The Settings

            She put a smile around her mouthful.
            ‘If I’d known you’d be wearing your diamonds, I’d have worn something nicer.’
            She replaced her own spoon and dabbed the corners of her lips. ‘I’m sure you would have.’
            The way she said it so softly tapped like a bird at my forehead and, though I tried to ignore it while she took up another spoonful, I found myself saying when she had finished it-
            ‘Subtext, please.’
            ‘Pardon?’
            ‘What,’ And this, I’m afraid, I articulated quite thoroughly. ‘Do you mean when you said that?’
            She shrugged.
            ‘You have many nice clothes,’ She wasn’t looking at me.
            ‘You know I do.’
            ‘I know.’
            ‘You do too.’
            ‘I know.’
            ‘So what do you mean?’ I asked again. I asked the question again.
            ‘I mean what I said. Why can’t I have meant what I said?’
            ‘You certainly can mean what you said – you have that right, legally, and socially, and in whichever other way you would want to have it – but you don’t mean what you’ve said, so please don’t try to tell me that you do.’
            Her spoon chirped against her bowl and she placed her hands in her lap. She took a few breaths before looking up at me. ‘I took the diamonds to a jeweller today.’
            I confess that I sighed. I admit that I folded my hands and rested them on my crossed knees while I looked out the window at the leaves falling in their lamplit commutes to the pavement.
            ‘You’ve embarrassed me,’ she said. ‘I’ve been a fool.’
            ‘You’re not embarrassed,’ I stayed with the leaves a while. In their dying, they seemed the more cheerful option. ‘You haven’t been a fool.’
            ‘I am,’ she insisted.
            ‘Why should you be embarrassed?’
            She scoffed and clutched the necklace. ‘I have worn these to galas. I have worn them to palaces.’
            I went for another spoonful of soup before it turned with her. ‘Could you tell? No, you had to go to some jeweller. You couldn’t tell. Why should they?’
            ‘It doesn’t matter if they can tell. You’ve fooled me, and I’ve been going around fooling everyone else and not even knowing it.’
            ‘Why did you take them to a jeweller anyway?’
            ‘I’m like a fooling limb that you use to fool everyone else.’
            ‘What happened to make you take them to the jeweller?’ I uncrossed my legs and sat with my hands flat on the table. I noticed that she had her elbows up on the table.
            ‘I’m just an arm for you to- I’m like a- a distraction. I’m the magic flurry. I’m,’ Having demonstrated the magician’s flourish, and having heard me correct her wording, she reached up to her neck and unclasped the diamonds. She tossed them down to her cutlery. ‘I’m not even real to you myself, am I?’
            ‘Not real to me?’ Her comment pushed me to the back of my chair. ‘What are you talking about?’
            Her face turned disgustingly sour, presumably bottled up with all those explanations that couldn’t quite make it to her lips.
            ‘How insecure are you?’
            ‘I’m not insecure.’
            ‘Tell me how insecure you are.’
            ‘Stop it.’
            ‘Come on,’ I was leant forward again. She was holding her elbows. ‘Tell me.’
            She looked out her Autumn window and said nothing.
            ‘Tell me how much jewellery I have to buy for you to stop being so insecure.’
            She turned back with a fire only as deep as that which falling leaves have. ‘Stop it. This isn’t about me.’
            ‘Not about you?’ I made an incredulous expression. ‘In what way is this not about you? Then who is it about? They’re your diamonds.’
            I gestured to them lying there, one link caught between the fork’s prongs. She tossed them forward and they dragged the fork with them. ‘They’re not my – It’s not my necklace.’
            ‘Am I a thief too, then? Is that what you’re saying? Are the police going to arrest me for stealing fake diamonds? Have you called them already?’
            ‘It’s yours.’
            ‘What do you mean they’re mine? I’m not the one who wears them to your galas and palaces and wherever else you go off to.’
            ‘You didn’t pay for them,’ She was running a hand around her unadorned neck. Her shawl had slipped off one shoulder and wasn’t long for the other.
