Unbecoming: A Novel

by Rebecca Scherm

  “Gracie, my painting is good,” he protested. “No one is ever going to guess that I did this.” He looked at her as if he were on the verge of laughter. “Look at me, baby. Look at me.” He pointed to his face. His curls were aglow from the street lamp behind them. “No one—no one—in Tennessee is ever going to suspect that Riley Sullivan Graham would do something like this.”

  A wave of nausea drowned her guilt for a moment. She wanted to kill him. “Don’t,” she pleaded. “Just forget the whole thing. This was supposed to be a game, right? A game.”

  He tried to kiss her and she pulled away. “What is this? We didn’t break up. That’s the game.”

  “No more games.”

  “You want out? Fine, you’re out! You’re too sensitive for this anyway. You worry too much.”

  “Riley,” she warned him.

  “You’ll see.”

  • • •

  Alls called her the next morning. “We agreed that we would never tell him,” he said, “and we’re going to stick with that.”

  She held her breath.

  “But I know what I want,” he said. “And I can’t help that.”

  She slid down the wall until she was on the floor. “Yes,” she said.

  “We can’t let him rob the Wynne House,” he said. “It’s suicide.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You told him you’re out?”

  “He doesn’t care.”

  “I’ve created a monster,” she said.

  “How do we steal a painting?”

  She had not expected that. She marveled at the we, which sounded now like a word she had never heard before.

  “We—we have to replace it with a fake,” she said. “We could buy a fake online, a print of some crappy still life in the same colors, and we put an old frame around it, and we switch them.”

  “No sweat,” he said doubtfully.

  “It’s not a great idea,” she said. “And besides—he could still try to steal the original, not knowing. And then it would be very clear to him what we’d done.”

  “So we can’t do that.”

  “No.”

  “We need to save him from himself,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, disbelieving. “How close is he to finishing the painting?”

  “I don’t know how to tell. I can send you a picture.”

  “Yes. He’ll tell me, though, when he’s done. He won’t be able to help it.”

  “Oh, you guys are talking?”

  “It’s like you thought,” she said. “He thinks this is his grand gesture.”

  “And then?”

  “Then you take his painting. When he’s in class, probably. And then you take the tour,” she said. “Once you’re upstairs, I come in and make the switch. You have to ask questions, upstairs, to give me time. We couldn’t sell it in America. That would be stupid.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I go to Prague in two weeks,” she said.

  “Me, too,” he said.

  She laughed, a short burst that startled them both. “We don’t have any money,” she said.

  “Riley’s going to pay you back for the rent,” he said. “He called it ‘priority uno.’”

  How easily they slipped into mocking him, this person they were so determined to protect.

  • • •

  He did pay her back, and then some. Anne Findlay had gotten a call requesting one unsold painting.

  “With interest,” he said, eyes gleaming. It was as if he were taunting her with his autonomy now. The we was gone. Her husband now showed off how easily he could act without her input. Riley seemed determined to prove that he could do whatever he wanted without losing her. But prove it to whom? If Riley wanted to show Grace that he held her under the thumb of his love, he had grossly miscalculated. Grace had been gone longer than even she had known.

  “You are not a criminal,” she pleaded. “I won’t let you do it. I’ll set off the car alarms across the street. I’ll pretend I’m having a heart attack on the office’s steps. I’ll call in a bomb threat. I’m not going to leave you here when you’re like this.”

  “Like what?” he said, gently biting her ear.

  “Manic. Delusional. Like this.”

  “Well, when I whisk you off to Paris, I won’t be like this anymore. I’ll be cured. I’ll be cured and I’ll be rich.”

  For a moment, she hoped he would do it and get caught, once she was long gone. His family couldn’t save him then. And Greg, well—she longed to see him regret anything. But this was not in her best interest.

  “I won’t be party to this,” she said stuffily. “It’s dangerous and it’s wrong and I won’t be associated with something like this.”

