The Undoing

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “That’s her,” she heard the doorman say.

  She nearly looked over her own shoulder, to see who was there.

  “Mrs. Sachs?”

  One of them was wiry and bald, with a gold stud in one ear and a cheap-looking brown jacket. The other, the smoker, was taller and wore a very nice suit. Knockoff Italian, though good fabric. Jonathan had a suit like that, Grace thought. But his was real.

  And then it hit her.

  Something had happened to Henry. Something … between here and Rearden? How many blocks was that? But it didn’t matter how many blocks. It took only one instant. A driver who wasn’t looking. A mugger. A crazy person. Most of the crazy people were off the streets, had been since the 1990s, fucking Giuliani. But it took only one. She couldn’t get the words out.

  “What is it?” She didn’t want to say Henry’s name. How crazy was she? “Did something happen?”

  Of course something had happened. Why else would they be here?

  “Is it my son?” she asked them, listening to herself. She sounded utterly unlike herself, but calm.

  They looked briefly at each other.

  “Mrs. Sachs? I’m Detective O’Rourke.”

  Naturally, she couldn’t help thinking. What a cliché.

  “It’s not about your son,” the other one said. “I’m sorry if we frightened you. We do that sometimes. We don’t mean to.”

  She turned to him, but her gaze seemed to follow at its own pace, leaving stop-motion traces behind it, like an acid trip, she supposed. She had never taken acid.

  “Joe Mendoza,” said the one who wasn’t here about Henry. He held out his hand, and she supposed she shook it. “Detective Mendoza. Sorry. Can we talk a minute?”

  It wasn’t Henry. Was it Jonathan? A plane crash? But he wasn’t flying today. He was at the conference today. Was there crime in Cleveland? Of course there was crime in Cleveland. There was crime everywhere. Then she thought: Is it my father?

  “Please just tell me,” she said to both of them. She could see the new doorman staring at her. Crazy person in 6B, she thought wildly. Okay, fine. Now fuck you.

  “You might have heard that a woman whose child attends your child’s school was killed,” said Mendoza. “I think the school sent out a message? They didn’t name the person.”

  Oh. She felt the relief, like an egg cracking over her head, an endless egg, dripping sweet release through every vein. She could have embraced them both and scolded them: You had me so worried! Don’t do that!

  “Yes, of course. I’m so sorry. It’s just … well, any parent would be terrified.”

  They both nodded, but one more pleasantly than the other.

  “Sure. I have two,” said the classic Irish cop. He was the one with the earring and the cheap jacket. Not so classic, maybe. “Don’t apologize. Do you mind if we talk somewhere? Maybe a little more private?”

  She nodded. He was her savior, and she wanted to please him. How could she refuse him now? And yet some new voice was trying to get her attention, holding out against the soaring flow of her relief. It said: Don’t let them upstairs. And she listened to it.

  “There are some seats inside,” she told them. Like most lobbies in most New York apartment buildings, there were chairs or couches or both. No one ever seemed to use them. The doormen had their own chairs or desks. Tradespeople waited in the vestibule to be let upstairs and deliverymen waited there, too, to be paid by someone who came down in the elevator. The seating was not so much a vestige of an earlier time as something that had always been out of place, and in all her life—as a child in this building and now a grown-up, a mother raising her own child here—she could not recall a single instance of these armchairs (redone a few years earlier in unsightly hotel-ese floral fabric) being used for actual conversation. She led the two men here, and sat, and set down her purse and plastic bag from Gristedes.

  “I just heard about Mrs. Alves,” she said as soon as they were settled on the chairs. “I had no idea what the message meant when I read it. The message from the school,” she clarified. “I couldn’t make any sense of it. Then someone called me and told me she’d died. It’s awful.”

  “Who told you about it?” O’Rourke said. He had removed a small notebook from the breast pocket of his ugly jacket.

