“Silver? Silver? No, I’m afraid we don’t take silver. We already have a surplus of it in stock, and I’m sorry to say, it’s just not moving for us anymore.”
“What is moving, these days?”
“Anything mid-century modern right now. Mid-century’s all the rage.”
Like what Pansy Chapin has, Cassandra thought. That bitch.
“What about jewelry? Do you take jewelry?”
“Well…” The salesgirl in her black sheath dress and period-appropriate red lipstick paused and looked over Cassandra from head to toe, as if trying to assess what the value of the jewelry of somebody like her might be worth. Not much, was her conclusion. She probably just has some piddling sentimental little hand-me-downs of her grandmother’s she’s hoping to cash in. My, but the world was a rough place out there right now, the salesgirl reflected, and not for the first time. Cassandra looked to her like a nice, genteel young woman who in another age could have gotten a decent job no problem, rather than being reduced to the absurd adventure of trying to pawn off her finery up and down the antique stores of East Sixty-First Street. The spectacles you saw, living in New York City! Any number of them could break your heart. That is, if you let them get to you, which the salesgirl, for one, had no intention of doing.
“Oh all right, all right!” Cassandra exclaimed. It was the sixth store she had tried that afternoon and she was finally getting the picture. “You don’t have to go into it all, I already know what you’re going to say. Thank you for your time, anyway.”
“You know. You might try the Diamond District, that part of town,” advised the salesgirl, watching Cassandra and her camel-hair coat. It was a beautiful coat, too, but the hem was unraveling. Cassandra, unlike the adroit Sylvie, was never at her best with a needle and thread and was going to seed on all fronts. She needed cash, and she needed it fast.
The very next day, she found herself waiting in line in a dim, dusty establishment on the fourth floor of an undistinguished office building on the far reaches of West Forty-Seventh Street. The silver was so heavy that she’d had no choice but to take it in a cab. Cassandra was sent into a tiny room with a thick Plexiglas window. The jeweler sat on the other side of the window, his desk littered with greasy black wrenches and tweezers and scales. He weighed and accepted the glorious haul of wedding silver first, then tackled the jewelry.
Picking up a pair of tweezers, he announced to Cassandra: “I have to take them out.”
“Take what out?”
“The stones.” He gestured to the diamond ring, the amethyst necklace. “To weigh them.”
Oh well, diamonds don’t suit me anyway, thought Cassandra, but nevertheless found herself wincing as he pried it out of the scalloped rose gold setting, dating back to the Edwardian era: that ring had been in her mother’s family for generations.
“Nice,” he said of the amethyst. It was a big one apparently.
Next up to be dismantled were the charm bracelets. The individual charms, as well as the gold link bracelets, had to be weighed separately to determine their value. At the sight of these poor cast-off charms, the tears welled up and began to flicker on Cassandra’s eyelashes.
“Look,” said the jeweler, stopping what he was doing to draw her attention to a charm in the shape of a seahorse. “Look, its eyes.”
Its eyes were studded with two dainty emeralds. With an expert, single twist, he pried them out and then they, too, bounced up and down on the dingy scale.
That did it. She let out a long, wounded wail. Thank God, though, she did leave there with cash; the jeweler, entirely unfazed by the sight of his down-and-out clientele bursting into tears, accepted everything. Outside on West Forty-Seventh Street it was raining and Cassandra’s mascara ran down her face in long, weepy, blackish violet streaks. She decided to walk back uptown. Meanwhile, it rained and rained. Soon she heard thunder. This catastrophic aspect of the weather suited her sense of personal devastation. At the Korean flower stands, dahlias were nodding their battered heads, pink and orange and purple, too, and mixed in with the sound of a man hawking sleazy plastic umbrellas—“Umbrellas! Five dollar! Umbrellas!”—were the rich, yearning chords of a man playing the violin. Life in the arts! Cassandra thought, with a momentary swell of pity for her fellow man. It’s a bitch. That guy’s pretty talented actually.
By the time she had walked all the way over to the East Side—collapsing, to regain her strength, on a bench outside the entrance to Central Park—the weather had cleared. Two middle-aged women strode right past her, one of them puffing on a cigarette. They were just exiting the park.
“If you want my opinion,” said the woman smoking the cigarette to her friend. “It’s time to get rid of the horses!”
My sentiments exactly, thought Cassandra, and at that very moment she decided to call up Orpheus McCloud, who happened to be in bed, just for old time’s sake, with Gala. When old lovers are together, they will often discuss old times. Just as the phone rang, Gala was imploring him: “I’m sorry! I’m still, like, totally sorry about that STD I picked up from that guy Christophe I was sleeping with in Paris…”
“Hey, why would Cassandra Puffin be calling me?”
“Oh! I bet because I told her you had a room in your apartment that was available. She was living on the Upper East Side with Pansy Chapin, that frigid little bitch, and—”
“Frigid is not the word,” said Orpheus, who, unbeknownst to Gala, had been unable to resist being swept into bed by the evil, luminescent, streaky-blond Pansy himself. “Well, I guess I might as well pick up. The only other person who’s interested in the room is Chase Raven.”
“Chase Raven? But, wait! I thought he was dead. I thought he OD’d.”
“No, he just took a term off to go dry out in Bali and never came back.”
“Oh.” So that explained it.
Orpheus picked up his phone. Cassandra got straight to the point.
“Well, I just wanted to know: Is the room in your apartment still available?”
It was; but when Orpheus got off the phone, Gala snuggled up next to him and said, “You know, Orpheus. I don’t know if you really want Cassandra for your roommate. She still doesn’t have a job yet.”
“But Gala,” said Orpheus, whose family had, indeed, once founded the state of Kentucky and to whom practicalities were of less than urgent concern. “Who do we know who does?”
Good point, thought Gala, having recently bailed on her gallery job in the absence of any other employment opportunities because she just couldn’t fucking take it anymore. But she’d done this, in a fit of satisfying pique, only to discover that Sylvie was right. Sometimes what you really need after all is an exit strategy for your exit strategy.