The Alexandrite Read online

  Afraid to wake her—if she actually is asleep—I don’t ring the bell at the cage. I whisper hello a couple of times.

  A loose-jointed young man with no hair on the sides of his oblong head unfolds himself into position inside the cage.

  “Help ya?”

  I hand him the ticket. He frowns at it, looks at me, sniffs, then hitches himself around the corner, where I hear him rustling through layers of other people’s lives.

  He reappears holding a small brown velvet jewelry box. “Here ya go.” He pushes it out to me.

  “How much do I owe you?”

  “Been paid for.”

  “By whom?”

  “Don’t know. You’d have to ask Mrs. Hightower.” He points at the woman in the wing chair.

  I look at her, wondering if she’s overheard us, but her eyes are still closed and she’s again breathing rhythmically through her mouth.

  “Was it paid by check?”

  The young man shrugs.

  “Do you know when it was paid?”

  “Dunno.” He turns up the palms of his hands.

  I thank him and start to leave.

  “Hey, you got to look at what’s in there before you take it.”

  “Oh, sorry.” I snap open the box.

  It is an antique-looking ring with a roundish, faceted stone, murky purplish in color. “It’s a ring.” I move back to the window and hold it out. “Is this an amethyst?”

  He takes it from me, gives it a perfunctory inspection, then hands it back. “Could be.” He shrugs and disappears into the rear of the shop the way he came.

  I stuff the ring in its box into a front jeans pocket and, with another glance at the plump little woman, go back out onto Oxford Street.

  When the box starts hurting my leg on the freeway as I’m driving home, I wiggle it out of the pocket and open it up with my left hand. At first I think the kid has played some trick on me. It’s a different ring. The stone is now a bright bluish-green, clear, with almost the fire of a diamond. But it’s the same ring. The kid only held it for a moment then gave it back to me. I try it on the ring finger of my right hand.

  It fits as if it’s been sized for me.

  Later, at our little house in North Hollywood, Sophie gets home from work in Beverly Hills and finds me asleep under the influence of about half of a family-size bottle of Deer Valley Chardonnay. I complain about what’s going on—or not going on—in my work life. She listens as much as she’s able to as I enlighten her about the ways in which reality television, already scourging through the European market, is about to start robbing me of my living, et cetera, et cetera. I quote some dire warnings from Variety and the Hollywood Reporter.

  I look at her out of the corner of my eye and see she’s under some kind of stress of her own. Sophie is pretty, open, and unguarded; so unguarded that I can tell now that something is definitely bothering her. She can be brusque and sometimes, frankly, a little cold, and she picks now, when I’m feeling shitty like this, as one of those times.

  To be fair, she isn’t usually cold or brusque. I met her at a lecture on “Taking Care of the Elderly after a Hip Fracture” at UCLA. My mother had broken her hip and I wanted to know how to take care of her. (It turned out her fall had been a freak thing. Rita has bones as hard as Bakelite, and nothing like that ever happened to her again.) After the lecture, Sophie and I struck up a conversation, and she invited me over for coffee. She didn’t say, “Let’s go out and have coffee.” She invited me to her apartment. I couldn’t believe this knockout girl was being so forward. (I’m not saying I minded.) I accepted her invitation, went over to her place, and we talked until dawn. We didn’t mess around or anything. That came the next time. After that, we messed around a lot.

  Just short of two months later, we got married.

  I have my nightmare again and shudder awake, terrified as always. Sophie is asleep next to me. I know if I wake her up to tell her about it, she will do her best to comfort me, but I also know that won’t fix anything.

  Looking at her, I think about getting up and maybe reading a little until I get drowsy again. But her face is so beautiful—not in the usual way, but confiding, in her sleep, a heartbreaking vulnerability. I have a badly timed urge to nestle into her, burrow into that place on the pillow next to where she’s adrift in whatever dream world she’s in. I want to inhale her, get lost in her, be as close as I can, not from the fear of my nightmare anymore, but from this fanatical tenderness that multiplies in me watching her sleep. I think of the Leonard Cohen lyric, “Your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm.” I want to enter into her storm and keep her warm and safe.

