Unbecoming (38 page)

“I can’t imagine that either,” she said to Alls.

“Well, let’s pretend,” he said. “I won’t be satisfied with your diamonds, and I’m not going home. So let’s just take a Saturday together and pretend we’re who we wanted to be.” He stood up and got close to her. “Can you do that?”

First they went to the grocery, where Grace nervously chose some plums and Alls marveled over the vast selection of yogurt. She showed him the things that had been unbelievable when she’d first arrived, the minor luxuries that made life here seem more precious, as though you could fill your grocery basket with enough to satiate your whole life’s hunger. Fatty yogurt in tiny blue ceramic pitchers, spotty cheese, duck confit in a can, butter wrapped in gingham foil, plums and apricots. On their way back she pointed up to the balconies in the buildings they passed and told him about the old woman who came out to water her hanging baskets in her red nightgown, the kid on the third floor who dropped sacks of something along a cord to waiting children on lower balconies, the set of sliding glass doors that had been painted over in mostly opaque purple streaks.

They walked through the mall at Gallieni and she watched him wonder at how dark and mundane it was, just as she once had, how crass and dumpy. She noticed his peculiar satisfaction in how disappointing Paris could be. They could have been in the Albe-mall, in Pitchfield. She pointed out the Boulevard Périphérique and the man who sold incense under it, the same smell in any country.

When Alls clasped his hands together on the bus, looking around almost shyly, she began to relax, just a little. She wondered if he wanted to prove something, to show her what they could have been, if she’d just stuck with the plan. He didn’t know that he already had.

Maybe this fake coziness was another way to shame her. But she would try to believe in it, or look like she did anyway, just for one day.

Lunch was surreal, a blind date in which they knew all the worst of the other person but little else. They ate buttery galettes and drank Coca-Cola. They laughed at a one-legged crow hopping around the sidewalk, tenacious and accusatory, cawing at the people eating at tables above him. The sight of Alls’s teeth when he laughed made her almost dizzy. She wanted to leap across the table and kiss them, to kiss his teeth and his lips and under his jaw. She wanted to hold his head in her hands and feel the weight of it resting on her lap. She wanted to pick the sleep from the corners of his eyes. She wanted to hit him on the chest to feel how real he was, how really
there
he was.

A man at the next table argued on his cell phone. He took off his sunglasses with his other hand and banged them against his table to punctuate his sentences. The man was telling the person on the phone that their offer was too low, that they should offer twice as much to even be in the running. He hung up abruptly and nearly smacked his phone on the table. He ran his hand down his face and then stood up to go inside, probably to the toilet. Alls took the man’s sunglasses from the table and tucked them into his pants pocket. No, Grace said softly, almost a whisper.

He raised a corner of his lips.

Because we’re being good today
, she wanted to say.
Because we’re being what we meant to be.

But good wasn’t what they had ever meant to be.

He shrugged, defying her to object further.

And this was what it would have been like, really. Poor and unspeaking, committing petty theft at sidewalk cafés, maybe pawning pricey sunglasses to cover the lunch they’d just bought. Fighting without speaking. Now she could see it.

 • • • 

“This is where you wanted to go?” he asked her as they passed the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.

She shook her head. “It would bore you.”

He insisted. Inside, she paid and they walked through the trompe l’oeil exhibit, where whole rooms were rendered in paint, flat on the wall, as though you could step into them. A violin hung from a ribbon on a heavy wooden door.
You see a violin on a door
, the placard read.
There is no violin, and there is no door.
She had read about the painting before. The wording of the placard struck her as particularly French.

Alls’s favorite was a painting of a painting: The inner painting was of Venus, rising naked from the sea, in an ornate frame; the outer painting was of a white cloth draped over the frame to conceal her nudity. The white cloth looked ten times as real as the woman behind it. Grace tried not to read anything into his appreciation of it.

She remembered the grandfather clock Riley had drawn with permanent marker on the wall of their living room on Orange Street.

“Do you remember the clock—”

“Yeah,” he said.

