The Undoing

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “I was thinking inside?” Rebecca said.

  “Let’s see inside.”

  Inside, apparently, was better. He brought in a light, a curved white screen, and one of the cases, from which he began to extract cameras. Grace stood nervously beside the couch, a stranger in this, her own land, watching them banish her leather chair to the vestibule. He pulled back her desk to set up his light, a hot bright box atop a chrome stalk, and wedged the screen against the opposite wall. “I usually have an assistant,” he told her without further explanation.

  Cheap job, she automatically thought. Low priority.

  “Nice flowers. They’ll look good against that wall. I’m going to move them into the frame.”

  Grace nodded. That Sarabeth. Amazing, really.

  “You want to …” He stopped and looked at Rebecca, who now stood with her arms crossed over her protruding bust.

  “Fix up a bit?” Rebecca finished for him. She had morphed into the photo editor.

  “Oh. Right.”

  Grace left them and went into her bathroom, which was very small—so small that it had once elicited a tearful outburst from an obese client—and not terrifically well lit. She regretted this just now, because even if she’d known how to magically transform her current self into a self that would appear, to her own Vogue-reader eyes, Vogue-worthy, she doubted she’d be able to pull that off in such a cramped, dim space. For want of a better idea, she washed her face with the available hand soap and dried it with one of the paper towels she kept in a dispenser. This produced no discernible effect, and she stared into her clean, familiar face with a sinking heart. From her purse she took out a tube of concealer and attempted two swipes under the eyes, but there wasn’t much improvement: Now she looked like a vaguely tired woman with concealer under the eyes. Who was she to treat Vogue so cavalierly?

  Was this important enough to call Sarabeth about? Grace had found, over the past few months, that she was reluctant to interrupt what she thought of as her agent’s real work—that is, her work with real writers. It would be wrong, in other words, to interrupt what might be a session of intense literary exchange with a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award to ask if she—Grace—ought to be sneaking out to Zitomer pharmacy and begging one of the ladies to buff her up. And what about her hair? Should it be in its usual configuration of tight coil and clean lines, pinned with the heavy bobby pins (these were made for old-fashioned plastic rollers and getting harder and harder to find)? Or should she brush it loose, which made her feel untidy, and look like a kid?

  I should be so lucky, she thought ruefully, as to look like a kid.

  Of course, she was not a kid. She was a woman of a certain seasoning, a self-reliant woman of some refinement, with myriad responsibilities and attachments, who had long ago set certain parameters for her appearance and then remained consciously within them, relieved at not having to reinvent herself constantly or even aspire to greater heights of beauty. She was aware of the fact that most people viewed her as formal and contained, but that didn’t bother her, because the Grace who wore jeans at the lake house and brushed out her hair as soon as she got home from work was not a Grace she wished to make available to the world.

  She was young enough. She was attractive enough. She seemed competent enough. That wasn’t it.

  The fame part … well, perhaps that was getting a bit closer. If she could have hired an actress (taller and prettier!) to play the role of her book’s author, she would have been tempted. An actress with an earpiece, into which Grace could feed the correct lines (In the vast majority of cases, your potential spouse will tell you everything you need to know very quickly …) as Matt Lauer or Ellen DeGeneres nodded soberly. But I’m a big girl, Grace thought, absently brushing dust against the surface of the mirror with the backs of her fingers. She went back to the others.

  Now Rebecca was sitting in Grace’s chair, staring deeply into the screen of her phone, and the coffee table had been angled away from the couch, with the pitcher of roses and the bound galley of her book pushed aside and forward, into the frame. No one had to tell her where to sit.

  “Your husband’s adorable,” Rebecca said.

  “Oh. Yes,” she said. She didn’t appreciate being put on the spot. “Thank you.”

  “How can he do that?” she said.

  Ron, who was already looking through the lens of one of his cameras, said, “Do what?”

  “He’s a doctor for kids with cancer.”

  “He’s a pediatric oncologist,” Grace said evenly. “At Memorial.”

