“Christ,” she said. “What is this?”
“That’s his word, not yours.” He crossed one of his legs over the other. “I thought this was how it was supposed to be. We’d run off together and live happily ever after, and at the end of the day we’d have a drink and talk about our days. I’m just trying it out. Seeing what might have been.”
“The good life? Alls, you can’t know how sorry—”
“Hush,” he said. “You had a long time to speak up, and that moment has passed.” He paused. “Where is it?”
The painting. “I don’t have it,” she said. “I sold it, and then the money was stolen from me.”
“Nobody likes to be lied to.”
“I’m not lying,” she said. “I was rich for sixteen hours.”
“How much did you get for it?”
“Seven hundred thousand euros. Just shy of a million dollars.”
He whistled. “You said you’d get two million.”
“I was wrong. Cash-only limits your market.”
“Well,” he said, “guess I’ll be heading home, then.”
She didn’t say anything.
“You could have told me,” he said, and then he laughed. “You could have told me a lot of things.” He pulled his glass across the table, watching the trail of condensation.
“What did you want me to say?”
“That you’d married him. That you were still together, actually.”
“Would it have mattered to you?”
“Doubt it. I’d lost my mind.”
She couldn’t look him in the eye for very long before her own eyes began to burn. She kept looking away, just behind him or beside him, but still she could feel his eyes.
“I can’t believe it’s really you,” he said.
She wasn’t sure it was, really. She had undergone too many transformations to know. She had been a tutor, a prostitute, a chambermaid, and Julie from California. She had been twice robbed and partly scalped. Now she was an antiques restorer and a part-time jewel thief. She swallowed. “How did you find me?”
He smiled now, but she didn’t know what his smile meant.
He had imagined she had stayed in Europe, he said. He knew that she had not come back to Garland after the arrest. He imagined she’d sold the painting, that either she was back in antiques or jewelry or art, or she was a kept woman.
“Thanks a lot,” she said.
“The beauty-for-profit sector, I figured that much. And in a major city: London, Paris, Tokyo. Probably Paris. I mean, you speak the language.”
“You didn’t come all the way here because I took French in high school.”
He ignored her. “I was going to be locked up for close to three years, if I was real good and real lucky.” He leaned back in his chair. “I feel like I should talk slow to make sure you get a sense of the time. Do you understand the kind of time we’re talking about here? Days are just gravel underfoot. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”
“I might,” she said carefully. Beneath her fear, she felt an ache of longing that she knew couldn’t be returned.
“And at first, I’ll admit, I just wanted to find you to win. I wanted to scare you.” He swallowed tightly. “I couldn’t believe you married him. Then. I think I get it now.” He paused. “You know, I used to imagine what my life would be like if I were Riley. All the time. He had everything and everyone I wanted. Less often, and this is pathetic, I’d even settle for Greg’s life. But I’d never thought about what it might be like to be you.”
Grace reddened. “We wanted the same thing,” she said.
“I always thought of myself as Riley’s worse half, if you were his better.”
She smiled grimly.
He leaned forward and his chair legs hit the floor. “Anyway, hundreds of magazines came in every month. Mostly shit, but we treasured them. A paper scrap of the outside world, a piece of personal property you don’t have to guard. A magazine! And when guys are done with them, if they’re in good shape and not ripped up or covered with piss and whatnot, they go to the library. I spent a lot of time in the library, my last year. I didn’t get library privileges until then.”
He looked excited, as though he were about to explain a card trick. “Architectural Digest, May 2011. You’ve seen it?”
“I don’t read it.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “You used to.”
“It’s too Hollywood,” she said. “You read that in prison?”
Alls rolled his eyes. “I apologize—what magazines do you think are convict appropriate? What books? My cellmate wrote dirty poems by circling single letters in The Purpose-Driven Life. Another guy stuck his eyelashes and eyebrow hairs to the wall with his own spit, made little drawings with them. There were eighty-three books in the prison library, and I read every one of them. I read anything—Rolling Stone, Maxim, fucking Country Weekly, cover to cover. But I guess we’re all supposed to act like the convicts we are, right?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“A thick stack of Architectural Digests showed up in the library when somebody got released and left them behind.”
He looked at her, his eyes fixed just below hers, on her nose or her chin or her neck. He was disappointed, and she wanted to explain that she had been thinking of them, all the time. She’d thought of them so much that she’d fixed a narrow vision in her mind and populated it with details that were now irrelevant.
He pulled out his wallet and from it unfolded a worn page, white at the creases.
“There,” he said.
“Americans in Paris,” the article was titled. “Emile Eustace and Heather Franks indulge in Americana elegance in their Triangle d’Or loft.” A reedy, bespectacled man in a black western-wear shirt stood behind a tan blond woman in a Federal Bentwood armchair. Surrounding the text were photographs of the couple’s prized possessions: a wrought-iron cane rack, a Chippendale tall-case clock, a birchbark canoe that they had mounted high on the wall, and a bracelet of horse cameos. Grace’s bracelet.
She gasped.
“You can take the girl out of Tennessee,” Alls said.
“Equestrian Cameo Charm Bracelet, c. 1880,” the caption read. “‘We found this treasure at a little jewelry shop in Saint Germain des Prés.’”
Mme Lachaille had only given her four hundred for it, the weasel.
How little it mattered that Grace had hidden, changed her name, changed herself inside and out. Riley’s family heirloom had tracked her across an ocean.
“I couldn’t believe it either,” he said. “I thought it would take me years.” He brushed imagined dust from the picture with his thumb in what appeared to be a habit. “But you were in the goddamn library.”
“I could have moved,” she said, her voice catching. “I sold that thing years ago.”
“Yeah, I know. I checked with Cy when I got out to be sure.”
“Cy? Helmers?”
“How many people do you think read the Albemarle Record outside the state, even the county? You should have seen the map, Gracie. He pulled it up in two minutes. You’re this red dot that never quits blinking.”
Grace was speechless. Of course. She spent her days nursing the artifacts of centuries past, but she couldn’t escape the year she lived in.
“There are only eight little jewelry shops in the Saint whatever. I took my picture and asked around—but for the bracelet. I told her I collected cameos.”
“She didn’t believe that,” Grace protested.
“You’re the one who told me collectors were snotty creeps. You called them ‘dollhouse fetishists,’ remember?” He shrugged. “It’s not a real complex persona.”
“I didn’t think you did personas.”
“I’ve learned that it pays to be flexible.”
“She told you where I worked,” Grace said. She had left America and made Paris into a town as small as Garland.
“Yes, Julie, she did. It’s easy to find what you want, if you pretend you’re looking for something else.”
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