(Pandora)

Finally, Samantha Golden was back where she felt she belonged on Fifth Avenue. This time she was right across the street from the Metropolitan Museum in a large apartment with a malachite bathroom and glass shelves two inches thick, owned, for now, by her new husband, Harry.

One Sunday in November, she was in her den watching ice skating on television. She especially liked it when the skaters fell on the jumps, and it was best of all when one fell in the pairs or ice dancing. She imagined the couples blaming each other and marveled how they got themselves right up and went on with no change of expression. She always admired self control.

When Harry came home, they were going to go over to see the exhibition of  jewels by JAR that had just opened at the museum. Already Samantha had a book of JAR’s jewels from Paris that weighed nine pounds and crushed her when she held it open in her delicate lap, turning each page slowly as she looked up and breathed a bit harder. Opening the book was always dangerous because it released desire and emotions like envy and craving that were not healthy for her. She would put it back in its slipcase then and feel safe.

Now, she knew four hundred of the actual jewels were just across the street. The exhibit had opened on Wednesday, but she held off going, wanting to bring Harry and get him inspired. Also, she had not quite decided how to dress herself for the jewels in case she might see someone she knew or even their mythic creator, Joel Arthur Rosenberg.

Samantha did not tell Harry how, in a previous incarnation and marriage, she had gone knocking on JAR’s door in the Place Vendome and been turned away. Well, not turned away, actually, but just not admitted. The two were the same to her.

She was anxious to see which pieces from the book were in the show. Of course the zebra brooch in banded agate with diamond plumes and reins and the sheep’s head with a corona of seed pearls and moon sapphire eyes the color of her own would be there. The paveed camellias, roses, poppies, pansies, tulips, gardenias and lilies; the butterflies, the wooden acorns would be there too in the cases lined in dark pumpkin velvet that she had read about in the reviews.

Samantha would pierce her ears for the green beetle wing earrings or the weeping willow pendants, though it meant she could never be buried with her parents in the mausoleum in Salem Field, for bodies with piercings or tattoos were not allowed in Jewish cemeteries. And besides, Samantha consoled herself, such heavy pieces would drag down the earlobes and long flaccid earlobes were a sign of old age.

She heard the door and now Harry was home carrying his tennis bag which, like those of the pros, contained at least four racquets. Impatient as she was, she knew she would have to wait.

“How was the game?”

“Very bad,” and he headed for the bathroom, his was blond onyx, and closed the padded door heavily. Maybe he would shave, though he never shaved on Sundays or tennis days before the evening. His face was heavily lined and the fuzzy gray furrows sunk in his dark skin were not attractive to her so she sighed and looked around, consoling herself  yet again with the apartment, bought from a Greek who had hired David Hicks to decorate. Harry insisted they leave all Hicks’ work, from the geometric patterned carpet up to the glass shelves, also the taupe leather banquettes and the beautiful closets where everything was built in as though he had guessed Samantha Golden’s own lavish dreams.

The Greek might have left behind some of his old gods along with the furniture. There were times when Samantha, alone in the apartment, felt presences spying on her. She knew where she belonged in that pantheon—with a trickster gods like Hermes, or, on good days, with Aphrodite herself.

In her fourth marriage, Samantha had learned acceptance, biting her tongue to keep herself from correcting, which, to all men, meant nagging. Instead, she used her abundant energy to please Harry.

She slipped the JAR book into its case and started into the kitchen to make Harry a sandwich. Just then a very tall man with a tiny Asian partner fell hard on the ice so Samantha laughed and felt better about the day. She looked down at the emerald cut emerald Harry had given her as she sliced the baguette.

Because he was English, Harry found Samantha exotic, because she was small like his mother he found her adorable, and because she was still beautiful he loved her. With guile she had focused her large eyes on him and never looked away. With her well practiced wiles and despite all his vows, she had lured him into his third marriage.

As they walked through their lobby after lunch, Samantha decided yet again that it was the most beautiful lobby in New York—all different variegated marbles in the ceilings and floors and walls even the benches. She gripped Harry’s arm as they crossed Fifth, going in by the side door so they would not have to climb the steps.

Samantha’s heart was beating hard and she was so excited, even a bit breathless, that she excused Harry for not having shaved or changed out of his tennis sweats and for already looking at his watch.

“Who is this man we’re going to see?”

“I think he’s the best jeweler in the world—not just anyone can buy his pieces.”

