Unbecoming: A Novel

by Rebecca Scherm

  “Let me clean them up,” she said.

  Jacqueline stared at the diamonds in Grace’s left palm as though they might jump up on their own. Grace took the balled cleaning cloth in her right hand and let the stones fall into a fold. She massaged one through the cloth, and then the other, feeling for the other stones, deeper in the fabric. When she found them, she reached into that fold and plucked them out. She dropped the two moissanite trillions into Jacqueline’s waiting hand, one of them featuring a small inclusion.

  “Perfect, thanks,” Jacqueline said, standing up. She hurried back to her office, leaving Grace alone with diamonds and disbelief.

  “She’s got you on the leash now,” Hanna said.

  She had not seen.

  “Stop pretending you wouldn’t do it, if you had nowhere else to go,” Grace said. “I can’t say no. You’re almost finished with the centerpiece and there’s nothing else.”

  Satisfied surprise flickered across Hanna’s eyes.

  “I’m only worth what someone will pay me,” Grace said.

  Hanna had nearly finished the centerpiece, earlier than she had expected, but she had been interrupted by no other jobs. Grace felt a peculiar envy as she looked at the centerpiece. She wanted something beautiful to work on, something with some substance and worth and history. It was impossible to hang on to any ideals in the current atmosphere. What beauty was there to aspire to?

  • • •

  Grace cleanly set the pair of perfect moissanite trillions in the ring, next to the solitaire. She looked at the prongs through her loupe. They were gently closed and clinging tightly to the stones. Perfect.

  She took the ring to Jacqueline, who uncrossed her legs to lean forward and admire it in the light of her desk lamp. “You really can’t tell,” Jacqueline said. “Moissanite. It’s a shame the name is so ugly.”

  It was right to steal the diamonds because Jacqueline was a thief herself, and because she had used Grace to help her steal. She hadn’t given Grace any choice but to steal. And the high, the high that raced up and down her, was electric, filling her head with champagne fizz, causing curls to spring up in her hair at her temples, making her forget, for moment, everything else.

  26

  Parolees Still Missing

  August 21

  Cy Helmers

  The Tennessee Department of Corrections continues to search for two missing parolees. While it was initially believed that the men may have absconded together, law enforcement officials now believe the men may be acting or traveling independently.

  Riley Sullivan Graham, 23, was last seen Saturday at Swiftway Dry Cleaning in Garland, where he had been employed since his release from the Federal Correctional Complex in Lacombe.

  Allston Javier Hughes, 23, is believed to have disappeared as early as Thursday night from his place of residence, 441 Jewett Road in Garland. After Hughes missed a scheduled meeting, his parole officer contacted Hughes’s father, employer, and known associates, including Graham and his family.

  Graham and Hughes were paroled on August 10 after serving 36 months for robbing the Josephus Wynne Historic Estate in June 2009.

  The Department of Corrections has issued warrants for both men’s arrests.

  She didn’t know what to make of it.

  Freindametz had gone out but left the TV on. A French game show cackled and screamed from her bedroom and Grace went in to switch it off. She wished she weren’t alone in the house. She poured herself a glass of the Scotch she kept far back on a high shelf above the stove and sat down on the stairs.

  If they’d headed for different places, they were after different things. Alls would start over, finally. Better to be a nobody headed nowhere than to be a convict in Garland, surrounded by Kimbroughs and people like them.

  But Grace was not going to sit and wait for Riley to find her. Whatever he wanted from her, he would have to find somewhere else. She trudged up the stairs and set her sweating glass down on her nightstand. She fumbled in her bag for the brown paper envelope and unwrapped the trillions, adding them to the scattering of diamonds that was already sparkling there on the desk. God, how they gleamed, even in the dark. She turned on her bedside lamp and sat there on the edge of her single mattress, staring at the big stones, like two bright eyes, looking at her and everything else.

  “Your problem,” Riley had shouted during one of their fights, “is that you want everyone to think you’re so goddamn special, but you don’t even think you’re that special. No one is!”

  “I’m not special,” she’d protested. “Please, I don’t think that at all.”

  “EXACTLY!” he’d roared.

  Grace sipped her drink.

  She had just been looking for the most love, that was all. Like anything you believed to be scarce, you had to take it for yourself wherever you found it.

  Lachaille would buy the trillions. Maxine Lachaille knew her well enough now; she might even take them for cash, though not for nearly as much as if Grace had had enough time to set them in something. Selling a naked diamond was nearly impossible, but Grace would have to try tomorrow and leave Paris straight after. It didn’t matter that Jacqueline knew Mme Lachaille, as long as Grace left right away. That was a guarantee, Grace decided, that she would really go.

  She pulled down her suitcase and began to fill it. Her books would have to stay. Just clothes. She pulled her skirts and dresses off their hangers and dropped them in. She’d buy a train pass and start moving; that was the main thing. She listened to a woman outside chattering at her baby as she pushed a stroller along the bumpy sidewalk. It was dark. In the apartment across the street, the teenage boys were smoking pot and listening to drum solos.

  Because of the drumming, she didn’t hear the knocking right away. But when the drums quieted, the knocking kept on.

