It was just like an affair, Graham thought, except without the sex or love or excitement or other good parts. There weren’t even the bad parts—shame or betrayal—because Audra knew and approved. Or at least she offered no objection and sometimes she even looked relieved. (She seemed overwhelmed lately.) No sex, no secrets, no guilt, no debauchery greater than gourmet potato chips.
So why then did Graham’s heart beat faster every time he climbed the steps to Elspeth’s building?
The reason Audra was so distracted was that she was getting the apartment ready for houseguests. She did all the usual things—set up a cot in Matthew’s room and put fresh sheets on the foldout bed in the den and stocked the bathroom with miniature toiletries and cleaned out space in the hall closet and made Graham wrestle the armchair out of the den and down to their storage space—this last part was reason enough never to have houseguests, Graham thought. But even for Audra, having these houseguests bordered on the extreme. Strangers. Two of them. For a month. (It seemed to Graham to get worse with every phrase.)
Over Christmas, Graham and Audra and Matthew had spent a week in a Miami resort and met another couple who were so unremarkable that if you got on an elevator with them, you not only wouldn’t remember them, you might not even notice they were there. They had an eleven-year-old son named Noah, and he, too, was completely unremarkable except for one quality—he and Matthew had become friends. The kind of friendship Graham had always hoped Matthew would have—easy and uncomplicated and heartfelt. Matthew and Noah explored the resort together and called each other on the hotel phones and went swimming and ordered milk shakes and stayed up late. Graham supposed they had fallen in love a little bit—the bright, sweet kind of love you feel when someone asks you to sit with them at lunch.
Naturally, Audra had spent hours talking to Noah’s parents and stayed in touch with them after they’d left. In some long complicated email thread (Graham imagined that printed out, it would stretch the length of a basketball court) Audra and Noah’s mother had worked out an arrangement where Noah would come and stay with them for the month of February, since he went to an international school with a long half-term break. And since Noah couldn’t travel by himself, he would bring his grandfather.
Oh, listen to Graham! Making it sound like this was all some crazy scheme of Audra’s. As if Graham hadn’t agreed to it, as if Graham hadn’t leapt at the chance, as if Graham didn’t want to live, however briefly, in that golden world where your child romped happily through the enchanted forest of friendship.
Graham knew that other people didn’t do this. Other people had children and those children had friends and they went over to the friends’ houses and watched TV and hung out and slept over and sometimes they drank the friends’ fathers’ whisky and then added water to fill up the bottle and kept doing that until the whisky was the color of dry sand. That was how it was supposed to work. That was how Graham remembered it working. But what happened when it didn’t work that way? What happened when your kid never seemed to make that kind of connection?
Before you had a special-needs child, you probably thought, Okay, special needs means a tutor, maybe a specialized school. You didn’t know then that having a child with special needs would seep into every part of your life, like rain through topsoil. Who would ever think you would be happy to host a strange boy and his grandfather for a month just so your kid could have a best friend? Your old self wouldn’t believe you would agree to such a thing. Your old self would stick his hands in his pockets and shake his head and give a little disbelieving whistle. But your old self knew nothing at all.
Noah’s grandfather was not what they were expecting. Graham had pictured a genteel, urbane older gentleman with a pointy white beard who would make witty conversation about his travels and possibly have a passion for the early works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton. But in reality Noah’s grandfather was a balding red-faced man who swayed alarmingly even when using a cane. He wheezed badly just from taking the elevator, and his first words to them were “These long flights are murder on my kidneys.”
Even more startling than this was that Noah’s grandfather was accompanied by a barrel-chested chocolate Labrador named Brodie, who lumbered past Graham and Audra as they stood at the door. Graham could hear Brodie’s claws scrambling madly for purchase on the hardwood floors.
At least Noah was the same as they remembered—pallid and thin, with no-color hair and pale eyelashes, and a gap-toothed smile. It was true: you really cannot help who you fall in love with. He smiled waifishly and Matthew beamed at him and then they disappeared into Matthew’s room.
Meanwhile Brodie pushed through the swinging door to the kitchen, letting out a little yelp as the door closed on his tail.
Graham pointed at the kitchen. “Did you know about this?” he said to Audra. Noah’s grandfather was in the bathroom.
“What—Brodie?” Audra said, as though Graham could possibly be referring to something else. “No. No. Well. No. Anyway, Graham, forget about the dog! What about him? He’s so old! What if he falls over and breaks his hip and we have to take care of him for three months? What if he wakes up tomorrow and can’t move the left side of his body? What if he has to be in rehab for months!”
“That’s not going to happen,” Graham said.
“But how do you know?”
“Because I won’t let it. Because if he falls and breaks his hip or has any other health problem, I will pay for him to be medevaced back to California.”
“Really?” Audra said. Her eyes were shining and she was gazing up at him as though he knew all the world’s secrets.
This was an actual conversation. Graham meant every word.
