The Undoing

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Grace lingered on in the lobby at her little table. She was moving the few remaining name tags around like a three-card monte dealer and fingering her left earlobe, which hurt just a bit more than the right earlobe, which was also hurting. She was wearing a pair of large diamond earrings, clip-ons that had once belonged to her mother (who, like Grace, did not have pierced ears). Grace had decided that they were more than appropriate for a duplex of staggering size, overlooking a front lawn comprising Central Park, and had built her outfit around them: a silk shirt in basic black (her go-to color, like that of so many of her Manhattan sisters), her highest heels (which brought her to Jonathan’s exact height), and the shantung silk pants in highly hot pink, a purchase that surprised no one more than herself when she found them at Bergdorf’s the previous fall. This was precisely what to wear when cowering before a Jackson Pollock or explaining to some captain of industry, who clearly cared not at all, that she was a therapist in private practice.

  The earrings were part of a collection of somewhat ostentatious pieces that had been presented to Marjorie Reinhart, piece by piece, over the years, by Grace’s father, Frederich, and which Grace still kept in a mirrored vanity her mother had owned, in the bedroom that had once been her parents’ and was now hers and Jonathan’s. There were, among many other items, a pin comprising a large pink rock of something grasped by little gold hands against a misshapen gold surface, a fat jade necklace her father had found who knew where, a leopard-print bracelet of black and yellow diamonds, a sapphire necklace, and a necklace of chunky, oddly proportioned gold links. What they all had in common was their very—how, really, could one avoid this word?—vulgarity. Everything seemed larger than it needed to be: big links of gold, big rocks, a certain quality of “look at me” in the designs. How her father could have chosen so poorly for her elegant mother was almost sweet, it occurred to her. Her father was such an oaf in this department that when he walked into a jewelry store to get his wife a present, he must have been easy prey for any bigger-is-better salesman. The jewels were a representation of someone doing his best to say I love you and someone else doing her best to say I know.

  Tap, tap, tap with her fingernail, manicured for the occasion. Grace removed the clip-on earrings and placed them in her evening bag—she couldn’t take it anymore. Then she rubbed her earlobes in relief and scanned the empty lobby, as if that would somehow move things along. Twenty minutes had passed without a single guest’s arrival, and only five forlorn name tags remained unclaimed on the table: Jonathan and two missing couples Grace didn’t know. Everyone else was upstairs, including the rest of the committee, the headmaster, and the large group he had arrived with (from the pre-event “Cocktails with the Headmaster” party held at the very apartment where Linsey of the Birkins had once told Grace that the doorman could hail her a taxi). She had even seen Malaga Alves come past her table, though she had not stopped. Which was just as well, since there had been no waiting name tag for her. She wasn’t surprised, and she wasn’t upset, that Jonathan hadn’t arrived yet. Jonathan’s eight-year-old patient had died two days before, a horrible thing that never got less horrible, despite the fact that it happened over and over again. The parents were Orthodox Jews and the funeral had been held almost immediately, so Jonathan had gone to that, and this afternoon he had gone back to Brooklyn to pay a shiva call at the family’s apartment in Williamsburg. He would stay as long as he needed to stay, and then he would come here. That was all.

  Grace did not know the child’s name. She was not even sure whether it was a boy or a girl. When Jonathan told her about the patient, Grace had thought with appreciation of that barrier they both maintained, or labored to maintain, between the life of their home and family and his life of the hospital. Because of that slender barrier, the dead child was only the patient, the eight-year-old, which was bad enough. But how much worse, for her, if she’d known more?

  “I’m sorry,” Grace had said when he told her about the shiva call and that he would probably be late.

  And Jonathan had said: “Me too. I hate cancer.”

  And that had nearly made her smile. He said this very often and had said it for years, just like this: as a matter of fact, a matter of benign opinion. He had first said it to her many years before, in his dorm room at the medical school in Boston, though back then it had sounded like a battle cry. Jonathan Sachs, about to be an intern, one day to be a pediatric oncologist specializing in solid tumors, hated cancer, so cancer had better watch its back! Cancer’s days were numbered! Cancer had been put on notice, and payback was a bitch! Today, there was no bravado left. He still hated cancer, more than when he was a student, more with every lost patient, more today than yesterday. But cancer didn’t give a rat’s ass how he felt.

  Grace had hated having to remind him about A Night for Rearden, to distract him with that from the pain of children and the dread fear of parents. But she had to. The fund-raiser. The school. The Spensers. The three apartments combined into one: an urban McMansion, she had called it when she’d first described it for him weeks earlier. Jonathan remembered everything, only there was so much on his mind that it wasn’t always completely accessible. It needed to be called up, like a book at the New York Public Library. Sometimes it took a little time.

  “Grace,” he had said, “I hope you haven’t had to waste a lot of energy on this. Can’t you leave it to the women who don’t work? You have far more important things to do than raise money for a private school.”

  But it was about the participation, she had said tersely. He knew that.

  And they didn’t have enough money to mitigate her nonparticipation. He knew that, too.

  And all of it had come up before, of course. In a long marriage, everything has come up before: circulating currents of familiarity, both warm and cool. Of course they couldn’t agree on everything.