  A while later, I remember the ring. I had taken it off and put it in the pocket of my windbreaker. I slip out of bed and go out to the front closet to get it out. I sit down on the sofa, turn on a lamp, open the box and take it out. I hold it closer to the light. The stone is a deep raspberry red.

  I wonder what whoever left it for me wants.

  I look into the deep red and feel the same sense of dread I feel in my nightmare. But this is concrete. It’s a thing. I’m holding it in my hand, which takes it out of the realm of fantasy; this is real.

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11, 1996

  I wake to Sophie sitting on the arm of the overstuffed chair I fell asleep in.

  “I’m going to work. What’s this?” She’s holding my right hand, looking at the ring, green in the morning sunlight streaming through the window. “Is this an emerald?”

  I rub my eyes. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  I tell her about the pawn ticket and Morgan’s Gifts.

  “Aren’t you curious to know what it is?”

  “I guess.”

  “For someone in the arts, you certainly can act like a cement salesman.”

  “Okay. I would definitely like to know.”

  “Can you meet me outside the old boy’s apartment building at eleven thirty?”

  “I guess.”

  I go to Ralph’s Grocery to pick up a few things we need. On the way back, just north of Carmine’s Carwash on Tujunga (advertising Free Psychiatric Help With Hot Wax), every gear but second on my Jaguar becomes unusable. I make it to our mechanic’s shop on Lankershim expecting it to cost five hundred dollars or more. I’ve known trouble was coming but I hoped it wouldn’t happen for a while.

  It takes ten minutes to fix. Parts and labor came to fifty-three dollars.

  When I get home, there’s a message from my agent, Gordon, scolding me for not having a pager and telling me I have an audition at 10:30 in Beverly Hills for an independent film. There won’t be time to do more than quickly read over the scene before I go in. The director is in town from New York for only one day.

  I change clothes, head over to Laurel Canyon and turn right on Sunset just west of what used to be Schwab’s Pharmacy, the one-time highly publicized actor hangout where, according to some forgotten gossip columnist, Lana Turner was discovered by a talent scout. I’ve heard that Turner said that story was a fable. To my right and up a short, steep hill is the Chateau Marmont hotel, where during her post-Hollywood period, Greta Garbo used to check in occasionally under the name of Harriet Brown, and where John Belushi died of an overdose.

  Driving west through West Hollywood, I pass the sleek, deco-style Saint James Club, formerly the Sunset Towers Apartments and featured in at least a dozen film noirs; the Rainbow Bar and Grill, where Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio met on a blind date; the Roxy, where almost every rock star has played at least once; and the Comedy Store, previously known as Ciro’s, where the studios used to send movie-star “couples” to be photographed together before they escaped out the back to their real-life partners—other or same-gendered.

  I learned most of this from Rita.

  My palms are sweating by the time I get to my audition. I have ten minutes to look at the scene. I can’t make much sense of it. Evidently, there are several other scenes that are about the same. It’s a character who doesn’t
say much, just “reacts.”

  The director, a muddy-featured lump of a man chewing on a thick wet cigar, says with an unlikely lateral lisp, “I’d jusht like to shee you lishen sshum,” and the casting director reads some of the star’s speeches, and I pretend they are the most riveting words I’ve ever heard—could ever imagine hearing.

  When the audition is over, the director makes a sucking sound with his tongue and front teeth, shakes his head and says, “The feeling musht flow up from within or there will be no beauty on the canvash.” He continues shaking his head.

  Somehow this self-important humpty with what looks and sounds like a turd in his mouth, shaking his head in condescension, opens up the place inside me where the homicidal little boy lives, the potential assassin: petrified, wounded.

