The Undoing

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Then her hand closed over it and she brought it up, like a pearl from the depths, and blinked at it, because the little screen showed not the stethoscope she had so irrationally expected to see (how could it? unless Jonathan had returned home, retrieved his still-sequestered cell phone from the cupboard by the bed, and used it to call her), or some unknown Midwestern number (“I’m such an idiot! I’ve lost my phone somewhere!”), but the nonword NYPDMENDOZAC, surely—of all the irritating and irrelevant things that might have appeared there—the most irritating and irrelevant of all.

  And then it came to her that he was dead, and they had found him and were calling to tell her the worst news she would ever hear. But what a strange coincidence that it should be the same police officer, out of all the police officers it might have been, to make this call. Perhaps this was her personal police officer, the one called upon whether she jaywalked or had a passing acquaintance with a murder victim or had to be informed that her husband had suffered some terrifying mishap. How many of these officers were there, for how many New Yorkers? And how bizarre that she would need hers twice, in only a couple of days.

  Well, I just won’t answer, she thought. That should fix it.

  But her father was looking at her, still. And he said: “Is it Jonathan?”

  Grace held up the phone, as if it might change its mind and be Jonathan after all. It wasn’t Jonathan.

  “Dad?” she heard herself say. “I don’t know if I really made this clear before, but I don’t know where Jonathan is. I thought he was at a medical conference in the Midwest somewhere, but now I’m not sure.”

  “Have you tried calling him?” her father said, as if she were stupid.

  In her hand, the phone stopped ringing. So easy! she thought. Wish granted.

  “Yes. Of course I have.”

  “Well, what about the hospital? They must be able to reach him.”

  What’s Jonathan up to these days?

  Grace shuddered.

  In her hand, the cell phone shuddered, too. It was ringing again. NYPDMENDOZAC really wanted to speak to her.

  And then, in a location so deep inside her that she had not known of its existence, really, let alone its whereabouts, something heavy and metallic chose this moment to creak the tiniest bit open, with a grating of rust and the release of a new, terrible thought: that everything rising around her was about to converge.

  “I need to take this,” she said nominally to her father. “I really do.”

  In response, he left the room.

  Then she did the strangest thing. She made herself walk, very deliberately, across to one of Eva’s long, uncomfortable couches and place her disordered handbag very carefully on Eva’s scarily expensive antique Kirman rug. And then, with the utmost specificity, and in such a severe and disciplined voice that she did not immediately recognize it as her own, she told herself the outright lie that everything would be all right.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SNAP, SNAP

  This time, they wouldn’t let her talk to them in the lobby, though they had called from the lobby, so they were right there when she came down in the elevator, and despite the fact that Eva’s lobby (being far more grand than her own) had even more elaborate furniture at hand. No.

  This time, there had been a “request” that they speak at what they called “the office,” where they could have privacy.

  Privacy for what? she asked them. And when they didn’t answer right away, she said, “I don’t understand. Are you arresting me?”

  Mendoza, who had already started leading their little group outside, stopped. His neck, she noted—not without some misplaced satisfaction—overflowed the collar of his coat as he turned back to her.

  “Why would I be arresting you?” he said.

  Then, she was exhausted. Already, a part of her had handed herself over. She let them open the door of the sedan for her and slid onto the backseat beside O’Rourke. The one with the neck stubble. Like a criminal.

  “I don’t understand,” she said again, but without much conviction. When neither of them reacted to this, she went further.

  “I told you, I barely knew Mrs. Alves.”

  Mendoza, who was driving, said—not unkindly—“We can talk when we get there.” Then—and this, under the circumstances, seemed the strangest thing of all—he turned on the radio. WQXR, the classical station. And no one said another word.

