You Should Have Known (19 page)

“I don't give in to everything I want,” Lisa said a little petulantly.

“You've never tried to not be attracted to men,” she said. “You know, men used to enter the priesthood because they wanted to be protected from their own homosexuality. That's how terrified of it they were. To actually go out looking for a way to not be sexual for your entire life is a big gesture, obviously; you'd really have to hate or fear your sexual identity for that to seem like a good idea. And then there's the fact that Daniel obviously loved you—loves you—I think he wanted very badly to be a husband and a father. He tried to do something that would make that happen, and he failed—and that's his own issue, not yours. Your issue is that you had an opportunity to anticipate this, early on, and that opportunity passed you by. At some point, I do think it's going to help you to look at that, but not today. Today is about being sad, which you're absolutely entitled to be.”

“You mean I should have known,” she said bluntly.

Yes
, Grace thought.

“No,” she said. “I mean that in the context of your real love for him, and your trust in him, and the fact that you wanted the same things he was saying he wanted, your ability to see clearly what you might have seen in other circumstances was compromised. You're a human being. You're fallible, not criminal. The last thing you need to be doing right now is punishing yourself for not having seen this. It serves no purpose, and it takes a hell of a lot of your energy, and you need every bit of your energy right now to take care of yourself and the girls. Besides, I know that Daniel is beating himself up about his inability to be honest with you.”

“Oh, goody,” she said, reaching for another tissue.

They sat in silence for a moment. Grace felt her thoughts begin to detach, against her will. She wanted to stay with this, with someone else's problem, even though it was a very bad problem. Her own problem, which was probably going to turn out to be not really much of a problem, hurt too much to think about.

“Did you know?” said her patient.

Grace frowned. “Did I know what?”

“About Daniel. Could you tell?”

“No,” she said. But this was not really true. Grace had suspected from the beginning and known shortly after. She had watched what felt like an epic war play out inside him, in which the part of him that truly wanted to be married to Lisa slowly, inexorably, succumbed to the cataclysmically greater force of his sexuality. In their eight months as her patients, she had never seen him touch her.

“He has a Rothko.”

“Daniel?” said Grace, wondering if they were going to start talking about financial settlements.

“No. Barry. The guy on Thirty-Second Street.”

She couldn't bring herself to say “boyfriend,” Grace knew.

“Is that significant to you?”

“He has. A fucking. Rothko. Over the fireplace in his brownstone. Which I saw through the window while standing outside on the adorable tree-lined street in highly desirable Chelsea. I'm sharing a box with two little girls on York Avenue. I've produced his children so now he can be a father on the weekends like he always wanted, and spend the rest of the time being his ‘authentic self.'”

“Authentic self” was a phrase Daniel had brought into therapy. It had attained “Rosebud”-like status, apparently, to Lisa.

“I'm certainly not going to tell you you're not entitled to your anger.”

“Oh, good,” Lisa said bitterly. Then she said: “You'd like to tell me something else, though, wouldn't you?”

“What is it you think I'd like to tell you?”

She followed Lisa's glance to—or was it her imagination—the galley of her book, there on the corner of her desk. She had not specifically informed any of her patients about the book (she thought it was improper, like a doctor pushing his own products at the front desk), but a few of them had seen or been told about the
Kirkus
review, and one, who worked for
Good Morning America
, had been privy to her competitive courtship by all three network morning programs.

“That I could have avoided all this. I could have listened more carefully.”

“Is that what you think I believe?”

“Oh, don't give me that Freudian shit!” Lisa leaned forward. She had said it fiercely. She had suddenly, and without warning, turned a corner to some well-thought-out and very focused anger. The focus, Grace realized,
c'est moi.

“I mean,” she continued, now with discernible sarcasm, “if I'd wanted somebody to sit there and just toss it all back to me, I'd be in analysis. Obviously, you think I should have seen this, I colluded in this. I know you've been thinking from the beginning, you know,
How come she didn't know she was marrying a gay man?
I've been watching you for months, thinking that. So, okay, it's abundantly clear to me that you're not going to turn into some warm and fuzzy person who's going to comfort me, but I could do without the judgment, thanks.”

