Unbecoming: A Novel
Page 26
Jacqueline paused at her office door. “Julie, a moment.”
Grace followed her.
Jacqueline smiled nervously. “Good,” she said, as if Grace had answered some question.
She opened the black velvet box before her to reveal another ring, this one an Edwardian engagement ring. Grace thought it was beautiful. The ring’s setting was empty around the center solitaire. The four sockets were darkened with age. Jacqueline handed her a packet of four stones, emerald cut, probably from her bag of zircons.
“Do it here,” Jacqueline said.
“In your office?”
“Yes, now.”
When Grace went to fetch her tools, Hanna was staring distractedly at the centerpiece.
Grace sat down in Jacqueline’s chair and took up a loupe. She saw the sharp, bright track marks in the sockets where someone had crudely plucked out the stones. She nestled the first stone in its square socket while Jacqueline, sitting on a file box of papers, watched her. Grace glanced up and saw her boss’s mouth set tightly, a white rim around her lips.
Grace set the first two stones on either side of the solitaire. When she sat back and looked at the ring under the light, she nearly laughed at how bad it looked. The center solitaire was an antique, old mine cut. It glowed softly and looked almost buttery in the light. Jacqueline’s blowsy zircons looked like cheap sequins next to it.
Jacqueline was biting her lip, and Grace waited for her to say it, that the ring looked bad, that it would never pass, but Jacqueline nodded. She couldn’t tell.
Grace set the remaining two stones, feeling sorry for the ring’s owner. Jacqueline had gotten sloppy, making these lousy substitutions that she didn’t have the eyes to understand. She was going to get caught. But if Grace told Jacqueline that she knew, she’d be gone in ten seconds.
And then what? Back to being a chambermaid? An “English tutor”?
“It’s good to have something to fall back on,” that man had told her three years ago, zipping up his fly before he paid her at his door. “For when times get tough.”
What wouldn’t she do with no one watching? Grace remembered thinking then. What wouldn’t she do, now that she didn’t know who she was anymore? Her sense of self had quickly turned to vapor. Whom was goodness for, when you were all alone?
Grace handed the finished ring back to Jacqueline and left, closing the door behind her. Hanna had left.
25
For the next two days, Grace and Hanna worked in near-silence on the centerpiece. Grace glued woolen snow to the winter ground. Hanna curled the string hair of the new shepherdess beneath her bonnet to match the old shepherdess. They spoke only about the materials in their hands. When Hanna stood up each day to go aboveground for lunch, it was clear that she did not want Grace’s company.
On the third day, Hanna cleared her throat, startling Grace, who was edging the fall quarter with piles of painted paper leaves.
“The quiet ones always surprise you,” Hanna began. “I was the fourth in a family of five daughters. Everything was always filthy, and we all looked at our mother and swore we’d rather die than have a life like hers. Klaudia, my second-eldest sister, was the one who waited on her when she was sick or pregnant, took care of the babies, cooked. Never made a fuss.
“When Klaudia was sixteen, she told my parents she was leaving the next day to go to Austria with a man who’d come to town to bury his mother. He was twenty years older than she was—she had met him at our father’s grocery, working there. My parents said no, of course, and then Klaudia told them she was pregnant. That was that.” Hanna perched the shepherdess on a metal spike and gently adjusted her arms. “We never saw her again.”
Grace grimaced.
“I was thinking about her, because, like you, Klaudia didn’t really like the man. She got pregnant on purpose, to get away from us and never be able to come back. I don’t know what or who she thought she’d find when she left.”
“I loved him, Hanna. I was young and very stupid, but I did love him.”
“No,” Hanna said. “I don’t think you know what love is, not the kind that makes you forget yourself. You were always out for you.”
“I didn’t want them to rob the Wynne House,” Grace said, knowing how feeble it sounded. “I told them not to.”
“Because you wanted the painting. How kind. I don’t think you’re sorry. You’re just pissed you couldn’t pull it off.”
Grace crossed her arms over her chest.
