Unbecoming: A Novel Read online

  “Two should be broken, like this.” Hanna said, handing Grace another picture. In this one, the peach had a bite missing, exposing the pit.

  Grace knew the broken peaches alone would take her all morning, quite possibly longer. Like needlework, the centerpiece was intended to display skill. She and Hanna had to do the work even better than the eighteenth-century artisans who’d created it, if their work was to pass. Grace had begun here with easy things, learning on jobs too simple for Jacqueline to waste Hanna’s or Amaury’s time with: vases with cracked feet, jeweled compacts with bent clasps. She had since worked up to broken filigree, chipped enamel, and even, once, a reliquary with several slack gemstone settings that allowed the stones inside to rattle around like loose teeth. This week she would make pea-sized peaches; next week she’d be painting Bible verses on grains of rice. If there was a next week.

  She rolled a ball of wax in her fingers, measured it, and recorded the diameter so that all the future peaches would match. She pinched and rolled and pinched and rerolled ten copies. When she had eleven equal balls of wax, she dug out her veiner, a plastic stem with a tapered end that cake decorators used to carve marzipan, and began to push a cleft down the side of the first peach. When all the peaches had clefts and pin-sized pits for the stems, Grace cut bites from two of them with her knife’s narrowest blade and held her breath as she sculpted the round pits. She wheedled a few winding veins into the pits with the eye end of an upholstery needle.

  Grace carved and painted peaches all day, stalling toward the end. She scumbled their shoulders with dry paint while she waited for everyone to go home. Hanna was last to leave. When she had finally gone, Grace pulled her James Mont box from the brown paper grocery bag under the bookcase where she had hidden it that morning. First, she removed all the hardware, and then she began to sand. Mont’s gilding process required sanding each layer of paint or leaf down to nearly nothing before adding another. Grace worked softly down through the layers, pausing to take photographs as each hidden layer of color was revealed.

  The studio computer had broken speakers, so Grace brought Jacqueline’s laptop out of her office to listen to NPR while she worked. During the day, they tended toward Chopin, Schubert, and the news on the radio, but alone at night, Grace often craved American voices. She didn’t care what they were talking about. Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s voice, in particular, had a fatty American timbre that eased her expat melancholy. Grace snapped her goggles on and started melting powdered enamel with a torch while Lynne discussed the attributes of farmer’s cheese. Minutes ticked by behind the tiny flame until Grace heard a door slam.

  “I decided not to leave it uncovered overnight,” Hanna said. “Even to dry. The dust.”

  Grace watched Hanna taking in Grace’s secret project, their boss’s computer.

  “Please don’t tattle,” Grace said.

  Hanna rolled her eyes and came over to look. “It is pretty,” she murmured, running her fingers over the chip where Mont’s gilt receded in mica-like layers. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Sell it, of course,” Grace said. “I need something going when this place collapses.”

  “How much do you think you’ll get?”

  “Three, maybe four hundred.”

  Hanna giggled. “Is it even worth it?”

  “He’s worth more in the U.S.,” Grace said, defensive. “You must make a lot more than I do here, if that’s so paltry to you.”

  “How much does she pay you?”

  “How much does she pay you?”

  “Just under three a month,” Hanna said. “Half what I made in Copenhagen.”

  “Three thousand?” Grace knew that Hanna made more but she had not known how much more.

  “How much does she pay you? I know you get cash.”

  “One thousand,” Grace said.

  “My God, how can you live on that?”

  “I barely do.” Grace covered her eyes. “I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose this job.”

  “I didn’t know you were so worried about it,” Hanna said.

  “Look around,” Grace said. “You and Amaury have got the only work.”

  “Valois will open up again under some other name. He always does, and Lemoine too. The work will come back.”

  Grace nodded, uncertain.

  “I’ll talk to Jacqueline,” Hanna said. “I’ll make sure she knows how valuable you are.”

