You Should Have Known

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “Look at Malaga,” Sylvia said suddenly, and Grace looked where she was looking. Malaga Alves stood framed by one of the great windows, holding a glass of red wine in one hand, the other wedged uncomfortably behind her back. She looked awkward and very alone, but she was alone for only an instant. As Grace and Sylvia watched, a captivating scene began to unfold, as first one dinner-jacketed man and then a second—this one being Nathan Friedberg, he of the $25,000 summer camp—came to join her. She looked up at them and smiled, and when she did Grace saw the transition—no, the transformation—that occurred. At first, she did not quite recognize what she was seeing, as Malaga stood between the two tall men—one handsome, one not—and seemed to open (as Fitzgerald might have said) like a flower, somehow becoming arrestingly sumptuous. Malaga wore a simple rosy dress, cut close but not tight around her postpartum body, ending just above a shapely knee. Around her neck was the gold cross, and she wore no other jewelry. She smiled tentatively at them, inclining a lovely neck first to one and then to the other of the men, and Grace was newly aware of her smooth skin, her undoubtedly natural décolletage (sufficiently displayed to convey its true-life contours), and her just slightly abundant upper arms, so aggressively untoned. So…Grace reached for the right word…womanly.

  There was a third man beside her now, a portly guy Grace recognized vaguely as the father of a girl in Henry’s class—something at Morgan Stanley. Very, very rich. All three men were talking to Malaga Alves, or to one another over her head, as she looked up at them. She herself didn’t seem to be talking or even doing much agreeing with whatever they might be saying. The three of them flapped and dipped, hovering within reach. As she and Sylvia stared, a fourth man came, pretending to greet one of his predecessors before turning his attention fully to Malaga Alves.

  To Grace, no neophyte as a student of human social interaction, it was a stunning display of raw attraction. Malaga Alves might have features that were unremarkable in themselves (and she was plump! with extra flesh in her cheeks, neck, and arms!), but somehow the sum of their parts was another animal altogether. Grace, watching the men, felt amused and sort of disgusted, appalled at their hypocrisy. It was more than likely, for example, that these four had employees who resembled Malaga Alves, women with the same flat features and creamy skin and fleshy waists and breasts and thighs beneath their classically understated uniforms. Quite probably, they interacted with women who looked like Malaga Alves many times a day in the course of their work or in their own homes. Women who looked like Malaga Alves might at this exact moment be tending to their children or doing their laundry. But did they behave around those familiar women as they were apparently behaving around this unfamiliar one? Not if they wanted to stay married, she thought.

  The magnificent room was full of highly tended women, acknowledged (even celebrated) beauties who were aerobicized and massaged, colored and coiffed, mani-pedied and Brazilled, and clothed in the most editorialized clothing, yet the distinct aroma of attraction in the crowd came from the place occupied by Malaga Alves. It was remarkably pure and powerful, a force plainly capable of toppling titans, yet it seemed undetectable by any of the sparkling sisterhood. This siren song, Grace thought, her gaze sweeping the crowd from gilded walls to glittering windows, was apparently detectable by the Y chromosome alone.

  Grace gave her glass to one of the waiters and went to help Sally, who was half herding, half leading the crowd from the foyer into the great living room so that the auction could begin. Sylvia collected her friend, once a struggling trigonometry student, now apparently the head of American furniture at Sotheby’s. He was bald and very thin and thoughtfully wore a silk bow tie of green and blue (Rearden’s school colors), and Sylvia led him to the podium in the corner of the room. “Hello!” Sally trilled into the microphone, then tapped it with a long fingernail until people stopped talking and covered their ears.

  “Is this on?” she asked.

  Resoundingly, the crowd gave her to understand that it was.

  “Hello!” said Sally. “Before I do anything, I’d like to ask for a round of applause for our hosts, Jonas and Suki Spenser. What a magnificent and gracious offer this was,” she said rather disingenuously. “We are so grateful.”

  The parents applauded. Grace applauded, too.

  “I also want to thank our very hardworking committee,” Sally was saying. “They strong-armed you all into coming here, and made sure you had good things to eat and lots of great stuff to spend your money on. Amanda Emery? Where are you, Amanda?”

  Amanda chirped, “Hello!” from the back of the room, and waved a glittering cuff above her bright blond head.

  “Sylvia Steinmetz? Grace Sachs?”

  Grace lifted her own hand, suppressing the automatic irritation. She was not “Grace Sachs,” ever. Not that she disliked the name or its superficial “Our Crowd” associations (Jonathan’s branch, however, had had nothing to do with Warburgs, Loebs, and Schiffs; his people had come from a shtetl in eastern Poland, via Boston), but it wasn’t her name. She was Reinhart, at all times: Reinhart at work, Reinhart on the cover of her almost-a-book, and Reinhart on every single document related to the Rearden School, including her listing on the auction program. Strangely enough, the only person who ever referred to her as Grace Sachs was her own father.

