Unbecoming: A Novel

by Rebecca Scherm

  Alls watched her pack with curiosity: Another Grace was emerging. The cardigans would be left behind with Petit Trianon and her books. When she tucked her black boots along the side of the suitcase, he remembered them. He’d taken a picture that day in New York, he said, of Grace smiling in Union Square on their way to the auction. She’d never seen the photograph, but she could imagine: At eighteen, she’d looked corn-fed, a babe in the woods but for another girl’s dress and the stiletto boots and all that they implied. She had been so eager to change.

  Now the boots suited her perfectly.

  At dusk, they stepped off the bus at Gallieni. He had their bags, his small duffel and her larger rolling suitcase. They crossed the street to where the tour buses were idling, sweaty travelers embarking and disembarking.

  “Tickets?” the stubbly driver asked, looking at his clipboard.

  “We need to buy them now,” Alls said, handing the driver the money.

  He waved them onto the bus, and they turned to mount the metal stairs.

  “No, no!” the man called after her, and Grace whipped around in the sudden grip of alarm.

  “You have to put your big bag down here,” he said, pointing under the bus. “Only small bags up there.” He held out his hand, ready to assist her.

  She looked to Alls, but he was already on the bus. Inside her suitcase were the Mont Box and all the secrets it held, her tools, precious metals, and a fortune in gemstones.

  Grace smiled and let the driver take the handle. “Thank you,” she said.

  Alls had found them two seats together near the back. In front of them, a young mother nursed a fretful infant. Three backpackers, separated by four rows of people, debated what they’d heard about the Madrid hostels. Alls took her hand as if they were any young couple traveling Europe on a shoestring, looking out the grimy windows, wondering at the smells of other people’s food. The driver climbed into his seat, and the bus lurched away from the curb, where a small crowd of strangers waved them good-bye.

  Epilogue

  Grace turned twenty-five outside Brussels, at the wedding reception of a rich Belgian girl she’d befriended at a daytime watercolor class six months before. Three hundred people were now crowded onto the brick terrace at the girl’s parents’ house, and when the bride’s father, silver-haired and American, raised his flute to toast the happiness of his only daughter, Alls raised his glass an extra centimeter for Grace. They would celebrate her birthday later, alone. The crowd applauded the young couple and then began to spread across the garden in clusters, waiters streaming between them with platters of canapés. Alls set his champagne flute on a white-dressed table and disappeared inside to find a bathroom. Grace plucked a tartlet from a passing tray.

  “Galette de pigeon,” the waiter said.

  When Alls came out of the house thirty minutes later, he found Grace chatting about Byzantine art with someone’s uncle, who laughed uproariously at her colorful jokes about Justinian. Grace fed Alls a bite of her lobster salad and wiped the sauce from the corner of his mouth with her pinkie, and l’oncle sidled away, beckoned by his wife to talk to an older couple. Alls had finished inside, and Grace could tell from his languid gestures and the softness of his forearm around her waist that his job had been an easy one, but they would have to stay through dinner anyway, mostly to charm but also to commit small, strategic offenses that would travel back to the bride and her family tomorrow and over the next weeks: a dirty joke shared sotto voce during the mother’s tearful toast, an ungenerous comparison of the groom to his brother, some uncovered yawning and unladylike postures. They had to kill any friendships to ensure an easy exit from the lives of their marks. She’d long since given up on others’ kind opinions of her; she had to shed these as easily as she shed her names. To offend someone swiftly, efficiently, even, as you left forever was kinder by far than to slowly withdraw, to confuse and disappoint. You didn’t want them to miss you. Anger was simple, self-sustaining as a cactus. You couldn’t look too closely at it, lest the spines get you in the eye.

  The people they had left behind were lucky to be done with them. Grace and Alls didn’t have the luxury of forgetting anyone. Always, she listened for the ticking. Only Jacqueline had vanished without leaving a trace. Greg was selling time-shares in Florida. Riley had not gone back to jail after all, but to a private psychiatric facility for one year instead. When he was released, he and Colin opened an ice cream shop, just as he’d always wanted. Grace hoped he was happy. She chose to believe that he was.

