The Undoing

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  But then Eva answered. “He-low?” she said, and you knew by the question in her voice that she truly did not know who it was. There was no caller ID in her father’s home, no DVR, and no computer. Grace’s father and stepmother had ceased to absorb new technology with the touch-tone phone and the videocassette (for which they were content not to expand their library of 1980s Masterpiece Theatre collections). They did have cell phones, which Grace and Eva’s children had insisted upon, but each of the phones had a bit of paper taped to the back with instructions and important phone numbers. Grace knew not to call her father on the cell, and she had never received a call from it, either.

  “Hello, Eva, this is Grace.”

  “Oh, Grace.” She sounded not so much disappointed as confirmed in some earlier disappointment. “Your father is out.”

  “Are you well?” said Grace, continuing in their set script. Eva, who had brought all the formality of her parents’ prewar life of wealth in Vienna to her own postwar life of wealth in New York, required very specific exchanges. She would—if she had ever desired a profession—have made an excellent drill sergeant.

  “Yes, quite well. We are expecting you for dinner tomorrow, yes?”

  “Yes, we are looking forward to it. I’m not sure whether Jonathan will be back in time.”

  This—this very tiny irritant—was all it took.

  “What do you mean, that you are ‘not sure’?”

  “He’s in Cleveland, at a medical conference.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m not sure what time his flight gets in.”

  This, to Eva, would be egregious enough. That she wasn’t actually sure what day he would get in would be incomprehensible. Eva simply had no comprehension of a wife whose entire life was not fueled by the needs of her husband. The reality of Grace’s family, with its burdens and schedules, its looming commitments (of course, Eva had been told all about the upcoming book, the tour, the media appearances, but did she really comprehend any of it?), not to mention the innate uncertainties of a doctor’s life, which required the jettisoning of social obligations when actual people got suddenly, palpably, acutely sick, was so distasteful to Eva that she routinely blocked it out.

  “I do not understand,” Eva said. “Can you not find out? Is it too difficult to make a phone call?”

  She was, thought Grace, the absolute antithesis of the classic immigrant mother. The classic immigrant mother of any ethnicity, whose pasta or goulash or roast could be made to stretch if you wanted to bring your friends home for dinner. Eva had always run a beautiful but profoundly unwelcoming home. Grace’s own mother, her real mother, had not been any kind of a cook, but at least she had made you feel she was glad to see you when she ladled out her Dominican cook’s very good soups. Eva, on the other hand, was a precise and excellent producer of meals, but good food without a welcome was not very hospitable either.

  “I have been trying,” Grace said lamely. “Why don’t we say that it will be the three of us, and I’ll of course let you know if I hear otherwise. It’s better to have too much than too little, isn’t it?”

  She might as well have asked if it wasn’t a good plan to store extra garbage in the refrigerator.

  “This is a terrible thing, at Henry’s school,” Eva said suddenly, and the non sequitur caught Grace so much by surprise that she didn’t immediately understand what her stepmother was saying.

  “His school?” she faltered. She had been trimming the stalk of the cauliflower and now paused, her knife suspended above the cutting board.

  “One of the parents, murdered. Your father rang this morning, from the office.”

  The notion that her father had learned of Malaga Alves’s death before she had was in itself alarming. He wasn’t exactly on the grapevine, personal or technological.

  “Yes, I know. It’s terrible.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “Oh no. Well, yes. But just a bit. She seemed like a very nice person.”

  This emerged naturally, in classic speak-well-of-the-dead fashion. Though she hadn’t, really, seemed particularly nice. But what did it matter now?

  Grace placed the cauliflower head into the steamer basket and started warming butter for the roux. She had trained Henry to eat cauliflower by smothering it with a cheese sauce her old friend Vita had once shown her how to make. The cheese sauce, sadly, was now one of the few traces of Vita still in her life.

  “Was it the husband?” said Eva, as if Grace could possibly know. “It’s usually the husband.”

  “I don’t have any idea,” said Grace. “I’m sure the police are looking into it.”

