Unbecoming: A Novel

by Rebecca Scherm

  Grace sat on her bed and stared at her thighs, which looked as frail and dry as if she’d had the flu.

  “What is it?” Kendall said.

  “What?”

  “Wait, did you—”

  Grace shook her head furiously.

  “No, no,” Kendall said, a glint in her eye. “Something happened.”

  Someone began to pound on their door. “Don’t move,” Kendall said, slipping into the hallway as if Grace might try to escape. She came back with Lana, whose face gleamed with excitement, though Grace hadn’t even heard them whispering.

  Kendall stood at the foot of Grace’s bed, her hands on her hips. She had the faintest smile on her lips. “Did you fuck him?”

  “No!” Grace said, her voice all air.

  “You did! Oh my God, you so did!” Kendall cried.

  “Shit,” Lana said. “This was the friend?”

  “Best friend,” Kendall said. “Of her husband!”

  When they saw that Grace was crying, they sat down on either side of her, and Lana rubbed her back. She put her head on Grace’s shoulder and shushed her maternally.

  “Wow,” Kendall said. “Who would’ve thought? Little Miss Small-Town America. Mrs., I mean. Come on, stop crying. Nobody died.”

  “I’ll get you some tissue,” Lana said. Grace nodded, snot running down her lip.

  “Well, something like this would have happened sooner or later,” Kendall said. “Long-distance relationships are doomed.”

  “Please stop,” Grace blubbered. “I can’t—”

  “I mean, I didn’t realize you were even into him—”

  “Kendall,” Lana scolded from the doorway, but when Kendall stopped, Grace began to sob again, bigger and bigger, as if a magician were pulling a mile-long scarf from her throat. She gasped for breath, and when she looked up, she saw that Lana was standing in the doorway with her video camera.

  “It’s okay,” Lana said, encouraging her. “Do what you feel.”

  V

  Paris

  14

  He might have forgiven you,” Hanna said.

  Grace laughed sadly. She hadn’t wanted to be forgiven. She hadn’t wanted him to find out. They were irreconcilable desires. You had either one impulse or the other, and Grace had always had the other.

  She and Hanna were sharing a bottle of Hanna’s wine on the balcony of her minuscule Belleville studio. Grace was accustomed to spending her evenings by herself, and she was surprised when she accepted Hanna’s invitation. But Mme Freindametz was off this week, and she had not forgiven Grace for snapping at her. Now that Grace had put a lock on her bedroom door, her landlady was visibly hostile.

  Tonight, when Hanna had asked Grace if there was any news from home, Grace had taken a glug of her wine and told Hanna that she had slept with a friend of her husband. The cliché was painful to spit out.

  “No good would’ve come of telling him,” Grace said now.

  “You would have broken up, like people do. You think he knows?”

  Grace nodded. “He must.”

  “And that’s why you’re so terrified of him,” Hanna said to herself.

  Grace knew this fork in the road: to tell Hanna that Riley was no one to be afraid of, or to nod easily and say Yes, exactly. Don’t think, she told herself. Just do it.

  “He wasn’t abusive,” Grace said. “I’m sorry I told you that.”

  “Oh.” Hanna blinked in surprise. “I see.”

  “He would have been devastated. I thought lying to him was kinder—protecting him.” Ah, that wasn’t quite right, but she had said the main thing. She had made the correction. She was trying.

  “Well, to protect his love for you.” Hanna sounded older suddenly, and newly prissy.

  “I’d worked so hard to earn it,” Grace said. “And then to lose it over one thing—”

  “Earn it!” Hanna cried. “What an American way of looking at it. You people think you deserve every happiness.”

  Grace tipped up her glass of wine and finished it. “Our founding fathers said we do.”

  Hanna peered at her, unsure if she was serious. Grace rolled her eyes, and Hanna sat back again.

  “I’ve never told you about Nina,” Hanna said.

  Nina—it sounded familiar somehow. Then Grace remembered: Antonia. She waited, anxious for Hanna’s confidence. Grace had confided in her, after all.

