The gold standard
The story starts off simply, with the tale’s teller, the goldsmith of the title, on a snowy night in New York city just before the turn of the new millennium, recollecting the great lost love of his life and dwelling on the mistakes that young men sometimes make, mistakes which haunt them worse than ghosts.
As a teenager, he’d embarked on a torrid affair with an older woman, Celia, one of his mother’s closest friends. She had known another love, many years before, a stranger who had dallied a while in passing through town. Then he’d vanished, abruptly and without warning, leaving her on the verge of the altar, broken-hearted and torn apart. The affair Celia fell into with our young narrator was sudden and unexpected. Something about him bewitched her, and they were irresistible to one another. But like a fool, misreading the situation and allowing his jealousies to fester, our hero bolted, fled the scene. He ran, learned his trade, shacked up in New York and yearned away his adult years crafting little golden delicacies and tossing around thoughts of what might have been.