  “There” was apparently the 23rd Precinct on 102nd Street. Only two miles from the neighborhood where she had grown up and was now raising her own child—a smaller distance than she was happy to walk almost anytime and less, in fact, than the distance she put in on the treadmill on the rare occasions she made it to her gym on 80th and Third—yet Grace had never set foot on 102nd Street in her life. Driving up Park, past Lenox Hill, where she and Henry had both been born, and the Brick Church, where two of her Rearden classmates had been married, and the 96th Street apartment building where her once friend Vita had grown up—a building perched literally on the edge of what Grace’s parents had considered permissible Manhattan—she had watched each landmark pass into her wake.

  The city of Grace’s youth came to a screeching halt at 96th and Park (which helpfully crested after a long incline at just that point and then seemed to plunge downward into Spanish Harlem, just where the subway emerged from its subterranean travels). So strict was the rule laid down by her mother—also a native New Yorker—about going north of 96th that there might as well have been one of those doomsday highway signs advising “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.” Grace and Vita never had, though they did enjoy, from time to time, the mild rebellion of trawling the length of 96th itself, from Fifth, where the brownstones were still anybody’s idea of elegant, to the East River, where things verged on just as dangerous as Marjorie Reinhart had always feared.

  Of course, as an adult she had been to Harlem many times. It wasn’t such a big deal, not today. There had been her graduate school years at Columbia, for one thing (though Columbia and its environs had an Ivy League exemption from the above 96th Street rule), and her counseling internship at a women’s shelter on 128th. And there was the awful play on 159th Street in which the mother of one of Henry’s friends had portrayed a character so experimental that the role had been called simply “The Woman”—she had gone to that with Henry and Jonah, when Henry and Jonah were still friends. Jonathan also loved Sylvia’s Restaurant with a passion she had never shared, and occasionally coerced her and Henry there for smothered pork chops and macaroni. And of course more than a few of the people they knew had opted for brownstones in this formerly beyond-the-pale neighborhood, where for the price of a postwar box on the Upper East Side you could buy three floors of prewar glory and a back garden, only a slightly scary ten-minute walk from the subway. These days, there was even a Brown Harris Stevens office here, she had read somewhere.

  Still, she felt the old, instinctive tightening as the car began to descend.

  Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

  The 23rd Precinct station house, it turned out, was in a building that looked like an imploded Rubik’s Cube in generic beige. When they brought her inside, taking her swiftly down a side corridor to a little meeting room, Detective O’Rourke only increased the surrealism of the occasion by offering Grace a cappuccino. She very nearly smiled.

  “No, thank you,” she told them. A shot of whiskey, she almost said, but the truth was that she didn’t want that, either.

  O’Rourke went for coffee for himself. Mendoza asked if she needed to use the bathroom. She declined. Were they always this polite? But then she saw him looking at his watch—bored already?—and writing down the time.

  “Do I need a lawyer?” she asked them.

  They looked at each other.

  “I wouldn’t have thought so,” said O’Rourke. They were both writing now, one jotting long lines on a yellow legal pad, the other filling out a form. She watched, for a moment, the steam rise from their paper cups.


  “Mrs. Sachs,” Mendoza said quite suddenly, “are you comfortable?”

  Was he crazy? No, she wasn’t comfortable. She looked at him with a kind of dull disapproval and said: “Sure. But I’m confused.”

  “I understand,” he said, nodding. And unless she was much mistaken, that nod—and the face that went along with it, a kind of bland and noncommittal face—and the tone of his voice, which was mild and vaguely musical, came right from the basic training manual for therapists everywhere. It made her enraged. And that only got worse when he said: “This must be very difficult for you.”

  “I don’t even know what ‘this’ is,” she said, looking first at one of them, then at the other. “What is ‘this’? I told you, I didn’t know Malaga Alves. I had no feelings about her one way or the other. I’m very sorry that she was …”

  What? Grace thought frantically. How did you end a sentence so stupidly begun?

  “She was … harmed. It’s a terrible thing. But what am I doing here?”

  They glanced at each other, and Grace, in that instant, saw the compressed and silent dialogue of two people who knew each other very well. They were disagreeing. Then one of them prevailed.

