The Undoing

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Jonathan’s good watch, the one she had given him when they were married, was supposed to be inside. It was a gold Patek Philippe, and he hardly ever wore it, but every so often there was an occasion, like her father’s wedding to Eva, when she had made a point of asking, or one of Eva’s grandchildren’s bar mitzvahs, when the appearance of Jonathan’s usual watch—whatever Timex or Swatch he was wearing to death at the time—would have caused more trouble than it was worth. And the cuff links her father had given Jonathan one year for his birthday—he had received them from Grace’s mother, and now … well, it would be a nice thing to keep them in the family. And a few things belonging to Grace herself, that she had just never wanted to mix in with her mother’s jewelry in the old mirrored vanity, like a Victorian cameo an old boyfriend had given her for a birthday (she had not loved the boyfriend, but she had loved the cameo), another necklace, also Victorian, she had bought on a trip to London with Vita the summer after their sophomore year, and a strand of gray pearls from 47th Street. Also—and this came to her with its own, dedicated physical stab—the classic Elsa Peretti cuff she had bought for herself the previous year, in a surge of self-satisfaction the week her book was sold. She had always wanted one. It was the first great thing she had ever bought for herself—not crazy extravagant, but certainly out of the ordinary. But she had worn it only a few times. It wasn’t very comfortable, that was the truth. So it lived in the book safe.

  Now the book safe was empty.

  Grace sat on the edge of their bed, holding the thing, which was not the real thing it had been created to be—an actual work, whatever its literary merits—but only a stupid box with a dreamy, romantic cover and a hole in the middle. A zero at the heart of a thing is still a zero. She wanted, incredibly, to laugh.

  Then she looked across the room with a kind of dread.

  He wouldn’t. He would never.

  The vanity that had been her mother’s. It was one of the very few objects belonging to her mother that remained in the apartment.

  The “classic six” rooms of Grace’s childhood had all been redecorated, her mother’s chintz and beige redefined in pale blues and browns, the carpeting lifted to liberate long-obscured parquet. The walls of the kitchen were now filled with Henry’s artwork and photos of the three of them, or Jonathan and herself at the lake, and the rest of the rooms mainly hosted the paintings from the flea market or from the Pier Show, except for two from the Clingancourt market in Paris, the year before Henry was born.

  Henry slept in the room Grace had once slept in. It had been yellow with a green shag rug then; now it was blue, robin’s-egg blue, with glossy white trim, and Henry, who was fastidious, kept it bizarrely pristine. The bulletin board that had once covered the entire wall above her bed had been a crazy mosaic of fan magazine photos, pictures of clothes she liked, snapshots of her friends (mainly Vita), certificates of merit from Rearden and the New York Turn Verein on 86th Street, where she took fitness and gymnastics classes. My brain on cork, she had thought of it, after the antidrug commercials of her youth. Henry had only one photograph over his bed, of himself and Jonathan on the dock at the lake, holding fishing poles. She had given them the fishing poles for Jonathan’s birthday. It may have been the only time he and Henry had ever used them.

  But the vanity, in the room she had finally forced herself to stop calling “my parents’ room,” was an island of stasis, inhabiting a magic circle of preserved time. It still wore its classic chintz apron and its ring of worn brass studs. There were mirrored drawers along the back of the table, meant for the armor of women—rings, earrings, bracelets, necklaces—but her mother had not always used them. When her husband, Grace’s father, gave her something—an abstract pin, perhaps, of pearls and emeralds on an amoeba of gold, or a bracelet of rubies and diamonds—she liked to lay the object out on the vanity’s cool glass tabletop. Perhaps it was a way of offsetting the fact that she never actually wore these objects (Grace had only ever seen her in pearl necklaces and simple gold earrings). Perhaps she preferred them as art objects, to be enjoyed by being put on display. Perhaps she had not wanted Grace’s father to know how little they suited her taste. He had always seemed very sentimental about them, very intent that they be passed on to Grace, and promptly, as her mother would have wanted. Only a week after her mother’s funeral, as she was packing to head back to Boston, Grace’s father had come into her childhood bedroom (now Henry’s bedroom) and deposited these former gifts, a ziplock bag of diamonds and rubies and emeralds and pearls, on her bed. “I can’t look at them anymore,” was what he’d said. It was the only thing he’d ever said about it.