            ‘They’re mine and I didn’t pay for them? How do I own jewellery that I didn’t pay for? In what world are you? Are policemen coming? Will they arrest me yourself? Is this a sting operation?’
            ‘They didn’t cost you,’ she said.
            Her eyes were wetting themselves. ‘Well, they’re costing me now, aren’t they?’
            She shook her head and could only manage a soft voice. ‘They’re not.’
            ‘Of course I’m paying for them now. Are you trying to tell me this isn’t all your idea of punishing me for something of absolutely no consequence?’
            ‘You’re not paying for the diamonds.’
            ‘Then tell me what I am paying for, because I feel like pounds of my flesh are being wrenched from my body, starting with my frontal lobe and everything else that’s required to think in a rational manner. I can only presume you’re taking them to supplement yourself.’
            ‘You’re not paying for the diamonds.’
            ‘I am.’
            She kept shaking her head. She shook it so finely I couldn’t have seen if I’d so much as stood up. ‘You’re paying for me.’
            I managed to maintain my face in its annoyance against her. She was looking out that window again. The breeze had stopped coming through and there was now nothing pushing against her to keep her from flying away like one of those leaves.
            My hands found their way to the cutlery, and I started flipping my knife one way or the other. The soup sat motionless, probably all but frozen by the open window. It had that colour of dead leaves and, seeing my face reflected in it, I had to remember how they used to fall in her hair when we went walking together.
            ‘I thought I had you,’ I said.
            There was no apology close at hand I know, but I thought we may have been reaching tenderness. From there, I hoped, I could be persuaded to put together some sort of penitence. I caught her eyes as she brushed them with the heel of her hand.
            ‘Well, I thought I had diamonds,’ she said.
            I hesitated to laugh. ‘It really is all about the diamonds, isn’t it?’
            ‘It’s not about the diamonds.’
            ‘Then what is this about?’
            ‘It’s about,’ And, finding nothing to pin it on, she picked them up and dropped them in her soup. She shrugged. ‘There.’
            ‘You are such a child,’ I said as she began to push the necklace down into her bowl again and gain.
            ‘You’re the one who gave me a- a toy.’
            ‘Stop it,’ I told her. ‘Before you damage them.’
            ‘It’s fake,’ She didn’t stop.
            ‘The silver isn’t,’ I reached forward for her wrist but, before I got there, she sat back and pushed her bowl forward towards me, the necklace sunk in it.
            Her fingers were now dripping with soup. Her napkin was on her lap and, not wanting to stain the dress or the tablecloth, she was forced to scrape her chair backwards to get to it. I watched the bowl full of soup and necklace in silence as she did. She had left fingerprints on it.
            ‘Do you want me to buy you diamonds? Is that what this is? Do you want new diamonds?’
            ‘No,’ She was looking out our window again. ‘I don’t want new diamonds.’
            ‘Then what do you want from me? What is this?’
            She looked at me, then up to the corner of the room.
            ‘I thought we were going to have dinner. What are you ruining our dinner for? Is this for fun?’
            ‘It’s for-‘
            ‘Is this how you spend your day? Do you spend your day thinking of all the things you can be ungrateful about so that you can throw them in my face? Is this what you find fun? Are you sick?’
            ‘Do I look like I’m enjoying this?’
            ‘I don’t know,’ I shook my head. ‘I don’t know anymore. Clearly, I can’t tell truth from falsehoods anymore, because I thought you liked that necklace. You told me you like it. If they’re fakes, I’d say it was a perfect match, because so are you apparently.’
            ‘I did like it.’
            ‘Then what’s changed? Have the palaces written to you? Did they call you up for public shaming because you wore fakes that no one could tell were fake? Because you wore damn good fakes? Will you be publicly shamed? Are they going to stone you?’
            ‘If,’ She darted her eyes around the room, desperately trying to find some excuse for continuing with this. ‘If Cook gave you something from a can – if this soup was from a can, you would feel humiliated and betrayed.’
