You Should Have Known (11 page)

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 hallway, 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.

It wasn't hard to imagine who was in there or what she was crying about. Grace, like any minimally aware New York mother, knew very well that most of the women who cared for the city's children of privilege had children of their own, but those children were usually far away, on other islands, in other countries; how much regret, how much bitterness, must underlie this particular social contract? The subject never came up at the mothers' group or in the lobby at the school—it never crossed that blood-brain barrier between the actual mothers and the caregivers. It was not a secret, of course, but it felt like a secret: brutal and bottomless, a monstrous irony. No wonder she wept, thought Grace, looking at the shut door, still frozen on the sisal runner a few feet away. Perhaps she had left her own children behind in some unlovely home far in every way from this penthouse mansion, to give care and even love to the children of Jonas and Suki Spenser, high above this unfathomably expensive city. Perhaps she had taken this private moment, with the house jammed with strangers and the family away, to indulge the grief of a mother deprived of her children.

Grace took a step back, willing the rushes underfoot not to rustle. They did not. She took another step, and turned, and went out the way she'd come.

Stepping back into the foyer, she felt a vibration in the hand holding her evening purse and removed her cell phone to find a text from Jonathan. He was indeed not at the party—that was no more than she already knew—but the surprising thing was that he had actually been in the Spenser apartment for at least part of the auction. “Got there late bec of shiva,” he had typed. “Just got message from hosp about a pt having bad night, will try to make it back later. SORRY.”

In Jonathan's life a “pt” was always having a bad night—a little boy or a little girl, just diagnosed, or interrupted by a sudden setback, or abruptly critical. There was always a frantic call from a mom whose bright five-year-old had been felled in an instant, a quivering guillotine materializing overhead like Ezekiel's spinning wheel. There were always parents, enraged by their impotence, liable to explode. Over the years, Jonathan had been hit, wept upon countless times, reasoned with endlessly. He had been summoned to hear confessions:
Had this happened because of the prostitute? Was it because she had been smoking, secretly, for the past four years and even in the pregnancy?
Jonathan's days were a conveyer belt of routine crises, every single one of them life-threatening, life-altering, of all-consuming implications. Even she, who had many times embarked upon an ordinary therapy session that swerved into a brick wall or a black hole to oblivion, could barely imagine the volatility of her husband's daily life.

“Didn't see you,” she typed with her thumbs, a skill at which she'd become sadly adept.

“Waved at you like an idiot!” he wrote back.

Grace sighed. There was no point in continuing. At least he had managed to get here.

“See you at home,” she typed in. “XX.”

“XX,” came back. It was their usual electronic parting.

When Jennifer Hartman came out of the bathroom, Grace managed a benign nod at her and went in. Here, another chandelier glittered with enormous, rough shards of glass, dappling the waxed walls. Over the toilet was a Warhol self-portrait, just the thing (Grace couldn't help but feel) to interrupt the flow of male urine. She washed her hands in lavender soap.

They were near the end now. Only the Millionaire Munchkin Camp (as Grace had privately dubbed Nathan Friedberg's entrepreneurial effort) remained, and that went, after a struggle among four, then three, then two, for $30,000—a bargain, Friedberg announced loudly, when you declare it as a nonprofit donation on your taxes. Grace did not recognize the trim European couple who'd made the winning bid.

With that, the auction ended, and in a collective sigh of relief and self-congratulation. Sally, Grace could see, was basking, accepting an embrace from Robert, the headmaster, and from Amanda, who emitted a fairly undignified “Woo-hoo!” as she squeezed her taller friend and made her jump awkwardly up and down, just like Hillary and Tipper at the Democratic convention. Men gave each other vigorous handshakes, sending the ambient congratulatory rush cascading around the room. Then began the exodus. A few couples were already at the door, slipping away discreetly, and there was Malaga Alves, who held up her auction catalog like a blinker or a fan, in front of her face. Apart from their brief greeting downstairs, Grace had not spoken to her and moved quickly, her head down.

A moment later, Robert Conover materialized beside her, one big hand on her shoulder, a rough cheek at her cheek. What a wonderful job she had done, he told Grace. “It's mainly Sally,” said Grace. “And the Spensers, of course. We have to give them a lot of the credit.”

“Certainly. In absentia.”

“Ours is not to reason why.” She shrugged. “And personally I would never look this gift view in the mouth. Besides, you have to admit, there's something kind of cool about being here without them. Sort of
Tailor of Gloucester
.”

“Perhaps a bit more cats-away-mice-will-play,” the headmaster said. “I bet a few of these guys are plotting how to get into the various Spenser sanctums upstairs.”

“And the women want to get into the closets!” said Grace.

Robert laughed. “Hell, I want to get into the closets myself.”

“Julian couldn't make it?” Grace asked. She had seen the current production at his theater, a dense and decidedly experimental interpretation of Kafka's
Trial
that she would have loved to talk about.

“Sadly,” Robert said, “at a conference at the Taper in L.A. Where's yours? I saw him during the auction.”

“Oh, he had a call from the hospital. He had to go back.”

She watched as the customary spasm crossed Robert's features. This happened often when the word
hospital
was mentioned in relation to her husband.

“God,” said Robert, right on cue. “How does he do it?”

She sighed. “It's all about what they can do for the kids. The forward progress.”

“There is forward progress, then?”

“Oh, of course,” said Grace. “Not as fast as anyone would like. But yes.”

“I don't know how he even gets through those doors every day. When Julian's mother was there—she had colon cancer…”

“I'm sorry,” Grace said automatically.

“Yes. She was there for a month about four years ago, and then another few weeks at the end. When it was over and we walked out for the last time, I thought,
I hope I never have to be inside this building for the rest of my life
. I mean, everywhere you look: pain, pain, pain.”

Yes, yes,
she thought, maintaining her most professional compassion. If Jonathan were here, he would be telling Robert Conover that, yes, the work was intense, yes, the emotions were powerful, but he felt privileged to be allowed into people's lives at these very moments of emotion and intensity, when their instinct might understandably be to circle the wagons and ask everybody to please go away, because the worst thing that has ever happened, the worst thing they could imagine ever happening, was happening right now, to their son or daughter. Jonathan would be saying that he might not be able to fix the child who was his patient, but almost always he could make things a little bit better, and that included taking away pain, which meant something to him and meant something to the child's family. He had been asked some variation on “How do you do it?” hundreds of times—hundreds of times in her presence alone—and he would always respond to it without the smallest shred of irritation and with a broad smile.