  “I was helpless to her,” Hanna said. “Every hour I spent near her seemed to vanish in a second. I could never get enough.”

  Hanna tilted her head back to rest it on the couch behind her and blinked up at the ceiling. “As soon as she left the room, it was as though the heat were switched off. I wanted to know everything about her, every detail of her life, her biography, her interests, her movements. Each thing I learned was a little piece of candy. And I always wanted more.”

  A week ago, Grace couldn’t have imagined Hanna in love. To be in love was to lose control, and Hanna, on the surface, at least, always exhibited perfect control.

  “The way you are in love is the way you are in all things,” Hanna said. “And the way you are in all things is the way you are in love. Sloppy, messy in life? Sloppy in love. Need to pin down every detail?” She pointed at herself. “That’s me in love—no laziness.”

  Grace didn’t want to think about how she was in love.

  “The woman I loved was a liar. So in life, in love. I see it in you too.” Hanna pointed at Grace. “Untrustworthy.”

  Grace’s mouth fell open. Hanna had accused her as if it were a joke, but she hadn’t meant it like one.

  “Lies beget lies,” Hanna went on. “Like little bunny rabbits. They make more lies, wherever they go. They can’t help it—pop, pop, pop, all over the place, little baby lies that grow up into big lies and make their own lies—”

  “Look,” Grace said. “I was young, and I fucked up, and I left, and I’m sorry. People make mistakes. They do crazy things when they’re in love.”

  “You’ve told lies, I bet, you don’t even realize you’ve told. Like an addict! They just fall out of your mouth, like you’re breathing them.”

  Grace recoiled. “What is this obsession with lying all of a sudden? Everyone lies. You try not to but you do. I’m no worse than anyone else. You’re a forger, for God’s sake.”

  “Used to be. Now I’m very frank, all the time. Now I don’t bet what I can’t afford to lose.”

  • • •

  One week had passed since the boys were paroled. Nothing.

  Grace saw the possibility that there would always be nothing, but she couldn’t really grasp it. She tried to settle into the ambiguity, which she knew could last forever. If she didn’t, the terrible uncertainty of where they were and what they were doing, feeling, thinking, saying would surpass anything they could ever do or think or say.

  So much of her life since she had left Garland, even the first time, had been a series of tragic errors. She couldn’t imagine that she’d gotten away with it. She didn’t feel as though she had gotten away with anything—more like she’d gotten away without.

  Grace was painting the hooves of one of Hanna’s sheep when Jacqueline called her in. Usually her boss came out of her office when she wanted something, looking over everyone’s work as she talked. Grace stood up, but her left leg had fallen asleep and she started to tumble. Hanna shrieked, high-pitched as a scared rabbit, and Grace grabbed the corner of the table to right herself. Amaury had leaned over to cover his workings with his arms, like a hen protecting a brood of chicks. His table was eight feet away.

  “Pardon,” Grace said.

  She hobbled into Jacqueline’s office, and Jacqueline shut the door.

  “Asseyez-vous,” she said. “I have something new for you.”

  “What about the centerpiece?”

  “Hanna will be working on it for weeks,” Jacqueline said. “In the meantime, we have to get paid.” She unlocked her desk drawer and pulled out a velvet jewelry box. “Hold this,” she sa
id, handing Grace a giant cocktail ring set with brightly colored jewels. Jacqueline pushed her finger into the jewelry box’s crease, peering into it. She turned the box over and shook it into her lap. Two pearls bounced across her skirt.

  “The pearls fell out,” she said, placing them in Grace’s palm.

  “I don’t know what to do with jewelry,” Grace said. “I don’t know anything about jewelry.”

  “Just pretend it’s a jewelry box instead of the jewelry, okay? You’ve done pearl setting before. The minaudière, remember?”

  “But that was costume,” Grace said.

  “This is costume.”

  “I don’t think it is,” Grace said, rubbing the thick gold band with her thumb.

  “It might as well be. Pearls, peridot. Nothing so very precious. The centerpiece is worth five times what this ring is worth.”