  It was O’Rourke who leaned forward, elbows on the table, and said: “Mrs. Sachs, where is your husband?”

  Grace caught her breath. She shook her head at them. They were like exotic creatures. They made no sense at all.

  “I don’t understand. I thought this was about what happened to Mrs. Alves.”

  “It is,” Mendoza said severely. “It is very much about Mrs. Alves. So I’ll ask you again: Where is your husband, Mrs. Sachs?”

  “I don’t think my husband ever met Mrs. Alves.”

  “Where is he? Is he in your apartment on Eighty-First?”

  “What?” She stared at them. “No. Of course not!”

  “Why ‘of course not’?” said O’Rourke, with what sounded like sincere curiosity.

  “Well, because …” Because if Jonathan were in the apartment, she wouldn’t have spent the last twenty-four hours in a state of such sickening fear. She would know where he was. She might not understand, but she would know. But of course she couldn’t say that. That—whatever was happening to Jonathan, to them as a couple—was none of their business. Instead she said: “Because … why would he be in our apartment? I told you, he’s at a medical conference. And if he were here, in the city, he’d be at work. But he’s not here.”

  They both frowned. O’Rourke pursed his lips and inclined his head forward a little bit. The skin of his bald head caught the overhead fluorescent light. “And work would be where?”

  It was the way he said it, so carefully, so anxious not to blow a punch line. There was cruelty in it and pity at the same time. It was so radioactive, it made her flinch. They were both looking at her, waiting for her. They had both kept their jackets on, though it was—she now realized—kind of hot in this room. Purposely so? Or did the city overheat its buildings as a rule? But it was unquestionably hot. She had taken off her own coat and was holding it across her lap, bundled up. She was holding it tight, as if it might try to get away from her. She had been hot. She wouldn’t have done it otherwise, since taking off your coat meant you were going to stay awhile, and she had no intention of staying a second longer than necessary to satisfy their “request.” Weren’t they hot? O’Rourke, the bald one, he looked hot. He had a fine sheen of perspiration on his brow, or bald head, or the place his hairline would have been if he’d had hair. The other one looked uncomfortable as well. Though perhaps their jackets made them look that way. Ill-fitting jackets, both. Both bulging at the armpit.

  And then, without warning, she had an image of herself hanging over a cliff, held up by ropes, and there were many ropes—enough to feel secure. She had always had ropes, she knew that: stability, good health, money, education. She was smart enough to appreciate all that support. But the ropes—they were breaking. Snapping. One by one—she could hear them: little pops, little rips. But it was still all right. There were still so many ropes, holding her up. And she wasn’t that heavy. She didn’t need much.

  “Memorial Sloan-Kettering,” she said, trying to summon any authority she could access, if not for herself, then for the institution. Usually, even mention of the institution was enough. Though even as she did it, some part of her wondered: Is this the last time?

  “He’s a doctor there.”

  “Doctor of …?”

  “Medical doctor. Pediatric oncology. Cancer,” she said, in case—if only—they were idiots. “In children.”

  Mendoza sat back in his chair. For a long moment, he let this weighty thing hang in the open. He seemed to be scanning her for some coded information. Then, apparently, he made up his mind.

  There was a box on the table. A document box, nothing remarkable. It had been there when the three of them came in and sat down—perhaps that was why Grace had not paid much attention. Now, however, Mendoza reached across the table and dragged the box over to himself. He peeled off the top and dropped it on the seat beside him, then he reached inside and withdrew a file. It wasn’t very thick. That was good, wasn’t it? At least, in a medical file, thick was usually worse than thin. When he opened it, she was surprised to see the hospital’s familiar logo, a deconstructed caduceus in which Asclepius’s staff was an upward-pointing arrow and its entwining snakes transformed to postmodern crosses. She regarded this simple image with utter stupefaction.

  “Mrs. Sachs,” said O’Malley, “it’s possible you don’t know your husband no longer works at Memorial.”