Breathe
, thought Grace.
And don't say anything. There's more to come.

“I didn't want you. I wanted the other one we went to see, last January. This therapist near Lincoln Center. He was enormous. He had sideburns. He was like this big bear. I thought:
I feel safe here. I feel supported.
But Daniel wanted you. He thought you were tough. He thought we needed tough. But I've got plenty of tough already, thanks. I mean, do you ever show any
feeling
?”

Grace, aware of the extreme tension in her back, in her crossed legs, made herself wait another moment before she said, very carefully, very
deliberately
: “I don't believe my feeling is going to be helpful to you, Lisa. Therapeutically. I'm here to bring you my expertise and, if appropriate, my opinions. My job is to help you work through the issues that brought you here. It's going to be much less useful to you to have comfort from me than to learn how best to comfort yourself.”

“Maybe.” Lisa nodded. “Or maybe you're just a cold bitch.”

She willed herself not to react. The moment stretched, in all its misery, as a car horn blared outside. Then Lisa leaned forward and plucked another tissue from the box.

“I'm sorry,” she said, looking past Grace to the door. “That was uncalled for.”

Grace nodded. “Therapy isn't a social occasion. I'll recover. But I'm curious as to why you wanted to continue seeing me. Especially since I seem to have been Daniel's choice, not yours. Maybe, in spite of what you perceive as my lack of warmth, you've come to believe that I can help you.”

She shrugged miserably. She had started to cry again, a little.

“And I do think I can help you,” Grace went on. “I see how strong you are. I've always seen that. Right now, you're angry at him and at yourself, and obviously at me, but I know that's nothing to the sadness you feel about losing the family you thought you had. And the truth is there's no way around these feelings of anger and sadness. You've got to go through them to get to the other side of them, and I'd really like to help you do that, so you can have some peace for yourself and the girls. And peace with Daniel, because he's going to be in your life, regardless. So I may not have facial hair or a cuddly disposition, and believe me, you're not the first of my clients to point that out to me—”

Lisa emitted a moist little laugh.

“But if I didn't think I could help you, I'd have told you so already. And I would also have helped you find a more bearlike therapist, if that's what you really wanted.”

She leaned her head back against the couch and closed her eyes. “No,” she said, sounding exhausted. “I know you're right. But…it's just…sometimes I look at you and I think,
Well
she
never would have fallen for this
. I'm, like, personally a disaster and you're personally composed. And I know we're not supposed to talk about you, and I don't really want to talk about you, but sometimes I just see:
composed
, and I think:
cold bitch
. Which I'm not proud of. And…well, of course I checked you out, back in the spring when we started. Which I hope you won't be offended by, but you know, today we practically do a background check on a plumber, let alone someone you're going to tell all your secrets to.”

“I'm not offended,” Grace said. And she shouldn't have been surprised, either.

“So I know you've been married for ages and you have this book coming out about how not to marry a psycho or something. And here I sit, your, like, target moronic reader.”

“Oh no,” she said evenly. “My target reader isn't a moron. She's just someone who isn't through learning.”

Lisa crumpled her current tissue and shoved it in her purse. Their time, they both knew, was nearly up. “I guess I better read it.”

Grace did nothing to suggest that this was a good idea. “If you feel it might interest you, certainly,” she said. She turned to her desk and began writing Lisa's invoice.

“It will help me next time,” she heard Lisa say.

And despite herself, Grace smiled.
Good girl
, she thought. It boded well that even in the depths of her present misery, Lisa could conceptualize a next time. She was going to be all right, Grace thought. Even poorer than she was now, and more burdened, and possibly humiliated, and with her husband in an art-filled brownstone on (Grace knew perfectly well) one of the loveliest streets in the city, she still saw a glimpse of future.

Then again
, thought Grace,
at least she knows where her husband is.