And then she returned to the vision of herself, only a year before, off the Place Vendome pressing the stamen of the bronze camellia that was JAR’s hidden doorbell and standing and standing there trying to look cool while Joel and his partner or, worse, some underling, stared at her and made a judgment. And nobody answered.

Nobody answered.

She had waited longer than she should have and not even the Chanel purchase on Rue Cambon or the hunk of Pont L’Eveque from Barthelemy had consoled her.

“He’s from the Bronx.”

“Is that so?” Harry said in his accent with a lift of his furry grey brows. “Well, quite, we shall have to see what all the fuss is about.”

“He says it’s good to be considered a monster because then people leave you alone and you save time…”

“A monster is it? You certainly have given time to that book of his…”

The long oval room was as dark as possible so that the jewels might flicker from their cases. “Flicker” was Joel Rosenberg’s word—and he had designed the exhibit, the cases lined with salmon velvet, the columns, the very darkness to achieve flickering.

“Can’t see a bloody thing,” said Harry. “Too many people. Too dark.”

“In London, it was completely dark and everyone had little flashlights.”

Samantha could not see anything over the crowds so Harry lifted her as much as he could and still she saw only bits, familiar glimmering and glittering bits they were, the butterflies and flowers, the magnificent animals that she knew as old friends. For the very first time she wondered if she was too small for such large pieces. Were they heavy or was he enough of a jeweler to make them light? They did flicker and flicker madly at that.

“Oh Harry, I must come back when it first opens tomorrow.”

“They are very pretty. Maybe I should get you one. Where do I find this Mr. Jar?”

“In Paris,” Samantha felt the red come into her face and was glad Harry could not see it.

“Oh good Lord, is that a bagel? And those acorn things there…quite clever. Would you like one of them?”

When she first met Harry, someone had told her the story of his parents, John and Bessie Shackman and how they would travel to New York every Spring, bringing their Rolls over on the Queen Mary and how John doted on fat little Bessie, covering her in furs and jewels as she toddled around on her tiny black shoes (all custom made, so Harry said). Harry had a picture of them, his tall father with a monocle standing over Bessie holding her plump hand, heavy with rings.

“I’d rather have a jewel.”

“And so you shall.”

Since Harry’s football game was starting, they left the museum.

At 9:35 the next morning, a Monday in the days when only special members were admitted, Samantha waited for the museum to open and headed straight for the exhibit. Now she had ample time to look and study the jewels. When the names of the owners were listed (most were anonymous) she paid special attention, though all of them except Gwyneth Paltrow were older and unfamiliar to her.

Suddenly, she stopped. She had never seen this one before. The brooch was a heart of rubies cracked open to spill a cluster of oval diamonds. It was named “The Bursting Heart.” Somehow this piece, above all the others, released something in Samantha. It caused a pain and yearning she had not felt since she was fourteen, standing, gripping the fence of Holy Trinity School to watch Porter Haynes kick a soccer ball and feel her heart break open.

Porter was her first love and first failure in love. She simply did not appeal to him though she made a point of getting to know him by sending him a Christmas card of a kneeling angel that said “Peace on Earth” to which she had added “To Find…call” with her phone number. She became his friend over the years, but she never had him and now he was dead. She stared and stared at the heart and, though she looked about, she was blind to all the others.

The next day and almost every other during the whole run of the exhibit, Samantha went to stand in the dark and look at The Bursting Heart. She brought Harry again though he thought the piece obvious and inferior to many of the other jewels.

“I can’t see anything else here now,” she said, and she used her dangerous eyes upon him and stroked his thigh just as she did her dog’s flank.

Day after day, she entered the dark tunnel of the room and came out into the light of the JAR gift shop full of inexpensive JAR pieces that were for sale and that offended her.

Then the exhibition was over and Samantha felt a certain relief. She would no longer have to be taunted by craving and memories. She would no longer have to see in the bursting heart Porter Haynes with his eyebrow cocked as he looked down at her and said things she did not understand and therefore thought profound. Driving into a lamppost, he was forever the one who burst her heart and escaped her.

For a long time after she left JAR’s dark room, she thought of the piece and wondered if Joel Rosenthal ever duplicated his work. Perhaps someone on West 47^th street could do the job. It would not be a JAR piece, and no matter what, it would not be as beautiful nor could it mean to same to her.

