“You won’t believe what happened!” Graham’s secretary said.
Her name was Olivia and she had long dark hair with heavy bangs. She always looked out from under the bangs like an excited cat peering from under a chair when you’re about to throw a ball of yarn. She was twenty-three, freshly emerged from college, although Graham sometimes thought she could be freshly emerged from the womb, given how naïve she was. Graham had had to show her how to read her bank statement! He had had to explain the difference between local and state taxes, and that food could still go bad in a refrigerator, and even daylight saving time. How could you not know about daylight saving time and live on your own? What were her parents thinking? But for all that, she was a pretty good secretary—an extremely fast typist and she never ran out of cheerful, friendly energy. (Graham’s previous secretary had been a woman in her fifties who sighed heavily, like a dog or a teenager, whenever he asked her to do anything.)
“What?” he asked now.
“I’ve locked myself out of my apartment!” Olivia said. “Just as the door clicked shut behind me this morning, I thought, Wait!—wait! And sure enough, I’d left the keys sitting on the kitchen counter.”
Graham recognized that feeling. “Call your roommate,” he said. He knew Olivia had a roommate. It was the only reason he could, in good conscience, stand to let her go home at night.
“She’s in Kentucky visiting her parents,” Olivia said.
“What about your neighbors?”
“What about them?”
“Do any of them have a key?”
She looked puzzled. “Why would I give a key to my neighbors?”
“In case you lock yourself out.”
“Oh! I see what you mean. But keys are expensive to make—like twenty-five dollars just for the one for the dead bolt.”
This was another thing about Olivia—how she and her roommate seemed to live on no money at all. Although she brought a giant Starbucks Frappuccino to work every single day, so Graham suspected it was not lack of funds but how those funds were spent.
“What about the super of your building?”
“Luis, you mean?”
“If that’s your super’s name, then yes.”
“But I don’t have his phone number,” Olivia said, “and he hardly ever answers when we knock on the door.”
“Well, then I guess you’re going to have to call a locksmith,” Graham said gently.
Olivia’s eyes got very wide, and she nodded gravely.
She went back to her desk and Graham could hear her pressing buttons on her phone and an instant later she said, “You won’t believe this! I locked myself out of my apartment!” and then she had basically the same conversation she’d just had with Graham. “No…She’s in Kentucky!…No…No…”
She hung up and dialed another number. “You won’t believe this! I locked myself out of my apartment!”
Graham sighed and got up to close the door to his office. He supposed that when Olivia had called all her friends, she would get around to calling a locksmith. He could still hear the beginning of every call, even through the door, with Olivia squawking the word believe like a pterodactyl.
Almost as soon as he returned to his desk, Olivia buzzed him on the intercom. “Phone call for you on line one,” she said. “Esp—Els—Elsp—”
“Elspeth?” Graham said. “Elspeth Osbourne?” (Like he knew more than one.)
“Yes,” Olivia said. “Can I put her through?”
“Go ahead,” Graham said.
Elspeth had never called him at work before. Well, not in ten years, at least. Imagine: it had been over a decade since he had spoken by phone to a woman he had once married. People were not meant to live like this, he sometimes thought. It was too confusing. He lifted the receiver and punched the button.
“Graham Cavanaugh,” he said, figuring that it was best to start out formally.
“Hello, Graham,” Elspeth said crisply, causing Graham to have an unexpectedly vivid image of her. Audra and every other woman he knew tilted their heads slightly when they answered the phone, so they could slide their handsets under their hair. But Elspeth always wore her hair pulled back in a French twist. She answered the phone without any nonsense. He could visualize the rest of her, too: her perfect posture, the silk blouses she favored, the narrowness of her shoulders, the way she always sat with her feet tucked slightly under her chair because she believed that crossing one’s legs caused varicose veins. (“It does?” Audra had said in a horrified voice when Graham had told her this years ago. She’d lost nearly a whole night of sleep worrying about it before deciding it was an old wives’ tale, like that thing about leaning on your elbows making them ugly.)
“Hello, Elspeth.”
They sounded like characters from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Graham thought. Won’t you be my neighbor? Won’t you please?
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Elspeth said, “but—”
“It’s no bother,” Graham said, interrupting without meaning to.
Elspeth paused for a moment. She didn’t like to be interrupted. “I’m calling because my great-aunt Mary died—”
“I remember Aunt Mary,” Graham said, interrupting again. He seemed to have forgotten how to talk to Elspeth. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yes, well, this is slightly awkward,” Elspeth said, “but Aunt Mary left us a joint bequest. She hadn’t updated her will. She had quite advanced dementia for many years.”
The implication was clear: only someone with advanced dementia would leave anything to Graham, after what he’d done to Elspeth. But Graham decided to ignore that.
“I see,” he said.
“So,” Elspeth said. “I was wondering if you might be able to meet me at the estate lawyer’s office so we can both sign for the bequest.”
“Certainly,” Graham said. “When?”
“How about tomorrow?”
She gave him the address and he wrote it down and they agreed on three o’clock and it was just like a normal phone call really. Almost.
Elspeth was waiting in the lobby of the estate lawyer’s building when Graham arrived. Her ash-blond hair was pulled back neatly, and she wore a tightly belted pale pink trench coat over a matching pink turtleneck and white wool pants. She was still Elspeth, still absolutely immaculate.
“Hello, Graham,” she said. “I’m sorry to put you to so much trouble.”
“It’s no problem.”
They took the elevator up to the lawyer’s office and signed together for the bequest, which turned out to be a small marble statue of a cat. Graham recognized it instantly—it had arched its marble back on a shelf directly over Aunt Mary’s head at the dining table during a dozen Sunday lunches.
“Oh, right, that cat,” Elspeth said flatly.
The lawyer explained that they could have the statue evaluated and then one of them could buy the other one’s half, or they could sell the statue and split the proceeds.
“I know,” Elspeth said. “I’m an attorney.”
The lawyer’s secretary boxed up the marble cat, and Graham and Elspeth took it with them, along with a sheaf of papers for each of them, the top one of which had a photograph of the statue paper-clipped to it.
“You can have the cat,” Graham said as soon as they were on the street. “I only came because the lawyer needed my signature.”
“I don’t want it,” Elspeth said. “I think we should sell it.”
“Okay,” Graham said. “But you sell it and keep the money.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t feel right about that,” Elspeth said, and Graham knew enough to realize that it wasn’t that she felt she owed him anything, it was that her lawyer’s mind had leapt ahead to the potential problems that might arise from such a casual arrangement.
They went into Starbucks to talk about it, and finally agreed that Elspeth would take the statue to Sotheby’s to have it valued and put up for auction.
“I feel like we’re on Antiques Roadshow,” Graham said.
“I can’t stand that program,” Elspeth said. “It’s so depressing how they always choose people whose whole quality of life hangs in the balance of the value of some knickknack.”
They had finished their coffee and began moving toward the door.
“I guess you should know,” Elspeth said, pulling the belt on her coat tight. “I’m living with someone.”
Actually, there was no reason he should know that. He and Elspeth had no children. In lots of really important ways, it was like they’d never been married at all.
“That’s great,” he said. “Who is it?”
“Oh, you don’t know him,” Elspeth said. “His name is Bentrup Foster.”
What is the very best thing about him? Audra would have asked. Where did you meet him? What did you think when you first saw him? Is he the type of person who thinks a bowl of cereal counts as dinner? How many times does he hit the snooze button in the morning? Would he ever do a shot of tequila to get drunk quicker? Does he watch game shows? Does he give good back rubs?
But Graham did not want to start channeling his second wife in the presence of his first wife, so he only said, “What does he do?”
“He works in the shoe department at Barneys,” Elspeth said.
“I’m glad for you,” Graham said. “That you have someone.”
“Yes.” Elspeth looked thoughtful. “With is better than without.”
He wondered if she would ever—ever—say anything that didn’t make him feel automatically guilty. He doubted it.
When Graham got back to their apartment that night, Audra was helping Matthew with his homework at the dining room table.
“What the heck is bus station division?” she asked Matthew, wrinkling her forehead as she read the worksheet. “Can we Google it?”
“Hi, Daddy,” Matthew said.
“Oh, hey,” Audra said. “How was it? What did Aunt Mary leave you?”
Graham dropped the sheaf of papers on the table, and Audra glanced at the photograph of the statue. “A marble kitty cat,” she said, clearly not impressed. (Honestly, Graham was starting to feel offended on the cat’s behalf.) “Did you see Elspeth?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Who’s Elspeth?” Matthew asked.
“Daddy’s first wife,” Audra said.
“I didn’t know you had another wife,” Matthew said. He looked at Audra. “Did you have other husbands?”