A
fter the last couple left, she didn't know what to do with herself. She couldn't bear to stay in the office, listening to the phone not ring and dreading the ring that wasn't coming. But then again she couldn't stand the thought of going back to Rearden, retracing her steps from the morning no wiser and no less scared even than then. She didn't want to count the news vans or see the self-consciously frantic parents in the forecourt, and she didn't want to hear anything that Sally Morrison-Golden might say to her on any subject, but especially the subject of Malaga Alves. She had no idea what had happened to Malaga Alves, and with every passing moment she found herself caring less. Malaga, the poor woman—the dead woman—had nothing to do with her, but there was an asteroid on the horizon, and it got bigger, denser, and more terrible with every passing hour.

Where was Jonathan? Where was he, and why wasn't he letting her know that he was safe? And how dare he disappear so thoughtlessly? What was she supposed to be telling their son about where he was, had Jonathan thought of that? What was she supposed to tell her father? And fucking Eva, who needed to know how many plates to set at the table?

She could not remember ever having been so angry at him. Or so terrified.

Grace left her office at two and walked into a wall of bad weather, something neither the
New York Times
nor the earlier sky nor any of her arriving patients had given her any warning about. She pulled her coat around herself and found that she remained very cold and more than a little wet, and she leaned into the wind, feeling the strangely not unwelcome bite of it and the wetness of the rain on her face. Everyone's face was wet.
We could all be crying
, it occurred to her, and she reached up with one very suddenly freezing hand to brush her own cheek. She was not crying. She was just…not right at the moment. Which was not a crime, and frankly no one else's business but her own.

She went south, away from Henry's school and down Lexington, past magazine shops and Korean grocers and the kind of now rare luncheonettes she had always loved—dingy places with stools at the bar and great hamburgers and mints in a little bowl at the counter where you paid your bill. Everyone seemed to be struggling with the wind. Two older women came out of Neil's and yelped in surprise, then ducked back inside, frantically buttoning their coats. Neil's was a place she'd gone with Jonathan, many times, during his residency at Memorial. It was near enough for him to get to quickly, far enough from the hospital that he didn't have to run into colleagues, and she loved the Russian burger on their menu. There had been times, all those years when she was trying to get pregnant and was so finely attuned to any little tweak in her body and its wants, that she had literally run to Neil's for a hamburger, as if satisfying a sudden craving would actually make her pregnant or nurture a zygote into personhood. Well-done meat, just to be safe, and no cheese, because you couldn't really be sure about cheese, and why take a chance after so many disappointments, so many filaments of life fallen out of her and flushed away?

She hadn't thought about that for a long time; it seemed churlish to do so, after Henry was born. Then, she had been persuading herself that all those missing filaments, those stricken possibilities, had been something anticipatory, like a red carpet unfurled before the arrival of the real movie star. From the minute there was a Henry, it had always been about Henry. Wanting Henry. Waiting for Henry. Being ready for Henry.

She hadn't been to Neil's in years, with Jonathan or anyone else. Once she had ordered a delivery meal from here, but even though the luncheonette was only a couple of blocks from her office, and even though she had called at the very start of her hour-long break, the burger had arrived fifty minutes later and cold in the middle, so that had been the end.

She was on the corner of 69th and Lexington, waiting for the light when the phone, deep in her coat pocket, vibrated against her thigh. She clawed for it, lost it once to the depths of the pocket, then snatched it up to the daylight.

The number on the caller ID ran through her like a white-hot blade. She wanted to throw the phone down into the streaming street, but she couldn't, and she couldn't ignore the call, either. She answered with a damp finger.

“Hello, Maud.”

“Grace!” said Maud. “Wait, J. Colton? Are you on?”

“Present!” the publicist said brightly. “I'm in L.A., but I'm present!”

“We wanted to call you together,” said Maud. “Are you in your office?”

Grace steadied herself. She looked around for a canopy but there wasn't one, only a small overhang in front of the Chase Bank. Miserably, she backed up against the glass storefront. “No, on the street,” she told them. She held the phone tightly to her ear.