  “The centerpiece? How much? Nine, ten thousand euros?”

  “More like fifteen, even as partial reproduction. Nothing like it, and the collector’s a little crazy. So who can say?”

  • • •

  The green center stone was a huge oval cabochon, rounded as an eyeball. Jacqueline had said semiprecious, but Grace was sure she was looking at an emerald, flanked by stacks of amethyst baguettes. The ring looked like formalwear for a Mardi Gras parade, like the fantasy jewelry of a six-year-old who wanted to be a princess. At the top and bottom of the emerald were empty sockets where the pearls were to go.

  “Amaury, do you have any pearl cement remover?” Grace waggled her finger, weighed down by the heavy ring. “I need to clean this up a bit.”

  Amaury cocked his head toward the shelf behind him, which held all manner of solvents and cements that Hanna and Grace seldom required. Amaury more often dealt with jewels, working on watches, and Grace wondered why Jacqueline hadn’t asked him to do the ring.

  Grace had the ring fixed in fifteen minutes. Dissolving the old glue was as simple as removing polish from a fingernail, and then she dabbed a little cement into each setting with a toothpick and pushed the pearls in. Three thousand euros, held together with glue.

  When she gave the ring back to Jacqueline, her boss ran her fingers over the pearls and around them, feeling for any roughness. She squinted at the ring under her desk lamp. “Good,” she said.

  Then she took a brown paper sack from her purse and upended it into her palm. Out tumbled a jeweled bangle, a fat gold tube striped with red and white stones. “Same with this bracelet,” Jacqueline said. “Some of the stones have come loose from their settings. It’s an older piece.” The gold was discolored and the remaining stones were dirty. Jacqueline held the bracelet out to Grace, who hesitated.

  “Did you want me to ask Amaury? He’s busier than you are right now—”

  “No,” Grace said quickly. “I’ll do it.”

  Jacqueline handed Grace a small envelope. She could feel the stones through the paper. She knew that when she opened the bag, the stones inside it would be bright and clean.

  At her desk, Grace looked closely at the gem settings. The lights buzzed overhead, and she turned on her brightest lamp. She picked at the crooked metal prongs that had given up their diamonds and rubies. Grace had been so eager to prove herself to Jacqueline, and this was what she’d done it for? She hadn’t stolen anything in years, not even a pack of gum. She looked at Hanna’s little sheep and their half-painted hooves with longing.

  • • •

  Grace and Hanna communicated in single words—Salad? Omelet?—until they were sitting next to each other on a park bench, staring together at a bird foraging from the rim of a garbage can.

  “Oh, I don’t think it’s that,” Hanna said when Grace told her about the jewelry. “She used to take in jewelry work from time to time. There hasn’t been any jewelry since you’ve been here?”

  “No, just watches,” Grace said. “Amaury’s things.”

  “She used to have a jewelry person here. Angeline. She left when her eyesight got too bad, and I guess that was the end of the jewelry. But I’m sure you’ll be very good—you do all the microscopic work very well. You should get reading glasses, though. You’ll ruin your eyes.”

  “It’s just bizarre for something so expensive to be in a paper bag like that.”

  “You know as well as I do that people don’t always take very good care of their things.”

  Grace nodded.

  “I mean, it could be,” Hanna said. “Stolen, I mean. We wouldn’t know. Would you really mind if it was?”

  “Of course I would.”

  “Funny that this would suddenly bother you,” Hanna said. “You know she’s not running a spotless operation.”

  “No one in antiques is,” Grace said. “But there’s a line. I’ll do whatever I’m told as long as I can reasonably believe that it’s okay.”

  “Reasonably believe? That’s not belief; it’s the opposite.”

  “Hanna, we don’t know what happens outside the studio,” Grace said.

  “That’s what I’ve been saying.”

  Grace sat in doubtful silence, picking at her salad. She thought now about Antonia and Nina and wondered if they were the same person or if these names, unusual sounding to her, were as common in Denmark as Madison and Emma were in Tennessee. So often she’d felt on the edge of knowing something, and as many times as she had leaped over that edge she had scrambled backward, covering her eyes. She didn’t want to know about the jewelry but it was too late. She wanted to ask about Nina and Antonia, but Hanna’s temperament seemed to forbid it.

