Unbecoming: A Novel

by Rebecca Scherm

  • • •

  At five thirty, he came to her table with three sheets of paper marked up with numbers. “Let’s go,” he said. “You need to change your clothes.”

  “I’m not coming to work,” she said. She hadn’t told him that she’d meant to leave Paris today. “Not if you robbed my boss.”

  “Yes, you are,” he said. “Unless you want her to think you did it.”

  “Jesus Christ, have you learned nothing?”

  “More than you have, apparently. But I didn’t get the safe open. Not yet.”

  “Yet? You think I’m coming back here with you tonight?”

  “Yes,” he said. “You’re going to sit there like a cherub and watch me crack your boss’s safe. Because you haven’t changed at all, right?”

  “You think I get off on this,” she said in disbelief.

  “I know you do.”

  They rode home on the first train of the day. She had sometimes gone to work this early, but she couldn’t remember ever coming home so late. When they got there, Freindametz was still gone, and Grace found herself relieved. She didn’t know what was happening, but at least she didn’t have to explain it.

  When Grace got out of the shower, Alls was asleep on her bed, on top of the blanket, stretched out straight on his back. Her wet hair dripped down her chest as she watched him. She quietly pulled a skirt and shirt from her closet and took them back into the bathroom to change.

  He could have been hers, if she had done it right. But that was an Alls from a long time ago. She didn’t know this one at all.

  • • •

  When Grace got to work, only two and half hours after she’d left it, Hanna was checking her measurements for the carrying case. Grace had no work of her own. She watched as Hanna jotted a series of tidy check marks in her notebook. Her vision was distorted with fatigue, every shape oversharp and indistinct. When she reminded herself that Alls was at home, asleep in her bed, she found herself doubting that it was true. She might have hallucinated it—him, what he would say to her. He might have been a dream. But then, staring at Hanna’s table, she saw Hanna’s notebook, the familiar printing, and she knew that all of this was very real.

  “Hanna,” Grace whispered. “He’s here. Alls is here.”

  “This is a great day,” Hanna said proudly. “Last tasks. On Monday I send this carnival packing.”

  Grace stared, and Hanna blinked gaily at her as if she had not heard.

  “He broke into my house last night,” Grace said.

  Jacqueline stepped out of her office and curled her finger toward Grace.

  At her desk, Jacqueline took the lid from a cardboard box. Coiled inside was a pearl necklace. “It’s filthy,” Jacqueline said, lifting it out. Hanging between the pearls were six gold disks with impressions of concentric circles, and in the middle of each disc was a ruby cabochon, each one like a lozenge of melted sugar. They reminded Grace of the cookies Riley used to have in his packed lunches, the ones with a blob of cherry filling.

  “Take these stones out and replace them with something semiprecious,” Jacqueline said. “Take out just one to match at Fassi and leave the necklace with me.”

  This time, she didn’t even offer an explanation.

  At her table, Grace extracted the first ruby cabochon from its gold doughnut.

  “Do you need anything from Fassi?” she asked Hanna, as if she were going out for a sandwich. But Hanna didn’t respond, not even a nod, a twitch, a flicker of recognition. It was as though Grace had not spoken at all.

  In his shop, Fassi laid out rhodonite, rhodolite garnets, rubellite, red spinel, and lab rubies. He and Grace held each stone up to the light. The lab ruby was closest. The bill for all six was only twenty-two euros. Fassi dropped them in a sack like jelly beans, not even wrapped.

  • • •

  “Hanna,” Grace said just before six. “Please talk to me.”

  “It’s too convenient, don’t you think?” Hanna was sealing the plywood’s edges with polyurethane.

  “What?” Grace asked, startled that Hanna had finally responded to her.

  “That you tell me this story you’ve been holding back for years, and now you tell me he’s here? A little too neat.” She tapped her pencil on the table. “Shit,” she grumbled. “I’m going to have to come in tomorrow.”

  “Why?” Grace asked. “And that’s why I told you. Because I was sure they were coming.”

