Grace closed her eyes. All right. She had had to do that. She had had to follow it that far.
Now, though, her head was going somewhere else, and because she had no strength left to fight with herself, she went there, too, and the place it took her to was back again to the basement of the medical school dormitory at Harvard. She remembered the messy room upstairs where he had made love to her for the first time (medical students are very basic creatures), and then, methodically, all of the rooms in which he had made love to her ever since. But there were too many of them and they were too disparate: Maine and London and Los Angeles and the apartment near Memorial and the apartment she had grown up in on 81st Street. And here, right upstairs in this very house, where it was unimaginably cold in the winter, as she now knew. And Paris. There were three trips to Paris over the years, but different hotels. How was she supposed to count them?
She thought of pregnancy and then Henry’s birth, and the nights getting up with him because he didn’t sleep well for the longest time, and how Jonathan would take the baby and say, “Go back to sleep, it’s fine.” And the playground on First Avenue where she had sat with Henry in the stroller on summer afternoons, waiting for Jonathan to sneak away from the hospital and sit with them for half an hour, the same playground where her son had later played with Jonah, who would one day stop speaking to him, the same playground where Henry had once stopped his father on the pavement as an unknown woman continued silently on. She thought of interviews with kindergarten evaluators all over Manhattan (because she was afraid Rearden wouldn’t take Henry—stupidly afraid), in which Jonathan had spoken so warmly about the kind of education he hoped his son would have, charming them one after another. Henry got in almost everywhere. And dinners at Eva’s house on his best behavior, and countless dinners at their own dining table, and kitchen table, and the table at which she was sitting right now, right at this moment. Oh yes, and the one time he had come to her office with Russian burgers from Neil’s, but they had not eaten them, or not right away. First, they had made love on her office couch. She had forgotten that time.
She thought of every single room in their apartment on 81st Street—her apartment, in which she had been a child first, and then a wife and mother, and then, briefly, an abandoned, terrified shell of a person waiting for annihilation. The parquet wood in the hallway, the dining room shutters, always kept closed by Grace’s mother and always kept open by her. And Henry’s room that was once her room. And Jonathan’s office that had once been her father’s den. And the kitchen that was once her mother’s and then became hers, and the bathtub and the bed and the bottles of Marjorie I and Marjorie II and Marjorie III, poured down the drain. And the jewels, one for every infidelity of an unfaithful husband who still loved his wife but could not be happy with her.
She would never live there again. This was the moment it finally broke through to her. That apartment, that home, was gone. Like her marriage. Like her husband, who was now thousands of miles away in a cold place, asking for her forgiveness.
Wait. But he wasn’t asking for that. She was sure before she took up the letter again, but she looked anyway, to be almost clinically thorough. This felt important—an important point. Jonathan, in the lines he had written himself, spoke of wanting to protect her and having lost control. He spoke of his own suffering. He said she would get through it. But he did not speak of forgiveness. Perhaps he knew there was too much he would need to be forgiven for, too much to be contained in even a letter like this. Or perhaps he did not think he needed to be forgiven at all.
So she went back again, further this time and broader. She thought beyond the boundaries of just her own story with Jonathan, to the story before and the story beside that story, and slowly it began to change and to look very different from what it had looked like before, only a few minutes ago. This time Grace saw the little brother who was sick and had to stay home from the bat mitzvah. She saw the father and mother he had walked away from, and the brother he had casually called a ne’er-do-well, an indulged boy-man who had never worked, who lived in his parents’ basement. She saw the woman in Baltimore with whom Jonathan had mysteriously lived while in college. The time he had disappeared for three days when he was a resident. And the money he had taken from her father, to buy tuition for a boy at their own son’s school. And the doctor he had hit: Ross Waycaster. And the lawyer he had consulted about the termination of his employment and told to go fuck herself. And the patients he had not just admitted to the hospital this afternoon. And the funeral in Brooklyn he had not just attended for an eight-year-old boy who had not just died of cancer. And the New York magazine editor who was also the aunt of Jonathan’s patient. And the medical conference in Cleveland, or Cincinnati, somewhere in the Midwest, that wasn’t in any of those places because it wasn’t anywhere at all. And Rena Chang, who might live in Sedona now and might have a baby who might be her husband’s child. Grace would never know the baby. She did not want to know it. But then she thought of the other baby, the one who would grow up on Long Island: That baby she would have to know for the rest of her life.
And Grace thought of Malaga Alves, who was dead.
She got to her feet and went to the back door and stepped out onto the porch, breathing deeply. Sherlock was on the dock, standing at attention, alert to some animal in the woods. He wagged vaguely when he heard the door, but he declined to be distracted. She went down the steps and out to him and stood there too for a few minutes, wondering what it was he saw or smelled. There might be something in the woods; it was a little early, but possible, she supposed. By summer the woods were full of animals, and the houses were full of people. The lake itself was stirring, she decided; everything down there would come back up, and the birds would come back—they always came back in the spring. She reached down to stroke the dog’s head.
