A small woman rushed up beside her and took her elbow. It was Sylvia, and she seemed determined to stay alongside.
“I have to—,” she tried to say.
“Come on,” said Sylvia. “There’s a cab.”
It had stopped for a light at the corner of Park, but with the peripheral vision that increased survival for New York cabbies from all four corners of the world, he saw the two women walking swiftly in his direction and immediately put on his right directional, to the predictable dismay of the cabdriver directly behind him. By the time Sylvia had the door open, the second driver had already honked twice.
“I can’t,” Grace said again once she had actually climbed inside. “I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t be,” Sylvia said simply. Then she asked the driver to take them to Madison and 83rd. Grace, through the fog of her irritation and the vastness of her distress, tried to figure out what was at Madison and 83rd, but she could picture only the coffee shop on the corner. She couldn’t remember its name, but it was the one Meryl Streep had watched her son from in Kramer vs. Kramer. At least, there used to be a framed photo of the scene, on the wall behind where the cashier sat. To her mild surprise, this was exactly where Sylvia asked the driver to stop.
Sylvia had refrained from speaking during the five minutes it had taken to drive, and Grace—who had brought her narrow reserves to bear on the challenge of not falling apart while riding in the backseat of a cab with a person she was not exactly on intimate terms with, to an uncertain destination, for an unknown purpose—had not said anything either. Now, watching Sylvia pay the driver, she wondered if she was supposed to know what was happening.
“Come on,” Sylvia said. “I think coffee for us both. Unless you need a drink.”
To her own surprise, Grace laughed out loud.
“Well, thank God for that,” said Sylvia.
They took a booth near the back, just under the Heimlich maneuver poster, and Sylvia practically barked at the waiter—“Coffee, please”—who performed the classic New York grunt of understanding with great economy. Grace had nothing to say and nowhere to look. She was baffled by the mere fact of being here with Sylvia Steinmetz. Why her? Only because she had made the effort?
But then it occurred to her that this—that Sylvia Steinmetz—was now what passed for a friend in her life. It seemed impossible, but it wasn’t. She could not comprehend how she had allowed this to happen.
Sylvia said something Grace did not quite make out, so she asked her to say it again.
“I said: I had no idea this was happening to you, until this morning. Sally e-mailed me this morning.”
“Fuck Sally,” said Grace. Then she laughed again, even less appropriately.
“Right. But irrelevant. Those reporters weren’t there because Sally told them.”
“But—” She stopped as the waiter brought two white mugs of black coffee, sloshing a little over the edge. “But I don’t think they knew me. They didn’t seem any more interested in me than in anyone else.”
Sylvia nodded. “That won’t last much longer. You have a few hours, I think. I wouldn’t count on more.”
And then Grace understood that she had been much too accustomed to thinking of her life in exactly the wrong way—in sort of a spatial way, which was no longer viable. It mattered very little, for example, that she had long seen herself as part of a little family, ringed in by parents and colleagues, then by acquaintances, and then by the city that had always been her home. Whether or not this topography was still accurate didn’t matter at all, because the question wasn’t relevant; what mattered now, as of this morning, was the temporal reality, not the topographical one. What mattered was the fact that her life, the one she had cherished, was rushing to its end. Rushing, rushing, as into a brick wall, and she knew there wasn’t a thing she could do to stop it.
“I’m sorry,” Sylvia said. “I went through this with a client once. We had a little more time.”
Grace’s head was still spinning. Ordinarily, she might have wanted first to satisfy her own curiosity. Sylvia represented workers who’d been unfairly terminated or who brought harassment suits of various hues. Which client? What had she done, or what had been done to her? Was she someone Grace might have read about—in the Times or New York magazine? She used to devour stories like this. They were so interesting. People were so interesting, the messes they made of their lives.
But she couldn’t afford the distraction.
“What did you do?” she asked instead.
