You Should Have Known (3 page)

“Last month,” Rebecca said, “my roommate from college had this complete blowout, five hundred people at the Puck Building. The flowers—oh, my God. At least fifty thousand dollars, I kid you not. And they had all the wedding presents out on a long table in another room, like they used to do, remember?”

Grace remembered. It was an old rite that, like so many other old wedding rites, had somehow returned in all of its materialistic glory, because apparently the modern wedding wasn't busy or flashy enough. Her own parents' wedding at the St. Regis had featured such a display of gifts in a foyer off the ballroom: Audubon silver, Haviland china, and a full set of Waterford Crystal, every bit of which was now in the clutches of Eva, her father's second wife.

“Half of Tiffany's. Plus every gadget Williams-Sonoma ever came up with. Which is a scream”—Rebecca laughed—“because she can't cook and I don't think he'll ever be civilized enough to eat with silver.”

Grace nodded. She had heard this before, these details, and so many others, from the oatmeal-colored couch in her office. She had heard about the massive search for the pastel-colored mints served at the bride's parents' wedding (apparently still produced only at one tiny storefront on Rivington), and the engraved lockets for the bridesmaids, and the precise make of vintage car to drive them to their wedding night at the Gansevoort, and then, at the end of it all, those ten days at the same resort in the Seychelles where some celebrity couple had honeymooned, in a hut on stilts in the vivid blue Indian Ocean.

Which was where they had had the argument that cast a pall over the entire nuptials and still reverberated here, years later, in front of the therapist who already knew that these two people brought out the worst in each other, and probably always had, and certainly always would.

Sometimes Grace wished she could take a poison-tipped lance to the entire wedding industry. Downgrade your average twenty-first-century nuptial extravaganza to quiet vows, taken in the presence of dear friends and family, and half the engaged couples—the right half—would drop the entire notion of marriage on the spot. Persuade couples to save the party for their twenty-fifth anniversary, when his hairline had evaporated and her waist was thick from childbearing, and a whole lot of them would retract in horror. But by the time they came to her, the barn door was bolted and the horse long gone.

“
Doubt can be a gift.
” Rebecca spoke the phrase aloud, as if testing its weight and repeatability. “That's good.”

Grace felt the weight of Rebecca's cynicism. Then she felt the weight of her own.

“It's not that I don't believe in human transformation,” she said, trying not to sound as defensive as she felt. “Human transformation is possible. It requires immense courage and selflessness, but it does happen. It's just that we spend so much effort on that slim possibility of correction and none at all on the side of prevention. That's a serious disconnect, don't you think?”

Rebecca nodded vaguely, but now she was busy. She was scribbling, her left hand all knuckles, the pen jerking and sputtering along the wide-ruled lines. After a moment, she came to the end of whatever she was trying to get down. Then she looked up and said with perfect therapeutic intonation: “Can you say more about that?”

Grace took a breath and went on. It was one of the more pointed ironies of her profession, she explained, that when you asked people what they wanted in a mate, they tended to offer you sobering, mature, insightful truths: Protection and companionship, they said, nurturing and stimulation, a snug harbor from which to be outward bound. But when you looked at their actual partnerships, where were those things? These same insightful and eloquent people were alone or in combat, perpetually diminished. There was abandonment and friction, competition and hindrance, and all because, at some point, they had said yes to the wrong person. So they came to her with this broken thing that needed fixing, but there was nothing to be gained by explaining it all now. You had to explain it all
before
they said yes to the wrong person.

“I'm getting married,” Rebecca said, quite suddenly, when she had finished writing all or some of this down.

“Congratulations,” Grace told her. “That's wonderful news.”

The girl burst out laughing. “
Really.
”

“Yes. Really. I hope you will have a beautiful wedding and, more importantly, a wonderful marriage.”

“So wonderful marriages are possible?” she said, enjoying herself.

“Of course. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be here.”

“And you wouldn't be married, I suppose.”

