Unbecoming (12 page)

“You found out about the arrest on the
news
? You didn’t talk to him?”

“We e-mailed each other. But I had no idea he was planning it.”

“Then it’s good you got away when you did,” Hanna said.

“Yeah,” Grace said. “You never know someone as well as you think you do.”

Hanna seemed to think this over. Grace didn’t know what she wanted to happen. She regretted lying to Hanna—how many times, just in this one conversation? She hadn’t meant to. It never felt like lying while she was doing it so much as trying to tell the truth and failing.

And of anyone she had ever known, Hanna was the one Grace could tell. Hanna would forgive her; she would have to. She had slit a woman’s throat. She knew how quickly a bad decision was born.

“It was serious?” Hanna asked.

“We’d been together since I was twelve years old,” Grace said. She could say
that
truthfully because she’d had so much practice saying it before. “We lived together.”

“And you didn’t know they were going to do this crazy thing? What, were you locked in the basement?”

“He didn’t tell me anything,” Grace said, angry with Hanna for joking about abuse that, as far as
she
knew, was very real.

“You were an appraiser’s assistant all through college, weren’t you?”

Grace nodded. She had exaggerated her biography a little for Jacqueline when she’d started. Hanna thought Grace—
Julie
—was twenty-six.

“I think he thought I would help him,” Grace said. “When I came home.”

“But he didn’t tell you?” Hanna blinked at her.

“He only told me exactly what he wanted me to know,” Grace said. “And I’d never had any reason not to believe him, you know?”

Every time she the missed the turnoff, it got harder to see the way back.

Amaury came in mumbling and took his spot, immediately bending over the collection of tiny brass movements before him.

Hanna nodded toward the computer screen, where she’d pulled up a photograph of the three trees in the centerpiece’s fall quarter. “Acorns,” she said to Grace. “Twenty.” She held out the envelope of surviving original acorns, and Grace had to get up and fetch it from her.

Grace hadn’t noticed how clammy her hands were until her fingers touched Hanna’s.

Back at her table, she grabbed a fresh thumb-sized lump of wax and started pinching off balls the size of peppercorns.

“Too big,” Hanna said.

Grace pulled over the magnifier and tried to disappear behind the lens.

She carved each bead of wax into an acorn on a needle mount, a T-pin stapled by its arms to a square of plywood. She perched a ball of wax on the upended needle and carved the groove that separated the cap, and then she pulled the end upward, tapering the nut. The first one took twenty minutes, but the second took her only ten, and then she cranked out nine more at six minutes apiece. She was grateful for Amaury’s silent presence. Hanna wouldn’t ask her any more questions in front of him.

The studio was quiet for the next two hours except for the tap and scrape of their tools. Just after eleven, Jacqueline opened her office door and stuck her head out. “Julie, I have some good news for you,” she sang. “You’re getting a visit from an old friend today.” She laughed, and all the coffee Grace had drunk rushed up the back of her throat.

Jacqueline clomped out of her office in her heeled sandals holding a burgundy cardboard box that was warped at the corners. Grace knew it well: the ugly teapot, again, far more welcome than any real old friend.

Jacqueline leaned over Grace’s table. She had a sunglasses tan, pale goggles across her face. “What are these tiny things? Are we making microbes now?”

“Acorns,” Grace said, and her boss rolled her eyes. Poor Jacqueline, so disinterested in decorative arts, stuck in the business most obsessed with their minutiae.

Jacqueline flapped a hand toward the red box. “Do it now,” she said. “She’s coming back for it late this afternoon—needs it for a luncheon tomorrow, or something.”

Hanna grunted as though losing Grace would present a great hardship for her project. Her hand darted greedily for one of Grace’s acorns, and she began to inspect it.

“She’s very good at this tiny work,” Hanna said to Jacqueline, peering into her palm. “You should look at this. It would have taken me longer.”

Hanna was trying to help, Grace knew, and she was grateful. If only it mattered.

