Unbecoming (20 page)

“Does it matter anymore?”

“You’ve thought about this a long time,” she said.

“Not because I wanted to.”

She was aching and wet and didn’t miss Riley at all. Riley was a world away, a souring memory that she couldn’t catch the details of and didn’t want to.

“We can never tell,” she said, and his shoulders collapsed. He’d expected her to shut it down. He might have been testing her, she realized, her loyalty to Riley.

He wasn’t.

“We can never tell,” he repeated.

He unzipped her coat and slipped his hands inside, around her waist, clutching her as if she might disappear. She pulled him down on top of her, and his face hovered just above hers, his eyes shining in the dark. They knew, in that moment, that they had not done anything irrevocable. They could still go back. But she could feel his breath on her lips; she could taste it. Then she raised her mouth to his and breathed him in.

And when she ran her hands up to his chest, under his shirt, she told herself that this wasn’t real. When he rolled her over him and she reached back to unclasp the neck of her dress, she knew that this could not be happening. It was not allowed and so it was not real. She slid his jeans down his thighs as if she were in a dream. She sucked on his earlobe and ran her wet fingers around the head of his penis as if she were just wondering what it would be like, to do that to him, and he pulled her dress up over her head in a blind tunnel where she floated, hoping she wouldn’t wake up. She got up and locked the door. He sat up on her bed, leaning against the wall. She climbed onto him and he cupped her ass in his hands and groaned into her neck and none of this was real, not the unfamiliar fingers sliding between her lips, not her sense that she’d known him always and somehow not at all, and then she sank down onto him and lost her breath completely.

 • • • 

They lay there next to each other afterward, not touching, as though by keeping still they might stop time. She saw his arm next to hers, his chest rising and falling, but she couldn’t turn to look at him directly. To do so would be to acknowledge both the sharpness and the depth of their betrayal: sharp like a cut where before there had been only an ache; deep as a sudden drop-off from shallow water.

He didn’t smell like Riley at all. He smelled like black pepper and burning leaves.

This will destroy you
, she thought.

She didn’t know what he was thinking, but as they lay there she felt the weight growing heavier with every second.

When Grace finally spoke, her voice was as rough as if she had just woken up. “You need to go now,” she said.

He didn’t answer her. Grace closed her eyes. Finally, she felt the bed move. She listened to the sounds of his dressing: legs shuffling into pants; the mocking zip of his fly; his feet shoving into shoes; the relief, finally, of his arms shrugging into his coat. When she heard the door click shut, she turned toward the wall and began to sob.

 • • • 

She had her pillow over her head when Kendall came in the next morning, but she wasn’t asleep. Grace pushed off the covers and got to her feet, wanting to pee before Kendall got in the shower.

“God,” Kendall said as Grace passed. “What happened to you?”

When Grace came out, Kendall was wrapped in her bathrobe, her dress slung over the back of her desk chair. Grace saw her glance at a pile on the floor and realized that it was her dress—Jezzie’s dress—lying there in a sloppy heap.

“Oh no, sorry about that,” she said, shaking it out to hang it up.

Kendall raised her eyebrows. “It’ll need to be cleaned anyway.” Grace must have flinched, because Kendall quickly added, “Mine too. Smoky and sweaty and disgusting.”

Grace sat on her bed and stared at her thighs, which looked as frail and dry as if she’d had the flu.

“What is it?” Kendall said.

“What?”

“Wait, did you—”

Grace shook her head furiously.

“No, no,” Kendall said, a glint in her eye. “Something happened.”

Someone began to pound on their door. “Don’t move,” Kendall said, slipping into the hallway as if Grace might try to escape. She came back with Lana, whose face gleamed with excitement, though Grace hadn’t even heard them whispering.

Kendall stood at the foot of Grace’s bed, her hands on her hips. She had the faintest smile on her lips. “Did you
fuck
him?”

“No!” Grace said, her voice all air.

“You did! Oh my God, you so
did
!” Kendall cried.

“Shit,” Lana said. “This was the friend?”

“
Best
friend,” Kendall said. “Of her
husband
!”

When they saw that Grace was crying, they sat down on either side of her, and Lana rubbed her back. She put her head on Grace’s shoulder and shushed her maternally.

