She laughed briefly. Then she tried it again.
“It was much more than my just not liking him. That guy you dated freshman year, I thought he was a total loser, and I didn’t have any problem telling you that.”
“Nope,” Grace confirmed, with a sigh.
“And I could see why you were drawn to Jonathan. He was magnetic, it was obvious. He was adorable, and so smart. But when he looked at me, and I mean even back on that first night, remember? When I came downstairs to look for you, and there you two were in the hallway? When he looked at me, it was like he was saying: You watch yourself. This is mine.”
Dumbstruck, Grace could only nod.
“So I felt, right from the beginning, that it was going to be a very, very delicate thing. Clearly adversarial. And first I just tried to make myself go back to the beginning with him. You know, start over and try to like him, or at least be neutral about it. But that didn’t help. And then I tried to just wait and see if you started to feel any of the things I was feeling, just on your own. But that didn’t happen either. And then I got kind of frantic about where you two were going. And I tried to talk to you about it.”
“No, you didn’t,” Grace interrupted her, but even as she said this, she did remember one particular night the following spring, when they had gone out for Scorpion Bowls, of all things, because it was Vita’s birthday and they’d never been, and it felt like something they at least ought to do once while they were living in Cambridge. That night—it was hard to get a grip on the details. It was hard to remember much at all, except, not surprisingly, the combined wallop of gin, rum, and vodka.
“Yes, I did,” Vita said, not unkindly. “I’m not saying I tried well. But I did try. Maybe it’s not the kind of thing you want to attempt in a state of inebriation, but without the inebriation I might not have tried at all. I asked you to tell me what it was you loved about him, and then I asked you to tell me, for every one of those things, how you knew they were true. And you said, more or less, because they just were. And I asked you why you thought he was so estranged from his family. Why he seemed to have no other friends. I asked you if you were worried about how quickly he’d kind of become the most important person in your life. I asked you if the reason he seemed so perfect for you was that you had made it really clear to him what perfect for you meant, and he gave you back exactly what you wanted, and I remember—”
“Wait,” said Grace, “how is that wrong? To find someone who gives you what you need from him? Isn’t that what we were looking for? Someone to do that?”
“Yes,” Vita said, staring unhappily into her now empty mug. “That’s what you said back then. That’s just what you said. But in his case it wasn’t that simple. There was nothing simple about him. Or maybe it just seems that clear in hindsight. I kept asking myself: Why don’t I like him? She likes him! She’s smarter than I am.”
“Vita, that’s not true,” Grace said, as if the point mattered at all.
“Well, I thought of you as smarter. I certainly felt pretty stupid at the time. I couldn’t be clear with myself about what I thought was wrong, for one thing. Back then I couldn’t. Jonathan looked great. He was at Harvard Medical School, for Christ’s sake. He was going to be a pediatrician. He never drank or smoked, unlike us, if you’ll recall.”
“Oh, I recall.”
“And he was all about you. I mean, from the word Go. All Gracie, all the time. So I had to start asking myself: Is this about jealousy? Am I jealous of this? I did have a boyfriend at the time, remember? He was there that night, too.”
“Joe,” Grace said simply. “Of course I remember.”
“Well, it wasn’t that. Then I even did the whole Children’s Hour bit on myself. I started thinking: Is there something I need to look at here? But it wasn’t that, either.”
“Oh, Vita,” Grace said. She couldn’t help smiling at this.
“Sure. Just … I was frantic to understand how upset I was. I even went to the counseling center at Tufts, but they just said: ‘Of course it hurts when your friend has less time for you.’ But I knew that wasn’t it. It was Jonathan. He made my heart pound, and not in a good way. And I just couldn’t put my finger on it. I couldn’t then,” she added darkly. “I think I could now.”