Sylvia frowned. “Well, we got her into a new home. We moved her bank accounts—they were joint accounts with her business partner, but he’d absconded with a lot. We also hired a crisis manager for her.” She looked up at Grace. “But she had a public profile already. That was different.”
Grace looked at her. She had never heard Sylvia speak about her work, at least beyond generalities. It was a different Sylvia, sitting across from her in the booth, stirring thin milk from a metal pitcher into her coffee till it threatened to overflow the rim.
“How did it turn out?” Grace asked.
“It was a long haul,” said Sylvia shortly. “But it’s better not to focus on that. It’s better to think about what you can do now.”
A shudder went through Grace. She felt the way she had for a brief time in college, when she’d let herself be persuaded to serve as coxswain for the women’s crew. She’d been good at the actual manipulation of the shell, the management of the personalities, and even the strategizing of the race itself, but she couldn’t bear the hour before the meet. An hour of purest fear, purest dread, an absolute conviction that she—and never the eight tall, powerful women facing her in the narrow shell—was about to ruin everything.
She bent forward over her coffee, and possibly it was the coffee, the heat of the coffee, that flew up into her eyes and cheeks and made her wonder if she was either about to cry or indeed already crying.
“Okay,” she managed. Then she took a breath to steady herself and straightened up. Sylvia seemed to be waiting. “Just … first,” she finally managed, “before I can do anything, I have to ask you. What do you know?”
Sylvia shook her head firmly. “I don’t know anything at all. I want to be clear about that. I haven’t accepted as fact anything I might have been told. My standard of proof is way too high for that.”
“Okay,” Grace said. Then, because it seemed appropriate, she said: “Thanks.”
“But what I’ve been told was that Jonathan had some kind of involvement with Malaga, and that the police want to talk to him, but he’s missing. And also that you know where he is and aren’t telling them. Which I can’t believe at all.”
“Good,” Grace said shortly, as if this were some kind of relief.
“Which part of it is good?” Sylvia asked, tearing a packet of Sweet’N Low and fluttering the contents into her cup.
“The part about not believing I know where he is and I’m hiding him. I’m not brave enough to do that. Or crazy enough. I don’t know where he is. I just … This just …” But she gave up.
“Did he know her? Malaga?”
“Well … the little boy was a patient at Memorial. They told me that, and I guess I believe them. The rest of it is all …”
But she stopped herself. All what? A vicious lie? She knew it wasn’t. She knew there was more, she was just letting it in as slowly as she possibly could. And she wasn’t going to proclaim his innocence to anyone. Let him proclaim his own innocence. And let him show up to do it, thanks.
“Well,” said Sylvia to her surprise, “that does make sense.”
“Really.”
“Yes. I’m going to tell you something that you may already know. But if you don’t, I need you to pretend that you know it. I’m in a bit of a liminal place here.”
Grace stared at her. “Am I supposed to understand what you mean?”
Sylvia sighed. “I guess not. I hoped you would, but I was afraid you wouldn’t.”
; “You’re acting very lawyerly,” Grace snapped. It sounded unkind. Well, she was feeling distinctly unkind at the moment. Sylvia would just have to adapt.
Sylvia turned the white mug between her palms, rotating the handle between ten and two. “He hired me. Back in February.”
“Hired you,” Grace said in disbelief. It came out sounding like an insult. She was sorry for that.
“Yes. He called, made an appointment, came in, and signed a document hiring me formally to represent him.”
“Jesus,” Grace muttered. “In February.”
“There was going to be a disciplinary hearing. He wanted advice.” She took a sip of her coffee, winced in displeasure, and set it down. “You knew about the hearing?”
Grace shook her head.
Sylvia started to roll the mug between her palms again. “I never asked him, point-blank, whether you knew. All these months, whenever we ran into each other, or doing benefit stuff, I always wondered. But I couldn’t say anything, not unless he brought you in himself, to my office. It was privileged. You understand.”