  At Memorial Sloan-Kettering, in other words. She really hoped they’d drop it.

  “I could never do that. He must be a saint.”

  “He’s a good doctor,” Grace said. “It’s a difficult field.”

  “Jesus,” said Ron. “No way could I do that.”

  It’s a good thing no one’s asking, she thought irritably. “I was trying to decide what to do with my hair,” she said, hoping to distract them both. “What do you think?” She touched the tight coil at the nape of her neck. “I can take it down. I have a hairbrush.”

  “No, it’s good. I can see your face. Okay?” he asked. But he was asking Rebecca, not her.

  “Let’s try,” she confirmed.

  “Okay,” he said.

  He picked up the camera again, looked through it, and said, “So this is just a practice, all right? No sweat.” And before she could respond, he produced a heavy metallic click.

  Instantly, Grace went stiff as a board.

  “Oh no.” Ron laughed. “I said it would be painless. Aren’t you comfortable?”

  “Actually, no,” she said, trying to smile. “I’ve never done this. I mean, had my picture taken for a magazine.”

  Thus completing my public infantilization, she thought as the last of her courage fled.

  “Well, what better magazine to start with!” Ron said merrily. “And I’m going to make you look so stunning, you’ll think some supermodel came in and pretended to be you.”

  Grace produced a highly disingenuous laugh and rearranged herself on the couch.

  “Very nice!” Rebecca said brightly. “But cross your legs the other way, all right? Better angle.”

  Grace did.

  “And we’re off!” said Ron, sounding chipper. He began to take pictures in a rat-tat-tat of clicks. “So,” he said as he dipped and leaned, producing—as far as she could tell—tiny variations on the same angle, “what’s your novel called?”

  “Novel? Oh, I didn’t write a novel. I couldn’t write a novel.”

  It occurred to her that she probably shouldn’t be talking. What would talking do to her mouth in the pictures?

  “You don’t have a new book?” he said without looking up. “I thought you were a writer.”

  “No. I mean yes, I wrote a book, but I’m not a writer. I mean …” Grace frowned. “It’s a book about marriage. I specialize in work with couples.”

  “She’s a therapist,” Rebecca said helpfully.

  But wasn’t she a writer, too? Grace thought, suddenly perturbed. Didn’t writing a book make her a writer? Then something else occurred to her. “I didn’t hire anyone else to write it,” she insisted, as if he’d accused her. “I wrote it.”

  Ron had stopped shooting and was looking down into the digital monitor.

  “Actually,” he said without looking up, “I need you a bit to the left. Sorry, my left. And could you lean back a little? … Okay,” he said, considering. “I think we might have been wrong about the hair.”

  “Fine,” Rebecca said.

  Grace reached back and deftly removed the three heavy pins, and down came one shoulder-length coil of highly conditioned dark brown hair. She reached for it, to fan it out, but he stopped her. “No, don’t,” he said. “This is better. It’s sort of sculptural. You can’t see it, but there’s a nice contrast with the dark hair and the color of your blouse.”

  She didn’t correct him. It wasn’t a “blouse
,” of course. It was a soft, thin sweater of parchment-colored cashmere—one of about five she owned. But she didn’t really want to talk blouses with Ron, even if he shot for Vogue.

  Then came a small adjustment of the vase. Another small adjustment of the book on the table. “Good,” he announced. “Right. Let’s go.”

  He began again. Rebecca looked on, saying nothing. Grace tried to breathe.

  She almost never sat here, on the couch, and the perspective was odd. The Eliot Porter poster, she noted, was askew, and there was a grimy mark over the light switch by the door. I must get that, she thought. And maybe it was finally time to replace the Eliot Porter. She was tired of the Eliot Porter. Wasn’t everyone tired of that Eliot Porter?

  “Marriage,” he said suddenly. “That’s a biggie. You’d think there wasn’t much left to say.”

  “Always more to say,” said Rebecca. “It’s the kind of thing you don’t want to get wrong.”

