So this is how it works, Graham thought.
Life went on. You learned the unimaginable, but life went on. The earth should have stopped spinning, or at least have tilted another twenty-four degrees on its axis, creating new seasons, new weather—a new, harsher world for everyone. But it didn’t. Everything went on as normal. Your child folded origami and your wife obsessed about United Nations Day and the afternoon doorman, Julio, lived in your den because—because—well, Graham wasn’t exactly sure why. Bedbugs? Landlord dispute? He couldn’t remember.
Graham looked out the window sometimes and expected to see a postapocalyptic world, with a cold gray skyline and abandoned cars clogging the street, not a living soul in sight. But when he looked outside, he saw only the normal Manhattan traffic and people hurrying around, with their shopping bags in their hands, or cellphones to their ears, gesturing at no one. The postapocalyptic world was inside him but no one seemed to notice.
Right now, for instance, Audra was talking to Julio in the kitchen. Julio was a good-looking Dominican guy in his early twenties who was so grateful to be staying with them that he did everything he could to be helpful. He and Audra had just returned from the vegetable stand. Graham was reading the paper in the living room but he could hear them perfectly.
“I’ve devised this whole new system for dividing the population into two groups,” Audra was saying. “It’s very simple: if you don’t like United Nations Day, you can be my friend. If you do like it, then you can’t.”
“What’s wrong with United Nations Day?” Julio asked.
“I don’t mean the actual United Nations Day,” Audra said. “I mean, United Nations Day at Matthew’s school, which is this day where every classroom is decorated like a different country and the children visit each country and learn about different cultures and stuff.”
“Well, what’s so awful about that?” Julio asked.
“It might be easier to tell you what isn’t awful about it,” Audra said. “Which is nothing. See how easy that was?”
But then she plunged ahead anyway and outlined the awfulness for Julio: the decorating of the rooms, the painting of murals, the hanging of bunting, the making of little passports, the sewing of costumes, the preparation of the food, the endless meetings to plan all this, and then the day itself, with the overexcited children and the visiting dignitaries from the real United Nations and the stressed parents snapping at each other.
“And some of the parents are really into it,” she concluded. “Actually, all of the parents, except me. At least they pretend to be.”
Last year, Graham remembered, Audra had worked in the England Room and had had to wear a low-cut Renaissance dress while she warbled on about humanism and art, and the Italian ambassador’s assistant had stuck a rolled-up dollar bill between her breasts. (Although later he realized that it was not the act that offended Audra so much as the amount. “A dollar!” she’d said. “Not even a twenty!”) This year she’d volunteered to be in charge of the Food Committee and had sworn that she would not interact with another soul on the actual day.
“But why do you have to be on any committee?” Julio asked. “Why can’t you just blow it off?”
“Because then everyone would say bad things about me later and not invite Matthew to birthday parties and things like that,” Audra said. “It’s like if you lived in Japan and gave someone a gift using only one hand. You’re supposed to use both hands—I learned that the year I worked in the Japan Room.”
And on she went, her voice rising and falling in the normal way as she washed the fruit and vegetables, quite as though she hadn’t broken Graham’s heart.
Graham had found out about Audra from an unexplained charge on their credit card.
He was going back through old statements to check his interest charges and there it was: a restaurant he’d never been to—a place called Le Vin dans les Voiles—and he knew. He didn’t think it was a mistake or identity theft or an online purchase. There seemed to be no originality in the world anymore. Somehow that made it even worse.
“Audra?” he had called from his study. She was in the kitchen with Matthew, making pancakes, but she came and stood in the doorway.
“What’s up?” she asked. She had a smudge of flour on her cheek.
He didn’t get up from his desk. “There’s a charge on the credit card,” he said. “Back in December. A French restaurant in the Village.”
She opened her mouth slightly and then paused. He could almost see her considering various explanations and rejecting them. It seemed to him that each excuse was a slight ripple across her expression, a minor adjustment. Then she came and sat in the chair across from his desk.
“Oh, Graham,” she said. “I’ve wanted so many times to tell you.”
“You’re having an affair,” he said flatly.