  “My friend Sylvia,” Grace said. Immediately, illogically, she wished she had not volunteered Sylvia’s name. Could Sylvia get in trouble for gossiping? Then she remembered that it hadn’t been Sylvia, actually. “But … you know, another friend left a message on my cell phone before that. So it wasn’t really Sylvia.”

  “Sylvia who?” said O’Rourke. “What’s the last name?”

  “Steinmetz,” said Grace, feeling guilty. “Though the message was from a woman named Sally Morrison-Golden. She chaired a committee at our school that we were all on. And Mrs. Alves.” Though Malaga Alves hadn’t really been “on” the committee. That is, she hadn’t really done anything, only attended that one meeting. Had her name been listed on the committee in the auction catalog? Grace couldn’t remember.

  “And that was at what time?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “What time did you learn about Mrs. Alves’ death?”

  That was awfully specific, Grace thought with some irritation. If they were going to go through everyone in the school community and ask them when they’d heard—it seemed more like a sociology project than a police investigation. “Oh … ,” she considered. “Well, wait, let me just check my phone.” She dug it out of her bag and scrolled through the call log. It wasn’t difficult to pinpoint. “Twelve forty-six p.m.,” she announced, unaccountably relieved, as if this offered some definitive proof of something. “We spoke for a bit over eight minutes. But why is that important? I mean, if I can ask.”

  The one named Mendoza gave an oddly musical sigh. “I never think about what’s important anymore,” he said, smiling a little. “Once upon a time I only asked what I thought was important. That’s why it took me way too long to make detective. Now I just ask everything, and I sort it out later. You’re a shrink, right? You only ask the important stuff?”

  Grace looked at him. Then she looked at the other one. They weren’t smiling.

  “How did you know I was a shrink?” she asked. “I mean, I’m not a shrink, I’m a therapist.”

  “Is it a secret?” he said. “You got a book out, right?”

  “She wasn’t my patient,” Grace said, jumping to a thoroughly illogical conclusion. “Mrs. Alves? I wasn’t her therapist. I was on a school committee with her. I don’t think I ever really spoke to her. Just, you know, chitchat.”

  “Chitchat about what?” said Mendoza.

  Grace was suddenly aware of her neighbor, the woman who lived directly upstairs, crossing the lobby. She had her portly Lhasa apso on a leash and carried a Whole Foods shopping bag. She looked amazed to see three people in the lobby chairs, having what looked like an actual conversation. Did she know the men were cops? Grace thought automatically. The woman had lived above her for nearly ten years, alone except for the dog, and another dog before that. Willie, or Josephine—the dog, not the woman. The woman’s name was Mrs. Brown, and Grace didn’t know her first name. That was a Manhattan co-op for you, she thought.

  “I don’t … Oh,” she said, remembering, “her daughter. Her baby. We admired the baby’s eyelashes. I remember that. I told you, nothing important.”

  “She discussed her baby’s eyelashes?” Mendoza said, frowning. “That strike you as odd?”

  “We were just admiring the baby. You know.” Though perhaps they didn’t. Perhaps they had never admired a baby out of politeness. “‘What a cute baby. What long eyelashes.’ It wasn’t a memorable encounter.”

  O’Rourke nodded, writing this terribly important thing down. “And this was at the committee meeting last Thursday, December fifth.”

  Had she said December 5? Grace thought vaguely. They seemed to be holding a bouquet of useless facts. “Well, I suppose so.
That was the only time I spoke to her.”

  “Apart from the benefit on Saturday night,” Mendoza said.

  And then Grace understood. Of course, they had talked to Sally already. Sally had probably called them, she thought irritably. Sally had probably said: I knew her! I was in charge of the committee! Grace Sachs will confirm it all! Fuck Sally.

  “I saw her on Saturday, at the party,” Grace corrected. “But I didn’t speak to her.”

  “Why not?” said Mendoza.