  He would just … get here when he got here. And if anyone wanted to know why he was not here, she would be glad to enlighten them, because her husband had a little too much on his plate to make time for everyone else’s sick fascination with what he did for a living.

  It was something no one else seemed to understand about Jonathan, that you had to dig such a small way into his general affability before you hit a man who was perpetually, brutally affected by human suffering. People felt emboldened by Jonathan’s matter-of-factness on subjects like cancer and the death of children, but when they broached these dreaded subjects, they did it in a way that was almost accusatory: How can you do what you do? How can you stand to see children in pain? Isn’t it terrible when a patient you have cared for dies of the disease? Why would you go out of your way to choose that specialty?

  Sometimes, Jonathan actually tried to answer these questions, but it never helped, because despite people’s obvious scrounging for the details, most of them just couldn’t handle the stuff he carried around all day, and they almost always stalked off to find someone with a more upbeat profession to talk to. Over the years, Grace had watched some variation on this script at dinner parties and camp visiting days and previous Rearden fund-raisers, always with a sinking heart, because they reminded her that this pleasant mom from Henry’s second-grade class, and the terrific couple who’d rented a house on their lake one summer, and the radio talk show host who lived two floors above them (the closest their building had to a celebrity) were almost certainly not going to become their friends. Once, she had simply assumed their social life would necessarily be populated by oncologists, people living within the same constriction of intense emotions as Jonathan, and their partners, but in fact those relationships never really developed either—probably, Grace decided, because Jonathan’s colleagues had the modest goal of leaving cancer behind in the hospital when they departed the building, and perhaps they were better at doing that than her husband was. Years ago, the two of them had socialized a bit with Stu Rosenfeld, the oncologist who still covered Jonathan’s practice if he had to be away for some reason, and Stu’s wife, and that had be
en agreeable. The Rosenfelds were passionate theatergoers who always seemed to know, months in advance, which tickets were going to be impossible to secure and ended up sitting in the fourth row next to Elaine Stritch on the first Saturday after the New York Times rave. She admired rather than liked Tracy Rosenfeld, who was Korean-American, an attorney, and a fanatical runner, but it felt good to be out with another couple, enjoying the city and its pleasures. The two women dragged their husbands away from the default topics (hospital personalities, hospital politics, children with cancer) and generally pretended to be better friends than they actually were while discussing Sondheim and Wasserstein and the general disgrace of John Simon’s hostilities in New York magazine. It was all fairly innocuous, and it might still be going on, except that Jonathan had come home one day about five years earlier and reported that Stu had said the most extraordinary thing to him, about a plan for dinner (nothing elaborate, just a Sunday night at a restaurant they all liked on the West Side) that had fallen apart a couple of times. Stu had said that he was sorry, but maybe for now they would just keep things professional. Tracy was up for partner and … well …

  “Well?” Grace had asked, heat streaming into her cheeks. “Well what?”

  “Did you and Tracy … quarrel about something?” Jonathan had asked her, and she’d had that sudden guilty feeling that came over you when you were sure you had done nothing wrong, or at least nearly sure, because how could you ever be sure? People hid their tender places. Sometimes you just couldn’t know when you were hitting some nerve.

  So they’d stopped seeing the Rosenfelds, except at hospital-related events, but there were precious few of those, or occasionally by chance at the theater, where they always chatted in a friendly way and talked about getting together for dinner sometime, which neither of them ever followed up on, like countless other couples who were crazy-busy with work, whatever the underlying intention.

  Jonathan never mentioned this again. He was used to loss, of course, and not just in the sense of loss—to death—because of terrible, grueling, painful, and merciless disease. There had been other losses, not to be slighted because the parties in question might still be among the technically living and no farther distant than, say, Long Island. This, in Grace’s personal and indeed professional opinion, had everything to do with the family he had grown up in, the parents who had failed him in almost every way short of violence or physical harm, and the brother who had never understood that he, too, would be harmed by losing that fraternal connection. Jonathan didn’t need many people in his life, and he never had, at least as long as Grace had known him, so long as he had his own family: the one he had made with Grace and Henry.

  Then, as the years passed, she started to feel that way as well, and she, too, started to let people go. It was harder in the beginning—hardest at the beginning when Vita dematerialized—then less and less as the one or two friends from graduate school drifted off, and the Kirkland House friends (now scattered everywhere in any case and convening only for weddings), and the one or two others from nowhere in particular whose company she had enjoyed. She and Jonathan were not reclusive people, obviously. They took an active part in the city’s life, their days were full of human beings and their troubles. And if she never thought of herself as, precisely, a sweet person or a soft person—that wasn’t a terrible thing. She cared very much about her patients and what they did or experienced when they left her office. Of course she did. And there had been plenty of middle-of-the-night phone calls for her, too, over the years, and she had always taken them and done what she needed to do, even meeting distraught men and women in emergency rooms or getting on the phone with dispatchers and paramedics and intake specialists at hospitals and rehabs all over the country. But her default setting was “off,” not “on,” and if she did not have to worry about their anxiety or their depression or whether they were going to meetings every day as promised, then she generally did not worry.

