You Should Have Known (18 page)

Also, I don't know where my husband is.

She reached her office about ten minutes before her patients were due and went about her customary routine: lights on, bathroom checked, Kleenex replenished, and a final look over her schedule for the day. There seemed to be a theme here, she thought, running her eye over the booking page of her office program. The couple about to arrive had separated the previous year after the husband's affair, then made a sober, iron-willed decision to attempt reconciliation, though Grace (while lauding their effort) did not believe the husband, a screenwriter, could actually stop pursuing other women. After them came the woman whose husband's “college experimentation” with men had returned to haunt them both and become the predominant theme in their sessions. Today she was coming alone, and while Grace generally did not agree to see partners individually, she was pretty sure that the joint sessions were now well and truly ended and that the wife would want to keep seeing her alone after they formally separated. And after that was a newer patient whose fiancé had been arrested for embezzlement at the company where they both worked and who was in a very fraught state.

Then she was supposed to go to her father's house, for dinner.

She didn't know where Jonathan was.

She opened her e-mail and typed in his address. It galled her that she was doing this, that she had to instruct him to get in touch with her. Yes, he could be absentminded. Over the years, he had slipped up on any number of appointments, dinner reservations, violin recitals, and certainly stupid things like Mother's Day and Valentine's Day, which were only manufactured holidays meant to sell chocolate and greeting cards. But always there had been a reason, and the kind of reason that made you ashamed for having demanded a reason—like, for example a little kid dying of cancer.

“Jonathan,” she typed, “would you please get in touch with me RIGHT NOW. And I mean AS SOON AS YOU READ THIS. Henry's fine,” she wrote, feeling guilty for the freak-out she would certainly be experiencing upon receipt of this particular communiqué. “Just call me ASAP.”

And she sent it off into the ether of e-mail, to find him wherever he was, in whichever Midwestern city the pediatric oncology conference was actually taking place. But had it actually been a pediatric oncology conference? Maybe he'd only called it that because his own interest was pediatric oncology, but the conference itself was really pediatrics as a whole or oncology as a whole or even something merely adjacent to one of those. It might be…a conference on new antibody-based drugs or genetic technologies, or a meeting focused on palliative care or even alternative care. Well, probably not alternative care. She couldn't see Jonathan wanting to attend a conference on alternative care; like nearly every doctor he'd ever worked with, he was firmly trussed to the mast of Western medicine. Grace had only ever known one of his colleagues to show any interest in what the woman herself had apparently called “parallel healing strategies,” and she had left New York long before, to practice somewhere—Grace seemed to recall—in the Southwest.

No, but the point was, this whole thing might be her own fault, the fault of her general distraction due to…well, a lot of things. Work as a whole, her son, the benefit, her book, for goodness' sake! She might easily have taken a few disconnected concepts like pediatric…oncological…flyover state, and somehow conjured the fully fledged notion of a pediatric oncology conference in Cleveland.
Typical me!
she thought almost jovially.

But it really wasn't. Typical her. And it never had been.

Her couple arrived. When Grace asked how their week had been, the husband began a vicious monologue about the producer who had bought his script the previous year but now seemed disinclined to make it into an actual film. His wife sat grim-faced, tautly wound, at the other end of the couch as he went on, gathering many of his other aggravations and resentments to himself in a building fulcrum: the producer's assistant, who was so passive-aggressive, who obviously did not understand that it was to your own benefit to be kind to people on the way up the ladder, and his own agent, who took four days to return a call, though he'd been seen at Michael's for lunch on the second day and was obviously not at death's door, unable to push the buttons on his phone.

Grace—listening, not listening, not really—head spinning a little, nodded whenever he paused for breath but couldn't bring herself to interrupt him, and she felt terrible about that. There had been a joke, passed among the students in her master's program, that she had not found very funny at the time, about two psychotherapists who rode the elevator together back and forth to their adjoining offices for years: up at the start of the day, down at the end of the day. One was dour, depressed, burdened by the burdens of his patients. The other was eternally upbeat. One day, after years of this disparity, the dour therapist said to his colleague: “I don't understand. Our patients have so many terrible things in their lives. How can you listen to them all day and still be so happy?”

The other man's answer: “Who listens?”

She had always listened.

But today, right now, she just couldn't listen. She couldn't
hear
.

The wife was shifting, growing palpably more resentful with each fresh character assassination from the other end of the couch. The actress who was supposed to be considering the part but was obviously too old. The young Tarantino freak in the screenwriting class he taught who had complained about him on Facebook, saying he wasn't qualified since he hadn't had a movie made. His wife's sister, who was insisting they all go out to fucking Wisconsin this year for Christmas, which was ridiculous because she didn't even like them and had always been a bitch to her older sister, his wife, so why she thought they would go spend a fortune on tickets and deal with the airport on the busiest travel day of the year just showed how deluded she was.

“Yes?” said Grace.

The wife exhaled, very carefully.

“This is all about Sarah's mother,” the husband went on. “She called Sarah a few months ago and told her to bring Corinne back to Madison and live with her. You know, as if my family is any of her business.”

“Steven,” said his wife in a warning tone.

“But my wife politely declines. Because she is my
wife
, and Corinne is my
daughter
. And whatever issues we have, we're working on, no thanks to her mother. But now we're supposed to pretend that this episode never happened and just fly out to fucking nowhere for figgy pudding.”

And she knew what she was supposed to say. She knew she was supposed to say
something
. But she didn't say anything.

“They're worried about me,” said Sarah, his wife. “Just the way you'd be worried about Corinne if she was having trouble in her life. In her marriage.”

“I moved back
in
,” he said petulantly, as if this matter of geography swept all attendant issues aside.

“Yes, and they understand that. They know we're trying. They just wanted us all”—Grace, glancing at the husband, noted that he was as unpersuaded by this “all” as she herself was—“to feel supported at Christmas.”