“Only other people’s,” she said cheerfully. (She claimed she couldn’t censor herself around Matthew or she’d go crazy.) “Now finish up your homework. It’s only seven problems. Just do them the regular way, I guess.”
She followed Graham into the kitchen. “How was it, seeing her?”
“It was okay, actually.”
“Did you have the sense she wanted to murder you?” She said this in a normal sort of voice; they might have been discussing whether they had any lemons.
“No, of course not,” Graham said.
“You used to say that,” Audra said. “You used to hang up the phone with her sometimes and say that you could tell she was hoping you’d drop dead.”
Had he said that? It was hard to remember. “Well, that’s different from wanting to murder me,” Graham said. “She was actually perfectly friendly. She’s living with someone.”
“Perfect!” Audra exclaimed. “We can go on a double date!”
“I don’t know about that,” Graham said. “That might be pushing it.”
“Oh, please,” Audra said. “It would be the most natural thing in the world.”
Well. Graham was not so sure it would be, not sure at all. “You seem to be forgetting,” he said, “that you were the cause of my divorce in the first place.”
“Oh, but that’s ancient history,” Audra said. “That was all twenty years ago.”
“Thirteen,” he corrected. She had a tendency to round up. It was almost a way of life.
“Well, whatever,” she said. “Surely she’s over it by now. She’s living with this other man. Aren’t you the least bit curious to meet him?”
“No,” Graham said, knowing full well that she would find this attitude incomprehensible.
Audra sighed loudly. “But I’m dying to meet her. Just think, you were married to her for a decade”—it had been eight years—“and she and I have never even laid eyes on each other!”
That was only half-true. Elspeth had seen Audra once but Audra didn’t know that. He and Audra had been on their way to Macy’s to register for wedding gifts and they’d come up out of the subway on Thirty-fourth Street, and dashed across Seventh Avenue into the store, and in those brief moments, Elspeth had seen them. Graham knew because she told him the next day on the phone. (This was when they were first separated and still talked bitterly on the phone every few days.) “I saw you and your girlfriend going into Macy’s yesterday,” she’d said. Graham still remembered what Audra had been wearing that day: jeans and a silk blouse and a little rabbit-fur vest she’d bought in a secondhand store. She had looked unbearably pretty and young, so young. He’d seen her through Elspeth’s eyes and felt guilty all over again.
“Maybe that’s for the best,” he said now.
“Why?” Audra said. “Are you ashamed of me? Ashamed of her?”
“No, neither,” he said, realizing as he said it that it was true.
“Then, please, just ask her,” Audra said. “The next time you speak to her, just mention the idea and see what she says.”
“Okay,” Graham said. Sometimes it was easier just to give in.
So when Elspeth called to tell him that the marble kitty cat had been valued at four thousand dollars, he said, “I’ve been thinking we should all have dinner together.”
“Dinner?” Elspeth repeated. She sounded startled.
“Yes,” Graham said. “The four of us. You, me, Audra, and Bentrup. Like a double date.”
“A double date?”
(This was a problem when you lived with people who had strong personalities; you started to sound like them.)
“That’s only an expression,” he said hastily. “I just thought, you know, the four of us could have dinner. But we don’t have to if you think it’s too, ah, unconventional.” He’d been about to say kooky when he realized that was an Audra word, too.
“Of course it’s unconventional,” Elspeth said. “We’re divorced.”
“There are a million ways to be divorced,” Graham answered. Which was another thing Audra said: There are a million ways to be married, there are a million ways to raise a child, there are a million ways to run a household. It so happened he agreed with her.
“I guess,” Elspeth said slowly, like someone struggling to comprehend a difficult concept.
“It doesn’t have to be a big deal,” Graham said. “We could—” He was about to say go out somewhere casual, when he remembered that Elspeth didn’t like to go to restaurants. “You could just come over for dinner,” he finished.
She was quiet for so long that he finally said, “Elspeth?”
“I’m thinking,” she said.
Graham remained silent, and after a moment, Elspeth said, “Okay. Let’s do it.”
“Good,” Graham said. This had to be the most lukewarm meeting arrangement ever made.
He wondered what factors she had been weighing during her silence. He was, he realized suddenly, very happy not to know.
“How do I look?” Audra asked, as she and Graham stood in the front hall, waiting for the babysitter. It had somehow worked out that they were going over to Elspeth’s new apartment for dinner, something to do with Bentrup’s work schedule.
“You look great,” he said, and she did. She wore black jeans and a thin fuzzy white angora boatneck sweater. The wide neckline showed her collarbones. Graham did not have the heart to tell her that she couldn’t win tonight—if she looked pretty, it would be assumed he was with her for her looks; if she didn’t, it would seem like she had let herself go.
“Now, remember,” he said. “Don’t say anything about helping her get the apartment. In fact, don’t even mention the apartment.”
“How can I not mention it if we’re standing inside it?” Audra said. “Won’t that seem sort of ungracious? What if, after we leave, Elspeth turns to Bentrup and says, ‘That woman was so odd! She didn’t say one word about our home.’ ”
That seemed to Graham to be possibly the best thing Elspeth might say about them after they left.
Audra had arranged for their downstairs neighbors’ daughter Melissa to babysit Matthew while they were at Elspeth’s. “It’s strange that Melissa’s always available,” Graham said. “It must say something about her social life.”
“Or else her boyfriend’s some married guy she can only see at, like, lunchtime,” Audra said, knotting a scarf around her neck.
It surprised Graham, still, how quickly Audra could access the seamy side of life.
There was a soft knock at the door and it was Melissa. Graham studied her while she slipped off her shoes, but he couldn’t picture her with a married lover, or any lover, in fact. To him, she just seemed like a cheerful, freckled teenager, almost without a gender. He could barely imagine having a conversation with her, let alone an affair.
(Audra had about two hundred stories of all the lecherous fathers of children she’d babysat in high school, including one father she’d actually had an affair with, a man named Edward. Edward used to pretend to walk his dog in the evenings but he would actually sneak over to Audra’s house on nights her parents weren’t there, and one night Edward’s wife drove by and saw their dog tied up in front of Audra’s house, looking cold and forlorn. So the next night, Edward’s wife called Audra up and said, “Just tell me the truth, has Edward ever—ever touched you?” and Edward picked up the basement extension and whispered, “Say no, Audra!” which was just about the stupidest thing anyone could’ve possibly done, in Audra’s opinion, and it blew up into a big scandal and she was blacklisted as a babysitter by the whole entire neighborhood and— You know, actually, maybe it wasn’t so surprising that Audra’s mind always leapt to some sort of sordid answer so quickly after all.)
“Hey, Melissa, how are you?” Audra said. “I love those boots. Are they new? Are they Uggs? I’ve never seen that color before. Matthew’s in his room, he wants to show you something on Google Earth. He wants a peanut butter sandwich for dinner—you know how he likes that, right? And he can have chocolate milk with dinner, and he can watch half an hour of TV, and read a little before bed but lights out by nine, and keep going back in to check, because otherwise, he’ll turn the light on again.”
Melissa said nothing, just nodded gently. Graham had noticed that shy people loved Audra because she talked so much, and she frequently did both parts of the conversation.
“Okay, great,” Audra said now, though Melissa had not actually said a word. “I guess we’re off.”
Melissa smiled. “I know the drill by now.”
“Well, good,” Audra said. “Because I feel like I was machine-gunning you with information there.”
Melissa laughed. They said good night, and as they walked out, Graham thought that if he had made a joke like that to Melissa, it would have been awkward, not funny. It was as though Melissa could not see or hear him. That was the real reason he couldn’t imagine having an affair with her. He was dead to her, but Audra, at barely forty—Audra was still young enough to move in the real world.
Bentrup answered the door of Elspeth’s apartment, and Audra said, “Goodness!” in a startled voice. (It was even ruder than it sounds, if that’s possible.)
But Graham knew what she meant because he was shocked by Bentrup’s appearance, too. It wasn’t so much that Bentrup was in his early sixties, or that his hair was bright silver, or that it was slicked back from his forehead in a pompadour, or that he had a deep artificial-looking tan the color of toast, or that his eyes were caught in nets of wrinkles, like a reptile’s, or that he was wearing a green velvet smoking jacket and an ascot—it was all of these things. All those details added up to make him someone entirely other than Graham had expected.
“It’s so nice to meet you,” Audra said.
So that, technically, she’d said Goodness, it’s so nice to meet you, except with a long pause in the middle and the intonation all wrong.
“And you, too, my dear,” Bentrup said, taking one of her hands in both of his. His voice was another surprise: British and fulsome and taking too long to get to the ends of words.
