The Undoing

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Then she yanked out the sliding garbage pail again, grabbed the cheddar with both hands, and hurled it in.

  A moment later, she was retching over the sink.

  No protein, no crime, she thought, giving in. Still hanging over the sink, she laughed helplessly.

  Somewhere in the dark, quiet apartment, a thing or a combination of things or even a network of things had eluded her. There was a system in place beyond her ken, and it had broken her life apart into pieces she was now supposed to be able to interpret for horrible men, drawing a chalkboard line from a disciplinary hearing to a murdered woman, as if she knew anything about either. These pieces had been marched before her over the past hours, in a baffling parade. An ATM card? A bank account she had never heard of—from Emigrant Bank? What was she supposed to be able to tell them? (Besides: Emigrant Bank? It sounded like something from another century. Where was it, on the Lower East Side?) And a pair of corduroy pants—they were very interested in corduroy pants. But Jonathan had lots of corduroy pants. He found them comfortable, and they looked good on him. Which pair did they mean? He had never worn corduroys until Grace first took him shopping years ago, back in Boston—did that make her responsible for this?

  And exactly how was she supposed to explain anything to anyone when she couldn’t even get her head out of the sink?

  Up, Grace thought. She stood, gripping the granite edges of the under-mounted steel basin. That thing, those things, the network of elusive truths, she couldn’t stand the thought of them any longer. If there had been any possibility of sleep, she might have waited for another day or another midnight, but there wasn’t, and she couldn’t do anything else until this was done.

  She went first to Henry’s room, since it seemed the least likely place and thus the first to dispatch.

  On his walls, in his drawers, lining the shelves, and stuffed into the closet: There was nothing here that she hadn’t placed herself or watched her son produce—drawings, clothing, an autograph book from camp, folders of violin music covered in Mr. Rosenbaum’s terse commentary (“Forte! Forte!”). On his shelves were the books her son had read, the textbooks from last year, a curling photograph of his happy younger self with his friend Jonah, the one who no longer spoke to him (Grace, pleased to be able to strike out at somebody, took the opportunity to rip this into shreds), and a framed picture of Henry and Jonathan at sixth-grade graduation. She held it up and searched their faces: so similar and so similarly pleased, both a little sweaty (it was hot in the outdoor area behind the school that June day). But she had been there. She had taken the picture. This, too, was a known thing.

  There was nothing in Henry’s room.

  There was no Henry in Henry’s room. Henry was where she had left him, at her father and Eva’s house, and there he would stay for the night—that much was obvious to her. That much would be obvious, at this point, even to her father and his wife, who by now must have understood that some massive thing was taking precedence over questions of table setting and general bad manners. Henry would need things, now. He would need a number of things, but some far easier to provide than others.

  She turned on the light over his desk. Lord of the Flies lay facedown, open at a page near the end. She turned it over and read the passage that seemed to describe Piggy’s death, but it was so obscure that she read through it a few times, trying to figure out how he had actually been killed, before remembering the irrelevance of the question. She set it back down. Henry would need the book for tomorrow, she thought, looking around. And his math folder. And his Latin textbook. She tried to remember if he had orchestra the next day. Then she tried to remember what the next day was.

  She went to his closet and instructed herself to collect a long-sleeved shirt, a blue sweater, jeans, and from the drawers of his bureau new underwear and socks. These and the books and papers she shoved into an old Puma bag that was in his closet. It had once been Jonathan’s gym bag, but she had bought him a new one, a nicer one, the year before—brown leather with a long strap—and he had given this one to Henry, who for some indeterminate adolescent reason had decided Puma was cooler than the ubiquitous Nike. Jonathan’s bag, the brown leather one with the long strap. She caught her breath. She hadn’t seen that bag in a while.

  Take the packed gym bag to the front door and set it down, where it will not be forgotten by a traumatized brain at the start of a terrifying new day.