The teapot was a trompe l’oeil cauliflower. The top half formed a nubby white floret, the lower half and spout a cradle of green cabbage leaves. Strasbourg, 1750, but who cared? It looked like something from a sidewalk sale in Garland, something that would sit next to a rack of leopard-print reading glasses. Perhaps it had once been a good example of its kind, but it was a Frankenstein piece now. The owners, entertainment lawyers in their forties, broke the teapot again and again. The first time, the bowl was cracked in three pieces; the second time it was the handle; the third, the bowl again. Why did they keep fixing it? What did the cauliflower teapot mean to them? A burdensome inheritance? The cracked hopes of their marriage embodied by an ugly wedding present?

There had been a time when a teapot was just a teapot.

Now the pot’s lid was fractured, the knob broken clean away, and several of the porcelain cabbage leaves at the bottom were busted up along their green veins. A mess. In the box, nestled in the raffia frizz, was a plastic bag holding all the missing pieces and shards of broken porcelain, in sizes ranging from Communion wafer to steel-cut oat. Grace emptied the bag onto her blotter and examined the smallest shards, wondering who had done what to whom that they needed to punish their teapot like this, and why in hell they cared about it so much. She called it her Cabbage Patch Kid, but nobody here got the joke.

But the same couple had also given Grace the most beautiful job she’d ever laid hands on, more than a year ago, another teapot. Maybe they collected them, or perhaps they had one of those accidental collections forced on people after someone noticed they had two of something.

That teapot was too breathtaking to have been acquired casually. Stunningly fragile, 1820s, sunlight-colored glass with finely detailed brass trim that formed the handle, a pheasant’s graceful neck, and the spout, a lamb’s head. On the lid, a swan reared back as if to attack. The animals looked alive, trapped and furious. That teapot was in near-perfect condition too, but for the tiniest speck of discoloration on the base. The surgery would be dangerous, and Grace was loath to risk it. She remembered the Hawthorne story she’d read in high school about the man who became obsessed with removing his wife’s birthmark. The surgery removed the spot and killed her.

The teapot survived Grace’s ministrations. She would give its owners this: When they threw a teapot across the room, they threw the right one.

She had hoped that if she could just keep the truth inside her, a nicer story than the real one would grow like a seed, taking root and getting stronger, until it grew around the truth and consumed it. The good twin would destroy the evil twin, or something like that. In her fantasy, no one, not even Grace, would be able to tell the difference.

But she had never forgotten the truth. She’d told shoddy lies. The story was pale and underdeveloped and looked like the impostor it was.

She took up a shard of green porcelain with her tweezers and slid it into the space she believed was its home. The piece just fit.

 • • • 

When Jacqueline had stepped out for her afternoon coffee, a man rang the bell.

“Puis-je vous aider?” Grace asked him at the door, but she knew. The teapot’s owner was just how she’d pictured him. He wore a navy blue suit with peaked lapels and high armholes, and he looked ashamed. Grace slipped on some clean gloves, but just for show; the teapot was a salvage title at this point. She tucked it into its raffia nest and draped some tissue over it, as though she were putting it to bed.

“Don’t touch it for at least twenty-four hours,” she told him. “It looks solid, but it’s still very fragile.” He grimaced and took the box from her. “You really can’t use it anymore,” she said. “Especially not for coffee, okay? It will stain the cracks, and then everyone will know.”

Amaury clucked from his corner. The man opened his mouth as if he were about to explain. “I hate this fucking thing,” he said.

When he left, Grace thought she saw a smirk on Hanna’s face.

“What?” she asked.

“Don’t stain the cracks,” Hanna gently mocked her. “Then everyone will know.”

 • • • 

After everyone else had gone home, Grace checked the
Albemarle Record
. Nothing. She took out her Mont box. She began to painstakingly sand down the layer of gold lacquer that she had applied the night before so that it was just a warm metallic film that revealed the layer of silver lacquer below. She moved her fingertips across the wood lightly. If she went too deep and broke through completely, she’d have to do the whole layer over.

Three and a half years ago, she had thought the solution to all her problems was to disappear with Riley, somewhere enviable and romantic and
far away
, somewhere like Paris, thinking that if they could just be alone together, without interference from anyone back home, they would be happy again. His love for her, abundant as it was, would make up for everything she had left behind, and her love for him—if not as potent as it once was, at least as rigorous—would always keep him close to her.
He’ll never leave you
, Alls had said. And now here she was, alone in Paris in a room full of antiques (the likes of which she could not even have imagined then), fearing that he would find her, that she would finally be alone in Paris with her husband.

