Unbecoming (31 page)

She went to the Wynne House on Tuesday morning with her hair pulled back severely, wearing dark lipstick and glasses. She borrowed clothes from her mother’s closet. She took the tour grimly, as if she were a serious historian. Dorothea, the ancient docent who had first toured Grace months ago, didn’t recognize her. Grace was not charming; she was not herself.

While they were upstairs, Alls slipped in downstairs with the fake, which they had cut from its frame. They had, Grace had estimated, ten to twelve minutes while Grace and Dorothea were upstairs. If it wasn’t easy to get the painting from its frame, they agreed, he would walk right back out. But it was; it was
so
easy. He popped the frame’s back off with the screwdriver tip of a Leatherman, cut the painting out in four clean cuts, and stapled the fake in its place. He rolled up the painting, put it in his backpack, and walked home to Orange Street. By the time Grace and Dorothea came down the stairs, he was gone.

When Alls called her on the phone that night and told her he’d slid the painting above the panels of the drop ceiling in his bedroom, Grace was lightheaded with joy. She was in love and was very close to getting to keep it, forever. Alls didn’t want to save Ginny’s Ice Cream, and when he’d found out that Grace was not quite the sundress sweetheart she had tried to be, he had loved her anyway. She felt newly honest and exhilarated, as though she were skinny-dipping at night in a dark lake.

Grace thought she should take the painting with her to Prague but Alls disagreed.

“You would proposition your ex-boyfriend’s best friend to steal a two-million-dollar painting with you,” he said. “There is a limit to how stupid you make me.”

Not her ex-boyfriend, but her current husband. She never told him. She had limits too.

 • • • 

Grace was leaving for Prague in just three more days. She took deep breaths and tried to keep the strands of her relationships untangled, though she herself was unraveling. She had read about men who had whole secret families in other states or countries. The distance was key. You could not sustain something like this when the two men you were planning futures with lived in the same house. Worse than managing this duplicity was navigating the relationships—plural—she was having with each of them. There was the relationship Riley thought they had, the one Alls thought she and Riley had, and the one she and Riley actually had, whatever the hell that was. And there was what she had found with Alls, which was real.

The night before she left, Riley showed up with a surprise. He propped it up on Grace’s childhood desk, against the bulletin board of all their prom photos.

“What do you think?” he asked her proudly.

The painting seemed to glow. Without thinking, she reached out to touch it, and Riley grabbed her hand. “Christ, it’s not dry yet.”

“Don’t do it, Riley. You are such a good painter. You don’t need to do this.”

“Painter,” he said. “You know, you used to say I was a good artist.”

“If you do this, I’m going to leave you. I’m serious.”

“The fuck you will,” he said. “Just try. You can’t.” She recoiled, and his face became pitiful. “I’m not asking you for help, just some faith in me. When have I let you down?”

If she told Riley that she didn’t love him anymore, he would certainly rob the Wynne House, just to show her what he could do, like a little boy having a tantrum with a real knife. Had this Riley always been there? How much of him had she created? Telling him the truth would make him crazy, she told herself. It would only destabilize him further.

Also, she didn’t want him to cancel her plane ticket.

Alls would follow her as soon as he could switch the paintings. He said it was best that they weren’t leaving at the same time. “Leaving a few days apart is the kindest thing to do,” he said, calling her on his cigarette break at the drugstore. “He can choose not to put it together this way, and he will. You know him. He only ever sees what he wants to.”

“You will come,” she pressed. “How do I know you’ll come?”

“I’m coming,” he said. “I promise.”

That was what Riley said too.

If only she had believed! Instead she felt a seed of distrust that she couldn’t ignore: that Greg could still fuck it all up somehow or that Riley would, even that Alls was setting her up.

It was nine o’clock. She knew that Riley was with Greg now—he had said they were going to Target with strange, ominous vagueness—and that Alls was at work.

Grace slipped on her backpack and went over to the house on Orange Street, letting herself in the back door. She stood on Alls’s bed to lift the ceiling tile and pulled out the painting. The canvas was so slight in her hands—it might have been a vinyl place mat. She just couldn’t take any chances.