Grace smiled evenly. It had been a struggle to give up even the limited amount of information her publisher insisted on. Therapists did not advertise their personal lives. Authors, apparently, did. She had promised Jonathan that their lives as a couple, as a family, would stay as private as they possibly could. Actually, he hadn't seemed as bothered by it all as she was herself.

“Tell me about your husband,” said Rebecca now, as Grace had known she would.

“His name is Jonathan Sachs. We met in college. Well, I was in college. He was in medical school.”

“So he's a doctor?”

He was a pediatrician, Grace said. She didn't want to say the name of the hospital. It changed things. All of this was readily available on any Internet search of her name, because she was mentioned in the short piece
New York
magazine had done a few years earlier, in the annual Best Doctors issue. The photograph showed Jonathan in his scrubs, his curly dark hair well past the point at which she usually urged him to get it cut. He wore the ubiquitous stethoscope, and there was a large pinwheel lollipop sticking out of his breast pocket. He looked as if he were trying to smile through exhaustion. A bald and grinning boy sat in his lap.

“Kids?”

“One son. Henry is twelve.”

She nodded, as if this confirmed something. The buzzer on Grace's desk sounded.

“Oh good,” said Rebecca. “That's Ron, probably.”

Ron must be the photographer. She got up to let him in.

He stood out in the lobby, surrounded by heavy metal cases. He was on his phone, texting, when she opened the door.

“Hello,” she said, mostly to get his attention.

“Hey,” he said mildly, looking up. “Ron? They told you I was coming?”

“Hi.” She shook his hand. “What, no hair and makeup?”

He looked at her oddly. He couldn't tell she was joking.

“I'm joking.” She laughed, secretly disappointed that there was no hair and makeup. She had allowed herself to fantasize about the hair and makeup. “Come on in.”

He stepped heavily inside, carrying two of the cases, then went back for the others. He was about Jonathan's height and might be Jonathan's build, Grace thought, were her husband not so conscientious about holding off this very protuberance of gut.

“Hey, Ron,” said Rebecca, who had come to the threshold of the office. The three of them now stood in the vestibule, which was even smaller than her consulting room. Ron looked aggrieved at what he saw: a couple of mission chairs, a Navajo rug, back copies of the
New Yorker
in a woven basket on the floor.

“I was thinking inside?” Rebecca said.

“Let's see inside.”

Inside, apparently, was better. He brought in a light, a curved white screen, and one of the cases, from which he began to extract cameras. Grace stood nervously beside the couch, a stranger in this, her own land, watching them banish her leather chair to the vestibule. He pulled back her desk to set up his light, a hot bright box atop a chrome stalk, and wedged the screen against the opposite wall. “I usually have an assistant,” he told her without further explanation.

Cheap job
, she automatically thought.
Low priority.

“Nice flowers. They'll look good against that wall. I'm going to move them into the frame.”

Grace nodded. That Sarabeth. Amazing, really.

“You want to…” He stopped and looked at Rebecca, who now stood with her arms crossed over her protruding bust.

“Fix up a bit?” Rebecca finished for him. She had morphed into the photo editor.

“Oh. Right.”

Grace left them and went into her bathroom, which was very small—so small that it had once elicited a tearful outburst from an obese client—and not terrifically well lit. She regretted this just now, because even if she'd known how to magically transform her current self into a self that would appear, to her own
Vogue
-reader eyes,
Vogue
-worthy, she doubted she'd be able to pull that off in such a cramped, dim space. For want of a better idea, she washed her face with the available hand soap and dried it with one of the paper towels she kept in a dispenser. This produced no discernible effect, and she stared into her clean, familiar face with a sinking heart. From her purse she took out a tube of concealer and attempted two swipes under the eyes, but there wasn't much improvement: Now she looked like a vaguely tired woman with concealer under the eyes. Who was she to treat
Vogue
so cavalierly?

