The Undoing

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Vita was gone. Of course, not gone. Not dead. But gone nonetheless. Vita had hung in there—confidante, companion, roommate in a dilapidated (actually slanting) house in Central Square when they were seniors in college, Grace at Harvard and Vita at Tufts, and climactically maid of honor—until Grace married. And then she had just … evaporated, removed herself from Grace’s life, leaving her with only facsimiles of friends. And precious few of those. Grace, even all these years later, was too bereft about it to be angry, and too angry to be sad.

  “Did you know she was coming?” Sylvia asked after a moment.

  “Who?” said Grace. “That woman who came late?”

  “Yeah. Did Sally say anything to you?”

  Grace shook her head. “I don’t know Sally very well. Just at school.”

  Then again, the same could almost as easily be said of Sylvia, despite the fact that Grace and Sylvia had actually been students at Rearden at the same time (Grace two years behind) and that she did sort of like Sylvia, now as well as back then. Certainly, she admired Sylvia. It couldn’t be easy to raise a daughter alone, work full-time (Sylvia was an attorney specializing in labor disputes), and care for first one parent and then the other as they had taken ill and died over the past couple of years. She supposed what she respected most about Sylvia was the fact that she had not married herself off to a man who wouldn’t make her happy, solely for the purpose of having the child she’d obviously wanted. In fact, when Grace explained to her clients—her female clients—that forgoing marriage to the wrong man did not mean they couldn’t have children, it was sometimes Sylvia who passed through her thoughts. Sylvia and her brilliant daughter from China.

  Once, at morning drop-off, another mother had praised Daisy Steinmetz’s obvious and astounding intelligence, and Sylvia had shrugged it off. “I know,” Grace had heard her say. “But it has nothing to do with me. These are not my genes. Daisy never heard English until she was nearly a year old, but she was chattering away a month or two after I brought her home to New York, and she read before she was three. Of course, I’m delighted for her, that she’s smart. I think it will make her life easier. And I’m a good mom, but I’m not responsible for that.”

  This, to say the least, had been a highly unusual thing to hear in the marble entry foyer of the Rearden School.

  “She’s very odd,” said Sylvia.

  “Sally?”

  “No.” Sylvia allowed herself the briefest laugh. “That woman, Malaga. She sits across the street on one of those benches in the park, you know? After she drops the son off. She just stays.”

  “With the baby?” Grace frowned.

  “Now with the baby. Before she came when she was pregnant. She doesn’t even read a book. Doesn’t she have anything to do all day?”

  “I guess not,” said Grace. For her, as for Sylvia and probably for every person they knew on the island of Manhattan, not having anything to do—indeed, not being frantically busy at all times—was an unfathomable state of being. It was also, for women like themselves, the most supreme New York put-down possible. “Maybe she was worried about her kid. Miguel?” Grace asked.

  “Miguel, yeah.”

  “You know, and wanted to stay nearby in case he needed her.”

  “Hm.”

  They walked a block or so in mutual silence.

  “It was just bizarre,” said Sylvia, finally. “I mean, sitting there like that.”

  Grace said nothing. It wasn’t that she didn’t agree. Just that she didn’t want to go on record agreeing. “Could be cultural,” she offered finally.

  “Please,” said the woman whose Chinese daughter was now preparing for her bat mitzvah.

  “Who’s the husband?” said Grace. They were nearing the school now, converging with mothers and nannies.

  “Never seen him,” Sylvia said. “Look, for the record, I was just as shocked as you were when Sally suggested you auction off a couples therapy session.”

  Grace laughed. “Okay. Thanks.”

  “I know it’s supposed to take a village to raise our children, but why does ours have so many village idiots? I mean, did I really just hear about toe shortening?”

  “I fear so. Then again, I once had a client, this was years ago, whose husband left her because he said her feet were ugly.”

  “God.” Sylvia stopped. After another step, Grace stopped, too. “What an asshole. What was he, like, a fetishist?”