  A few blocks from the Beverly Vue Apartments where Sophie works is a fancy Beverly Hills jewelry store on Rodeo Drive called Jewels By Jaxon. Sophie and I are buzzed through wrought iron security gates into an intimidating space with plush sage-green carpeting, walls covered with elegant green and gold paper, floor-to-ceiling panels of mirror, and rich, dark walnut showcases full of expensive-looking jewelry.

  An attractive ash blonde in her early forties wearing a simple pink silk dress and only a strand of pearls and tiny pearl earrings for jewelry approaches us and says in a near whisper, “May I show you something?”

  “Actually, we’d like to show you something,” I say. “I was given a ring. I wondered if you could tell me what it’s worth.”

  She stiffens slightly. “Did you want an appraisal for insurance purposes?”

  “No, we just want to find out … what this is—just to have a rough idea.”

  “May I see it, please?”

  I take off the ring and hand it to her. She holds it to the light and makes a faint humming sound in the back of her throat. “This may be an alexandrite. I’m not an expert, but I’ll let you speak with Mr. Parsons. He’s our gemologist and appraiser.”

  She returns the ring to me, disappears into a back room and very shortly returns with a slender gentleman dressed in what looks to be a Forties-style Savile Row double-breasted suit like Adolphe Menjou used to wear, or Herbert Hoover. He is fine-featured, gray-haired, and appears to be in his early sixties. He takes us to a small immaculate room filled with books and gem-testing instruments.

  “Won’t you have a seat?” He speaks in a firm, friendly voice that’s high, almost feminine. As Sophie and I settle into comfortable armless leather chairs, he says, “Let’s see what we have here.”

  I hand him the ring.

  Parsons examines it with a jeweler’s loupe that springs miraculously to his right eye. He turns the ring over and back again.

  “Do you know what it is?” says Sophie.

  He looks up at her, startled by the interruption. “Yes, I know this stone. It’s an alexandrite. May I ask how you came by it?”

  “It was given to me,” I say.

  “And how did the giver acquire it?”

  “I don’t know. Is it valuable?”

  “It’s about seven carats. I’ll measure it in a minute. I’d judge the retail value to be about fifty thousand. It has a small feather-shaped inclusion that would lower its market value, but it’s an exceptional stone.” He flips a switch on a matte black high-tech lamp. “This is a full-spectrum light source—the same range of illumination as the sun.”

  He holds the ring under it. The alexandrite is now a deep bluish emerald green, as it was when I looked at it driving home on the freeway from Morgan’s Gifts.

  “The changes in hue are due to the delicate balance maintained in the absorption color; a change in the color of the light transmitted is all it takes to produce a change in the color of the stone.” He turns it and studies it from several angles. “This is extraordinary.”

  “Did you …? Was that fifty … thousand?” I say, glancing at Sophie.

  She gives me the strangest look, as if she’s happy and sad at the same time.

  Parsons looks off into the distance. “Depends on the buyer. It could be more.” He shakes his head slowly like a wine taster clearing his palate and returns his attention to the ring.

  “Alexandrite is remarkable in the first place. It’s a twinned crystal, as unmatched in its way as diamond. But the color in this stone is unusually deep.” He puts the ring in the clip of a microscope, adjusts the focus and examines it again. “Here, take a look.”

  Sophie looks at it. I follow. It’s a velvety green stone with a flat top ringed by triangular and kite-shaped facets that sparkle as the stone absorbs and reflects the light. Near the bottom and off to one side is a tiny floating feather that’s a little lighter than the surrounding crystal. Gazing at it, I feel as if I’m in danger of falling, like I’m standing on the edge of a cliff, and for a half second, I have the notion that I might, without meaning to, step off and drop into some bottomless abyss I’d never be able to climb out of.

  I stare at it for a long time. “That’s … um, uh … that’s really … fascinating.” As I look up, congratulating myself on such sophisticated patter, Sophie purses her lips, frowns at me, then looks through the microscope again.