  She moved on to the hallway, passing one of the oddball art school portraits she had collected, mainly at the Elephant’s Trunk flea market in Connecticut. They were from the 1940s or’50s, of sour-looking models, captured by less than brilliant students. Together they formed a kind of gallery, of unlovely faces and rather judgmental observers:

  You’re wearing that?

  It’s not what I would do.

  I hope you’re not too proud of yourself.

  The painting in the hallway was of a severe woman about her own age, with bobbed hair and a nose that looked unnaturally small for her face and an expression, Grace had always thought, of pervasive misanthropy. The picture hung, rather regally, over one of those stripped-down English or Irish tables, imported by the boatload, which she and Jonathan had bought from the Pier Show. Not a good decision, really, since it wasn’t nearly as old as the dealer had promised and cost far too much for what it was; and because it had been so expensive, they’d pretty much felt obligated to hold on to it. In the table’s single drawer: tape, batteries, gym brochures. Had he been thinking of changing gyms? No, the brochures were hers, she remembered now. From a year ago. Nothing.

  She went through the hall closet, shoving her hands deep into each pocket and finding only crumpled tissues and a gum wrapper. Every coat had been purchased by her, and every one she recognized: Brooks Brothers, Towne Shoppe in Ridgefield, Henry’s favored Old Navy parka with the fake fur trim, the red fox coat that had been her mother’s, which she could not wear because she did not wear fur, but which she could not get rid of because it had been her mother’s. Every boot and glove and umbrella could be vouched for, the scarves on the overhead shelf had all been bought by her, except for one Jonathan had brought home, once. A couple of years before.

  She pulled it out. It was green wool, not at all objectionable. Handmade? Grace frowned at it. It had no tag. It had been very nicely done, with a kind of coarse, authentic texture. She might have bought it herself, in a shop, for her husband. But she hadn’t. Immediately, she was furious with the thing, as if it had wormed its untrustworthy way into her home, for who knew what purpose. Holding it carefully between thumb and forefinger, she dropped it on the hallway floor and went on to the next room.

  The living room couches and chairs had been purchased in a general overhaul a few years earlier (out with anything that felt too “starting out on a shoestring,” in with one particular alcove from the fourth floor of ABC Carpet & Home). Jonathan had been there that day, and Henry with a book, reading his way through Narnia in one of the armchairs as his parents bought it out from beneath him. All very verifiable. The paintings here, two studies of the same young man—from, undoubtedly, the same art school class, but very different painters—also found at the Elephant’s Trunk, had been framed in identical black wood, as if to underscore their differences. One version of the man was so stiffly delineated that he bordered on cubism, his classic white button-down shirt and khaki pants rigidly arranged in a posture (half-crossed legs, torso in a forward incline, elbow braced almost impossibly on thigh) that looked profoundly uncomfortable; the other rendered him so breathtakingly sensual that Grace assumed some highly mutual (though necessarily silent) flirtation had been ongoing throughout the class. Grace could only imagine the corridor of fate that had brought them, the mismatched pair they made, from separate but simultaneous creation to side-by-side display at the flea market on Route 7, to the Upper East Side.

  She moved on. There was a linen closet in the hallway to the master bedroom: musty towels, stacks of sheets (the flat ones gratifyingly ne
at, the fitted ones teetering), soap and mouthwash and Jonathan’s antidandruff shampoo, bought in bulk (by her) on the uppermost shelf. Nothing. Nothing. The sling from when Henry had sprained his wrist. Her own traumatic pharmacy of fertility drugs, which she had not looked at in years but was still somehow unwilling to throw away (she also had, elsewhere, the positive home pregnancy test that heralded the arrival of Henry; whenever she came upon it, she thought of the myth of Meleager, who was fated to live only as long as the log burning on the fire at the time of his birth, and which his mother consequently snatched out of the flames). But nothing else. Nothing of his, really—nothing dubious a man with limitless access to any drug under the sun might have spirited away to his own home. Of course not.

