The Undoing

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “Should I make more coffee?” asked Hilda or Helga, who had followed Grace into the kitchen. She stood barefoot, her feet looking none too clean, Grace thought. She also had a dark metal nose ring that communicated a certain lack of cleanliness.

  “Yeah, maybe. And would you mind taking the ba? We’ll get done a lot quicker without her contributions,” said Sally, as if she had to apologize.

  Silently, the au pair reached out for the squirmy Djuna, whom Sally extended over the table. Djuna, sensing her departure from center stage, let out a diva’s cry of protest.

  “Bye, sweetie,” said Sylvia. “God, is she cute.”

  “She’d better be,” Sally said. “She’s my last.”

  “Ooh, are you sure?” Amanda said. “Neil and I keep saying we wish we’d kept our options open.”

  Grace, who did not know Amanda very well, was unsure of what this might refer to. Vasectomy? Egg freezing? Amanda had ten-year-old twins and despite some recent “facial rejuvenation” was easily forty-five.

  “Done and done. To tell you the truth, Djuna was a bit of a surprise, but we figured, what the hell? I mean, why not?”

  Why not, indeed? thought Grace, as thoroughly aware as the other women in the room of what four children (or, indeed, six children) signified in New York City. Two children meant that you had reproduced yourself, numbers-wise, which was expensive enough. Three meant that a third round of private school and summer camp and ice hockey lessons at Chelsea Piers and college counseling at IvyWise was inconsequential. But four children … well, not many families in Manhattan had four children. Four children meant an extra nanny, for one thing, and a town house. You couldn’t ask kids to share a room, after all. Children needed their private space, to express their uniqueness.

  “And I mean,” she went on, “what’s better than raising children? I had this big career, seriously I haven’t missed it for one second since Ella was born. Even at my reunion last year, when all these women I’d gone to college with gave me crap about giving it up, like I have some big responsibility to Yale that’s supposed to dictate how I live my life. I just looked at them, like, You’re so wrong. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s not the most important thing you can do,” she insisted to Amanda, as if this were the issue at hand.

  “Oh, I know, I know,” Amanda said weakly. “But I mean, the twins, they’re so much work. God forbid they should want to do anything together. If one wants Broadway Kids, the other wants gymnastics. Celia won’t even go to the same camp as her sister, so thanks very much, two visiting weekends in Maine.”

  Hilda/Helga brought coffee and set it down on the long farmhouse table. Grace produced the box of butter cookies she’d stopped for at Greenberg’s, and these were greeted with mild enthusiasm.

  “My thighs hate you,” Sally said, taking two.

  “Your thighs have no right to hate anyone,” Amanda told her. “I’ve seen your thighs. Your thighs are the envy of the entire Upper East Side.”

  “Well,” Sally said, looking pleased, “you know, I’m sort of in training. Simon said if I finished the half marathon out at the beach, he’d take me to Paris.”

  “My mother used to bring these home,” said Sylvia, tasting her cookie. “You know those little cinnamon buns they make? They had a German name.”

  “Schnecken,” Grace said. “Delicious.”

  “Should we start?” Sally asked. She had not grown up in the city and, having nothing to contribute to the shared nostalgia, sounded almost irritated.

  Pads were produced and pens uncapped. Everyone looked deferentially at Sally, who was chairing the committee as well as hosting the meeting. “Right. Two days to go. And we are …” She trailed off with a girlish shrug. “But I’m not worried.”

  “I’m a little worried,” said Sylvia.

  “No, it’s fine. Look …” Sally turned her yellow pad to display a neat column of items in blue Sharpie. “People want to come and they want to spend money. That’s what’s important. The rest is just details. And we’ve got two hundred confirmed. Almost two hundred. It’s already a success.”

  Grace looked over at Sylvia. Of the three of them, she knew Sylvia the best, or at least had known her the longest. Not that they were particularly close. Sylvia, she knew, was holding her tongue.

  “So I was over at the Spensers’ yesterday morning. I did a walkthrough with Suki’s assistant and the house manager.”

  “Suki wasn’t there?” said Sylvia.