  “We both know that’s not true,” he said.

  • • •

  The snag appeared when, just ten days before Grace was supposed to leave for Prague, Riley had still not finished his fake. Of course, he saw no hurry, since he believed he was meeting her there later. He bragged to her about his glazes, his shadows, his brushwork, the luminescence, until she gave him a warning look. “I don’t want to hear about it,” she said.

  “I’m almost done,” he said. “Shame you won’t get to see the finished product.”

  If Riley did not finish the painting in time, she and Alls would be sunk. The two of them had to switch the painting together, one upstairs, occupying the docent, while the other made the switch.

  But, Grace thought, if Riley didn’t finish his fake in time, they would still have to steal the original. To protect Riley, so there would be no painting for him to steal. His heist would be ruined, and he would be safe in his little Garland life, and she and Alls would be gone, forever. Alls agreed. Again and again, they spoke of saving Riley from his own happy arrogance, from Greg’s caper-movie logic, from trying to win Grace back when she could no longer be won. She was not a prize.

  “I’ll buy the fake,” she told Alls. “I’m sure I can find something close enough.”

  He stood across the aisle from her, three feet between them. They had not been any closer than this since New York. Alls had called her on the phone with this condition: They had done something terrible and they were planning something worse, but until they were finished, alone together and away from Garland, away from Riley, there could be no physical contact. Alls wanted to hang on, he said, to some scrap of—of—

  “Honor?” Grace had said, disbelieving. His was a very relative, very negotiated kind of honor. But she had agreed, more because she feared losing control. If she so much as touched his hand, her mind would leave her. She had to focus.

  Now she knew it hadn’t mattered. A toddler was wailing for Pepsi in the aisle behind them, and Alls, backed by bright plastic vacuum cleaners, looked sallow and sleepless under the fluorescent lights, but Grace didn’t feel at all in control.

  “Just for a few days,” he agreed. “Until I can swap in the better one.” The better one meant Riley’s forgery, which neither of them liked to say.

  “How would you do that alone?”

  “I’d have to follow another tour in,” he said.

  She bit her lip. This was a rush play, sloppy and desperate, exactly the kind of talk that had made her sure that Riley had no business trying to pull off something like this himself.

  “Or we could just leave it. No one would ever notice except Riley.”

  “No, we have to get his forgery into Wynne House,” Alls said, swallowing, “so that he can’t rat us out.”

  She nodded. She wished he hadn’t said it. She preferred the narrative that they were protecting Riley to the one in which she and Alls were only ensuring their escape.

  “I can do it,” he said. “I could go at night, pick the lock.”

  She nodded. They weren’t making sense anymore. They wanted it to work too badly.

  • • •

  Buying a fake painting was easy. There was an entire industry devoted to printing images cheaply on canvas of any size and then swabbing
clear “brushwork” over the top, nonsensically, to approximate artistry. Grace’s fake Bosschaert wasn’t even a Bosschaert—his work was neither famous nor fun enough for hanging over couches—but a Willem van Aelst, who had worked in roughly the same time, place, and style. The Bouquet of Flowers she bought was identical in size, similar in composition and color palette. She opted not to purchase the fake brushwork, which looked like wrinkled plastic wrap and would attract more attention than the painting itself ever had. Her van Aelst cost $149 plus rush shipping and arrived in five days. Grace pulled the canvas from its bubble wrap and sucked in her breath. They were really going to do it.

  She went to the Wynne House on Tuesday morning with her hair pulled back severely, wearing dark lipstick and glasses. She borrowed clothes from her mother’s closet. She took the tour grimly, as if she were a serious historian. Dorothea, the ancient docent who had first toured Grace months ago, didn’t recognize her. Grace was not charming; she was not herself.