Then he shook hands with Graham and took the bottle of wine they’d brought and there was a little flurry of conversation (Bentrup asking how their trip over was and Audra saying, “Well, you won’t believe this but the cabdriver told me how to program our TV remote”) and then they followed Bentrup down the hall.
The Rosemund was just as Graham thought it would be—glossy and hard-edged, with so many chrome and stainless steel fixtures that it seemed as though the apartment were wearing braces. It was the kind of place that had to be kept aggressively clean, otherwise all those reflective surfaces would double any messes you left behind.
Elspeth was in the kitchen. “Graham, hello,” she said, and kissed his cheek. He wasn’t expecting that. “And you must be Audra,” she said. Was he imagining it or was there just the slightest bit of mockery in her tone? Like You must be Audra, unless Graham’s moved on to someone else by now.
“Hello,” Audra said, and her voice was warm and pleased. “I’ve heard so much about you.”
“Likewise,” Elspeth said, and turned to stir something on the stove.
This was something he’d forgotten about Elspeth, how she tended to be very minimal in conversation sometimes, and a certain kind of person found that minimalism uncomfortable and rushed in to fill the void with revealing chatter.
“You know, I think I was in this building years and years ago for an alcoholic intervention,” Audra said. “I was working as this woman’s personal assistant and she asked me to participate. She was arranging the intervention for her husband, and I think she wanted to up the numbers. I was afraid she might fire me if I said no, so I went and then we all had to get up and talk about how the husband’s drinking was impacting our lives and I didn’t know what to say. I mean, I wanted to say, ‘Well, it’s impacting my life because I have to be here on a Friday night when I could be out drinking with my friends,’ but I didn’t feel that would be overly helpful.”
Bentrup was twisting a corkscrew into a wine bottle. “Did it work?” he asked.
“Hmmm?” Audra said absently, as though she had already moved on to thinking about something else. “Oh, no. It turned out that the husband was in an alcoholic blackout that night and didn’t even remember there’d been an intervention.” She turned toward Elspeth. “So if you don’t mind my asking, why don’t you like restaurants?”
Elspeth pursed her lips slightly. “Why don’t you like Chinese food?”
“I do like Chinese food,” Audra said.
“Well, name something you don’t like,” Elspeth said.
“People’s breath after they’ve eaten Doritos,” Audra answered so promptly that Elspeth blinked.
“Okay,” she said, still stirring the pan on the stove. “Why don’t you like people’s breath after they’ve eaten Doritos? It’s the same sort of question.”
“Not really,” Audra said. “Because, I mean, have you ever smelled someone’s breath after they’ve eaten Doritos? It’s really unpleasant, but restaurants are, on the whole, pleasant experiences.”
“Unless the waiters have been eating Doritos,” Bentrup said, and Audra laughed.
“Now I have to ask you something,” she said to him.
“Certainly,” he said.
“If you work in the shoe department, why are you wearing slippers?”
Bentrup was indeed wearing slippers—or maybe they were moccasins. They looked new and stiff, nothing like the ones Graham wore at home, which bulged out at the sides like a hamster’s cheeks. Bentrup smiled. “I don’t like to be too predictable.”
During all of this, Graham was very distracted by the blouse Elspeth was wearing. It was black silk and had a picture of a white bow on it, but not an actual bow. Graham liked analogies and he couldn’t help thinking that there was some way in which the blouse suited Elspeth perfectly. It was not that she was a two-dimensional person, he knew her far too well to ever think that. It was more the self-contained, insoluble, impenetrable nature of it.
Bentrup raised his wineglass. “To your very good health,” he said.
“Cheers,” Audra said, clinking her glass with his.
Graham and Elspeth raised their glasses. Graham glanced at Elspeth and saw that he could read her expression as easily as he read a clock face: she was amused at her own expense. Who would have ever thought I’d be socializing with these two particular people? She was thinking that, or something close to it, he could tell.
It was amazing, really, that after so many years apart, he and Elspeth still spoke in marital code.
He called the day after dinner to thank her and she said, “It was a pleasure. Audra is certainly vivacious.” But what she meant was She talks too much, however do you stand it?
“I enjoy that about her,” he said. “Bentrup is extremely dapper.”
“I like the way he looks,” she said spikily, having understood him correctly to mean He looks like a dandy. (Actually, Audra had said on the way home that Bentrup reminded her of a sexy snake-oil salesman, but Graham wasn’t going to go there.)
“I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet Matthew,” Elspeth said, which didn’t make much sense because Matthew hadn’t been invited.
“Well, it was a school night,” Graham said.
“Audra told me he goes to the Laurence School,” Elspeth said. “I didn’t realize he was autistic.” I guess everything didn’t turn out so hunky-dory for you and Audra after all.
“He’s not autistic,” Graham said, his voice rapping out more sharply than he’d intended. “He might not even have Asperger’s. No one knows. But he’s a visual learner and he does well at Laurence. Lots of kids there have exceptional IQs.” And, as anyone with a special-needs child could tell you, that sort of defensive speech is code for Watch it.
“Yes, of course,” Elspeth said. “And Audra showed me a picture. He looks like her, very handsome.” I can give compliments, even about your second wife. I am not a small, vindictive person.
So Graham said, “Matthew reminds me of your father, actually.”
“My father?”
“Yes,” Graham said. “Very bright and mathematical but not terribly good at picking up on social signals.” Take that. Actually, it sort of described Elspeth, too.
“My father did not have Asperger’s,” Elspeth said, emphasizing every other word slightly. You never liked him.
“Not diagnosed, no,” Graham said. “But remember the first time you took me skiing with your family and he asked me to calculate what temperature water boils at at ten thousand feet? That was his idea of small talk.” I know how strange your family is, don’t forget.
“And you did it,” Elspeth said. Who are you to accuse my father of having Asperger’s?
“Yes,” Graham admitted reluctantly. And even more reluctantly, but also involuntarily, he supplied the answer again. “One hundred and ninety-four degrees Fahrenheit. For each thousand feet above sea level, the boiling point of water drops two degrees.”
“And I married you,” Elspeth said. “So there you go.”
This last part was a little cryptic, even for code. Did she mean, I married you and look how horribly it turned out, or I married you because you reminded me of my father, so it serves me right, or even something more general, like For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost?
Graham didn’t know how to respond, so he said, “Thanks again for last night. The red snapper was delicious.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I took an Asian cooking class last year.”
There was a moment of silence when they both seemed to realize that they had actually meant what they were saying. They weren’t speaking in code anymore. Graham felt a needle of fear: God only knew what she might say now.
So he said he had a meeting and that they should all have dinner again soon and he would be in touch, and she said the same sorts of things back, and—safely cloaked in code again—they hung up.
“Can I just ask,” Audra said that night. “Is Elspeth in or is she out?”
They were sitting on the sofa after dinner and she was drawing dolphins freehand for a brochure she was designing for a scuba diving school. Dolphins in left profile, dolphins in right profile, dolphins looking straight ahead, smiling, staring, laughing. She tore each sketch out of the book after she drew it and threw it on the floor. It was how she got inspired.
“What are you talking about?” Graham asked.
“It’s just something I’ve noticed about you as you get older,” she said, sketching. “People are either in or out with you. Either you accept them as a friend and someone you’re interested in, or you want no interaction with them.”
“You couldn’t be more wrong,” Graham told her. “It’s not something that’s happened since I’ve gotten older. I’ve always been that way. I don’t need to be friends with the doormen and the man at the bodega and the dentist.”
“I’m not friends with the dentist,” Audra said. (They had their own marital code.)
“You had lunch with him.”
“Never!” She looked scandalized. “I think you mean Dr. Medowski.” She’d had lunch with her gynecologist? This seemed even worse on a number of levels, but before he could say anything, she continued, “And you should be friends with the doormen, Graham. They’ll do anything for me—call me a cab in the worst weather or carry the teeniest package.”
“I can call my own cabs,” he said. “And carry my own packages, too.”
“You miss out on a lot, though,” Audra said, tearing another sketch out of her book. A drawing of a dolphin talking on the phone floated to the floor. “They know so much gossip about everyone in the building. You know that couple on Two with the little redheaded boy who keeps pulling leaves off the plants in the lobby? Well, they hired a nanny last week and she quit after half an hour. Half an hour. Can you imagine? Anyway, you never answered—is Elspeth in or is she out?”
Graham considered for a moment before he answered. He and Elspeth had not made a very successful married couple, but maybe they could be successful friends. Didn’t they have all the ingredients for that: a shared history and common interests and similar intellectual outlooks? Certainly if Audra could be friends with the checkout girl at the health-food store, he could be friends with Elspeth.
“In,” he said finally. “She’s in.”
And so they began, cautiously, occasionally, to do the things that couples do.
Graham and Audra had Elspeth and Bentrup over for brunch and introduced them to Matthew.
