Jean Hanff Korelitz - You Should Have Known

U sually people cried when they came here for the first time, and this girl looked as if shed be no exception. She walked in with a briefcase and a swagger and shook Graces hand like the cool professional she clearly was, or at least wished to be. Then she sat on the couch and crossed one long twill-encased leg over the other. And then, sort of abruptly, she seemed to register where she was, with a wallop.

Oh wow, said the girl, whose nameGrace had double-checked a few minutes earlierwas Rebecca Wynne. I havent been in a therapists office since college.

Grace sat in her customary chair, crossed her own much shorter legs, and leaned forward. She couldnt help it.

Its so bizarre! The minute you come in here, you just want to start bawling.

Plenty of Kleenex. Grace smiled. How many times had she sat in this chair, with her legs crossed just the way they were now, listening to the room fill up with weeping. Weeping happened here so often, she sometimes imagined her office underwater, as in one of the magical Betty MacDonald stories shed loved as a child, where the crybaby protagonist literally couldnt stop sobbing until the water had risen to her chin. When there was extreme anger, the shouting kind or the silent, venomous kind, she envisioned the walls of her office (in actuality painted a very innocuous off-white) turning dark with rage. When there was happiness or accord, she sometimes imagined she could smell sweet pine, as from late summer at the lake.

Well, its just a room, she said cheerily. With boring furniture.

Right. Rebecca looked around, as if this needed confirmation. The roomGraces consulting roomhad been constructed with immense care to be many things at once: comfortable but not particularly inviting, warm without troubling individuality, decorated with things so familiar they commonly resonated: that Eliot Porter print of the birches she had up beside the doorhadnt everyone lived with that poster at some point? dorm room? summer rental?the red kilim rug, the oatmeal-colored couch, and her own swiveling leather chair. There was a glass-topped coffee table with a single box of Kleenex in a leather holder and an old country pine desk in the corner, its drawers stocked with yellow legal pads and lists of psychopharmacologists, child psychologists, smoking-cessation hypnotherapists, real estate agents, travel agents, mediators, estate planners, divorce attorneys. On the desktop, pens protruded from an unlovely ceramic mug her son, Henry, had made in first grade (this was an item that had, over the years, elicited an astonishing number of comments, ushered into speech a remarkable number of impacted memories), and a white ceramic lamp with a burlap shade threw discreet light on the proceedings. The only window overlooked the back alley of the building, and there was never anything out there to see, despite one attempt years earlier to install a planter of some bright no-brainer florageraniums, actually, and ivy. The superintendent had signed off on this project, though his enthusiasm stopped well short of helping her maneuver the wooden planter off its truck and down the alley to its resting spot, but the plants had starved for light and the planter itself disappeared soon after, leaving a dark mark on the cement that persisted. She was not a flower person, really.

Today, though, she had actually brought in flowers: dark pink roses, on the specific recommendation of Sarabeth, whoas the Great Day drew ever nearerwas becoming more and more inclined to micromanage. Not only must Grace purchase flowers for this occasion, but they must be roses, and the roses must be pinkdark pink.

Dark pink roses. Why? Grace had wondered. Sarabeth wasnt expecting a color photograph, was she? Was it not sufficiently incredible that Vogue magazine had a black-and-white pictures worth of interest in her? But shed done as she was told, plunking them in the only vase she had in the offices little galley kitchen, from a forgotten flower delivery (end-of-treatment flowers? thank-you-for-showing-me-I-had-to-leave-him flowers? Jonathan flowers?), awkwardly and not very prettily spreading them out. Now they sat on one of the end tables, in some danger of being overturned by Rebeccas heavy wool coat.

You know, Grace said, youre right about the crying. Usually it takes a lot out of people just to get here. Or in the case of my practice, to get their partner here. Its very common to see people just let go when they finally make it through the door for the first time. Its perfectly all right.

Well, another time, perhaps, the girl said. She was thirty, Grace thought, give or take, and pretty, if a bit severe, and the clothes she wore had been rather cleverly designed to conceal her actual body type, which was plainly curvaceous and buxom, and present in its place the fiction that she was boyish and lean. The white cotton shirt looked as if it had been tailored expressly for this purpose, and the brown twill pants hit at exactly the right spot to suggest a waist that was barely there. Both pieces were triumphs of illusion and had clearly been made by someone who knew exactly what they were doingbut when one worked for Vogue, Grace imagined, one had access to such people.

Rebecca rummaged around in the briefcase at her booted feet, then extracted an ancient tape recorder, which she placed on the glass-topped table. Do you mind? she asked. I know, its like an antique, but I need it as a backup. I once spent four hours with a certain pop star not known for her ability to speak in complete sentences, and I had this little space-age gadget the size of a matchbook. When I tried to play it back later there was absolutely nothing there. Most terrifying moment of my career.

It must have been. Grace nodded. Obviously, you managed to handle the setback.

Rebecca shrugged. Her fine blond hair was cut in a sort of highly constructed mess, and she wore a silver necklace that lay along her clavicles. I made her sound so smart shed have been crazy not to confirm the quotes when they fact-checked. Not that I wasnt worried. But her publicist actually told my editor it was her favorite interview shed ever done, so I came out smelling like a rose. She stopped. She looked squarely at Grace. You know, she said with a half-smile, it occurs to me that I should not have said that. Another effect of being in a therapists office. You sit on the couch, you spill the beans.

Grace smiled.

Rebecca, with an audible click, depressed the pertinent buttons on her tape recorder. Then she reached back into her briefcase and extracted an old-fashioned steno pad and a shiny bound galley.

Oh, you have the book! said Grace. It was still so new, it amazed her to see it in anyone elses possession. As if the entire endeavor had been to produce a vanity item for herself alone.

Of course, said the girl coolly. Her professionalism, her control of the meeting, seemed to have been restored to her in the same instant Grace had shown herself to be such a neophyte. But she couldnt help it. It was still so strange to see the book in its actual book-flesh: her book,