Unbecoming (39 page)

Alls gave her a warning look.

She turned to face the wall. They didn’t have a Hanna Dunaj, the man said. Grace hung up and called Hanna’s phone number again. Dead.

She began to riffle through the contents of her boss’s desk, looking for a list of employee phone numbers and emergency contacts, anything. She found it inside Jacqueline’s ledger, in the left-hand drawer, a small moleskin notebook. On the inside cover, Amaury’s name was scribbled first. The next four names were lined through and scratched out. Grace and Hanna were near the bottom, separated by a few more of the rejected or departed, but there were no other numbers for any of them, no emergency contacts. Jacqueline had never asked Grace for one, but maybe this was another thing they all had in common. Grace felt a knot of worry rising in her throat.

“Enough,” Alls said.

“She was upset when she saw you,” Grace said. “She thought I was making you up.”

“She knew who I was?”

“She knows everything,” she said without apology. “I told you, she’s my only friend.”

“Jesus, Grace, I hope something
did
happen to her. Are you insane?”

I didn’t believe you
, Hanna had said. Grace couldn’t get it out of her head. Why hadn’t Hanna believed her? Because she’d lied before, of course. But Hanna had believed enough to be disgusted with Grace, instead of amused or annoyed at the ravings of a harmless lunatic. What she had not believed was that Alls—or anyone, probably—would show up.

How did you ever get anyone to love you like that?
Hanna had asked her.

Nina, Grace realized.

I was helpless to her
, Hanna had said.
I could never get enough.

It had to be. Grace turned on the computer. She had read about Hanna’s past life in the
Copenhagen Post
only weeks ago. This time she searched not for Hanna, but for Antonia Houbraken.

Copenhagen police arrested a woman lurking outside the home of FC Copenhagen player Jakob Houbraken this morning. Antonia Houbraken reported that at around three thirty a.m., she heard someone knocking repeatedly on the door and then trying to get into the house. From her third-story window, Houbraken argued with the intruder, an unnamed woman in her thirties. Police took the intruder into custody. Houbraken was unharmed.

Hanna must have left right from work, right after she saw her with Alls. She wasn’t allowed back in Denmark, but at the sight of Alls, she had gone to Nina. Grace tried to understand.

How did you ever get anyone to love you like that?

A real liar never came clean, Grace knew. A real liar only scrubbed away a patch here and there, just enough to clear herself for a few minutes, days, or weeks at a time. Hanna, Grace saw now, was a real liar. She had divided Nina and Antonia into two women, one who had loved her and one who had only used her. One had hurt her; the other she had hurt. Grace’s heart ached for her friend and what she must have thought was love. But who was Grace to say? She hadn’t really known Hanna at all.

She stepped quietly into the office and sat down at Jacqueline’s desk, watching Alls turn the dial back and forth. He was most of the way down his second page for the night.

“Do you want anything? A glass of water?”

“No, I’m fine.”

If Alls hadn’t been held back by an ocean and the threat of more jail time, why should Hanna? The sudden, impossible appearance of Alls must have looked heroic to Hanna, must have helped her to believe that Nina, deep in her heart, wanted Hanna to come back.

Alls had come for what he was owed, or, barring that, a sense of vengeance, and perhaps Hanna had gone after Nina for the same reason. But now Grace looked down at Alls and hoped, with quiet desperation, that Hanna had seen something in his sudden, fearless appearance that Grace herself had not dared to.

She turned back to the wall and began to page through the ledger, trying not to watch him. Amaury and Hanna were paid the same, twenty-eight hundred euros per month. Jacqueline paid herself three thousand. Infuriating. Jacqueline had charged sixty euros for the cabbage teapot the last time Grace had repaired it. The birdcage job had been billed for six hundred. There was an entry for “Centerpiece Deposit” for two thousand. She turned the page, looking for Amaury’s jobs. He had been busy before he’d left: In the past month, he’d had more than four thousand euros in billings. Grace hadn’t realized his work was so much more lucrative than hers, and she felt momentarily defensive. But the jewelry that Grace had worked on was not in the ledger, not that she was surprised. There were several small payments to Hanna on this page that she didn’t recognize, thirty euros on five occasions, maybe reimbursements for supplies or something. But Hanna had only gone out for supplies once recently; she had everything she needed ordered in. Grace stared at the tiny amounts. All were from the past week. They hadn’t been doing anything except the centerpiece and jewelry.