  But he still hadn’t divorced her. He wouldn’t need her consent if he couldn’t find her, and she’d long since cut her last tie to Garland, just an e-mail address after all. The Tennessee courts would ask Riley only to make the appropriate gestures, the “good faith effort”: calling old numbers, asking the post office for a forwarding address. Then the Record would run a legal notice, divorce by publication. But the Record had run no such thing.

  She didn’t know why, and when the question woke her up at night, she would go into the bathroom, face the mirror, and turn the lights out, a simple homemade spell for believing she had disappeared.

  • • •

  The Belgian wedding cake was American in style, tiered and fondant encased with gum-paste lilies of the valley, each no larger than a molar. Grace bent to admire the petals’ ruffled edges. Miniatures always reminded her of Hanna, who worked for a frame shop in Warsaw now. The owner was named Dunaj; Grace assumed that Hanna had been given a family job. She hated to imagine Hanna glassing in impressionism posters and college degrees, wasting her talent. She’d be very good, Grace thought, at decorating wedding cakes. So would she, if she ever had to reform.

  But even in her split-second daydream, cake decorator was another costume, a cover.

  After cake, Grace found the bride and groom and paid her delighted respects, flirting a bit obnoxiously with the groom. The bride would not call her again.

  • • •

  That night, Grace sprawled gratefully on their downy hotel bed, still in her wedding clothes, and watched Alls undress. He was a careful dresser, and he neatly hung his jacket, his tie, his shirt, and his pants as he took them off. Grace sometimes thought that heaven, whatever that was, would be a small and potent happiness looped forever. Her heaven would be lying down on a soft bed and watching Alls undress.

  He undid the five straps that bound his hidden pockets to his thighs. When he dropped the pouches onto the bed, the comforter puffed up around them. He knelt on the bed and slipped his hand through the slit in Grace’s dress. Her own pocket snaked around to her inner thigh. Whenever she pushed something into it, something small and heavy, she would lean forward slightly, to laugh or take a bite, as the small lump traveled down the narrow tunnel to the soft purse fastened between her legs. She and Alls never put anything in plain pockets anymore, because of the inkwell problem: The weight made clothes hang wrong. Alls retrieved her spoils and dropped them across the comforter, puff-puff-puff.

  He lay down next to her and she rolled onto her belly to examine their gifts. From the safe, Alls had taken a heavy tangle of jewelry containing at least twenty carats of diamonds and a smattering of other precious stones. In addition, Grace had picked up l’oncle’s Russian diamond tie pin and some his-and-hers gold card cases that Grace happened to know were in the forest green–wrapped box in the wedding gift pile in the guest room next to the powder room.

  She opened and shut one of the card cases, enjoying the heavy, satisfying click. “These are revolting. The bride would have hated them anyway,” she said.

  He laughed. “You’re a liar.”

  “Well, she should hate them.” She bent her head to his and touched her nose to his nose. “I’m surprised there wasn’t any cash. Or gold bricks, not that we could have fit them. They seemed like gold brick people.”

  “They’ve got more than one safe,” he said. “Smart.”

  “Lucky me, then, that we got the jewelry.”

  Alls loved opening s
afes, picking locks and pockets. He didn’t care whose or how; he craved the breach itself. Grace didn’t, not especially. Working parties and weddings was only the necessary means of stocking her supplies. What thrilled her was the transformation: An audacious cocktail ring became a modest brooch; a bracelet studded with chartreuse peridots was renovated with stolen diamonds that made it 150 times as valuable but far less memorable to the eye. No one could remember a thing about their diamonds except the sparkle. They all sparkled.

  She, too, was reborn in stunning ambiguity.

  Turning her hands to herself, Grace could raise and lower her eyebrows, thin her lips into a patrician dash or blow them up into pillowy distractions. She could pin her hair across her forehead, a louche and slouchy party girl, or shave her hairline back to be the perpetually disappointed stepdaughter of a foreign diplomat. That was easy. She could starve a few weeks to deepen the hollows beneath her cheekbones and the wells above her collarbones, or fatten on bread and cheese until she puffed back into rosy-sweet baby fat. She could aerate her voice, make it low and soft as fog, or she could be Hanna, crisp angles and impatient expertise. When she scrubbed off her makeup at night, a naked canvas blinked back at her in the mirror.