A long way off, she heard a strain of fiddle, coming over the water in stops and starts, the wind blowing it toward her from Leo’s house. Now, because she knew what it was and where it was coming from, the sound seemed far clearer than it had her first weeks here, when she’d sat on the dock wondering what kind of music she was hearing and who was making it. Now, though, there was a tentativeness to the playing. It wasn’t confident or fast, the way it had always been in the past. It wasn’t very sure of itself. But it was pretty. She closed her eyes. This was Henry, she realized. Not Rory or Leo. Henry was playing the violin. Henry, she corrected herself, was playing the fiddle.
I loved my marriage, she suddenly thought. She did not know why it seemed so important to admit this. But she had, and she did, and now that was over, too.
Then she went inside to find the business card Detective Mendoza had given her, a very long time ago.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
SOMEBODY ELSE ENTIRELY
“About fucking time,” said Sarabeth. She had picked her up off hold after a scant five seconds. “Do you know how many messages I left for you?”
“I’m sorry,” Grace said. “Sorry,” she was well aware, wouldn’t be cutting it. But it was what she had.
“No, seriously. I left, I don’t know, twenty messages, Grace. I hope you know I was trying to support you.”
She nodded, as if Sarabeth could see her.
“I ran away,” she said simply. “I was trying to get lost.”
“And I completely understand that,” Sarabeth said. With that, her tone had shifted. “I have just been incredibly worried about you. Business aside. As a friend.”
“Well …” Grace sighed. “I thank you for that. And I apologize. I am so extremely sorry for leaving you in the lurch, and I promise you, it will not happen again.”
But then, why would it? Grace asked herself. After today, after this phone call, they would never have anything to talk about again. And Sarabeth was hardly going to stay on as her friend.
“Hang on,” said Sarabeth. Grace heard her say, to someone else, “Tell him I’ll call him back …
“So listen,” she went o
n, “can you come in and talk to us? I think the best thing is for all of us to sit down together and figure it out.”
Grace frowned at the wooden tabletop. She was at her own kitchen table on 81st Street. The surface hadn’t been cleaned for a long time and was visibly grimy.
“I’d rather not, to tell you the truth. Whatever they have to say, and I know they have a lot, and they’re absolutely justified, can’t you just pass it along to me? Financially, I’m totally prepared to reimburse them. I haven’t looked at the contract lately, but I’m aware of my obligation, and I intend to meet it.”
There was a long moment of rare Sarabeth silence. Then she said: “Well, this is what happens when people don’t answer twenty messages. They fill in their own side of the conversation that isn’t happening, and it’s never the right conversation. For example, I can assure you that Maud has no interest in being reimbursed. They pulled it for January, of course. But they still want to publish your book.”
Grace heard the rain. She looked up, across the kitchen to the window. Rain was drumming on the air-conditioning unit, and it was suddenly dark outside. She had no idea what Sarabeth was talking about.
“Look, the last thing I want to do is be crude about this. But. You’ve gone from being the unknown first-time author of a fascinating, intelligent book to a very different kind of author, of a book that a lot of people are going to be interested in. That is a very major transition, to be handled with dignity and great care. I can assure you that your publisher has absolutely no desire to exploit you, Grace.”
Grace couldn’t help it. She laughed.
“Right,” she said. “I believe that.”
“Yes. Right. I’ve known Maud for ten years. I’ve done at least twenty books with her. She is scary smart, and she is very good at her job, but if she weren’t a decent human being, I would never have given her your book in the first place. Now that this has happened, I’m happier than ever that your book ended up with her. In fact, if you came to me today with that book, she’s the first person I’d want it to go to.”
Grace still said nothing. But now she was at least thinking about it.
“Where are you?” Sarabeth said. “Do you realize I have no idea where you’re calling from? Where have you been for the last three months?”
“I took my son to Connecticut. We have a house there. A summer house, we’ve never lived there in the winter. But it’s been good, actually. We’re going to stay. I’m in New York now, though. I’m packing up the apartment.”
“What about your practice?” Sarabeth said.
“I’m opening a practice in Great Barrington. Massachusetts,” she clarified.
“Wait, you’re in the city right now?” said Sarabeth. “Can you come into the office?”
“No,” said Grace. “I’m just packing. I sold my apartment, and I have movers coming in three days. I can’t do anything. Besides, I need to think about this. I honestly … I thought we were done with the book. I kind of put it out of my mind.”
“Oh, we are so not done.” Sarabeth laughed. “In fact, I’m sure Maud’s going to want you to write a new foreword. And there may be other things in the book you want to look at again. I think there’s an even more nuanced and resonant book here, actually. An important book with the potential to reach a lot of people. Look, I hate that this happened to you, Grace, I really do. But I know at least one good thing that can come out of it. When can you come in and talk?”