            ‘Yes,’ I shook my head and – the only word I can think of is sneered. ‘But I give Cook money. You don’t give me anything.’

So, that is why I’m sat here now, with an Autumnal breeze bothering my curtains as I pick with tweezers at bits of soup stuck under and in real silver links. I had to put my glasses on to really get at it. She really did a number on it. She’s upstairs now with some slices of bread. She can’t have been too upset if she thought of taking a bite to eat with her. Then again, my confidence in my comprehension of her has recently diminished dramatically.
            A trio of men who had too many are serenading the streetlights and bushes. They’re surprisingly in tune, even if their diction is slurred and one is keeping an unsteady beat with his sobs. When I get this chunk out of the setting, I’ll move my chair to the window and listen a while.
            I can see myself sat there now, my glasses between my fingers, finding joy and beauty in what is ostensibly quite tragic. I will be like an exiled angel, maintaining eloquence at least as I look down on my new kin. I may be at peace there as I can’t be here.
            This chunk has gotten itself under the last clasp on the largest diamond. It’s right under the curve, as if sheltering from me. It saw me wipe its fellow marring off with the napkin, then watched as I hunted out the remnants, like some solitary Gestapo officer. Now it alone stands to defend this bastion against my purifying conquest. It trembles now as I tap at it. I’m trying not to scratch the glass it clings to.
            It is lasting longer than the rest, so my tongue is beginning to taste the bitterness of my teeth. It seems to think that it is bound, perhaps by some voodoo magic, to the movement of my tweezers. My teeth, then, would be the silver and glass, each as brilliant and beautiful as the other. I have never needed a tooth replaced.
            I keep turning the diamond in the light, trying to see the piece of soup’s exact positioning, and if I’m moving it at all. Perhaps a brush would be better than the tweezers. I know she has a soft one in the bathroom. This would mean moving past her, but if I was holding the necklace as I passed, she would know how much effort I am going to for her.
            Best not to risk it, anyhow. I’ll stay where I am, but perhaps that flat end of the tweezers might be a good help. It’s flat and thin, perhaps thin enough to get under the clasp. Only just under, though. I don’t want to pry it up.
            I've never held tweezers like this before. I guess it’s more for scraping or scratching than tweezing, but I think I can be tactful enough if I bring it close. I only hear it as I slide it along the glassy surface of the diamond, up to the silver clasp’s stowaway. But the movement of grasping it and quickly flicking the piece of soup out and to the side feels more like the swiftness of rescuing a hostage, held in a steely grasp. The hostage, the soup, now lies open at the edge of the gem. A licked thumb will get it off.
            The window is quiet now when I go to it, the trio having moved on. I can only just hear them down away but I’m sure music is what I need, so I go to the records and put on some Armstrong. It doesn’t quite hit while I pick at the other settings in the necklace. It sounds too much like I’m doing damage to it and, besides, if she heard it, she would have to think I was being callous.
            I slow the music down. Now my window is lumping melody back out onto the street and, sometimes, the slow dancing curtains align with the sluggish beat.
            Now that I think about it, the diamonds were always the centre point anyway, and my neck is starting to ache. There is a much easier way to save this necklace. I look to the ceiling, beyond which she’s probably sobbing. Why should she be? The diamonds made her stunning. Few things delighted me as much as seeing her wear them and trust that I was never looking at the silver.
            Would she recognise them on a new chain?
            The first setting that I tweeze up out of place thrills me. The diamond breathes. I have freed it from its cage. I smile. I shouldn’t. Why shouldn’t I? They’re mine, she said, and now it falls into my hand, and it isn’t even cold. I smirk. Perhaps the soup warmed it.
            I set about the other stones until I hold them all in my palm and I can pick up any one of them that I choose and see it on its own and really get to know its utter perfection. They are so smooth, symmetrical, geometry at its finest. I close my fist around these perfect diamonds, and I will leave the silver to sit on the sill.