  Snap.

  For a moment, she wasn’t sure what felt more shocking to her: what he said about Jonathan not working at the hospital or the fact that he had used the hospital’s familiar abbreviation. “No,” she said. “It’s not possible. I mean, I don’t know that.”

  He held up the paper and scrutinized it, leaving Grace to focus on that familiar logo through the sheet.

  “According to Dr. Robertson Sharp—”

  The Third, she added automatically. The Turd.

  “Dr. Jonathan Sachs’ employment was terminated on the first of March of this year.”

  Snap. Snap.

  He looked over the page at her. “You were not aware of this?”

  Say nothing, some frantic voice cautioned her. Don’t give them anything they can use to make it worse. So she shook her head.

  “Are you saying: No, you were not aware of this?”

  For posterity, she thought. For the paper trail.

  “I was not aware.” She managed to get the words out.

  “You were not aware that his termination followed two earlier disciplinary actions at the hospital?”

  She shook her head and then remembered. “No.”

  “And that it resulted from a third violation of the hospital’s code of conduct, requiring what the hospital’s legal counsel described as a permanent separation from the institution?”

  No. Snap snap.

  So. What’s Jonathan up to these days?

  “I want to stop this,” she told them. “Can we stop?”

  “No, unfortunately we’re not going to stop.”

  “And you’re telling me I don’t need a lawyer?”

  “Mrs. Sachs,” O’Rourke said angrily, “why would you need a lawyer? Are you hiding your husband? Because if you’re hiding him, then yes, you’re going to need a very good lawyer.”

  “But … No, I’m not!” Grace felt the heat in her face, in her throat. Though she wasn’t crying. And she wasn’t going to. “I thought he was at a medical conference. He said he was going to a medical conference.” Even to herself, she sounded pathetic. Grace-the-therapist wanted to scream at her. “In the Midwest.”

  “It’s a big place. Where in the Midwest?” Mendoza said.

  “I think … Ohio?”

  “Ohio.”

  “Or … Illinois?”

  O’Rourke snorted. “Or Indiana. Or Iowa. They all sound alike, don’t they?” />
  To a New Yorker, yes, they did. Like Saul Steinberg’s famous view of the world: Beyond the Hudson River, there was only “out there.”

  “I can’t remember what he said. There was a medical conference. Pediatric oncology. He’s …”

  But then she shuddered. Because apparently he wasn’t, anymore. Jesus Christ, Jonathan.

  “And he’s not in your apartment.”

  “No!” she yelled at them both. “I told you. He’s not.”

  “Though his phone seems to be. According to Verizon.”

  “Oh. Well, yes. His phone is there.”

  O’Rourke sat forward. His beard seemed to have grown more, even over the past hour. He must shave twice a day, Grace thought dimly. Jonathan shaved in the morning, though sometimes he missed a day if he was rushing away to work.

  “Your husband’s phone is in your apartment, but your husband is not.”

  Grace nodded, since this, at least, was a non-event. Or ought to be. “Right.”

  “A detail you might have mentioned,” O’Rourke said disapprovingly.

  She shrugged. It almost felt a little good to see him so irritated. “You didn’t ask where his phone was. You asked where he was. He forgot his phone at home—he left it. It’s not the first time he’s forgotten his phone. But so what? I found it last night, and that’s why I don’t know where he is. Because he forgot his phone and I can’t call him.”

  Quite the speech, she thought in conclusion. Grace-the-therapist thought: And this makes sense?

  “And that makes sense to you,” Mendoza said.

  She nearly laughed. No, of course it did not make sense. Sense was now rather hard to come by, in general.

  “Look, this …” Whatever this was. “What you’re telling me, about Jonathan, I’m not accusing you of making it up. And it’s terrible, and obviously I’ve got a lot to absorb here, but I still don’t see what it has to do with you. I mean, if it’s true that he lost his job, and hasn’t told me, then clearly—”