You Should Have Known (2 page)

“My editor sent it a few weeks ago,” Rebecca said, placing the galley on the tabletop next to the Kleenex box. “Loved it. You know, people don't really ever hear this:
Don't screw up at the beginning and you won't have a lot of these problems down the line.
And it's very in-your-face. The typical book on this subject has a bit more of a kinder, gentler approach.”

Grace, aware that the interview had now actually begun, tried to summon that cock of the head and those perfectly formed sound bites. Her voice, when she spoke next, was not the voice of what she considered her real life; it was a situational voice. It was what she thought of as her therapy voice. “I understand what you're saying. But to be frank, I think kinder-and-gentler hasn't served us especially well. I think women are ready to hear what my book says. We don't need to be handled gently. We're grown-ups, and if we've screwed up, we should be able to take a little truth about it, and make our own decisions. I always explain to my clients that if all they want is for someone to tell them everything's going to be all right, or everything happens for a reason, or whatever the pointless jargon of the moment is, then they don't have to come to my office and pay me for my expertise. Or buy my book, I suppose.” She smiled. “They can buy one of the other books. Any of them.
How to Love Your Marriage Back to Health.
How to Fight for Your Relationship.
”

“Yes, but your title's rather…confrontational, isn't it?
You Should Have Known.
I mean, that's what we always say to ourselves when we're watching the press conference and some politician's just tweeted a photo of his penis to the world, or got caught with a second family, and the wife's standing there next to him looking stunned. You know,
Really? This surprises you?
”

“I don't doubt the wife is surprised.” Grace nodded. “The question is,
should
she be surprised? Could she have avoided finding herself in this position?”

“So this is the title you chose?”

“Well, yes and no,” Grace told her. “It was actually my second choice. I wanted to call it
Attention Must Be Paid
. But nobody got the reference. They said it was too literary.”

“Oh really? We didn't all read Arthur Miller in high school?” Rebecca asked archly, establishing her bona fides.

“Maybe your high school,” said Grace diplomatically. In fact she had read
Death of a Salesman
in middle school at Rearden, the proudly intense (and, once upon a time, vaguely socialist) New York private school where her own son was now a seventh grader. “Anyway, we compromised. You know how we always tell ourselves,
You never know,
when someone does something we don't see coming? We're shocked that he turns out to be a womanizer, or an embezzler. He's an addict. He lied about everything. Or he's just garden-variety selfish and the fact that he's married to you and perhaps you have children together—that doesn't seem to stop him from behaving as if he's still a single, unencumbered teenager?”

“
Oh yeah
,” Rebecca said. It sounded, Grace thought, a little personal. Well, that was hardly surprising. That was sort of the point.

“And when it happens we just throw up our hands: We say:
Wow,
you never know about people
. And we never hold ourselves accountable for what we bring to the deception. We have to learn to be accountable. If we don't, we can't act in our own best interests. And we can't prevent it next time.”

“Uh-oh.” Rebecca looked up. She fixed Grace with a plainly disapproving expression. “We're not about to blame the victim, are we?”

“There is no victim,” said Grace. “Look, I've been in practice for fifteen years. Over and over I've heard women describe their early interactions with their partner, and their early impressions of their partner. And listening to them, I continually thought:
You knew right at the beginning
. She knows he's never going to stop looking at other women. She knows he can't save money. She knows he's contemptuous of her—the very first time they talk to each other, or the second date, or the first night she introduces him to her friends. But then she somehow lets herself
un
know what she knows. She lets these early impressions, this basic awareness, get overwhelmed by something else. She persuades herself that something she has intuitively seen in a man she barely knows isn't true at all now that she—quote unquote—
has gotten to know him better
. And it's that impulse to negate our own impressions that is so astonishingly powerful. And it can have the most devastating impact on a woman's life. And we'll always let ourselves off the hook for it, in our own lives, even as we're looking at some other deluded woman and thinking:
How could she not have known?
And I feel, just so strongly, that we need to hold ourselves to that same standard. And
before
we're taken in, not after.”

“But you know”—Rebecca looked up from her pad, while her pencil, impressively, continued to write—“it's not just men. Women lie, too, right?” She was frowning, and there was, in the middle of her forehead, a pronounced V. Clearly—happily—the magazine she wrote for had not persuaded her to inject herself with botulinum toxin.

“Right. Of course. And I do talk about this in the book. But the fact is, nine times out of ten it's the woman sitting right there on my couch, totally distraught because, in her view, her male partner has hidden something from her. So I decided, right at the start, this book is going to be for women.”

“Okay,” the girl said, returning to her pad. “I get it.”

“I'm being didactic,” Grace said with a rueful little laugh.

“You're being passionate.”

Right
, Grace thought. She would have to remember that.

“In any case,” she said deliberately, “I reached a point where I couldn't stand to see so many decent, well-intentioned women suffering through months or years of therapy, ripping their guts out and spending a fortune, just to realize that their partner has not changed at all, possibly has never seriously tried to change, or even expressed a willingness to change. The women are right back where they started when they first came in and sat where you're sitting right now. Those women deserve to hear the truth, which is that their situation isn't going to improve—at least, not nearly as much as they want it to. They need to hear that the error they've made might be irreparable.”

She stopped herself, partly to let Rebecca catch up, partly to savor the impact of this, her “bombshell” (as Sarabeth the agent had put it in their very first meeting the previous year). It still felt just slightly seismic. In fact, Grace could remember the moment she had decided to actually write down the thing she really thought, the obvious thing made ever more blindingly obvious with each passing year of her professional life, with every dating guide (which never said it) and marriage manual (which never said it either) she had devoured in preparation for writing her book, and with every International Association of Marriage and Family Counselors conference she'd attended (where it was never uttered). This thing no one talked about, but which she suspected her colleagues understood as well as she. Should she say it in her book and call down the vitriol of her peers? Or just reiterate that ridiculous myth that any “relationship” (whatever that was) could be “saved” (whatever that meant).

