You Should Have Known (10 page)

Then, as the years passed, she started to feel that way as well, and she, too, started to let people go. It was harder in the beginning—hardest
at
the beginning when Vita dematerialized—then less and less as the one or two friends from graduate school drifted off, and the Kirkland House friends (now scattered everywhere in any case and convening only for weddings), and the one or two others from nowhere in particular whose company she had enjoyed. She and Jonathan were not reclusive people, obviously. They took an active part in the city's life, their days were full of human beings and their troubles. And if she never thought of herself as, precisely, a sweet person or a soft person—that wasn't a terrible thing. She cared very much about her patients and what they did or experienced when they left her office. Of course she did. And there had been plenty of middle-of-the-night phone calls for her, too, over the years, and she had always taken them and done what she needed to do, even meeting distraught men and women in emergency rooms or getting on the phone with dispatchers and paramedics and intake specialists at hospitals and rehabs all over the country. But her default setting was “off,” not “on,” and if she did not have to worry about their anxiety or their depression or whether they were going to meetings every day as promised, then she generally did not worry.

Jonathan, though, was a very different animal. Jonathan was just fatally softhearted, a profoundly humane and selfless person, capable of comforting the dying child and the almost bereaved parents with the right words and the right touch, giving hope and removing it deftly, kindly, when it had no place anymore. There had been times when he was so twisted with sadness about what he had left on the wards, or even in the morgue, that he could not speak to them when he got home and would go into his study at the back of the apartment, in the room they had once hoped would belong to a second child, taking himself out of the family equation until he could get free of it.

Once, the autumn they'd met, she had arrived at the hospital where he was doing his internship and watched him hold an elderly woman who physically shook in his arms. The woman's son, a middle-aged man with Down syndrome, had been dying nearby of his congenital heart defect, a death that could not have been unexpected since the moment of his birth, yet the woman had been howling with grief. Grace, who'd arrived a few minutes before Jonathan's thirty-six-hour shift was due to end, had stood at the end of the corridor watching this, feeling the shame of her own observance, the contamination she knew she was bringing to this purest human interaction.

She was already, that year, her last in college, a student of behavior, a dedicated future practitioner of the art of healing human pain, subcategory: psychic. And yet, and yet…the sonic boom of the suffering she saw at the other end of that long hospital corridor very nearly knocked her back. The power of it…no one had mentioned that in her senior seminar on Freud's Dora or the fascinating course she had taken junior year on abnormal psychology. There had been wheels and cogs and mice running through mazes, theories and drug trials and various forms of therapy: aversion, primal, art and music, and dull, inefficient talk. But this… she could hardly bear to be so close to it, which wasn't very close at all.

The truth was that Jonathan found suffering everywhere—or, more accurately, it seemed to find him: wherever it might be hiding or lying dormant, waiting for a passing soul to stick to. He collected the random sadness of strangers and the confessions of the guilty. Taxi drivers offered him their bereavements. He could not pass the doormen downstairs without taking on some discouraging report of the paralyzed nephew or the parent sinking into dementia. He couldn't eat at their regular Italian place on Third without asking the owner whether his daughter's cystic fibrosis was responding to the new drug, a conversation that had never once ended with less than utter dejection. When the three of them were alone together, he could be buoyant, which was one reason Grace protected their family time so efficiently, but out there people seemed unable to resist taking advantage of his good nature.

Perhaps what it came down to was that in spite of his personal suffering, he did not seem to fear pain the way others did, but instead dove straight into its whirlwind, determined to keep thrashing away, as if he would ever—
ever
—be capable of dealing it the slightest blow. She loved and admired that about him, she supposed, but it exhausted her, too. And sometimes it worried her. Cancer, obviously, would defeat him in the end. The struggles people endured, and the infinite varieties of sadness they carried—those would never ease, even a tiny bit. And all of that left him so vulnerable. She had tried to express this to Jonathan more than once. She had tried to make him understand that his very decency, amid the less-decency of others in the world, might come to harm him in some way, but he generally declined to see it. He could never seem to think as badly of other people as she could.