  Next, Parsons puts the ring in something he calls a Leveridge gauge and measures the stone. “It’s just over seven and a quarter carats. Who gave it to you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Parsons looks puzzled, almost annoyed. “If I were you, I’d try to figure out where this came from.” He puts an index finger to his forehead and massages lightly, as if trying to soothe a sore spot. “Plato believed that precious stones were living beings. And this is an alexandrite. This could be your friend.”

  Sitting with Sophie in Roxbury Park between Olympic and Pico in Beverly Hills, I say, “I won’t be home till late tonight. I’m having dinner with Rita.”

  She isn’t listening. “Somebody pawned the ring. All you have to do is go down there and ask that woman.”

  “She probably doesn’t know either.” I’m thinking how much better I’d feel if we had the fifty thousand in cash.

  “Yes, but she might. Maybe it was paid for in person when the boy wasn’t there. Aren’t you dying of curiosity?”

  “Actually, I don’t think I want to know anything more about it.”

  She looks at me as if she’s never seen me before. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It blows my mind that this thing has … been given to me—anonymously, but it feels like there’s something maybe in the stone itself that I really … don’t want to know about.” She’s staring at me, and I realize she looks deeply sad. “I don’t have any idea what I’m saying,” I say. “Maybe it’s the fact that it changes color, and you’d never expect that. Maybe it’s the crystal itself. When I saw it under the microscope, I felt … Didn’t it make you feel strange—as if you were about to pitch off into the depths of somewhere you knew you didn’t want to be?”

  She’s frowning.

  “Never mind. It’s me. I know it is. I just don’t like change … I realize you can’t avoid it, but … sometimes I feel as if I’m barely holding it together.”

  Seeing that I’m disappointing her, I say, “Okay, okay, I’ll go.” I’m gazing off toward the west. For some reason, I’m seeing in my mind the Pico Avenue gate of Twentieth Century Fox Studios, where Marilyn Monroe shot twenty of her twenty-nine completed movies. “Anyway, she’s probably cashed the check by now.”

  Sophie looks at me like Rita used to when I was a kid and she was driving me home from acting class and I’d just told her I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be an actor.

  “But the customer would have been given a receipt,” says Sophie. “And the woman would have a copy of it. You want to drive over there right now?”

  “I don’t think so. Maybe tomorrow … or next week.”

  She looks over my shoulder, off in the other direction toward Hollywood, and shakes her head. “I hoped this would work out to be something nice for you. You need something nice. But you don
’t seem to court nice things anymore. You don’t even reach out for them when they’re offered to you. You court unhappiness. You don’t give as if you expect anything good in return. It’s as if you expect only bad to come your way.”

  “What are you talking about?” I hold up the alexandrite. “I just got this thing.”

  She doesn’t answer. “I don’t know how to say this …” She looks shaken. “I think we need some time … away from each other.”

  I stare at her. “What do you mean?”

  “We aren’t … nice to each other anymore.”

  I’m numb. “Sure we are. It’s just kind of a bad time is all.”

  “It’s been a bad time for five years. And it’s getting worse.” She looks more pained than I’ve ever seen her. “You’re sinking, Jack. I love you, but you’re sinking.” She shakes her head. “And I’m not going down with you.” She looks at the grass beneath our feet.

  “Something’s going to break for me. I’ll get a job, a better attitude. I really will. I’m making an effort to tap into the good parts of me, into my thoughtful, selfless parts, into my … you know, my generosity.”

  “I don’t see how that goes along with continuing to do something that—as you pursue it, anyway—seems to be turning you into the opposite of what you’re saying.” She shakes her head again. “I don’t think, when you tap into the deepest parts of yourself, you get what you want; I think you get what you are.”

  “That’s a really shitty thing to say.”

  “I can’t let myself go under because you’re determined to. This has been going on way too long.”

  I don’t even defend myself. I can’t even speak up for my marriage to a woman who is without question the best thing that’s ever come into my life. I think of her asleep on her pillow. I want to go back and be with her in a more loving, transfigured way, but I don’t have the tools for something like that.