  Grace shrugged. “Maybe. It’s irrelevant. The point is, he made himself very clear about what mattered to him. He was a guy who had always told her she had ugly feet. From day one. And when they split up, her feet were right at the top of his list for why he couldn’t live with her anymore. He was an asshole, of course, but he was a straightforward asshole. And she married him anyway, even though it was blindingly obvious that he was at least capable of contempt for her. What was he going to do? Change?”

  Sylvia sighed. She was reaching into her back pocket and removing her phone, which was apparently vibrating. “They say people do.”

  “Well, they’re wrong,” said Grace.

  CHAPTER THREE

  NOT MY CITY

  Rearden had not always been the demesne of hedge funders and other assorted Masters of the Universe. Founded in the nineteenth century to educate the sons and daughters of workingmen, the school had once been identified with atheist Jewish intellectuals and their red diaper babies and attended by the offspring of journalists and artists, once-blacklisted actors, and socially conscious folksingers. Students of Grace’s generation had taken perverse pride in their school’s having been disparaged as “Bohemian” (by The Official Preppy Handbook, no less), but over the following decades Rearden, like nearly every other private school on the island of Manhattan (and a few in Brooklyn to boot), had shifted substantially—not so much politically, but in the general direction of money. Today, the typical Rearden dad made money out of other money, that was all, and he was intense, distracted, extraordinarily rich, and nearly always absent. The typical mom was a former attorney or analyst, now consumed with the work of running multiple houses and overseeing the development of multiple children. She was very thin and very blond and usually rushing to SoulCycle with her entire life mashed into a white-stitched Barenia Birkin. The school was preponderantly white (if no longer preponderantly Jewish), though there was now a sizable contingent of students from Asia and India. These students, and the even smaller number of black and Hispanic students, were featured prominently in Rearden’s admissions literature, but the truly—if far more covertly—advantaged students were hiding in plain sight: These were the offspring of Rearden graduates, alumni men and women who were not, in actual fact, titans of modern industry or its money-spinning equivalents, but simply men and women who toiled as their predecessors had, in the arts, academia, or—like Grace—the so-called healing professions. They had attended the school before the deluge of money, when it had been not nearly so consumed by a sense of its own importance.

  Her era (the 1980s) had been the last of the school’s innocence, before all those Masters of the Universe had swarmed the city’s independent schools and hurled the old guard over the parapets. Back in those Elysian days, Grace and her classmates knew they were not poor, but they did not exactly think of themselves as rich, either. (Even then there had been some quite rich children at Rearden, who were driven to school in long cars by men who wore caps—and appropriately ridiculed as a result.) Most lived in basic “classic six” apartments on the Upper East and Upper West Sides (back then, such apartments were within reach of most families with a single professional parent—a doctor, an accountant), though a few iconoclasts were in the Village or even SoHo. On the weekends and during the summers, they decamped to small (and not very well-kept) houses in Westchester or Putnam County, or in Grace’s case to the modest lakeside house in northwest Connecticut mysteriously purchased by Grace’s grandmother (and namesake) at the height of the Depression for the bizarre sum of $4,000.

  To
day, the parents Grace met at Back to School Night visibly glazed over when they learned that she was a therapist, her husband a doctor. They would not have understood how it was possible to live in such cramped quarters as Grace’s three-bedroom apartment, or what was the point of driving all the way to Connecticut if not to a gated estate with its own horse barn, tennis court, and guest cottage. The world these parents inhabited was one of titans and the people they hired to do things for them. They dwelt on Fifth or Park Avenue, in homes fashioned from multiple apartments, purchased and merged and overflowing to two or three floors, configured for (and dependent upon) live-in staff and suited to lavish entertaining. When these new Rearden families went away for the weekend it was to private islands, soaring mountain estates, or Hamptons palaces where horses waited in their stalls and boats in their slips.