Now it was Grace’s heart that was pounding. Now they were at the door, she thought. They were at the door, which was still closed, but it was opening, too, and behind the door was a word she had so far kept penned to a place beyond her own awareness. She wasn’t ready for this. She didn’t want this. She reached frantically for a way to make this not happen. She was not remotely ready for the fact of that word.
“Well,” she said, inappropriately lighthearted, “hindsight is twenty-twenty. Live and learn.”
“You know,” Vita said carefully, “I’m sure this has been true of your patients every bit as much as mine, but sometimes when people come in they are so completely enmeshed in the ‘Great Mistake’ they feel they’ve made, that’s led to whatever crisis they’re in. That’s how I always think of it: the ‘Great Mistake.’ Usually it’s that first drink, or that first drug experience. Sometimes it’s a relationship. Or the Great Mistake is listening to someone’s bad advice. And whatever happens later, it all goes back to that moment or that decision, and they’d have been fine if only that one time they hadn’t screwed up. And I always sit there thinking: You know, that’s how it always works in a story or a film, but real lives aren’t like that. It doesn’t always come down to those two roads in a yellow wood, you know? And a lot of the time, no matter what you did back there at the crossroads, you’d have ended up wherever you are now. I’m not saying it wasn’t a mistake, just that it’s more complicated than that. You don’t have to be angry with yourself for a decision that brought some wonderful things into your life. Your son, for example.”
But Grace didn’t grab the bait. Yes, her son was wonderful. No, she did not regret one single decision she had ever made, whatever attendant mass destruction it had caused, that had helped bring Henry into the world and her own life. But she was distracted by what Vita had just said, because what Vita had just said was very much not the same as her own therapeutic outlook, at least in her long-ago life as a therapist. Because she actually did see human lives as a series of all-important decisions, some of which might magnanimously extend you a second chance, but many of which emphatically would not. Those patients who had come to her already clutching their Great Mistake, more often than not they knew precisely what they had done. Sometimes they were a tiny bit off—sometimes the patient was already speeding down the wrong road in that selfsame yellow wood when they arrived at what they had decided was their Great Mistake—but in general, yes, her work as a therapist had often meant going back to some moment of perceived error, and it was a terribly important part of her work to show them just where that junction was. Because only by doing that and taking ownership of that did you get to move forward.
Was it blame? Well, blame, that was a little strong. Blame might be counterproductive. But the stringing together of one decision and the next and the one after that into a clear narrative, a story line for a life as it was being lived, did she believe in that?
Oh yes. Oh, absolutely.
It was why she had so often wished she could tell her patients, and tell them—if possible—before they found it necessary to become her patients, Don’t make the Great Mistake in the first place.
Like I did, she thought now.
“Maybe I need a therapist,” she said as if Vita had been following all of this.
“Maybe you do,” said Vita mildly. “I certainly know some fantastic ones around here.”
“I’ve never done it,” Grace confessed. “They made us do some in graduate school, of course. But otherwise, I’ve never done it.” She considered this for a minute. “Is that strange?”
“Strange?” Vita pursed her lips. “No stranger than a dentist who doesn’t floss. I’m only slightly amazed.”
“I gather y
ou’ve been in therapy.”
“Oh, a ton, yeah. Some are greater than others, but it’s never not been helpful. Louise wouldn’t even be alive if Pete and I hadn’t found a really good couples therapist at one point. I’m so grateful for that.” She looked squarely across the desk. “Gracie?”
Grace looked at her. Vita had called her Gracie. No one else ever had. When Vita had left her life, the nickname had left it, too, and that was sad. Grace’s mother had once told her that her own mother, for whom Grace had been named, was also nicknamed Gracie.
“I made a Great Mistake,” she said sadly. “I have no business telling anybody else what to do with their life. I can’t imagine how I ever had the arrogance.”
“Oh, that’s ridiculous,” Vita said. “People may need kindness from their therapists and they may need to learn how to be kinder to themselves, but they also need clarity. You are extraordinarily gifted at that. You’re a great therapist.”