  In fact, she thought grimly, I know the police are looking into it.

  “What kind of man kills the mother of his child?” her stepmother said, and Grace, who was now grating cheddar over the cutting board, rolled her eyes. I don’t know, she thought. A bad one?

  “It’s an awful thing,” she said instead. “How is Daddy’s hip? Is it still bothering him?”

  Even this, she knew, trespassed on Eva’s sense of propriety, the hips of her eighty-one-year-old husband being simply too intimate a topic for discussion with his only child. That he would certainly require one hip, if not both, to be replaced sooner or later—probably sooner—did not make the subject any more palatable.

  “He is fine. He doesn’t complain about it.”

  Grace, sensing the impasse, finished the call, promising to confirm Jonathan’s attendance as soon as she heard from him. Then she put the lamb chops into the broiler and began stirring flour into the melted butter.

  After dinner, when Henry had returned to his room to practice and Grace had finished clearing up, she went to her own room and removed her laptop from the leather satchel she kept it in. Their bedroom, by agreement, had always been a technology-free zone, apart from the Bose CD player on Jonathan’s side of the bed. (He kept his hundreds of CDs in leather binders in his bedside cabinet, meticulously broken down by genre and then organized alphabetically by artist. Unlike most people who claimed to like “all kinds” of music but never listened to anything but rock or jazz or blues, Jonathan really did have musical tastes so bizarrely wide-ranging that he was as likely to bring home a collection of Aboriginal didgeridoo or Baroque chamber music as the most recent Alison Krauss.) Grace wasn’t a Luddite. She fully managed her life and her husband’s (at least the nonprofessional part) and her son’s on an iPhone, and she had written her book on a laptop, but she didn’t like to be assailed by information, at least not at home. In the wider world it was inescapable; products and ideas were pitched to her constantly, wherever she looked or listened, and even her beloved NPR had taken its finger out of the dam, letting torrents of corporate sponsorship swim through. She might not share her husband’s appreciation of didgeridoo (“didgeri-don’t,” Henry—who agreed with her—had once called it), but at least it wasn’t trying to sell her anything but itself.

  Still, their bedroom, with its mossy green walls and red toile curtains and the Craftsman bed in which her parents had once slept (new mattress, of course!), was a haven for other forms of communication. She loved waking up here, especially before the day had properly started and it was still dark, to the rising curve of her husband’s bony shoulder. She liked waking up at night when Jonathan came home, being pulled back from sleep and into the warmth of his body with that strange and malleable uncertainty about whether she was dreaming or awake: love in a liminal climate, powered by REM and lust and the grown-up privacy of the marital bed. When Henry was very small, he had slept here between them, first because she had placed him there, very, very carefully, to make sure, in her new-mother terror, that he stayed alive through the night, and later because he climbed in himself. Soon, though, Jonathan insisted he decamp to his own room down the hall, a room she had once stenciled with a gender-nonspecific moon-and-stars motif, now long since painted over. It was around that time that she made a conscious effort to change their own room around. Apart from the bed, which she
had always loved, and the dressing table, which she did not, really, but kept because it brought her mother close to her, everything belonging to her parents’ time had been altered, from the liberated parquet (kept pristine, at least, by the beige carpeting she had grown up with) to the glowing green of the walls. When the decorator Grace had hired showed real horror at the fabric she’d chosen for the curtains, Grace fired her and hired a seamstress without an opinion. Jonathan, for his part, said he didn’t care so long as she was happy.

  And she was happy. She was very happy, here, in this room, here in her life. Happy enough to presume to tell other people how to be happy in theirs. She had never been the richest or the prettiest. She was not the luckiest. She still thought, sometimes—not often, because even all these years later it retained a sharp punch of sadness—of the babies who had begun to be hers and somehow never arrived. She still sometimes reached for the phone to call Vita and then stopped herself, and then felt a kind of baffled but still very painful dismissal, because she had never understood why they were no longer friends. She still missed her mother. But most of the time she could not believe she was actually living this life, with this brilliant, compassionate man she continued to look at and think: I’ll have him, as if she didn’t already, and their beautiful, clever son, in this apartment where she was daughter, wife, and mother, all at once. The brutal truth was that she had been very fortunate, and Malaga Alves, who had returned to Grace now—on her parents’ bed, in her marital chamber, with her son safely doing his homework down the hall—had been so very much the opposite.