  She tried not to mind. She tried to remind herself that this was Henry’s school experience, not her own, and why should the inequity of rich versus disgustingly rich bother her so much when Henry himself was such an amiable, noncovetous type anyway? Henry’s classmates might be growing up in opulent apartments tended by resident couples (he the butler, she the cook) and shepherded by tag teams of nannies, then tag teams of tutors and private coaches. They might get iPhones in kindergarten and credit cards in third grade, but it didn’t seem to affect Henry. So she struggled mightily not to let it affect her.

  Then, one Saturday, had come the snub so artlessly dealt that it landed like a door in the face, and shattered her attempts at sanguinity once and for all. Grace had been dropping Henry off at a birthday party in a Park Avenue penthouse where the windows framed breathtaking views on all four sides. From where she stood on the mosaic floor of the entranceway, just off the private elevator, the children could be observed beyond a marble archway, tearing around the massive living room in pursuit of a magician in a bowler hat. Grace had just handed over a gift-wrapped science kit to an employee of some kind (secretary? party facilitator?) when the hostess gaily passed by.

  This hostess, this birthday party mother—Grace did not know very much about her, except that her first name was Linsey and she hailed from somewhere in the South. She was willowy and tall, with breasts disproportionately high and suspiciously spherical, and she made good use of the catchall pronoun substitute y’all when navigating morning drop-off at the third-grade classroom doorway. (Y’all was admirably useful when you couldn’t recall someone’s name, Grace had to admit. She was not at all sure that Linsey, three years after their sons had been assigned to the same class, knew her name.) In addition to Henry’s classmate, Linsey’s husband had older children at Rearden, from his first marriage. He was something at Bear Stearns. It had to be said that Linsey had never been anything but pleasant, but past the veneer of good manners there seemed to lurk nothing at all.

  One other important fact that Grace had gleaned about Linsey was that she had a mind-boggling collection of Hermès Birkins, a veritable color wheel of them in ostrich, crocodile, and occasional leather. Grace noticed Birkins, and she possessed exactly one, in basic brown-pebbled Togo, a gift from Jonathan on her thirtieth birthday. (Poor Jonathan had been made to jump through many hoops down at the Hermès store on Madison, where, in his charming naïveté, he had assumed he could just walk in and purchase a Birkin bag. It was adorable, really.) She took care of this beautiful object with great devotion, and it lived on a cloth-lined shelf in her closet with its dowager aunts, the two Hermès Kellys she had inherited from her mother. Grace secretly itched to see Linsey’s bags, especially in situ, wherever in the great apartment they might reside (possibly in their own closet or, indeed, vault!), and was hoping to be offered a tour.

  “Hello!” Linsey had said when she saw Henry and Grace arrive. Henry, without prompting, took off to join the kids in the living room, and Grace stood before her hostess, wondering if some kind of actual intimacy was about to be launched. She could see, through yet another archway, and down past a very long dining room, and through an open door, a few other mothers positioned around a kitchen island, drinking coffee. She could do coffee, actually, Grace thought. It being Saturday morning. And though she had made a special arrangement to see a couple in crisis that afternoon, she had no obligations until then. “So glad y’all could make it!” the hostess said with her customary warmth. The party would be over at four. Then she let Grace know that one of the doormen would be glad to hail a taxi for her, if she needed one.

  The doorman would be glad to hail a taxi for her.

  Grace had moved numbly to the door and stepped numbly into the elevator for the long ride down. In her own building, where she had grown up and still lived, the doormen were mainly Irish or Bulgarian or Albanian, friendly guys who volunteered for their local fire squad in Queens and showed you pictures of their kids. They also held the door and took your bag unless you waved them off. And they hailed taxis, of course. Of course they did. She did not need to be told that they did.

