allude to Atlas and his burden of the world, and to make the further, more important connection between time and money. As Ann enters Tiffany’s, she pictures herself caught in the door, trapped like an insect by its thick panels of glass; but she is urged in by the insistence of another customer who pushes at the partition behind her.
The jewelry showroom is a square box, high ceilings supported by cliffs of dark wood paneling and deep green marble. No column or corner blocks the vision of one end of the salon from another. Tiffany and Company is a store without whimsy; its purpose is unneedful of decoration, the merchandise itself sufficient to seduce. And despite the inclusion of chairs for the consideration of a ring or a watch or a choker of fat pearls, a place to sit while awaiting credit clearance, the room offers no comfort other than the implied protection of wealth. Even the floral arrangements, a garden’s worth of flowers and leaves crammed into each great urn, are ponderous, stressing mass over beauty.
Just ahead of Ann at the diamond counter, stands a middle-aged businessman and a girl whose scant clothes and obviously bleached hair declare her his mistress. They consider a wide gold bracelet with a modest garnish of diamonds. “I’m afraid that only stones weighing a carat or more are certified by Tiffany’s,” the salesman replies to a murmured question. “But, as you can see, these diamonds are of superb clarity.” As he speaks, turning the bracelet under the lights, the woman’s hand strays to the back of her thigh where a little sliver of tanned flesh and a lace panty border are revealed by the artfully torn denim of her tight jeans.
Tiffany’s seems populated by tourists, people traveling, yet always in the country of wealth. A store directory is provided in five languages, and the blue brochure is considered by the weary eyes of a group of French women and clutched in the earnest hands of Japanese wives resplendent in clashing designer initials. Their teenaged daughters lean over the counters, glassy-eyed in their tee-shirts and blue jeans, their white canvas sneakers. A faded debutante, wrapped in an Hermes scarf and sniffing in boredom, passes by a silent group of Arabs wearing djellabas and Nikes, passes by as ephemerally as the wafting scent of her perfume, a dab of Chanel. Just behind her a pregnant woman, perspiring gravidly, makes her way to the elevators, no doubt en route to the second floor to register for its selection of silver rattles and cups.
Ann is wearing no jewelry; she feels naked. There seem to be as many security personnel as patrons; and, unlike detectives in a department store, theirs is an announced presence. Like Secret Service agents, their ears are stoppered with tiny earphones whose wires disappear down the necks of their jackets. Tall and solid and devoid of any expression beyond the occasional frown of attention paid to a remote message, they look powerfully lithe, like animals in clothing. For those brief moments of a transaction that leave a ring untended on its velvet pad between the busy tallying hands of a salesman and the eager fingers of a purchaser, a guard steps forward unabashedly, his eyes trained on the gem.
Ann should be browsing, feigning nonchalance, but she can’t stop herself from staring at the people around her. The salesman waiting on the businessman and his mistress calls softly over his shoulder to one of the guards. “Will you stand over to Susan?” he says. His diction is of no discernible origin, a false British affectation: the dialect of imagined privilege. The guard closes in obediently as the indicated saleswoman draws a pair of earrings from a display case.
A customer takes one from where the saleswoman lays it on a velvet pad. “Oh, these are clip-ons,” she says.
“Yes,” the saleswoman says. “But they can be converted for pierced ears, of course.”
“Oh no,” says the woman. “I’ve let my holes close. I deeply regret having had my ears pierced. It destroys the integrity of the body.” Ann stares at the woman whose flesh, tanned to leather, doesn’t exactly look like a temple to the Holy Ghost.
At a signal from the salesman—he raps his keyes to the jewel case on its thick glass counter—a guard comes forward to collect the businessman’s credit card and take it to the rear of the store where its validity will be assessed. Ann hears this occasional rapping throughout the store. A communication that all the employees use, it is the only discordant note from a vast organ in which every stop slips with the great lubricant of money.
A videocamera in each of the square ceiling’s corners silently records the activity in the room. Ann walks among the various cases, estate jewelry and band rings, pearls and watches; finally she gravitates toward the case bearing the largest of the diamonds.
Five rings rest on a central brown velvet dais, each on a tiny pedestal. Ann kneels to look through the glass. Behind her, the pressure of scrutiny—the eyes of the guards and of the sales personnel and of the cameras—is a familiar weight. Intended to awe and frighten, instead it excites her, making her feel, in this moment, more fully alive.
She beckons to a salesman, who leans languidly against a cabinet enclosed by the counters. “I’d like to see the ring on the far left, please, the, what is it, a round-cut solitaire?”
“Yes, that would be the larger of the two brilliants.” The salesman’s tongue lingers on his teeth at each t.
With the sensual acuity of arousal, Ann hears the passage of the key into the showcase’s lock and even the tumbling of the lock’s chambers behind the man’s modulated voice. His hand slips into the back of the case and withdraws the ring. “Four carats and one point,” he says. “That’s four and one one-hundredth of a carat.” He does not slip the ring on Ann’s waiting finger or even offer it to her hand, but polishes the stone against a velvet pad the color of chocolate and, after holding it aloft for her appreciation, places it just so on a ring mount in the center of the pad.
The ring is not pretty, one stone of vulgar size set in a platinum band, but Ann feels her mouth go dry with desire for it. The largest facet on the diamond is so big that it makes a tiny, perfect mirror which, she is sure, would give back a miniature likeness of her face. The salesman turns the ring’s tag over with his index finger and reports a few statistics from the minuscule legend inscribed there; he neglects to mention the price. Is this because he assumes she cannot afford such a ring or because when contemplating a stone of such magnitude, the cost is entirely beside the point? As she looks at the ring, she feels the salesman’s eyes move over her unadorned hands, wrists, and ears; her throat without the choker of gold or pearls.
The pressure of surveillance settles on her shoulders like a shroud, and with a rush of pulse in her ears Ann understands suddenly that she is standing somewhere she shouldn’t be. Like an open window on the fiftieth floor, a razor blade on the bathroom counter, the glowing electric heater within reach of the bath, her position offers the collusion of longing and repulsion. Only in Ann’s case the balance is tipped, undone. She should never have entered this store.
As her hand closes over the ring, Ann hears the rapping of the salesman’s keys on the thick glass counter. She turns away and takes two quick steps toward the door behind her, and before she can take another, she is stopped by the painfully firm grip of a guard above either elbow. She says nothing. Like a perfectly choreographed dance, her disposal is quiet and dignified, and most of the shoppers are sufficiently engrossed by the merchandise that they do not see that Ann is being led away by security to the back of the store.
There are no alarms, no accusations. By the time she is seated in a tastefully nondescript office, her hands are empty. She remembers holding the ring—like a bullet, it weighed more than its size would suggest—but she cannot remember how it was taken from her. When she closes her fingers and makes a fist, she feels it still, the small, sharp presence in her hand.
A phone call, the arrival of an unmarked car to the rear door: Ann’s exit from Tiffany and Company is swifter and less dramatic than her arrival. Had a photographer been present to capture her expression, had her crime been attended by closer consideration than that of a ceiling-mounted surveillance camera, her departure, “strangely exultant” as the manager will later note to the police, would have been recorded, the wet rapture of her eyes like the bright hungry hope of prayer. But, as it was, the abbreviated story in the New York Post ran without a photograph.