The Undoing Page 2

  “Oh yeah,” Rebecca said. It sounded, Grace thought, a little personal. Well, that was hardly surprising. That was sort of the point.

  “And when it happens we just throw up our hands: We say: Wow, you never know about people. And we never hold ourselves accountable for what we bring to the deception. We have to learn to be accountable. If we don’t, we can’t act in our own best interests. And we can’t prevent it next time.”

  “Uh-oh.” Rebecca looked up. She fixed Grace with a plainly disapproving expression. “We’re not about to blame the victim, are we?”

  “There is no victim,” said Grace. “Look, I’ve been in practice for fifteen years. Over and over I’ve heard women describe their early interactions with their partner, and their early impressions of their partner. And listening to them, I continually thought: You knew right at the beginning. She knows he’s never going to stop looking at other women. She knows he can’t save money. She knows he’s contemptuous of her—the very first time they talk to each other, or the second date, or the first night she introduces him to her friends. But then she somehow lets herself unknow what she knows. She lets these early impressions, this basic awareness, get overwhelmed by something else. She persuades herself that something she has intuitively seen in a man she barely knows isn’t true at all now that she—quote unquote—has gotten to know him better. And it’s that impulse to negate our own impressions that is so astonishingly powerful. And it can have the most devastating impact on a woman’s life. And we’ll always let ourselves off the hook for it, in our own lives, even as we’re looking at some other deluded woman and thinking: How could she not have known? And I feel, just so strongly, that we need to hold ourselves to that same standard. And before we’re taken in, not after.”

  “But you know”—Rebecca looked up from her pad, while her pencil, impressively, continued to write—“it’s not just men. Women lie, too, right?” She was frowning, and there was, in the middle of her forehead, a pronounced V. Clearly—happily—the magazine she wrote for had not persuaded her to inject herself with botulinum toxin.

  “Right. Of course. And I do talk about this in the book. But the fact is, nine times out of ten it’s the woman sitting right there on my couch, totally distraught because, in her view, her male partner has hidden something from her. So I decided, right at the start, this book is going to be for women.”

  “Okay,” the girl said, returning to her pad. “I get it.”

  “I’m being didactic,” Grace said with a rueful little laugh.

  “You’re being passionate.”

  Right, Grace thought. She would have to remember that.

  “In any case,” she said deliberately, “I reached a point where I couldn’t stand to see so many decent, well-intentioned women suffering through months or years of therapy, ripping their guts out and spending a fortune, just to realize that their partner has not changed at all, possibly has never seriously tried to change, or even expressed a willingness to change. The women are right back where they started when they first came in and sat where you’re sitting right now. Those women deserve to hear the truth, which is that their situation isn’t going to improve—at least, not nearly as much as they want it to. They need to hear that the error they’ve made might be irreparable.”

  She stopped herself, partly to let Rebecca catch up, partly to savor the impact of this, her “bombshell” (as Sarabeth the agent had put it in their very first meeting the previous year). It still felt just slightly seismic. In fact, Grace could remember the moment she had decided to actually write down the thing she really thought, the obvious thing made ever more blindingly obvious with each passing year of her professional life, with every dating guide (which never said it) and marriage manual (which never said it either) she had devoured in preparation for writing her book, and with every International Association of Marriage and Family Counselors conference she’d attended (where it was never uttered). This thing no one talked about, but which she suspected her colleagues understood as well as she. Should she say it in her book and call down the vitriol of her peers? Or just reiterate that ridiculous myth that any “relationship” (whatever that was) could be “saved” (whatever that meant).

  “Don’t pick the wrong person,” she told Rebecca now, emboldened by the presence of Vogue in her bland little office, the artificially long and lean woman on her oatmeal-colored couch, wielding her retro steno pad and tape recorder. “Pick the wrong person and it doesn’t matter how much you want to fix your marriage. It won’t work.”

  After a moment, Rebecca looked up and said, “That’s pretty blunt.”

  Grace shrugged. It was blunt, she wasn’t going to argue with that. It needed to be blunt. If a woman chose the wrong person, he was always going to be the wrong person: that was all. The most capable therapist in the world wouldn’t be able to do much more than negotiate the treaty. At best, Grace thought, it was terribly sad, but at worst it was punitive—a lifetime of punitive. That was no way to have a marriage. If these couples were childless, the effort should go into separation. If there were children: mutual respect and coparenting. And separation.