  With a steadying breath, she went into the master bedroom and stood for a long moment, trying to decide how to begin. The room had only one closet, and its door was slightly ajar, a bit of plastic bag protruding into the gap from the dry-cleaning delivery she had hung up Monday evening. She went to it and opened it the rest of the way.

  The closet was evenly divided, more or less, and fairly orderly, which was possible only because neither of them shopped recreationally, but only to replace clothing that was being discarded. Her side was hung with blouses and sweaters, the linen and wool skirts that had long signified “discriminating grown-up” to her and “unimpressed by trend.” Good fabric. Good cut. Soft colors. Quiet jewelry, the older the better. Nothing flashy or showy or “look at me,” because she had never wanted anyone to look at her for any other reason but to think: Now there’s a woman who has her shit together. And she did! she told herself now, glaring at her classic clothes, drifting briefly, dangerously, close to tears. She did! But she wasn’t here to look through her own things.

  Jonathan, like Grace, had made most of the big decisions about clothing long ago. She might have seen him first in sweatpants and a far from pristine Hopkins T-shirt, but soon after that she had gleefully purged most of what he had (highly suspect items of clothing from college and even high school) and taken him shopping for corduroys and khakis and striped button-down shirts, all of which he continued to wear to this day. Like a lot of guys, he didn’t really care what he wore. He was going to be a doctor, after all. Who even noticed what doctors wore under their white coats? Now the right half of their shared closet rod was hung with brown-striped shirts and blue-striped shirts and green-striped shirts, a few solid shirts in mild colors, a half dozen or so plain white.

  The cleaner had returned six shirts encased in a single plastic bag: more stripes, including the deep red that was one of her favorites, and racy multicolored stripes of green and blue that she had noticed at the Gap one day and bought for him. But there was something else in there, something she had vaguely noticed three days earlier when she’d carried in the delivery, tired at the end of her long day of patients and the violin lesson and dinner at the Cuban restaurant with Henry. At the time, she had declined to investigate; if the dry cleaner had made a delivery mistake, it would have to—inconveniently—go back: another item for the endless to-do list. She looked more closely at it now. It was a shirt like the others, but not striped and not a solid color. Grace tore away the plastic and eased apart the hangers to isolate the offending item. Wonderful, she thought. The shirt was a garish hot-rust-and-orange pattern that looked like something from a mass-produced Navajo blanket, but with solid black lapels: completely hideous. It stood out from the rest of his clothes like something BeDazzled, a Vegas showgirl in a pastel Balanchine corps de ballet. She pulled back the collar to see if there was a name there, but the only name was “Sachs,” just like Jonathan’s real shirts. Grace plucked it off the rod and glared at it, then she unbuttoned it and spread it out, making a meal of its awfulness. What was she looking for? Lipstick on the collar? (She had never really understood why there should be lipstick on a collar. Who kissed a collar?) Of course there was nothing there. She smelled it, too, though it had obviously just come back from being cleaned. Most likely it belonged to somebody else—somebody with terrible taste!—and had migrated over to their weekly delivery of classic button-down shirts and very fine cashmere sweaters. But she was being merciless. The shirt couldn’t be vouched for, so she threw it (not without satisfaction) on the floor.

  It practically didn’t count, since she’d been thinking about the unfamiliar object in the dry-cleaner bag from the start of this … this dig, of sorts. Not a dig like a treasure hunter’s, or a speculator’s, more like what an archaeologist did, armed with a theory to be proved or—she still faintly hoped—disproved. She had not forgotten the shirt, or rather, she had, but it had come back while she was deep in the hall closet. Where have I felt this before? she had thought, holding that rather nice and thoroughly unfamiliar green scarf.

  A moment later, in the breast pocket of a heavy jacket he hardly ever wore, she found a condom.

  Grace knew what it was even before her stunned fingers emerged, holding it pinched like something that might get away, but she still gaped at it, ricocheting back and forth between sense and bafflement. A condom. A condom did not signify in the world she occupied. A condom—even back at the beginning, back when they were students, back before their marriage, when they knew it wasn’t all right for them to have a baby yet, they had not used condoms. She had been on birth control pills for about a year, and then that horrible IUD she still blamed—irrationally, since she had seen the studies—for every month of failure that would follow and, more pointedly still, for every miscarriage. Never a condom. Never.