The dates: thirty euros twice on August 17, thirty on the nineteenth, thirty on the twenty-third. Every time Grace completed a piece of jewelry.

Had Hanna been making a finder’s fee on her? Getting a cut while Grace scraped by on a thousand per month?

“You all right?” Alls asked her.

“Fine,” she said. She closed the ledger and slipped it back into the drawer.

She could almost hear Hanna’s voice, so generous she was nearly singing
. I’ll talk to Jacqueline
,
she had said
. I’ll make sure she knows how valuable you are.

Grace heard a soft click. Alls had opened the safe.

He began to pull on a pair of Grace’s cotton gloves, too small for him.

“Wait,” she said.

“Nothing you can do, Gracie.”

She took his gloved hands in hers and began to pull the gloves off by their fingertips. She slid them onto her own hands. Gloved, her hands looked more like her own than they did naked.

“I want to do it,” she said. “Myself.”

He sat back. Grace reached into the safe. The first box was the pearl and ruby necklace, the rubies just sitting in the box with it, like extras. The second box was a bracelet she’d never seen. The third was the ring, the pretty one. There were four more boxes. In the last box was a brooch, an orchid in enamel with pink and green tourmaline spilling out at the throat. The column was tipped with a natural pearl. She carefully put the lid back on.

“Not this one,” she said.

He’d been watching her but giving her room. Now he became skeptical. He thought she was getting sentimental.

“It might be one of a kind,” she said. “We don’t want to mess around with that again.”

She stacked the remaining boxes in her lap and picked them up as a tower, one hand below and the other above. She stood up and Alls followed her to her desk. He held open her bag and she nestled the tower along the bottom.

“Hanna has been arrested in Denmark,” she told him. He didn’t understand, not yet. “She lied to me.”

It was ten after five. Together they returned to Jacqueline’s office. She pushed the safe closed with her gloved fingertip.

“Should I turn the dial?”

“Be my guest.”

Everything in its place. He put on his jacket.

“Just a minute,” she said. This time, he did not object.

Still gloved, she returned to her table and packed up her very best tools for small work from her station: tweezers straight and curved, her set of needle files, cutters, two pliers. A starter kit. Then she moved Hanna’s tools in their place. Jacqueline would never know the difference.

Her eyes fell on Hanna’s notebook.
Lundi
, the top page read.
J’emballerai le cadeau et le livrerai!!!
Wrap the present and deliver, ecstatically. Grace fixed a shepherdess’s dress, the hem askew, and smoothed down the little corn stalks. The green leaves, bent backward and down over the ears, shouldn’t have been quite as jagged and uneven as in real life. She put Hanna’s notebook in her purse.

Jacqueline could no sooner call the police than a drug dealer could when his stash was stolen. And Hanna had already been arrested; it hardly mattered what anyone accused her of now.

 • • • 

They emerged from their return taxi just before dawn. The rush was still with her, the suspense more powerful with each step away from Jacqueline’s safe. They walked silently to her door and crept up the stairs. Alls waited by the window while Grace locked her bedroom door. She took the cardboard boxes from her bag and opened them one by one, setting them in a row across her desk.

She had reached in and taken them with her own hands. Her conscience felt resplendently clean. She felt whole, even. He had watched her do it.

Two selves, collapsed.

Alls had been quiet. He was leaning against the windowsill and watching her, she realized, the way he used to, without looking right at her, as though she might vanish if he looked too hard. She swept her hand through the air over the jewelry.

“These are for you,” she said.

“I know,” he said. He sat down on her bed.

A delivery truck rumbled down the street. She sat next to him, just inches away, but it felt as if there were a glass wall between them. It was almost seven o’clock in the morning, and the dawn sun was glowing on its way up, covering her room in velvety golden light.

“I’ll miss her,” she said to Alls. “Hanna might have been my only friend.”