Graham and Audra had never had a dog; they were not dog people. And Graham thought that probably even dog people weren’t Brodie people. Graham could not get used to the way Brodie’s nails scraped constantly on the floors, or the strings of drool that hung from the corners of Brodie’s mouth, or Brodie’s sudden fits of scratching, which seemed to go on endlessly, his tags jingling noisily. Brodie panted constantly, even though it was February, and he barked almost as much as he panted. He barked when the elevator dinged, or the phone rang, or when they opened and shut the cabinet doors (or when their neighbors opened and shut their cabinet doors). He barked for almost half an hour at an African mask in the den until Audra pulled it off the wall and put it in a closet. Brodie carried their shoes around and chewed the laces out of the eyelets. He also got into the coat closet and chewed the pockets out of all their coats (there must have been crumbs in them), which they only discovered when their keys kept falling on the floor. He jumped up on everyone who came into the apartment, and he tipped over the wastebaskets and spread garbage on the floor, and he stole a whole loaf of bread off the kitchen counter.
“Brodie, sweetie,” Papa Stan said. “You have to behave! Remember your manners! These nice people are our hosts. This is their home. Now show them what a good boy you can be. Please? Can you do that? Brodie? Brodie! I asked you a question.”
That’s the way Papa Stan spoke to Brodie: long complicated sentences that didn’t contain one single command. Clearly, this was what happened when you were a lonely old man and a dog was your only companion. It was only too easy to imagine them watching the nightly news, Papa Stan trying to elicit Brodie’s opinion on same-sex-marriage appeals.
When Papa Stan spoke to Brodie like that, Graham’s throat tightened and he had to turn away. Sometimes other people’s pain is more than you can take. You have to seal yourself off.
Elspeth’s apartment was as simple and stylish as a showplace. Part of it, Graham supposed, was that she was one person living in a two-bedroom apartment, but he didn’t like to think about that. And anyway, he knew that the main part of it was just Elspeth. She liked to keep things extremely neat. That had driven him fairly crazy when they were married. She could not relax—she was always moistening her finger to pick crumbs off the table or stretching to pluck fluff off the carpet—and she’d had a way of watching him, too, as though silently daring him to spill his drink or crumble a cracker. And—this was the worst—often when Graham himself neatened up, when he pushed in the dining room chairs, or centered a candlestick on a table, Elspeth would come along right behind him and readjust the chair or candlestick by an inch. It was as though she didn’t want objects in the apartment to get the wrong idea and start thinking Graham was the boss.
But the apartment seemed overly tidy, even for Elspeth. Graham found it depressing. It was like when you were young and single and cleaned your apartment and then realized you still didn’t have a date—you were just a person with a clean apartment who didn’t have a date.
Even her handbag on the hall table looked staged, like something out of a magazine, perhaps because otherwise the tabletop was bare, with no jumble of keys or scattering of mail. In the kitchen, the counters were free of crumbs, the appliances shining; there was no dish drainer because Elspeth dried dishes and put them away as soon as she washed them (and if you think that’s relaxing, think again). The carpet was far cleaner than a twice-a-week cleaning service could account for, and the furniture was dustless but without the smell of Pledge—Graham seemed to recall that Elspeth polished it with lemon oil. The dining room table gleamed so deeply it was reflective, and Elspeth always had a different centerpiece—a candle floating in a crystal dish, or a square tray filled with blue stones, or a bowl of perfect green apples. Real apples, too. But what did she do when they started to ripen? One person couldn’t eat a dozen apples in a day or two. Perhaps she got all economical and whizzed them up into applesauce. But how often does a single person eat a dish of applesauce? Oh, everywhere Graham turned, he stumbled into the fact of Elspeth’s aloneness.
Still, it was a nice apartment—no getting around that.
Graham and Elspeth’s evenings were full of intimacy. Graham arrived at Elspeth’s building and the doormen no longer bothered to make him wait while they called up, they just waved hello, and there was intimacy in that, and when Graham got to Elspeth’s apartment, the door was propped open on the dead bolt and Graham could let himself in, and there was intimacy in that. The wine would be on the counter, chilling, and there was intimacy in that, and often Graham would have done some shopping on the way over and he would put the food in the refrigerator, and there was intimacy in that, and usually Elspeth would be in the bedroom changing clothes with the door slightly ajar and there was intimacy in that; oh my, yes.
But Elspeth did not come out of the bedroom in a silky robe or floaty negligee. She had merely changed from her suit into wool pants and a silk blouse, or maybe black leggings and a black sweater. This was, Graham knew, her equivalent to putting on her bathrobe. And she always wore high heels. She was the only woman Graham had ever known who didn’t kick off her high heels with a moan of pleasure as soon as she got home. (That had been another unrelaxing component of their married life, that she never lounged around in her bathrobe. Try lounging around in your bathrobe while your spouse clicks around the house in stiletto heels and vacuums the back of the television set. It gets to you.)
Elspeth would join him in the kitchen and they would make dinner together, stepping around each other as neatly as square dancers. They never touched, not even accidentally. It seemed to Graham that they went out of their way not to touch, that they didn’t touch even when they should. Elspeth would put her glass on the counter and step back while Graham filled it, and then he would step back and she would reach for it. Do-si-do, Graham would think. Promenade. Swing your partner. Big foot up and little foot down.
Honestly, sometimes he wondered if he was losing his mind.
They spoke mainly of whatever they were cooking, for they were both ambitious cooks, and often whatever they were making led them to plan future meals: chicken gumbo leading to chilaquiles verdes to chicken vindaloo Vesuvius. There was never any doubt that they would do this again.
And then after dinner, they would sit on the couch and drink more wine. Elspeth did not sit directly beside him, but she always turned toward him, extending her arm along the back of the couch, her face as open and calm as a pansy.