There wasn’t anything else to say after that, and after a diminished show of appreciation for the next few pieces rendered along the wall, they drifted toward the door. But then Alls caught sight of the sign for the fourth floor, for the traveling Van Cleef & Arpels exhibition. She saw the glint reappear in his eyes.

“It’ll be totally clogged with old American women,” she said.

“I want to see you see it,” he said, making looking at bracelets sound like something dirty.

Grace had been right: In the first room, it was hard to see anything for the women in bright cardigans bent over the glass cases. In the next room, the jewels were mounted behind glass bubbles set into the wall, like in a public aquarium, with a wide round tank on a pedestal in the center. She and Alls slipped into the ring of people.

Much of the jewelry looked like animals. In one brooch, a peacock’s tail fanned out into a half dozen individual feathers, scalloped and lined like madeleines. The peacock held a citrine teardrop in its open beak; an emerald carved into a plume arced from its golden head. The lace wings of a wooden butterfly brooch were inlaid gold droplets. An onyx bangle became a panther’s carved head on one side and its tail on the other. The tail was inset with oval wreaths of diamonds inset with emeralds carved into tufted pillows. Even the ugly things impressed her; she felt humbled by the detail. She had always found jewelry very boring when it was stripped of sentiment. The shiny rocks, the little claws that held them—the formulas seemed so simple and so limited. But here was a jeweled flower that appeared to be soaked completely red: There were no visible settings, no telltale golden prongs, only an undulating grid of ruby cubes packed shoulder-to-shoulder.

Grace felt the familiar glimmer of envy. These pieces were so far beyond her. She had never made anything from scratch. She could cobble together the picture, but only if it were already broken into jigsaw pieces.

She showed Alls a ring of pavé diamonds surrounding a spray of topaz and pink tourmalines. The design was a bird of paradise, the gem petals’ sharp ends tucked safely into gold bezels.

He leaned over the case. “How do you make something like that?”

“I’m not a jeweler,” she said, shrugging. These pieces had been made by bench jewelers, niche experts in an assembly line. “I don’t know how to dance, just follow.”

“Come on,” he pressed. “Say that pink one came loose, what would you do?”

“It wouldn’t come loose,” she said. “It’s bezel set, see? You’d have to pry the bezel open all the way around to take the stone out. You cast a cup for the stone out of metal, make the rim too high, and then once the stone is in you have to file the edges down so there’s just a shallow lip, and then you push the edges down tight around it. Then you have to burnish them until they’re flush and smooth.” She shook her head. “Now those little diamonds, the pavé, those are just held in with claws. But it’s like a jigsaw puzzle. It’s hard to get just one piece out if all the others are in tight. You have to really sneak down under the stone and pop it.”

She pointed to a fly brooch with a yellow diamond body and bezel-set lapis eyes. “Now, in that one, the most precious stone is the big yellow one, and it’s held in with nothing but a few fingers.”

The women next to them were staring. Alls nudged her to move along.

 • • • 

“What do you want from me?” she asked him once they were back on the street.

“Are you going to ask me that every day?”

“How many days are there?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m collecting on a debt.”

“The safe where I work. Will that be enough?”

“I don’t know what’s in it.”

“And you think I’ll just go in there Monday morning like everything is fine,” she said.

“It will be, for you. You can keep your job.”

“Like she won’t know,” Grace said emptily. She would have to keep going to work now.

“But she won’t know, will she? What’ll she do, call the police? She’s a crook. You said it yourself.”

“And you’ll rob somewhere else? You think they won’t catch you?”

“I don’t think they will identify and apprehend me, no.”

“Where will you go?”

“You think you’re the only girl who works in a jewelry shop?” he said. “I have to think long term.”

“You’ll leave me when you’ve emptied it,” she said. “You’ll leave me alone then.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

She had known it was coming, so why did it sting so badly? Not today, she wanted to tell him. Today, they were pretending.

 • • • 

Because it was Saturday night, Alls didn’t want to pick the lock before three a.m. He would take as many nights as he needed, he said. It could be forty. He wouldn’t rush and risk making a mistake with the safe, skipping a number.

He went to sleep at eleven and set his watch alarm for two. “I suggest you do the same,” he said, lying in her bed.