“Do you know who Satoshi Kamiya is?” Matthew asked them.
“The head of Toyota?” Bentrup guessed.
“No,” Matthew said. “He’s the best origami guy in the world.” He turned to Elspeth. “Did you know who he is?”
“No,” she said. “Do you know who Alexander Fleming is?”
Matthew shook his head. “Does he do origami?”
“No,” Elspeth said, never one to volunteer information.
“Do you do origami?”
“No.”
“Who is Alexander Fleming?” Audra asked.
“He discovered penicillin,” Elspeth said.
Audra frowned slightly. “I thought that was Jonas Salk.”
(The rest of brunch went a lot better.)
But mainly they walked. They walked through Central Park and had hot dogs; they walked through Little Italy for the cannoli; they walked across the Brooklyn Bridge.
Since four people can’t easily walk together, they tended to divide into pairs, and the formation of these pairings and subsequent conversations were fascinating to Graham.
Sometimes he walked with Elspeth and they updated each other on mutual friends’ lives. (He and Elspeth never spoke directly of their marriage, only of the times before and after. Graham imagined it would be this way if you had a relative who went to prison.) Some of their friends had done so little in thirteen years that it was boring to hear the updates—“He still works in finance, his mother lives with them now”—but others were intriguing: Elspeth’s cousin had left his wife for the teenage pool boy; one of their former neighbors had started a healing ministry after his eczema mysteriously improved; another friend had invented a self-propelled vacuum and was now a multimillionaire. It amazed Graham that he had forgotten some of these people completely, and yet they were still around, still in touch with Elspeth. He in turn told her about his mother and her sciatica; about some people he worked with whom she’d always been fond of; about a friend from high school who still called drunk at three a.m. sometimes. Every time they exchanged information about someone who had chosen sides in that long-ago split, Graham felt a little less responsible, a little like he’d repaired some tiny bit of damage.
He wondered sometimes why Elspeth agreed to these outings, and even suggested them. Surely she didn’t feel guilty about their divorce. He thought maybe it was because she was, and always had been, a difficult person socially. He didn’t mind her quirks, and neither did Audra, but how many other friends did Elspeth have? Not many, was Graham’s guess.
Graham and Elspeth talked about the marble kitty cat sometimes, too, and speculated on its fate. Three months had gone by and Sotheby’s had yet to sell it.
“I feel bad for it,” Graham said.
“And for Aunt Mary, too,” Elspeth said. “She thought it was this treasure and no one wants it.”
“She should have had it buried with her,” Graham said, and wondered suddenly if he’d gone too far and offended Elspeth, but she only laughed.
While he talked to Elspeth, Audra and Bentrup strolled ahead, deep in conversation. Graham thought privately that Bentrup was in awe of Audra—her flirtatiousness, her prettiness, her forceful personality. But Elspeth never seemed the slightest bit jealous, even though Audra always tucked her hand into Bentrup’s arm as they walked, so maybe Graham was wrong about that. Later Audra would tell him that Bentrup was sixty-two, and that he grew up in Portsmouth, England, and that he used to go to tanning booths but didn’t anymore, his skin just sort of stayed that color. Also, he’d been married twice, the first time to a woman named Tillie, who had an unshakable belief that dishcloths should be folded a certain way to avoid bad luck, and the second time to a woman named Margaret, who disliked it when Bentrup spat in the rhododendrons.
Sometimes Graham and Bentrup walked together, but they never spoke of anything personal. In fact, Graham found Bentrup almost maddeningly impersonal, like some tour guide they’d hired and now regretted bringing along. He said things like, “Chinatown is the largest Chinese community outside Asia,” and “While much of the foliage in Central Park appears natural, it is in fact almost entirely landscaped.” Even worse, it took him easily—easily—five minutes to get to the end of any sentence with the way he drawled in his British accent. Was this the kind of conversation he had with Elspeth at home? Was this what she liked? But Graham never paid much attention to Bentrup because he was too busy trying to eavesdrop on Elspeth and Audra.
How opposite they were! How could one man have fallen in love with both of them?
“My grandmother always said that you should be totally packed and ready twenty-four hours before a trip,” Audra said. “But I don’t think she had so much stuff.”
“I agree with her,” Elspeth replied. “You should be organized.” Her use of you did not sound general.
And once Audra said, “Lorelei used to work at Baskin-Robbins and she believes your choice of flavor reveals all sorts of things about you.”
“Who’s Lorelei?” Elspeth said. Then a moment later, as though she were unable to resist, “What does my choice reveal about me?”
They had just come from Baskin-Robbins, and Graham had a moment of profound gratitude that Elspeth had not ordered vanilla, because God knew what Audra would have made of that.
“Oh, Lorelei says women who order Pralines ’n Cream are almost always PMSing,” Audra said. “They are craving the salt and the sweet at the same time.”
Salvation came from an unexpected source when Bentrup said, “Did you know there is a physiological basis for food cravings during premenstrual disorder?”
“Premenstrual syndrome!” Audra laughed. “It’s not a personality disorder, though I guess maybe it seems like one.”
She moved up to talk to Bentrup, and Graham dropped back to talk to Elspeth, as smoothly as partners in the Virginia reel.
One day they were having coffee at the High Line and Graham sat on a bench between Audra and Elspeth. He was eating a croissant with his coffee, and a flake of croissant stuck to the side of his mouth. Elspeth and Audra reached to brush it away at the same moment.
“Oh, sorry,” Elspeth said, and it was the closest to embarrassed Graham had ever heard her sound.
“Hey, be my guest,” Audra said. “I get to wipe crumbs off his face all the time.” This seemed to Graham like a dangerous thing to say, but Elspeth only smiled and brushed the bit of croissant away.
“There,” she said with satisfaction.
“I was looking forward to eating that,” Graham said, and both women looked at each other and laughed, a sound that was lost quickly in the wind and the screech of seagulls, but one that seemed to Graham to linger on and on.
For some reason concerning Lorelei’s apartment being renovated and unfit for company, Graham and Audra were having to have Lorelei and her husband, Doug, and their priest over for dinner so that Doug and Lorelei could get their godson baptized in their local church and not have to waste a Sunday driving to Staten Island. Or something like that. (Apparently the priest was outside Audra’s direct sphere of influence and a mere phone call wouldn’t suffice, hence the need for dinner.)
Graham didn’t mind—he was just happy that Doug and Lorelei weren’t moving in with them while their apartment was being renovated. (The den was available as guest quarters once more, now that Bitsy had finally gone back to her brownstone in Brooklyn—a move prompted solely by Bitsy’s desire to prevent Ted from moving back to the brownstone first. It was strange now to think that Bitsy had left the magnifying glass of their apartment and gone back to being a teeny beige tile in the huge glittering eight-million-tile mosaic of New York City. It always surprised Graham when houseguests left and resumed their lives elsewhere.)
“We should invite Elspeth and Bentrup, too,” Audra said.
“Why?”
“Because we, you know, owe them.” Audra made a vague circular motion with her hand, presumably to indicate—what? The vast confusing ocean of who owed what to whom?
But Graham understood. Now that they were friends, Graham and Audra had to shuffle Elspeth and Bentrup into the friendship deck of cards, to be dealt back out again evenly in the form of social commitments. A dinner party for seven was just as much work as a dinner party for five, so okay.
Audra left it up to Graham to call Elspeth and ask if she and Bentrup would be interested in spending an evening helping them emotionally seduce a priest. He thought he was calling Elspeth’s mobile, but it must have been her landline because Bentrup answered.
“Good evening,” he drawled. It was less of a spoken word and more like a sticky drop of amber resin that flowed slowly down the line.
“Hello, Bentrup. It’s Graham Cavanaugh.”
“Ah, Graham, what a pleasure.” Bentrup took nearly a full minute to round off the word pleasure. It made Graham want to snap his fingers in irritation.
“Yes, well,” he said. “Audra and I are having a kind of impromptu dinner party tomorrow and we were hoping you and Elspeth could join us.”
“How very kind of you,” Bentrup said. “I will have to check with my lady.”
Lady? Did he mean Elspeth? (Of course he did, because who else would Bentrup have to check with—the cleaning lady?) But did Elspeth know he referred to her this way? Did she like it?
“However, if I may be so informal,” Bentrup continued, his voice lingering over every consonant, “I’m sure she and I will be delighted to come to your soiree. Please consider us a soon-to-be-confirmed yes.”
“Okay, great,” Graham said hastily.
They said their goodbyes and hung up. Graham felt that if there’d been a snare drum handy, he would have beat out a staccato rhythm just to get the sound of Bentrup’s voice out of his head.