W
hen she stepped off the elevator and into the now packed space of the Spensers' foyer, Grace immediately saw that their hosts' absence had become the topic of the evening. Sally, in particular, was still visibly reeling from the unexpected news that both Spensers not only had failed to meet with them before the party, but were not expected to join their guests at any point in the evening. Jonas, they were told, was in China—this was less egregious—but Suki's whereabouts were unknown. She might have been across town or at her Hamptons compound. She might have been elsewhere in the epic apartment, for all the eager benefit committee knew, but it didn't really matter: she was not where they had all imagined she would be, which was with her fellow parents in the Spenser abode. Sally had been apoplectic, her state rendered almost comical by the difficulty she was having maintaining her veneer of jolly gratitude in front of the Spensers' staff.

At the little table in the lobby, only one arriving guest had asked Grace outright if the Spensers were upstairs at the party. “I think he's in Asia,” she had said, keeping it vague, as she assumed Sally would wish. But Sally evidently did not wish. Sally seemed to have decided that everyone must be brought up to speed on the situation. Now, as Grace watched from the foyer with a glass of champagne in her hand—Sylvia had brought her the champagne, and Grace had gratefully accepted it—Sally could be seen in clear spin mode, flitting from group to group, watching, pollinating the party like an unhappy hummingbird, trailing a distinct odor of panic behind her. Grace and Sylvia drank their champagne and watched her make her way. Earlier, the two of them had tried hard to calm Sally down. The apartment was breathtaking, they reminded her. With its oversize rooms and MoMA-worthy art, it had not one thing to apologize for, and if the guests were disappointed to find that its owner, a media titan of global stature, was not in attendance, they would at least revel in the glories of the space. Media titans of global stature might understandably be somewhere more important than a school fund-raiser (most of the guests, when you got right down to it, might understandably be somewhere more important than a school fund-raiser), and the men would not notice, let alone care, that his wife was similarly missing. The women were another story. It was the women who were going to twist the knife when they realized that both Spensers had skipped the party. But that would be later, after the bidding was over and the checks written. Wasn't that the whole point?

In the actual Spensers' place stood a cordon of their attendants: the secretary, who was in charge, and at least ten uniformed guards stationed around the rooms and protecting the doors to more private areas of the apartment, who reported to her. (This, of course, in addition to the maids and servers and two Caribbean women Grace saw emerge from the kitchen, carrying dinner trays and passing through one of the blockaded doorways to parts unknown.) The effect, the inescapable effect, was that of an event thrown in some opulent but ultimately rentable public space—a Newport mansion, say, or the Temple of Dendur—not of a parent's home thrown open to the parents of their children's schoolmates. Grace, who had earlier quelled her own disappointment, knew precisely what Sally had hoped for, if not expected outright: witty, personal anecdotes about the artwork and the trouble taken to find just this damask for the living room curtains, perhaps even a peek inside the famous closets (Suki Spenser was a “Best Dressed” regular). She knew that Sally (like Grace herself, she had to admit) had hoped to see the vast and elaborately detailed larder, which Suki, native to Hokkaido, had apparently stocked with a comprehensive array of Japanese ingredients—in
Vanity Fair
, Grace had read that the Spenser children followed a strictly macrobiotic diet—or that ultimate manifestation of New York real estate porn, the large laundry room photographed in
Architectural Digest
, with three uniformed laundresses ironing the zillion-thread-count sheets. But with access to all but the most ceremonial rooms emphatically blocked, such personal gestures were obviously not to be experienced, and Sally seemed to be experiencing real difficulty in making the adjustment. In the hour before A Night for Rearden formally began, she ricocheted through the public spaces (followed closely by two of the uniformed guards), straightening the auction table and checking the temporary bar (erected in the foyer, beneath its grand staircase), with Sylvia and Grace in her wake. She was perhaps compensating her disappointment by indulging in a fantasy that she herself was the lady of this urban manor. Certainly she had dressed this part, in a scary, tiger-patterned Roberto Cavalli that showed quite enough of her large (but at least natural) breasts, and teetery-tall heels. She dripped, literally, with diamonds, a real-life version, Grace could not help thinking, of a little girl's play set of plastic necklace, earrings, bracelet, and ring.