Three silent years stood between them. She imagined that with each passing month, he tapped new reserves of rage. But those were the admissible fears. Uglier by far was the fear that he had forgiven her. She could see him convincing himself that they’d merely hit a rough patch. He would appear one day out of nowhere, yet another of his grand gestures, ready to be loved again. Finally, there was the fear of his eyes on her, of seeing in them a reflection of a girl she’d left in America.

It could have been worse, she reminded herself. If they’d found the painting he would have gotten ten years, twenty. Or he would have turned her in. She reached back and touched her bald spot, smoothing the hair down over it.

Just after nine, Grace was sanding the corners of the box, the places most vulnerable to too much pressure, when the sun went down all at once in a way that always spooked her. The windows became black rectangles, blurry feet passing across them.

Then she saw his feet. Standing, heels to the window. He was leaning against the building. Those were
his
feet. His shoes, canvas slip-ons with the heels tamped down. His ankles, the left one knobby from spraining it playing pickup basketball. His calves, long and taut, the red-gold hair she would know anywhere.

She pushed against the floor and rolled her chair back into the shadows, away from the windows. The casters on the concrete floor were loud, a rattling cough.

He couldn’t see her. She was in the shadows all the way back to Amaury’s corner.

She pulled her feet into her chair and her knees up to her chest. He couldn’t see her. He would have to lie down on the sidewalk to look in. A cigarette butt landed on the sidewalk and the left shoe ground it out. Riley had never smoked cigarettes, but she had to remember that she didn’t know him anymore.

She closed her eyes. When she opened them, the feet were just some kid’s, some kid in slip-ons with the heels flattened. The ankles and calves looked plain and strange. They were not his, and he was not hers.

IV

New York

8

I
n August, Grace’s father demanded to drive her to New York. She wanted Riley to drive her, but his classes began the same week. The trip was the most time Grace and her father had ever spent alone together. “Listen,” he said in West Virginia. “I know you’re sure you want to do this. But if it ever gets to be too much—”

“It’s just college,” she said.

“If it ever gets to be too much, don’t be afraid to come home.”

She rolled her eyes toward the billboards. “Thanks, but I think I’ll be okay.”

He squinted. “Of course you’ll be okay. I never said you wouldn’t be okay.”

Grace and her father huffed up to the fifth floor of the dorm and shuffled past the loud families. In Grace’s assigned room, a girl sat on one bed. Her hair was electric blue at the scalp and shining black below her ears. She wore white fake eyelashes and a T-shirt that read
FUCK A MUSICIAN
.

“Are you Kendall? I’m Grace.”

“Gra-a-ace,” she said. “Grace from Tennessee.” She extended a hand with a different snake ring on each finger. “What’s your thing? What are you working on?”

“Probably something in art hist—”

“I’m doing ‘Bewildering Desire: Hentai and Idée Fixe.’” She laughed. Grace’s father was struck mute, reduced to a porter. “You’ll become one of us sooner or later.” She looked at the quilted floral duffel bag that Grace had dropped on the floor. “Maybe later,” she said.

Grace’s father glanced at her shirt and reddened. “So you’re a musician?”

“No,” she said.

“Kendall’s from Staten Island,” Grace said, trying to change the conversation.

“Um,
Long
Island,” she said. “But we lived in Manhattan until last year. Our dad still does. And I’m Jezzie. Kendall’s my little sister. Oh my God—me, Kendall! That is
too
funny. She’s currently napping elsewhere. Big night. I’m just back here for nostalgia reasons.” She paused. “I do some theater,” she said.

“Is Kendall a—is she an actress too?” Grace’s father asked.

“Ha ha! Oh my God, you are charming. No, she’s business school. Big desk, dolla-dolla-bills, all that.” She stood up and hoisted her bag to her shoulder. “But I must leave you now,” she said, collapsing her knees together as if she had to pee and frowning like a party clown.