You Should Have Known (4 page)

“Novel? Oh, I didn't write a novel. I couldn't write a novel.”

It occurred to her that she probably shouldn't be talking. What would talking do to her mouth in the pictures?

“You don't have a new book?” he said without looking up. “I thought you were a writer.”

“No. I mean yes, I wrote a book, but I'm not a writer. I mean…” Grace frowned. “It's a book about marriage. I specialize in work with couples.”

“She's a therapist,” Rebecca said helpfully.

But wasn't she a writer, too? Grace thought, suddenly perturbed. Didn't writing a book make her a writer? Then something else occurred to her. “I didn't hire anyone else to write it,” she insisted, as if he'd accused her. “I wrote it.”

Ron had stopped shooting and was looking down into the digital monitor.

“Actually,” he said without looking up, “I need you a bit to the left. Sorry, my left. And could you lean back a little?… Okay,” he said, considering. “I think we might have been wrong about the hair.”

“Fine,” Rebecca said.

Grace reached back and deftly removed the three heavy pins, and down came one shoulder-length coil of highly conditioned dark brown hair. She reached for it, to fan it out, but he stopped her. “No, don't,” he said. “This is better. It's sort of sculptural. You can't see it, but there's a nice contrast with the dark hair and the color of your blouse.”

She didn't correct him. It wasn't a “blouse,” of course. It was a soft, thin sweater of parchment-colored cashmere—one of about five she owned. But she didn't really want to talk blouses with Ron, even if he shot for
Vogue
.

Then came a small adjustment of the vase. Another small adjustment of the book on the table. “Good,” he announced. “Right. Let's go.”

He began again. Rebecca looked on, saying nothing. Grace tried to breathe.

She almost never sat here, on the couch, and the perspective was odd. The Eliot Porter poster, she noted, was askew, and there was a grimy mark over the light switch by the door.
I must get that
, she thought. And maybe it was finally time to replace the Eliot Porter. She was tired of the Eliot Porter. Wasn't everyone tired of that Eliot Porter?

“Marriage,” he said suddenly. “That's a biggie. You'd think there wasn't much left to say.”

“Always more to say,” said Rebecca. “It's the kind of thing you don't want to get wrong.”

He went down on one knee and shot up at an angle. Grace tried to remember if that was supposed to make your neck look shorter or longer. “I guess I never thought too much about it. I thought, you meet somebody, if it's the right person, you just
know
. I mean, I knew when I met my wife. I went home and told my friend I was living with, ‘This is the girl.' Love at first sight kind of thing.”

Grace closed her eyes. Then she remembered where she was, and she opened them. Ron put down his camera and picked up another one, which he proceeded to fiddle with. It seemed safe to speak.

“The difficulty is when people count on that ‘you just know,' and they dismiss people they don't respond to right away. I actually think there are lots of good matches for each person, and they cross our paths all the time, but we're so wedded to the idea of love at first sight that we can miss the really great people who don't come with a thunderbolt attached.”

“Can you look over this way?” Rebecca said.

Can you shut up, in other words?
Grace thought. She looked at Rebecca, who was seated in Grace's own chair, at Grace's own desk. To compensate for this unpleasant fact, she felt herself smile broadly. That was even more unpleasant.

