Unbecoming: A Novel

by Rebecca Scherm

  Alls had come for what he was owed, or, barring that, a sense of vengeance, and perhaps Hanna had gone after Nina for the same reason. But now Grace looked down at Alls and hoped, with quiet desperation, that Hanna had seen something in his sudden, fearless appearance that Grace herself had not dared to.

  She turned back to the wall and began to page through the ledger, trying not to watch him. Amaury and Hanna were paid the same, twenty-eight hundred euros per month. Jacqueline paid herself three thousand. Infuriating. Jacqueline had charged sixty euros for the cabbage teapot the last time Grace had repaired it. The birdcage job had been billed for six hundred. There was an entry for “Centerpiece Deposit” for two thousand. She turned the page, looking for Amaury’s jobs. He had been busy before he’d left: In the past month, he’d had more than four thousand euros in billings. Grace hadn’t realized his work was so much more lucrative than hers, and she felt momentarily defensive. But the jewelry that Grace had worked on was not in the ledger, not that she was surprised. There were several small payments to Hanna on this page that she didn’t recognize, thirty euros on five occasions, maybe reimbursements for supplies or something. But Hanna had only gone out for supplies once recently; she had everything she needed ordered in. Grace stared at the tiny amounts. All were from the past week. They hadn’t been doing anything except the centerpiece and jewelry.

  The dates: thirty euros twice on August 17, thirty on the nineteenth, thirty on the twenty-third. Every time Grace completed a piece of jewelry.

  Had Hanna been making a finder’s fee on her? Getting a cut while Grace scraped by on a thousand per month?

  “You all right?” Alls asked her.

  “Fine,” she said. She closed the ledger and slipped it back into the drawer.

  She could almost hear Hanna’s voice, so generous she was nearly singing. I’ll talk to Jacqueline, she had said. I’ll make sure she knows how valuable you are.

  Grace heard a soft click. Alls had opened the safe.

  He began to pull on a pair of Grace’s cotton gloves, too small for him.

  “Wait,” she said.

  “Nothing you can do, Gracie.”

  She took his gloved hands in hers and began to pull the gloves off by their fingertips. She slid them onto her own hands. Gloved, her hands looked more like her own than they did naked.

  “I want to do it,” she said. “Myself.”

  He sat back. Grace reached into the safe. The first box was the pearl and ruby necklace, the rubies just sitting in the box with it, like extras. The second box was a bracelet she’d never seen. The third was the ring, the pretty one. There were four more boxes. In the last box was a brooch, an orchid in enamel with pink and green tourmaline spilling out at the throat. The column was tipped with a natural pearl. She carefully put the lid back on.

  “Not this one,” she said.

  He’d been watching her but giving her room. Now he became skeptical. He thought she was getting sentimental.

  “It might be one of a kind,” she said. “We don’t want to mess around with that again.”

  She stacked the remaining boxes in her lap and picked them up as a tower, one hand below and the other above. She stood up and Alls followed her to her desk. He held open her bag and she nestled the tower along the bottom.

  “Hanna has been arrested in Denmark,” she told him. He didn’t understand, not yet. “She lied to me.”

  It was ten after five. Together they returned to Jacqueline’s office. She pushed the safe closed with her gloved fingertip.

  “Should I turn the dial?”

  “Be my guest.”

  Everything in its place. He put on his jacket.

  “Just a minute,” she said. This time, he did not object.

  Still gloved, she returned to her table and packed up her very best tools for small work from her station: tweezers straight and curved, her set of needle files, cutters, two pliers. A starter kit. Then she moved Hanna’s tools in their place. Jacqueline would never know the difference.

  Her eyes fell on Hanna’s notebook. Lundi, the top page read. J’emballerai le cadeau et le livrerai!!! Wrap the present and deliver, ecstatically. Grace fixed a shepherdess’s dress, the hem askew, and smoothed down the little corn stalks. The green leaves, bent backward and down over the ears, shouldn’t have been quite as jagged and uneven as in real life. She put Hanna’s notebook in her purse.