  Then Hanna asked her why she had cheated on her husband in the first place. Whatever limits she felt, she clearly ignored.

  “The same reason anybody does,” she said. “I was lonely and disappointed.”

  “Or bored and entitled.”

  “Maybe bored,” Grace agreed.

  “People always say the other person didn’t mean anything.”

  “No, he meant a great deal to me,” Grace said. “I loved him horribly, if you can say that. Like I was sick with him. I knew I’d made the right choice, marrying my husband, and some evil part of me was trying to ruin everything, and she needed to be silenced.” She grimaced. “I sound like I’m describing a psychopath.”

  “Two selves.”

  “Everyone has them, I think.”

  “Public and private.”

  “Right and wrong.”

  “I find it so strange that you were married. You’re such a remote person. I can’t imagine you as a passionate teenager.”

  Grace could hardly imagine herself as a passionate teenager. Until that night with Alls, she had never been at a loss to explain, to herself, her own decisions. She had never confused self-interest with self-indulgence. She knew the difference.

  • • •

  When they came back from lunch, Amaury was in Jacqueline’s office. They could hear him. Hanna put her finger to her lips, and Grace tiptoed back to her table.

  “Whose is it?” Amaury demanded.

  “Go back to your desk,” Jacqueline said. “Stop asking me questions if you don’t like the answers.”

  “You made a promise, and I won’t work here anymore if—”

  “Nobody’s making you work for me.”

  When Amaury came out, Grace and Hanna dropped their eyes, their tools suddenly clacking. He took his jacket from his station and left.

  Grace clanked the handle of her pliers loudly on the edge of the table. She wished she hadn’t overheard.

  15

  On Monday, Grace was winding the centerpiece’s tree trunks with bronze-beaded wires, spiraling from the base to the fine branches. Applying these beaded wires was the easiest thing they’d done to the centerpiece since cleaning, and Grace didn’t want to rush. Jacqueline had left her alone after she’d finished the bracelet, and Grace wished she could work quietly on the centerpiece with Hanna. She was proud of her work: Her peaches, now bound to the branches, looked soft and fragrant, though they were neither, and her acorn
s were so small and precise that no one would even see them until they looked very, very closely.

  She’d also done quite good work on the ruby and diamond bracelet, but she didn’t want to think about that.

  Hanna was clipping serrations along the edges of her silk leaves with minute scissors, the sharp blades short as a pencil tip, when Grace asked her what Nina had lied about.

  Her brow furrowed, but she did not ask Grace to clarify.

  “Real liars don’t lie about anything,” Hanna said. “They just lie. ‘About’ is a word liars use to justify their lying, to make it seem like a localized problem.”

  “You’ve made quite a study,” Grace said, trying to sound light and wry.

  “But I still don’t know,” Hanna said. “And that upsets me. With a liar, you can never know the whole truth, ever. You can’t ever be sure that this version is the real version. There is no end, no bottom. Sometimes I wonder if the whole thing was a hoax.”

  “The whole thing?”

  “Our whole affair. I’m not sure she was even conscious of lying, or if lying had become so much of her nature that she lied without thinking. So, yes. If I was just another object for her lying.”

  “And if you were in on it,” Grace said, standing to get closer to the tips of the trees. “Lying to yourself, or wanting to believe too much.”

  She had meant to commiserate, to empathize, but Hanna was too quiet. Grace looked up to see Hanna’s eyes tightly screwed onto her leaves. Bits of fabric small as dust floated down into her lap.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “Nobody wants to be lied to.”

  “Of course not,” Grace said apologetically. “Not consciously. It’s just that you know the person wants something that isn’t—”

  “Yes,” Hanna said. “You lie because you know, when asked the question, that there’s a good answer and a bad one.”

  “You want to give the good one,” Grace said. “To be good. And they want you to, too.”