“Wow,” Kendall said. “Who would’ve thought? Little Miss Small-Town America.
Mrs.
, I mean. Come on, stop crying. Nobody died.”

“I’ll get you some tissue,” Lana said. Grace nodded, snot running down her lip.

“Well, something like this would have happened sooner or later,” Kendall said. “Long-distance relationships are doomed.”

“Please stop,” Grace blubbered. “I can’t—”

“I mean, I didn’t realize you were even
into
him—”

“Kendall,” Lana scolded from the doorway, but when Kendall stopped, Grace began to sob again, bigger and bigger, as if a magician were pulling a mile-long scarf from her throat. She gasped for breath, and when she looked up, she saw that Lana was standing in the doorway with her video camera.

“It’s okay,” Lana said, encouraging her. “Do what you feel.”

Paris

14

H
e might have forgiven you,” Hanna said.

Grace laughed sadly. She hadn’t wanted to be forgiven. She hadn’t wanted him to find out. They were irreconcilable desires. You had either one impulse or the other, and Grace had always had the other.

She and Hanna were sharing a bottle of Hanna’s wine on the balcony of her minuscule Belleville studio. Grace was accustomed to spending her evenings by herself, and she was surprised when she accepted Hanna’s invitation. But Mme Freindametz was off this week, and she had not forgiven Grace for snapping at her. Now that Grace had put a lock on her bedroom door, her landlady was visibly hostile.

Tonight, when Hanna had asked Grace if there was any news from home, Grace had taken a glug of her wine and told Hanna that she had slept with a friend of her husband. The cliché was painful to spit out.

“No good would’ve come of telling him,” Grace said now.

“You would have broken up, like people do. You think he knows?”

Grace nodded. “He must.”

“And that’s why you’re so terrified of him,” Hanna said to herself.

Grace knew this fork in the road: to tell Hanna that Riley was no one to be afraid of, or to nod easily and say
Yes,
exactly
. Don’t think, she told herself. Just do it.

“He wasn’t abusive,” Grace said. “I’m sorry I told you that.”

“Oh.” Hanna blinked in surprise. “I see.”

“He would have been devastated. I thought lying to him was kinder—protecting him.” Ah, that wasn’t quite right, but she had said the main thing. She had made the correction. She was trying.

“Well, to protect his love for
you
.” Hanna sounded older suddenly, and newly prissy.

“I’d worked so hard to earn it,” Grace said. “And then to lose it over
one
thing—”

“Earn it!” Hanna cried. “What an American way of looking at it. You people think you deserve every happiness.”

Grace tipped up her glass of wine and finished it. “Our founding fathers said we do.”

Hanna peered at her, unsure if she was serious. Grace rolled her eyes, and Hanna sat back again.

“I’ve never told you about Nina,” Hanna said.

Nina—it sounded familiar somehow. Then Grace remembered: Antonia. She waited, anxious for Hanna’s confidence. Grace had confided in
her
, after all.

“I was helpless to her,” Hanna said. “Every hour I spent near her seemed to vanish in a second. I could never get enough.”

Hanna tilted her head back to rest it on the couch behind her and blinked up at the ceiling. “As soon as she left the room, it was as though the heat were switched off. I wanted to know everything about her, every detail of her life, her biography, her interests, her movements. Each thing I learned was a little piece of candy. And I always wanted more.”

A week ago, Grace couldn’t have imagined Hanna in love. To be in love was to lose control, and Hanna, on the surface, at least, always exhibited perfect control.

“The way you are in love is the way you are in all things,” Hanna said. “And the way you are in all things is the way you are in love. Sloppy, messy in life? Sloppy in love. Need to pin down every detail?” She pointed at herself. “That’s me in love—no laziness.”

Grace didn’t want to think about how she was in love.

“The woman I loved was a liar. So in life, in love. I see it in you too.” Hanna pointed at Grace. “Untrustworthy.”

Grace’s mouth fell open. Hanna had accused her as if it were a joke, but she hadn’t meant it like one.

“Lies beget lies,” Hanna went on. “Like little bunny rabbits. They make more lies, wherever they go. They can’t help it—pop, pop, pop, all over the place, little baby lies that grow up into big lies and make their
own
lies—”

“Look,” Grace said. “I was young, and I fucked up, and I left, and I’m sorry. People make mistakes. They do crazy things when they’re
in love
.”