  Crossing the room to the vanity now, sitting before it on its low matching bench, Grace used the sleeve of her shirt to wipe the mirrored drawers of the table. Something held her back. She had continued to keep her mother’s jewelry here, but never in plain sight, on the tabletop. Like her mother, she tended toward the understated end of the jewelry spectrum: a strand of pearls, a wedding ring. The big garish pieces, the pins with large misshapen stones and the chunky necklaces, remained in the vanity’s mirrored drawers, where she seldom visited them. But Grace actually loved these objects. She knew what they had meant to her father, who gave them, and her mother, who received them—even if she never wore them, even if she so clearly viewed them as love letters, they were still just as potent as a stack of envelopes tied with a ribbon, kept in a special box. Jonathan, who was more comfortable articulating his feelings than her father had ever been, had not needed to use jewelry as a proxy for those feelings. In fact, he had given her only one piece of jewelry in all the years they’d been together: the simple diamond engagement ring he’d bought on Newbury Street. It was modest by anyone’s standards, a single square-cut diamond, with the so-called Tiffany mount, on a platinum band, a ring so classic that it might have (but hadn’t) been passed down to her. And that was that. He hadn’t gotten the memo about presenting a gift on the birth of their child. (To be fair, Grace hadn’t either. The first time she’d heard the truly tasteless term push present had been in the baby group she’d briefly joined with Henry.) But even if he had, it would far more likely have been a book or piece of art than an item of jewelry.

  There was the issue of worth, of course. The objects in the mirrored vanity might have been unworn by mother and daughter alike, and valued sentimentally, but obviously they were worth money, too. At her behest, Jonathan had added them to their insurance policy, and she vaguely saw in them some future help with college tuition or down payments, but she never followed through on the idea of purchasing a safety-deposit box and putting them away. She preferred to keep them here, close to her—close to them. A shrine to the kind of long and good marriage she wanted for herself.

  He would never, she thought again, as if that made it true. Then she opened up the drawers.

  Gone, gone: the leopard-print bracelet of black and yellow diamonds, the diamond clip-ons that had pinched her earlobes at A Night for Rearden, and the sapphire necklace and the big chunky necklace of gold links, the pin of pink stone held by little gold hands. Drawer after drawer full of air. She struggled to remember the objects: red, gold, silver, and green. All those crazy things her father had brought home over the years, and that her mother had pointedly not worn, and that she herself had also not worn but had loved nonetheless.

  She kept closing the drawers and then opening them again, as if admitting the possibility of a new reality each time, which was not logical. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? Grace nearly laughed. Wasn’t that supposed to be the definition of insanity?

  Which would at least explain a few things, she thought.

  Those objects from the book that wasn’t a book … well, she would survive. The Elsa Peretti cuff had hurt her wrist. The pearls … she loved them, but come on, pearls were pearls: They were hardly irreplaceable. Not that she would ever replace them now. They had been ruined now: one little lost battle in a vast conflagration, sw
eeping past. But the empty drawers, the air where her mother’s things should have been—she could not get her brain to make sense of them.

