Unbecoming (35 page)

“When in Rome, you’ll take any whiskey,” she said evenly. “Did you want a cup of tea?”

She needed him out of her room. He followed her downstairs to the kitchen table, where she poured them both a finger of Scotch.

“How was your day?” he said, as though they sat there often.

“Not my best,” she said.

“Why, what happened? Get caught with your hand in the till?”

“Christ,” she said. “What is this?”

“That’s his word, not yours.” He crossed one of his legs over the other. “I thought this was how it was supposed to be. We’d run off together and live happily ever after, and at the end of the day we’d have a drink and talk about our days. I’m just trying it out. Seeing what might have been.”

“The good life? Alls, you can’t know how sorry—”

“Hush,” he said. “You had a long time to speak up, and that moment has passed.” He paused. “Where is it?”

The painting. “I don’t have it,” she said. “I sold it, and then the money was stolen from me.”

“Nobody likes to be lied to.”

“I’m not lying,” she said. “I was rich for sixteen hours.”

“How much did you get for it?”

“Seven hundred thousand euros. Just shy of a million dollars.”

He whistled. “You said you’d get two million.”

“I was wrong. Cash-only limits your market.”

“Well,” he said, “guess I’ll be heading home, then.”

She didn’t say anything.

“You could have told me,” he said, and then he laughed. “You could have told me a lot of things.” He pulled his glass across the table, watching the trail of condensation.

“What did you want me to say?”

“That you’d married him. That you were still together, actually.”

“Would it have mattered to you?”

“Doubt it. I’d lost my mind.”

She couldn’t look him in the eye for very long before her own eyes began to burn. She kept looking away, just behind him or beside him, but still she could feel his eyes.

“I can’t believe it’s really you,” he said.

She wasn’t sure it was, really. She had undergone too many transformations to know. She had been a tutor, a prostitute, a chambermaid, and Julie from California. She had been twice robbed and partly scalped. Now she was an antiques restorer and a part-time jewel thief. She swallowed. “How did you find me?”

He smiled now, but she didn’t know what his smile meant.

He had imagined she had stayed in Europe, he said. He knew that she had not come back to Garland after the arrest. He imagined she’d sold the painting, that either she was back in antiques or jewelry or art, or she was a kept woman.

“Thanks a lot,” she said.

“The beauty-for-profit sector, I figured that much. And in a major city: London, Paris, Tokyo. Probably Paris. I mean, you speak the language.”

“You didn’t come all the way here because I took French in high school.”

He ignored her. “I was going to be locked up for close to three years, if I was real good and real lucky.” He leaned back in his chair. “I feel like I should talk slow to make sure you get a sense of the time. Do you understand the kind of time we’re talking about here? Days are just gravel underfoot. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”

“I might,” she said carefully. Beneath her fear, she felt an ache of longing that she knew couldn’t be returned.

“And at first, I’ll admit, I just wanted to find you to win. I wanted to scare you.” He swallowed tightly. “I couldn’t
believe
you married him. Then. I think I get it now.” He paused. “You know, I used to imagine what my life would be like if I were Riley. All the time. He had everything and everyone I wanted. Less often, and this is pathetic, I’d even settle for Greg’s life. But I’d never thought about what it might be like to be you.”

Grace reddened. “We wanted the same thing,” she said.

“I always thought of myself as Riley’s worse half, if you were his better.”

She smiled grimly.

He leaned forward and his chair legs hit the floor. “Anyway, hundreds of magazines came in every month. Mostly shit, but we
treasured
them. A paper scrap of the outside world, a piece of personal property you don’t have to guard. A magazine! And when guys are done with them, if they’re in good shape and not ripped up or covered with piss and whatnot, they go to the library. I spent a
lot
of time in the library, my last year. I didn’t get library privileges until then.”

He looked excited, as though he were about to explain a card trick. “
Architectural Digest
, May 2011. You’ve seen it?”

“I don’t read it.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “You used to.”

“It’s too Hollywood,” she said. “You read that in
prison
?”