  “No, but I went over everything with the staff.”

  Grace nodded. To be granted admission to the Spenser abode—that alone had been a serious coup and certainly a big motivator for those two hundred RSVPs, at $300 a pop. Suki Spenser, third wife of Jonas Marshall Spenser and the mother of Rearden preschoolers, presided over one of the most storied apartments in the city (it was actually three apartments, combined into two floors the width of their Fifth Avenue building). She had called out of the blue the previous month—well, her assistant had called—and said that while Mrs. Spenser wasn’t able to serve on the committee, she’d be pleased to host the event. Her staff would serve whatever food was brought in, and they could also offer the wine. The Spenser family had their own vineyard in Sonoma.

  “Do you know her?” Grace asked Sally.

  “No, not really. I’ve nodded to her in the halls at school, that’s all. And of course I e-mailed inviting her to work on the committee, but I didn’t expect to hear from her, let alone all this.” The RSVPs had had to go through security checks, which had been a hassle. But it was worth it.

  “Oh, my God, I am so excited,” Amanda chirped. “Did you see the Jackson Pollocks?”

  There were two of them, on facing walls of the dining room. Grace had seen them in Architectural Digest.

  “I think so,” said Sally, honestly enough. “Sylvia, your friend’s all set? It’s so great he’s doing this for us.”

  Sylvia nodded. She knew someone at Sotheby’s who had agreed to handle the auction. “He told me it’s payback for getting him through trigonometry at Horace Mann. Actually I barely got him through trigonometry.”

  “And the auction itself?” Grace asked. She was visualizing Sally’s list, trying to push things forward.

  “Right. I have a proof of the catalog. Amanda, what did I do with it?”

  Amanda pointed out the ragged-edged booklet amid the scattered papers on the table.

  “Okay,” Sally said. “This isn’t final, we can still add till tomorrow morning, but he’s printing tomorrow afternoon, and … Sylvia?”

  “Picking them up Saturday at one,” she said efficiently.

  “Good.” She put on her glasses, opened the cover, and started down the printed page.

  Flowers from L’Olivier and Wild Poppy. Stays in no fewer than six Hamptons houses, one on Fire Island (“But the family part,” Sally said reassuringly), a pair each in Vail and Aspen and one in Carmel, New York (this particular offering relayed with less than effusive gratitude). There was a design consult with an A-list decorator (daughter in twelfth grade), a cooking lesson for eight in an excessively popular Tribeca restaurant (son of chef’s publicist in seventh), a chance to shadow the mayor of New York for a day (policy analyst’s twins applying for two of the extremely valuable spots in next year’s pre-K), and something called a “stem-cell face lift” with a doctor at NYU, which sounded so appalling (yet so intriguingly bizarre!) that Grace made a mental note to ask Jonathan what it was.

  “And—I think I sent out an e-mail about this,” Sally said. “Or maybe not. But Nathan Friedberg offered us a place in his camp.”

  “Sally, that’s fabulous!” Amanda said.

  “What camp?” Grace asked.

  Amanda turned to her. “You know, his camp? That he’s starting?”

  “It was in Avenue,” said Sally. “He’s starting this camp?”

  “It’s going to cost twenty-five thousand dollars for the summer,” said Sylvia.

  “That’s … a lot of waterskiing,”
Grace observed.

  “No waterskiing. No knot tying. No campfires,” said Sylvia, sounding suitably bemused. “Children of mere mortals need not apply.”

  “But … I’m sorry, I’m not understanding. This is a summer camp?” Grace said slowly.

  “I think it’s a little bit brilliant, actually,” said Amanda. “I mean, let’s face it, these are the kids who are going to be running things. They need to know how business works, and they need to know how to be philanthropists. Nathan called me about it. He was wondering if the twins might want to enroll. I said I’d love it, but they’d kill me if I took them out of their camps in Maine. They have these whole posses up there.”

  Grace still couldn’t grasp it. “Where exactly do they go for this camp? What do they do?”