“It’s the way you kept lying to them—over such a long time! My ex did that. She would grow a lie and tend it like a houseplant. But you’ve never stopped, have you? You’re probably lying to me right now, but I’ll never know, so what’s the point of even wondering? It’s not like I would ever trust you.”
How could she explain lying to someone who didn’t know it already, through and through, deep in her bones? Lies charged compound interest. You tried to fix what you had broken before you were found out, making little payments as you could afford to, just enough to keep the whole weight of it at bay. But the lie kept growing and growing. You could never pay it off, not without losing everything. The cost was total.
“You want me to judge you, Julie. You’re hungry for it. You don’t judge yourself harshly enough and you know it.”
When Grace had first arrived in Paris, she’d thought about confessing. Mrs. Graham went to confession every week, and when she came back she always looked less harried, relieved. And once, when her husband had teased her about it, Mrs. Graham had said, “I don’t get spa days, dear, and Father Tilton has a pay-what-you-wish program.” Grace had thought it would feel good to confess to a stranger, someone professionally obligated to forgive. Like throwing up, or taking out the trash.
“He could have picked up his life right where he left it when he got out,” Grace said. “He could have had the life he wanted, finally. He could paint the Wynne House! People would love it. He’s so forgiven, Hanna. He always has been. Prison probably would have been good for his career.” His art would seem more interesting, even if it hadn’t changed at all. “Now he’s gone and ruined his chances to do anything.”
She meant Riley, of course. She couldn’t blame Alls for running, but Riley was only hurting himself.
Hanna gaped at her. “You are unbelievable. Prison was good for him?”
Grace pushed her chair back. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
Hanna shot her leg under the table and hooked Grace’s chair leg with her ankle, trapping her there. “You don’t pick up where you left off. You can’t. You’re changed.”
“Well, he could more than some people—”
“Let me tell you a little about what prison is like,” Hanna said. “Since you obviously don’t know.”
“Hanna.” Grace pushed the table, trying to move her chair, but Hanna had her locked in.
“Imagine a hospital. Now bust out half the lights, and make the rest buzz, incessantly, like insect traps. Now tip over all the jars of alcohol and formaldehyde. Because that’s what prison smells like, all the time.” She grabbed a bottle of rubbing alcohol from her supply rack and poured a thin stream of it into a puddle on Grace’s table.
Grace grabbed for a rag to mop it up. She didn’t know the woman who was speaking to her now. “Hanna, stop. I didn’t mean that how it sounded.”
“Prison smells that way because you’re always cleaning it, all day every day. It smells like shit and vomit anyway, from three hundred open toilets. Someone is always shitting right next to you. And if your boy wasn’t on any drugs, he is now. Because you have to make the time go somewhere. Time loses all meaning; a day feels like a year, and a year becomes a day. Those first months, all you can think about is what the people on the outside are doing without you. What they are laughing at on TV, what they are whining about in their days. What they are eating. Who’s in bed with them. And you think, why not try heroin to ease the transition to absolutely nothing? Tetanus gets you a week in the infirmar
y, and they have magazines in there. Someone is always watching you, getting ready to steal from you, spit on you. The officers, the others on your block. People will claw your eyes out because they’re bored, because the boredom drives you insane. And yes, that’s in Poland. But that’s also in a women’s prison.”
Jacqueline’s office door creaked open. Grace’s heart was pounding. Hanna had never spoken to her like that. Rattled, Grace tried to undo what Hanna had said somehow, to generalize it or pretend that her anger had been unfocused, impersonal. Instead, Grace could only think of Alls, and the hard, committed patience of his stare, as though for the entire time she’d known him, he’d been watching a clock, awaiting his release.
Prison would have destroyed Riley. She tried hard not to think so, but she knew. She imagined him laughing at someone, so used to being liked, and getting punched in the gut. She saw him in brief loops, flip-books, in which he collapsed like a pool float, again and again.
Hanna unhooked her ankle and leaned back. “You don’t know them anymore,” she said. “And I bet they never knew you at all.”