Eventually, it would be nine o’clock and Graham would rise (though Elspeth wouldn’t; he saw himself out) and thank Elspeth for dinner and she would smile as though he’d said something ridiculous and he would say, “We should do this again soon,” and she would say, “Well, how about the day after tomorrow?” and he would say, “That would be great, if you’re not tired of feeding me,” and she would say, “Don’t be silly. But are you sure they won’t need you at home?” and he would picture Audra and Matthew and Noah’s grandfather and Noah and Brodie (God, there were so many of them!) and say, “Oh, no,” as if his family were a power station or fresh water supply, one of those things you were very grateful for but didn’t think about all that much.
There are some good houseguests—people who know why your dishwasher is making that clunking noise, and friends with all-day meetings and big expense accounts—but Noah’s grandfather wasn’t one of them. (They were supposed to call Noah’s grandfather Papa Stan. “I’m almost sixty years old,” Graham said. “I’m not going to call a man ten years older than me Papa anything.” But he did. Of course he did.)
From the very first morning, Papa Stan took to wandering around in a ratty old blue bathrobe. Didn’t houseguests understand that the point of growing up and buying a house and all the responsibility that went with it was so that you didn’t have to see anyone but your spouse in a bathrobe? Papa Stan set the television in the den to Fox News at a high volume and he seemed to dirty a fresh cup for every sip of coffee and he used up all the half-and-half in a single morning. And that was just for starters. He wanted attention all the time—he wanted you to show him how the shower worked and where you kept the butter and give him directions to the nearest supermarket. He wanted you to watch the news with him and fix him sandwiches and listen to his opinions on police brutality. He was as helpless and needy as a newborn baby.
Papa Stan also had the hearing of a lynx. Graham had to set but one toe on the floor outside the bedroom—quietly, quietly—and suddenly Papa Stan would appear and say, “I was just thinking about breakfast myself.” But what he meant was, Ah, someone to make me breakfast! And if Graham lied (yes, Graham had done this) and said he wasn’t going to the kitchen at all, he was actually going to change a lightbulb or put some laundry in, then Papa Stan would trail along behind him, plucking at his sleeve and asking questions and telling boring stories until Graham wished he’d just gone ahead and made Papa Stan breakfast and been done with it.
Except that he wouldn’t have been done with it. There was no being done with Papa Stan. If you made him breakfast, he wanted you to keep him company while he ate it. If you read the newspaper, he read aloud from the page facing him. If you unloaded the dishwasher, he leaned on his cane right in front of the silverware drawer and talked to you. If you checked your email, he breathed over your shoulder. If you said you were going for a walk, he said the exercise would do him good. If you said you were also going to run a bunch of errands, he would say that he didn’t mind that. If you said they were really long, boring errands, he said he would bring a book. If you said that now that you thought about it, you had a really important meeting on the other side of town, then he just looked disappointed and let you go, and if you felt like a horrible person for dodging a lonely old man, it served you right. (It was worth it, though.)
Like all affairs, Graham and Elspeth’s involved a lot of alcohol. At least, Graham assumed all affairs involved a lot of alcohol, just as he assumed that people who didn’t drink had fewer affairs. But he didn’t really know. Maybe they had more affairs because they had more time, what with no trips to the liquor store or hangovers to deal with.
At any rate, whenever he got to Elspeth’s apartment, she would have a bottle of dry white wine chilling in an ice bucket on the counter, along with two balloon wine goblets—the kind of glasses that Audra claimed made her drink too quickly. Graham would pour the wine and they would start drinking.
Drinking, for Graham, had always been like traveling down a gently curving country road, clearly marked with speed limits and traffic arrows. He knew this was not the case for everyone. Some people, like Audra, rocketed down the road from a sober starting point with no control or caution and they were as surprised as anyone else when they missed that last curve and ended up vomiting in someone’s potted plant and had to call the hostess and apologize the next morning. But not so for Graham.
For Graham, the road was clearly signposted in two-glass intervals, and the brake was always within easy reach. The first drink was unbeatable: delicious, relaxing, restorative—practically medicinal. He had read that alcohol didn’t enter your bloodstream for twenty minutes after the first sip, but everyone knew that was nonsense; it started working as soon as you poured it into the glass.
The second glass was nearly as good as the first, and this was what Graham thought of as the Relaxed Stage. During the third glass, he passed smoothly into the Euphoric Stage. He could almost read the sign, white letters on a reflective green background: WELCOME TO EUPHORIA. It was a mellow, blissful kind of euphoria, but euphoria nonetheless. Words flowed more freely, his outlook was brighter, his muscles more relaxed. Sometimes Graham could extend his stay in Euphoria to three glasses by eating dinner—like pulling into a scenic overlook on the road to drunkenness, he supposed. He and Elspeth cooked elaborate meals—crab jambalaya or lamb shank ragù—and the food could stabilize his sobriety level, at least briefly. Between the fourth and fifth glasses, Graham entered the Mildly Confused State—the country road had sharper turns now, more yellow warning signs, even guardrails. Sometimes Graham was aware that he could not remember a particular word, or realized that he had no idea what time it was. But these were small things. Between the sixth and seventh glasses, Graham would reach a stoplight that flashed red and warned him to go to bed. If he passed that light, he would be sorry the next day, so he almost never did.
And so it was, one night when he was in the Mildly Confused State, and he and Elspeth were sitting on the couch after dinner. Elspeth was wearing a thin white sweater and long wide-legged pants, which made her look like a stilt walker. And yet, Graham liked them. They swirled around her legs when she moved.
