So I understood immediately that it was Lisa he was hiding behind his idea of the trip.
“Get on a plane. You can use the store’s AmEx. That’s what it’s there for,” he said. “Relax with Kizakov in Tel Aviv. The way he splashed the green around on that place of his you wouldn’t even think he’s Jewish. Of course, they are different in Israel than they are over here.”
“Okay,” I said. I had always wanted to see Jerusalem. “That sounds good. Why not? I could use a little break. You’re right. Good idea,” I said.
“Buy us some diamonds. We can run a promotion when you get back.”
I didn’t think they were having sex. He wasn’t trying to get me out of town so they could have a weekend together. They wouldn’t do that to me. Jim wouldn’t look at the sex as a betrayal. He would view that part recreationally. But Lisa would.
That was an advantage I had over them. Each understood what would count as a betrayal of me differently. I had double indemnity.
Then I thought: But what would Jim count as a betrayal?
“Keep it light. Don’t go crazy. Spend a few hundred grand. I need a D Flawless six-carat marquise. A fine make. Ideal make if you can find one. It doesn’t need to be certified. See what you can conjure up. Let Elie hold your hand.”
So I left them both behind and flew to Israel. I stayed with Kizakov at his mansion in Netanya. I regretted this because I could not drink as much as I wanted or call a hooker. But the hookers seemed scarce in Israel. Hong Kong had been the same unfortunate way.
I tried calling Lisa several times while I was gone. I knew better than that. But I was up at all hours anyway. I crept down Kizakov’s cool, breezy hallway in the dark and used a phone I had found on a hall table. There was no phone in my guest room, and my phone didn’t work in Israel. One time her phone went straight to voice mail so, quickly, I called Jim’s cell phone. His went straight to voice mail, too.
After we settled on the diamond buy we went to the coast and had dinner. Israel is an ugly, sandy country under construction, with more bulldozers than trees, but the food was excellent. We had roasted duck and many small plates of delicious pastes and hot flatbread. Kizakov did not drink, so I had a bottle of white Israeli wine to myself. It tasted like copper.
“Now you want to buy a piece of turquoise,” Kizakov said.
“For my daughter Claire,” I said. “She was born in December. Two years ago. It’s her birthstone. You know how it is with your children. When you are traveling.”
“Please, what’s to apologize?” Kizakov said. “I admire turquoise. The true turquoise.”
Not the next day but the following day, the day before I had to leave, he flew me in his little leather-seated jet to Cairo and we met with the turquoise sellers.
“This is turquoise de la vieille roche,” the wrinkled Egyptian explained. It was like in a book you read when you were a boy. We sat on a red rug together in our bare feet and he poured the blue stones from leather pouches. The high-ceilinged room was quiet and decorated with many brass and silver ornaments. There was a large Koran on an ornate stand. He explained the quality of different turquoises to me and I learned. His turban was black. There was something in this Bedouin’s ancient face that made me certain I could believe what he told me. But perhaps he merely came from an older, cleverer culture of sales. With Kizakov there, learning, too, serious and deliberate, I felt like a child among these men.
The Egyptian had finished pieces also, set in orange twenty-two-karat gold, but I selected a stone about the size of the top half of my thumb. It was a color of blue that you have not seen. After the long, patient discussion of price, while they drank tea and he graciously served me a beer, we settled at seventeen thousand. I still have the stone today. That is, my ex-wife has it, in one of that Muslim’s simple leather pouches, in a safety deposit box at her bank, waiting for Claire to turn twenty-one.
•
Back in Fort Worth Jim was supposed to pick me up at the airport. I hung around the baggage check for half an hour or so, until the crowd cleared and I was there alone, watching the metal plates roll past, and then I called the store. At first there was no answer. I counted the rings. When I got to fifteen and the voice mail answered, I hung up in disgust and called again. Around ring eleven he answered. Of course, I thought. After eleven rings the owner answers the goddamn phone. I wished we could fire every salesperson we had and start fresh.
“Where are you?” I said.
“I’m just chatting with my dear friend Shelley,” he said. I recognized his salesman voice. “You bring our big packages of diamonds, buddy? You find a bunch of bargains?”
“I thought you were picking me up,” I said.
“Oh, good, good,” he said. “Well, I better run, buddy. See you soon. See you as soon as you get those stones cleared through customs.”
The diamonds were shipped under separate cover, of course, with insurance, and went through our customs broker.
I took a cab. But the way things were, since he was supposed to pick me up and left me here, I thought I would go home first and take an hour or two before getting back in to work. Maybe Lisa would have time for an early lunch. But I called and she didn’t answer the phone.
Where is she all of a sudden? Just since I’ve been away, she disappears, I thought. I wondered if she knew when my plane got back. She didn’t really work during the day. Obviously she wasn’t with Jim. He was at the store.
•
“It’s for Wendy,” I told Jim.
A few days after I was back I bought Lisa an eighteen-karat gold and natural pearl bracelet that an antique dealer from Houston brought in. Normally I would not pay for natural pearls from a dealer because it was all bullshit, no one had a reliable way of confirming whether or not pearls were natural, you could use badly formed pearls from a farm and they would look like old naturals. But Jim had known this dealer for years and he never misrepresented his merchandise. The bracelet had been made by Cartier in the fifties and it had little knotted bars of gold wound all the way around. It was stamped, and not just on the clasp, which could have been added later. In between the bars were the pearls. Eight millimeters each. Eleven of them.
“Why would you divorce her and give her a bracelet?” Jim said.
“We go into arbitration in a few weeks.”
“Mediation.”
“That’s what I meant,” I said. “Mediation.”
“Lord knows I have given my wives enough jewelry,” he said. “But I never picked something out for my ex-wife.”
It was only Lily he ever referred to when he referred to his ex-wife. The other two were like photocopies of Lily and with each new copy the image was inkier and more blurred. In the most recent divorce, which was only a few months old, Jim had relocated — on paper only, of course — to Nevada, for legal residence, and hired an actress to represent his wife in court. She never even knew they were divorced. She still thought they were merely separated. Tanner, their new little baby, lived with his mother, but Jim gave himself custody in the papers. “Because it was the right thing to do. I love my son. Also for leverage,” he said, “in case she ever acts up.”
“On the other hand, maybe it’s smart thinking,” Jim said, changing his mind. “She’ll be generous, thinking she might still get you back if she isn’t too greedy. But that bracelet’s a find.”
“This way it stays in the family,” I said. “It’ll be like a dowry for Claire.” I felt guilty when I said that. I didn’t like to use my daughter for material.