  “The poly has to cure overnight, and then the glue has to cure before I apply it, and then it takes twenty-four hours to set completely. A messy calendar.”

  Distrust and then disregard—that was all Hanna would give her. Fine. “Can’t you pick it up Monday?” she asked.

  “I’m getting a Biedermeier on Monday.”

  “You are? When did that happen?”

  “While you were at Fassi. Jacqueline says it’s a beauty, a chaise longue! I’ve been promised loose gimp and scratched arms.” She seemed as pleased as she seemed far away. “I can hardly wait.”

  Grace’s hand was cramped. The sixth ruby popped out, plinking like a tiddlywink on the table. “I’m telling you the truth,” she said, nestling the imposter into the gold. “I have no reason not to.”

  “That’s a real problem for you, isn’t it? That you need a reason.” Hanna pulled off her rubber gloves and dropped them in the trash.

  Hanna was packing up her things quickly and Grace hurried to follow her. She returned the necklace and all its parts to Jacqueline without a word and raced up the stairs after Hanna.

  “See you Monday,” Hanna sang out in the echoing vestibule. She pushed open the front door.

  Alls was there waiting, leaning against the building and smoking a cigarette. He didn’t look at Grace, giving her the chance to ignore him in front of her coworker, but Grace realized that a beat too late. When Hanna turned to give her a cool wave, Grace’s face had already betrayed her.

  Hanna noticed the man standing there, the man Grace was trying not to look at. She looked from Alls to Grace and back again

  Alls smiled casually. “Hey,” he said to Hanna.

  “I didn’t believe you,” Hanna said. She turned and pushed between the people walking too slowly and raced down the sidewalk, her shoulders stiff with being watched.

  • • •

  “You should sleep,” Alls said. “Did you sleep at all last night?”

  “You know I didn’t,” she said. “How could I sleep?”

  The ease and intimacy with which they were discussing her sleep irritated her. He had come here to claim the painting or what money she had gotten from it. She knew that. Still, desire curled upward, a wisp of smoke. His ease was almost mocking, as though with every casual aside and every unfinished thought, he was reminding her what might have been.

  At home she climbed the steps to her room and kicked off her shoes. She lay down on her bed and the scent startled her. Her sheets smelled like a man. She buried her face in her pillow.

  He woke her up at midnight. “Got to wake up now, Gracie. We’re going to be late for the party.”

  She blinked. He stood over her, blocking the light that streamed from the hallway. He reached to flick on the overhead light. “Back to work.”

  • • •

  That night, Alls filled another three pages with numbers. Grace sat on the floor just outside the office, keeping her eyes open as she had been asked to. She wasn’t worried about him cracking the safe, not really. She was leaving anyway. He would get what he wanted and they would part ways, again.

  “I hope you’re not disappointed when you get in,” she said. “There’s a very good chance you’re going to find nothing but fakes.” She thought about the real rubies she had effortlessly returned to Jacqueline that afternoon. She hadn’t even thought about keeping them, she realized with pride. “I’m almost sure of it.”

  “Well, we’ll see.” His voice floated from behind her.

  “Why this safe? I can tell you a dozen places more promisin
g.”

  “Because this is the closest thing I know of to your safe. Do you have a safe deposit box you want to tell me about?”

  “The stuff on my desk is all I have.”

  “Stuff,” he said. “Too bad for you, then.”

  “There are other things I can do,” Grace said. “Sometimes I fix things up to sell them. I’ve probably made eight or nine hundred euros this year that way.”

  “Inkwells,” he said. “Weekend projects.”

  “It helps.”

  “I can’t believe you’re not rich yet,” he said. “That is what really surprises me. I was sure you’d find a way.”

  “I’m not qualified for much, you know.”

  “Look, I’m self-taught too. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. A bachelor’s degree just isn’t for everyone. But I thought you’d be with some asshole, someone really sleazy, like a banker or someone always about to make a movie.”