  Jonathan, though, was a very different animal. Jonathan was just fatally softhearted, a profoundly humane and selfless person, capable of comforting the dying child and the almost bereaved parents with the right words and the right touch, giving hope and removing it deftly, kindly, when it had no place anymore. There had been times when he was so twisted with sadness about what he had left on the wards, or even in the morgue, that he could not speak to them when he got home and would go into his study at the back of the apartment, in the room they had once hoped would belong to a second child, taking himself out of the family equation until he could get free of it.

  Once, the autumn they’d met, she had arrived at the hospital where he was doing his internship and watched him hold an elderly woman who physically shook in his arms. The woman’s son, a middle-aged man with Down syndrome, had been dying nearby of his congenital heart defect, a death that could not have been unexpected since the moment of his birth, yet the woman had been howling with grief. Grace, who’d arrived a few minutes before Jonathan’s thirty-six-hour shift was due to end, had stood at the end of the corridor watching this, feeling the shame of her own observance, the contamination she knew she was bringing to this purest human interaction.

  She was already, that year, her last in college, a student of behavior, a dedicated future practitioner of the art of healing human pain, subcategory: psychic. And yet, and yet … the sonic boom of the suffering she saw at the other end of that long hospital corridor very nearly knocked her back. The power of it … no one had mentioned that in her senior seminar on Freud’s Dora or the fascinating course she had taken junior year on abnormal psychology. There had been wheels and cogs and mice running through mazes, theories and drug trials and various forms of therapy: aversion, primal, art and music, and dull, inefficient talk. But this … she could hardly bear to be so close to it, which wasn’t very close at all.

  The truth was that Jonathan found suffering everywhere—or, more accurately, it seemed to find him: wherever it might be hiding or lying dormant, waiting for a passing soul to stick to. He collected the random sadness of strangers and the confessions of the guilty. Taxi drivers offered him their bereavements. He could not pass the doormen downstairs without taking on some discouraging report of the paralyzed nephew or the parent sinking into dementia. He couldn’t eat at their regular Italian place on Third without asking the owner whether his daughter’s cystic fibrosis was responding to the new drug, a conversation that had never once ended with less than utter dejection. When the three of them were alone together, he could be buoyant, which was one reason Grace protected their family time so efficiently, but out there people seemed unable to resist taking advantage of his good nature.

  Perhaps what it came down to was that in spite of his personal suffering, he did not seem to fear pain the way others did, but instead dove straight into its whirlwind, determined to keep thrashing away, as if he would ever—ever—be capable of dealing it the slightest blow. She loved and admired that about him, she supposed, but it exhausted her, too. And sometimes it worried her. Cancer, obviously, would defeat him in the end. The struggles people endured, and the infinite varieties of sadness they carried—those would never ease, even a tiny bit. And all of that left him so vulnerable. She had tried to express this to Jonathan more than once. She had tried to make him understand that his very decency, amid the less-decency of others in the world, might come to harm him in some way, but he generally declined to see it. He could never seem to think as badly of other people as she could.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ACCESS TO THE QUICK OF THINGS

  When she stepped off the elevator and into the now packed space of the Spensers’ foyer, Grace immediately saw that their hosts’ absence had become the topic of the evening. Sally, in particular, was still visibly reeling from the unexpected news that both Spensers not only had failed to meet with them before the party, but were not expected to join their guests at any point in the evening. Jonas, they were told, was in China—this was less egregious—but Suki’s whereabouts wer
e unknown. She might have been across town or at her Hamptons compound. She might have been elsewhere in the epic apartment, for all the eager benefit committee knew, but it didn’t really matter: she was not where they had all imagined she would be, which was with her fellow parents in the Spenser abode. Sally had been apoplectic, her state rendered almost comical by the difficulty she was having maintaining her veneer of jolly gratitude in front of the Spensers’ staff.

  At the little table in the lobby, only one arriving guest had asked Grace outright if the Spensers were upstairs at the party. “I think he’s in Asia,” she had said, keeping it vague, as she assumed Sally would wish. But Sally evidently did not wish. Sally seemed to have decided that everyone must be brought up to speed on the situation. Now, as Grace watched from the foyer with a glass of champagne in her hand—Sylvia had brought her the champagne, and Grace had gratefully accepted it—Sally could be seen in clear spin mode, flitting from group to group, watching, pollinating the party like an unhappy hummingbird, trailing a distinct odor of panic behind her. Grace and Sylvia drank their champagne and watched her make her way. Earlier, the two of them had tried hard to calm Sally down. The apartment was breathtaking, they reminded her. With its oversize rooms and MoMA-worthy art, it had not one thing to apologize for, and if the guests were disappointed to find that its owner, a media titan of global stature, was not in attendance, they would at least revel in the glories of the space. Media titans of global stature might understandably be somewhere more important than a school fund-raiser (most of the guests, when you got right down to it, might understandably be somewhere more important than a school fund-raiser), and the men would not notice, let alone care, that his wife was similarly missing. The women were another story. It was the women who were going to twist the knife when they realized that both Spensers had skipped the party. But that would be later, after the bidding was over and the checks written. Wasn’t that the whole point?