  When you stopped trying to be one perfect person, you could be many. Grace had been a dozen girls in the past three years, every one a sylph.

  Alls pulled her on top of him and traced an imaginary necklace along her chest. “Do you wish we were having a liver-toast wedding?” he teased.

  “A pigeon-pie wedding?”

  “You can walk down the aisle right here,” he said. “Start from the bathroom door and pass the TV—”

  “We’ve got rings,” she said. “Several to choose from.”

  Alls began to sing the wedding march as if he were the tuba in a brass band and he’d been told the song was a battle cry. Grace imagined toddlers throwing rose petals and broke into laughter, shaking against his chest.

  “You know I’d marry you if I could,” she said when she could stop.

  “Who needs to get married? We’re more than married.”

  They rolled onto their sides, nose-to-nose and knee-to-knee, and she knew it in her very bones: This was the only life for them. Here was her only anchor. She risked for him and he risked for her. She’d sinned for him and he’d sinned for her. For richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, and everyone else was a stranger, either a mark or a liar. This was their happiness and they would not let it go.

  “Happy birthday, Gracie,” Alls said. “I love you.”

  But that was the least of it. He knew the worst of her, and that was better.

  • • •

  On a cloudy evening about two weeks later, Grace sat down to work on the floor in front of the cracked laminate coffee table facing the TV, the best feature of the flat she and Alls had rented in Odense. She’d found a channel that played American movies, and lately she’d been turning them on for background while she worked alone. Alls had been out working on a job for the past six nights, and Grace had been uneasy without him. The life they’d chosen was riddled with chance, and with every triumph, she feared they’d finally tilted the odds against them. She always worried that Alls would be caught or worse until the moment she heard him clear his throat on the stairs. He did, every time, just to let her know that he was alone, intact, and that they’d made it another day.

  Three Makeup Princess fashion dolls, the reviled plastic modepoppen, sat on top of the television, smiling at her from their cardboard cases. Grace poured half an inch of ethyl acetate into two bowls and mixed into each a stream of bright nail polish, one magenta and one turquoise. She would paint this solution on their loose diamonds and other pale gems, turning them into garish plastic fakes that she would use to bedazzle the dolls’ lamé headbands and plastic necklaces, which were ideal for concealing gems in plain sight. She could have hot-glued the Hope Diamond to one of those dolls and no one would see it. On the off chance she and Alls were checked at customs, their savings should be safe in these toys Grace had supposedly bought for her nieces back home. Alls would have preferred to tape the stones into suitcase linings than fool around with bulky toys, but Grace was a better actress when she had nothing to hide. Then she could really believe.

  They hadn’t bothered about customs until now, traveling around the EU unchecked for the past few years, but they had never traveled with quite so much. As soon as he finished the safe he was working now, they would leave for London. It was a shame they couldn’t sell this lot in Antwerp, but they never sold a piece in the same country where they’d picked it up, even after Grace had reset all the stones. They would stay in London only long enough to sell. They hadn’t decided where to go after. Alls was tired of Europe and Grace wanted a break from jewelry, parties, laughing at other people’s jokes. They had been moving so precisely, so purposefully—dancing, really—and neither could imagine what it would feel like to slow to a stop. “You don’t think we’ll get bored?” she’d asked him, really asking him if he would. Those too-quiet moments of doubt were perhaps the same in any kind of marriage: How much do you love me, and what other choice do you have? But he said he wanted to get bored, just enough to sleep through the night.

  Sometimes she missed loving someone who she knew would always love her more.

  They had three secondhand safes, each no larger than a microwave, in their apartment right now; Grace reset their combinations periodically so Alls could train for speed. Now she fetched the loose stones and spread them out on the newsprint. She began to dab at the first one with hot pink, holding it down with a toothpick as she moved her brush over the facets.