Jacqueline clacked over to their table. “What is that, alcohol? Wipe that up, the smell is horrid. Julie, come with me.”
• • •
The job was another ring, a hulking emerald with trillion-cut diamonds the size of Grace’s eyeteeth on either side. Jacqueline looked right at Grace and told her to replace the diamonds with something less valuable. The owner, she said, wanted to give the diamonds to her son’s new wife.
“What a lovely mother-in-law,” Grace said.
“Use moissanite,” Jacqueline said. “It’s warmer.” She hurried to open a second box and then stopped, patted the lid back down, and closed her hand over it. “One thing at a time,” she said. “You’ll need to go to Fassi.”
Grace had been to Fassi only twice before, for rhinestones. Then, she had taken the pieces with her so she could match the replacements. “Just don’t get mugged,” Jacqueline had said when Grace left with an art deco jeweled hand mirror in her purse. For a thief, Jacqueline was awfully trusting of others—or perhaps just arrogant. She probably thought Grace lacked the nerve to steal from her.
“We’ll need to measure them here,” Jacqueline said. “Obviously, you can’t take this out.”
Obviously. Grace went back to her desk for a ruler and a loupe. Perhaps Jacqueline did not trust her quite as much as she’d thought. When she returned, Jacqueline was on her knees, opening the safe. Grace sat down in her boss’s chair and switched on the desk lamp. She held the ring against the ruler. The stones were nine millimeters on each side and six millimeters deep at the point. She peered through the loupe, looking at the way they sparkled.
“Nine on each side, six deep.” Grace noticed a minute speck near the bottom tip of one of the diamonds. An inclusion. These diamonds were very real indeed.
Jacqueline leaned back on her heels and held out her palm for the ring. She restacked the boxes deep in the safe and clanked the door shut.
“A friend of mine since we were teenagers—her husband has a little jewelry shop.” Jacqueline paused to frown. “Monsieur had a heart attack and she has been at loose ends, trying to keep up while he’s recovering. They still have orders that came in before his accident. They have small children, and it’s just chaos for her.”
Grace knew the trap of trying to explain your answers before anyone asked a question. She smiled and nodded. “You’re a good friend.”
• • •
On the bus, bouncing toward Fassi in Montmartre, Grace sat next to a girl just a few years younger than she was. The girl held her gray leather purse in her lap and balanced a book on it. She was reading Huysmans, À Rebours. The copy was new, its pages bright and flat, no dog-earing or wavy expansion from reading in the tub. Her fingernails were smooth ovals, unpolished and startling in their pink health.
“I love that book,” Grace said, scarcely aware that she was speaking.
“It’s for school,” the girl said, her French flat and closed-throated.
“You’re American?”
She blushed and smiled grimly. “Yes, sorry, my accent is not very good.”
Grace shook her head. “No, it’s good! You’re studying abroad? What’s the course?”
“Literature of the Belle Époque.”
“Oh, are you reading Bel-Ami?”
The girl nodded vigorously. “I love that novel! It is very scandalous!”
Grace almost laughed. To be scandalized by the mustachioed gigolos of the 1880s! Her chest cramped with regret. This girl’s was the life Grace would have had—should have had—if she hadn’t done so many stupid things trying to get it. The bus was not at Grace’s stop yet, but she rose to get off.
“Enjoy your trip,” she said in English, smiling at the girl, whose eyes lit up at Grace’s American accent. Grace had delighted her.
She pushed toward the front and hurried off the bus.
How much time did she have left? Telling Hanna the truth—the truth, out and gulping for breath, squalling for attention—had left Grace exposed. It didn’t matter whom you told: A secret always sought its own life. Someone would find her now, or Jacqueline would get shut down, maybe arrested, or Grace would. She needed to leave. It was time to start over again, somewhere bigger this time, or more difficult.
How different from her that girl had looked. Those fingernails, like a living doll’s.
Grace stopped under an awning, next to a wire carousel of black-and-white postcards, and waited for her light-headedness to pass.