  Someone was knocking at the front door.

  She looked out the window to the street below but saw no car. She tried to see around the awning over the front door, but she could see nothing.

  No one ever knocked on the door. Freindametz’s daughter just barged in.

  Riley. She had known it would happen just this way.

  Grace sat on her bed and waited—for what, she didn’t know. If she went downstairs and opened the door, there he would be, her cheated husband who never broke a promise.

  The knocking stopped.

  Grace stood next to the window, looking out from where she couldn’t be seen. No one.

  Then she heard the door open. The hinge squeaked and the sound hung there. Shoes. Slow, pausing, stopping, looking around.

  On the stairs now.

  It could be Hanna, or some disgruntled boyfriend of Freindametz’s daughter, looking for her. Was she sure Freindametz didn’t have a son? A husband. A handyman. Any man she did not know. The footsteps, though soft, were a man’s.

  On her little writing desk was a cup of pens, some scissors, a sterling letter opener. She reached for the letter opener and shut it in her fist. She should have turned around but she was scared to.

  In the hall.

  He cleared his throat behind her and she knew, she knew, she knew.

  “Grace,” he said. “Long time no see.”

  27

  Alls was taller than Grace remembered, and broader. His chest was deep and upright, not crouched and hollow like it used to be. She couldn’t yet stand to look at his face.

  “It’s you,” he said. “I knew I would find you, but I still can’t believe I did.”

  Grace stepped backward, but there was only wall behind her. Alls shut the door.

  He took her hand in his and looked over her nails, her hot palms. She stared at his fingers, his knuckles, his wrist, the cuff of his sleeve. She couldn’t stand him touching her. She held tight to the letter opener in her other hand. She knew he’d seen it.

  He dropped her hand and sat down on her bed. “You look exactly the same,” he said.

  He flicked his eyes up at her impatiently. She sat down next to him, nea
rer her pillow, enough space for another person between them.

  He took out a cigarette and offered it to her first. Grace shook her head and smoothed her skirt over her thighs. His were already splayed out carelessly. He rooted for a lighter in his jacket pocket. The weight on her narrow, lumpy mattress shifted and her body pitched toward him. She reached out to steady herself, trying not to touch him. She crossed her legs and pulled at the hem of her dress, like some schoolgirl at a babysitting interview, and he laughed, though exactly how he was laughing she couldn’t tell. He was a stranger.

  “You didn’t think I would come,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “Or, not alone.”

  She saw the twitch of surprise in his neck.

  “This isn’t what I thought Paris would look like,” he said.

  “It’s only Paris in the municipal sense.”

  “This room is very similar to the last bedroom we sat in together.” He patted the blanket on either side of him. “Little bed against the wall. One window to the street. Little desk, little chair.”

  Grace felt like Alice, already little herself and shrinking to a crumb.

  “A dorm room,” he said. “You came all the way over here to live in the same goddamn dorm room?” He nodded toward the window. “Cobblestones, I guess.”

  He had lines around his eyes already, as if he had been squinting into the sun for years. But the sadness she used to see there was gone. She didn’t know what she saw instead. She had imagined this moment, a hundred variations on the wrong theme, for years, and now Alls had broken into her house and she didn’t think it was her place to ask why.

  “How did you find me?” she asked him.

  “It’s always how with you. Never why.”

  “I can’t ask you that,” she said. “I don’t think I want to know.”

  He stood up and went to her bookshelf, stooping to look over the titles. He went to her desk and picked up one of the trillions, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger. “Still a magpie,” he said quietly. He turned toward her and she flinched.

  “You think I came all this way to hurt you?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

  “You don’t know me anymore. I get that.” He shrugged and nodded toward her desk, toward the loose diamonds and piles of books under the poster of Petit Trianon that hung over her desk. “Is it possible you haven’t changed? That as different as I am, you’ve just been sitting up here in your little room, changing your hair but staying the same?”

  She shook her head. “I’m not the same.”

  “What,” he said, looking toward the diamonds again. “You steal those yourself?”

  But stealing alone was a real difference, wasn’t it? She had grown up, if sideways. She raised her eyes to meet his. “I did.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “I know what you must think of me,” she started.

  “You can’t imagine,” he said.

  “Where’s Riley?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not taking questions just yet.”

  “Please tell me,” she begged him. “You don’t know what I—”

  “I don’t?” he shook his head. He reached for her drink and when he saw that it was empty, he asked for his own. “Scotch?” he said in disbelief. “Benedict Arnold.”

  “When in Rome, you’ll take any whiskey,” she said evenly. “Did you want a cup of tea?”

  She needed him out of her room. He followed her downstairs to the kitchen table, where she poured them both a finger of Scotch.

  “How was your day?” he said, as though they sat there often.

  “Not my best,” she said.

  “Why, what happened? Get caught with your hand in the till?”

  “Christ,” she said. “What is this?”

  “That’s his word, not yours.” He crossed one of his legs over the other. “I thought this was how it was supposed to be. We’d run off together and live happily ever after, and at the end of the day we’d have a drink and talk about our days. I’m just trying it out. Seeing what might have been.”

