The Undoing

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  It wasn’t hard to imagine who was in there or what she was crying about. Grace, like any minimally aware New York mother, knew very well that most of the women who cared for the city’s children of privilege had children of their own, but those children were usually far away, on other islands, in other countries; how much regret, how much bitterness, must underlie this particular social contract? The subject never came up at the mothers’ group or in the lobby at the school—it never crossed that blood-brain barrier between the actual mothers and the caregivers. It was not a secret, of course, but it felt like a secret: brutal and bottomless, a monstrous irony. No wonder she wept, thought Grace, looking at the shut door, still frozen on the sisal runner a few feet away. Perhaps she had left her own children behind in some unlovely home far in every way from this penthouse mansion, to give care and even love to the children of Jonas and Suki Spenser, high above this unfathomably expensive city. Perhaps she had taken this private moment, with the house jammed with strangers and the family away, to indulge the grief of a mother deprived of her children.

  Grace took a step back, willing the rushes underfoot not to rustle. They did not. She took another step, and turned, and went out the way she’d come.

  Stepping back into the foyer, she felt a vibration in the hand holding her evening purse and removed her cell phone to find a text from Jonathan. He was indeed not at the party—that was no more than she already knew—but the surprising thing was that he had actually been in the Spenser apartment for at least part of the auction. “Got there late bec of shiva,” he had typed. “Just got message from hosp about a pt having bad night, will try to make it back later. SORRY.”

  In Jonathan’s life a “pt” was always having a bad night—a little boy or a little girl, just diagnosed, or interrupted by a sudden setback, or abruptly critical. There was always a frantic call from a mom whose bright five-year-old had been felled in an instant, a quivering guillotine materializing overhead like Ezekiel’s spinning wheel. There were always parents, enraged by their impotence, liable to explode. Over the years, Jonathan had been hit, wept upon countless times, reasoned with endlessly. He had been summoned to hear confessions: Had this happened because of the prostitute? Was it because she had been smoking, secretly, for the past four years and even in the pregnancy? Jonathan’s days were a conveyer belt of routine crises, every single one of them life-threatening, life-altering, of all-consuming implications. Even she, who had many times embarked upon an ordinary therapy session that swerved into a brick wall or a black hole to oblivion, could barely imagine the volatility of her husband’s daily life.

  “Didn’t see you,” she typed with her thumbs, a skill at which she’d become sadly adept.

  “Waved at you like an idiot!” he wrote back.

  Grace sighed. There was no point in continuing. At least he had managed to get here.

  “See you at home,” she typed in. “XX.”

  “XX,” came back. It was their usual electronic parting.

  When Jennifer Hartman came out of the bathroom, Grace managed a benign nod at her and went in. Here, another chandelier glittered with enormous, rough shards of glass, dappling the waxed walls. Over the toilet was a Warhol self-portrait, just the thing (Grace couldn’t help but feel) to interrupt the flow of male urine. She washed her hands in lavender soap.

  They were near the end now. Only the Millionaire Munchkin Camp (as Grace had privately dubbed Nathan Friedberg’s entrepreneurial effort) remained, and that went, after a struggle among four, then three, then two, for $30,000—a bargain, Friedberg announced loudly, when you declare it as a nonprofit donation on your taxes. Grace did not recognize the trim European couple who’d made the winning bid.

  With that, the auction ended, and in a collective sigh of relief and self-congratulation. Sally, Grace could see, was basking, accepting an embrace from Robert, the headmaster, and from Amanda, who emitted a fairly undignified “Woo-hoo!” as she squeezed her taller friend and made her jump awkwardly up and down, just like Hillary and Tipper at the Democratic convention. Men gave each other vigorous handshakes, sending the ambient congratulatory rush cascading around the room. Then began the exodus. A few couples were already at the door, slipping away discreetly, and there was Malaga Alves, who held up her auction catalog like a blinker or a fan, in front of her face. Apart from their brief greeting downstairs, Grace had not spoken to her and moved quickly, her head down.