  “Oh, they’ll all live at home. A bus picks them up in the morning. And all these great people are going to come talk to the kids,” Sally said. “People from business and the arts. They learn about business plans, and investments. They take trips to visit companies downtown and outside the city. I know they’re going out to Greenwich at least once. And they get the weekends off so they can do whatever they’d usually do then. I signed Ella up. Bronwen just wants to stay out at the beach all summer. She has her horse out there. But then I thought, I wonder if he’d donate a place. I mean, a twenty-five-thousand-dollar value! If we could get that for the school, it would be great.”

  “Bravo, Sally!” Amanda smiled. “That is completely brilliant.”

  “Yes,” Grace managed, but she was still mystified. And now slightly appalled, as well.

  They went back to the list. A college admissions counselor. A preschool admissions counselor. A genealogist who came to your house with her computer, so you didn’t have to do all that online stuff, and made a gorgeous family tree for you, which she painted like a Shaker dream design. (Grace wondered briefly if she ought to buy that one herself—she would probably have to buy something, and wouldn’t that be a good thing to give Henry?—but the thought of Jonathan’s terrible family stopped her. To have such hateful people on her son’s Shaker family tree made her angry, then guilty, then just sad for him. Bad enough that he was down to a single grandparent. Knowing that those people were still out there, and only a few hours’ drive away, in spite of their showing not the slightest inclination to see their grandson, somehow made it worse.) And then the doctors: dermatologists, plastic surgeons. And someone Amanda referred to as “the toe guy.”

  “He has a daughter in third grade and one in Daphne’s class,” she explained to Sylvia.

  Sylvia frowned. “He’s called the toe guy?”

  “He’s famous for making the second toe shorter than the big toe. So I waited till I saw his wife at pickup and I asked if he’d donate a toe shortening.”

  Just one? Grace thought. What about the other foot?

  “I mean, I’ll ask anybody anything. Why not? What can they say except yes or no? But they almost never say no. Why should they, this is their kid’s school! They should be happy to donate their services. And what’s the difference if it’s a plumber or a doctor, right?”

  “Well, but …,” Grace couldn’t stop herself interjecting, “you’re talking about elective things. Most doctors aren’t dealing with—” She nearly said human vanity but caught herself. “With … things people actually want to be seeing a doctor about.”

  Amanda sat back in her chair and looked frankly at Grace. She did not seem angry, just perplexed.

  “That’s not true,” she said. “I mean, we all want to safeguard our health. Even if it’s … I don’t know … a tummy doctor or a heart doctor, it’s all about taking care of ourselves, and you always want to go to the best person, whether it’s a financial adviser or a doctor. How many wives would buy a consultation with a famous heart doctor for their husbands?”

  “Grace’s husband is a doctor,” Sylvia said. She said it matter-of-factly, and Grace knew exactly why she’d done it. Now they both watched its inevitable effect.

  “Oh right, I forgot that,” Amanda said. “What kind of doctor is he again?”

  “Jonathan’s a pediatric oncologist.”

  Amanda frowned for a baffled moment, then sighed. She had concluded, appropriately, that no one wanted the services of a pediatric oncologist, no matter how famous.

  Sally was shaking her head. “I keep forgetting. He’s always so upbeat when I see him. I mean, how does he do that?”

  Grace turned to her. “Do what?”

  “Work with those sick kids, and their parents. I could never do it.”

  “Me neither,” said Amanda. “I can barely deal with it when one of my kids has a headache.”

  “It’s different when it’s your kid,” Grace said. She was sympathetic to this, because she had always found it unbearable when Henry got sick, which he hadn’t even done very much. He had been a very healthy child. “When it’s a patient, and you’re bringing your expertise to their illness, it’s just a whole different thing. You’re there to help. You’re trying to make their lives better.”

  “Yeah,” Amanda said disagreeably. “But then they die.”

  “You still tried,” Grace insisted. “No matter what doctors do, people still get sick and die, and some of them are kids. That’s never not going to be true. But I’d much rather have a kid with cancer now than twenty years ago. And I’d much rather have a kid with cancer in New York than anyplace else.”

