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. Farthe
r 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.
Now that it was clear where she was going, Grace walked more quickly, heading south again, down York. She had entered Hospital Land—Jonathan’s name for this neighborhood and now hers. It was not merely a part of the city in which hospitals—Cornell and Special Surgery and of course Memorial, the mother ship—were present, but an area that had gradually transmogrified into feudal lands encircling those hospitals, serving them, housing their workers, anticipating and fulfilling their needs.
Hospitals, of course, were not like other places to work—not remotely. Shops and restaurants emptied at night and were locked up. Offices wound down, diminishing and diminishing until the very last worker turned out the very last light. But the hospitals never emptied and they certainly never closed. They thrummed with the sheer imperative of what was going on inside, jittering on in perpetual crisis. They were worlds unto themselves, informed by the art, the science, and of course the commerce of illness. They were dramatic stages on which an incalculable number of great stories (mostly tragic) were playing on a perpetual loop: scenes of recognition and reversal, religious fervor, redemption and reconciliation, cataclysmic loss. In Hospital Land you lurched from event to event. In Hospital Land, the very stuff of human experience was perpetually cracked open and held to the light. The general urgency and sense of higher purpose, it permeated everything in the neighborhood.
Jonathan thrived in Hospital Land, just as he’d thrived in medical school, and before that in college. He was one of those people who somehow knew everybody’s name and was pretty much current on the main events in their lives. Grace, who’d never shared this ability (or, to be honest, desired to have it), had observed him deep in conversation with absolutely everyone, with hospital administrators and doctors and nurses and orderlies and the guy who wheeled the soiled linens down to the immense laundry in the basement, and she knew he sometimes held up the line at the hospital cafeteria because he was chatting away with the hairnetted lunch ladies. He had the exact same kind of intensity with absolutely everyone, king or commoner in the land, an avid interest and a need for connection. When you placed him beside another human being, something just happened to him: He slowly, inexorably, turned the full beam of his glorious attention on that person, and that person responded—turning, turning, orienting to this marvelous new source of energy. It made Grace think of those time-lapse films, where the flower slowly twists its face to the sun and opens its petals. She had been watching this happen for almost twenty years, and it was still just a little bit enthralling.
Jonathan inhaled other people. He wanted to know who they were and what mattered to them and maybe also what wounds their lives and characters had formed around. Almost without exception, he could get people to talk about their dead fathers or drug-addicted sons, and she did admire that quality very much, though it had meant many episodes of waiting on the curb as her husband wrapped up his exchange with the taxi driver, or pointedly holding their coats beside him as he wrote down the title of a book or the name of a hotel on Lesbos from some waiter. He had always been like that, she supposed. He had been like that with her, from that first night in the tunnels. She thought he must have been born that way. One did not always expect the best from doctors, in terms of their characters. It was said, with some justification, Grace believed, that they were cold or self-aggrandizing or labored beneath a God complex. But imagine you had a child who was sick—very sick—and think how comforted you must be to find your very sick child in the care of someone who clearly reached beyond himself and his own needs, who was so respectful not just of your child, but of you, who thought deeply about the human experience your child’s illness had created, even as he labored to relieve suffering.
Grace felt invisible now, walking east on 69th, letting the men and women in scrubs of various hues and patterns walk past her. She watched the usual smokers (even in the rain, even backed into the a
lcoves of a cancer hospital) and saw that they were the only ones not moving fast. She felt as if there were some kind of light around her that was glaring and noteworthy and made her seem suspect, as if she were doing something transgressive. She had never done anything suspect or transgressive. All she wanted, now, was to get away from here. She had nearly reached the corner. She might simply turn—north on York, away from Memorial’s entrance—and no one would have the slightest idea that something had gone very, very wrong in her afternoon, if not her life. But instead, for some reason she did not anticipate, let alone examine, she spun abruptly, as in a square dance or a marching formation, in order to charge back up the street she had just walked down, and so she found herself hurtling into the unprepared people who had been behind her, who were very busy citizens of Hospital Land, a few of whom gave looks of some displeasure, and one of whom called her by name.
“Grace?” he said.
Grace looked up, into the rain and into the face of Stu Rosenfeld.
“I thought that was you,” he said, affably enough. “You’ve changed your hair.”
She had colored her hair, just a bit. She was starting to find gray streaks near her part. She was ashamed of how much this had upset her. Jonathan, actually, had not noticed, but—incredibly, surreally, given the circumstances—Stu Rosenfeld had.
“Hi, Stu,” she said. “Lovely day.”
He laughed. “I know. Tracy told me to bring an umbrella. Of course I forgot.” Tracy was his wife, the one she had not had a quarrel with, she was nearly certain.
“How is Tracy?” said Grace, as if they were not standing on a street corner in the rain.
“Wonderful!” He grinned. “Second trimester! We’re having a boy.”
“Oh … ,” she said, trying not to show her surprise. “That’s fantastic news. I had no idea.”
Of course she’d had no idea. One thing she had always remembered was Tracy Rosenfeld’s jovial assertion that she and her husband had no intention of having children. “Some of us just don’t want that,” she had said, as if “that” were something society as a whole had long since decided was beyond the pale. And Grace, who had just suffered a miscarriage (her third? or fourth?), nearly cried, although just about everything at that time had nearly made her cry, and she probably would have been far more miserable if the rather unpleasant Mrs. Rosenfeld had blithely announced that she and her husband did, in fact, want “that.”
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