  “Lovely,” she said. “That’s not really my thing anymore.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “Hitch your wagon to a star. It turns out I can’t stick to the trail.”

  She heard him scratching his pen at the paper, coaxing out more ink.

  “When did you find out we were married?”

  “The day after the robbery. He was in a sorry state, telling all his secrets. I had no idea you were such a nasty piece of work, Gracie. That you put him up to the forgery, that it was pretty much an ultimatum—I mean really.” He sighed dramatically, sarcastically.

  She swallowed. “And when did you tell him—”

  “About us?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Never.”

  “What?”

  “I never told him. He doesn’t know.”

  “He doesn’t know what?”

  “Anything. Everything. I told him nothing.”

  “But what happened when he saw the painting wasn’t there?”

  “He didn’t. I made the switch, I had to. And then he freaked out so bad afterward he didn’t want to look at any of the stuff anyway, wouldn’t touch the bags. I cut our SkyMall fake into pieces and flushed it down the toilet. I didn’t want him to know either, Grace. Not after you’d left me high and dry. You forget that.”

  It couldn’t be.

  “I told them I’d hidden the painting in the boat shed,” Alls continued. “We’d all agreed that if anything happened, there was no painting, never was. Later, I told Greg I’d destroyed it, and he was relieved. But Riley never said another word about it, not even to me.”

  But Grace wasn’t thinking about the painting. She was thinking about what Riley didn’t know about her. He might have sensed something about Grace and Alls but never let on, not even to Alls. He had that much pride. It was impossible to think now that Riley didn’t know, when for so long she had been sure he did. That his parents didn’t know either. Her heart heaved.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell him,” she said. “Even after you were arrested.”

  “Why would I? To punish you? To beg for his forgiveness? Grace, he was still talking about you all the time. How disappointed you would be, how he had let you down, how he could tell that you weren’t really feeling it anymore but he thought he could get you back.”

  She had been wrong about everything. She had been carried away on loop after loop, thinking Riley knew everything she had done, that he had thrown open every deception. Now it seemed worse that he didn’t know. It meant that she had gotten away with it. She had fixated on so many fears, but that had never been one of them. Grace felt guiltier than she had ever felt before.

  “So he still doesn’t know,” she said dumbly.

  “What, you want to go back to him? Is that it?” She heard him push himself up. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “No,” she said. He was standing in the doorway. “No, not at all. I just can’t believe that all this time I thought—I thought you would—”

  “I was in love with you! Do you understand that? Did you ever understand that? Maybe you think you bamboozled me or something, that you made me do what I did for you. Well, you didn’t.” He slid down the doorframe until he was sitting on the floor.

  “I did everything I did because I loved you,” he said. “I fell in love with you when I was sixteen, as stupid as a person ever is, and I couldn’t let it go. I stayed in Garland because of you. I used to read your books, you know that? I used to go around the house when you weren’t home and pick up the books you left splayed open, and I would read the page you’d just read. I never knew what the hell was happening, but that seemed right, in a way, since I never knew what the hell was going on with you. I would read these pages that you’d just read and try to catch some glimpse of you, some clue. No, they weren’t pages of your thoughts, but they were as close as I could get, like I was sitting in the seat behind you on a train, seeing every tree the moment after you did. And that is a stupid way to try to know someone, but how else can you know someone who refuses to be known?

  “When you came home from New York,” he continued, “I thought you came home for me. I felt horrible about what we did, but when you came home you were going to leave him. I was sure of it. But the looks you gave me that first week, Grace, goddamn. You turned on your fucking floodlight so bright I couldn’t see to walk in front of me.”

  He squinted, watching her closely. “I half expect you to do it right now, but you can’t anymore, can you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, wishing it were true.

  “When I don’t want to be looked at, I look down, close up, and shut up. But not you. I watched you do it for years—the second anybody crept too close, your motion sensor would trip, and you’d laugh, you’d smile, you’d nice up so fast and so bright that you’d bleach out every shadow, every detail. You’d have everyone in the room staring at you and they couldn’t see a goddamn thing. You came back and blinded me. And I fell for it again and again, just standing there blinking in the dark, because I couldn’t stop staring, trying to see.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “Why? I knew better. You didn’t fool me, Grace. I only fooled myself.”