“Don't pick the wrong person,” she told Rebecca now, emboldened by the presence of
Vogue
in her bland little office, the artificially long and lean woman on her oatmeal-colored couch, wielding her retro steno pad and tape recorder. “Pick the wrong person and it doesn't matter how much you want to fix your marriage. It won't work.”

After a moment, Rebecca looked up and said, “That's pretty blunt.”

Grace shrugged. It was blunt, she wasn't going to argue with that. It needed to be blunt. If a woman chose the wrong person, he was always going to be the wrong person: that was all. The most capable therapist in the world wouldn't be able to do much more than negotiate the treaty. At best, Grace thought, it was terribly sad, but at worst it was punitive—a lifetime of punitive. That was no way to have a marriage. If these couples were childless, the effort should go into separation. If there were children: mutual respect and co-parenting. And separation.

Not, of course, that she didn't feel for them. She truly did feel for them, her own patients especially, because they had come to her for help and it was too late to offer them anything but the equivalent of garbage bags and Windex after the oil spill. But what she hated most of all was the sheer preventability of all this distress. Her patients were not unintelligent. They were educated, insightful about others. Some, even, were brilliant people. And that they should have met, on the paths of their younger lives, a potential companion who offered sure or at least likely pain, and that they should have said yes to that sure or at least likely pain, and thus received the very sure or at least likely pain that was promised…well, it baffled her. It had always baffled her, and enraged her, too. Sometimes—she couldn't help it—she wanted to shake them all.

“Imagine,” she said to Rebecca, “that you are sitting down at a table with someone for the first time. Perhaps on a date. Perhaps at a friend's house—wherever you might cross paths with a man you possibly find attractive. In that first moment there are things you can see about this man, and intuit about this man. They are readily observable. You can sense his openness to other people, his interest in the world, whether or not he's intelligent—whether he makes use of his intelligence. You can tell that he's kind or dismissive or superior or curious or generous. You can see how he treats you. You can learn from what he decides to tell you about himself: the role of family and friends in his life, the women he's been involved with previously. You can see how he cares for himself—his own health and well-being, his financial well-being. This is all available information, and we do avail ourselves. But then…”

She waited. Rebecca was scribbling, her blond head down.

“Then?”

“Then comes the story. He has a story. He has many stories. And I'm not suggesting that he's making things up or lying outright. He might be—but even if he doesn't do that, we do it for him, because as human beings we have such a deep, ingrained need for narrative, especially if we're going to play an important role in the narrative; you know,
I'm already the heroine and here comes my hero
. And even as we're absorbing facts or forming impressions, we have this persistent impulse to set them in some sort of context. So we form a story about how he grew up, how women have treated him, how employers have treated him. How he appears before us right now becomes a part of that story. How he wants to live tomorrow becomes part of that story. Then we get to enter the story:
No one has ever loved him enough until me. None of his other girlfriends have been his intellectual equal. I'm not pretty enough for him. He admires my independence.
None of this is fact. It's all some combination of what he's told us and what we've told ourselves. This person has become a made-up character in a made-up story.”

“You mean, like a fictional character.”

“Yes. It's not a good idea to marry a fictional character.”

“But…you make it sound as if it's inevitable.”

“It's not. If we were to bring to this situation a
fraction
of the care we brought to, for example, our consumer decisions, problems would arise far less than they do. I mean, what is it about us? We'll try on twenty pairs of shoes before we make a purchase. We'll read reviews by total strangers before we choose someone to install our carpeting. But we turn off our bullshit detector and toss out our own natural impressions because we find someone attractive, or because he seems interested in us. He could be holding up a placard that says,
I will take your money, make passes at your girlfriends, and leave you consistently bereft of love and support
, and we'll find a way to forget that we ever knew that. We'll find a way to
unknow
that.”

“But…,” Rebecca said. “People do have doubts. Maybe they just don't act on them.”

Grace nodded. Doubts emerged often in her practice: very old, desiccated doubts, saved and preserved and brought forth by very wounded, very sad women. They were a theme with countless variations:
I knew he drank too much. I knew he couldn't keep his mouth shut. I knew he didn't love me, not as much as I loved him.

“Many people have doubts,” she agreed. “The problem is, few of us recognize doubt for what it is. Doubt is a gift from our deepest selves, that's how I think of it. Like fear. You'd be amazed how many people experience fear just before something bad happens to them, and when they go back to that moment later, they understand that they missed an opportunity to avert what was about to take place. You know:
Don't walk down that street. Don't let that guy give you a ride home.
We seem to have a highly developed ability to ignore what we know, or suspect. From an evolutionary standpoint alone, that's fascinating, but my interests are more practical. I think doubt can be an extraordinary gift. I think we need to learn to listen to our doubt, not just dismiss it, even if that means putting a stop to an engagement. You know, it's much easier to cancel a wedding than it is to cancel a marriage.”

“Oh, I don't know about that,” Rebecca said with heavy sarcasm. “Some of the weddings I've been to lately. I think it might be easier to cancel the Olympics.”

This—without knowing anything about Rebecca's recently married friends—had to be true. Grace's own wedding had been small because her family consisted of her father and herself, and Jonathan's family had chosen to absent themselves. But she, too, had attended her share of insane nuptials.