Was this important enough to call Sarabeth about? Grace had found, over the past few months, that she was reluctant to interrupt what she thought of as her agent's real work—that is, her work with
real
writers. It would be wrong, in other words, to interrupt what might be a session of intense literary exchange with a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award to ask if she—Grace—ought to be sneaking out to Zitomer pharmacy and begging one of the ladies to buff her up. And what about her hair? Should it be in its usual configuration of tight coil and clean lines, pinned with the heavy bobby pins (these were made for old-fashioned plastic rollers and getting harder and harder to find)? Or should she brush it loose, which made her feel untidy, and look like a kid?

I should be so lucky
, she thought ruefully,
as to look like a kid.

Of course, she was not a kid. She was a woman of a certain seasoning, a self-reliant woman of some refinement, with myriad responsibilities and attachments, who had long ago set certain parameters for her appearance and then remained consciously within them, relieved at not having to reinvent herself constantly or even aspire to greater heights of beauty. She was aware of the fact that most people viewed her as formal and contained, but that didn't bother her, because the Grace who wore jeans at the lake house and brushed out her hair as soon as she got home from work was not a Grace she wished to make available to the world.

She was young
enough
. She was attractive
enough
. She seemed competent
enough
. That wasn't it.

The fame part…well, perhaps that was getting a bit closer. If she could have hired an actress (taller and prettier!) to play the role of her book's author, she would have been tempted. An actress with an earpiece, into which Grace could feed the correct lines (
In the vast majority of cases, your potential spouse will tell you everything you need to know very quickly…
) as Matt Lauer or Ellen DeGeneres nodded soberly.
But I'm a big girl
, Grace thought, absently brushing dust against the surface of the mirror with the backs of her fingers. She went back to the others.

Now Rebecca was sitting in Grace's chair, staring deeply into the screen of her phone, and the coffee table had been angled away from the couch, with the pitcher of roses and the bound galley of her book pushed aside and forward, into the frame. No one had to tell her where to sit.

“Your husband's adorable,” Rebecca said.

“Oh. Yes,” she said. She didn't appreciate being put on the spot. “Thank you.”

“How can he do that?” she said.

Ron, who was already looking through the lens of one of his cameras, said, “Do what?”

“He's a doctor for kids with cancer.”

“He's a pediatric oncologist,” Grace said evenly. “At Memorial.”

At Memorial Sloan-Kettering, in other words. She really hoped they'd drop it.

“I could never do that. He must be a saint.”

“He's a good doctor,” Grace said. “It's a difficult field.”

“Jesus,” said Ron. “No way could I do that.”

It's a good thing no one's asking
, she thought irritably. “I was trying to decide what to do with my hair,” she said, hoping to distract them both. “What do you think?” She touched the tight coil at the nape of her neck. “I can take it down. I have a hairbrush.”

“No, it's good. I can see your face. Okay?” he asked. But he was asking Rebecca, not her.

“Let's try,” she confirmed.

“Okay,” he said.

He picked up the camera again, looked through it, and said, “So this is just a practice, all right? No sweat.” And before she could respond, he produced a heavy metallic click.

Instantly, Grace went stiff as a board.

“Oh no.” Ron laughed. “I said it would be painless. Aren't you comfortable?”

“Actually, no,” she said, trying to smile. “I've never done this. I mean, had my picture taken for a magazine.”

Thus completing my public infantilization
, she thought as the last of her courage fled.

“Well, what better magazine to start with!” Ron said merrily. “And I'm going to make you look so stunning, you'll think some supermodel came in and pretended to be you.”

Grace produced a highly disingenuous laugh and rearranged herself on the couch.

“Very nice!” Rebecca said brightly. “But cross your legs the other way, all right? Better angle.”

Grace did.

“And we're off!” said Ron, sounding chipper. He began to take pictures in a rat-tat-tat of clicks. “So,” he said as he dipped and leaned, producing—as far as she could tell—tiny variations on the same angle, “what's your novel called?”