  Why not? The question didn’t really compute. There wasn’t a “Why not,” just as, if she had spoken to Malaga Alves at the benefit, there wouldn’t really have been a “Why.”

  She shrugged. “No special reason. I didn’t speak to most people at the party. I was downstairs for a lot of it, handing out auction flyers and name tags. By the time I got upstairs there was a huge crowd. And then the auction started. There were a lot of people I didn’t talk to.”

  “Did you happen to notice anyone Mrs. Alves did speak to at the party? Even if you weren’t speaking to her yourself. Did you see her with anyone in particular?”

  Aha, Grace thought. She looked at them, instantly torn between her feminist and pre-feminist selves, not to mention her wish to be helpful and her disdain for Sally. She was no Sally, full of vitriol at the arrival of a prettier girl—or a girl possessed of some potent pheromone, capable of luring the beaux away. If men like the men at the Rearden fund-raiser wanted to gather around Malaga Alves, forsaking their wives for such a succulent newcomer, she had no opinion about it, especially since her own husband hadn’t been one of them. Malaga was not to be blamed for her obvious sensuality, which she seemed—on the contrary—not to flaunt, even in such conducive circumstances. Those men sniffing around her had only their consciences, and of course their wives, to answer to.

  Then again, it wasn’t her place to point the finger.

  “I guess you’re asking whether I noticed all the men around her,” she said, taking the bait, but on her own terms. “Of course I did. I think it would have been hard to miss. She’s … she was. An attractive woman. But the little I saw, I thought she was acting very properly.”

  She waited a moment while Mendoza finished writing this down. She was thinking: But even if she hadn’t been, I hope you’re not implying she deserved to be killed. I thought we were past that, she nearly said. But she stopped herself.

  “You said you never spoke to her. On Saturday,” Mendoza said, finishing.

  “No,” Grace agreed. It had occurred to her that Henry would be here any minute. She didn’t want him to see this—this tableau in the lobby.

  “But you must have greeted her when she came in.”

  Which one said this? She looked at them both, as if she might read the answer from the muscles of their throats. But one, O’Rourke, had a throat concealed by stubble and the other, Mendoza, by fat. Neck fat was something she’d always been a little repelled by. She had never seriously contemplated plastic surgery, but if her own jaw ever became obscured by neck fat, she knew she would not be able to live with herself. My personal line in the sand, it occurred to her now, is a jawline.

  “Yes?” Grace frowned.

  “You said you were downstairs in the lobby. At the party.”

  “Benefit,” the other one, Mendoza, the one without a jawline, corrected.

  “Yeah. You must have spoken to her. You said you were giving people the name tag.”

  “And the catalog,” said Mendoza. “Right?”

  “Oh. Sure. Maybe. I don’t remember. People were arriving all at the same time.” She felt so profoundly frustrated. What could it possibly matter if she gave Malaga Alves her stupid auction catalog and name tag? There wasn’t even a name tag! Malaga hadn’t even RSVP’d!

  “So would you like to revisit that earlier statement?” he said, affably enough.

  A word had been buzzing at her, for the last … how long? Five minutes, at the most. But five minutes was a long time. The word was lawyer. Actually, there were more words than that. In addition to lawyer, she kept thinking: Wrong. As in: This is wrong. And also, for some incomprehensible, ridiculous, and incidentally infuriating reason: You idiots.

  “Mrs. Sachs?” O’Rourke said.

  “Look,” she said, “I want to help, of course. But I don’t see what I can add that might possibly be relevant. I don’t know the first thing about this woman. I only spoke to her once, and not about anything important. It’s awful what happened to her, whatever happened. I don’t even know what happened!” she said, her voice rising. “But whatever it is, I’m sure it has nothing to do with the school. And I know it has nothing to do with me.”

  They looked at her with an odd satisfaction, as if they had been waiting for her to display some evidence of resentment, and now she had obliged them and made them right about her. Already, she regretted even this mild outburst. But she wanted them to go away. Now—before Henry arrived and saw them. And they were still here.

