Unbecoming (21 page)

“Did you want me to ask Amaury? He’s busier than you are right now—”

“No,” Grace said quickly. “I’ll do it.”

Jacqueline handed Grace a small envelope. She could feel the stones through the paper. She knew that when she opened the bag, the stones inside it would be bright and clean.

At her desk, Grace looked closely at the gem settings. The lights buzzed overhead, and she turned on her brightest lamp. She picked at the crooked metal prongs that had given up their diamonds and rubies. Grace had been so eager to prove herself to Jacqueline, and
this
was what she’d done it for? She hadn’t stolen anything in years, not even a pack of gum. She looked at Hanna’s little sheep and their half-painted hooves with longing.

 • • • 

Grace and Hanna communicated in single words—Salad? Omelet?—until they were sitting next to each other on a park bench, staring together at a bird foraging from the rim of a garbage can.

“Oh, I don’t think it’s
that
,” Hanna said when Grace told her about the jewelry. “She used to take in jewelry work from time to time. There hasn’t been any jewelry since you’ve been here?”

“No, just watches,” Grace said. “Amaury’s things.”

“She used to have a jewelry person here. Angeline. She left when her eyesight got too bad, and I guess that was the end of the jewelry. But I’m sure you’ll be very good—you do all the microscopic work very well. You should get reading glasses, though. You’ll ruin your eyes.”

“It’s just bizarre for something so expensive to be in a paper bag like that.”

“You know as well as I do that people don’t always take very good care of their things.”

Grace nodded.

“I mean, it
could
be,” Hanna said. “Stolen, I mean. We wouldn’t know. Would you really mind if it was?”

“Of course I would.”

“Funny that this would suddenly bother you,” Hanna said. “You know she’s not running a spotless operation.”

“No one in antiques is,” Grace said. “But there’s a line. I’ll do whatever I’m told as long as I can reasonably believe that it’s okay.”

“
Reasonably
believe? That’s not belief; it’s the opposite.”

“Hanna, we don’t
know
what happens outside the studio,” Grace said.

“That’s what I’ve been saying.”

Grace sat in doubtful silence, picking at her salad. She thought now about Antonia and Nina and wondered if they were the same person or if these names, unusual sounding to her, were as common in Denmark as Madison and Emma were in Tennessee. So often she’d felt on the edge of knowing something, and as many times as she had leaped over that edge she had scrambled backward, covering her eyes. She didn’t want to know about the jewelry but it was too late. She wanted to ask about Nina and Antonia, but Hanna’s temperament seemed to forbid it.

Then Hanna asked her why she had cheated on her husband in the first place. Whatever limits
she
felt, she clearly ignored.

“The same reason anybody does,” she said. “I was lonely and disappointed.”

“Or bored and entitled.”

“Maybe bored,” Grace agreed.

“People always say the other person didn’t
mean
anything.”

“No, he meant a great deal to me,” Grace said. “I loved him horribly, if you can say that. Like I was sick with him. I knew I’d made the right choice, marrying my husband, and some evil part of me was trying to ruin everything, and she needed to be silenced.” She grimaced. “I sound like I’m describing a psychopath.”

“Two selves.”

“Everyone has them, I think.”

“Public and private.”

“Right and wrong.”

“I find it so strange that you were married. You’re such a remote person. I can’t imagine you as a passionate teenager.”

Grace could hardly imagine herself as a passionate teenager. Until that night with Alls, she had never been at a loss to explain, to herself, her own decisions. She had never confused self-interest with self-indulgence. She knew the difference.

 • • • 

When they came back from lunch, Amaury was in Jacqueline’s office. They could hear him. Hanna put her finger to her lips, and Grace tiptoed back to her table.

“Whose is it?” Amaury demanded.

“Go back to your desk,” Jacqueline said. “Stop asking me questions if you don’t like the answers.”

“You made a promise, and I won’t work here anymore if—”

“Nobody’s making you work for me.”

When Amaury came out, Grace and Hanna dropped their eyes, their tools suddenly clacking. He took his jacket from his station and left.

Grace clanked the handle of her pliers loudly on the edge of the table. She wished she hadn’t overheard.