“You’ve told lies, I bet, you don’t even realize you’ve told. Like an addict! They just fall out of your mouth, like you’re breathing them.”

Grace recoiled. “What is this obsession with
lying
all of a sudden? Everyone lies. You try not to but you do. I’m no worse than anyone else. You’re a forger, for God’s sake.”

“Used to be. Now I’m very frank, all the time. Now I don’t bet what I can’t afford to lose.”

 • • • 

One week had passed since the boys were paroled. Nothing.

Grace saw the possibility that there would always be nothing, but she couldn’t really grasp it. She tried to settle into the ambiguity, which she knew could last forever. If she didn’t, the terrible uncertainty of where they were and what they were doing, feeling, thinking, saying would surpass anything they could ever do or think or say.

So much of her life since she had left Garland, even the first time, had been a series of tragic errors. She couldn’t imagine that she’d gotten away with it. She didn’t feel as though she had gotten away with anything—more like she’d gotten away
without
.

Grace was painting the hooves of one of Hanna’s sheep when Jacqueline called her in. Usually her boss came out of her office when she wanted something, looking over everyone’s work as she talked. Grace stood up, but her left leg had fallen asleep and she started to tumble. Hanna shrieked, high-pitched as a scared rabbit, and Grace grabbed the corner of the table to right herself. Amaury had leaned over to cover his workings with his arms, like a hen protecting a brood of chicks. His table was eight feet away.

“Pardon,” Grace said.

She hobbled into Jacqueline’s office, and Jacqueline shut the door.

“Asseyez-vous,” she said. “I have something new for you.”

“What about the centerpiece?”

“Hanna will be working on it for weeks,” Jacqueline said. “In the meantime, we have to get paid.” She unlocked her desk drawer and pulled out a velvet jewelry box. “Hold this,” she said, handing Grace a giant cocktail ring set with brightly colored jewels. Jacqueline pushed her finger into the jewelry box’s crease, peering into it. She turned the box over and shook it into her lap. Two pearls bounced across her skirt.

“The pearls fell out,” she said, placing them in Grace’s palm.

“I don’t know what to do with jewelry,” Grace said. “I don’t know anything about jewelry.”

“Just pretend it’s a jewelry box instead of the jewelry, okay? You’ve done pearl setting before. The minaudière, remember?”

“But that was costume,” Grace said.

“This is costume.”

“I don’t think it is,” Grace said, rubbing the thick gold band with her thumb.

“It might as well be. Pearls, peridot. Nothing so
very
precious. The centerpiece is worth five times what this ring is worth.”

“The centerpiece? How much? Nine, ten thousand euros?”

“More like fifteen, even as partial reproduction. Nothing like it, and the collector’s a little crazy. So who can say?”

 • • • 

The green center stone was a huge oval cabochon, rounded as an eyeball. Jacqueline had said semiprecious, but Grace was sure she was looking at an emerald, flanked by stacks of amethyst baguettes. The ring looked like formalwear for a Mardi Gras parade, like the fantasy jewelry of a six-year-old who wanted to be a princess. At the top and bottom of the emerald were empty sockets where the pearls were to go.

“Amaury, do you have any pearl cement remover?” Grace waggled her finger, weighed down by the heavy ring. “I need to clean this up a bit.”

Amaury cocked his head toward the shelf behind him, which held all manner of solvents and cements that Hanna and Grace seldom required. Amaury more often dealt with jewels, working on watches, and Grace wondered why Jacqueline hadn’t asked him to do the ring.

Grace had the ring fixed in fifteen minutes. Dissolving the old glue was as simple as removing polish from a fingernail, and then she dabbed a little cement into each setting with a toothpick and pushed the pearls in. Three thousand euros, held together with glue.

When she gave the ring back to Jacqueline, her boss ran her fingers over the pearls and around them, feeling for any roughness. She squinted at the ring under her desk lamp. “Good,” she said.

Then she took a brown paper sack from her purse and upended it into her palm. Out tumbled a jeweled bangle, a fat gold tube striped with red and white stones. “Same with this bracelet,” Jacqueline said. “Some of the stones have come loose from their settings. It’s an older piece.” The gold was discolored and the remaining stones were dirty. Jacqueline held the bracelet out to Grace, who hesitated.