“Look at Malaga,” Sylvia said suddenly, and Grace looked where she was looking. Malaga Alves stood framed by one of the great windows, holding a glass of red wine in one hand, the other wedged uncomfortably behind her back. She looked awkward and very alone, but she was alone for only an instant. As Grace and Sylvia watched, a captivating scene began to unfold, as first one dinner-jacketed man and then a second—this one being Nathan Friedberg, he of the $25,000 summer camp—came to join her. She looked up at them and smiled, and when she did Grace saw the transition—no, the
transformation
—that occurred. At first, she did not quite recognize what she was seeing, as Malaga stood between the two tall men—one handsome, one not—and seemed to open (as Fitzgerald might have said) like a flower, somehow becoming arrestingly sumptuous. Malaga wore a simple rosy dress, cut close but not tight around her postpartum body, ending just above a shapely knee. Around her neck was the gold cross, and she wore no other jewelry. She smiled tentatively at them, inclining a lovely neck first to one and then to the other of the men, and Grace was newly aware of her smooth skin, her undoubtedly natural décolletage (sufficiently displayed to convey its true-life contours), and her just slightly abundant upper arms, so aggressively untoned. So…Grace reached for the right word…
womanly
.

There was a third man beside her now, a portly guy Grace recognized vaguely as the father of a girl in Henry's class—something at Morgan Stanley. Very, very rich. All three men were talking to Malaga Alves, or to one another over her head, as she looked up at them. She herself didn't seem to be talking or even doing much agreeing with whatever they might be saying. The three of them flapped and dipped, hovering within reach. As she and Sylvia stared, a fourth man came, pretending to greet one of his predecessors before turning his attention fully to Malaga Alves.

To Grace, no neophyte as a student of human social interaction, it was a stunning display of raw attraction. Malaga Alves might have features that were unremarkable in themselves (and she was plump! with extra flesh in her cheeks, neck, and arms!), but somehow the sum of their parts was another animal altogether. Grace, watching the men, felt amused and sort of disgusted, appalled at their hypocrisy. It was more than likely, for example, that these four had employees who resembled Malaga Alves, women with the same flat features and creamy skin and fleshy waists and breasts and thighs beneath their classically understated uniforms. Quite probably, they interacted with women who looked like Malaga Alves many times a day in the course of their work or in their own homes. Women who looked like Malaga Alves might at this exact moment be tending to their children or doing their laundry. But did they behave around those familiar women as they were apparently behaving around this unfamiliar one? Not if they wanted to stay married, she thought.

The magnificent room was full of highly tended women, acknowledged (even celebrated) beauties who were aerobicized and massaged, colored and coiffed, mani-pedied and Brazilled, and clothed in the most editorialized clothing, yet the distinct aroma of attraction in the crowd came from the place occupied by Malaga Alves. It was remarkably pure and powerful, a force plainly capable of toppling titans, yet it seemed undetectable by any of the sparkling sisterhood. This siren song, Grace thought, her gaze sweeping the crowd from gilded walls to glittering windows, was apparently detectable by the Y chromosome alone.

Grace gave her glass to one of the waiters and went to help Sally, who was half herding, half leading the crowd from the foyer into the great living room so that the auction could begin. Sylvia collected her friend, once a struggling trigonometry student, now apparently the head of American furniture at Sotheby's. He was bald and very thin and thoughtfully wore a silk bow tie of green and blue (Rearden's school colors), and Sylvia led him to the podium in the corner of the room. “Hello!” Sally trilled into the microphone, then tapped it with a long fingernail until people stopped talking and covered their ears.

“Is this on?” she asked.

Resoundingly, the crowd gave her to understand that it was.

“Hello!” said Sally. “Before I do anything, I'd like to ask for a round of applause for our hosts, Jonas and Suki Spenser. What a magnificent and gracious offer this was,” she said rather disingenuously. “We are so grateful.”

The parents applauded. Grace applauded, too.

“I also want to thank our very hardworking committee,” Sally was saying. “They strong-armed you all into coming here, and made sure you had good things to eat and lots of great stuff to spend your money on. Amanda Emery? Where are you, Amanda?”

Amanda chirped, “Hello!” from the back of the room, and waved a glittering cuff above her bright blond head.

“Sylvia Steinmetz? Grace Sachs?”

Grace lifted her own hand, suppressing the automatic irritation. She was not “Grace Sachs,” ever. Not that she disliked the name or its superficial “Our Crowd” associations (Jonathan's branch, however, had had nothing to do with Warburgs, Loebs, and Schiffs; his people had come from a shtetl in eastern Poland, via Boston), but it wasn't her name. She was Reinhart, at all times: Reinhart at work, Reinhart on the cover of her almost-a-book, and Reinhart on every single document related to the Rearden School, including her listing on the auction program. Strangely enough, the only person who ever referred to her as Grace Sachs was her own father.