The buzzer sounded the next night and Graham went to answer it, expecting it to be Doug and Lorelei, but it was the priest, Father Hicks, a friendly, white-haired, round-faced man wearing a suit with a clerical shirt and collar under it. The only unusual thing about him was that he was very short, possibly under five feet, and Graham kept unintentionally talking to the area about six inches above Father Hicks’s head.
Audra came tap-tapping in high heels down the hall from Matthew’s bedroom. She looked very pretty, in a dark red dress, her hair pulled back in a gold clip. “Oh, my goodness,” she said as soon as she saw Father Hicks. “I know you! You’re the man I cut in front of in the supermarket checkout line. I’m sorry, I didn’t know then that you were a priest or whatever.”
Graham blinked, not sure where to start objecting. Father Hicks was a priest, not a priest or whatever. Did she think he was a vicar? Also, she seemed to be implying that she would have no remorse about cutting in front of a layman.
But Father Hicks only smiled and said, “That’s perfectly all right.”
And then, fortunately, Doug and Lorelei arrived. Doug was a big fleshy man with pale crew-cut hair you could see his scalp through. No matter what shirt Doug wore, his neck always squeezed over the collar in the back. He looked to Graham like a not-very-bright midwestern high school football player who now sold used cars. Actually, he was a native New Yorker and the chief commercial officer of an international company. Graham liked him a lot.
Bentrup and Elspeth arrived a minute later and there was a little burst of introductions, with everyone sort of talking over each other, and Bentrup saying, “The pleasure is entirely mine” twice.
Graham had to go into the kitchen and get dinner ready, so he missed whatever it was they found to talk about, though he could hear Audra offering wine to everyone. He prepared seven plates of tomato-and-mozzarella salad and then called them all into the dining room.
“You’re so lucky Graham cooks,” Lorelei said to Audra as soon as they were seated. “Doug can’t cook a thing.”
“Neither can I,” Audra said. “Really, next to nothing. But you’re a great cook, Lorelei. Now, Elspeth, tell me, when you and Graham were married, who did the cooking?”
Elspeth gave Audra one of her long looks and then she said, “We took turns.”
“And do you cook, Bentrup?”
God, it was like being on some endless, awkward talk show.
“Oh, not at all,” Bentrup said. “Not one bit, I’m afraid.”
Audra looked thoughtful for a second. “So if Lorelei came to live with Graham, and I went to live with Doug, who would gain more weight? You guys, from cooking delicious meals for each other, or Doug and me, from ordering pizza all the time?”
Graham wasn’t sure they should be talking about wife swapping, even of the culinary sort, in front of a priest, but to his surprise, Father Hicks joined right in. “Oh, you’d get tired of pizza pretty quick,” he said. He pointed his fork at Graham and Lorelei. “But they’d just keep trying to outdo each other with lavish meals and get fatter and fatter.”
“I think so, too,” Audra said, giving him her most approving smile. “Now tell me, who cooks for you, Father?”
This topic carried them all the way through the chicken masala, though it did reveal a large amount of ignorance on Audra’s part. Apparently, she thought Father Hicks lived in a kind of rooming house for priests (that was how she described it) and that the church paid some woman to cook for all of them. She was surprised to learn that he lived in an apartment and cooked his own meals.
“And what about laundry?” Audra asked.
“I have a washer and dryer,” Father Hicks said. “I do my own laundry.”
“Just like a regular person,” Audra marveled.
Graham thought Doug and Lorelei’s godson’s chances of getting baptized in Father Hicks’s church were probably low and falling.
Then Bentrup and Lorelei had a brief discussion about the price of mozzarella and a deli Bentrup knew of somewhere in Queens. “You must remind me later,” he said to Lorelei. “I will give you the address forthwith.”
Not for the first time, Graham wondered how successful Bentrup was as a shoe salesman. Did people get up and leave rather than listen to him? Or did they buy a pair of shoes just to shut him up?
He glanced across the table at Elspeth and their eyes caught for a second, like two coat hangers before you shake them free of each other.
After dinner, they moved into the living room. Audra sat next to Father Hicks on the sofa, and said, “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
Without really meaning to, Graham held his breath, and he was pretty sure everyone else did, too.
“Go ahead,” said Father Hicks.
“Well, I went to your church charity shop this week to buy a dresser,” Audra said, “and I was wondering if you’d noticed that the man who works there looks just like a young Charlie Manson?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Father Hicks said.
“I’m so glad it’s not just me,” Audra said. “But really, it was so unnerving being alone in the shop with him! I kept thinking, Is he going to kill me, or brainwash me, or just sell me a dresser? But he was as nice as could be. And going to school in social work, too.”
Father Hicks nodded approvingly. “He’s a good kid.”
Audra took a sip from her wineglass. “And do you know our dentist, Dr. Alpen? I believe he’s a member of your congregation.”
“Oh, yes,” Father Hicks said. “He’s an usher.”
“Well, I can’t understand why Dr. Alpen is not off treating lepers somewhere,” Audra said, “because he has absolutely saintlike patience when it comes to cleaning Matthew’s teeth. Do you go to Dr. Alpen, Father? Or someone who, like, specializes in priests?”
“No, no,” Father Hicks said. “My dentist is a Lutheran.”
He seemed charmed by Audra’s interest in his life, and not offended like a sensible person would be.
“Now, let’s see,” Audra said thoughtfully. “Who else do I know from your church? What about the Mosebys?”
“Oh, yes,” Father Hicks said. “David and Carol and their five kids.”
Audra leaned forward slightly. “Maybe you don’t know this, but when their oldest son, Bobby, threatened to burn down the house unless his parents bought him a motorbike, they bought him a motorbike.”
“I’ll have the community pray for him,” Father Hicks said.
Audra laughed. “I think it might be a little late for that.”
They both sounded very merry.
Graham said nothing and drank his wine. He understood that Audra was using this gossip to include Father Hicks, to draw him to her in a warm silk net that felt, for this evening anyway, like friendship. The gossip was all gentle and harmless, though Graham had no doubt whatsoever that Audra knew things about all these people that were far more shocking than anything Father Hicks had ever—ever—heard in confession.
“Perhaps you can tell me something,” Father Hicks said to Audra. “Do you happen to know a former parishioner of mine named Brice Breedlove? Because he and his wife stopped coming very abruptly about a year ago, and they used to be such regular churchgoers.”
“Oh, yes, I know what happened to Brice,” Audra said unexpectedly. (Well, sort of really expectedly, actually.) She leaned forward to refill her wineglass and Father Hicks’s. “Apparently God spoke to Brice one morning last year and told him that he was making a big mistake with his adjustable rate mortgage. And Brice was like ‘What are you saying? You think I should get a fixed rate mortgage?’ And God said, ‘No, no, I want you to move right out of that beautiful expensive condo to a studio apartment in Queens and have no mortgage at all.’ ”
(She kept saying God as if He were some friend of hers, the way another person might say Sheila.)
“Heavens,” Father Hicks said, looking a little startled.
“And furthermore, God wanted it done by his forty-sixth birthday!” Audra said. Then she touched Father Hicks’s arm. “I mean, Brice’s forty-sixth birthday, obviously. God is, like, seven hundred million years old.”
“Did Brice do it?” Lorelei asked.
“Oh, yes,” Audra said. “I don’t think Brice’s wife wanted to, but how can you argue with your husband and say you know more than God? Literally, more than God? So she went along with it and God made them have an estate sale to get rid of most of their earthly possessions and I bought their brand-new waffle iron for fifty cents, which is when Brice’s wife told me all this. And now they live in Queens with almost no stuff and I guess they go to some church out there. Although maybe they don’t really need to go to church at all, what with God talking to Brice directly.”
(Now Audra was saying God somewhat ironically, as though it had quotes around it, but the way someone might say Sheila if Sheila were a poodle, or perhaps a rosebush.)
“Can we just back up for a second?” Doug asked. His eyes were sharp with interest. “You say God was against adjustable rate mortgages but did He say anything about jumbo loans?”
“You’d have to ask Brice that,” Audra said primly.
“But why didn’t God tell Brice to buy Apple stock ten years ago?” Elspeth said suddenly. (Trust Elspeth to find the loophole even in divine intervention.) “Then Brice could have afforded any house he wanted.”
“I thought of that, too,” Lorelei said.
“Well, Apple or Microsoft,” Doug said to Elspeth somewhat critically. “Apple ten years ago or Microsoft twenty years ago.”
“Indeed,” Bentrup said. “It does seem there could have been some more forward thinking.”
“You know, maybe God wasn’t involved in people’s finances before now,” Audra said slowly. “He may only have started to think about finances extremely recently, since, in God’s lifetime, the stock market is a very new thing. Maybe He wasn’t sure it would last. Maybe God thought the stock market was like, I don’t know, break dancing or cocaine.”