  He went down on one knee and shot up at an angle. Grace tried to remember if that was supposed to make your neck look shorter or longer. “I guess I never thought too much about it. I thought, you meet somebody, if it’s the right person, you just know. I mean, I knew when I met my wife. I went home and told my friend I was living with, ‘This is the girl.’ Love at first sight kind of thing.”

  Grace closed her eyes. Then she remembered where she was, and she opened them. Ron put down his camera and picked up another one, which he proceeded to fiddle with. It seemed safe to speak.

  “The difficulty is when people count on that ‘you just know,’ and they dismiss people they don’t respond to right away. I actually think there are lots of good matches for each person, and they cross our paths all the time, but we’re so wedded to the idea of love at first sight that we can miss the really great people who don’t come with a thunderbolt attached.”

  “Can you look over this way?” Rebecca said.

  Can you shut up, in other words? Grace thought. She looked at Rebecca, who was seated in Grace’s own chair, at Grace’s own desk. To compensate for this unpleasant fact, she felt herself smile broadly. That was even more unpleasant.

  But there was another thing, too, and as she sat, uncomfortably angled, uncomfortably twisted, that other thing began to move up through the situational distraction of being photographed for Vogue (in whose pages, she was quite sure, not a single reader would mistake her for a supermodel) and the displacement of being on her own couch, until it had set itself indisputably before her. That thing was the unalterable fact that she—like Ron the photographer, like any number of patients in this very room, like an unknowable portion of the future readers of her book—had absolutely just known, the first time she had laid eyes on Jonathan Sachs, that she would marry and love him for the rest of her life. It was a truth she had hidden from Sarabeth the agent and Maud the editor and J. Colton the publicist, just as she was now hiding it from Rebecca the about-to-be-married writer and Ron, who, like her, had just known that he had met the woman he was supposed to marry. That night she had crossed the Charles River in the first trill of autumn, with her friend Vita and Vita’s boyfriend, to go to a Halloween party in some ghoulish cavern in the medical school. The others had gone in first, but she had wanted the bathroom and gotten herself lost in the basement, turning like a mouse through underground corridors, losing herself, growing increasingly irritated, increasingly afraid. And then, very suddenly, she was not only not alone, but in the presence of—the company of—a man she recognized instantly, though she was quite sure she had never seen him before. He was a scrawny guy with neglected hair and several days’ growth of inelegant beard. He wore a Johns Hopkins T-shirt and carried a plastic tub of dirty clothes with a book about the Klondike wobbling on top, and when he saw her, he smiled: an earth-on-its-axis-halting smile that had lit up the grimy hallway, making her stop on a dime, changing her life. Before Grace had taken her next breath, this still-unnamed man had become the most trusted, valued, and desired person in her life. She just knew. So she had chosen him, and now, as a result, she was having the right life, with the right husband, the right child, the right home, the right work. For her, it really had happened that way. But she couldn’t say that. Especially not now.

  “Hey, can we do a few close-ups? You mind?” said Ron.

  Should she mind? Grace thought. Did she get a vote?

  “All right,” said Rebecca, confirming that the question was not for her.

  Grace leaned forward. The lens seemed so close, only inches away. She wondered if she could look through it and see his eye on the other side; she peered deep into it, but there was only the glassy dark surface and the thunderous clicking noise: no one was in there. Then she wondered if she would feel the same if it were Jonathan holding the camera, but she actually couldn’t remember a single time when Jonathan had held a camera, Click, let alone a camera this close to her face. She was the default photographer in her family, though with none of the bells and whistles currently on display in her little office, and with none of Ron’s evident skill, and with no passion at all for the form. She was the one who took the birthday pictures and the camp visiting-weekend pictures, Click, the photo of Henry asleep in his Beethoven costume, and Click, the photo of him playing chess with his grandfather, Click, her own favorite picture of Jonathan, minutes after finishing a Memorial Day road race up at the lake, with a cup of water thrown over his face and an expression of unmistakable pride and just distinguishable lust. Or was it only in retrospect, Grace thought, Click, that she had always seen lust in that picture, because later, running the numbers, she had realized that Henry was about to be conceived, just hours after it was taken. After Jonathan had eaten a bit and stood for a long time under a hot shower, after he had taken her to her own childhood bed and, Click, rocked over her, saying her name again and again, and she remembered feeling so happy, and, Click, so utterly lucky, and not because they were actually in the act of making the child she wanted so badly, but because at that specific moment even the possibility of that did not matter to her, nothing but him and, Click, them and this, and now the memory of this, rushing up to the surface: the eye and the other eye through the lens that must be looking back.