  • • •

  Grace hardly slept that night, and when she did, she dreamt that she and Mrs. Graham were pulling weeds in her herb garden, and then Grace dug up some teeth and tried to hide them from Mrs. Graham, but she grabbed them out of Grace’s hand and ran inside. Grace couldn’t go back to sleep after that.

  In the morning, when Grace got to work, Hanna was already hunched in a corner like a dead spider, her fingers bunched around a thread of beads. Grace sat down across from her and picked up a peach stem.

  They worked silently until Hanna stood up and went to the sink. It was half past eight. When she came back with her mug of tea, she gently took the tiny peach from Grace’s hand and held it up. “These were all finished last night,” she said. “Whatever you’re doing now is going to ruin them.”

  Grace tried to think of something she could say that would make sense. She was too tired to reason. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said, as though that answered a question.

  “Me neither.” Hanna had switched to English. They’d never spoken English together.

  They were the only ones in the studio. Hanna put her hands on her hips and looked toward the transom windows. “You know, today I have been away from Copenhagen for nine years. My anniversary.”

  “You want to go back,” Grace said, now speaking English too. It felt strange and private, as though she’d suddenly shed her clothes.

  “Doesn’t matter if I do or not,” Hanna said.

  For a minute they were quiet, which was unusual only because neither woman was working. They were accustomed to long stretches of silence, but not idle ones. Hanna looked at Grace. Grace rearranged some of the tools in her jars.

  “What was he in prison for? I don’t think you told me.”

  “Robbery. Antiques, actually.” Grace felt the blood rush into her cheeks. “He and some friends looted an estate.”

  “An estate?”

  She didn’t know how to describe the Wynne House, the likes of which did not exist in Paris. The nearest example she could think of was Versailles. “A big old house where no one lives anymore, and now it’s open to tourists, but they almost never come.”

  Hanna raised her eyebrows. “Daring,” she said. Grace couldn’t tell if she was sincere.

  “They were caught in five days. They hadn’t sold anything yet. The estate got it all back.” Except for the painting.

  Hanna began to flip through her notes, but Grace could tell she wasn’t really looking at them. “When did this happen?”

  “About three years ago,” Grace said. “Just after I first came to Europe.” She folded her hands in her lap. “Now they’re out and it’s just got me a little . . . unsettled.” She shrugged hopelessly.

  “This is the one you’re afraid of,” Hanna said.

  “Yeah,” Grace said, her throat growing hot. She shifted uneasily in her seat. “I never broke up with him. I was afraid to. I went to Prague for a summer college thing, and a week later, I read in the local news that he and his two best friends had been arrested.”

  “I didn’t know you’d been in Prague. Why didn’t you ever tell me that?

  Grace shook her head. “I don’t know. Never came up.”

  Hanna frowned. “What did you do when you found out?”

  “Nothing,” Grace said quickly. “I never talked to him again. I was so shocked and horrified, I just—shut down.”

  Hanna held a line of tiny beads threaded along a needle. She tipped her hand and Grace watched the beads slip off the needle and down the thread like drops of water.

  “I nev
er went home. I was supposed to go home after, but I didn’t. And I never wrote, never called. Not even to his family.”

  “You found out about the arrest on the news? You didn’t talk to him?”

  “We e-mailed each other. But I had no idea he was planning it.”

  “Then it’s good you got away when you did,” Hanna said.

  “Yeah,” Grace said. “You never know someone as well as you think you do.”

  Hanna seemed to think this over. Grace didn’t know what she wanted to happen. She regretted lying to Hanna—how many times, just in this one conversation? She hadn’t meant to. It never felt like lying while she was doing it so much as trying to tell the truth and failing.

  And of anyone she had ever known, Hanna was the one Grace could tell. Hanna would forgive her; she would have to. She had slit a woman’s throat. She knew how quickly a bad decision was born.

  “It was serious?” Hanna asked.

  “We’d been together since I was twelve years old,” Grace said. She could say that truthfully because she’d had so much practice saying it before. “We lived together.”

  “And you didn’t know they were going to do this crazy thing? What, were you locked in the basement?”