She hadn’t his gift for rational sleep execution. She curled up on the couch downstairs and half-watched
Qui Sera le Meilleur Ce Soir?
on TV, pulling at strands of her hair. Tonight Christophe Dechavanne, the diminutive host, presented an array of child performers vying for prize money. A fifteen-year-old boy juggled fruit from a grocery cart. A girl of twelve entwined herself in a length of rope descending from the ceiling to perform proto-sexual acrobatics, her ribs gleaming under her shimmery leotard. Victoria Silvstedt, the towering Swede and retired Playmate who assisted Dechavanne, nodded and clapped squarely and evenly for every performance. The juggler won.

One morning, Hanna would be nursing her Biedermeier and Grace would be leeching diamonds out of a Mickey Mouse brooch or something when Jacqueline discovered the empty safe. Alls would be gone.

Hanna hadn’t believed her.

She’d been too caught up in Alls to think about Hanna until now. “I didn’t believe you,” she had said when she saw Alls. But now she did. When Alls robbed the safe, Hanna would think it was Grace. Why wouldn’t she?

Grace was drinking cheap Beaujolais out of a jelly jar when she heard the bed creak and the sound of his feet hitting the floor. He came downstairs with his shoes on. In the kitchen, he plucked an apple from the colander on the countertop and chomped into it. He didn’t look the least bit nervous.

“I don’t want to come,” she said.

“You don’t have a choice.”

“I don’t see what difference it makes. You know what you want and you either get it or don’t, and you go. If anything, I’m a liability.”

“That’s what you said last time,” he said. “You never want to help anyone, Grace. You want all the help. But you’re coming with me, and you’re going to sit there and watch.”

30

T
hat night, he picked each lock in less than a minute. He was on his belly before the safe in no time at all. Grace sat down at her desk and slumped with her head in her hands. A strange cocktail, dread cut with impatience. She tapped a pencil against her desk and stared dully at Hanna’s table in front of her. The carrying case was where she had left it, in pieces, stained but unassembled.

Grace lightly touched a piece of the particleboard propped in the vise. It was dry. The jar of epoxy Hanna had left overnight was dry too. Grace picked up the jar and jiggled it. A hard crust had formed over the rest, which rolled in a thick goop. It was unusable. Hanna must not have come back today.

But Hanna was supposed to have come back today. She had said that she would. Not only had she said it; she had set up this glue. Hanna would have come back wrapped in coats if she had pneumonia, propped on crutches if she’d broken an ankle. At first Grace didn’t even recognize her worry for what it was. Something had happened to Hanna.

She picked up her cell phone and put it back down. She couldn’t call Hanna without telling her why she thought something was wrong—that Grace was in the studio at three in the morning. It wasn’t unheard of, but she wouldn’t
arrive
at three—that was crazy—and besides, Hanna had seen Alls. She would have to call from some other phone. Grace rushed into Jacqueline’s office. “I have to step out for a minute.”

Alls shot upright and grabbed her wrist. “The hell you do.”

“Hanna didn’t come in today,” she said. “I think something happened to her.”

“You’re not using this phone. She’s going to have to wait until Monday.”

“I could go to a pay phone,” she said. “But I can’t wait. It’s not like her.”

He looked hard at her, wondering, no doubt, what kind of scheme this was.

“I can even hang up if she answers. I just want to know she’s okay.”

He shook his head. “It’s almost four,” he said. “She’s not going to answer.”

“She’s my only friend.”

He pulled a flip phone from his front pocket. “I haven’t used it yet. Hang up as soon as she answers. If I hear you say even a word, the phone’s on the ground.”

Grace dialed Hanna’s number and it went to straight to voice mail. Dead.

“I would like to call the hospitals,” she said.

“Absolutely not.”

“I won’t identify myself,” she said. “If she’s there, I’ll hang up.”

Alls looked up at her as if she’d just entered the first stages of dementia, putting her shoes in the oven or trying to put the trash can inside the trash bag, but he didn’t try to stop her. She called the closest hospital, and then another. “Je téléphone pour une patiente, Hanna Dunaj? Est-elle là?” She spelled Hanna’s name. “Oui, je suis sa soeur.”