“You just threw her under the bus,” he said.

“She threw herself,” Grace said. “And she threw me first.”

“A match made in heaven,” Alls said. “First love?”

Grace shook her head. “Asshole.” And then, newly brave, she asked him, “Do you think I never loved you?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

She had loved him—still did, a punishment—but hers was love mixed with harder metals. It hadn’t been enough to run away from the Grahams’ house back then; she had wanted to drop a match on the lawn as she left. She’d felt no transcendence, no generosity. Love was supposed to make you better, to fill in all the mean little holes in your being. Instead, it had opened up new ones.

“You need one person who knows you,” she said. “Just one person you can’t fool, even when you fool yourself.”

“One didn’t used to be enough for you,” he said.

“Don’t you see?”
Grace implored him. “It wasn’t about Riley. It was
her
.” She looked at him, waiting for him to understand.

He didn’t make her say it.

“We both wanted to be one of them,” he said. “But you’d really made it.”

She shook her head. “I can’t talk about that. Anything but that.”

He took a deep breath. “Well, you’ll never fool me again.”

His voice seemed to make the room vibrate. She felt the buzzing, the shivering, in her fingers and in her teeth.

“You liked reaching into that safe,” he said.

She wanted to squeeze him between her thighs and never let him go.

“Admit it,” he said.

“I liked it.”

“Listen,” he said, leaning back. “I’ll need to be going. Sunday’s a good day to travel.”

It was like waking up alone when she didn’t expect to. “Where will you go?”

He picked at a scab on his forearm. “Probably better for you not to know, right?”

She stared at the wall as the light climbed over it, moving queer, sourceless shadows.

“You should get some sleep,” he said.

“I can’t,” she said. The insides of her thighs were damp, and she felt a trickle of sweat behind her knee.

“I can’t believe you came all the way here just for that,” she said.

He laughed, though with bitterness or regret, she could not tell. He didn’t want her. He just wanted money and a new life, away from the place he’d always lived and the people who thought they knew him.

“Not this time,” he said. “I don’t do
accidents
anymore.”

She nodded.

He licked his lips. “You have to say it.” He looked at her mouth. “I’m going to make you tell me what you want.”

Last time, no lights had been on, no words spoken. Now she could see the sweat on his upper lip, the sun catching his stubble.

“I want you,” she said.

“You want me,” he said, looking at the wall over her desk.

“I want you,” she said again, and this time she stood up, nudging his knees apart to stand between them. She gently pushed a thigh forward to his groin and felt that he was growing hard, and she put her hands around his neck, trailed her fingers through the short hairs there. She ran her thumb across his lower lip, holding his chin still in her hand. She wanted all of him for herself. His hands were still, beside him on the bed.

“You are not smarter,” she said. “You are very, very stupid if you still want me. But I want you now, and I wanted you then. And I am so sorry, but I still want what I want.”

She bent to brush her lips to his damp temple and then under the corner of his jaw. She would touch him everywhere; she would wear him down. She lingered there until she felt his hands on her waist, clear and sure, pulling her down with him.

 • • • 

She woke up tightly fitted into him in the bed, her bed, his arm holding her close. She hadn’t slept next to anyone in years.

She lay there awake and blinking for a long time, their bodies growing sweaty where they were pressed together. She didn’t want to wake him up. She knew better than anyone that the night brain consented to thoughts that the day brain wouldn’t.

He stirred behind her and she held very still, wishing him back to sleep, but he pulled his arm back. She watched its shadow on the wall, stretching upward, and then it dropped back down, returning to her.

 • • • 

Freindametz gave her a nasty look when they came downstairs. They quickly left the house.

They walked to the cemetery and shuffled between the shady patches. She showed him where Delacroix was buried, and then Jacques-Louis David, Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, and Gertrude Stein. Each grave had its own little crowd of pilgrims. Grace and Alls toured the tourists. Walking by the Americans and hearing their accents, she felt a rush of daring, as though a flicker of recognition on her face might give her away to these strangers. She and Alls kept going, wandering away from the people, and she felt the warmth of being with him, the invisible tether that kept them moving in the same direction, despite the crowds of strangers. Together, alone.