“Not an affair,” she said, as though scandalized. “More of a—a flirtation that got a little bit out of control. His name is Jasper and he’s a photographer.”
“How old is he?” Graham asked.
“Thirty,” Audra said. “That made me feel so awful, how young he was. I felt like a dirty old man.”
Graham didn’t want to hear about how awful she felt. “And you and he had a relationship?”
“Yes, but not what you think,” Audra said. “Well, not as bad as you think, probably. It wasn’t because of you, Graham. It wasn’t because I’m unhappy with you. It was more that it was exciting. And I thought, well, I could have you and Matthew and I could have this other thing, too. And by the time I realized I couldn’t, we were too serious, and he said—”
Graham interrupted. “I don’t want to know any of that.”
He could have sworn she looked disappointed. “What do you want to know?” she asked finally.
“Is it over?”
“Yes,” she said. “It was over by Christmas. I felt so conflicted and he had this girlfriend—”
“Stop!” he said.
“Graham,” Audra said. “We were never lovers—it didn’t go that far. We almost—”
He must have winced because she stopped. “I have to get back to Matthew,” she said softly. She got up and walked toward the door.
“Why did you use the credit card?” he asked suddenly. “You must have known it would show up on the bill.”
“That was an accident,” she said. “They charged the card I made the reservation with and I didn’t know how to undo it.”
“But why use the card to even reserve the table?”
He could see in her face that this was not something he should have asked. She tilted her head slightly. “It was his birthday,” she said simply. “I wanted to take him somewhere special.”
And then she let herself out of his study, very quietly, closing the door gently behind her, like a nurse leaving a patient alone to deal with a difficult diagnosis.
Once, years ago, Audra had been stuck in an elevator for over three hours with a man who raised ferrets for a living and she told Graham later that she was sort of sad when the elevator began moving again, because she and the man were still getting acquainted. How ironic was it that Graham should be married to someone who loved to talk that much, and now not want to talk to her?
He had forbidden her to talk about her almost affair, her almost lover. He didn’t want to know any details, felt he could not survive if he was forced to hear any details, and Audra was a very detail-oriented person. (She knew the names of the children of the man who owned the Mexican restaurant on the corner, for example, knew the oldest one, Tiffany, was working for Senator Schumer.) So Graham refused to discuss it.
And strangely, there seemed nothing else to talk about. Which was another layer of irony, since once Graham and Audra had gone to Vermont for a week, for Christmas, to a remote farmhouse, and Audra had said worriedly, “What if we run out of things to talk about?” and Graham had had to suppress a smile.
Oh, life was thick with irony now. Sort of like baklava, layer after layer pressed down on each other, with grit in between the layers and honey glossed over everything to make it sweet. He was pleased with this analogy, or as close to pleased as he got in these days where it seemed all his emotions lay under a cool frost. He wanted to tell Audra about it. But he didn’t, because not only would she have gasped and said, “Baklava! Jesus, I’d better order some for the Greek Room,” but because he didn’t want to give her anything right now—no gift, no peace offering—no matter how humble.
When Graham got home from work about a week after the discovery, Audra was talking to Lorelei outside the building. She and Lorelei did this constantly—bumped into each other and said they wished they had time to talk but they didn’t, and then stood around talking for an extremely long time anyway. Graham guessed they’d been standing there for at least forty-five minutes.
“It’s like I’ve turned,” Audra was saying. “Like I’ve become someone else. This perfectly nice lady called me and offered to work on the Food Committee between two and four, and I said I was really hoping for people to work all day, and she said she could only do that one shift, and I was like, ‘United Nations is a big day and I need a big commitment.’ And then I stopped and thought, Did I just say that? What’s happened to me? I think when United Nations Day is finally over, I’m going to need deprogramming.”
Normally Graham would have stopped and joined the conversation, or at least said hello. But suddenly he realized that Lorelei must know all about Jasper—that surely Audra had shared it with her on a minute-by-minute basis as it happened, for there was nothing that Audra didn’t share with Lorelei immediately.
And so instead of stopping to talk to them, he continued on into the building, feeling that losing Lorelei on top of Audra was entirely too much for him to bear.