Father Hicks’s eyes were huge. “I think that is absolutely profound,” he said.
He was gazing at Audra adoringly, and it seemed to Graham that he looked torn between wanting to convert her and wanting to pounce on her.
Finally, at ten-thirty, Doug and Lorelei made reluctant noises about going home, and Elspeth and Bentrup agreed. They all went to the front hall together. Elspeth had the deeply reflective air of someone who has just seen a particularly savage wildlife documentary, and Bentrup had taken on the seedy, shellacked look of a late-night convenience store shopper.
“Thank you for a delightful evening,” Father Hicks said, hugging Audra. His head fit under her chin and he seemed to rest his head on her breasts for a moment.
Lorelei hugged Audra, too, and Graham heard her whisper, “You are the most wonderful friend.”
Graham shook hands with everyone, and he and Audra watched them walk out into the hall toward the elevator, Father Hicks looking none too steady on his feet.
Audra shut the door and leaned against it. “Do you think we should give Matthew some sort of late baptism?” she asked.
“No,” Graham said. “I definitely do not.”
“Thank God,” Audra said. “Because I don’t think I have another such evening in me.”
And she went straight to bed without even clearing the table.
“You won’t believe who I ran into today,” Audra said one night a few days later.
“Who?” Graham asked.
“Bentrup!”
They were in the kitchen. Audra had promised to make something like two million cookies for the bake sale at Matthew’s school tomorrow, and she was melting chocolate in the double boiler while Graham unwrapped caramels.
“Where did you see Bentrup?” he asked.
“At Barneys.”
“Ah,” said Graham.
“I went there to buy some mascara,” Audra said, “and then I thought I would just mosey up to the shoe department and see if he was there and he was!” (Toward the end of the sentence, her voice had picked up speed, making it sound as though this were some amazing coincidence.)
“That makes sense, given that he works there,” Graham said. “Did he see you?”
“Oh, yes,” Audra said. “I went in and said hello and he was so nice. He took me through the whole store and introduced me to tons of people and let me use his employee discount to buy some scented candles and I told him he should buy one for Elspeth but he said she didn’t believe in them. How can you not believe in scented candles? They’re not like UFOs.”
Audra loved scented candles, which was something he’d always found slightly incongruous in her personality. “Why?” she’d asked once. “It’s not as though I like Yankee candles.” Graham had often tried to find the perfect comparison for the way she’d said that, something to do with champagne or caviar or maybe even real estate (“It’s not as though I live in Queens”), but he could never come up with anything that had exactly the right inflection. He had eventually concluded that it depended on some insider knowledge of scented candles he didn’t possess.
Audra was still talking. “And then we had coffee in the employee restaurant—did you know there’s a whole other café that the normal customers don’t even know about?—and then he had to go back to work.”
“What was more exciting, the employee discount or the employee restaurant?” Graham asked.
She did not even have to think about it. “The discount, of course. Though we had a very interesting conversation over coffee. He told me that when he and Elspeth go to dinners and stuff for her law firm, she wants him to tell people he’s retired, instead of saying he works at Barneys. Sadly, I was unable to find out what kind of sex they have.”
“What do you mean, what kind of sex?” he asked.
“Well, you know, how often and what position and does she make him wash his hands first and does he fetch her slippers in his teeth,” Audra said. “Really, I’m so interested, any little detail would have thrilled me. Aren’t you curious?”
“No,” Graham said. “I don’t like to think about it.” This was half truth and half lie because he honestly didn’t like to think about it, but he was very curious. To him, Elspeth and Bentrup seemed an entirely platonic couple, like Bert and Ernie. “And have you ever, ever made a man wash his hands first?”
Audra shook her head. “But she’s so fastidious and I’m so notoriously unfastidious.”
Notorious to whom? The general population or men she’d had sex with or what?
Audra stopped stirring and looked at him. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her skin was flushed from the heat of the double boiler. Graham would not have improved one single feature of her face.
She gestured at him impatiently. “I can’t believe that in this entire time you’ve unwrapped three caramels. It goes much faster if you use your fingers. The way you sit there with your bifocals and a penknife!”
“What’s wrong with a penknife?” Graham asked. “And why shouldn’t I wear my bifocals? Otherwise, I’ll cut my hand and bleed all over the caramels and you wouldn’t like that, either.”
Audra moved the double boiler off the burner and came over to help. “It’s more the picture you create,” she said. Her fingers were monkey-quick on the caramels, unwrapping three more in the time it took her to say that. Her voice was amused. “It’s like, I don’t know, you’re a patient in an old folks’ home and this is some project I’ve given you and you don’t know how to do it.” She laughed. She had a habit of laughing at her own jokes.
Graham laughed, too. He was glad, suddenly, that she was teasing him about seeming old, because, he realized, when she stopped teasing him about it, it would be because he really was.
They met Elspeth and Bentrup for dinner in a small French restaurant on the Upper East Side that Audra knew.
“Is this okay?” Audra said to Elspeth while they were waiting to be seated. “It’s not freaking you out?”
“No,” Elspeth said. “I don’t have a phobia about restaurants. I just don’t particularly like them.”
Audra looked intrigued. “Is it because you’re paying someone? For something you could do in your own home?”
“Yes, sort of.”
“I’ll bet you don’t like getting massages, either,” Audra said.
“Correct,” Elspeth said.
“I love massages,” Audra said. “I don’t mind that I’m paying someone to touch me. That doesn’t extend to hookers, though.” She glanced at Bentrup with an apologetic expression, as though to imply that everyone present knew Bentrup had a heavy prostitute habit but that they all liked him anyway.
Bentrup smiled reassuringly. “I don’t go to hookers, either,” he said.
“I think being a hooker would be the worst job in the world,” Audra said, and her voice took on a slight relish. “Well, except maybe cat food salesperson. But honestly, imagine all the unattractive men you’d have to have sex with if you were a hooker. Just think about it.”
“I am, I am,” Bentrup said. He seemed to have gotten the knack of conversing with Audra, the knack being that you had to pretend you were talking to someone in the time before society had formed and social boundaries had been invented.
“If you were to go to a hooker, though,” Audra said to Bentrup in a slow, considering voice, “what-all would you ask for?”
Bentrup looked alarmed and another man waiting to be seated looked delighted, but fortunately the hostess came to lead them to their table just then. Audra went first, followed by Bentrup, but Elspeth lingered for a moment to give Graham a hard look. Her eyes reminded him of a certain kind of gravel, the type that bit your feet when you walked on it barefoot. She probably thought this was the kind of conversation he and Audra had at home all the time. (It sort of was.)
The hostess seated them at a table. They ordered wine and listened to the specials and then they were left to study the menus.
“What are you having?” Audra asked Bentrup.
“Well, now,” he said, rolling the words around in his mouth like a merlot. “I believe I’ll have the baked clams and the pork tenderloin.”
“I know without even asking that Graham will have the duck,” Audra said.
“Oh, do you still like duck so much?” Elspeth said to him. “It always bothered you that I never cooked it.”
It seemed to Graham that a crevasse had opened suddenly, that he was perilously close to falling in. “I do still like duck,” he said carefully. “I cook it myself.”
“What are you having?” Audra said to Elspeth.
“The trout with raspberry vinegar,” Elspeth said. Graham could have predicted that, too.
“I’m sorry to interrogate you,” Audra said, “but my grandfather always wanted everyone at the table to order the same thing, and it sort of affected me.”
This confirmed something that up to now Graham had only suspected: that Elspeth’s refusal to be charmed by Audra’s eccentricity made Audra act even more eccentric in front of her. The grandfather story was true, he happened to know, but she generally only told it when she wanted attention of some sort.
“Why on earth would he want that?” Elspeth asked.
“He thought it would be easier on the waiter,” Audra said. “He thought if we didn’t all order the same thing, the waiter would have some sort of breakdown.”
Elspeth looked a little astonished. “Did you all do it?”
But it was as though having finally gotten Elspeth’s attention, Audra had lost interest. “Oh, sometimes,” she said, studying her own menu. “More often, we just changed our orders when he was in the bathroom or something.”
It made her sound callous, suddenly, and selfish and insensitive and unkind, and all the things she wasn’t.
Then one night they went over to Elspeth and Bentrup’s for dinner, and Elspeth answered the door. She had a glass of red wine in her hand and looked exceptionally pale. It took Graham a minute to realize she wasn’t wearing any makeup.
“Oh,” Elspeth said when she saw them. “I meant to call you and cancel but I forgot.”
“What’s wrong?” Audra asked. “What can we do?”
Elspeth studied them for a moment. “Come on in,” she said finally.
She didn’t hold the door for them but walked ahead into the apartment, calling over her shoulder, “Get some glasses from the kitchen, Graham. You know where they are.”