Alls rolled his eyes. “I apologize—what magazines do you think are convict appropriate? What books? My cellmate wrote dirty poems by circling single letters in
The Purpose-Driven Life
.
Another guy stuck his eyelashes and eyebrow hairs to the wall with his own spit, made little drawings with them. There were eighty-three books in the prison library, and I read every one of them. I read anything—
Rolling Stone
,
Maxim
, fucking
Country Weekly
, cover to cover. But I guess we’re all supposed to act like the convicts we are, right?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“A thick stack of
Architectural Digest
s
showed up in the library when somebody got released and left them behind.”

He looked at her, his eyes fixed just below hers, on her nose or her chin or her neck. He was disappointed, and she wanted to explain that she had been thinking of them, all the time. She’d thought of them so much that she’d fixed a narrow vision in her mind and populated it with details that were now irrelevant.

He pulled out his wallet and from it unfolded a worn page, white at the creases.

“There,” he said.

“Americans in Paris,” the article was titled. “Emile Eustace and Heather Franks indulge in Americana elegance in their Triangle d’Or loft.” A reedy, bespectacled man in a black western-wear shirt stood behind a tan blond woman in a Federal Bentwood armchair. Surrounding the text were photographs of the couple’s prized possessions: a wrought-iron cane rack, a Chippendale tall-case clock, a birchbark canoe that they had mounted high on the wall, and a bracelet of horse cameos. Grace’s bracelet.

She gasped.

“You can take the girl out of Tennessee,” Alls said.

“Equestrian Cameo Charm Bracelet, c. 1880
,” the caption read.
“
‘
We found this treasure at a little jewelry shop in Saint Germain des Prés.’”

Mme Lachaille had only given her four hundred for it, the weasel.

How little it mattered that Grace had hidden, changed her name, changed herself inside and out. Riley’s family heirloom had tracked her across an ocean.

“I couldn’t believe it either,” he said. “I thought it would take me
years.
” He brushed imagined dust from the picture with his thumb in what appeared to be a habit. “But you were in the goddamn library.”

“I could have moved,” she said, her voice catching. “I sold that thing years ago.”

“Yeah, I know. I checked with Cy when I got out to be sure.”

“
Cy?
Helmers?”

“How many people do you think read the
Albemarle Record
outside the state, even the county? You should have seen the map, Gracie. He pulled it up in two minutes. You’re this red dot that never quits blinking.”

Grace was speechless. Of course. She spent her days nursing the artifacts of centuries past, but she couldn’t escape the year she lived in.

“There are only eight little jewelry shops in the Saint whatever. I took my picture and asked around—but for the bracelet. I told her I collected cameos.”

“She didn’t
believe
that,” Grace protested.

“You’re the one who told me collectors were snotty creeps. You called them ‘dollhouse fetishists,’ remember?” He shrugged. “It’s not a real complex persona.”

“I didn’t think you did personas.”

“I’ve learned that it pays to be flexible.”

“She told you where I worked,” Grace said. She had left America and made Paris into a town as small as Garland.

“Yes,
Julie
, she did. It’s easy to find what you want, if you pretend you’re looking for something else.”

 • • • 

Greg had given Riley and Alls ten thousand dollars each in cash—guilt money, start-fresh money—upon their release. He had gone to work in his mother’s wine shop—he could never become a lawyer now—and saved for his friends’ release. He had brought Alls care packages—requested books, candy, better socks—every month. Greg, Alls said, would be ashamed for the rest of his life. He was castrated with it.

Alls left town with his magazine clipping. He’d procured the necessary travel documents with the assistance of a friend of a friend he had met in the prison library, “reading
National Review
,” he added.

“You have a fake passport?” Her own false identity was so flimsy in comparison.

“I couldn’t have left otherwise, and now I can’t go back.”

“Why would you do that, violate your parole? Risk
more
jail time?”

“There’s nothing there for me, Grace. My parole is contingent on me living with my father. In Garland. Some people can do that, but I can’t
.
”

“I know,” she said quietly. “I couldn’t.”