  Stepping out onto Park that morning, she had had a queasy feeling, like a twister-tossed girl from Kansas emerging into unreal Technicolor. This particular apartment building, Linsey’s building, was famous and had been the home of many a robber baron in its time. Her own father’s law partner had lived here for years, and Grace had attended many New Year’s Day open houses on a floor a few stories below Linsey’s, in a dress specially selected by her mother, wearing patent leather shoes from Tru-Tred and carrying a little purse. The building’s lobby had been redecorated since then, of course—probably many times—and she found that she could no longer recall the specifics of Jazz Age opulence that she had always associated with the building; today, all was granite and marble and sleek technology, with the uniformed concierges and guards just conspicuous enough to get their point across. And it was from this cold vision of forbidding wealth that she had emerged onto the street. It was springtime, and the bulbs planted abundantly along the Park Avenue medians were crowding up out of the expensive dirt: hot pink and hot yellow, jostling for the thin sunlight. How many years of how many bulbs had she seen grow up out of the Park Avenue medians? How many years of Christmas trees and Botero statues and the steel Louise Nevelson on 92nd Street that was supposed to represent Manhattan itself? She even remembered the long-ago holiday cross, made by office lights left on at night, back when the MetLife Building had been the Pan Am Building, back when the sight of a cross illuminating the lower end of Park Avenue might have passed without comment, let alone outrage—that’s how far back she could remember this thoroughfare.

  The doorman would be glad to hail a taxi for her.

  Not my city, she had thought then, turning north along the avenue. Once, but not any longer. She had never, with the exception of college, lived anywhere else, had never, in fact, considered living anywhere else. But then again, New York gave little weight to longevity. The city was funny that way; it took you in, straight off the bus or plane or however else you managed to arrive, with no long-enforced period of audition in which you might be considered a foreigner or a flatlander or a Yankee until your great-grandchildren finally showed up to inherit the privilege of being a local. Here, you belonged on arrival, or just as soon as you looked as though you had somewhere to go and wanted to get there fast. New York didn’t care about your accent or whether someone had come over on the Mayflower; it was enough that you had chosen to be here when you might have gone somewhere else (though why anyone would choose to go somewhere else was, in itself, mystifying). Grace, who had been born on 77th Street and reared on 81st, who now lived, indeed, in the apartment of her childhood and sent her son to the school she herself had attended, who used the dry cleaner her mother had used and still ate in some of the restaurants once favored by her parents, and bought Henry shoes at Tru-Tred, the very store she had been taken to as a little girl (where he might have been seated in the same little chair Grace had once sat in and had his foot measured by the selfsame measuring tool that had once measured his mother’s foot) … was a New Yorker. Jonathan had g
rown up on Long Island, but he, too, had transmogrified into a New Yorker the minute he turned the key on their first unlovely New York apartment, in a white-brick tower on East 65th, near Memorial. And Linsey, lately arrived on the arm of a new husband and ushered directly into one of the great apartments at one of the city’s legendary addresses, whose Manhattan life had been presented to her in a kind of Big Apple welcome wagon (this store, this school, this facialist, this domestics agency), whose companions were the similarly arrived and espoused and attired, who conceived of the city not as a story that had begun long before her entrance and would endure (one hoped) long after her exit, but as a place she happened to be living, instead of, say, Atlanta or Orange County or one of the nicer suburbs of Chicago—she, too, was a New Yorker. God!

  Sally had been right, of course, that Henry did not need delivery to his violin lesson, let alone picking up. New York kids generally ran loose in the city after the age of ten or so, and many other twelve-year-old boys would not have been pleased at the sight of their mothers in the marble foyer of the Rearden School at three fifteen. Henry, though, still searched for her with his long-lashed eyes as he descended the stone steps from the classroom floors above, still showed that briefest flash of relief at finding that she was here, that she had come for him after all. It was her favorite moment of the day.

  He came now, carrying his violin in its backpack configuration, a sight that always gave Grace pause (such an expensive instrument, such a casual mode of conveyance, etc.). To his mother he gave the briefest embrace, more Let’s get out of here than Happy to see you, and Grace followed him out, repressing the usual admonition to zip up his parka.