Elspeth took a drink from her wineglass. Her eyes over the rim were as clear as blue bath beads.
“I always knew,” she said, “about the affair you had with that teenage typist.”
Graham’s fingers tightened on his wineglass so abruptly that he was surprised it didn’t shatter. She wasn’t a teenager and she wasn’t a typist, but Graham knew exactly who Elspeth was talking about. Her name was Marla and she had been the temporary receptionist in his office. And, well, yes, she was twenty-two, which, Graham supposed, was still young enough to see your teen years if you glanced back over your shoulder.
Marla had lived in a studio apartment with a pet iguana named Leonard, and whenever Graham came over, Leonard would inflate his dewlaps and rock back and forth on his front legs and get ready to charge. Marla said this was because Leonard thought Graham was a male iguana. Graham would have to wait in the hall while Marla chased Leonard around and forced him back into his cage, which he was outgrowing. And then Graham and Marla would have sex on Marla’s daybed while Leonard bobbed his head up and down in the background and whacked the wall of his cage with his tail. After about a month, it had begun to seem to Graham seedy rather than sexy, and Marla’s temp job ended and they stopped seeing each other. Graham almost never thought of her except for a brief time when Matthew was five and had played a song called “I Wanna Iguana” endlessly, and then Graham had thought of her—more precisely, of Leonard—all the time.
He supposed his affair with Marla was unforgivable on a lot of levels, but the absolute worst part of it was that it took place while Elspeth’s mother had been dying. Not just dying (if there is such a thing as just dying) but dying a horrible, undignified death from a series of strokes. The strokes had come quickly—the first at home, the rest in the hospital. The medical staff had been unable to prevent them, unable to do anything to shore Elspeth’s mother’s brain up as it crumbled like an eroding cliff. The last stroke had left half of her face frozen in an ugly sneer that belied her sweet nature. Elspeth’s father was dead by then, and she had no siblings, so Elspeth did everything you do when someone is in the hospital—visited and comforted and consulted and stayed awake and feared the telephone—alone. Alone except for Graham, when he wasn’t with Marla. (Which really had been hardly ever, he told himself.)
Graham swallowed. His throat made a clicking sound. “You must have hated me,” he said finally.
Elspeth looked thoughtful. “I guess I did. A little bit. For a little while. But in a way it made it easier. Well, not easier, but more straightforward. I had to rely on myself. There was no other choice.”
Graham drank the entire contents of his enormous wineglass. His mouth remained as dry as a volcanic plain.
Elspeth was still staring dreamily ahead. “And, of course,” she said, “then I fell in love with Mr. Dutka, and I could hardly hate you after that.”
“Mr. Dutka?” Graham said.
Elspeth leaned forward and refilled her wineglass.
“I know it must sound strange to you,” she said.
Strange? Strange? Mr. Dutka was an elderly Hungarian man who had lived in their apartment building when Graham and Elspeth were married. Elspeth used to do his grocery shopping on Saturday mornings and once she helped him when his umbrella had gotten stuck in the lobby’s revolving door, and that was it, as far as Graham knew. That was the extent of their involvement with Mr. Dutka. He would have bet his life on it. But evidently that would have been a mistake.
“But you weren’t—” Graham said. “It wasn’t— This was an emotional connection, right?”
“No,” said Elspeth. “We were lovers.”
“You and Mr. Dutka? Mr. Dutka, who was, like, seventy?”
“Yes,” she said. “He had incredible stamina.”
He could remember Elspeth arising early on Saturday mornings—she didn’t like to sleep in; that was yet another unrelaxing habit she had—and he could remember hearing her move about the bedroom as he slid deeper under the covers. He remembered the final soft click of the bedroom door on her way out and how that made sleeping in seem extra-decadent, yet also more pleasant—to lounge in bed while his selfless philanthropic wife went off and did some old man’s grocery shopping. Or did Graham actually remember those things? It seemed like he did. It felt like he did. But maybe he was only adding them in, now that he knew the truth. If he did know the truth. If the truth was, in fact, knowable.
“You have to understand,” Elspeth said. “No one had ever seen me as sexy before. I used to think, Well, I’ve always been slender, so I’m not one of those people who have to struggle with their weight, and then I’d think, Thank God I’m intelligent and don’t have to worry about that, and I would sort of add up all my good qualities, like being organized and well-read and self-motivated, and I’d feel so much luckier than almost everybody, and then we’d see some girl—I mean, some awful waitress with the flashiest earrings, and I’d realize all over again that I wasn’t sexy.”
Ah, that waitress! She worked at the Cuban diner and Graham remembered her well. She used to give you a slow smile when she served fried plantains that could just about make you sob. And Graham thought again, guiltily, of Marla’s nipples poking at her blouse—like puppies’ noses or pencil erasers.
“But then Zoltan came along,” Elspeth continued, “and he thought I was the sexiest woman in the world! Why, I barely had to touch him—”
“Could we just get something straight?” Graham interrupted. “Did you ever in fact buy the man’s groceries?”
“Oh, yes,” Elspeth said. “But after a few weeks, we began having them delivered. So we would have more time.”
More time. Really, it was amazing how people always feel the need to add some little flourish, some extra element that you didn’t want to know. It was like they could not stop themselves.