“How's California?” Maud was saying.

“God. Glorious.”

“And our movie star?”

“You're not paying me enough.”

Maud laughed delightedly. To Grace, it sounded utterly wrong, it did not compute. Laughter on Lexington Avenue when it was pissing with rain and an awful thing was tugging at her—incessantly, interrupting every other thought.

“A certain lady thespian to be named later,” said Maud, evidently to Grace. “Not, shall we say, known for her modesty.”

“Okay,” said Grace. She closed her eyes.

“But listen. I had a call about you. Are you ready?”

She looked bleakly across the street at a large man struggling with his umbrella. “Yes!” It came out sounding tragic, but they seemed not to notice.

“
The View
!”

This was followed by what sounded like silence. “The…few?” said Grace.

“
View.
Five women on a couch? You don't watch it? It's Whoopi Goldberg.”

“Oh. Yes, I've heard of it. I'm doing that?”

“Knock wood!” Maud crowed.

“Great,” Grace said, looking down. There was a line of damp across both leather boots.
Ruined
, she thought sourly. She could not understand why she had gone out in this. What was she thinking? When had it become so uncomfortable to think about anything?

“Can't tell you how hard it is to get a book on
The View
,” J. Colton was saying. Grace imagined her by a pool at an L.A. hotel. But then she couldn't remember what J. Colton looked like. “I mean, we send them everything, of course. But do they read it? Who knows? So I get this call from Barbara Walters' producer, and she goes, ‘Women need to read this book.' And I said, ‘
Exactly!
'”

“Exactly,” Maud confirmed. “This is huge, Grace. Oh, and what about Miami?”

What about Miami?
Grace thought, but the question was apparently not for her.

“Miami's a go,” said California J. Colton.

“The Miami Book Fair wants you,” said Maud, sounding merry. “How do you feel about Florida in general?”

Grace frowned. Her face was still wet, and her feet were very cold. The conversation contained so many unknowns. She wondered if they had segued into another dialect. She had no particular feelings about Florida in general. She didn't want to live there, she knew that, though at the present moment it was probably a far more pleasant place to be, weather-wise. Were they suggesting she move to Florida? “I don't know,” was all she managed.

Because the Jewish Book Council, said Maud, had let them know that she, that Grace, that her book,
You Should Have Known
, was going to be their lead title for the winter. “You know what this means?” J. Colton said
.

Grace told them no, she didn't know what it meant.

It meant more trips, to big Jewish centers full of readers, many of them in Florida.

She frowned. “But it's not really a Jewish book.”  

“No, but you're a Jewish author.”

Not really
, she nearly said. Her parents' home had been mainly absent of Jewish practices and utterly absent of Jewish belief. Her mother, as close to an anti-Semite as a Jewish person could get, would don the necessary accoutrements for her friends' children's bar mitzvahs and weddings but preferred to stoke her inner life with classical music and other beautiful things. Her father had the German Jew's general disdain for things of the shtetl but had taken, mysteriously enough, to his second wife's observance of Jewish ritual. Grace believed nothing and did even less.

“And they never do this kind of book,” said Maud. “Novels and memoirs, and lots of nonfiction. But a book like
Should
—”

Should
was Maud's personal abbreviation for
You Should Have Known.
Obviously the title was in need of a nickname, but Grace could not bring herself to call her book
Should
.

“I can't remember, ever. J. Colton? Have they ever taken a book like this?”

“They took
The Rules
, I think,” said J. Colton.

Grace automatically rolled her eyes. She was glad they couldn't see her.

“They took Dr. Laura.”

“Oh God,” Grace said, mere aversion progressing to outright horror. “She's appalling.”

“She's appalling and she has a gazillion listeners, Grace,” said Maud, laughing. “We're trying to get you on her show.”

Grace said nothing.

“And the tour,” Maud went on. “We're working on early February. Give people a chance to hear about the book before we send you out. Did you know people need to hear the name of a new book three times before they buy it?”