 • • • 

Riley borrowed Greg’s car to drive her to the airport, mistaking Grace’s worry for a different kind. He didn’t know that he would never see her again. He thought he was comforting her, and that was intolerable.

“I’ll be there soon,” he said. “So soon!”

“
How
soon?” she asked.

“You’re going to love it! Old buildings, cheap liquor, that one poet you love. Sites of historic terror! What are you crying for?”

“I can’t believe you did this for me.”

“Well, I can,” he said. “I’m almost insulted that you would say that.”

“Please don’t do it,” she said. “Just forget it.”

“Do what?”

“Rob the Wynne House!”

“Oh,” he said. “Okay, I won’t.”

She knew, of course, that he didn’t mean it. She had lost her control over him. Whatever he did now was for an idea of her. For that, she could not be responsible.

 • • • 

Grace spent her first day in Prague searching, lost and sweaty, for an Ethernet cord to plug in to her computer. The Communist-era dorms didn’t have wireless and she was anxious to talk to Alls. When she finally saw his face flicker at her on her laptop screen, she thought she might pass out from relief. She had shut herself in the tiny WC for privacy and was sitting on the toilet. The long blue Ethernet cord stretched under the door and back to her desk.

“You made it,” he said, almost shy.

“I made it,” she said.

Her roommate was doing the same thing on the other side of the door, and for a moment Grace felt that they were the same, just two girls lovesick and homesick and talking to their boyfriends on the Internet.

But her joy at seeing him was short-lived. Greg and Riley’s plan, Alls told her, was now in motion. Riley had just been waiting for her to leave.

“Wait, why are they still doing the antiques?” Grace asked when Alls told her. “That’s insane, if he has the painting.”

“Yeah, I know,” Alls said. He was sitting in his car in the parking lot of the Whitwell Starbucks. They had Wi-Fi there and no one from Garland would see him. “It’s Greg, I think. I’m trying to derail the whole thing, since I can’t exactly tell them to focus on the painting.”

Greg had told his parents that they were going to spend a few days at the house on Norris Lake. It was only an hour and ten minutes away. They would drive up in the afternoon and be seen: eating ribs at Hale’s, buying beer and whiskey at the liquor store, filling up the gas tank. They needed Alls to come with them, Riley said, even if he was going to puss out on the rest. At the end of the evening, they would park Greg’s car in the garage next to their second car, untitled and anonymous, already there waiting for them.

The next day, they would drive together in the second car to the Walmart in Pitchfield, where their third car, also untitled and anonymous, waited in the parking lot. Greg had been moving it between Walmarts every three to four days. They would switch cars and drive to Garland, arriving at the Wynne House at nine in the morning. If there were no unexpected cars in the lot, Riley would go in for the tour. When they got upstairs, he would lock the docent in the windowless study, and then meet Greg and Alls—Riley was sure Alls would come around—downstairs.

“
Lock
her?” Grace was incredulous. “She’s an old woman. She’ll have a heart attack.”

When the boys were done, they would calmly walk out with their sacks to their car. They would drive together back to the Walmart, where they would switch cars again, transferring their Walmart bags of Confederate antiquities, and return to the lake house. They’d spend the evening goofing off at the lake, shouting over the water to annoy the neighbors. The next morning, Riley would head to New York, leaving Greg at the lake for appearances. In New York, Riley would liquidate everything over the next week, using a list of vendors he had compiled.

“It’s my list,” Grace told Alls mournfully. “I made that fucking list.”

“Just come,” she said. “Just leave the other one and come. Get
out
of there.”

“It’s almost dry, I heard him say it. They need longer than that to tie up their loose ends. I bought a ticket for Saturday, okay? He says next Thursday is the day. But by then, his painting will be gone, and he won’t be able to do a goddamn thing about it. Their whole machine will fall apart, and I will be with you.”

 • • • 

The summer study program itself was just an excuse for rich college kids to drink beer that was cheaper than water and get school credit for it. Grace went to the classes without knowing why—for show, she supposed. Her roommate was a whiny communications major from Connecticut, the kind of girl Kendall and Lana would have eaten alive. She found herself missing them. God, what would they think of her now?