  She got to her feet so quickly that she was abruptly dizzy and had to put her hand down on the mirrored tabletop to steady herself. Then she went back out to the hallway and opened the door to the apartment’s third and smallest bedroom, the room that had once been her father’s classically masculine den, the only place in which her mother had permitted him to smoke his pipe and that still—in Grace’s imagination, at least—possessed a certain lingering aura of pipe smoke. Once, she and Jonathan had hoped the room would belong to a second child, and it had never been actually rededicated. They had not had a discussion—she had never been able to initiate that, and Jonathan, in deference to her feelings, had never done it either—but gradually the room had taken on, soundlessly, an alternate designation, if not an actual name. It had turned into the place Jonathan went to read, or do his e-mail, or sometimes make phone calls to his patients’ families if he hadn’t had a chance to speak to them at the hospital. She had not technically decorated in here, but there were a few low shelves on the walls, lined with old issues of JAMA and Pediatric Research, and textbooks from Jonathan’s medical school. A few years earlier, she’d moved in a big easy chair for him, with a matching ottoman and a desk she’d found in Hudson, New York (a town, Jonathan was fond of saying, that was “going up” and “going down” at the same time). He had a computer here, too, a big, boxy Dell she hadn’t seen him use in a long time (he used his laptop, of course—his now very much absent laptop), and beside it a box of patient files—the kind of box with sturdy handles that you might use to bring home your possessions on your final day of work.

  Nice catch there, Grace, she made free to tell herself.

  She did not have it in her to look through that box. Or turn on (try to turn on) the computer. Or open the drawers of the desk. Or even enter the room itself. This far but no farther, she thought. So she stepped back into the hallway and closed the door in her own face.

  Then she thought of the phone.

  She went back into the bedroom and opened the bedside cupboard. It was still there, naturally, right where he had left it, behind the phone books. Of course it was dead as a stone now, its flicker of battery power from the last time thoroughly departed. She held it up anyway, trying to make herself focus on the buttons and remember how Jonathan usually held it and what he did with it. It was one of the less user-friendly types, more technical, vaguely space-age, and she, being still at least three generations behind in the rapidly mutating genus of the cell phone (and associated technologies), was not even sure how to get it turned back on. But she did understand that even trying meant crossing a line she hadn’t yet crossed, not by walking through her own home, searching through the drawers and closets of her own possessions. For some reason she could not fully make herself understand, she wanted desperately not to cross that line, but she also knew that this might be her last chance to … well … if she wanted, to help him. And helping Jonathan had been her default instinct for many years. Helping him study for his medical boards. Helping him move out of his dorm. Helping him buy a decent suit, get new plates for his car, roast a chicken, splint a broken finger, feel good, choose a wedding ring, make his peace with the sad inadequacy of his family of origin, father a child, be happy. It’s what you did when you chose a partner, hopefully for life. It was how you made a marriage.

  It was not so easy to stop helping.

  But then again, she reminded herself, they knew about the phone, the police did. They knew it was here, in the apartment; it was why they’d thought Jonathan himself might be here. Which meant that they would want to see it. They would ask her for it, and she would have to hand it over, because if she didn’t, there would be … well, it was a crime of some kind not to, wasn’t it? And when they asked for it and when she gave it to them, they would know—somehow they would be able to figure out—that she had done something to it, read something or changed it or eliminated it. And that would be a very, very bad thing for her, and also for Henry. She had to do everything right now, for Henry.

  So she put it back in its strange place, thinking she would simply leave it where it was, for them to find when they came to look for it. And then, because this was the first time she had imagined them in her apartment, looking into drawers and closets and cupboards the same way she had just been looking, and because the minute she imagined this, she realized that such a scene was now an inevitibility, she opened the cupboard again and took out the phone and left it on top of the cupboard, in the open, where it didn’t look as bad, as … incriminating, as it would if he had hidden it. She had told them the phone was here, in the apartment. She had not said that it was squirreled away. Why shouldn’t she do that for him, anyway?

  I know you want to protect him, one of them had said, though which one she couldn’t remember now.

  Grace lay back on the bed, on top of the covers, and closed her eyes. She was weary, hollow with weariness. She kept thinking about objects, the objects she had discovered—the scarf and the shirt and the condom—and how they explained nothing, how they were some sort of rune or hieroglyph she could not comprehend. That sparse little trail of things on the floor whose appearance could not be explained—the scarf and the shirt and the condom—it wasn’t the right trail at all. The right trail, it came to her, was the one of objects that were no longer here.