  “The good life? Alls, you can’t know how sorry—”

  “Hush,” he said. “You had a long time to speak up, and that moment has passed.” He paused. “Where is it?”

  The painting. “I don’t have it,” she said. “I sold it, and then the money was stolen from me.”

  “Nobody likes to be lied to.”

  “I’m not lying,” she said. “I was rich for sixteen hours.”

  “How much did you get for it?”

  “Seven hundred thousand euros. Just shy of a million dollars.”

  He whistled. “You said you’d get two million.”

  “I was wrong. Cash-only limits your market.”

  “Well,” he said, “guess I’ll be heading home, then.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “You could have told me,” he said, and then he laughed. “You could have told me a lot of things.” He pulled his glass across the table, watching the trail of condensation.

  “What did you want me to say?”

  “That you’d married him. That you were still together, actually.”

  “Would it have mattered to you?”

  “Doubt it. I’d lost my mind.”

  She couldn’t look him in the eye for very long before her own eyes began to burn. She kept looking away, just behind him or beside him, but still she could feel his eyes.

  “I can’t believe it’s really you,” he said.

  She wasn’t sure it was, really. She had undergone too many transformations to know. She had been a tutor, a prostitute, a chambermaid, and Julie from California. She had been twice robbed and partly scalped. Now she was an antiques restorer and a part-time jewel thief. She swallowed. “How did you find me?”

  He smiled now, but she didn’t know what his smile meant.

  He had imagined she had stayed in Europe, he said. He knew that she had not come back to Garland after the arrest. He imagined she’d sold the painting, that either she was back in antiques or jewelry or art, or she was a kept woman.

  “Thanks a lot,” she said.

  “The beauty-for-profit sector, I figured that much. And in a major city: London, Paris, Tokyo. Probably Paris. I mean, you speak the language.”

  “You didn’t come all the way here because I took French in high school.”

  He ignored her. “I was going to be locked up for close to three years, if I was real good and real lucky.” He leaned back in his chair. “I feel like I should talk slow to make sure you get a sense of the time. Do you understand the kind of time we’re talking about here? Days are just gravel underfoot. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”

  “I might,” she said carefully. Beneath her fear, she felt an ache of longing that she knew couldn’t be returned.

  “And at first, I’ll admit, I just wanted to find you to win. I wanted to scare you.” He swallowed tightly. “I couldn’t believe you married him. Then. I think I get it now.” He paused. “You know, I used to imagine what my life would be like if I were Riley. All the time. He had everything and everyone I wanted. Less often, and this is pathetic, I’d even settle for Greg’s life. But I’d never thought about what it might be like to be you.”

  Grace reddened. “We wanted the same thing,” she said.

  “I always thought of myself as Riley’s worse half, if you were his better.”

  She smiled grimly.

  He leaned forward and his chair legs hit the floor. “Anyway, hundreds of magazines came in every month. Mostly shit, but we treasured them. A paper scrap of the outside world, a piece of personal property you don’t have to guard. A magazine! And when guys are done with them, if they’re in good shape and not ripped up or covered with piss and whatnot, they go to the library. I spent a lot of time in the library, my last year. I didn’t get library privileges until then.”

  He looked excited, as though he were about to explain a card trick. “Architectural D
igest, May 2011. You’ve seen it?”

  “I don’t read it.”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “You used to.”

  “It’s too Hollywood,” she said. “You read that in prison?”

  Alls rolled his eyes. “I apologize—what magazines do you think are convict appropriate? What books? My cellmate wrote dirty poems by circling single letters in The Purpose-Driven Life. Another guy stuck his eyelashes and eyebrow hairs to the wall with his own spit, made little drawings with them. There were eighty-three books in the prison library, and I read every one of them. I read anything—Rolling Stone, Maxim, fucking Country Weekly, cover to cover. But I guess we’re all supposed to act like the convicts we are, right?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  “A thick stack of Architectural Digests showed up in the library when somebody got released and left them behind.”

  He looked at her, his eyes fixed just below hers, on her nose or her chin or her neck. He was disappointed, and she wanted to explain that she had been thinking of them, all the time. She’d thought of them so much that she’d fixed a narrow vision in her mind and populated it with details that were now irrelevant.

  He pulled out his wallet and from it unfolded a worn page, white at the creases.

  “There,” he said.

  “Americans in Paris,” the article was titled. “Emile Eustace and Heather Franks indulge in Americana elegance in their Triangle d’Or loft.” A reedy, bespectacled man in a black western-wear shirt stood behind a tan blond woman in a Federal Bentwood armchair. Surrounding the text were photographs of the couple’s prized possessions: a wrought-iron cane rack, a Chippendale tall-case clock, a birchbark canoe that they had mounted high on the wall, and a bracelet of horse cameos. Grace’s bracelet.

  She gasped.

  “You can take the girl out of Tennessee,” Alls said.

  “Equestrian Cameo Charm Bracelet, c. 1880,” the caption read. “‘We found this treasure at a little jewelry shop in Saint Germain des Prés.’”

  Mme Lachaille had only given her four hundred for it, the weasel.