“I have been in United Nations Day meetings all afternoon,” Audra said the next evening, banging into the apartment and slamming her purse down on the table where Graham and Julio were sitting, drinking beer. Julio had just gotten off duty and was still wearing the red-and-gold pants of his doorman uniform with a plain green T-shirt.
“It was excruciating,” Audra said, going into the kitchen to get her own beer. “As head of the Food Committee, I had to stand up and give a progress report and afterward everyone said, ‘Things used to run so smoothly when Mrs. Adams was in charge of the Food Committee,’ and ‘Mrs. Adams had such a serene, efficient manner,’ and then they’d look at me sideways.”
“What’s up with that shit?” Julio asked. “Where’s this Mrs. Adams now?”
“She moved to Ohio,” Audra said. “Which is apparently my fault. People kept saying, ‘It was such a shame she had to move.’ Honestly, it was even worse than the time Grandpa Sandoval French-kissed me under the cuckoo clock.”
Julio looked extremely startled by this piece of information but Graham wasn’t. Audra had five events that differed in degrees of awfulness and she was always using them as reference points, as though she were plotting all the events of her life on some chart. One: the time when her grandfather French-kissed her one sunny afternoon when she unsuspectingly wandered into her grandparents’ kitchen looking for a Fresca. Two: the time when her car ran out of gas in the driveway of some man she was having an affair with while his wife was at work. (Graham didn’t imagine this was one of the man’s particular favorite memories either.) Three: the spectacular case of food poisoning which had put her off Taco Bell forever. Four (sometimes this moved up to number three temporarily, displacing Taco Bell): the time when she gave a man she was dating a blow job and immediately afterward, he said, “Well, I don’t know if I would call you my girlfriend.” Five: the Cub Scout camping trip when Matthew was six and they woke up with two inches of rain in the tent.
She didn’t include even worse events, like the day they got Matthew’s Asperger’s diagnosis, or her miscarriage the year before Matthew was born, or when her college roommate took an overdose of sleeping pills, though Graham supposed maybe she kept a more private roster of them.
“Your grandfather French-kissed you?” Julio asked.
“Yes,” Audra said. “He had Alzheimer’s, although we didn’t know it then. I think maybe he thought I was my grandmother and it was 1930.”
“How old were you?” Julio asked.
“Nineteen.”
“That’s terrible,” he said. “I don’t know how you’re, like, still a functioning member of society.”
Graham said nothing, though he wanted to. He wanted to tell Julio that you could go through much worse than that and still function. You could learn things about your wife and marriage that you never suspected and still function. You could go around completely shredded inside and no one could even tell.
It turned out that Julio had a girlfriend. He brought her over one night to introduce her to them. At least Graham thought it was just to introduce her, but maybe the girlfriend was going to move in with them, too. Lately the mesh of his brain had widened—too much information slipped through.
Julio and his girlfriend arrived at dinnertime, when Graham was in the kitchen, braising peppers and onions.
“Mr. Cavanaugh, this is my girlfriend, Sarita,” he said. “Sarita, this is Mr. Cavanaugh.” (He called Audra by her first name, but not Graham.)
Sarita was a slender black-haired girl in her early twenties, with enormous brown eyes fringed by thick dark lashes and full red lips that even Graham could tell were free of lipstick. She looked extremely nervous, and Graham wondered if her promotion to Julio’s girlfriend was something that had happened very recently.
Audra came down the hall from Matthew’s room to greet Julio, and when she saw Sarita, her face became carefully neutral and her eyes took Sarita in from head to toe with a long look and a slow single blink, like a lizard’s. Graham knew she was assessing Sarita’s outfit—jeans and a tight-fitting pink satin cowboy type of shirt with pearly snap-buttons—and comparing it to her own. He waited to see whether she would decide that Sarita’s outfit was sexier.
She must have, because in the next instant, she gave both Sarita and Julio her most dazzling smile and said, “It’s such a pleasure to meet you, Sarita! Give me a kiss, Julio!”
Graham marveled for the hundredth time that out of all the women he knew, Audra alone seemed to understand that the prettiest woman in any room would always be the one with the most confident smile.
For a second there, he almost admired her.