Grace looked up at her sharply. “You can’t possibly know that,” she said. “By the time I was in grad school we weren’t speaking to each other. How can you know what kind of a therapist I was?”
Vita swiveled in her heavy chair. As Grace watched, she reached out and put her hand on an object that was instantly familiar, just so unexpected that she could not understand why it was here, in this room. Or why she had not noticed it until now.
“This,” said Vita, tossing the bound galley on the desktop, “is a very, very fine piece of work.”
Jesus, Grace thought. She might have said it aloud. The galley was far from pristine; clearly, it had been read, possibly more than once. It was the first time she had ever seen a galley of her own book that had already been read, its pages turned, some corners bent down. How often had she imagined, as most authors must imagine, watching a stranger—on a subway, say—reading a book she had written. She had imagined her colleagues reading her book, wishing they’d thought of some of her ideas. She had imagined her teachers reading, learning something from her, the former student. Mama Rose, especially. She thought of Mama Rose in her bower, seated on one of her big kilim floor pillows, holding open the galley in her lap, nodding along and feeling persuaded by Grace, formerly her pupil, now like an equal, almost a teacher! That had not happened. None of it was going to happen now. “I don’t understand. How do you have that?” she asked Vita.
“I do some reviewing for the Daily Hampshire Gazette, if they have a psychology book. This one, though, I’ll be completely honest, I asked for. I was curious. But it blew me away, Gracie. And if you’re asking do I agree with every single thing you wrote? No, of course not, any more than you’d agree with everything in a book I wrote. But what comes through is your care for your patients, and how smart you are about the ways we do ourselves in. This is so valuable.”
She shook her head. “No, it isn’t. It’s just me telling people they screwed up. It’s just me being a bitch.”
Vita threw her head back and laughed, and her hair—that long, graying hair—moved over her black shirt in a kind of ripple of silver. She laughed for what seemed a very long time, certainly longer than the occasion warranted.
“This is funny?” Grace said at last.
“Yes, very funny. I was just thinking that, to women like us, it’s more of an insult to be called nice than to be called a bitch.”
“Women like us?”
“Tough, bitchy, Jewish, feminist, New York women. Like us. Yes?”
“Oh, well …” Grace smiled. “If you put it like that.”
“And the truth is, the world is full of therapists who’ll sit you down, take your money, massage your self-esteem, and send you on your way, without ever helping you understand how you helped create the circumstances that brought you here.”
Grace nodded. That much was certainly true.
“They’re like, ‘Let’s figure out who to blame, then we can blame them, then we’re done.’ Do we need more of these therapists? We do not. Do they help anyone? Well, sometimes. Anything is going to help some patients sometimes. But as someone who works with patients who are grappling with horrendously powerful addictions, let me tell you that giving them kindness alone is like giving them an overcooked noodle and sending them off to slay a dragon.”
She leaned back in her swivel chair and braced her legs against the wall. There was a big dark mark there already.
“To tell you the truth, I think the kindness part is the easy part. Most people are basically kind already, so most therapists are basically kind, right off the bat. But there’s so much more to being really able to help your patients. Maybe you—I mean you, Gracie—work best at the other end of the spectrum. Super. So maybe you get to cultivate a little more kindness, over your entire career, say. Then you can do that. But you have a lot to offer. When you’re ready, I mean.”
“What?” Grace frowned.
“When you’re ready to start again. I can help you, if you want. I mean, I can introduce you to some people. I work with some group practices in Great Barrington, for example.”
There was something about this that Grace was not fully processing. After a bit, she gave up and said, again: “What?”
Vita sat up straight in her chair. “I’d like to help. Is that all right?”
“Help me join a group practice in Great Barrington?” she said, mystified. Until that moment, she had not realized how completely she had detached from the idea of herself as a therapist. She had placed it on an ice floe and watched it float away, not even waving.