She nodded. She did understand. She was bound to her own clients the same way. But then, she didn’t know the people in their lives. She didn’t walk to school with them or sit on committee meetings with them. It wasn’t fair.
“And it’s still privileged, technically,” Sylvia went on. “I should not be having this conversation with you. The fact that he’s a suspect now, or that we’re friends, it’s not relevant. And I can’t take the slightest chance of being disbarred.” She stopped. She seemed to be waiting for something from Grace, but Grace wasn’t sure what it was.
“I can’t be disbarred. I’m a single parent.”
She waited again. Grace just looked at her.
“Grace, do you want me to continue?”
“Oh,” she said, getting it. “Yes. I understand. I wouldn’t do that to you.”
Sylvia sighed. “All right. He only came once. He didn’t like the advice I gave him, which was to apologize to hospital administration, and accept any arrangement they offered. Just to try to avert outright dismissal. That was not what he had in mind at all.”
“What … did he have in mind?”
“He wanted to go after his bosses. He said one was a plagiarist, another was a pedophile. He wanted me to let them know he’d talk to the press if they went ahead with the hearing. He thought he was paying me for that, and I’d just do it. It’s pretty common for clients to make that kind of assumption,” she said, as if she were trying to be kind. “But even if he had some proof, even if it was relevant to his circumstances, somehow, which it obviously wasn’t, I just don’t have the stomach for that in my practice. I need to look at myself in the mirror when I brush my teeth, you know?”
Grace nodded, but she was losing the drift. Which one was the plagiarist? Was it Robertson Sharp-the-Turd? It was hard to believe that Jonathan, in all of his rants about Robertson Sharp-the-Turd, had never mentioned a crime as egregious, and easily proven, as plagiarism.
“I looked over the paperwork he brought me and I told him, There’s too much here. They have more than enough to fire you. Go in and plead with them, say you’ll take rehab—”
“Rehab!” Grace practically shouted. “For what?”
“Whatever they wanted,” Sylvia said tightly. “However they wanted to package it in terms of a disability, that would have been ideal. And they were offering him something like that, but he wouldn’t consider it. He told me …”
But she stopped herself. She took a deep breath, lifted her mug again, and then remembered and set it back down.
“Actually,” she said, aiming for something sardonic, something less than horrific, “he told me to go fuck myself. But you know, he was under enormous pressure. I wished him good luck, and I meant it.”
Grace squeezed her eyes shut. She had to stop herself from apologizing.
“I don’t even know what happened with the hearing,” Sylvia said.
She took a breath. “According to the police, they fired him,” she said. It came out sounding miraculously like old news. “I didn’t know anything about it till last night. All these months …” She took a breath. “I guess, when he told me he was at work, he wasn’t.” It sounded so utterly lame, she thought. It was perhaps the single lamest sentence she had ever uttered. “I don’t know anything. I don’t know how I’m supposed to do this.”
“Well, let me help you,” Sylvia said earnestly. “I can try, anyway. So listen to me, because I have two things to tell you. First of all, if you know where he is, tell them.”
She shook her head vigorously. “I don’t. I don’t have any idea. I’ve already told them so.”
Their waiter was back. Were they going to order anything? Sylvia asked for the check.
When he went away again, she said, “It’s very important that you cooperate with them. The sooner they make it clear you’re not involved, the better you’ll be treated in the media.”
“All right,” Grace said, though she hated the thought of “cooperating” with Mendoza and O’Rourke.
“And the other thing, actually the most important thing you can do right now is get yourself and your kid out of the way.” She leaned forward, moving aside her full coffee mug. “Jonathan, whatever his reasoning, did not stick around for this. So he gets to miss the circus, whenever it happens. Tonight. Or tomorrow at the latest. But you’re here, and they have to point the camera somewhere. Take Henry and find somewhere to go. Somewhere out of New York.”
“Why out of New York?” she said, horrified.