  “He didn’t tell me anything,” Grace said, angry with Hanna for joking about abuse that, as far as she knew, was very real.

  “You were an appraiser’s assistant all through college, weren’t you?”

  Grace nodded. She had exaggerated her biography a little for Jacqueline when she’d started. Hanna thought Grace—Julie—was twenty-six.

  “I think he thought I would help him,” Grace said. “When I came home.”

  “But he didn’t tell you?” Hanna blinked at her.

  “He only told me exactly what he wanted me to know,” Grace said. “And I’d never had any reason not to believe him, you know?”

  Every time she the missed the turnoff, it got harder to see the way back.

  Amaury came in mumbling and took his spot, immediately bending over the collection of tiny brass movements before him.

  Hanna nodded toward the computer screen, where she’d pulled up a photograph of the three trees in the centerpiece’s fall quarter. “Acorns,” she said to Grace. “Twenty.” She held out the envelope of surviving original acorns, and Grace had to get up and fetch it from her.

  Grace hadn’t noticed how clammy her hands were until her fingers touched Hanna’s.

  Back at her table, she grabbed a fresh thumb-sized lump of wax and started pinching off balls the size of peppercorns.

  “Too big,” Hanna said.

  Grace pulled over the magnifier and tried to disappear behind the lens.

  She carved each bead of wax into an acorn on a needle mount, a T-pin stapled by its arms to a square of plywood. She perched a ball of wax on the upended needle and carved the groove that separated the cap, and then she pulled the end upward, tapering the nut. The first one took twenty minutes, but the second took her only ten, and then she cranked out nine more at six minutes apiece. She was grateful for Amaury’s silent presence. Hanna wouldn’t ask her any more questions in front of him.

  The studio was quiet for the next two hours except for the tap and scrape of their tools. Just after eleven, Jacqueline opened her office door and stuck her head out. “Julie, I have some good news for you,” she sang. “You’re getting a visit from an old friend today.” She laughed, and all the coffee Grace had drunk rushed up the back of her throat.

  Jacqueline clomped out of her office in her heeled sandals holding a burgundy cardboard box that was warped at the corners. Grace knew it well: the ugly teapot, again, far more welcome than any real old friend.

  Jacqueline leaned over Grace’s table. She had a sunglasses tan, pale goggles across her face. “What are these tiny things? Are we making microbes now?”

  “Acorns,” Grace said, and her boss rolled her eyes. Poor Jacqueline, so disinterested in decorative arts, stuck in the business most obsessed with their minutiae.

  Jacqueline flapped a hand toward the red box. “Do it now,” she said. “She’s coming back for it late this afternoon—needs it for a luncheon tomorrow, or something.”

  Hanna grunted as though losing Grace would present a great hardship for her project. Her hand darted greedily for one of Grace’s acorns, and she began to inspect it.

  “She’s very good at this tiny work,” Hanna said to Jacqueline, peering into her palm. “You should look at this. It would have taken me longer.”

  Hanna was trying to help, Grace knew, and she was grateful. If only it mattered.

  The teapot was a trompe l’oeil cauliflower. The top half formed a nubby white floret, the lower half and spout a cradle of green cabbage leaves. Strasbourg, 1750, but who cared? It looked like something from a sidewalk sale in Garland, something that would sit next to a rack of leopard-print reading glasses. Perhaps it had once been a good example of its kind, but it was a Frankenstein piece now. The owners, entertainment lawyers in their forties, broke the teapot again and again. The first time, the bowl was cracked in three pieces; the second time it was the handle; the third, the bowl again. Why did they keep fixing it? What did the cauliflower teapot mean to them? A burdensome inheritance? The cracked hopes of their marriage embodied by an ugly wedding present?

  There had been a time when a teapot was just a teapot.