“If you were in love with him—” Graham said, and his voice was as acidic as the space creature’s blood in Alien. He couldn’t help it. “If you were so in love with him, why didn’t you leave me and run off with him?”
“He wouldn’t hear of it,” Elspeth said simply.
Honestly, it was lucky that Graham could take a taxi home. If he’d been driving, he would have surely crashed the car.
Papa Stan turned out to be allergic to nearly all interesting food. Not that anyone told Graham this—no, indeed. He had to find out from Audra through the most irritating sort of process of elimination. Every morning, she would come up to him and ask casually what he was going to make for dinner and no matter what he answered, she would say “That sounds delicious!” in a falsely hearty voice and then add anxiously, “It doesn’t have scallions in it, does it?” Or olives. Or basil. Or almonds. Or feta cheese.
Audra had obviously been given a list of Papa Stan’s food allergies—probably it was in the same email that had announced Brodie would be visiting—so why didn’t she just tell Graham everything that was on the list and get it over with? Instead she backed him into a culinary corner until he found himself asking what Papa Stan wanted and that was what they wound up having: canned soups and grilled cheese sandwiches and sloppy joes and hot dogs and macaroni and cheese. Honestly, was it any wonder Graham wanted to go over to Elspeth’s for dinner?
Brodie was the only one who seemed to appreciate Graham’s cooking. One night Graham made a rib roast (let them eat hot dogs on a night he was out), and the aroma was almost more than Brodie could bear. He stood in front of the oven, drooling and moaning desperately. As the rib roast cooked, both the drooling and the moaning escalated, until Brodie was nearly gargling.
“It’s like living on Dagobah with Chewbacca,” Graham said to Audra.
She frowned slightly. “Was Chewbacca ever actually on Dagobah?”
“No, he wasn’t,” Matthew called from the living room.
“What?” Papa Stan said, and Matthew and Noah began giggling like crazy.
This was Graham’s life. His real life.
During the meals Graham ate at home, Brodie sat at Papa Stan’s elbow, moaning with desire every time someone passed a dish. Finally, Audra, who could be surprisingly handy, installed a baby gate across the doorway to the dining room, so now at meals, Brodie no longer groaned and slavered at the dinner table. He groaned and slavered behind the gate.
“Sweetie!” Papa Stan called to him. “I know it’s hard, but be patient! Let the nice people enjoy their dinner! I will give you a special treat later! You and I can watch Masterpiece Theatre together!”
(He didn’t really say that last part.)
Matthew and Noah ate as fast as possible, so they could go back into Matthew’s room and do whatever it was they did on the computer. (What were they doing in there? Graham wondered. Was anyone monitoring them?) Graham ate as fast as possible, too, so he wouldn’t have to listen to Papa Stan.
If it had been up to Graham, they would have ignored Papa Stan—politely, of course—and talked to each other, but Audra seemed to feel the need to include Papa Stan, to draw him out, even.
“Now, Papa Stan,” she would say warmly, “tell us about your day.”
“Well,” Papa Stan would say slowly. “First thing, Brodie and I checked the stock market and found that Pfizer had announced a tax inversion. Was it Pfizer? Or Walgreens? Pfizer, I think. Then we went for a walk and I stopped and got the newspaper, and then I went around the corner for a cup of coffee. Now, what is the name of that place?”
“Starbucks?” Audra said helpfully.
“No, no, the other one.”
“Tea Leaf?”
“Well, now, maybe it was, maybe it was. It was on Broadway and was it Seventy-second, or Seventy-third…”
Graham wished they could put Papa Stan behind the gate, too.
“…And then we came back and Brodie and I watched something on the History Channel. What was it, Brodie? Something about America’s Doomsday plans, maybe. Or was it about sharecropping? Let me think…”
“And tell me, what is the Doomsday Plan?” Audra said. She sounded like a TV talk show host. Graham thought he might strangle her and Papa Stan both if he sat there a moment longer.
He pushed back his chair so abruptly the legs screeched against the floor. “I’ll take Brodie out,” he said. “He looks restless.”
Brodie did look restless, but it was no doubt because he was eager for table scraps. It was Graham who was restless for escape.
Nevertheless, Graham would snap the leash on Brodie and drag him, nails clawing and scraping, out the door, into the elevator, and out on the street.
Walking Brodie was less like walking a dog and more like trying to fly a kite in a hurricane, or possibly windsurfing. Brodie lunged at people, dogs, lampposts, mailboxes. For Graham, it was all a matter of keeping himself firmly anchored and ready for Brodie’s next leap. How did Papa Stan manage?
Graham didn’t speak at all on these walks—there was no point since Brodie didn’t know any commands. Graham was sure the silence rang in both their ears.
And not only did they have to talk to Papa Stan, they had to talk about him, too.
“So today,” Audra said as they were getting ready for bed, “I told Papa Stan that I wished the dishwasher was either bigger or smaller because I keep running it three-quarters full. And I look up and he’s staring at this spot over my shoulder and he looks like he might faint and I’m thinking, Oh, no, this is what I’ve been afraid of! He’s going to die right here in the kitchen! And then I realize, no, he’s bored.”
She flexed her elbows in a brief chicken-wing formation while she undid her bra, and then pulled her nightgown over her head.
“I bored Papa Stan,” Audra said. “How awful is that? I feel I’ve hit an all-time conversational low. It’s like—I don’t know. Like I should go live in a cave or something. I’m apparently not fit for human society.”