Audra asked Graham and Julio to collect food for United Nations Day from the people who had it frozen and ready a week in advance. She said people needed motivation to plan ahead because everyone is basically so lazy.
“Our car’s in the shop, remember?” Graham said happily. (Sometimes the gods smile on you for no reason at all.)
“Oh, honestly,” Audra said, as though this were a piffling detail.
She was standing in front of Graham and Julio, who were unfortunately both sitting on the love seat in the living room. The love seat was very deep with a short back, and anyone seated on it tended to look recumbent and idle.
“I’ve already told everyone to expect you tonight,” Audra said in a wheedling tone.
“I could probably find us a car,” Julio said to Graham. Julio looked guilty. (He didn’t know that Graham never needed to feel guilty again where Audra was concerned.)
“I can go with you,” Audra said. “If Graham wants to stay here with Matthew and label two hundred bags of Korean scorched rice candy.”
Well, Graham wanted to do that even less than he wanted to drive around with Julio. So off they went, in a blue Honda Accord that Julio had somewhat magically supplied. Graham suspected it belonged to another tenant who had no idea the car was out and about. He hoped they didn’t spill sweet-and-sour sauce on the upholstery.
Julio seemed unconcerned, driving fast and well, although he whistled when he saw the list of addresses. “How are we supposed to make twenty stops in two hours?” he asked Graham.
“Maybe we can do it if we call people and have them meet us in front of their buildings,” Graham said.
So Julio drove while Graham dialed his cellphone and they made a series of stops, putting on the hazard lights amid much honking, while a variety of parents ran out and thrust Tupperware boxes full of frozen food at them through the car window.
One woman handed Graham a bag full of cylindrical objects wrapped in plastic and then leaned in the window and gave them a long blast of information about rolling out the dough and brushing it with butter and afterward sprinkling each individual roll with egg wash and then a little pearl sugar or possibly almonds unless that was a danger due to nut allergies, which schools were way too paranoid about in her opinion.
Graham thanked her and rolled up the window.
Julio pulled the car back into traffic. “Do you remember one word of the shit that woman said?” he asked Graham.
“No,” Graham admitted.
“Shit,” said Julio. (He used the word shit all the time, Graham had noticed: as a noun, as an adjective, as an interjection, and sometimes just as a sort of filler, where another person might take a breath.) “I feel like my brain can’t hold one more piece of information about United Nations Day. It’s like my head’s full. I hear shit but I can’t absorb it.”
Graham had been unable to absorb any information for three weeks now, ever since the credit card finding. Julio was right; his head was full.
Julio continued. “You know, in the beginning, I cared about all this shit Audra said. I was concerned that nobody would work in the China Room even though one out of every four people in the world is Chinese or whatever. I thought it was terrible that the India Room wouldn’t acknowledge the Pakistan Room. I got upset when the bunting for the cafeteria was fifty feet too short. Bunting? I don’t even know what that shit is. But I cared because Audra cared.”
“I know—” Graham started to say, but Julio was too worked up.
“Now she talks and I don’t hear it,” he said. “It’s like I can’t hear it. It’s like there’s a limit to how much any one person can hear about United Nations Day and I’m there.”
“I think I reached it three or four United Nations Days ago,” Graham said.
“Audra says she’s going to be the happiest person on the planet when United Nations Day is over,” Julio said, “but she’s not. She’s going to be the second-happiest person, because the happiest person is going to be me— Oh, look, there she is.”
They were only a few blocks from home now and there was Audra, standing in front of the flower stand with Matthew. Audra was pointing at one bunch of flowers and then another and asking Matthew something. (Probably she wanted his opinion; she could never understand that men don’t have opinions on flowers.)
She was wearing her short swingy green coat and a little green beret, and just the ends of her hair curled from beneath it. Julio and Graham were stuck at a light so they watched as Audra finally decided on both bunches of flowers. She tucked them under one arm and took Matthew’s hand and began walking. Their clasped hands swung easily between them.
Julio blew out a breath. “A fine, classy lady,” he said.
And there was a little pause, a little space, where Graham was supposed to say “Yes, a very fine lady.” But he didn’t.
On the last Friday of every month, Graham and Olivia ordered Chinese food for lunch and ate it in Graham’s office.