Which only meant that she herself was now stranded on some arctic edge, perhaps already beginning that long, drifting decline that had so fascinated Jonathan. In that story, the one he had loved, about the man and the dog and the lost fire, the man makes only a single panicked bolt for survival before giving up, letting the sweet numb cold pull him out of life, but the dog trots onward, thoughtlessly in search of another man and another fire. He isn’t tortured about it. He’s just programmed to live. That was Jonathan, she supposed. If one scenario didn’t work out, you just trotted along through the snow to the next.
Grace looked over at Vita. She could not remember what the question had been or whether Vita had answered it. “I don’t know,” she managed. “I’m figuring things out.”
Vita smiled. “No sweat. Open offer. I just … I hated to think you might be in need of an old friend, and not realize you had one just over the state line. It has to be gruesome, what you’re dealing with, Grace.”
After another moment she added, a little awkwardly, “I think I told you, I still get the New York Times.”
Grace looked at her. She was looking for disapproval, for outright schadenfreude, even. But in Vita’s face she saw only that much maligned human frailty known as kindness.
She couldn’t think what to say to it.
How about: Thank you?
“Thank you,” said Grace.
“No, no, don’t thank me. I’m just so fucking grateful to be in the same room with you, I want to do whatever I can to keep you here. Metaphorically, of course. You probably have to be somewhere else.”
Grace nodded. She did indeed have to be somewhere else. She had to go pick up Henry at the Housatonic Valley Regional School and take him for greasy pizza in Lakeville. She got to her feet, and almost immediately she felt horribly awkward. “Well, this was really nice.”
“Oh, shut up,” said Vita, coming around the desk. “Do I need to warn you this time? Or can I just go ahead and hug you?”
“No,” Grace said. She wanted to laugh. “I still need a warning.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
A COUPLE OF MISSING FINGERS
Robertson Sharp III preferred not to meet in his office, for reasons Grace had no real wish to probe, but when he arrived—late—for their appointment, he had barely settled himself into the booth before he unburdened himself about the breadth of his conflict.
“I want you to know,” he said gruffly, “that it is not the wish of the board that we speak to each o
ther.” Then, as if this were all that needed to be said, he picked up the menu and started examining it.
The menu was vast. The place he had chosen was the Silver Star on 65th and Second, a coffee shop so eternal that she had once broken up with a boyfriend in one of the booths on the other side of the room. There was a long countertop where you could get a serious, if stodgily old-fashioned, drink (like a highball or a gimlet) and, just inside the door, a standing glass case full of revolving cakes and colossal éclairs and napoleons.
Grace said nothing in response; she didn’t think it was necessary, and also she didn’t want to be antagonistic if she didn’t have to be. He was doing her a favor, even if his board hadn’t objected. That he was seeing her at all—the wife of a former employee, a terminated employee!—she supposed she appreciated. Though she also wanted to kick him under the table.
Sharp was a big man, long-legged, well enough dressed in a blue bow tie and a shirt of narrow brown and white stripes, over which he wore his very clean, very pressed white coat. His name—his real name, not the one Jonathan had given him—was embroidered on the breast pocket, out of which peeked two pens and a cell phone. Then, amiably enough, as if his previous comment belonged to an entirely different encounter, he said: “What are you going to have?”
“Oh, maybe a tuna fish sandwich. You?”
“That sounds good.” He slapped the heavy laminated menu shut and dropped it on the table.
Then they looked at each other.
Robertson Sharp, known for years within her own household as “the Turd,” Jonathan’s attending physician for the first four of his years at Memorial and later the chief of pediatrics, seemed to have momentarily forgotten why he was here. Then he seemed to remember again.
“I was asked not to meet with you.”
“Yes,” Grace said mildly. “You mentioned that.”
“But I thought if you were motivated to reach out to me personally, you certainly have a right to whatever insight I can offer. Obviously, this has been a horrendous experience for you. And …” He seemed to search his own database for any available information but came up with nothing. “Your family.”
The Undoing Page 35