15

O
n Monday, Grace was winding the centerpiece’s tree trunks with bronze-beaded wires, spiraling from the base to the fine branches. Applying these beaded wires was the easiest thing they’d done to the centerpiece since cleaning, and Grace didn’t want to rush. Jacqueline had left her alone after she’d finished the bracelet, and Grace wished she could work quietly on the centerpiece with Hanna. She was proud of her work: Her peaches, now bound to the branches, looked soft and fragrant, though they were neither, and her acorns were so small and precise that no one would even see them until they looked very, very closely.

She’d also done quite good work on the ruby and diamond bracelet, but she didn’t want to think about that.

Hanna was clipping serrations along the edges of her silk leaves with minute scissors, the sharp blades short as a pencil tip, when Grace asked her what Nina had lied about.

Her brow furrowed, but she did not ask Grace to clarify.

“Real liars don’t lie
about
anything,” Hanna said. “They just lie. ‘About’ is a word liars use to justify their lying, to make it seem like a localized problem.”

“You’ve made quite a study,” Grace said, trying to sound light and wry.

“But I still don’t know,” Hanna said. “And that upsets me. With a liar, you can never know the whole truth, ever. You can’t ever be sure that
this
version is the real version. There is no end, no bottom. Sometimes I wonder if the whole thing was a hoax.”

“The whole thing?”

“Our whole affair. I’m not sure she was even conscious of lying, or if lying had become so much of her nature that she lied without thinking. So, yes. If I was just another object for her lying.”

“And if you were in on it,” Grace said, standing to get closer to the tips of the trees. “Lying to yourself, or wanting to believe too much.”

She had meant to commiserate, to empathize, but Hanna was too quiet. Grace looked up to see Hanna’s eyes tightly screwed onto her leaves. Bits of fabric small as dust floated down into her lap.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “Nobody wants to be lied to.”

“Of course not,” Grace said apologetically. “Not consciously. It’s just that you know the person wants something that isn’t—”

“Yes,” Hanna said. “You lie because you know, when asked the question, that there’s a good answer and a bad one.”

“You want to give the good one,” Grace said. “To be good. And they want you to, too.”

Grace had never talked like this with anyone. She looked down at the wastebasket and saw in its lid Hanna’s reflection. She had leaned back from the table and turned her head toward the stairs and Jacqueline’s door. Grace heard it open.

Jacqueline strode over with two jewelry boxes. “Hello, ladies,” she said. “How’s the gossip?”

Grace smiled weakly. “Fine.”

Jacqueline sucked her teeth. “Amaury’s going to come back to locked doors. That man.” She laid a cool hand on Grace’s bare shoulder, her jasmine perfume drifting forward. “Not that we need him anymore, right, Julie?”

She opened the first jewelry box. Inside was a watch, a jeweled pink monstrosity.

“Just the clasp needs fixing. I have an appointment, but I’ll be back to close.”

“There
is
no clasp,” Grace protested.

“Relax,” Jacqueline said. “It’s right there.” She split apart the jewelry cushion and dug out a jeweled crescent, a clasp in the shape of a single paisley. “The missing stones are in there too, but you can pull them out with tweezers. I can’t get in there with my fat fingers.”

It didn’t even make sense for a watch to be in a cushioned box like that. “I’m not sure I can fix this,” Grace said.

“I am,” Jacqueline said.

 • • • 

The watch was the sort of bauble that a Disney princess would wear if brought to life. Platinum; candy-pink crocodile strap; diamonds surrounding a pink teardrop face. Grace found a comparable watch for sale at a shop in Connecticut for ninety-five thousand dollars.

The clasp had been torn from the band, as though the watch had been ripped from its owner’s wrist, but the stones missing from the clasp would have come loose gradually. There were nine diamonds, each no larger than a mustard seed, and only eight sockets.

Grace was furious at this, that Jacqueline had been too sloppy to even count, to make it
look
right for her. There was no question that Jacqueline was stealing stones. Was there a partner somewhere, a jeweler who took in pieces for cleaning and returned them to owners sparkling with fakes? Or were these lifted right out of dressers and drawers?

“How come she doesn’t ask you?” Grace lamented.

“She did once, but I refused. It’s such a slippery slope for me, back to my old habits. I can’t mess around even a little. I don’t work on anything that doesn’t have good papers.”

“What? I’ve never seen any papers. What do you do when there are no papers?”