Graham didn’t say anything. He was thinking that Audra wore satiny nightgowns and Elspeth had worn tank tops and pajama bottoms and you’d think it would be the other way around. He was thinking that maybe people weren’t meant to get married twice; it only led to comparisons.
Graham had to spend the first half hour of his workday— just think, thirty minutes during which no medical research was accomplished, no capital raised, no venture undertaken—examining a tiny little raised freckle on Olivia’s hand and reassuring her that it wasn’t skin cancer.
“But what is it?” Olivia said worriedly. “It was never there before.”
She rested the hand with the new freckle in the bright circle of light cast by the gooseneck lamp on Graham’s desk. Her hand was like an actress’s hand in a commercial for paper towels, slim and white and red-nailed.
“It’s a skin tag,” Graham said.
“Skin tag!” Olivia looked like she would be happier to hear it was cancer.
He turned the light off now, the afterimage blooming behind his eyelids like a bruise. Olivia pulled her hand away. “It’s a harmless lesion—”
“Our dog has skin tags!” Olivia nearly wailed. “And she’s like a million years old in dog years!”
“If it really bothers you,” Graham said, “you can have a dermatologist remove it.”
“Our dog has them all over her body,” Olivia continued. “Is that going to happen to me? Is this thing”—she gestured at one hand with the other—“going to get brothers and sisters?”
“I don’t think it will repopulate the area, no,” Graham said drily.
Olivia examined her hand suspiciously. No doubt about it: there were too many women in his life.
Graham called Audra to tell her he wouldn’t be home for dinner and caught her just as she was going out the door.
“What?” she said. “Well, okay. Right now I have to take Papa Stan to a playdate and Brodie to the tutor and Noah to get his shots. Matthew’s staying with Julio.”
“Wait,” Graham said. “You mean you’re taking Noah to a playdate and Brodie to get his shots and Matthew to the tutor?”
“No, I meant exactly what I said.” Audra sounded harassed, but she never hurried a conversation. “Papa Stan met an old man in the park and the man’s daughter called me and we set up a time for them to get together for a couple of hours. They want to watch some History Channel special about Vikings. Isn’t that a playdate? I don’t know what else to call it.”
“Well, I guess—” Graham started.
“And it turns out Noah is allergic to Brodie and has to have these superstrength allergy shots every week while he’s here,” Audra said, “and I found this dog trainer for Brodie who specializes in difficult cases so today I’m taking him over for his assessment.”
“Assessment?” Graham asked.
“The trainer calls herself the Alpha Dog,” Audra continued as though he hadn’t spoken, “and everyone else has to call her that, too. Can you imagine how I felt calling up and asking for her? This woman answered and I said, ‘Could I speak to the Alpha Dog, please?’ and I thought the woman would say something like ‘You lousy kids and your prank calls!’ but she just said, ‘Speaking.’ So we had this normal conversation about setting up the assessment, but the whole time I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was talking to a standard poodle. But apparently she’s excellent. Mrs. Swanson recommended her after Brodie bit her hand in the elevator.”
“Brodie bit someone?” Graham asked. It seemed to him that biting was the one piece of bad behavior Brodie didn’t indulge in.
“Papa Stan said it wasn’t biting,” Audra said. “He said it was mouthing, which is apparently some instinctual way that dogs communicate with each other, only Brodie does it to people, too. He did it to Mrs. Swanson in the elevator and Mrs. Swanson felt that what Brodie was trying to communicate was that he wanted to bite her hand off. But she said the Alpha Dog would fix him right up and it seemed like the least I could do was agree to take him.”
Graham wondered if the Alpha Dog would agree to work with Papa Stan, too. Perhaps they could book a double appointment.
“So Matthew’s going to stay with Julio because I didn’t know what else to do with him,” Audra finished. “Why were you calling?”
“Just to tell you I’d be out for dinner,” Graham said.
Surely it was possible to love your family from a distance. People must do it all the time.
It seemed that now that they knew the worst about each other, Graham and Elspeth could relax for the first time in twenty-three years. Sometimes silence rolled out between them like a cottony soft cloud Graham could float on. And when they did talk, not every subject had to be pursued until Graham nearly collapsed under the strain of it. (Conversations with Audra often felt to Graham like asymptote curves on a graph, where the distance between the curve and the line approaches zero but never actually gets there; that’s how endless they were.) But Graham and Elspeth were just two people making a delicious meal that no one complained about. Heaven.
Sometimes Elspeth would reach around him in the kitchen and her blouse would whisper sweetly against the silk of her camisole, and it would seem to Graham that he had retained the muscle memory in his fingertips of all those wonderful, maddening layers that Elspeth wore—blouse, skirt, slip, camisole, bra, stockings. It was like unwrapping an Eskimo who wore only silk. And underneath all those cool slippery layers, the warmth of her skin. He remembered, too, that Elspeth’s breath had always tasted sweet and faintly spicy, like cinnamon or cardamom. The first time Graham had ever had a chai latte in Starbucks, he’d had a flashback to kissing Elspeth that was so powerful he’d nearly dropped the cup. And still they never touched.