  “That’s nice,” Ron said, lowering the camera. Now she could see his eye again: brown, after all, and utterly unremarkable. Grace nearly laughed in embarrassment. “No, it was good,” he said, misunderstanding. “And you’re done.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  WHAT’S BETTER THAN RAISING CHILDREN?

  The highly intentional neglect of Sally Morrison-Golden’s East 74th Street town house began with its exterior, which featured window boxes of nondescript greenery, both dying and dead, and a drooping red balloon tied to the iron grille over the door. The house sat on its leafy side street between two elegant and immaculate brownstones of the same vintage (made, more than likely, by the same architect and builder), whose dignified and doubtless expensive plantings and bright polished windows seemed to bear their slumming neighbor with a certain long-suffering forbearance. Inside, when the stout German au pair opened the door to Grace, that theme of defiant disarray was taken up by immediate and relentless mess, which began just inside the door (indeed, the door could not open completely because of the bulging shopping bags behind it) and continued along trails of child-related debris down the hall to the kitchen and up the stairs (where it undoubtedly led to messy spaces unseen). This was all thoroughly deliberate, Grace thought, as the au pair (Hilda? Helga?) pulled back the door and she stepped carefully inside. In a city of wealth, Sally was perhaps the richest person Grace personally knew, and with a staff that certainly included at least one person whose job was to keep order, if not cleanliness, even in the wake of the four children who lived here (and the two from Simon Golden’s first marriage, who visited on weekends with their own accompaniments of homework, sports equipment, and electronics). Yet this assertive accumulation of stuff had to be Sally’s preference. The stacks of discarded shoes, the teetering pile of Obser
vers and Times, the bulging shopping bags from the Children’s Place and Sam Flax blocking the bottom of the staircase—Grace looked at these with an involuntary calculation: five minutes to move them, unpack them, fold the shopping bags into order, and store them in the place one kept shopping bags for some future use; two minutes to put the receipts into the box or file where they lived (or ought to live), remove the tags from the new clothes and take them to the laundry room; another two to place the paints and papers wherever art got made; and a final two to gather up the papers and dump them outside in the recycling bin. Eleven minutes at most, and really, how hard could it be? The elegant Greek Revival house was shouting for release, its dentiled moldings and fine plaster walls nearly obscured by children’s finger paintings and macaroni assemblages, tacked or taped up at random, as if the entryway were the hallway outside a kindergarten classroom. Even the Morrison-Goldens’ ketubah, richly colored and solemnly Hebrew, like a page from a Semitic Book of Kells, had been framed in a Popsicle-stick contraption with bits of dusty fuzz and dried glue protruding from between the shards. (This was oddly fitting, Grace had to admit, since Sally had converted to Judaism at the request of her then fiancé and after the marriage had effortlessly drifted into her husband’s neglect of all other things Jewish.)

  She followed the noises of a meeting in progress to the back of the house, where new construction had extended the kitchen into a small garden. There Sally sat, between the sycophantic Amanda Emery and Sylvia Steinmetz, single mother of the brilliant Daisy Steinmetz, adopted from China as a one-year-old and—after leapfrogging third grade—the youngest student by far in Rearden’s middle school.

  “Thank God …” Sally laughed, looking up. “Now we can actually accomplish something.”

  “Am I that late?” said Grace, who knew she wasn’t.

  “No, no, but we can’t seem to settle down without your calming influence.” She adjusted the wiggling toddler on her lap: her youngest, named Djuna (Sally had informed them) after her late mother-in-law, Doris.