  That missing gym bag, the good leather one she had given Jonathan. It normally lived on the floor of the closet. It was not there now. Say he picked it up and moved around the room with it, placing things inside: What things would he take? Underwear. Shirts. Toiletries. Pants. The corduroy pants those detectives had seemed so fascinated by? How was she supposed to know which ones they meant? Jonathan had at least six pairs of corduroy pants. She should know, she had bought them all, and all of them were now absent from the shelf in the closet, above the closet rod. There were orphaned hangers and empty drawers and a newly vacated shelf in the bathroom where his toothbrush and his razor usually lived. No wonder it hadn’t registered until now; it was barely registering even now. Everything looked every bit as it should for a man out of town for a couple of days—on a trip, for example, to a medical conference in Cleveland—due back before he ran out of clean underwear.

  Not what is here and does not belong, she told herself, but what is not here and does. It sort of made her think of that poem by James Fenton, about war—some war, she could not remember which:

  It is not the houses. It is the spaces in between the houses.

  It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.

  Added and taken away, plus and minus: but without a prayer of canceling each other out. All of the new people in her life—police detectives and murder victims—not making up for the person unaccountably gone. And not some other war but my own war, she understood, squeezing shut her eyes. My very own.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  RUSHING TO ITS END

  Somehow, she slept. By the next morning she had traveled from her own side of the bed to Jonathan’s, as if over those ragged, uncompromising hours she had begun to doubt that he was gone and needed to be sure no one was there. No one was there—no head (dark curling hair, dark growing beard) making its customary dent in the soft pillow, no shoulder, rising and falling over the duvet, no presence at all. Grace woke in the same traumatized clothing she had put on twenty-four hours earlier, when she had been merely concerned, merely annoyed. How wonderful to feel merely those things now.

  It was just after six and not yet very light. She dragged herself upright and did all of the necessary things, dressing herself, washing to the extent she could. The room looked disheveled, with the sheets and duvet half twisted off and her shoes on the floor. The strange shirt and the condom in red foil seemed to glow in some malevolent way from where they had been deposited in front of the closet, as if they had been outlined—like the way a dead bod
y might be outlined—but in neon. She kicked them aside as she went to the closet, then threw down her own shed clothes on top of them, as if to hide them from herself. She put on a new sweater, a new skirt, both close in style to what she had worn the day before (because it hurt to think about clothes), and then she did a couple of things that also hurt to do, but which she had fallen asleep thinking about doing, and had woken up thinking about doing, and saw very clearly that she had to do.

  So, with her laptop open on the bed before her, she canceled every one of her appointments that day, and every one of her appointments the next day, Saturday morning, which was as far as she felt able to look ahead. For explanation, she cited only a “family illness” and said she would be in touch to reschedule. Then, bracing herself against her own distaste, she called J. Colton’s number and left a message saying that she would be unable to speak with the writer from Cosmopolitan this afternoon and to please not schedule anything for her for the next week because she was dealing with something in her family, and she would be back in touch as soon as she could be. “Thank you!” she told the dead silence of the tape recorder—though it wasn’t, of course, a tape recorder. There no longer were any tape recorders.

  When these two things had been accomplished, she felt as exhausted as if she had toiled, physically, for many hours.

  With Henry’s Puma bag she went down to the lobby and set out into the cold predawn of the morning, still exhausted but now also brutally wide awake—a very uncomfortable combination. There were eight blocks separating her apartment from her father and Eva’s, and the frigid air she hauled into her lungs along the way felt awful but just possibly therapeutic, the way only a truly awful sensation could. The streets were mainly empty, though the pavement in front of the redoubtable E.A.T. was alive with delivery trucks and prep workers, and she looked longingly inside as she passed, as if the familiar pleasures of the city were already unavailable to her. Waiting for the light at 79th, she found herself staring at the nearly forgotten contours of Malaga Alves’s face on the cover of a newspaper in a blue metal dispenser. The headline, whatever it was, could not be seen, and when the light changed, she walked on.