  The commercial ended and the movie came back on. The voices were immediately familiar. Grace looked up to see a mink-clad woman, middle-aged, stubbing her cigarette out in a fried egg. Mrs. Graham had loved this part, hissing when the cigarette hit the yolk.

  Ah, no. Not this. Not tonight.

  To Catch a Thief. Grace had not thought about the movie in years. She watched, stock-still, as Grace Kelly swept into the frame in a yellow flowered day dress. She knelt on a damask couch, crossed her golden arms daintily over the back, and arched, smiling and preening. “You know, you might look a little like her,” Mrs. Graham had said, and Grace had soaked in that compliment, though she was not so golden, her jaw not so haughtily square. But now she recognized herself in the preening smile, the balletic gestures of the other Grace, the one she’d meant to become. She watched the other Grace throw her shoulders around, tilt her face to the sun, spill her silvery voice like coins falling into a pile. Grace had loved that voice’s faux-frank arrogance. The other Grace was all surfaces, as if she’d somehow rid herself of herself.

  Grace remembered herself in the mirror, trying on Mrs. Graham’s lipstick when she was a girl. Crushed Rose, wasn’t it? If only she could laugh. Instead the ache of longing rushed up in her too fast for her to stop it. She set down her brush, the polish already dried hard on the bristles. She wished Alls were home. She could have told him she was having a magnolia spell—a euphemism for this sudden anguish—and he would have helped her through it. He was not immune to such difficulties himself. But he was out, alone, on his belly in black on some cold floor, and she was home alone.

  I don’t think you know what love is, Hanna had said.

  Grace turned off the TV and sat in the quiet apartment full of fumes. She opened her computer and typed 429 Heathcliff into the search bar. Garland Tennessee USA. She didn’t allow herself a moment to recognize the mistake she was making. She needed to see the house, the front door, the hemlock tree they had climbed, the roof they used to lie on. First was the map, the dumb green arrow pointing to the location of another Grace, left behind.

  But under the map was a photograph, too nice for satellite.

  Poplar Realty Featured Properties: 429 Heathcliff Ave.

  The Grahams were selling their house.

  She clicked.

  Wonderful family home, the listing began.
Grace pored over the photographs, every lamp and every rug an unreadable sign of life: the needlepoint pillow of sunflowers, the pie safe with punched-tin doors, the brass tripod floor lamp they’d bought when the boys had knocked over their third lamp in a year. In the dining room, Grace saw her, a ghost in white lace with a high neck, her sandy hair swept up into a shell, her hands hidden by dark glossy leaves and open white blooms. Grace couldn’t see the details in the photograph, but she knew them by heart.

  Grace knew what love was.

  She hurried toward the bathrooms and stairwell, trying to get away, but then she was in the bedrooms, first the brothers’ and then Riley’s. Grace didn’t recognize his room at first—gone was the striped blue bedspread, the cork board crowded with the detritus of their childhood. Now the walls were painted pale lilac, the furniture white wicker. A guest room. But there was a stuffed rabbit on the twin bed, long ears strewn across the pillow. Then she recognized the toile-shaded lamp, and then her old quilt, folded across the back of a white rocking chair. She clicked through the rest of the rooms, all unchanged. Her attic was not pictured. It was probably used for storage now. Grace did not recognize that bunny on the bed. It was not Mrs. Graham’s.

  She went back into the dining room. On the wall with Mrs. Graham, on the other side of the shot of the boys in the leaf pile, was a family photograph—new, or new to her.

  Grace zoomed in until the photograph filled her screen, hopelessly blurred. The Grahams were shadowy silhouettes whose details she could not sharpen. They were standing together, water behind them. A lake or a beach somewhere. All four brothers, but she couldn’t make out their faces, and two women Grace did not recognize, one with a blond ponytail and a white tank top, another with dark curls. Dr. Graham and Mrs. Graham stood in the center. It was Riley, she thought, standing next to his mother. If only they had been lined up better, she would know the boys by height. Grace leaned in toward the screen, desperate to see it clearly, but she couldn’t. She could only see the baby girl, a fat infant in a red sundress, whom Mrs. Graham held in her arms.