  Amanda, impervious to this argument, only shook her head. “I couldn’t deal with it. I hate hospitals. I hate the way they smell.” She shuddered, as if assailed—there, amid the expensive squalor of Sally Morrison-Golden’s town house—by a puddle of Lysol.

  “I just wish we had more, you know, artists and writers,” said Sylvia, who—having raised this particular topic, was now obviously attempting to move on. “Lunch with an opera singer or a visit to the painter’s studio. Why don’t we have more artists?”

  Because they don’t send their children to Rearden, Grace thought irritably. In the topography of New York private schools, Rearden was located in a mountain pass between the Wall Street Range and the Peaks of Corporate Law. Other schools—Fieldston, Dalton, Saint Ann’s—got the children of creative parents, theater people, and novelists. It hadn’t been delineated quite so clearly when Grace had been a student there. One of her friends had been the daughter of a poet who taught at Columbia, another was the unmusical son of two members of the New York Philharmonic. But Henry’s classmates were growing up in the homes of personal wealth managers and hedge fund warriors. It wasn’t particularly pleasant, but it couldn’t be helped.

  “Well, I think we’re in pretty good shape,” Sally announced. “Forty lots—something for everyone, right? Unless I’ve missed something. There’s still time to get it in if anyone has something?”

  “I was thinking … ,” Grace said, alarmed by a wave of shyness. “I mean, if you want. I have my book. Just galleys at the moment, but you know I could promise one. I mean, a signed copy.”

  All three of them looked at her.

  “Oh, that’s right,” Amanda said. “I forgot you wrote a book. What kind of book is it? Is it a mystery? I’m always looking for a good book for the beach.”

  Grace felt herself frown. It was the best way she knew of not laughing.

  “No, no. I’m not that kind of writer. I’m a therapist, you know. This is a book about marriages. It’s my first book,” she said, noting—and disapproving—the distinct whiff of pride in her voice. “It’s called You Should Have Known.”

  “What?” Amanda said.

  “You Should Have Known,” she repeated, louder this time.

  “No, I heard you. I mean, I should have known what?”

  “Oh. It’s … you always know people better at the beginning of a relationship.”

  In the very long and very silent moment that ensued, Grace had ample time to reevaluate her title, her thesis, and pretty much everything she held dear. Professionally, at least.

 
“Could you maybe do a therapy session?” Sally said eagerly. “You know, ‘Authority on marriage will do couples therapy for you’?”

  Shocked, Grace could barely keep it together enough to shake her head. “I don’t think it would be appropriate.”

  “Yeah, but people might really go for that.”

  “I’m sorry. No.”

  Amanda gave the tersest, tiniest frown of disapproval. Then, from the front of the house, they all heard the doorbell sound, a low and lazy chime. Grace, with immense gratitude, felt the tension drain from their little group. “Hilda?” Sally called. “Will you get that?”

  There was movement in the kitchen.

  “Was someone else supposed to come?” Amanda asked.

  “Well, no,” Sally said. “Not really.”

  “Not really?” Sylvia said, laughing a bit.

  “No. I mean, someone said they might, but they didn’t follow up with me, so I thought …”

  There were voices now, muffled and indistinguishable. And something else: a squeaking sound, like something on springs. Then Hilda reappeared. “She’s leaving the carriage in the hallway. Okay?” she asked Sally.

  “Oh.” Sally looked mildly stunned. “Okay.” She shook her head. “Okay.” When she looked up again, she had affixed a bright and toothy smile to her face. “Hello!” she said, getting to her feet.

  A woman had arrived, stepping around from behind Hilda. She was a person of medium height with dark hair curling to her shoulders and skin the color of caramel. She had very black eyes and above them very dark and full eyebrows that arched in a manner that made her look vaguely flirtatious. She was wearing a tan skirt and a white shirt open far enough to reveal two items of note: a gold crucifix and a substantial cleavage. She seemed somewhat cowed by her surroundings, the large but messy home, the baffled women, the evidence of a meeting already in progress, if not—as indicated by the note pages and printouts on the table—nearing its end. She gave them all a furtive sort of nod and stood awkwardly in the doorway.