He was silent for too long and she hurried to fill the space. “When did you get here?”

“Two days ago,” he said. “Today, I followed you home, rode behind the bus on a bicycle.”

“And what—what were you planning to do, once you found me?” The real question, the one she wanted to ask but could not bear to, scratched in her throat like a struggling cough.

He shrugged. “That depended on who I found.”

 • • • 

He wanted to know everything she did at Zanuso et Filles. She told him she restored antiques. Her boss gave her broken things, and her job was to unbreak them. What kinds of things, he asked. All kinds, she said. Furniture, lamps, china, weird old art projects. She told him she filled gouges, melted enamel, puzzled together shattered porcelain, cleaned dirt from unseen crevices, found duplicate handles, bases, hinges, and pulls when the originals had been lost—

“You love it,” he said.

“I do,” she admitted.

He looked around. “They don’t pay you much.”

“It’s not that. I really like the things. I don’t have to talk to the owners, who I’d probably hate. I just make repairs, and take my pleasure in the beauty of the thing itself.” She tried to explain to him how the work—repetitive, probing, apologetic, minute—felt like a service. Not to people, but to the objects.

“A penance,” he said. “You’re doing penance.”

“In a way.”

“For what we stole, not who we stole it from, and not to me, not to Riley.”

“No one made you rob the Wynne House,” she said.

“Where does stealing diamonds fall within this belief system of yours?”

“My crooked boss had me stealing for her, replacing diamonds with fakes.”

“So you’re skimming a little off the top. That’s beautiful.” He stretched, wrenching his back from side to side. He reached down into his pants pocket and then spread her trillions and her little stones on the table. She had not seen him take them. He turned a trillion to catch the light and studied the bright spots that floated on the ceiling.

“Gracie,” he said. “You know you owe me.”

28

S
o she’d learned about jewelry, he said. Not much, she protested. She didn’t know
about
jewelry, only the simple mechanics. Jewelry repair was a skill accidentally acquired.

“Like you and the locks,” she said. “You had perfectly fine reasons for picking locks.”

“Perfectly fine,” he said wryly. “Almost like we couldn’t help it, what happened after.”

“Where is he?” she begged.

He smiled. “Show me your office. I’d like to see where you work.”

“I don’t have a key,” she lied.

He shrugged: a minor inconvenience.

It was after two o’clock in the morning. No metro. He told her to call a taxi.

“Tell him to pick us up at your stop and drop us off at—what’s the nearest landmark building to you?” When he saw that she would not help him, he rolled his eyes. “I have the address. I’ve already been there. Just save me the step, okay?”

“Sacré Coeur,” she said.

They walked to Gallieni in the balmy night haze, passing no one on the street but a group of teenage boys who heard Alls’s English from up the block and began making lewd comments in approving tones. They were excited, Grace could tell. Tourists never came to their neighborhood.

“Put it in her ass tonight, man? Put it in her ear?” The boy couldn’t have been eighteen. “I bet she sucks it good.”

“Mange de la merde,” she said, passing them by.

 • • • 

In the cab, Alls chattered loudly about how excited he was to be here with her, and how sorry he was that they had to stay in such a crappy hostel, but if she could just see past that for a sec she’d see that they were finally in the most romantic city in the world, headed toward Sacray Core late at night, and did she bring the camera, and baby please don’t pout, I promise I’ll bring you back in ten years and we’ll do it up in style. Grace was mute with anxiety, the color gone from her face and her lips dry, but when the driver glanced at her in his rearview mirror, her grim pallor only added to Alls’s charade.

The walk from the cathedral to Zanuso was just over a kilometer.

Grace had so many questions for Alls that she was scared to ask because of all the questions he could ask her in return. The small, impossible hope she had felt that he was here because he still loved her was drying up, a persistent drip from a faucet finally wrenched closed.

“I don’t know what you think I can give you,” she said. “I have nothing.”

“And isn’t that why you’re taking me to your work? Because when you have nothing to give, you take from someone else?”