  “And I’m Sally Morrison-Golden,” said Sally, pausing for acknowledgment. “I’m so delighted that we’ve come together tonight, to celebrate our wonderful school and do what we can to make our children’s educational experience the best it can possibly be. Now I know,” she went on with a merry grin, “some of you may be thinking, ‘Don’t I already pay enough tuition?’ ”

  The expected nervous laughter rippled uneasily through the crowd.

  “And of course, you do. But it’s our responsibility to make sure that Rearden can accept the students it wants to accept, and that those students will be able to attend the school despite their financial circumstances.”

  Really? thought Grace. Since when? The crowd clapped halfheartedly.

  “And of course,” said Sally, “it’s also up to us to see that our wonderful teachers are so well paid that we don’t lose them to other schools. We love our teachers!”

  “Right on!” said someone over by the Jackson Pollocks, causing a surge of laughter, for the archaic expression if not for the sentiment. Of course it was true that Rearden valued its teachers, thought Grace. Just not enough to invite them to tonight’s event. But how many could have dropped $300 on a ticket?

  “So I hope you’ve all brought your checkbooks, people, because while we are certainly here to drink beautiful wine, eat fantastic food, and check out the view, the bottom line is the bottom line!” Sally grinned at the crowd, delighted with her own cleverness. “We accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express Black Cards! Stocks and bonds!”

  “Artworks!” chimed in Amanda Emery. “Real estate!”

  People laughed awkwardly.

  “And now,” said Sally, “before we roll up our sleeves and get down to the serious business of spending money, our own Mr. Chips, Robert Conover, would like to extend an official welcome. Robert?”

  The headmaster waved from a far corner of the long room and began making his way toward Sally.

  Grace let her mind wander as he began to say all of the expected things, lingering on the thank-yous (again) and reminding them all (again) why the money was needed, and what a wonderful thing it was to be able to honor the superlative education their kids were receiving, and how much that meant to the teachers. Then Grace let her gaze wander, too. On a small table beside her sat Sylvia, her laptop at the ready to record the bids. The time, plainly visible on the laptop screen, was 8:36, which meant that Jonathan was now more than merely running late, he was seriously late. She looked first at the bodies at the edges of the room, then made a grid of the crowd and worked it, left to right, back to front. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t in any of the doorways. He wasn’t in the little group that, at that moment, erupted
into the foyer, comprising the missing couples from the pre-K class, who must have come together following a private celebration of their own and were perhaps already too drunk to have noticed the coatrack in the lobby. They came in a dark bubble of cashmere and fur, laughing at something undoubtedly fully separate from A Night for Rearden, until one of them realized what an entrance they were making and hushed the other three. He wasn’t with them, a part of their revelry. He wasn’t behind them in the private elevator, which had released them into the apartment and then gone away.

  So. The shiva call was taking longer than he’d thought, they had pressed food upon him, or the mother would not let him go away, because when her child’s doctor went away her child would have gone away as well, or there was a minyan to say kaddish, and he would have had to stay for that, or at least to nod along with it, since she doubted he knew it by heart—even after all these years of funerals. It astounded her that he could bear another shiva call, another devastated family, another kaddish. The burden he carried, those kids and their terrified parents—it was another world from the imperviousness and entitlement in this room, she thought, looking around at the others, at their faces, a little flushed, nodding happily at whatever surely reassuring thing the headmaster was telling them, perhaps that their healthy, nurtured children had ranked well on some newly commissioned analysis of New York private schools or that they were on track for a higher rate of Ivy League acceptances than Trinity and Riverdale. They were smiling in harmony and laughing as if being conducted from the podium. And why not? All was well in their world, high above the city: these men who spun money out of other money, and the women who lined their nests with it, and even the shared endeavor at hand: to make “charitable donations” to—what an incredible coincidence!—their own children’s school. How could it even occupy the same planet with what her husband was doing right now? She imagined him in that little apartment in Crown Heights, toe-to-toe with the others, a square of torn fabric pinned to his coat, shaking hands and bowing his head for the prayers and feeling—she knew this perfectly well—as if he had failed utterly.

  Who knew when he might arrive. Who knew if he might arrive, she admitted to herself. And for a little moment she allowed the mildest surge of resentment to push at her. But then that went away and was followed by a surge of terrible guilt.

  She really hated herself sometimes.

  Right out of the gate, the Sotheby’s auctioneer went off script.

  “Observe,” he said. He was holding up a half-full glass of water, an ordinary glass. Grace, who was pretty sure she knew where this was going, didn’t dare look at Sally. “My own donation to Rearden School, the reason we’re all here. I hereby offer for sale a glass of tap water, from the kitchen sink. Ordinary New York City tap water. Any of you could have gone out to the kitchen and poured it yourself.”

  No, they couldn’t have, thought Grace.

  “So let me ask you something—what is the value of this glass of water? What is it really worth to you?” He looked them over. He had done this, or something like this, many times, obviously, but he still relished it, that was equally obvious.

