Unbecoming: A Novel

by Rebecca Scherm

  Lachaille’s steel grate was still down, despite that the sign said they opened at nine. Grace walked around the block. If Lachaille didn’t open soon, the day was already shot.

  At 9:20 the grate flew up. Grace was watching from the café across the street.

  “We don’t buy loose diamonds,” Mme Lachaille said, shaking her head. “And no certificates? No, we don’t do that.”

  Grace spread out Alls’s torn page from Architectural Digest and pointed to her bracelet. “How much did you get for this? Five times what you paid me?”

  The older woman pursed her dark lips. “It was a fair price.”

  Grace folded her arms and waited. “I’ve sold you some really beautiful things,” she said. “I didn’t expect that I was—”

  “These are not my business. I sell antique jewelry. These need antique jewelry behind them. You’re not going to get a good price anywhere.” She shook her head quickly. “Put some clothes on them,” she hissed.

  Grace had expected a lowball offer that the magazine clip would improve; she had not expected to be turned down entirely.

  “I can make a call for you,” Mme Lachaille said. “That’s it.”

  “Please.”

  Mme Lachaille rooted through her address book, grumbling, and then put up a finger. “I have to ask my husband,” she said. “One minute.”

  Grace wouldn’t sell the trillions today—an early blow. She’d never sold jewelry anywhere else, and she didn’t have time to try, not if she was going to make it to work before Jacqueline, which she had to because she always did, and this day could not look any different. She needed to be there when Jacqueline discovered she had been robbed so that her accusations would fall on Hanna. And who would Lachaille send her to, anyway? She had no idea. No, it was too risky to improvise.

  But Madame had left her address book splayed open on the glass counter, and under it, her blank pad of carbon paper receipts. An invitation. Grace knew her stoned-heiress-abroad act might not work everywhere. She had no certifications, no little slips of paper to legitimize her. Her charm had definite limits. She slipped the pad into her purse and then reached for the address book too. She might need to make some new friends soon.

  She left quickly and quietly, stilling the bells that hung from the door in her hand.

  On the sidewalk, she flipped open Alls’s phone. He had not called yet, but it was early. He was to go out this morning to buy another phone, and he had given her his to take. He said he would call her as soon as he had it so she could call him when Jacqueline discovered the safe had been emptied. “Just call the number back,” he said. “I won’t answer.” They needed to be ready to go, in case Jacqueline or her superiors went for Grace and her apartment instead of Hanna and hers.

  Grace feared the call would not come and she would be left holding the bag. That was what she had done to him. But there was nothing to do except wait and see.

  • • •

  At work she pressed the buzzer as she always did, going through the motions but expecting silence. No one answered. Good. She leaned against the brick wall to wait. But then there was a crackle on the intercom, then a buzz, and the front lock clicked open. Damn.

  The studio door was propped. Grace didn’t like this, any of it. She pushed open the door and saw Amaury standing there, baggy-eyed and grimacing, as if it were he who had been caught at something.

  “My God,” she said. “I didn’t think you were coming back.”

  He shook his head slowly, as if he couldn’t believe it himself. “And yet, here I am again. How are things?”

  “Fine,” Grace said. “Slow. Very slow.” She dropped her bag on her chair and scratched her ankle. “Hanna’s almost finished with the centerpiece.”

  “I saw,” he said. “It looks very nice.”

  They stood together, admiring it. Grace had expected the project to take much longer, but Hanna had worked on nothing else. Grace blew into the air and watched the corn stalks flutter. She and Amaury laughed.

  “I like the corn,” he said. “And the peaches, the little pits.”

  “I did those,” Grace said, knowing he knew that. Carving fruit seemed like ages ago.

  Grace squinted toward Hanna’s station.

  “What is it?”

  “She said she was going to finish the case on Saturday,” she told him. “She mixed some glue before she left on Friday.”

  He frowned, but not as if he cared. Grace went to inspect Hanna’s unfinished work.

  “And what have you been doing?” he asked. “More jewelry?”

  “Just a few things, cleaning and resetting,” she said. “These rich people, knocking their jewelry around and breaking it. I guess if you have a lot of it, it’s less precious.” Too much, she thought. She should have said half that.

  He nodded absently.

  “It’s really strange that Hanna didn’t come in,” Grace said. “I hope she’s okay.”

  Jacqueline came in at 10:20, looking as if she’d spent the weekend drinking on a boat. “Hanna’s not here,” Grace tattled. “And she didn’t finish the case.”

  “Well, what are you waiting for? It’s due there at noon!”

  The work was well below Hanna’s code, but Grace hustled together the last pieces of the case with a staple gun and twine. She carefully slid the centerpiece into its wide wooden box with Amaury’s help. It was heavy, maybe thirty pounds, and of what? Wool, wire, glass beads, and scraps of fabric.

  She knocked on the door to Jacqueline’s office. “Pardon,” she said. “Are you going to pay us today?”

  “Yeah,” her boss said absently. “This afternoon.”

  “Because my rent is due and—”

  “I said today.”

  Grace called a taxi, and Amaury helped her get the centerpiece up the stairs. They declined the driver’s help.