But there was another thing, too, and as she sat, uncomfortably angled, uncomfortably twisted, that other thing began to move up through the situational distraction of being photographed for
Vogue
(in whose pages, she was quite sure, not a single reader would mistake her for a supermodel) and the displacement of being on her own couch, until it had set itself indisputably before her. That thing was the unalterable fact that she—like Ron the photographer, like any number of patients in this very room, like an unknowable portion of the future readers of her book—had absolutely
just known
, the first time she had laid eyes on Jonathan Sachs, that she would marry and love him for the rest of her life. It was a truth she had hidden from Sarabeth the agent and Maud the editor and J. Colton the publicist, just as she was now hiding it from Rebecca the about-to-be-married writer and Ron, who, like her, had
just known
that he had met the woman he was supposed to marry. That night she had crossed the Charles River in the first trill of autumn, with her friend Vita and Vita's boyfriend, to go to a Halloween party in some ghoulish cavern in the medical school. The others had gone in first, but she had wanted the bathroom and gotten herself lost in the basement, turning like a mouse through underground corridors, losing herself, growing increasingly irritated, increasingly afraid. And then, very suddenly, she was not only not alone, but in the presence of—the company of—a man she recognized instantly, though she was quite sure she had never seen him before. He was a scrawny guy with neglected hair and several days' growth of inelegant beard. He wore a Johns Hopkins T-shirt and carried a plastic tub of dirty clothes with a book about the Klondike wobbling on top, and when he saw her, he smiled: an earth-on-its-axis-halting smile that had lit up the grimy hallway, making her stop on a dime, changing her life. Before Grace had taken her next breath, this still-unnamed man had become the most trusted, valued, and desired person in her life.
She just knew.
So she had chosen him, and now, as a result, she was having the right life, with the right husband, the right child, the right home, the right work. For her, it really had happened that way. But she couldn't say that. Especially not now.

“Hey, can we do a few close-ups? You mind?” said Ron.

Should she mind? Grace thought. Did she get a vote?

“All right,” said Rebecca, confirming that the question was not for her.

Grace leaned forward. The lens seemed so close, only inches away. She wondered if she could look through it and see his eye on the other side; she peered deep into it, but there was only the glassy dark surface and the thunderous clicking noise: no one was in there. Then she wondered if she would feel the same if it were Jonathan holding the camera, but she actually couldn't remember a single time when Jonathan had held a camera,
Click
, let alone a camera this close to her face. She was the default photographer in her family, though with none of the bells and whistles currently on display in her little office, and with none of Ron's evident skill, and with no passion at all for the form. She was the one who took the birthday pictures and the camp visiting-weekend pictures,
Click
, the photo of Henry asleep in his Beethoven costume, and
Click
, the photo of him playing chess with his grandfather,
Click
, her own favorite picture of Jonathan, minutes after finishing a Memorial Day road race up at the lake, with a cup of water thrown over his face and an expression of unmistakable pride and just distinguishable lust.
Or was it only in retrospect
, Grace thought,
Click
, that she had always seen lust in that picture, because later, running the numbers, she had realized that Henry was about to be conceived, just hours after it was taken. After Jonathan had eaten a bit and stood for a long time under a hot shower, after he had taken her to her own childhood bed and,
Click
, rocked over her, saying her name again and again, and she remembered feeling so happy, and,
Click
, so utterly lucky, and not because they were actually in the act of making the child she wanted so badly, but because at that specific moment even the possibility of that did not matter to her, nothing but him and,
Click
, them and this, and now the memory of this, rushing up to the surface: the eye and the other eye through the lens that must be looking back.

“That's nice,” Ron said, lowering the camera. Now she could see his eye again: brown, after all, and utterly unremarkable. Grace nearly laughed in embarrassment. “No, it was good,” he said, misunderstanding. “And you're done.”