He did know exactly where they were. Elspeth never changed anything in the kitchen. He went into the kitchen and pulled two more glasses out of the cupboard.
Audra called, “I think you should bring another bottle of wine, too.” She said it exactly the way she told him to bring Tylenol and the thermometer when Matthew had a fever, so Graham picked up another bottle from the counter and hurried into the dining room.
The table was not set, the only things on it were a mostly empty wine bottle and Elspeth’s glass. She sat at the head of the table with Audra on her left. Graham sat across from Audra.
“Where’s Bentrup?” he asked.
This question seemed to make Elspeth take a very long drink of wine. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “He left. I told him to leave.”
“Oh, Elspeth,” Audra breathed. “How terrible. What happened?” She motioned impatiently for Graham to open the wine. He obeyed.
“Well,” Elspeth said. “Last night he said—”
“Wait, wait,” Audra interrupted. “Where were you? What were you doing, exactly?” Audra liked her stories to have context.
“Oh-kay,” Elspeth said slowly, in a we’ll-do-it-your-way-if-we-must voice. “Last night we went to a farewell dinner for this man who works in my department. Yes, Audra, it was at a restaurant.” She took another enormous swallow of wine. Graham wondered if she would be able to finish her story at this rate. “And the people at our table were discussing movies and Bentrup said that he saw Accidental Love last week, at a matinee.”
Audra moaned.
Elspeth nodded.
Graham knew something had passed between them—that some essential piece of information had been exchanged—but he didn’t have a clue what it was. “I don’t get it,” he said.
Both women looked at him impatiently.
“No man would go see a romantic comedy by himself,” Audra explained. “Especially not in the afternoon. He obviously went with a woman.”
And then Elspeth said something else but Graham didn’t hear what it was because it was almost like he had physically left the room. It seemed as though he and Elspeth and Audra were all carts going along a track in a coal mine, and his cart had suddenly been shunted off on a separate track into a dark shaft while theirs continued ahead. Graham was so enveloped by emotion that he was utterly unaware of his surroundings, and the emotion was vindication. He was not the only person who couldn’t be faithful to Elspeth! Bentrup couldn’t do it either!
When Graham reentered the conversation, only a few seconds had passed and Elspeth was saying, “So this morning, I hid his iPhone and he looked and looked for it but finally he had to go to work without it and I took it into the office with me and hacked the pass code—”
“You hacked the pass code?” he asked, distracted despite himself. “How long did that take you?”
Elspeth waved her wineglass dismissively. “About five tries. It was his birth date but done the European way, with the day first.”
“Oh,” Graham said.
“Anyway,” Elspeth continued, “I entered the pass code and there were all these sexy text messages from some woman.”
Audra shook her head. “What a fucking idiot,” she said.
Graham and Elspeth both looked at her. Now, Graham thought, Audra would say Bentrup was an idiot to cheat on Elspeth, and he felt a momentary pride in Audra for knowing what to do. But what Audra actually said was “Everyone knows you get caught with text messages.”
Elspeth rolled her eyes. “I called him at work and we came home to discuss it and he admitted everything. It’s apparently some thirty-year-old woman and it’s been—”
“Thirty!” Audra exclaimed. “What sort of thirty-year-old?”
“Does it matter?” Elspeth asked, her voice cool.
“It would matter to me,” Audra said thoughtfully. “I mean, was it a thirty-year-old bombshell or some sort of chunky, messy girl who keeps pigeons?”
Elspeth stroked her chin with the side of her forefinger and looked at Audra for a long moment. Audra gazed back, unperturbed. It occurred to Graham that here, finally, was the similarity between the two women he’d chosen to marry: they were both totally unrufflable, one out of iciness, the other out of obliviousness.
“At any rate,” he interposed hastily. “You threw him out.”
Elspeth finished her wine. “Yup,” she said, and he knew she must be very drunk, because she always said yes, never even yeah.
“Have you had anything to eat?” he asked. “I could fix you a sandwich.”
He was a big believer in food as the answer to most of life’s questions.
She shook her head. “I think I’d like you to go, if you don’t mind.”
“Are you sure?” Audra said, as though there had been anything even slightly equivocal about Elspeth’s words or tone.
Elspeth nodded, and so Graham and Audra gathered up their coats, which hung over the backs of their chairs since Elspeth had never taken them.
“We can let ourselves out,” Graham said.
Elspeth smiled, a wry complicated smile. “I know.”
He regretted his words now. Wasn’t that a version of how their marriage had ended, Graham letting himself out?
And so they left. Graham made sure the door locked behind them in case Elspeth got too drunk to get up and check. He didn’t want to be held responsible for her being murdered in her bed, along with whatever else she held him responsible for.
They rode the elevator in silence, and as they walked through the lobby, Audra sighed deeply. “She hates us.”
“What?” Graham said, startled.
“She hates us now.”
Graham cleared his throat. “I think that might be—premature.”
“Didn’t you see the way she looked at us?” Audra asked. “We’re not her friends anymore, we’re one of them again: the cheaters, the trollops, the bastards.”
She sighed a second time, and Graham put his arm around her as they went out through the revolving doors and into the cool night air. Audra was not quite as oblivious as he thought.
Graham waited for Audra to say it and when, after five days, she didn’t, he couldn’t resist saying it himself: “I guess you can’t use that Barneys discount anymore.”
“I know!” Audra said. “I thought of that right away.”
They were in the kitchen, drinking wine on one side of the breakfast bar, while Matthew sat on the other, folding an origami creation called a Snake Dragon. Audra was folding origami, too, some part of the dragon’s tail. Just like the Old Masters had had apprentices who filled in the backgrounds of paintings, Matthew had Audra, who sometimes did the easier folds on very complicated projects.
“But we have to be loyal to Elspeth, even if she is ignoring us,” Audra said.
Graham had called Elspeth twice and left messages, asking if there was anything she needed, if there was anything at all that they could do. She hadn’t returned either call. Now both he and Audra glanced at the phone on the kitchen wall, even though they both had cellphones, and multiple email accounts, and Graham had a phone at his office. There were probably a dozen avenues Elspeth could use to ignore them.
“Why do we have to be loyal to Elspeth?” Graham asked.
“You’re doing that fold wrong,” Matthew said from across the counter.
“Sorry,” Audra said absently. To Graham she said, “Because Elspeth’s more, like, family or whatever. We have a connection to her. Besides, what are we going to do, have Bentrup and his new girlfriend over for dinner? That would be so—tangential.”
Graham could not help thinking that they’d certainly had more tangential social interactions. Last year the locksmith who came to fix the dead bolt ended up sleeping in the den for two nights because his wife had stopped speaking to him due to the fact that he insisted on cutting the dead skin off his feet with a very small pair of scissors instead of using a pumice stone. (“Have you ever heard of anything so ludicrous?” Audra asked. Yes, he had: letting the locksmith sleep over. Although the locksmith had repaired their toaster for free.)
“It’s supposed to be a valley fold,” Matthew said.
“Hey, I’m doing my best,” Audra answered. She took a new square of origami paper from the stack on the counter and started again. “You know,” she said, “I used to have this fantasy that Elspeth had a terminal illness and asked me to give you back for six months, and I did.”
Graham was speechless for a second. “I can’t imagine who would hate that more, me or Elspeth.”
“Well, in my fantasy, she was very grateful to me, and you were very dutiful, and you sort of even fell back in love a little,” Audra said wistfully. “You had these beautiful months together, and I used the time to paint.”
“Good God,” Graham said. (When she came out with things like that, it was like being married to a less talented, prettier Van Gogh.)
“Could you concentrate?” Matthew asked, in such a perfect imitation of Audra’s own exasperated voice that both Graham and Audra laughed.
“Okay,” she said. “Show me what I’m doing wrong.”
She and Matthew bent their heads together over the counter, and Graham, momentarily excluded, stared at the phone again. Audra had a theory (talk about ludicrous!) that when you called someone and they were home but not answering, the ringing sound had an ever so slightly different timbre to it. Although Graham had made fun of this for years, he could not help wondering now if maybe the reverse was true and the silence of this phone had a different quality because Elspeth wasn’t calling it. A dry, chalky, guilt-inducing silence, which filled his throat like dust.
They had taken to going to an Asian supermarket Elspeth had told them about on lower Broadway on Saturday mornings while Matthew was with his dyslexia tutor.