  “I should go with you,” Amaury said. “To get it out again.”

  “Not necessary,” Grace said. “But I should take the gurney. Wait here?”

  In the stairwell she opened the phone. Alls still had not called.

  • • •

  Grace let the driver help her slide the box onto the folding cart, and she rolled it into the lobby of the collector’s marble-floored building. She went up in the freight elevator, light-headed with nerves. She would unveil the centerpiece and show it off, and then she would return to work and the spectacle of horrors that would unfold there.

  The collector, a man who otherwise looked disappointingly average in a starched white button-up, wore compass cufflinks, their arrows spinning indiscriminately. He breathed deeply, as if he were in the habit of meditating, but crossed and recrossed his arms as she pushed the gurney across the floor. He wanted the centerpiece in a small sitting room behind his library; he said he displayed his folk art there. The centerpiece was hardly folk art, but perhaps the man meant all his funny art, or all his miscellaneous art. She obliged, hearing him suck in his breath as she wheeled around corners. His walls were crowded with oils and tapestries, mostly religious scenes. She told him she would need assistance to move it off the gurney, and he doubled back to murmur into an intercom.

  The room was furnished in bizarre simplicity with a single bed, a shabby dining table with one chair, and a child’s writing desk. The bedspread was threadbare. Grace thought of her attic bedroom at the Grahams’ and quickly shook off the memory.

  “Here,” he said, pointing to the table.

  “Here?” Grace repeated. The man had been far too passionate about the restoration to have Grace drop it on a rickety table.

  “It’s bolted to the floor,” he said, kicking gently at a table leg.

  Another man had appeared, a secretary, perhaps, and the three of them together slid the centerpiece out onto the table. The collector sat down in the chair and stared, his hand over his mouth.

  “It’s like going back in time,” he said finally.

  Grace hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath. He was pleased.


  “Yes,” she said.

  “Your work,” he said, “is exquisite.”

  “Thank you.”

  He stood and backed up to the wall, never taking his eyes off the centerpiece. He pushed a button on the wall, just under a small crude oil painting of a pair of goats. She heard it before she saw it: A clear acrylic lid, a bottomless box, was descending from the ceiling on steel wires. The collector and his secretary switched places wordlessly and the collector hurried to the centerpiece. He motioned with his hands for the lid to drop, to pause, to drop a little more, as if he were helping someone park on the street. They stopped when the lid hovered just over the tops of the trees, and they waited until it was completely still in the air and they were sure the centerpiece was correctly positioned under it. Then the secretary pushed the button once more, and the lid settled around the centerpiece with a soft clunk.

  The collector relaxed his shoulders and clapped his hands. “I love it!” he squawked. He put his hands on his hips and bent over his new prize.

  “Did you see the peaches?” She pointed toward the orchard. “They’re my special favorite.”

  He laughed when he saw the bite marks. “However did you do it?” he said. “You must have such steady hands. Me, I can’t even thread a needle.”

  When she left, he tried to write her a check, she supposed as a tip. Grace couldn’t take checks; she had no way to cash them. “I couldn’t,” she demurred. “No, please. You paid for our services. That is the arrangement.”

  “Please, please,” he said. “You have made me so happy.” He tried again to hand her a check. She saw that he had written it to Hanna Dunaj. Jacqueline must have told him—he might even have e-mailed with Hanna, or spoken to her. Grace had never had such intimate contact with a client.

  “Really, I can’t,” she said.

  His face changed; he was used to giving people money and used to them wanting it. “Ah,” he said with a thin smile. He withdrew a clip of bills from his pocket and peeled off several of them. He handed her the rest. “You have given me so much joy—you can’t be compensated fairly for that.”

  “Thank you, you’re very generous. Would you like a copy of the notes?” she asked him. “You might enjoy reading our notes on the restoration.”

  He looked positively aroused. “I would love that,” he said. “Oh do send all the notes, please.”

  • • •

  On the sidewalk, she looked down at her phone. There, a missed call. She thought she might capsize in the wave of relief; the number on the screen was like a hand reaching out for her.

  She couldn’t fuck up now.

  Outside Zanuso et Filles she pressed the buzzer.

  “Who is it?”

  Jacqueline never asked who it was. Grace knew she had opened the safe.

  “Julie,” she said, calling Alls at the same time. When the phone rang twice, she hung up. She tromped down the stairs, making up for her wobbly-legged anxiety by landing hard on her feet.

  Jacqueline was at the door, dry-lipped and wild-eyed. She motioned Grace in and shut the door behind her. “We’ve been robbed,” she said.

  “What? When?”

  “Over the weekend. The safe is empty.”

  “My God,” Grace said. “What was in it?”

  Jacqueline pushed her hands through her hair. “Where is she?” she demanded. “Where is Hanna?”

  Grace shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do,” Jacqueline said through her clenched jaw. “You two talk all the damn day. Tell me where she is.”

  “We’re just work friends,” Grace said limply. “I don’t even know where she lives.”

  “She has a key, and he has a key.”

  “Jacqui,” Amaury warned her from across the room.