“And I'm Sally Morrison-Golden,” said Sally, pausing for acknowledgment. “I'm so delighted that we've come together tonight, to celebrate our wonderful school and do what we can to make our children's educational experience the best it can possibly be. Now I know,” she went on with a merry grin, “some of you may be thinking, ‘Don't I already pay enough tuition?' ”

The expected nervous laughter rippled uneasily through the crowd.

“And of course, you do. But it's our responsibility to make sure that Rearden can accept the students it wants to accept, and that those students will be able to attend the school despite their  financial circumstances.”

Really?
thought Grace.
Since when?
The crowd clapped halfheartedly.

“And of course,” said Sally, “it's also up to us to see that our wonderful teachers are so well paid that we don't lose them to other schools. We love our teachers!”

“
Right on!
” said someone over by the Jackson Pollocks, causing a surge of laughter, for the archaic expression if not for the sentiment. Of course it was true that Rearden valued its teachers, thought Grace. Just not enough to invite them to tonight's event. But how many could have dropped $300 on a ticket?

“So I hope you've all brought your checkbooks, people, because while we are certainly here to drink beautiful wine, eat fantastic food, and check out the view, the bottom line is the bottom line!” Sally grinned at the crowd, delighted with her own cleverness. “We accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express Black Cards! Stocks and bonds!”

“Artworks!” chimed in Amanda Emery. “Real estate!”

People laughed awkwardly.

“And now,” said Sally, “before we roll up our sleeves and get down to the serious business of spending money, our own Mr. Chips, Robert Conover, would like to extend an official welcome. Robert?”

The headmaster waved from a far corner of the long room and began making his way toward Sally.

Grace let her mind wander as he began to say all of the expected things, lingering on the thank-yous (again) and reminding them all (again) why the money was needed, and what a wonderful thing it was to be able to honor the superlative education their kids were receiving, and how much that meant to the teachers. Then Grace let her gaze wander, too. On a small table beside her sat Sylvia, her laptop at the ready to record the bids. The time, plainly visible on the laptop screen, was 8:36, which meant that Jonathan was now more than merely running late, he was seriously late. She looked first at the bodies at the edges of the room, then made a grid of the crowd and worked it, left to right, back to front. He wasn't there. He wasn't in any of the doorways. He wasn't in the little group that, at that moment, erupted into the foyer, comprising the missing couples from the pre-K class, who must have come together following a private celebration of their own and were perhaps already too drunk to have noticed the coatrack in the lobby. They came in a dark bubble of cashmere and fur, laughing at something undoubtedly fully separate from A Night for Rearden, until one of them realized what an entrance they were making and hushed the other three. He wasn't with them, a part of their revelry. He wasn't behind them in the private elevator, which had released them into the apartment and then gone away.

So. The shiva call was taking longer than he'd thought, they had pressed food upon him, or the mother would not let him go away, because when her child's doctor went away her child would have gone away as well, or there was a minyan to say kaddish, and he would have had to stay for that, or at least to nod along with it, since she doubted he knew it by heart—even after all these years of funerals. It astounded her that he could bear another shiva call, another devastated family, another kaddish. The burden he carried, those kids and their terrified parents—it was another world from the imperviousness and entitlement in this room, she thought, looking around at the others, at their faces, a little flushed, nodding happily at whatever surely reassuring thing the headmaster was telling them, perhaps that their healthy, nurtured children had ranked well on some newly commissioned analysis of New York private schools or that they were on track for a higher rate of Ivy League acceptances than Trinity and Riverdale. They were smiling in harmony and laughing as if being conducted from the podium. And why not? All was well in their world, high above the city: these men who spun money out of other money, and the women who lined their nests with it, and even the shared endeavor at hand: to make “charitable donations” to—what an incredible coincidence!—their own children's school. How could it even occupy the same planet with what her husband was doing right now? She imagined him in that little apartment in Crown Heights, toe-to-toe with the others, a square of torn fabric pinned to his coat, shaking hands and bowing his head for the prayers and feeling—she knew this perfectly well—as if he had failed utterly.