T
he highly intentional neglect of Sally Morrison-Golden's East 74th Street town house began with its exterior, which featured window boxes of nondescript greenery, both dying and dead, and a drooping red balloon tied to the iron grille over the door. The house sat on its leafy side street between two elegant and immaculate brownstones of the same vintage (made, more than likely, by the same architect and builder), whose dignified and doubtless expensive plantings and bright polished windows seemed to bear their slumming neighbor with a certain long-suffering forbearance. Inside, when the stout German au pair opened the door to Grace, that theme of defiant disarray was taken up by immediate and relentless mess, which began just inside the door (indeed, the door could not open completely because of the bulging shopping bags behind it) and continued along trails of child-related debris down the hall to the kitchen and up the stairs (where it undoubtedly led to messy spaces unseen). This was all thoroughly deliberate, Grace thought, as the au pair (Hilda? Helga?) pulled back the door and she stepped carefully inside. In a city of wealth, Sally was perhaps the richest person Grace personally knew, and with a staff that certainly included at least one person whose job was to keep order, if not cleanliness, even in the wake of the four children who lived here (and the two from Simon Golden's first marriage, who visited on weekends with their own accompaniments of homework, sports equipment, and electronics). Yet this assertive accumulation of stuff had to be Sally's preference. The stacks of discarded shoes, the teetering pile of
Observer
s and
Times
, the bulging shopping bags from the Children's Place and Sam Flax blocking the bottom of the staircase—Grace looked at these with an involuntary calculation: five minutes to move them, unpack them, fold the shopping bags into order, and store them in the place one kept shopping bags for some future use; two minutes to put the receipts into the box or file where they lived (or ought to live), remove the tags from the new clothes and take them to the laundry room; another two to place the paints and papers wherever art got made; and a final two to gather up the papers and dump them outside in the recycling bin. Eleven minutes at most, and really, how hard could it be? The elegant Greek Revival house was shouting for release, its dentiled moldings and fine plaster walls nearly obscured by children's finger paintings and macaroni assemblages, tacked or taped up at random, as if the entryway were the hallway outside a kindergarten classroom. Even the Morrison-Goldens' ketubah, richly colored and solemnly Hebrew, like a page from a Semitic Book of Kells, had been framed in a Popsicle-stick contraption with bits of dusty fuzz and dried glue protruding from between the shards. (This was oddly fitting, Grace had to admit, since Sally had converted to Judaism at the request of her then fiancé and after the marriage had effortlessly drifted into her husband's neglect of all other things Jewish.)

She followed the noises of a meeting in progress to the back of the house, where new construction had extended the kitchen into a small garden. There Sally sat, between the sycophantic Amanda Emery and Sylvia Steinmetz, single mother of the brilliant Daisy Steinmetz, adopted from China as a one-year-old and—after leapfrogging third grade—the youngest student by far in Rearden's middle school.

“Thank God…” Sally laughed, looking up. “Now we can actually accomplish something.”

“Am I that late?” said Grace, who knew she wasn't.

“No, no, but we can't seem to settle down without your calming influence.” She adjusted the wiggling toddler on her lap: her youngest, named Djuna (Sally had informed them) after her late mother-in-law, Doris.

“Should I make more coffee?” asked Hilda or Helga, who had followed Grace into the kitchen. She stood barefoot, her feet looking none too clean, Grace thought. She also had a dark metal nose ring that communicated a certain lack of cleanliness.

“Yeah, maybe. And would you mind taking the ba? We'll get done a lot quicker without her contributions,” said Sally, as if she had to apologize.

Silently, the au pair reached out for the squirmy Djuna, whom Sally extended over the table. Djuna, sensing her departure from center stage, let out a diva's cry of protest.

“Bye, sweetie,” said Sylvia. “God, is she cute.”

“She'd better be,” Sally said. “She's my last.”

“Ooh, are you sure?” Amanda said. “Neil and I keep saying we wish we'd kept our options open.”

Grace, who did not know Amanda very well, was unsure of what this might refer to. Vasectomy? Egg freezing? Amanda had ten-year-old twins and despite some recent “facial rejuvenation” was easily forty-five.

“Done and done. To tell you the truth, Djuna was a bit of a surprise, but we figured, what the hell? I mean, why not?”

Why not, indeed?
thought Grace, as thoroughly aware as the other women in the room of what four children (or, indeed, six children) signified in New York City. Two children meant that you had reproduced yourself, numbers-wise, which was expensive enough. Three meant that a third round of private school and summer camp and ice hockey lessons at Chelsea Piers and college counseling at IvyWise was inconsequential. But four children…well, not many families in Manhattan had four children. Four children meant an extra nanny, for one thing, and a town house. You couldn't ask kids to share a room, after all. Children needed their private space, to express their uniqueness.