  While they were upstairs, Alls slipped in downstairs with the fake, which they had cut from its frame. They had, Grace had estimated, ten to twelve minutes while Grace and Dorothea were upstairs. If it wasn’t easy to get the painting from its frame, they agreed, he would walk right back out. But it was; it was so easy. He popped the frame’s back off with the screwdriver tip of a Leatherman, cut the painting out in four clean cuts, and stapled the fake in its place. He rolled up the painting, put it in his backpack, and walked home to Orange Street. By the time Grace and Dorothea came down the stairs, he was gone.

  When Alls called her on the phone that night and told her he’d slid the painting above the panels of the drop ceiling in his bedroom, Grace was lightheaded with joy. She was in love and was very close to getting to keep it, forever. Alls didn’t want to save Ginny’s Ice Cream, and when he’d found out that Grace was not quite the sundress sweetheart she had tried to be, he had loved her anyway. She felt newly honest and exhilarated, as though she were skinny-dipping at night in a dark lake.

  Grace thought she should take the painting with her to Prague but Alls disagreed.

  “You would proposition your ex-boyfriend’s best friend to steal a two-million-dollar painting with you,” he said. “There is a limit to how stupid you make me.”

  Not her ex-boyfriend, but her current husband. She never told him. She had limits too.

  • • •

  Grace was leaving for Prague in just three more days. She took deep breaths and tried to keep the strands of her relationships untangled, though she herself was unraveling. She had read about men who had whole secret families in other states or countries. The distance was key. You could not sustain something like this when the two men you were planning futures with lived in the same house. Worse than managing this duplicity was navigating the relationships—plural—she was having with each of them. There was the relationship Riley thought they had, the one Alls thought she and Riley had, and the one she and Riley actually had, whatever the hell that was. And there was what she had found with Alls, which was real.

  The night before she left, Riley showed up with a surprise. He propped it up on Grace’s childhood desk, against the bulletin board of all their prom photos.

  “What do you think?” he asked her proudly.

  The painting seemed to glow. Without thinking, she reached out to touch it, and Riley grabbed her hand. “Christ, it’s not dry yet.”

  “Don’t do it, Riley. You are such a good painter. You don’t need to do this.”

  “Painter,” he said. “You know, you used to say I was a good artist.”

  “If you do this, I’m going to leave you. I’m serious.”

  “The fuck you will,” he said. “Just try. You can’t.” She recoiled, and his face became pitiful. “I’m not asking you for help, just some faith in me. When have I let you down?”

  If she told Riley that she didn’t love him anymore, he would certainly rob the Wynne House, just to show her what he could do, like a little boy having a tantrum with a real knife. Had this Riley always been there? How much of him had she created? Telling him the truth would make him crazy, she told herself. It would only destabilize him further.

  Also, she didn’t want him to cancel her plane ticket.

  Alls would follow her as soon as he could switch the paintings. He said it was best that they weren’t leaving at the same time. “Leaving a few days apart is the kindest thing to do,” he said, calling her on his cigarette break at the drugstore. “He can choose not to put it together this way, and he will. You know him. He only ever sees what he wants to.”

  “You will come,” she pressed. “How do I know you’ll come?”

  “I’m coming,” he said. “I promise.”

  That was what Riley said too.

  If only she had believed! Instead she felt a seed of distrust that she couldn’t ignore: that Greg could still fuck it all up somehow or that Riley would, even that Alls was setting her up.

  It was nine o’clock. She knew that Riley was with Greg now—he had said they were going to Target with strange, ominous vagueness—and that Alls was at work.

  Grace slipped on her backpack and went over to the house on Orange Street, letting herself in the back door. She stood on Alls’s bed to lift the ceiling tile and pulled out the painting. The canvas was so slight in her hands—it might have been a vinyl place mat. She just couldn’t take any chances.

  • • •

  Riley borrowed Greg’s car to drive her to the airport, mistaking Grace’s worry for a different kind. He didn’t know that he would never see her again. He thought he was comforting her, and that was intolerable.

  “I’ll be there soon,” he said. “So soon!”