She named a day the following week, then thought again and suggested two weeks after that. She would be back in the city that day, for the closing. Then she said she was sorry another time, and Sarabeth said it was all right another time, and they hung up.
It was raining even harder now, and the apartment was chilly. March was a grim month anywhere, but even in the city, where most seasons were beautiful to her, February and March had always been a bit of an exception. Even if she loved New York City far too much to leave it forever, she could stand to miss this time of year.
It was her second day here, packing full-time. Packing and sorting and throwing many things away. She had dreaded it, naturally, yet it had amazed her how quickly the sheer weight of logistical detail had silenced the blare of her great sadness. There were thousands of objects, every single one of which was stuck to a history, banal or profound, desperately happy or desperately sad. But every single one of them also had to be dispatched before Moishe’s Movers arrived on Thursday. She was almost forty years old and finally leaving home.
Luckily, she had strategized all the way down to the city and for a few weeks beforehand. There were things to go to Connecticut—lots of them. Almost everything that was Henry’s, except for some clothes he had already outgrown. Most but not all of her own clothes, because now she mainly wore jeans to work, something she could not have done in the city but that her Great Barrington patients (three, so far) did not seem to mind at all. Her books. Some furniture and paintings that she loved too much to leave behind and things from the kitchen she’d been sorely missing.
That was the easy part.
There were so many things she would not be taking with her. They heaped themselves up together in an imaginary room, vast and crammed. Everything of Jonathan’s, for instance: objects belonging to Jonathan, objects loved by Jonathan. Also things of the marriage, not his in particular or hers, but tainted by association: coffee mugs, telephones, an umbrella stand. They were all going, too. She never wanted to see them again.
Actually, that part also turned out to be surprisingly easy.
The Birkin bag, the object of beauty, the single item of obvious status she had ever desired for herself, and which had been kept so carefully in her closet and so rarely worn—Jonathan had given it to her, and there was no pleasure in it anymore. Still, it was going to hurt, letting it go. Tenderly she placed it into its soft orange bag and carried it to Encore on Madison, where she had resigned herself to accepting a fraction of its value. But they declined to take it from her.
“It’s a copy,” said the Frenchwoman who guarded the case of Vuitton and Chloé and Hermès. She made a smacking sound with her mouth, as if it offended her to have to touch it. “Good-quality copy, but a copy nevertheless.”
No, no, Grace had started to say. About this, she was sure. She was absolutely sure. She stood there in the second-floor room, jammed with clothing, jammed with women. She was remembering the birthday, the big orange box, how the two of them had laughed about Jonathan’s great faux pas at Hermès, just walking in and expecting to leave with a Birkin bag. It was a funny story, a self-effacing story, a story that had made her love him for his sweet naïveté, his willingness to persevere even in the face of supercilious salespeople who were clearly laughing at him. But that was a made-up story, too. She left with the Birkin, and then she left the Birkin, still in its soft orange sack, in the garbage can on the corner of 81st and Madison.
In the end, that hadn’t hurt, either.
What hurt enough to make up for what didn’t hurt were the photographs—albums of them and walls full of framed portraits and candid shots: her husband, her son, herself, separately and together. Jonathan could not be removed from those, and she couldn’t throw them away—they were her history, and Henry’s—but she couldn’t stand the idea of living in the same house with them. They were going to Eva’s place on Long Island, of all places. Her father, in an act of considerable kindness, was coming to collect them specifically, tomorrow, and take them away to a place where she would not have to share space with them, but where they could be kept until Henry—or perhaps just possibly she—was ready.
He was also bringing her mother’s china, all twenty settings of the Haviland Limoges Art Deco, packed by Eva herself. That would go to Connecticut, too, and somehow room would be found for it in the rustic little house. Amid the general devastation, she was a tiny bit elated. She had tried—and, she feared, completely failed—to convey to Eva how much she appreciated the gifts, but Eva proved to be as uncomfortable with
the subject as she was herself. “Don’t be silly,” she told Grace. “If I’d had any idea you wanted it. You never said. I have more than enough dishes, Grace, you know.”
Everyone left it there.
She was pulling sheets from the dryer, folding them as best she could, when the house phone rang and the doorman said a detective was downstairs in the lobby, and for a moment she tried to pretend that she didn’t know what this meant. The sheet in her hands was warm. It was a good sheet and had not been inexpensive. It was … eggshell. Or ecru. Once, it might have been called beige, but sheets, she had noticed, were no longer called beige. There was nothing wrong with the sheet, except that she had slept on it, and made love on it, with Jonathan. She would not be starting her new life with marital sheets.
He arrived a few minutes later, and she met him at the front door. She was holding the other sheet, the fitted one. She had never known the right way to fold a fitted sheet and was doing a bad job of it. O’Rourke came off the elevator already looking distracted.
“Hello,” Grace said. “Where’s your better half?”
He glanced behind him. The elevator man was only just closing the gate.
The Undoing Page 43