“And I mean,” she went on, “what's better than raising children? I had this big career, seriously I haven't missed it for one second since Ella was born. Even at my reunion last year, when all these women I'd gone to college with gave me crap about giving it up, like I have some big responsibility to Yale that's supposed to dictate how I live my life. I just looked at them, like,
You're so wrong
. Don't let anyone tell you it's not the most important thing you can do,” she insisted to Amanda, as if this were the issue at hand.

“Oh, I know, I know,” Amanda said weakly. “But I mean, the twins, they're so much work. God forbid they should want to do anything together. If one wants Broadway Kids, the other wants gymnastics. Celia won't even go to the same camp as her sister, so thanks very much, two visiting weekends in Maine.”

Hilda/Helga brought coffee and set it down on the long farmhouse table. Grace produced the box of butter cookies she'd stopped for at Greenberg's, and these were greeted with mild enthusiasm.

“My thighs hate you,” Sally said, taking two.

“Your thighs have no right to hate anyone,” Amanda told her. “I've seen your thighs. Your thighs are the envy of the entire Upper East Side.”

“Well,” Sally said, looking pleased, “you know, I'm sort of in training. Simon said if I finished the half marathon out at the beach, he'd take me to Paris.”

“My mother used to bring these home,” said Sylvia, tasting her cookie. “You know those little cinnamon buns they make? They had a German name.”

“
Schnecken
,” Grace said. “Delicious.”

“Should we start?” Sally asked. She had not grown up in the city and, having nothing to contribute to the shared nostalgia, sounded almost irritated.

Pads were produced and pens uncapped. Everyone looked deferentially at Sally, who was chairing the committee as well as hosting the meeting. “Right. Two days to go. And we are…” She trailed off with a girlish shrug. “But I'm not worried.”

“I'm a little worried,” said Sylvia.

“No, it's fine. Look…” Sally turned her yellow pad to display a neat column of items in blue Sharpie. “People want to come and they want to spend money. That's what's important. The rest is just details. And we've got two hundred confirmed. Almost two hundred. It's already a success.”

Grace looked over at Sylvia. Of the three of them, she knew Sylvia the best, or at least had known her the longest. Not that they were particularly close. Sylvia, she knew, was holding her tongue.

“So I was over at the Spensers' yesterday morning. I did a walk-through with Suki's assistant and the house manager.”

“Suki wasn't there?” said Sylvia.

“No, but I went over everything with the staff.”

Grace nodded. To be granted admission to the Spenser abode—that alone had been a serious coup and certainly a big motivator for those two hundred RSVPs, at $300 a pop. Suki Spenser, third wife of Jonas Marshall Spenser and the mother of Rearden preschoolers, presided over one of the most storied apartments in the city (it was actually three apartments, combined into two floors the width of their Fifth Avenue building). She had called out of the blue the previous month—well, her assistant had called—and said that while Mrs. Spenser wasn't able to serve on the committee, she'd be pleased to host the event. Her staff would serve whatever food was brought in, and they could also offer the wine. The Spenser family had their own vineyard in Sonoma.

“Do you know her?” Grace asked Sally.

“No, not really. I've nodded to her in the halls at school, that's all. And of course I e-mailed inviting her to work on the committee, but I didn't expect to hear from her, let alone all this.” The RSVPs had had to go through security checks, which had been a hassle. But it was worth it.

“Oh, my God, I am so excited,” Amanda chirped. “Did you see the Jackson Pollocks?”

There were two of them, on facing walls of the dining room. Grace had seen them in
Architectural Digest
.

“I think so,” said Sally, honestly enough. “Sylvia, your friend's all set? It's so great he's doing this for us.”

Sylvia nodded. She knew someone at Sotheby's who had agreed to handle the auction. “He told me it's payback for getting him through trigonometry at Horace Mann. Actually I barely got him through trigonometry.”