And then after dinner, there would be the long pleasantly drunk hours on the couch, talking or not talking, no forced chatter, no hearing about people he had no interest in, no breathless revelation about how the cashier at the supermarket had broken her eyetooth on a stale bagel. Instead they discussed their days and current events and sometimes Graham told Elspeth stories about Papa Stan and Brodie that made them seem—just for a moment, in the subdued, tasteful light of her apartment—amusing. And Elspeth smiled but she didn’t laugh until she spit wine everywhere. It was all wildly civilized.
All this and afterward Elspeth did the dishes! Now you’re talking, as Audra would say.
The garlic from their meal had given Elspeth’s face a pink, girlish glow. Graham had forgotten that, how garlic made very fair women flush like they’d just had the best sex of their lives. (If you only ever got that look from a woman after shrimp aioli, you were doing something wrong, was Graham’s view.)
But maybe it was more than just the garlic because Elspeth took a long sip from her wineglass and then said, “There’s an ABA Leadership Conference on Thursday and I get a room at the conference center even though I live here. I thought I would stay there—you know I like hotel rooms.”
That was true—she did. Something about all those clear surfaces and empty drawers. Elspeth loved them the way other women love hot fudge sundaes.
“I was thinking,” she said slowly, “that you could meet me there, maybe stay the night.”
She looked at Graham and her eyes were like two cups of Easter egg dye—that blue, that clear.
“You don’t have to tell me now,” Elspeth said. “Just think about it.”
So there it was. Graham had known it was coming, and yet its arrival startled him and made his heart race—like the first shotgun-rattle of rain against your window from a storm you’ve been following on the Weather Channel.
Graham was waiting for a sign. If he told Audra he was going to be out late and she objected, that would be a sign that he shouldn’t go.
But Audra didn’t object. He stood in the bathroom doorway while she put on her makeup and told her that he had a very late business dinner on Thursday in Hoboken.
Audra rooted around in the drawer that held her jumble of cosmetics and said, “That’s Papa Stan’s last night,” which momentarily startled Graham into silence. For so long he had viewed Papa Stan’s departure as a wondrous event that was promised but never materialized, something like the seventh astral plane. But he should have remembered because he had made arrangements for Papa Stan and Noah and Brodie to go out and stay at the airport Marriott on Thursday, since their flight left so early on Friday morning. Graham had paid for the hotel and he was happy to do it. He felt like he would pay $150 a night for the rest of his life, just for the pleasure of not having Papa Stan and Brodie in the apartment.
“Anyway,” Audra went on, “it’s fine if you want to go out, because he asked if we can have tuna casserole for dinner.”
Graham could tell by the slight smoothing out of her forehead when she spoke that she was relieved not to have to sell him on the idea of the tuna casserole (which would have been an impossible sale, by the way).
“I might be really late,” Graham said. Here was another chance for Audra to object.
“Okay,” she said. She was putting on mascara and looking down her own nose at her reflection.
“If it runs past midnight, I might get a hotel room,” Graham said. “You know how impossible it is to get back from New Jersey.”
Stroke, stroke went the wand of Audra’s mascara. “All right,” she said. “Whatever’s easiest on you.”
“I’ll be sure to say goodbye to Papa Stan and Noah on Thursday morning before I leave for work.”
“Okay,” Audra said.
Good God, woman, give a sign! Make an objection! Show some possessiveness! But she just dropped the tube of mascara in the drawer and shut the drawer with a bump of her hip.
So Graham was free to meet Elspeth, it seemed. And it was odd because at this point in his life, Graham could not imagine going to meet a stranger in a hotel room—that had once seemed exciting but now the idea just seemed stressful. He did not have the energy to worry about what some new woman would think of him or what expectations she might have or what judgment she might pass on his body—the body that had served Graham so well and faithfully for all these years. It seemed less like his body and more like a devoted servant. He could not bear the idea of someone insulting it.
But meeting Elspeth—that was different. He knew exactly how she would behave. He had been in countless hotel rooms with her. He knew her body well—it, too, was like an old friend. (Perhaps it would be like doubles tennis or a bridge foursome, Graham and Elspeth and their bodies getting together for an evening.) And Graham knew Elspeth—he knew the scent of her perfume, and the sound of her footsteps, and the curve of her face. He could predict exactly her pleased smile when she opened the hotel room door and saw him standing there. And wasn’t that the weird thing—sorry, one of the million weird things—about marriage? That the familiarity that drove you so crazy at times—Audra had a particular three-tiered yawn that Graham thought might cause him to throw himself out the window if he heard it again—was the very thing you longed for in the end.
When Graham got to the hotel lobby, he realized that he didn’t know Elspeth’s room number. He sat down in an armchair so deep it nearly swallowed him and took out his phone to call her.
Just then Elspeth arrived. She walked through the revolving door wearing a tightly belted trench coat and carrying a single leather satchel. Graham had always admired the way she traveled—such economy and simplicity. Not like Audra, who invariably wound up putting a whole bunch of last-minute items in a paper shopping bag, which then broke in the middle of the airport and stuff scattered everywhere. (Seriously, that happened every single trip they took.)
Graham watched as Elspeth went to check in. His chair was to the side of the reception desk, and she could have seen him if she’d glanced even slightly to her right, but she didn’t. The chair was too shadowed and the lobby too softly lit for her to notice him, which, Graham supposed, was probably the point.
The reception clerk was a young man with full cheeks and a high, scratchy voice. Graham could hear him clearly when he asked for Elspeth’s name.
“Elspeth Osbourne,” she said, “I’m here for the conference.”
The clerk rattled the keyboard of his computer. “The ABA conference or the NASA conference?”