Fassi was two blocks farther. The gall of Jacqueline, lying to her so obviously—she could have at least taken out the stones first and told Grace they’d fallen out. That would have been considerate, to spare the underpaid, immigrant help the burden of knowing.
She pushed the buzzer outside Fassi’s building. “Julie, for Jacqueline Zanuso,” she shouted into the static of the ancient intercom. She climbed the stairs to the third floor and wound around the cracked marble corridor to Fassi’s door.
He pushed the door open just a crack—she knew to catch the knob before it fell shut again—and returned to his post behind the glass case.
“Vous-desirez?” His grumble was half phlegm, half resentment. “I’m having lunch soon.”
She pulled out her crumpled slips. He shuffled to the long row of card catalogs and map chests that lined the back wall. He flipped through file cards, returning with three brown paper envelopes, each in use for many years, old tape clinging to their edges. Grace pulled a velveteen mat in front of her and they each grabbed a loupe.
“How many?”
“Two, a matched pair.”
He muttered as he sorted and measured the trillions. They easily found a pair in the right size, but Fassi discarded one after looking at it through his loupe. He set it aside and ran his stubby finger through the pile, looking for another.
“What’s wrong with that one?” she asked him.
“Not perfect.” He shrugged. “A little ribbon near the bottom.”
“An inclusion? In moissanite?” She picked up the stone. He was right. The white needle, like a crack in ice, was so tiny she had to squint to see it even with a loupe.
Fassi set two more stones with the first trillion. “You choose,” he said. “These are all good.”
She paid with the blank check Jacqueline had sent with her, made out to Fassi, and he handed her the taped paper parcel, no bigger than a saltine cracker.
Grace hadn’t known that moissanite had inclusions. Of course it did; moissanite was natural, flawed like any precious stone.
She fished out her crumpled note again, making a sour face.
“Wait,” she said. “I was supposed to get two pairs. Four of them.” She frowned in annoyance. “I’ll have to take the one with the inclusion. And I already gave you that check.” She rummaged in her purse for her wallet. “How much for the bad stone?”
“Eh, you can take it for two twenty-five.”
“She better reimburse me quickly,” Grace said.
• • •
It was possible Jacqueline had noticed the small inclusion in the diamond trillion, but Grace was certain she would not have inspected it closely enough to register its exact size and shape. Still, her palms grew damp. The only thing she was sure of was the flaw’s placement. Even if Jacqueline hadn’t thoroughly examined the inclusion, the ring’s owner might have. It would be a month’s rent and nowhere to go if she were caught.
No. This ring wasn’t owned by a gemologist. Someone had been sloppy enough to trust Jacqueline, whose fingers were too stiff to repair fine work but plenty sticky enough to steal it. Even to a jeweler, an inclusion didn’t warrant truly investigative attention, only enough to dock the stone’s value accordingly.
When Grace returned to the workshop, she showed the pair of perfect trillions to Jacqueline, who looked them over next to the ring and nodded. “I’ll bring the ring out to you in a moment.”
Grace went back to her desk. Hanna was there, biting her lip as she clipped the loose ends from wire loops. Grace took the imperfect trillions out of her purse and began to work them over with a damp cloth.
Jacqueline came out with the ring and pulled up a chair. She was going to sit there and watch as Grace removed the diamonds.
“I’m going to put them right back in the safe,” Jacqueline said. “We can’t have diamonds floating around the piles of sawdust and glue guns.”
There was no sawdust. There were no glue guns. Their workshop was spotless.
“Of course,” Grace said, carefully setting the wad of cloth, trillions deep inside, on the table. Damp, the cloth stayed together. “I don’t think they’ll be hard to remove.”
The ring was old, the gold soft, and Grace’s prong lifter easily pulled apart the weak jaws of the jewels’ settings. She lifted out one trillion, and then the other. There was a rim of grayish gunk around the perimeter, decades of dirt, hand lotion, and flaking skin cells.