  “You’ve called the police?” Grace asked.

  “Ha,” Amaury said.

  “We have to call the police,” Grace said, stepping toward Jacqueline’s office.

  “No! I already called the police. They’ve already been here.” She looked at Amaury, threatening him into believing it, but he was slumped over at his desk, arms crossed, looking at his lap.

  “I knew this day would come,” he said.

  Jacqueline was almost gasping for breath. “I knew she was a thief,” she said.

  “Are you sure it was her?” Grace asked. “She might just be sick.”

  Jacqueline rolled her eyes. “You don’t know her,” she said. “Look, her things are gone too.”

  Amaury sighed.

  “Go home,” she snapped at Grace. “There is nothing to do.”

  “I need to be paid,” Grace said. “You said you’d pay me on Friday.”

  “Get out!” Jacqueline shouted. “If you ever want to work again, just get out!”

  Amaury groaned and stood up. Grace followed him out the door. She had almost a thousand euros in her purse from the collector. She reached in and fingered the bills.

  “What will she do?” she asked Amaury outside the building.

  He shrugged his soft, hilly shoulders. “What will we do, you mean.” He looked at her tiredly. “The job is gone,” he said, gently breaking the news. “You don’t need to come back.” She threw her arms around him, and he stumbled back in surprise. He gently patted her back, unsure and uncomfortable.

  The ship had been going down anyway; he’d known it and so had she. She released him and slipped a hundred euros into his pants pocket. He was far too discombobulated to notice.

  “I guess I won’t see you for a while,” she said to him.

  “No,” he said.

  • • •

  She had almost a thousand in her pocket but had planned to end the day with ten, and Alls was not expecting her for five more hours. She could have called him and said she was early; they had certainly allowed for the possibility that Jacqueline would close up shop immediately. But Grace had not sold the trillions, and while the money in her pocket was a nice surprise, it was not nearly enough surprise. Maybe she had the time, after all, to try again.

  No one would give her a good price for loose diamonds. She had the ring she had taken the diamonds from; she could pop them right back in. But that wasn’t the case she had made to Alls; she had promised him that she could set diamonds stolen from the Joneses into jewelry stolen from the Smiths.

  Grace went to the third arrondissement to look for earrings. Her requirements were specific, and she knew she might come up empty. She needed a pair in eighteen- or twenty-two-karat gold with simple, three-prong settings and only semiprecious stones, so she wouldn’t have to go too deep into her pockets to pay for them. Such earrings weren’t fashionable here; she would have had better luck at the Albe-mall.

  The small shops had nothing for her. She vowed to give up after two hours, but it didn’t take nearly that long. She found them in Galeries Lafayette for two hundred, white gold with aquamarines. She paid in cash and threw the receipt in the can on the way out. Switching these stones at home would be easy for her, child’s play. She was excited: This wasn’t exactly the plan, but maybe it was better. She would show him. She would show him that he needed her.

  • • •

  Alls was not at home. The jewelry boxes were gone from her desk. He had left her. So tidily, hadn’t even left a mess. Grace leaned back against the wall.

  His duffel bag was still there.

  She pawed through it, her mind sparking in a dozen panicked directions. No jewels. She yanked open her drawers, a burglar in her own home, searching desperately for evidence that he had not gone without her. And what if he had? She had half-expected it, hadn’t she?

  The Mont box. She had shown it to him last night, every varnished layer and every babied hinge. Now she threw it open. She groped in the slip until her nails hit metal. They were there. He had hidden them away. Yes. Of course.

  When Alls came in an hour later, Grace had shoved the earring posts into the bottom of a plain wax candle that she held upturned between her knees.
She sat by the window, hunched over. She would have to buy a new headlamp, a new magnifier, since she was freelancing now. She would eventually need a portable soldering apparatus like the one at work. But today, she had only to open the prongs and close them around a pair of diamonds as big as unopened sunflower seeds. She allowed herself a sigh of relief when she heard him come in.

  He wanted to know everything that had happened so far. She gave it to him in detail, keeping her eyes on her work. He seemed more interested in what she was doing than disappointed that she hadn’t sold the trillions, and that was how she knew. She felt like a plane touching down, finally on safe, hard ground.

  She’d wrapped the aquamarines in a tissue. “We should save those,” she said. “They might come in handy sometime.”

  He stood behind her as she clamped the last prongs closed.

  “Hand me that cloth,” she said, pulling the earrings from the wax. The diamonds were nearly naked, barely held. Only a woman with more money than she could ever spend would wear something so valuable and so vulnerable.

  “Put them on,” he said.

  She wiggled the posts into her ears. He followed her into the bathroom, and they looked together at her reflection in the mirror.

  “They don’t look real,” he said. “They’re too big to look real.”

  “Diamonds only look real if you already look rich,” she said.

  He laughed.

  “We could still sell them today,” she said. “I can do it. Come with me. You’ll see.”

  He shook his head. “These are probably easier to hide than the cash would be,” he said. “Safer to travel with.” He reached up and took her earlobe between his fingers, and she turned and pulled him closer.

  • • •