“And the auction itself?” Grace asked. She was visualizing Sally's list, trying to push things forward.

“Right. I have a proof of the catalog. Amanda, what did I do with it?”

Amanda pointed out the ragged-edged booklet amid the scattered papers on the table.

“Okay,” Sally said. “This isn't final, we can still add till tomorrow morning, but he's printing tomorrow afternoon, and…Sylvia?”

“Picking them up Saturday at one,” she said efficiently.

“Good.” She put on her glasses, opened the cover, and started down the printed page.

Flowers from L'Olivier and Wild Poppy. Stays in no fewer than six Hamptons houses, one on Fire Island (“But the family part,” Sally said reassuringly), a pair each in Vail and Aspen and one in Carmel, New York (this particular offering relayed with less than effusive gratitude). There was a design consult with an A-list decorator (daughter in twelfth grade), a cooking lesson for eight in an excessively popular Tribeca restaurant (son of chef's publicist in seventh), a chance to shadow the mayor of New York for a day (policy analyst's twins applying for two of the extremely valuable spots in next year's pre-K), and something called a “stem-cell face lift” with a doctor at NYU, which sounded so appalling (yet so intriguingly bizarre!) that Grace made a mental note to ask Jonathan what it was.

“And—I think I sent out an e-mail about this,” Sally said. “Or maybe not. But Nathan Friedberg offered us a place in his camp.”

“Sally, that's fabulous!” Amanda said.

“What camp?” Grace asked.

Amanda turned to her. “You know, his camp? That he's starting?”

“It was in
Avenue
,” said Sally. “He's starting this camp?”

“It's going to cost twenty-five thousand dollars for the summer,” said Sylvia.

“That's…a lot of waterskiing,” Grace observed.

“No waterskiing. No knot tying. No campfires,” said Sylvia, sounding suitably bemused. “Children of mere mortals need not apply.”

“But…I'm sorry, I'm not understanding. This is a summer camp?” Grace said slowly.

“I think it's a little bit brilliant, actually,” said Amanda. “I mean, let's face it, these are the kids who are going to be running things. They need to know how business works, and they need to know how to be philanthropists. Nathan called me about it. He was wondering if the twins might want to enroll. I said I'd love it, but they'd kill me if I took them out of their camps in Maine. They have these whole posses up there.”

Grace still couldn't grasp it. “Where exactly do they go for this camp? What do they do?”

“Oh, they'll all live at home. A bus picks them up in the morning. And all these great people are going to come talk to the kids,” Sally said. “People from business and the arts. They learn about business plans, and investments. They take trips to visit companies downtown and outside the city. I know they're going out to Greenwich at least once. And they get the weekends off so they can do whatever they'd usually do then. I signed Ella up. Bronwen just wants to stay out at the beach all summer. She has her horse out there. But then I thought,
I wonder if he'd donate a place
. I mean, a twenty-five-thousand-dollar value! If we could get that for the school, it would be great.”

“Bravo, Sally!” Amanda smiled. “That is completely brilliant.”

“Yes,” Grace managed, but she was still mystified. And now slightly appalled, as well.

They went back to the list. A college admissions counselor. A preschool admissions counselor. A genealogist who came to your house with her computer, so you didn't have to do all that online stuff, and made a gorgeous family tree for you, which she painted like a Shaker dream design. (Grace wondered briefly if she ought to buy that one herself—she would probably have to buy something, and wouldn't that be a good thing to give Henry?—but the thought of Jonathan's terrible family stopped her. To have such hateful people on her son's Shaker family tree made her angry, then guilty, then just sad for him. Bad enough that he was down to a single grandparent. Knowing that those people were still out there, and only a few hours' drive away, in spite of their showing not the slightest inclination to see their grandson, somehow made it worse.) And then the doctors: dermatologists, plastic surgeons. And someone Amanda referred to as “the toe guy.”