  Jacqueline could no sooner call the police than a drug dealer could when his stash was stolen. And Hanna had already been arrested; it hardly mattered what anyone accused her of now.

  • • •

  They emerged from their return taxi just before dawn. The rush was still with her, the suspense more powerful with each step away from Jacqueline’s safe. They walked silently to her door and crept up the stairs. Alls waited by the window while Grace locked her bedroom door. She took the cardboard boxes from her bag and opened them one by one, setting them in a row across her desk.

  She had reached in and taken them with her own hands. Her conscience felt resplendently clean. She felt whole, even. He had watched her do it.

  Two selves, collapsed.

  Alls had been quiet. He was leaning against the windowsill and watching her, she realized, the way he used to, without looking right at her, as though she might vanish if he looked too hard. She swept her hand through the air over the jewelry.

  “These are for you,” she said.

  “I know,” he said. He sat down on her bed.

  A delivery truck rumbled down the street. She sat next to him, just inches away, but it felt as if there were a glass wall between them. It was almost seven o’clock in the morning, and the dawn sun was glowing on its way up, covering her room in velvety golden light.

  “I’ll miss her,” she said to Alls. “Hanna might have been my only friend.”

  “You just threw her under the bus,” he said.

  “She threw herself,” Grace said. “And she threw me first.”

  “A match made in heaven,” Alls said. “First love?”

  Grace shook her head. “Asshole.” And then, newly brave, she asked him, “Do you think I never loved you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  She had loved him—still did, a punishment—but hers was love mixed with harder metals. It hadn’t been enough to run away from the Grahams’ house back then; she had wanted to drop a match on the lawn as she left. She’d felt no transcendence, no generosity. Love was supposed to make you better, to fill in all the mean little holes in your being. Instead, it had opened up new ones.

  “You need one person who knows you,” she said. “Just one person you can’t fool, even when you fool yourself.”

  “One didn’t used to be enough for you,” he said.

  “Don’t you see?” Grace implored him. “It wasn’t about Riley. It was her.” She looked at him, waiting for him to understand.

  He didn’t make her say it.

  “We both wanted to be one of them,” he said. “But you’d really made it.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t talk about that. Anything but that.”

  He took a deep breath. “Well, you’ll never fool me again.”

  His voice seemed to make the room vibrate. She felt the buzzing, the shivering, in her fingers and in her teeth.

  “You liked reaching into that safe,” he said.

  She wanted to squeeze him between her thighs and never let him go.

  “Admit it,” he said.

  “I liked it.”

  “Listen,” he said, leaning back. “I’ll need to be going. Sunday’s a good day to travel.”

  It was like waking up alone when she didn’t expect to. “Where will you go?”

  He picked at a scab on his forearm. “Probably better for you not to know, right?”

  She stared at the wall as the light climbed over it, moving queer, sourceless shadows.

  “You should get some sleep,” he said.

  “I can’t,” she said. The insides of h
er thighs were damp, and she felt a trickle of sweat behind her knee.

  “I can’t believe you came all the way here just for that,” she said.

  He laughed, though with bitterness or regret, she could not tell. He didn’t want her. He just wanted money and a new life, away from the place he’d always lived and the people who thought they knew him.

  “Not this time,” he said. “I don’t do accidents anymore.”

  She nodded.

  He licked his lips. “You have to say it.” He looked at her mouth. “I’m going to make you tell me what you want.”

  Last time, no lights had been on, no words spoken. Now she could see the sweat on his upper lip, the sun catching his stubble.

  “I want you,” she said.

  “You want me,” he said, looking at the wall over her desk.

  “I want you,” she said again, and this time she stood up, nudging his knees apart to stand between them. She gently pushed a thigh forward to his groin and felt that he was growing hard, and she put her hands around his neck, trailed her fingers through the short hairs there. She ran her thumb across his lower lip, holding his chin still in her hand. She wanted all of him for herself. His hands were still, beside him on the bed.