  She opened her laptop and began to find out what everyone else already seemed to know. Predictably, the Times website had nothing about the murder of a woman whose child happened to attend a highly regarded Manhattan private school, but both the News and the Post had small items, worded so similarly that they might have been written by the same person. In the Post version:

  Tony Upper East Side Rearden Academy—

  Sic! thought Grace.

  is in shock over the death of fourth-grade mom. According to police, 10-year-old Miguel Alves returned home to find Malaga Alves, 35, dead in their blood-strewn apartment.

  “Blood-strewn”? thought Grace. This was why she never read anything but the Times.

  An infant girl, also in the apartment, was unharmed. Police have not been able to reach Alves’ husband, Guillermo Alves, 42, a native of Colombia. Alves manages Amsterdam Printing at 110 Broadway, one of the oldest and most successful financial printing service providers in the Financial District. Rearden Academy is one of the city’s premier college prep schools, routinely sending its graduates to Ivy League universities and Stanford and MIT universities. Tuition for Rearden Academy reportedly costs between $30,000 and $48,000 per year, depending on grade. Current Rearden students include the children of media titan Jonas Marshall Spenser and Aegis Hedge Fund founder Nathan Friedberg.

  Persons with information related to this or any ongoing case are encouraged to call Crime Watch at 1-888-692-7233.

  And that was all she wrote, Grace thought. Not much to go on. Surely not enough to brew a scandal. Still, she had been reading New York magazine long enough to know that they, at least, were unlikely to leave a Rearden parent’s murder alone, especially one in a “blood-strewn” apartment. Even if it turned out—as, let’s face it, it almost certainly would—that Colombia-born Guillermo Alves, the conveniently unreachable husband, had struck down his wife for any of the classic, time-honored reasons (jealousy, addiction, financial distress, adultery), the prospect of such a pulp-fiction plot line against a backdrop of Manhattan elitism would be hard to resist.

  There wasn’t much else, just a few pointless shout-outs on Urban Baby (“Anyone know anything about the mom at Rearden who got killed?”). A Google search on “Malaga Alves” produced reassuringly austere results; Malaga was a person, clearly, with what J. Colton the publicist would have called “a negligible online presence.” (Grace herself had had “a negligible online presence” before J. Colton had gotten her virtual hands on her. Now Grace had a website, a virgin Twitter account, and a Facebook page, all thankfully managed by a young woman in North Carolina, hired by the publisher.) Scanning the Google results page, watching the construct “Malaga+Alves” quickly break down to its parts (Malaga Spain, Malaga Rodrigues, Celeste Alves, Rentals Malaga/Jose Alves Agency Villas Self-Catering …), she was surprised to feel a kind of validation of her own distance from the search terms and the person they nominally represented. She did not know anyone named Malaga Rodrigues or Celeste Alves. She had never been to Malaga, Spain, and if she ever chose to go there, she would not be renting a self-catering villa.

  Of course, the husband would be long gone by now. Back in Colombia, probably, having left his children behind like the prince he obviously was. Even if they found him, they probably wouldn’t get him back, or if they did, it would take years. There wouldn’t be anything like justice, and what would happen to the kids was hard even to think about. The baby girl might be all right, if she got adopted or even fostered with the right family, but the son, Miguel, would never recover from what he had seen and what had been done to him. He was lost—plainly, irredeemably lost. You didn’t have to be a therapist to see that. You didn’t even have to be a mother.