  Not, of course, that she didn’t feel for them. She truly did feel for them, her own patients especially, because they had come to her for help and it was too late to offer them anything but the equivalent of garbage bags and Windex after the oil spill. But what she hated most of all was the sheer preventability of all this distress. Her patients were not unintelligent. They were educated, insightful about others. Some, even, were brilliant people. And that they should have met, on the paths of their younger lives, a potential companion who offered sure or at least likely pain, and that they should have said yes to that sure or at least likely pain, and thus received the very sure or at least likely pain that was promised … well, it baffled her. It had always baffled her, and enraged her, too. Sometimes—she couldn’t help it—she wanted to shake them all.

  “Imagine,” she said to Rebecca, “that you are sitting down at a table with someone for the first time. Perhaps on a date. Perhaps at a friend’s house—wherever you might cross paths with a man you possibly find attractive. In that first moment there are things you can see about this man, and intuit about this man. They are readily observable. You can sense his openness to other people, his interest in the world, whether or not he’s intelligent—whether he makes use of his intelligence. You can tell that he’s kind or dismissive or superior or curious or generous. You can see how he treats you. You can learn from what he decides to tell you about himself: the role of family and friends in his life, the women he’s been involved with previously. You can see how he cares for himself—his own health and well-being, his financial well-being. This is all available information, and we do avail ourselves. But then …”

  She waited. Rebecca was scribbling, her blond head down.

  “Then?”

  “Then comes the story. He has a story. He has many stories. And I’m not suggesting that he’s making things up or lying outright. He might be—but even if he doesn’t do that, we do it for him, because as human beings we have such a deep, ingrained need for narrative, especially if we’re going to play an important role in the narrative; you know, I’m already the heroine and here comes my hero. And even as we’re absorbing facts or forming impressions, we have this persistent impulse to set them in some sort of context. So we form a story about how he grew up, how women have treated him, how employers have treated him. How he appears before us right now becomes a part of that story. How he wants to live tomorrow becomes part of that story. Then we get to enter the story: No one has ever loved him enough until me. None of his other girlfriends have been his intellectual equal. I’m not pretty enough for him. He admires my independence. None of this is fact. It’s all some combination of what he’s told us and what we’ve told ourselves. This person has become a made-up character in a made-up story.”

  “You mean, like a fictional character.”

  “Yes. It’s not a good idea to
marry a fictional character.”

  “But … you make it sound as if it’s inevitable.”

  “It’s not. If we were to bring to this situation a fraction of the care we brought to, for example, our consumer decisions, problems would arise far less than they do. I mean, what is it about us? We’ll try on twenty pairs of shoes before we make a purchase. We’ll read reviews by total strangers before we choose someone to install our carpeting. But we turn off our bullshit detector and toss out our own natural impressions because we find someone attractive, or because he seems interested in us. He could be holding up a placard that says, I will take your money, make passes at your girlfriends, and leave you consistently bereft of love and support, and we’ll find a way to forget that we ever knew that. We’ll find a way to unknow that.”

  “But … ,” Rebecca said. “People do have doubts. Maybe they just don’t act on them.”

  Grace nodded. Doubts emerged often in her practice: very old, desiccated doubts, saved and preserved and brought forth by very wounded, very sad women. They were a theme with countless variations: I knew he drank too much. I knew he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. I knew he didn’t love me, not as much as I loved him.

  “Many people have doubts,” she agreed. “The problem is, few of us recognize doubt for what it is. Doubt is a gift from our deepest selves, that’s how I think of it. Like fear. You’d be amazed how many people experience fear just before something bad happens to them, and when they go back to that moment later, they understand that they missed an opportunity to avert what was about to take place. You know: Don’t walk down that street. Don’t let that guy give you a ride home. We seem to have a highly developed ability to ignore what we know, or suspect. From an evolutionary standpoint alone, that’s fascinating, but my interests are more practical. I think doubt can be an extraordinary gift. I think we need to learn to listen to our doubt, not just dismiss it, even if that means putting a stop to an engagement. You know, it’s much easier to cancel a wedding than it is to cancel a marriage.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Rebecca said with heavy sarcasm. “Some of the weddings I’ve been to lately. I think it might be easier to cancel the Olympics.”

  This—without knowing anything about Rebecca’s recently married friends—had to be true. Grace’s own wedding had been small because her family consisted of her father and herself, and Jonathan’s family had chosen to absent themselves. But she, too, had attended her share of insane nuptials.

  “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 poin
t 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.