  “You are not smarter,” she said. “You are very, very stupid if you still want me. But I want you now, and I wanted you then. And I am so sorry, but I still want what I want.”

  She bent to brush her lips to his damp temple and then under the corner of his jaw. She would touch him everywhere; she would wear him down. She lingered there until she felt his hands on her waist, clear and sure, pulling her down with him.

  • • •

  She woke up tightly fitted into him in the bed, her bed, his arm holding her close. She hadn’t slept next to anyone in years.

  She lay there awake and blinking for a long time, their bodies growing sweaty where they were pressed together. She didn’t want to wake him up. She knew better than anyone that the night brain consented to thoughts that the day brain wouldn’t.

  He stirred behind her and she held very still, wishing him back to sleep, but he pulled his arm back. She watched its shadow on the wall, stretching upward, and then it dropped back down, returning to her.

  • • •

  Freindametz gave her a nasty look when they came downstairs. They quickly left the house.

  They walked to the cemetery and shuffled between the shady patches. She showed him where Delacroix was buried, and then Jacques-Louis David, Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, and Gertrude Stein. Each grave had its own little crowd of pilgrims. Grace and Alls toured the tourists. Walking by the Americans and hearing their accents, she felt a rush of daring, as though a flicker of recognition on her face might give her away to these strangers. She and Alls kept going, wandering away from the people, and she felt the warmth of being with him, the invisible tether that kept them moving in the same direction, despite the crowds of strangers. Together, alone.

  At one point, he took her hand in his, and she was so shocked at the feel of his skin that she stumbled forward, half-witted with lust and disbelief.

  Neither of them spoke of his leaving, and when they got home and he went to the bathroom, she thought this was it, that now he would pack up and leave to make the last Sunday train. But he did not go and instead ran his hands up the backs of her thighs, under her skirt. He pressed his nose into her belly and slid his fingers behind her underwear, moaning when he felt how slick she was. I have been waiting for you, she wanted to tell him, knowing you would never come. She pushed him down on the ancient flowered couch and told him that she didn’t want him to leave, she never wanted him to leave, every way she knew how to.

  You still haven’t learned any other way to get what you want, she thought, but she pushed the thought away. All she wanted was him, and all she could do was give—show him how badly she loved him and hope to make him want her even half as much in return.

  • • •

  Afterward they sat at the table, radiant and profane, and Grace fed him greengage plums and buttered toast and wine. Alls didn’t talk and so neither did she. She didn’t want to disrupt whatever fragile balance was keeping him in the chair across from her.

  “Someone will search your house,” he said.

  She pushed the crumbs on her plate into a line. “She can’t call the police.”

  “Then someone else, someone worse. It won’t be nice.”

  “She’s going to think it was Hanna,” she said.

  “I don’t know your boss, I don’t know what kind of people she’s with, but you can’t stay here.” He rubbed his eyes. “I thought I’d leave your life in shambles,” he said. “I planned on it. But not like this. Where can you go?”

  She shrugged, trying to swallow her dismay. “Anywhere,” she said. “Anywhere I haven’t been yet.”

  “This isn’t how I thought it would be,” he said.

  She waited. She didn’t know what he meant yet.

  “I thought you would have figured it all out now,” he said. “I thought you’d be telling redneck jokes for Europeans at dinner parties. I thought you’d be a well-dressed alcoholic. I thought you’d have just what you wanted and then I’d come and take it from you.” He laughed sadly. “I thought you’d be the collateral damage—some revenge on the side—on my way to get what I wanted.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Fuck if I know. I never did.”

  “I knew,” she said. “I wanted you.”

  “I wish I believed you.”

  No, she’d misheard him. I wish I’d believed you, he’d said.

  “Then,” she said, making sure.

  He nodded.

  “I do too,” she said.

  “You haven’t destroyed anything,” she said. “I needed to leave here anyway. This isn’t any life I wanted either, and I think you know that now, right?”