“Because right now it’s a New York story. And as long as it’s a New York story, news crews from outside the city aren’t going to be as dedicated. And the New York outlets aren’t going to field crews to … I don’t know, Arizona or Georgia. Not for the wife. With him, it would be different, but right now you can’t think about him.”
Grace, who’d managed, more or less, to follow until this last part, asked her to explain what that meant.
“I mean, when they find him, and they’re going to find him, it will be everywhere. Just … be somewhere else until it happens, and be somewhere else when it happens.”
She paused. “I forget. Are your parents here?”
“My father,” Grace said.
“Siblings?”
“No.”
“Close friends?”
Vita, she thought immediately. But she had not spoken to Vita in such a long time. And there was no one else. How had she let this happen?
“Not really. It was always …”
Me and Jonathan, she was going to say. Jonathan and me. They had been together nearly twenty years. Who made it to twenty years anymore? Who had those long-and-great marriages that her parents’ generation enjoyed, with multigenerational safaris to Africa and family compounds on a lakefront or a shore somewhere, and big raucous parties for the milestone anniversaries? Only marriage therapists, she thought ruefully.
“But …,” she started to say. She was thinking: my patients. She could not walk away from her patients. That was not allowed. That was not ethical. Lisa and her missing gay husband and bewildered children, Sarah and her enraged, failed screenwriter who had deigned to move back in. She had responsibilities.
And her book. What about her book?
She could not bear to think about her book.
And then she felt as if she had taken hold of the very tight lid of a very old jar, very, very deep inside her, and let the tiniest breath of its contents escape through the tiniest of breaches, and even that was enough to bring her down. Acrid shame. The most powerful, the most poisonous, of human essences. It took only an instant to be absolutely everywhere.
“I’m sorry,” Sylvia said, though if she felt real pity, she was kind enough not to show it. “Listen,” she said with great care, “I know we don’t think of ourselves as close friends, but I do want you to know you can call on me.” She stopped. Then she frowned at Grace. “Should I say that again?”
<
br /> Grace shook her head and said no, but the truth was that she had stopped listening again and really wasn’t at all sure.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
TO SEARCH FOR AND TO SEIZE
“They’re upstairs,” her doorman told her, unnecessarily. She had seen the cars and the two vans, one marked NYPD, one something else, she couldn’t make it out, as soon as she’d rounded the corner from Madison, and for a long time she had stood there, alternately resigned to it and not, then trying to understand why she could not seem to stand up straight while she worked it out. (Because of food, she reminded herself. Because you need to eat something soon—idiot—or just give up completely.) And then she went on, little lamb that she was, down the lane to the slaughterhouse.
“Okay,” she told him. Then, ridiculously, she said thank you.
“They had a warrant. We had to let them in.”
“Sure,” she said. His name was Frank. She had bought a baby gift for his newborn, back in the summer. Julianna, that was the baby’s name. “How is Julianna?” she asked absurdly, and he smiled but said nothing. Instead, as if it were any other day, he walked alongside her to the elevator and waited until the door closed.
Inside, she leaned heavily against the elevator wall and closed her eyes. How far down would this go? she wondered. If I get through today, if I get through tomorrow. How long would it last? On which morning would she get to wake up back in her own life?
But even as she stood—leaned—thinking about that life, it was leaking away, disassembling itself, little bits of it detaching and flying off. So much lost, so quickly; she could barely track the slippage. Ever since Wednesday, and the news about Malaga. No, since Monday, the day of Jonathan’s departure. The day Malaga had died. (She couldn’t think about that yet. She was nowhere near ready for that.) But wait, of course it had begun far earlier—long, long before that. How long? How many years? How far back did it go?
But that was an equation for another day. The elevator stopped at her floor, and when the door slid open she saw the official notice, photocopied into a blur, fastened to the front door with a kind of tape that was bound to strip paint on removal, and realized to her own immense sadness that she didn’t even care, because she didn’t live here anymore.
The Undoing Page 26