  “Mrs. Sachs,” O’Rourke said at last, “we’re sorry to have troubled you. I don’t want to keep you any longer. I do want to speak to your husband, though, if you don’t mind. Is he upstairs?”

  She stared at them. Again, without warning, her thoughts flashed to some 1950s universe in which these men—these men—had to obtain some Y-chromosome-attached endorsement before leaving her alone, which merely made her crazy. But all she could manage to say was: “Why?”

  “Is it a problem?” said the other one.

  “Well, it is because he’s not here. He’s at a medical conference. But even if he weren’t, he wouldn’t have any idea who you were talking about. He didn’t even know this woman.”

  “Is that right?” said the first one, the Irish one. “Not through the school, like you?”

  “No. I take my son to school and pick him up.”

  They were frowning at her, both of them.

  Mendoza said: “Every day? Your husband never takes him?”

  She nearly laughed. She was thinking, bizarrely, of a couple she’d once treated, in which the husband and wife had a business they’d created and run together, with great harmony and success. Still, when it came to their home and the care of their two children, the woman found herself entirely on her own, making sure the tuition was paid and the toilet paper didn’t run out, keeping track of vaccinations and taxes and up-to-date passports, coming home to make dinner and set up appointments for the kids and wipe down the counters as he decompressed from a hard day at work. The wife’s frustration was set to a perpetual simmer. In therapy, the two of them had circled and circled this maddening state of affairs, gently addressing the husband’s family-of-origin issues that had given rise to his idea of what married life was supposed to look like, and the wife’s traumatic early loss of her father. There had been carefully proposed charts and lists to redress the imbalance of responsibilities. There had been visualization of the family life each wanted for themselves and their children. And then one day, as the wife was explaining to her husband why it was not all right to schedule “boys’ night” on Back to School Night, he suddenly experienced one of those rare but usually fulfilling jolts of inner illumination for which therapy is so justly lauded. With a rush of the purest outrage, the man sat up on the couch and turned to his wife, business partner, the mother of his children, the only woman he—in his own words—had ever loved, and said: “You’re not going to be happy till I do half!”

  So maybe she was the tiniest bit of a hypocrite. Or maybe it was just the way she wanted it, walking her son to Rearden, waiting for him, taking him to his violin lesson, not sharing this precious bit of Henry-time with Jonathan, who for the record had never asked to share it. Anyway, what business was it of theirs? And why on earth did it matter?

  “Well,” she said with a small laugh that sounded forced even to her, “it might be modern times and all that, but I doubt it’s any different at your kids’ schools. Are the parent-teacher committees and booster clubs full of dads?”
/>   They exchanged a brief look. Then the one who’d said he had two kids gave a shrug. “I don’t know. My wife does all that.”

  Exactly, she thought.

  “But still, they might have met, right? Your husband and this lady. Mrs. Alves?”

  And then Henry arrived. He slouched into the lobby, wearing his violin on his back, his heavy leather book bag slapping at his hip with every step; then the unfamiliarity of actual people on those chairs made him look up. Grace’s heart sank, though she couldn’t have said exactly why.

  He had been a beautiful boy and was on his way to being a beautiful man, though at the moment he was delayed on an isthmus of preadolescence, the faintest darkening of incipient hair on his upper lip. Like Jonathan, he had curly black hair. Like Grace, he had fine bones and a long neck. Like both of them, he thought more than he spoke.

  “Mom?” said Henry.

  “Hi, honey,” she said automatically.

  Henry stood, fingering the key he had taken from his school bag. Latchkey, she thought, though he wasn’t a latchkey kid, not really. Probably, he had thought she was already upstairs, waiting for him, and if he’d found himself alone would have assumed she was on her way, which she certainly would have been—had been, in fact—before these irritating men had blocked her path. Henry was still waiting.