  But somehow a condom had materialized in the breast pocket of this jacket, which—like nearly every item of clothing her husband wore—had been purchased by Grace herself, this one at Bloomingdale’s, at one of their big sales. But the jacket was of an awkward weight: too hot for summer and sort of too hot for winter, too. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen Jonathan wear it or why she’d kept giving it a reprieve every time she went through the closets to send things away.

  The condom wrapper was red. It had not been torn open. It was incomprehensible. It was just, completely, incomprehensible.

  Holding it far away from herself, she dropped this, too, on the floor.

  “Fuck,” she pronounced over it.

  It was now two o’clock in the morning.

  What do I know? And what do I not know? Whatever she knew, could verify, could comprehend—that thing could remain in situ, at least for now. Anything that could not be witnessed or vouched for she would leave in the open, an isolated artifact to be returned to when her strength returned, when—if—she became clearheaded again. A mysterious scarf and a hideous shirt and a wrapped condom. Three things in all this searching—it wasn’t much, really. It was within normal bounds, even. The scarf—he could have picked it up by accident somewhere, mistaking someone else’s for his own. He didn’t pay that much attention to things like that. Lots of men didn’t. He might have been cold one day and stopped into a store and bought it for himself. That was allowed. It wasn’t a crime. It wasn’t something he had to clear with her! And the ugly shirt—she had already persuaded herself that the dry cleaner was responsible for that one. The “Sachs,” written in some kind of permanent marker on the tab, just above the breakdown of cotton and polyester (another indictment) … well, “Sachs” was not the rarest of names, not in New York. It might be as simple as that. An Upper East Side dry cleaner? Come on! How many Sachers and Seichers and Sakowitzes were there, just within the immediate neighborhood! How many other families called “Sachs,” for that matter? Really, the only surprise was that it didn’t happen more often.

  But then, the thought of that condom punched through her little moment of reprieve.

  She stood still to let the now familiar sensation have its way with her. It felt like screaming acid, poured directly over her skull, then flowing through her and out the tips of her fingers, the tips of her toes, pooling around her in a black, treacly mess. She was becoming used to it. She was becoming tactical
in her response to it: Don’t fight, go loose, let it pass. In only a few minutes, she could move again.

  There might be other objects. They might be hiding. They might be pretending to be things they weren’t. She pulled at the books on the bedroom bookshelves, which were tightly wedged and a little dusty, without much room behind them. They were mainly hers—mainly novels. There were some biographies, some books on politics. The political books they both read. They had shared a fascination with Watergate that expanded over the years into adjacent areas: Vietnam, Reagan, McCarthy, civil rights, Iran-Contra. It didn’t seem to matter, now, which of them had brought which book into the apartment. One of the books wasn’t a book at all, but a book safe, some remaindered tome that had been outfitted with a plastic insert. It had been given to her a couple of years earlier by a patient whose company bought unpopular books and adapted them for this purpose, on his last day of therapy. Grace had wondered aloud whether the books’ authors ever spotted their works on a shelf, then were humiliated to find that their opus now hid bracelets and necklaces, and the patient had laughed: “Nobody ever got in touch to say so!” She had to admit the idea was very clever. “Thieves are not book-minded,” her patient had told her, and she supposed that was true. She had never heard of a burglary in which someone took the time to pore over the Stephen Kings and John Grishams.

  This one was a Jean Auel novel, one of those prehistoric sagas, not her kind of thing at all. As she took it down and opened it to its interior plastic chamber, she made herself think about what she had placed inside it that night, the night the man had given it to her, but already she knew that there was something wrong. The book was too light. It made no sound when she shook it, very gently. The book … well, it was an open book. What was supposed to be there could not much matter now, because nothing, when she finally got around to opening the cover, would be there at all. This was already, abundantly, clear.