After a few false starts, the other students gave up on talking to her. She saw in their reactions that she was giving off something both scared and scary, as if she were contaminated. Not that it mattered. The dorm was just a place to stay until Alls came. She could hardly imagine. When she started to—the sight of him, in the lobby downstairs, or the sunlight through the window on his bare back—she tried to wipe away the picture, suddenly superstitious. She waited through the next three days half present in a sort of anxious purgatory, waiting for him, for her real life to begin. The past year had been just a bad dream.

Once a day, she e-mailed with Riley. He didn’t mention the plan and she didn’t ask. She told him her webcam was broken so she wouldn’t have to see him, but she otherwise went through the motions. Now that she was away forever, she could afford to be what he wanted again, for just a few more days. She’d learned how to speak the truth, or part of it, to the wrong person, so that it didn’t even feel wrong, just misplaced. When she told Riley she loved him, she was talking to Alls.

When she saw Alls on her screen, a thrill ran through her like ice water, bracing and aching. The universe would give you whatever you wanted if you twisted its arm hard enough.

She knew she needed to tell him she had the painting. It wouldn’t change anything; it shouldn’t, as long as she told him before he stood on his bed to make a cursory check in the ceiling tiles and found out himself. If she’d had the painting all along, she would have checked it every day, probably twice a day. Her mother probably would have seen and thought she was hiding drugs or something. Alls had been right to keep it with him.

She needed to tell him that night.

 • • • 

“Where are you?” Grace asked him that night. His face floated fuzzily against a gray wall. “Are you at
home
?”

“There’s no one here,” he said. “Listen, they’re going to the lake tomorrow.”

“You said—”

“Greg’s parents want the cabin then, so he and Riley are going up early.” Alls had clenched his jaw and kept looking toward the window. “He baked the painting to dry it faster. It was in the oven when I got home.”

“Shit. Shit, shit, shit.”

“I think I have to break in tonight,” he said.

“No,” she said. “No way.”

“I can pick the lock,” he said. “It’s an old one, shouldn’t be too bad.” He raked his hand through his hair. “There is no good way out of this anymore.”

“Listen, I have the Bosschaert,” she said. “I took it. Cut Riley’s up and throw it in the Dumpster and come.”

She watched him absorbing what she had said. She saw the moment it registered in his eyes: stunned, disbelieving.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was too worried about Greg—”

The window where his face had been went black. And of course, he never came.

The next day, Riley, Greg, and Alls robbed the Wynne House. Riley locked Dorothea in the upstairs bedroom so they could ransack the rooms of all Grace’s little red dots. Then the groundskeeper, who Grace herself knew was not supposed to be there that day, walked in and saw them and collapsed.

The plan fell apart. Grace imagined that Riley, awakened to the reality of the crumpling old man and himself as the one who’d hurt him, would not go to New York. He and Alls left the lake house and returned to the house on Orange Street, where they were arrested on Greg’s information four days later. The groundskeeper went home from the hospital, and the boys went to prison. All of the stolen antiques were recovered from Greg’s car at the lake house before investigators had completed their inventory of what was missing.

No one noticed the missing painting. Grace watched and waited from four thousand miles away as her fate sputtered out in two-hundred-word updates on the
Albemarle Record.
But no one ever said her name.

VII

Paris

24

I
t was dark now outside the studio’s high windows. Grace had helped Hanna finish beading the snow onto the branches of the winter trees, but they had set down their tools now.

“Where is the painting?” Hanna asked.

Grace shrugged sadly. “I sold it to a collector in Berlin. Some creep. I was too scared to go to a dealer or an auction house—scared that I wouldn’t be able to keep my name out of it. And I wanted cash.”

In Prague, Grace had not looked at the painting, which was the size of a wrapping paper roll and hidden, even from her, along the inside edge of her suitcase, until the trial had concluded in August. She tried to will it into invisibility. When the summer program ended, she moved to a hostel for two days, where her laptop and raincoat were stolen from her luggage, but not the painting tucked beneath her suitcase’s lining. She went back to the dorm. The desk matron agreed to a price of $210 per month for a single on the fourth floor. The room was the size of a car and hadn’t been repainted in decades, but Grace flipped off the buzzing overhead light and sank down onto the cool floor, relieved to be alone.