  A moment later, Robert Conover materialized beside her, one big hand on her shoulder, a rough cheek at her cheek. What a wonderful job she had done, he told Grace. “It’s mainly Sally,” said Grace. “And the Spensers, of course. We have to give them a lot of the credit.”

  “Certainly. In absentia.”

  “Ours is not to reason why.” She shrugged. “And personally I would never look this gift view in the mouth. Besides, you have to admit, there’s something kind of cool about being here without them. Sort of Tailor of Gloucester.”

  “Perhaps a bit more cats-away-mice-will-play,” the headmaster said. “I bet a few of these guys are plotting how to get into the various Spenser sanctums upstairs.”

  “And the women want to get into the closets!” said Grace.

  Robert laughed. “Hell, I want to get into the closets myself.”

  “Julian couldn’t make it?” Grace asked. She had seen the current production at his theater, a dense and decidedly experimental interpretation of Kafka’s Trial that she would have loved to talk about.

  “Sadly,” Robert said, “at a conference at the Taper in L.A. Where’s yours? I saw him during the auction.”

  “Oh, he had a call from the hospital. He had to go back.”

  She watched as the customary spasm crossed Robert’s features. This happened often when the word hospital was mentioned in relation to her husband.

  “God,” said Robert, right on cue. “How does he do it?”

  She sighed. “It’s all about what they can do for the kids. The forward progress.”

  “There is forward progress, then?”

  “Oh, of course,” said Grace. “Not as fast as anyone would like. But yes.”

  “I don’t know how he even gets through those doors every day. When Julian’s mother was there—she had colon cancer …”

  “I’m sorry,” Grace said automatically.

  “Yes. She was there for a month about four years ago, and then another few weeks at the end. When it was over and we walked out for the last time, I thought, I hope I never have to be inside this building for the rest of my life. I mean, everywhere you look: pain, pain, pain.”

  Yes, yes, she thought, maintaining her most professional compassion. If Jonathan were here, he would be telling Robert Conover that, yes, the work was intense, yes, the emotions were powerful, but he felt privileged to be allowed into people’s lives at these very moments of emotion and intensity, when their instinct might understandably be to circle the wagons and ask everybody to please go away, because the worst thing that has ever happened, the worst thing they could imagine ever happening, was happening right now, to their son or daughter. Jonathan would be saying that he might not be able to fix the child who was his patient, but almost always he could make things a little bit better, and that included taking away pain, which meant something to him and meant something to the child’s family. He had been asked some variation on “How do you do it?” hundreds of times—hundreds of times in her presence alone—and he would always respond to it without the smallest shred of irritation and with a broad smile.

  But he wasn’t here. And she did not feel authorized to deliver his lines.

  “It’s very difficult,” she said to Robert.

  “Oh, my God. I mean, I could not even stay functional around that.” He turned to greet, in a hearty but nonspecific way, a man who slung a heavy arm onto his shoulder as he passed by toward the elevator. Then he turned back. “I’d be no use to anyone. I’d just bawl constantly. I mean, I even lose it when the kids get rejected by their first-choice
colleges.”

  “Well,” Grace said dryly, “that is tragedy on a cosmic scale.”

  “No, seriously,” he said. Apparently, he wanted a serious response.

  “It’s a very hard job, but he gets to help people, so it’s worth it.”

  Robert nodded, though he did not seem satisfied. Grace, belatedly, wondered why this sort of thing didn’t fall within the spectrum of rudeness. Would you say to the guy who pumps out the septic tank, How you can do that? But she tried to give Robert the benefit of her considerable doubt. She did like Robert.

  “I have some excellent news about your little scholar. He’s doing very, very well, you know.”