  “Is that glass half-full or half-empty?” said a man at the back.

  The auctioneer smiled. “What am I bid?” He raised it overhead.

  “A thousand,” said someone in the center of the room. It was Nathan Friedberg.

  “Ah!” said the auctioneer. “Now this glass of water is worth a thousand dollars. Does that mean, sir, that you are willing to donate one thousand dollars to the Parents’ Association of Rearden School in exchange for possession of this glass of water?”

  Nathan Friedberg laughed. His wife, Grace saw, stood beside him, clutching her equally ordinary wineglass with one rock-encrusted hand and her husband’s elbow with the other.

  “No,” he said, grinning, “but I am willing to donate two thousand dollars.”

  The crowed seemed to let off tension in a hiss of movement and breath.

  “Now this glass of water is worth two thousand dollars.” The auctioneer nodded approvingly. “It’s that point in the evening when we pause to remind ourselves why we’re here. Do we need a free ticket to see a Broadway show? Probably not. Can we make our own arrangements to rent an apartment in Paris? Of course we can. But that isn’t the point of our gathering. We are here because giving our money to the school our children attend is worth our while. These objects we’re about to auction off are worth our money. Though I have to say”—he grinned—“I’ve seen a lot of auctions, and you people really know how to put together a great auction.”

  “Three thousand,” said Simon Golden, lifting his hand.

  “Thank you!” the auctioneer said, raising the glass of now highly valuable water in approbation. “I did mention, didn’t I, that I fully intend to collect on this item?”

  Everyone laughed now. Another husband entered the fray, then another. The number rose, $1,000 per bid. The auctioneer held up the glass again when it reached $11,000. It was as if even he felt it was wrong to go higher. “Any further bids? Fair warning.”

  There were no more bids.

  “Sold! One glass of New York tap water, aqua Giuliani, to the gentleman in the very attractive blue tie, for eleven thousand dollars. Sir? Your water.”

  Amid thunderous applause, Nathan Friedberg made his way to the front of the room, took the glass from the auctioneer’s outstretched hand, and drained his prize. “Delicious!” he reported. “Worth every penny.”

  And with this testosterone throw-down, the auction proper began. Trips and jewelry, a chef’s table at Blue Hill, tickets to the Tony Awards, a week at Canyon Ranch…the bids came and came on a cushion of helium, each crisp tap of the auctioneer’s gavel on the podium followed by a little collective ecstatic sigh. Sally was beside herself, Grace could see. Only halfway through the roster of lots, they were ahead of their projections for the entire evening.

  It was absurd, but it wasn’t out of the ordinary—even Grace knew that. At Dalton, someone had auctioned a visit to the Oval Office for the winning bidder’s child. At Spence, somebody bought the right to sit next to Anna Wintour at a show during Fashion Week (conversation with the great arbiter of taste, presumably, not included). At Collegiate, there was a rumor about face-to-face interviews with the deans of admission at Yale and Amherst. Access, in other words, and not to something that didn’t matter, like backstage at the Garden, though that little item also turned up at private school benefits all over town. Access to information. Access to the quick of things.

  She let herself slip out of the room during heated bidding for a week in Montauk and made her way to the bathroom off the foyer, but it was occupied. “Is there another?” she whispered to the inevitable guard, and he inclined his big head to the door those two Caribbean women had disappeared behind an hour earlier. “I can go back there?” she asked.

  Back there was a corridor, not very wide, carpeted with some sort of crackly sisal. Miniature chandeliers, all dimmed, hung every ten feet or so, but the old master drawings on the walls had their own illumination, perfect little spotlights that made them glow. Unable to help herself, she stopped before a Rembrandt nude, marveling at the fact that she was not in a museum but in somebody’s house, and in a back corridor at that. When she closed the door behind her, the rest of the apartment, and the massive party, seemed to dematerialize completely.

  There were rooms along one side of the corridor, like dormitory rooms or rooms in the servants’ wing of a great house, which was, Grace supposed, precisely what they were. She thought of those uniformed Caribbean women disappearing through that same door with their dinner plates, relieved—presumably—of their charges, who were either here or not here, in which case they must be with other nannies in other Spenser homes. All the doors were closed. She went along, from drawing to drawing to drawing, as if she were hopping from one lily pad to the next across a river, passing the closed doors as she went. The bathroom finally revealed itself at the end of the hallw
ay, by a light around the edges of the door and a glimpse of blindingly white tile. This door, too, was emphatically shut, and a fan droned inside. And there was water running. And something else. Grace frowned. A sound with which she, like any therapist, was profoundly intimate: the sound of weeping of the most pure, most brokenhearted variety, muffled by hands making an honest attempt to hide the sound. Even after years of watching people weep, of hearing people weep, there was something acute and terrible about this sound. Grace stood a few feet from the door, afraid almost to breathe, unwilling to let the woman add to her suffering the fact that it was being overheard by a stranger.