“I either get them myself, or get something via e-mail. If I can’t, I tell Jacqueline I won’t work on it without papers, and then she finds someone else.”

“Me.”

“Sometimes.”

“How could you? And not
tell me
?”

“Julie, I thought you didn’t mind. You’ve never asked about papers.”

“I didn’t know I could.” Grace’s mouth had gone dry.

“I thought that was why you were here, why she picked you. To do the jobs that are a little . . .” Hanna wiggled her fingers.

“And you never said anything. All this time.”

“I didn’t think you’d want to talk about it,” Hanna said. “It’s not the kind of thing people
say
. I’m sorry, I had no idea you were so—”

“Was there even an Angeline?” Grace asked, disgusted.

“Yes,” Hanna said. “She left.”

“Does Amaury do it?”

“He used to,” Hanna said. “Not that they ever spoke of it in front of me, but it’s obvious enough. But he got spooked or something. He only does clocks and watches now.”

“What happened? What scared him?”

“Nothing much. We’re all here, aren’t we? Maybe he didn’t have the stomach for it. He has a kid. He has to be cautious.”

“I thought he lived alone.”

“His son lives with his mother, I think in Montreuil. In his teens by now.”

Amaury had been here since before Jacqueline took over for her father. Grace had only been here two years. Trusting her must have been a last resort.

“These aren’t just little snatches from regular commissions,” Grace said. “This is a hundred-thousand-dollar watch.”

“So tell her no.”

“If there’s no one here under me, she’ll probably fire me if I don’t.”

“There’s no one here under you.”

Grace knew she was at the very bottom of any ladder. Jacqueline probably wouldn’t dare switch out the stones herself, even if she could. She wouldn’t want to dirty her hands. So she gave Grace the materials, the instructions, and a smile.

Her?
Jacqueline could say to the hypothetical interrogators who bothered Grace’s imagination.
This girl?
American. Hired her off the street. She betrayed me—a thief!

Rage spread from Grace’s fingertips up to her ears. She was disgusted that she could still be so naive.

 • • • 

Jacqueline’s office was neater than usual. Grace started with her desk drawers. Cigarettes, pens, hair ties, a melted lipstick, busted sunglasses, mints, dozens of crumpled receipts, dirty centimes. In the filing cabinets, Grace peered over the papers for bulges. She rummaged in the pockets of the silk jacket draped over the chair. She checked behind the books, lifting them by the spines to check for false compartments. She ran her hand under the desk in case anything was taped there. When she was done, there was only the safe, but that was hopeless.

Grace sat in her boss’s chair. Hanna would be back from lunch soon; she didn’t have much longer. The clock ticked. The chair creaked. The inkjet printer was unplugged. Grace leaned forward and lifted the lid, and there, as goofy and bright as a little girl’s bead set, was a plastic bag half-full of cheap stones. There were hundreds, all zirconia or something like it, all on the small side, pencil-eraser size or less. No, Jacqueline wouldn’t risk the big central stones of a piece; she’d just swap the smaller ones. Grace raked through the bag. There were cuts in every style—round, square, emerald, baguette. An impostor ready for every role.

She went back to her desk to retrieve one of the replacement diamonds Jacqueline had given her. From the plastic bag, she took three more just like it.

And now to work: She blew out the eight empty sockets and emptied three more, leaving the little rocks loose on the table. When she heard Hanna at the door, Grace brushed the three diamonds into her lap with her forearm. She spent the next hour popping the zirconia into the eleven sockets and clamping them shut.

She picked up the clasp, now filled and glittering, and banged it against the table. Hanna yelped and jumped.

“Do you
mind
?”

“I’m testing the settings,” Grace said. Nothing trembled, nothing budged. She inspected the clasp under the lamp, looking for differences in luster or color or sparkle.

“Looks good,” she murmured to herself.

“Watch yourself,” Hanna said. “It’s a slippery slope,
petite voleuse
.”

When Hanna left at seven, Grace worked on the Mont box for an hour, listening for the door in case Hanna came back and surprised her. When the box was dry enough to put back in the paper bag, she pulled the three diamonds from her skirt pocket and arranged them under her magnifier. Incredible, that some speck of mineral could command so many hearts and wallets, just because it threw the light around and made a rainbow on the wall. So did the face of her Timex.