  “How soon?” she asked.

  “You’re going to love it! Old buildings, cheap liquor, that one poet you love. Sites of historic terror! What are you crying for?”

  “I can’t believe you did this for me.”

  “Well, I can,” he said. “I’m almost insulted that you would say that.”

  “Please don’t do it,” she said. “Just forget it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Rob the Wynne House!”

  “Oh,” he said. “Okay, I won’t.”

  She knew, of course, that he didn’t mean it. She had lost her control over him. Whatever he did now was for an idea of her. For that, she could not be responsible.

  • • •

  Grace spent her first day in Prague searching, lost and sweaty, for an Ethernet cord to plug in to her computer. The Communist-era dorms didn’t have wireless and she was anxious to talk to Alls. When she finally saw his face flicker at her on her laptop screen, she thought she might pass out from relief. She had shut herself in the tiny WC for privacy and was sitting on the toilet. The long blue Ethernet cord stretched under the door and back to her desk.

  “You made it,” he said, almost shy.

  “I made it,” she said.

  Her roommate was doing the same thing on the other side of the door, and for a moment Grace felt that they were the same, just two girls lovesick and homesick and talking to their boyfriends on the Internet.

  But her joy at seeing him was short-lived. Greg and Riley’s plan, Alls told her, was now in motion. Riley had just been waiting for her to leave.

  “Wait, why are they still doing the antiques?” Grace asked when Alls told her. “That’s insane, if he has the painting.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Alls said. He was sitting in his car in the parking lot of the Whitwell Starbucks. They had Wi-Fi there and no one from Garland would see him. “It’s Greg, I think. I’m trying to derail the whole thing, since I can’t exactly tell them to focus on the painting.”

  Greg had told his parents that they were going to spend a few days at the house on Norris Lake. It was only an hour and ten minutes away. They would drive up in the afternoon and be seen: eating ribs at Hale’s, buying beer and whiskey at the liquor store, filling up the gas tank. They needed Alls to come with them, Riley sa
id, even if he was going to puss out on the rest. At the end of the evening, they would park Greg’s car in the garage next to their second car, untitled and anonymous, already there waiting for them.

  The next day, they would drive together in the second car to the Walmart in Pitchfield, where their third car, also untitled and anonymous, waited in the parking lot. Greg had been moving it between Walmarts every three to four days. They would switch cars and drive to Garland, arriving at the Wynne House at nine in the morning. If there were no unexpected cars in the lot, Riley would go in for the tour. When they got upstairs, he would lock the docent in the windowless study, and then meet Greg and Alls—Riley was sure Alls would come around—downstairs.

  “Lock her?” Grace was incredulous. “She’s an old woman. She’ll have a heart attack.”

  When the boys were done, they would calmly walk out with their sacks to their car. They would drive together back to the Walmart, where they would switch cars again, transferring their Walmart bags of Confederate antiquities, and return to the lake house. They’d spend the evening goofing off at the lake, shouting over the water to annoy the neighbors. The next morning, Riley would head to New York, leaving Greg at the lake for appearances. In New York, Riley would liquidate everything over the next week, using a list of vendors he had compiled.

  “It’s my list,” Grace told Alls mournfully. “I made that fucking list.”

  “Just come,” she said. “Just leave the other one and come. Get out of there.”

  “It’s almost dry, I heard him say it. They need longer than that to tie up their loose ends. I bought a ticket for Saturday, okay? He says next Thursday is the day. But by then, his painting will be gone, and he won’t be able to do a goddamn thing about it. Their whole machine will fall apart, and I will be with you.”

  • • •

  The summer study program itself was just an excuse for rich college kids to drink beer that was cheaper than water and get school credit for it. Grace went to the classes without knowing why—for show, she supposed. Her roommate was a whiny communications major from Connecticut, the kind of girl Kendall and Lana would have eaten alive. She found herself missing them. God, what would they think of her now?