  Grace smiled awkwardly. It was not a surprise that Henry was excelling, of course. He was so smart—that was not a virtue, just an accident of DNA—but he worked hard enough that you didn’t begrudge his winning of the cerebral lottery. He wasn’t one of those kids who coasted or, worse, submarined their own potential because they resented it, or resented that it was important to the people around them. Still, it was odd to be discussing this now, as if they were at some big, social parent-teacher conference where people got dressed in their finery to find out how their kids were doing in school.

  “He loves his math teacher this year,” Grace said truthfully.

  At that moment, Sally Morrison-Golden bounded up and gripped Robert around the shoulders, possibly as much to steady herself as to express affection. She was, Grace saw, more than just a mite drunk. She teetered a bit on her very high heels and sported a faint half-moon of pink lipstick on her left cheekbone. Sometime after the evening’s take had been tallied—or even just estimated—she must have cut loose. She was now exceptionally loose.

  “What a wonderful night,” Robert told her.

  “Oh, rah,” she slurred sarcastically. “Nice of our hosts to show up, wasn’t it?”

  Still? thought Grace. “Doesn’t matter,” she told Sally. “We’ve had a great time and we did really well. Can you believe this apartment, Robert?” she said.

  “If I lived here, I’d be home now,” Robert said affably. “And I’d own that Francis Bacon over the couch. Which would be nice.” He kissed them both on the cheek and left them. Grace was not sorry to see him go.

  “Did Malaga find you?” Sally said. “She was looking for you before.”

  “Find me?” Grace frowned. “What for?”

  “God, can you believe all those men she had drooling on her? They were like Pavlov’s dogs. Amanda and I were like, ‘I’ll have what she’s having.’ Jilly Friedberg just about lost it. She literally went and dragged her husband away.”

  Grace, who was a bit sorry to have missed this moment, gave a noncommittal smile. “She did look very pretty,” she said.

  Sally seemed to wobble a bit. She moved her feet as if she were en pointe, which, given the height of her heels, she very nearly was. Then she, too, lurched off in the direction of the dining room. Grace, who really wanted to leave, went to find Sylvia.

  “Can we leave?” she asked her. “Do you think it’s all right?”

  “I think it’s more than all right. I think it’s required,” Sylvia said. “Did you see the way those guards are looking at us? They want us o-u-t.”

  “Okay, then,” Grace said, relieved. She had been sure the staff would not want them to linger, but she’d also worried that Sally would want to remain as long as possible, perhaps even calling a postmortem beneath the Jackson Pollocks. “I’m going. I’m really beat.”

  “Where’s Jonathan?” asked Sylvia. “I thought I saw him before.”

  “Yes, he was here,” said Grace. “But he got a call about a patient in the hospital. He had to go back.”

  “To Sloan-Kettering?” asked Sylvia, as if Jonathan had ever worked anywhere else.

  She wondered if she was about to face another round of “How does he do it?” but mercifully Sylvia seemed to contain herself. She said nothing, and Grace managed to get away before anyone else could stop her. She wanted to be home when Jonathan arrived, to be waiting for him in case he needed her. And if experience was her guide, he might very well need her. He had just helped bury an eight-year-old in Brooklyn, and now he had another patient in crisis in the hospital. He was going to be in terrible shape, whenever he made it home. He felt these things so deeply.

  PART II

  DURING

  CHAPTER SIX

  NOT FOR MUCH LONGER

  The end came not with a bang and not with a whimper, but with the silent blink of the envelope icon on her cell phone. The icon had been programmed, once upon a time, to flash once for a single message, twice for a second message, and so on, until it hit some sort of inner, critical mass of messages, at which point it just blinked in perpetuity, like a fluttering wing of iridescent green at the corner of her cell phone. Later she would remember that blink, so ordinary that she had ignored it through the first patients of the morning (a couple fighting a doomed fight to remain married), and her second appointment (with a long-term patient on the threshold of a manic episode), and even through a lunch break she’d devoted to a pre-interview with a producer from Today.

  Four days had passed since the fund-raiser, A Night for Rearden.