Grace had not known. She had never thought about it.

“So, a story in a magazine, a prominent book review, then you're on a talk show and people go, ‘Wait, I heard about that book!' Or they go to the bookstore and it's there on the front table, which is paid real estate, by the way. You know that, right?”

Assuming she was understanding what “paid real estate” meant in this context, no, Grace had not known that either. The things she had not known were piling up. The rain was bouncing off the pavement, falling down, jumping up. Farther down the street, a portly dachshund was refusing to walk. He cringed and shuddered on his stubby brown legs, and his owner looked down balefully at him. She began to wonder what it would take to make this conversation end.

“But we're doing a full month at Barnes and Noble. You know, I'm so glad we moved it up. Aren't you glad, Grace?”

She nodded dully. “Yes!” she managed.

You Should Have Known
had first been scheduled for February 14, a gesture Grace had considered more than a little cynical, but Maud had moved it to early January in order not to compete with a relationship book by a sex columnist from another imprint within the same company. January books got a bad rap, she had explained to Grace (as if Grace had ever even noticed what time of year certain books were published), but this was actually a good thing. Because January was a slow time for books, review editors had fewer books to weed through, which meant there was a better chance of having reviews and features written. And besides, after the holidays people got in the mood for a little self-reflection, a little tough self-love.

Maud had said it, so it had to be true.

“It's much easier to get on the List in January than, say, in the fall.”

“Like, remember…you know that memoir we did?” J. Colton was asking from poolside. “About the girl who was bit by the rabid dogs? That was a January book. It took only twenty thousand in sales to get on the List with that book.”

Grace thought hard—girl, bit (bitten?), rabid dogs, the List—but of course it turned out that J. Colton wasn't speaking to her.

The two of them were talking about books again. These people talked constantly about books—books they wanted to read or wished they'd read, books they'd heard were wonderful, books she—Grace—should read, books she
must
read, books she couldn't possibly
not
have read.
You Should Have Read That!
They made Grace, who had always liked to read, feel entirely illiterate.

She thought:
I am standing under an overhang on Lexington Avenue, in a wool coat and wet boots, holding an open phone in a cold hand that is shaking. The phone is shaking, too. I am thirty-nine years old, married for eighteen years, the mother of a twelve-year-old son. I am a therapist in private practice. I am the author of a book. I am the lead author, for winter, of the Jewish Book Council in Florida. I will have to go to Florida. All of  these things are true. I know them for sure.

“Grace?” It was Maud. “Are you there?”

“Oh, I'm so sorry,” she said. “It's all fantastic news.”

She must have been persuasive, because they let her go.

Grace put her head down and walked out from underneath the overhang, south down the avenue, and then east to the familiar streets of her first years with Jonathan. She did not know where she was going until she passed the grubby postwar tower on First Avenue where she and Jonathan had once lived in a charmless one-bedroom at the end of a dingy beige corridor. The place seemed utterly unchanged, even to the artificial plant on the lobby coffee table and the Staten Island–fabulous light fixture hanging from the ceiling. She did not recognize the uniformed doorman but gave him an automatic half-smile anyway, a gesture toward her own history. Emerging from the front door and pausing beneath the awning were younger versions of herself and her husband: newly minted professionals with briefcases and yoga mats, dry-cleaning sacks slung over their shoulders and environmentally responsible canvas grocery bags dangling at the wrist, bound for D'Agostino's. She would hate to be living here now, she thought. She had hated it then, though she had made the best of it, painting the walls with colors from Martha Stewart's midcentury palette (“midcentury” was the best she could conjure from such irredeemably bland rooms) and refusing to supplement the few bits of actually good furniture they had with the abundantly available cheap stuff (which made for very sparse rooms). She was not all that distracted by décor back then. Neither of them was, since at the time they had really had only a few things on their minds: their careers, first and foremost, and making a baby. She stopped in the rain, took out her phone again, and looked at it balefully. Then she stuck it back in her pocket and went on.