Her time in the dark had changed Samantha. Harry did not like the way she was behaving now. She was not as attentive. On the weekends, after tennis, he had taken to making his own sandwiches as she sat silent in front that television show where the women, puppets of the producers, bickered and screeched over nothing at all.

He wondered if her mood was from wanting that heart jewel and then he remembered. In his very building lived a man known as the Replicator, the best in the world, a man who could take and cut and copy any great jewel with fake stones that he cut. Surely he could copy that piece that had turned her into a zombie.

There had been a fuss with some neighbor complaining about the noise the Replicator made at his grinding wheel. Harry had taken the Replicator’s side in the dispute, he felt a man should do as he wished within his home.

Harry took the elevator up to the penthouse where the Replicator lived and worked and, in the pocket of his tweed jacket, he had a picture. The man knew the piece and that he could duplicate it. The time involved and the price was discussed and agreed and Harry took the elevator down feeling relaxed for the first time in months.

“Where were you? Hedi wants to go out.”

“Doing a little business, darling,” he said, as pleased with himself as after a tennis win or a successful deal. He was leaving for London that weekend.

“If any packages come for me,” he said, knowing her well enough, “Just put them in the hall closet. I’ll deal with them when I return. The next trip we will go together.”

Truly he did not want her along—scowling in the restaurants, bored at Wimbleton, mooning over Lord knows what in her past. She could stay here with her dog Hedi, named for some designer, not the old movie star.

Ten days after he left, the door bell rang without anyone calling up to announce.

There stood a small bearded man holding a shiny wooden box covered with red wax seals. Samantha did not recognize the Replicator because she paid no attention to anyone or any of the doings of the building.

With a slight bow and a long stare, The Replicator handed her the box.

“For your husband, Madame. ”

“What is it?”

The Replicator shook his head.

“If it’s caviar or the cigars from Cuba… I should put it in the refrigerator…”

“No, no refrigerator.”

He got in the elevator which, strange to her, seemed to be going up.

Samantha studied the seals which contained different impressed crests as though he had used a variety of old seals. Around the box were white silk cords tied into elaborate knots over which the seals had been applied. The box itself was macassar ebony and triangular like the boxes from the store Takishimaya when it still existed in New York.

She stared at the box, shaking it lightly then went to the kitchen for a knife to cut the cords.

Since she was a child, Samantha had never waited. She would rather walk away than stand in line. Often, she would stand in line and then, soon after, give up and walk away. She had sent her housekeeper to stand on line for her at sample sales. As a child, she went down to the Christmas tree in the middle of the night, catching her father putting out the presents and sitting with him on the floor as they unwrapped them together.

Her hands were shaking as she popped the seals and lifted the lid. Inside, in a moss green velvet nest, was The Bursting Heart.

“Oh!” Samantha sat down on the floor of her lobby her little legs out rigid. “Ooooh.”

With great tenderness she lifted the brooch from its cradle. It was lighter than she expected.

Samantha’s father had been a jeweler and had taught her, even as a child, how to bite pearls, “oyster shit” to him, to see if they were real, how to clean diamonds with nothing but soap and water, all sorts of important things. He spun out for her histories of the famous old stones, let her play with a jar of fake colored gem stones and gave her a steel pencil with a diamond tip that could write on glass. She still had his platinum jeweler’s loop in her top drawer, but she did not need it.

This Bursting Heart, beautiful as it was, was a fake, a dead piece. Something dead as Haynes Porter, crumpled into his car bent around a lamppost. The owner would not sell the Heart, nothing would persuade Joel Rosenberg to repeat himself.

She was sitting on the floor, perspiring now with an angry pain in her chest. She felt the old scolding gods, false idols all, swishing through the air around her. They would always be here in this place to judge her. She had seen too much of them in the museum filled with gods across the street. They were there, painted and chiseled, draped in their disguises, poised in their chases, their assaults and rapes of mortals. They were much too close.

Samantha’s old nature—the vanity, greed and ignorance, the constant sense of grievance, her sentimental notions—all recently suppressed, emerged. She had contained herself so long in this marriage with Harry that she was exhausted, ready for one of her frequent naps. Quickly she closed the box and held it tight to her chest.

She would pretend to like the heart when Harry returned. She would wear it often, especially around the house. She would cover Harry’s feet when he was asleep, just as he liked.

Maybe someday on the Place Vendome, Joel Rosenberg would open his door. For a girl like Samantha Golden, there was always hope.

 

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