  With this thought, she felt herself soften toward the police detectives. It must be frustrating to know that the person most likely to have murdered their victim was already out of reach and likely to remain so, and all they could do was circle around the remainder of her obliterated life, pointlessly massaging the periphery. So much water, but not a drop to drink! Thinking of this, Grace wished she had had something, anything, to tell them that might help. But she didn’t.

  Mostly, though, she wished Jonathan were here. Jonathan, so well versed in the nuances of death, would know what to say to her, how to assuage this inexplicable tinge of guilt she carried, ever since her conversation with Sylvia. (But why? What was she supposed to have done, inserted herself into a stranger’s life and said, “Do you happen to be married to a man who might murder you? And if so, do you need my help to leave him?”) She wished he would pick up his messages already. Or just call in. Or maybe not turn off quite so completely when he was away on these junkets. What was the point of so many channels of communication if you just couldn’t get through?

  She favored the phone. It was her preferred medium. But Jonathan had moved with the times, first to e-mail and then to texting. She might have more luck with one of those, she decided, navigating on her laptop to her e-mail account. E-mail they used mainly for the kind of low-stakes, practical communiqué that had no great impact on their inner life as a family but came in handy for a certain class of reminder (“Please try to get there before 7 tonight, you know how freaked Eva gets if we don’t sit down on time …”) or schedule readjustment (“I’ve got something going on with a patient. Can you take Henry to violin?”). The circumstances at hand were obviously in the e-mail ballpark. She typed in her husband’s address and in the subject line a pithy “Wife Seeks Husband.” Then she wrote:

  Honey, would you give me a call? Need to figure out when you’re getting back so I can tell Big E if you’re coming tomorrow night. Also, something’s happened at Rearden that doesn’t affect Henry but, if you can believe this, the police actually came around to talk to me about. So bizarre and pretty horrible. Hey, guess what, I did an interview with Today today! Love you, G.

  And then she clicked Send.

  And then she heard that sound, like a technological gulp, once and then again, and then again. It was a sound from the sound track of her life, or at least her married life, because when you were married to a doctor, at least the kind of doctor who had—always—sick patients in the hospital and parents of those sick patients who should never feel that they could not reach their sick child’s doctor, a sound that had, in its time, interrupted dinners with Jonathan and concerts with Jonathan and walks and sleep with Jonathan and even lovemaking: click/g
ulp, click/gulp, click/gulp, and then silence. It meant: Someone has just sent your husband an e-mail.

  She looked toward the sound and saw only Jonathan’s familiar bedside table, with its white ceramic lamp (the twin of her own) and last week’s New Yorker, a Bobby Short CD (At Town Hall, one of his favorites), and one of the many pairs of reading glasses she regularly supplied him with (the cheap ones from the drugstore, because he lost or destroyed them too regularly for expensive frames). But none of those items had made that noise, and she had heard that noise—she knew she had. She did not know enough to be afraid. Why be afraid of a familiar sound in a familiar place, even if hearing it made no sense?

  Grace put aside the laptop. She eased off the bed and knelt beside it, ignoring the thrum that had gripped her, quite suddenly and with so much force that, had her brain succeeded in conjuring any thought at all, she would not have heard it for the noise. She opened the door of the bedside cabinet and saw only the familiar things: three bulging leather binders full of jazz and rock and vintage Brill Building pop and “didgeri-don’t,” plus a few takeout menus and a folded program from the last recital of Vitaly Rosenbaum’s students. It had been a phantom, a mechanical phantom, signifying nothing except, perhaps, the fact that she missed her husband and—this was only just occurring to her—was not entirely, completely persuaded that she knew exactly where he was. And yet if that were true, if she really were convinced that she had imagined the sound, that clicking, gulping Someone has just sent your husband an e-mail sound, then why did she reach forward to grasp and then remove first one and than another of the binders, to look behind it and see what she was not prepared to see: the terribly familiar sight of Jonathan’s BlackBerry, its “low battery” light blinking in mute distress and the green message indicator letting her know—as if she needed to be told—that someone had just sent her husband an e-mail.