The supermarket was owned by a Chinese man and his mother-in-law, and the man had once called them at home to tell them that Audra had left her purse in the frozen foods aisle, actually in the freezer full of dumplings. (“I guess I put it in there when I took the dumplings out,” she’d mused, undisturbed. “Some unconscious check-and-balance thing.”) So now while Graham shopped, Audra went into the back room and drank tea and talked to the man and his mother-in-law. She called them Hwang and Li, which amused Graham since he suspected that those were their last names and Audra was unaware that Chinese people say their surnames first. This didn’t seem to keep her from getting to know them, however, and advising them about colleges for the oldest son.
And on this Saturday, while Graham was pushing his cart along the dusty, spicy, fragrant aisles, he saw Elspeth. She was wearing a pale blue linen coat buttoned all the way up, even though the weather was warm, and her hair and makeup were as flawless as ever. Graham had given up leaving messages two weeks before.
“Hey,” he said, pushing his cart to the side so it was nose to nose with hers. “I’ve been meaning to call you.”
She looked annoyed. “I hate it when people say that,” she said. “Like you remind them of some forgotten chore.”
Actually, Graham sort of hated that, too. So why had he said it and why did he hate hearing she hated it so much?
“Well,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “Maybe it would be more accurate to say that I have been thinking about you. Wondering how everything is.”
“If that’s your way of asking about Bentrup,” she said, “he’s gone.”
“It was my way of asking about you,” Graham said softly.
“I’m alone,” she said.
There didn’t seem to be much of an answer to that, but he tried. “Would you like to come over sometime, maybe for lunch? Audra and I—”
Elspeth slumped against her cart suddenly, forsaking her usual perfect posture. “Could we not do this anymore?” she said. “Not pretend to be friends? I really don’t need you and Audra to show me how great your marriage is and prove to me that you were meant to be together.”
“That was never my intent,” Graham protested. But at the same time, a very soft dissonant chord chimed once in his chest. They hadn’t meant to do that. Had they?
Elspeth turned and walked away. It took Graham a moment to realize she had abandoned her cart and was leaving the store, and by the time he did, the bell over the front door was already jingling as she walked out.
He was still standing there when Audra came down the aisle behind him and said, “Guess what? Hwang’s son got into NYU! They gave me some spring rolls to celebrate.” She was carrying a small Tupperware box. “Are you almost done? Because we should go get Matthew. Oh, look, someone went off and left a shopping cart.”
Graham thought he could ask any of the women he knew how motherhood had changed them, and they would all sigh and talk about how their hips had widened or their skin had coarsened or their feet had flattened (Audra claimed her arms were hairier), but Graham thought the real changes were mental. The real changes were a tendency to give ten-minute warnings before leaving the house; a restlessness at school pickup time even on weekends and holidays; a previously unsuspected knowledge of the lyrics to folk songs; and the strange compulsion to comment aloud on everyday sights. Oh, look, a drawbridge. Oh, look, a fire truck. Oh, look, a mother duck and her ducklings. Oh, look, someone lost a glove, someone dropped an earring, someone forgot a math book, someone went off and left a shopping cart.
Audra glanced into Elspeth’s abandoned cart briefly, and then continued on down the aisle. She didn’t comment further, perhaps because Matthew wasn’t there, or perhaps because she was still thinking about Hwang’s son, or perhaps because she just didn’t care.
One week later, Graham got a check in the mail at his office. The check was from Elspeth. There was no letter with it, only a careful notation in the memo line of the check: Proceeds from the sale of Sotheby’s item. Ah, his half of the value of the marble kitty cat, which must have finally sold. It came to slightly less than two thousand dollars.
Graham sat at his desk and looked at the check for a long time. Not much doubt now. He was “out” with Elspeth, if he had ever been in. For once, he didn’t feel particularly guilty. He didn’t think this was his fault, or Elspeth’s, or even Bentrup’s. Maybe in some relationships there was so much history that fondness and guilt and curiosity and familiarity remained separate elements and could never be melted down into friendship. He had a sudden urge to tell Elspeth this.
Instead, he gathered up his things and left the office.
Olivia was on the phone to her roommate. “I’m pretty sure our stove is gas,” she said. “You know that little circle of fire? I don’t think you get that on an electric stove.”
She trilled her fingers at Graham.
It was early evening. He went across the street to the bank and put Elspeth’s check in the night deposit box. Then on impulse, he walked the fifteen blocks to Barneys. He went straight to the housewares department and discovered that they had a whole counter dedicated to “Home Fragrance.”
“What’s the most expensive scented candle you have?” he asked the girl behind the counter.
The girl’s carefully made-up face betrayed no surprise. “That would be the Joya Coup de Foudre,” she said. “It’s two hundred and twenty-five dollars. A limited edition candle with notes of cassis, cedar leaf, suede, and smoke.”
Graham resisted the urge to make a joke about how all candles were sort of limited edition by nature, and all must smell of smoke, given that they were on fire. “That’s perfect,” he said. “Can you wrap one up for me?”
“Certainly,” the girl said, and then Graham waited forever while she wrapped the candle and put it carefully in a tiny carrier bag with tissue paper and even sprinkled some rose petals on top. He paid with his credit card and went back out on the street.
Graham decided he would walk home.
He knew that Elspeth’s check was still in the deposit box, that it wouldn’t be added to his account until tomorrow, and wouldn’t clear for at least two days after that. But it felt as though he’d purchased the candle with Elspeth’s money. It was extravagant, and it came from Barneys, and Audra would love it. These things were as deeply pleasing to Graham as the nap of velvet against his fingers, though he could not have explained exactly why.
It was late September now. On Wednesday evenings, like this one, Graham picked Matthew up from Clayton’s apartment. Wednesdays were half days at Matthew’s school, so Audra dropped Matthew off at noon, and Matthew and Clayton did origami together until Graham picked him up at seven. Matthew loved it and it was a break for Audra (and for Clayton’s wife, Graham suspected).
Graham pushed the buzzer and heard footsteps, and Clayton answered. “Come in, we’re just finishing up.”
Graham followed Clayton down the hall, past many framed origami creations, to the dining room, where Matthew was still folding.
“Hey, buddy,” Graham said. “Time to go.”
Matthew frowned. “We’re working on the Tadashi Phoenix.”
They had been working on the phoenix now for several weeks. Pieces of paper lay all over the table in various states of complicated folds. Graham couldn’t tell which were parts of the phoenix and which were unsuccessful attempts that had been crumpled up and discarded.
“I know,” Graham said. “But we have to go. Get your backpack and stuff, okay?”
Matthew moved away reluctantly and Graham was left to talk to Clayton. “This is very impressive, very detailed,” Graham said, gesturing to the phoenix parts on the table. It was a kind of all-purpose origami remark, but it usually worked.
“Thank you.” Clayton beamed. “This particular phoenix is very difficult, as you may be aware. We’re working from crease patterns.”
Audra was right. They couldn’t let Matthew grow up to be like this guy. If he was going to spend his Wednesdays here, maybe they should insist Matthew take alligator wrestling on Thursdays, or else apprentice him into some seedy, messy occupation, like emergency plumbing.
Matthew showed up with his backpack and they said goodbye to Clayton and went out on the street.
“Are we going to get a hot dog?” Matthew said worriedly. Graham had bought Matthew a hot dog from a street vendor on the way home from the first lesson, and with Matthew, anything done once became a routine that had to be followed forever.
“Sure,” Graham said, and Matthew relaxed.
They walked toward Tompkins Square Park in companionable silence. Graham thought, as he did every Wednesday, that if they walked around the south side of the park, they would pass a gourmet shop that Elspeth had taken him and Audra to weeks earlier, when they were still double-dating. They had gone there one Sunday. Audra and Bentrup had stayed at the front of the store, sampling about a dozen kinds of lavender honey and calling to each other, “Try this one!” “No, this one!” “Wait, here, here—it’s like paradise on a breadstick!”
But Elspeth had taken Graham over to the mushroom bins and shown him the shiitakes and the oysters and the portobellos and even rarer ones like hen of the woods and blue foot.
“They have the most beautiful chanterelles in the autumn,” Elspeth had said, her voice almost dreamy. “I sauté them in butter with cream and veal and a tiny bit of tarragon. I’ll have to make it for you.”
She had looked at him and her eyes were perfectly blue, so clear that he felt like he could see all the way to the back of them. She could have been fifty, or twenty, or no age at all.
Graham and Matthew had reached the edge of the park.
“There’s a hot dog guy,” Matthew said happily.
Graham gave him some money and let him run ahead. The hot dog would be Matthew’s dinner but Graham didn’t know yet what he and Audra would have.
He thought about the chanterelles, which would be in season now. He would like to make the dish that Elspeth had described. He could imagine it, how the ridges of the chanterelles would hold drops of tarragon-flavored cream like dozens of gently cupped hands. He thought about it, about how simple it would be to walk home on the south side of the park with Matthew and stop at the gourmet shop. But he didn’t think he would. He never went there now.