  “I loved you,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  29

  When they went back to Bagnolet in the morning, Freindametz was making tea in the kitchen, still in her raincoat over her nurse’s uniform. She had just returned from the hospital. Usually, she had a cup of tea and then went to bed.

  She must have been exhausted from her night of work, because it took her a moment to register the presence of a strange man in her kitchen. She tightened her raincoat as if it were a bathrobe and turned a bitter eye on Grace.

  “Qui est-ce?” she asked. “Qui est cet homme?”

  “C’est mon cousin, en visite,” Grace said. “David, this is Madame Freindametz, my roommate.”

  “Bonjour,” he said badly, extending his hand.

  “Where is he sleeping?” Freindametz asked.

  “In my room. I’m sleeping on the couch.”

  “A gentleman,” Freindametz sniffed, not believing Grace for a moment. But she took her mug and trundled off to her room, and Grace refilled the kettle.

  They slept for a few hours, Freindametz in her room, Alls in Grace’s, and Grace on the couch as she had promised. Grace woke up at noon and made coffee. Freindametz stayed asleep and Grace and Alls sat at opposite ends of the couch, drinking coffee, an illustration of something more normal. She did not know what to say to him. Alls flipped through one of Grace’s books, looking up now and then to ask her about repoussé or bas-relief. Grace was pretending to read too, but she couldn’t. She felt as if she were in a play, and at any minute, a curtain would fall and she would run away, escape through a back door to the alley behind the theater, relieved and devastated with disappointment.

  Alls snapped the book shut and asked her what she would usually do, what her day would be like if he were not here. He sounded fri
endly but cagey, a performance that made her cringe at how she wished for the real thing. Fine, she could do that too. She told him she would probably go to the grocery and then see the traveling exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. This month there was a show of trompe l’oeil and pastiches.

  He marveled at how boring she was, how consistent in her habits.

  “What if I really were just here visiting?”

  “How?”

  “If you’d gone off to Europe to find yourself, and liked it here and stayed, and left us at home to our own devices, and no one had ever set foot in the Wynne House again. And then I came to Paris to visit my old friend Grace.”

  He unfolded his crisp tourist map and spread it on the coffee table.

  “I can’t imagine that,” Grace said. “I can’t even begin to imagine that life.” She stood up. He was at the other end of the sofa, but he seemed to take up all the space in the room. “For either of us. How can you stand it?”

  “Don’t ask me to comfort you, because I won’t.”

  “I would never.”

  “And how about if it had gone like it was supposed to?”

  “You’d come to Prague with a rolled-up still life and we’d sold it for millions of dollars?”

  “And now we lived in Paris together, in the shitty rented room upstairs, poor and hungry and run out of money, but we’d really done it.”

  No one could have imagined such a life. There was no script for it. It wasn’t like being fifteen and imagining yourself in a wedding dress that looked like a wadded-up tissue. It wasn’t like attending an art auction and wishing you could transform into someone comfortable, in every sense of the word, like the people standing around you. They had planned a heist, and heist dreams always ended in a firework, the blaze of triumph, nothing of the mess but the smoke that hung over the ground. That was the point. You never dreamed of bickering, whining, trouble banking, stolen luggage, bleeding head wounds, the man you love in prison, and running out of money. You never had to deal with the wreck of yourself, whatever had gone so wrong in your wiring that this, this scheme with its fakes and maps and comps and fickle timetables and reliance on old Dorothea Franey’s ruined hearing, seemed like the best way out of the life you couldn’t live any longer. No. In the dream you only got as far as the sale, the hotel room, the suitcase full of cash, and then what? What? She had gotten that far alone, and then she’d learned, grotesquely, that Greg wasn’t the only idiot who’d confused real life with the movies.