  He sighed, almost imperceptibly, and she felt an opening.

  “Let’s go together,” she said. “This time. I know you can’t love me, not like you did. I can do jewelry, swap out the stones, I can—”

  He was shaking his head. “No fakes. We’d be caught in a week.”

  “Precious for precious,” she said. He was listening. “Nothing fake. But if you switch amethysts for emeralds and put in a diamond where there used to be a topaz—everything would check out with any jeweler. We could steal and sell for years and years, and nothing could be traced, as long as I changed enough. I could do that,” she told him. “I’d be good.”

  He laid his head on the table.

  “We’ll sell the trillions to get started,” she said. “To buy stones for these pieces from the safe. And then we’ll use the stones I pull from these in the next pieces. Not all at once, there are sizes and shapes and all that to consider, but we could move them a little at a time, as much or as little as we needed. The rocks from bracelet A into necklace B into brooch C into ring D. Nothing would be recognizable, as long as we only use mass jewelry. Nothing one of a kind. Gold, platinum. We’ll go everywhere. I’ll get a job as coat-check girl when we run out, or a maid, and you can sneak in and open their safes. There’s jewelry everywhere,” she said, running out of breath. “The harvest would be endless.”

  “You’ve been wrong before.”

  “I’m not wrong this time.”

  He had closed his eyes hard, shutting her out. Now he lifted his head. “Where is Riley?” he asked.

  She hadn’t checked since Alls had come.

  31

  The story was two days old. NY AUTHORITIES FIND MISSING PAROLEE, the headline read.

  U.S. marshals say they have found a Garland man who left Tennessee while on parole as part of a robbery sentence.

  A parole warrant was issued on August 19 for 23-year-old Riley Sullivan Graham, who went missing from his place of employment the day before. Graham was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct in a Queens, New York, bar on Tuesday. Upon his arrest, the U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force or
dered him returned to Tennessee, where he will reappear before the court for sentencing.

  Graham had served nearly three years for the robbery of the Josephus Wynne Historic Estate in Garland in 2009.

  He had been looking for her. She saw that Alls was reading the page again and then again. She sat down on the bed and crossed her arms tightly. Her throat began to seize.

  Everything she touched, she thought.

  “I should have told him,” he finally said. “I should have made him hate us both.”

  Grace closed her eyes. She couldn’t look at him. “Where did you think he’d gone?”

  “I thought he needed to start over as someone else, away from his family.” He shook his head. “I didn’t care what he did.”

  She dug her palms into her eyes. “He was looking for me. I knew he would.”

  “I thought he was over you. I was the one who wasn’t.”

  The air between them was thick and human. She felt drugged. “Don’t you see? I ruined everyone. One bad apple. This will never end.”

  “Who’s the fucking apple? Don’t you see?” he said. “This is the end.” He pulled her hands from her eyes. “We have to leave him behind. He has people to take care of him.”

  “You don’t get it,” she said. “I’m poor. I mean, I’m poor like this”—she looked around the kitchen—“but I’m poor, here.” She thumped her open palm on her chest. “I’m a vacuum, just sucking up everything I can.”

  “Take it,” he said. “Give me what you’ve got, and I’ll give you what I’ve got, and that will have to be enough for us.”

  • • •

  They needed cash to travel. Alls had some left from Greg but Grace wanted to pull her own weight. Jacqueline had not paid her regular wages on Friday and she didn’t know what that meant. Alls had been hoping there would be some money in the safe but there had been only jewelry. Grace could have told him that Jacqueline didn’t have any money.

  On Monday morning, she put on her best white sheath and a black cardigan over it for work. First she went to Lachaille with the trillions. She didn’t need to be at work right at nine. Jacqueline didn’t even know she had a key—Grace had copied Hanna’s without asking their boss—and this would be a poor time for Jacqueline to realize that she did. Jacqueline wouldn’t come in until ten, and Amaury and Hanna had keys to get in before then, but they were gone. Grace would get there just early enough to wait outside for her boss.