He glared at her. Then he said: “I'm Jewish, Sarah.”

“We're all Jewish. That's not the point.”

He exploded. This being another of his sand traps, one they had not previously trod upon in therapy, but so similar to the others (his career, his parents' interference, his now pubescent daughter's sudden lack of outright adoration for him) that Grace could, from the comfort of her armchair, plot the hills and valleys of the forty minutes remaining in their session. So he raged on, both women uncharacteristically silent. Grace looked past them both to the venetian blinds covering the window behind them and through those angled slats to the glass pane that was grimy with New York dust. Sometimes she gave the doorman, Arthur, some extra money to wash the outside of the pane, but it had been awhile. She could slip out now and do it herself, she thought, and neither of them would notice, and then at least she would have accomplished something today, and the sun would come in. If there was sun. She suddenly could not remember whether there was sun.

When it ended, she used what remained of her wherewithal to resist apologizing to them and saw them out with a request that they not discuss the Christmas travel issue before their next session, but that they each think carefully about what they wanted the holiday to represent for them and for their daughter. Then she used the five minutes before her next patient to check her phone and e-mail.

There was nothing. At least, there was nothing from Jonathan. A Sue Krause from NY1 had left a voice mail asking for a statement about “the situation” at Rearden and wondering whether she had any memories of Malaga Alves she would like to share with her seven million fellow New Yorkers. That this unpleasant request had materialized on her office phone was of course preferable to finding it on her cell phone, or in her personal e-mail, or God forbid her home phone, but it still galled her. No, not everyone was eternally eager to thrust himself before a television camera in order to toss some “Me too!” filament of non-information onto a genuine tragedy. Grace deleted the message, but even as she did so, the phone rang, emitting its silent “in session” blink. She didn't recognize the number, a New York cell, but she played the message as soon as it materialized.

“Dr. Reinhart Sachs, it's Roberta Siegel from Page Six.”

Spoken as if she were supposed to know who that was. But in fact, Grace did at least know what Page Six was. Everyone knew what Page Six was, even those who—like herself—declined to indulge in the daily download of so-called boldface names. That Page Six was showing an interest in what was going on at Rearden boded very ill, for where Page Six went so went the nation. At least, the nation of those with too much time on their hands.

“I've been told you were a good friend of Malaga Alves, and I wonder if you have a few minutes to talk to me.”

Grace closed her eyes. How she'd been upgraded from fellow committee member to “good friend” was a mystery, but not, she supposed, one worth solving. This message, too, she deleted, but not before wondering whether Sally Morrison-Golden, another “good friend,” had also heard from Page Six. She hoped not.

Her next patient arrived and began, without much preamble, to cry. This was the woman who had canceled her appointment the previous week, the woman whose husband was now somewhere in Chelsea, address withheld, and reachable only at work (and there only by leaving a message and awaiting a callback). He was no longer interested in counseling, said the wife—wailed the wife—other than the legal kind. Her name was Lisa, and she was in her thirties, muscular, on the short side, and by her own definition “sort of a klutz”—something Grace herself could have confirmed, as there had been innumerable bangings against one particular corner of the coffee table. This week she had indeed been advised of the end of her marriage—in a kindly enough manner, she reported to Grace almost defensively—and given the name of an attorney her husband had hired, as well as a few names of divorce attorneys that attorney had recommended—for her. (Was that absurd politeness? Grace wondered. Or plain old shady?)

She cried for a long time, crumpling tissue after tissue, alternately covering and uncovering her face. Grace did not try to stop her. She imagined it must be hard to find time to cry like this, with a full-time job at one of the city's more beleaguered public agencies and those five-year-old girls, just barely in kindergarten. With the husband already moved out, Grace worried that she would no longer be able to afford her apartment or the private school she wanted to send the girls to next year. Or therapy, for that matter. Not that therapy would be an issue. Grace had been in this situation once or twice over the years and had always managed to carry her patient at least through the crisis.

The husband, it turned out—surprise!—had a boyfriend, and the boyfriend had a tricked-out duplex on a tree-lined street in Chelsea, where—surprise again!—the husband was now living. She had followed him there, the woman said, sobbing. “I had to. He wasn't answering the phone. And I left a message for him at his office and he didn't call me. And Sammy kept asking why Daddy wasn't walking them to school, and I finally thought,
I am
lying
to my
kids
. And I have no idea
why.”

“That must have been very painful,” said Grace.

“I mean,” she said bitterly, “okay, I get it, he's out of the marriage. I get it. He's gay. But we still have these kids. What am I supposed to tell them? He went to the Korean grocer for cottage cheese and he hasn't come back? Oh, and by the way, Mommy's an imbecile because when this handsome man supposedly fell in love with her and wanted to marry her and have a family, she actually believed him?”

Grace sighed. They had been down this road before.

“I was always this totally pragmatic, totally rational person, you know? I mean—duh!—I wasn't skinny and blond. I'm not a babe. I'm not going to date the football captain. I know this! And it was okay, because the truth was I didn't really want the football captain. And I had all these nice boyfriends who appreciated that I didn't act like I wished I could do better. I could have had a great life with one of those guys, but suddenly this great-looking man comes along and it's like, ‘You mean I could have him?' And like that, it's all gone. I guess he thought I'd be so, like, blinded and pathetic that I wouldn't notice he was full of shit when he said he wanted to get married and have kids.”

“But, Lisa,” Grace told her weeping client, “I think a lot of what Daniel told you was probably the truth. He really did want to be married and have a family. Maybe he even said to himself, ‘I want that so much that I'm going to…to try to excise the other part of me that wants other things.' But he couldn't. Most of us can't do that. The pull toward what we really crave, it's just too strong.”