“They’re much too expensive.”
“Do you think so?” She looked away toward the street, apparently uninterested in his opinion. It was late afternoon, nearly closing time. Her indifference to Beard’s remark annoyed him.
“Too expensive,” he said, as if he didn’t really want the earrings but was inviting her to haggle.
“Should I put them away?” she asked.
Beard didn’t answer.
“They are expensive, I suppose,” she said. “But prices fluctuate. If you like, I’ll keep your business card and phone you if the earrings aren’t sold in a few weeks.”
Beard heard contempt in her voice, as if she were saying the point of jewelry is to be expensive, even too expensive. He drew his wallet slowly from his jacket pocket, and then, with a thrill of suicidal exultation, he slapped his credit card, not his business card, on the glass beside the earrings. She plucked it up, stepped away, and ran the card through a machine. He signed the receipt quickly to disguise the tremor in his hand.
When he arrived at Inger’s apartment house, his heart was beating powerfully. He felt liberated, exceedingly happy, and slightly sick. He planned to take Inger to a fine restaurant. He’d done so before. She’d seemed not the least impressed, but tonight, after dinner, he would give her the earrings. The quality of the light in the restaurant, the delicious food, the wine, the subtle ministrations of the staff — such things matter. The earrings would intensify the occasion. She would be impressed, even if she didn’t think precisely like a whore. Besides, it would matter to Beard.
A woman in a short skirt opened the door. She was older than Inger and had cold violet eyes. Her black hair was cut level with her ears and across into severe, straight bangs, emphasizing her hard, thin-lipped expression. She looked somehow damaged and petrified by her beauty. Beard introduced himself. The woman said she was Greta Matti, Inger’s roommate, then said, “Inger is gone.”
“Impossible.”
“It is possible,” said Greta, her lips briefly, unpleasantly curled. Beard understood that Greta disliked being contradicted, but he didn’t believe her. The woman was malicious.
“She took her monkey,” she said. “Please go look for yourself. No clothes in her closet, no suitcase, no bicycle.”
Greta turned back into the apartment. Beard entered behind her and looked where she gestured toward a room, and then followed her into it. Closets and drawers were empty. There was nothing, no sign of human presence. Stunned by the emptiness, Beard felt he himself had been emptied.
“You never know a person,” said Greta. “She seemed so shy and studious, but she must have done something criminal. I was an idiot to let her move in, a girl with a monkey. Half the time it was I who fed the beast. The telephone never stopped ringing.”
Beard followed Greta to the kitchen. A teapot had been set on a small table with a cup and saucer.
“Where did she go?” he said. He didn’t expect a positive, useful answer. Who would disappear like that and leave an address? But what else could he say?
“You are not the first to ask. I don’t know where she comes from or where she went. Would you like a cup of tea?”
Greta sat at the table and turned slightly toward Beard. She crossed her legs. It was clear that she didn’t plan to stand up again to get another cup and saucer, and she seemed merely to assume Beard would stay. Her legs, he couldn’t not notice, were long, naked, and strikingly attractive in high heels. He glanced at the white flesh of her inner thigh and felt humbled and uncomfortable.
Greta poured tea for herself without waiting for his answer, and took a sip. Did she think her legs gave him enough? He wanted to ask questions, perhaps learn something about Inger. He knew hardly anything about her.
“I’m sorry,” said Greta, softening a little. “Her disappearance is very inconvenient for me. Perhaps it is worse for you.”
Beard nodded. “Does Inger owe you money?”
“Technically, I owe her money. She paid a month in advance. I can make another cup of tea.”
Beard was inclined to say yes. He needed company, but the whiteness of Greta’s legs had become unbearable; repulsively carnal. He couldn’t not look at them.
“Thank you,” he said. “I must go.”
Beard found a phone directory in a bar, looked up the address of the museum, and then hailed a taxi. He’d remembered that Inger took classes in paper restoration. They were given in the evening. At the museum, an administrator told him that Inger had quit the program. Beard next went to the restaurants where they had gone together. He didn’t expect to find her in any of them. To his painful disappointment, it was just as he expected. He returned to the hotel. Inger’s bicycle was no longer in the lobby, where it had been propped against a wall for two days. Its absence made him feel the bleakness of the marble floor, the sterility of the potted plants beside the desk, the loneliness of hotel lobbies.
In his room, Beard unwrapped the earrings and set them under the lamp on the night table. He studied the earrings with grim fascination, as if to penetrate their allure, the mystery of value. It came to him that, after creating the universe, God saw it was good. “So what is good about it?” Beard asked himself. He smoked cigarette after cigarette, and felt tired and miserable, a condition long associated with thought.
The earrings, shining on the night table, told him nothing. They looked worthless. But it was value — the value of anything aside from life itself — that Beard thought about. As for life itself, he assumed its value was unquestionable because he hadn’t ever wanted to kill himself. Not even this minute when he felt so bad. Before he went to sleep, Beard read a train schedule and set the alarm on his travel clock.
At noon he checked out of his hotel, wearing his new jacket, and went to a restaurant where he ordered a grand lunch. He refused to suffer. He ate the lunch assiduously, though without pleasure, and then he took a taxi to the train station. The ticket he bought was first class, another luxurious expense, but he wanted — angrily — to pamper himself, or, as Inger would say, to be “self-indulgent.”
As the train pulled out of the station, Beard slid the compartment door shut and settled beside the window with a collection of colorful, expensive magazines that he’d bought in the station. The magazines were full of advertisements for expensive things. Almost every page flared with brilliant color, and they crackled sensuously. They smelled good, too. He stared at pictures of nearly naked models and tried to feel desire. Exactly for what he couldn’t say. It wasn’t their bodies. Maybe it was for the future, more experience, more life. Then he reached into his jacket pocket to get his cigarettes and the earrings, intending to look at them again and resume his engagement with deep thought. He felt his cigarettes, but the earrings weren’t in his pocket. Nor were they in any other pocket.
Beard knew instantly that he needn’t bother to search his pockets, which he did repeatedly, because he remembered putting the earrings on the night table and he had no memory of picking them up. Because he hadn’t picked them up. He knew. He knew.
As the train left the city and gained speed, he quit searching his pockets. Oh God, why had he bought the earrings? How could he have been so stupid? In an instant of emotional lunacy, he’d slapped his credit card down in the jewelry store and undone himself. The earrings were a curse, in some way even responsible for Inger’s disappearance. He had to get hold of himself, think realistically, practically. He had to figure out what to do about retrieving them.
It was urgent that he communicate with the hotel. Perhaps he could send a telegram from the train, or from the next station. He would find a conductor. But really, as he thought further about it, he decided it wasn’t urgent to communicate with the hotel. It was a good hotel. This was Germany, not America. Nobody would steal his earrings. They would soon follow him to his destination, another good hotel. They were not gone forever. He had nothing to worry about. This effort to reassure himself brought him almost to tears. He wanted desperately to retrieve the earrings. He stood up and went to the door. About to slide it open and look for a conductor, he heard a knock. He slid the door open with a delirious expectation. The conductor would be there, grinning, the earrings held forth in his open hand. Beard stared into the face of Inger.