  Now the pot’s lid was fractured, the knob broken clean away, and several of the porcelain cabbage leaves at the bottom were busted up along their green veins. A mess. In the box, nestled in the raffia frizz, was a plastic bag holding all the missing pieces and shards of broken porcelain, in sizes ranging from Communion wafer to steel-cut oat. Grace emptied the bag onto her blotter and examined the smallest shards, wondering who had done what to whom that they needed to punish their teapot like this, and why in hell they cared about it so much. She called it her Cabbage Patch Kid, but nobody here got the joke.

  But the same couple had also given Grace the most beautiful job she’d ever laid hands on, more than a year ago, another teapot. Maybe they collected them, or perhaps they had one of those accidental collections forced on people after someone noticed they had two of something.

  That teapot was too breathtaking to have been acquired casually. Stunningly fragile, 1820s, sunlight-colored glass with finely detailed brass trim that formed the handle, a pheasant’s graceful neck, and the spout, a lamb’s head. On the lid, a swan reared back as if to attack. The animals looked alive, trapped and furious. That teapot was in near-perfect condition too, but for the tiniest speck of discoloration on the base. The surgery would be dangerous, and Grace was loath to risk it. She remembered the Hawthorne story she’d read in high school about the man who became obsessed with removing his wife’s birthmark. The surgery removed the spot and killed her.

  The teapot survived Grace’s ministrations. She would give its owners this: When they threw a teapot across the room, they threw the right one.

  She had hoped that if she could just keep the truth inside her, a nicer story than the real one would grow like a seed, taking root and getting stronger, until it grew around the truth and consumed it. The good twin would destroy the evil twin, or something like that. In her fantasy, no one, not even Grace, would be able to tell the difference.

  But she had never forgotten the truth. She’d told shoddy lies. The story was pale and underdeveloped and looked like the impostor it was.

  She took up a shard of green porcelain with her tweezers and slid it into the space she believed was its home. The piece just fit.

  • • •

  When Jacqueline had stepped out for her afternoon coffee, a man rang the bell.

  “Puis-je vous aider?” Grace asked him at the door, but she knew. The teapot’s owner was just how she’d pictured him. He wore a navy blue suit with peaked lapels and high armholes, and he looked ashamed. Grace slipped on some clean gloves, but just for show; the teapot was a salvage title at this point. She tucked it into its raffia nest and
draped some tissue over it, as though she were putting it to bed.

  “Don’t touch it for at least twenty-four hours,” she told him. “It looks solid, but it’s still very fragile.” He grimaced and took the box from her. “You really can’t use it anymore,” she said. “Especially not for coffee, okay? It will stain the cracks, and then everyone will know.”

  Amaury clucked from his corner. The man opened his mouth as if he were about to explain. “I hate this fucking thing,” he said.

  When he left, Grace thought she saw a smirk on Hanna’s face.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Don’t stain the cracks,” Hanna gently mocked her. “Then everyone will know.”

  • • •

  After everyone else had gone home, Grace checked the Albemarle Record. Nothing. She took out her Mont box. She began to painstakingly sand down the layer of gold lacquer that she had applied the night before so that it was just a warm metallic film that revealed the layer of silver lacquer below. She moved her fingertips across the wood lightly. If she went too deep and broke through completely, she’d have to do the whole layer over.

  Three and a half years ago, she had thought the solution to all her problems was to disappear with Riley, somewhere enviable and romantic and far away, somewhere like Paris, thinking that if they could just be alone together, without interference from anyone back home, they would be happy again. His love for her, abundant as it was, would make up for everything she had left behind, and her love for him—if not as potent as it once was, at least as rigorous—would always keep him close to her. He’ll never leave you, Alls had said. And now here she was, alone in Paris in a room full of antiques (the likes of which she could not even have imagined then), fearing that he would find her, that she would finally be alone in Paris with her husband.

  Three silent years stood between them. She imagined that with each passing month, he tapped new reserves of rage. But those were the admissible fears. Uglier by far was the fear that he had forgiven her. She could see him convincing himself that they’d merely hit a rough patch. He would appear one day out of nowhere, yet another of his grand gestures, ready to be loved again. Finally, there was the fear of his eyes on her, of seeing in them a reflection of a girl she’d left in America.