  The Today appearance would not take place until after the new year, but with the holiday coming up, the producer explained, they were trying to get ahead of things. “And they gave you the breaking news speech already?”

  Grace said no. They hadn’t, but wasn’t it obvious?

  “Yeah, this kind of story can get tossed around a little, if something comes up.”

  The interviewer’s name was Cindy Elder. Grace had jotted the name on a pad, an old habit from years of speaking to potential clients. Ironically, Cindy Elder sounded young, practically collegiate. “What would you say are the most important things you should try to find out about someone you’re interested in?”

  “I would say,” said Grace, “that it’s more a question of listening to what someone is trying to tell you than asking questions about specific background information, or the so-called big issues or deal breakers people sometimes concentrate on when they’re dating someone, such as money or religion. Those things are important, of course, but I would argue that it’s even more important to hear what a person’s behavior, or tone, is already communicating when they speak about ideas and people.”

  Grace could hear the clack of Cindy Elder’s keyboard in the background and her encouraging, intermittent, “Mm-hm …”

  She had done enough interviews already to see the way the wind was going to blow. Like it or not, You Should Have Known was going to be presented to the world as a dating guide, shelved—quite possibly—cheek by jowl with the odious The Rules and Relationships for Dummies. It couldn’t be helped, she supposed, or at least not if she wanted her book to be a bestseller.

  “What are some things you might hear in a man’s behavior or tone?”

  “You might hear disdain for ex-partners, or co-workers, or parents and siblings. We all have negative feelings about some people in our lives, but hostility as a pattern is problematic. And in men, hostility toward women in general is an enormous red flag.”

  “Good,” said Cindy Elder, clacking. “What else?”

  “A lack of interest in others. Talking about people as if they only exist in relation to him and not as separate individuals. That’s something that may never change, not with marriage or even children. You have to remember, this is a person who’s reached adulthood with his attitudes intact, and he is comfortable enough with them to have them on display with a person he doesn’t know very well and is theoretically trying to impress.”

  “Right,” she heard Cindy say.

  “So our responsibility, particularly as women, is to really pay attention. We tend to get tunnel vision sometimes, especially with a man we’re physically attracted to. If the chemistry of attraction is strong, it can drown out some of our other receptors.”

  The typing stopped. “You make this sound very c
linical. Is that your intention?”

  “Well,” she said, “yes and no. I think it’s possible to be a romantic and still keep your wits about you. Not every attraction has to lead to a long-term partnership. The trouble comes when we’re so attracted to a potential partner that we stop hearing what he’s actually telling us.”

  “Such as …”

  “Such as … I’m not really that interested in you as a partner. Or I’m not interested in anyone as a partner. Or how about, any woman as a partner? That one comes up more often than you’d think. Or, Sure, I’m interested in you as a partner, but only on my terms, and those terms are going to make your life miserable.”

  “Okay!” said Cindy. “I think I’ve got enough.”

  “Fine,” Grace said. They thanked each other and Grace hung up. Then she looked at her cell phone again. Earlier, waiting for the office line to ring for her scheduled interview, she had scrolled through the senders and decided to ignore the messages. The first appeared as “M-G,” her own abbreviation for Sally Morrison-Golden, whose post-fund-raiser information assault was scarcely lighter than its pre-fund-raiser counterpart. The second sender was Henry’s school, but not an actual human at Henry’s school, who might be trying to reach her because Henry was ill or some academic or behavioral crisis warranted a meeting with a teacher. It was the generic Do-not-reply automaton at Rearden that sent mass e-mails to the effect that Crazy Hat Day would take place tomorrow, or an early dismissal for teacher training was scheduled for the following Monday, or a case of head lice had been confirmed in the kindergarten. Grace sometimes woke to this same nonperson on winter mornings, announcing snow days or late openings, and in fact it had actually snowed this morning, a little, early for winter but not bizarrely so, and hardly enough to require a response. She scrolled on down. Sylvia Steinmetz. M-G. M-G. M-G.