“The ABA.”
The clerk smiled. “Do you know how NASA organizes their conference?”
“What?” A tiny line appeared between Elspeth’s eyebrows.
“Do you know how NASA organizes their conference?” the clerk repeated. “They planet!” He laughed.
Elspeth was so close to Graham and her face so perfectly illuminated by the reception desk spotlight that Graham could see her expression clearly. The skin around her mouth tightened and her eyes hooded slightly. Her lips made a perfect little circle, just enough to let out an annoyed breath that was one shade too deliberate to be called a sigh. But even if he hadn’t seen her so well, Graham would have known exactly how she looked. He had seen that expression a million times—a hundred million times—when a person made a joke that Elspeth thought was unfunny or inappropriate. Most of the time, that person had been Graham.
Silently, she held out her hand for the key.
The clerk shrugged good-naturedly and handed Elspeth a little envelope. “You’re in room 917,” he said. “The restaurant is open until eleven.”
She picked up her leather satchel and started toward the elevator bank. Now was the time for Graham to stand up and intercept her, to take her hand and tuck it in his arm.
But Graham sat in his chair.
Elspeth had never found him funny—she had only found him tiresome. How could he have forgotten that?
The desk clerk was already greeting the next customer, his scratchy voice cheerful and confident. Well, he didn’t have to go up and face Elspeth. But then, neither did Graham.
His cellphone was still in his hand. He hesitated for a moment and then typed out a text: I’m sorry. G. He didn’t add any sort of explanation, not because there wasn’t one, but because she wouldn’t want to read it, she wouldn’t care to read it. And if you didn’t believe that, you didn’t know Elspeth as well as Graham did.
Graham left the hotel and walked all the way home, sixty-two blocks, his heart as heavy as his shoes.
Was he doomed to be never faithful, but never unfaithful? But that was ridiculous. He had been faithful, for years and years, and he had been unfaithful, too, also for years. So why now did it seem like he was caught in some horrible limbo where he was destined to disappoint everyone? Perhaps that was why some men got married five or six times. Everyone hates uncertainty.
He headed down the block toward his apartment building and realized that even though he would be home hours earlier than he had said—he would tell Audra the dinner was awful, a waste of time—it was still after eight, the time that Papa Stan and Noah and Brodie left. There was no loss without some small gain.
He realized suddenly that his feet were sore and his ears were cold and his stomach was empty and he wanted a drink so badly that his throat clicked drily when he swallowed. Food, shelter, alcohol, love—he wanted it all and he wanted it now. And yet he paused in front of the door to the lobby, his breath making white plumes in the air. He was suddenly afraid that no one would be home or, worse, that no one would recognize him, that his key wouldn’t open the lock, that strangers lived there now and they wouldn’t let him in.
This is what life had taught Graham about houseguests: they drained your batteries. The very best of them left you a little juice, just enough to miss them once they’d gone. He suspected that everyone felt that way about houseguests. Except Audra. Then why had he married her? Sometimes that was an impossible question to answer.
Graham let himself into the apartment and did a quick emotional survey. Did he miss the click and scrabble of Brodie’s claws on the floor? Did he miss Papa Stan’s wheezy greeting? No, on both counts. If he had hooked himself up to an emotional battery tester, the needle wouldn’t have moved at all.
Still, the apartment was too quiet. Graham checked the bedroom and then went to Matthew’s room. Matthew was sitting at his computer, a peanut butter sandwich on a plate at his elbow.
“Where’s Mom?” Graham asked.
Matthew took a bite of his sandwich. “Up on the roof.”
Graham hesitated. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Do you miss Noah?”
Matthew glanced up at him and nodded. “It was so much fun to have him here.”
Fun. Wasn’t that really the beauty of childhood? That you measured experiences by how much fun they were, not by how much work or inconvenience or tedious conversation they caused you? Of course you didn’t think of the tiresome things if you were a kid, because you didn’t have to do them. And that was just as it should be, in Graham’s opinion.
But still he could not bring himself to be sorry Papa Stan and Brodie and Noah were gone. Apparently there were limits to what you would do for your child. Graham had never realized that before. He leaned down and kissed the top of Matthew’s head.
Graham went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of wine, but suddenly he could not stand to be in the apartment. He left his wineglass on the counter, grabbed his coat, and went up to the roof deck.
Audra was there, standing coatless at the railing, slender and pretty in a powder-blue sweater and jeans. She looked over at him and smiled. It had started to snow, just a few thick shaggy flakes that looked more like ash than like snow. Graham was reminded of a nuclear winter, a long volcanic season, sunlight blocked for years.
Audra never altered, Graham thought. Infidelity, illness, houseguests, natural disaster, the end of the world—it would all wash over her and she’d still be there, looking fresh as a flower and wondering if there were any blueberry muffins left. It was the very best and the very worst thing about her.
Suddenly, Graham yearned for her. She would rescue him from this terrible feeling of not belonging, of being adrift. She always had. She was an absolute certainty in a horribly uncertain world. Other people could try to make sense of the world by doing crossword puzzles and installing dead bolts and eating peas one at a time. Graham only needed Audra.
He had paused in the doorway, and she started toward him, snowflakes catching in her hair and glinting on the shoulders of her sweater. She would reach him, Graham thought, and he would hold on to her. As long as he held on to Audra, let the world try to do its worst. Just let it.