Graham was fairly sure that Olivia looked forward to it—she always reminded him on Thursday nights, saying, “Tomorrow’s our lunch!” But sometimes he wondered if Olivia viewed their lunches as a form of community service. Perhaps she thought she was having lunch with some sort of shut-in. (It never pays to overestimate yourself.)
Today they had sesame noodles and shredded pork with snow cabbage and sliced beef with black bean sauce. Graham always ordered; he was trying to expand Olivia’s palate. She’d told him that before she came to work for him, the only Chinese food she’d ever had were egg rolls and sweet-and-sour chicken, and she’d only had that once at a restaurant in her hometown. (Graham did not want to even think about how bad Chinese food in Kentucky must be.)
Now Olivia was curled in the chair across from Graham’s desk, her feet tucked under her. She was wearing a black skirt and a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar and looked about eight years old. She ate rice dreamily, grain by grain with her chopsticks. “I love Chinese rice,” she said. “Whenever I make rice at home, it burns and we have to throw out the pan.”
It was news to Graham that Olivia ever tried to cook anything at home and he felt mildly encouraged for her future. “Just set a timer,” he said. “Then you won’t forget about it.”
“I guess,” she said, still dreamy. “But I wish there was, like, a machine that cooked the rice for you, like a coffeemaker makes coffee.”
“There is.”
Olivia looked confused. “There is what?”
“A machine that cooks rice,” Graham said. “It’s called a rice cooker.”
“What—you’re saying it really exists?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes were very round. “Where can I get one? Do I have to go to Chinatown?”
“Oh, no,” Graham said soothingly. “I’m sure you can get one in any department store.”
Olivia looked worried. “Will you write down the name of it?”
“I’ll tell you what,” Graham said. “I have an extra one. I’ll bring it in on Monday and give it to you.”
It wasn’t true that he had an extra one, but he did have one he hardly ever used. In fact, he could picture it, sitting in its box at home in a high cupboard that was hard to reach. He could see in his mind the thick layer of greasy dust that seemed to collect on all seldom-used kitchen utensils. He would give it to Olivia, and she and her roommate would eat rice all the time for a month and then she, too, would probably put it in a cupboard and maybe it would follow Olivia on a few of her moves, or maybe she would forget about it and it would remain in her kitchen for the next occupants. It made Graham feel, all at once, very sorry for the rice cooker, for anything that got left behind.
It was really just amazing the way life kept grinding forward, demanding things of him. He had to get up and go to work and earn a living and cook dinner and be a parent, all on days when he didn’t know if he could manage to brush his teeth. And he had to take Matthew to Origami—some special meeting where Matthew’s club was joining forces with another origami club. (Graham had gathered that there was bad blood between the two clubs—some sort of turf war over who could and who could not shop at a certain paper-supply store in the West Village—but evidently they had all moved past it.)
“Do you think it’s safe just to drop him off?” he asked Audra in the kitchen as he shrugged into his coat. “What if these other men are child predators?”
“Oh, I’m sure they’re not child predators,” Audra said, in her maddeningly calm way. She was paging through an Italian cookbook.
“Why wouldn’t they be?” Graham asked. (Sometimes, they did accidentally drift into conversation.)
“Well, because think how much trouble it would be for a child predator to learn to fold that Tadashi Mori Dragon—”
“Leviathan,” Matthew corrected from the hallway.
“Leviathan,” Audra said. Then she lowered her voice. “Why does he always listen when we don’t want him to and never when we do? Anyway, the Leviathan has about five hundred folds and they can all do it by memory and I don’t think a child predator would go to so much trouble. I think he’d just go out and buy an Xbox. Besides, Clayton will be there to look after him and bring Matthew home.”
Clayton! If there was someone of more questionable emotional maturity and moral fortitude, Graham couldn’t think who it was.
But Matthew called from the door, “We’re going to be late if we don’t go now,” so Graham left and he and Matthew took a cab down to the diner.
The other Origami Club members were already there—plus a few men Graham didn’t recognize, who must have been from the other club—clustered around a table.
“Hello, everyone,” Graham said.
They’d saved a chair for Matthew, who slid into it, already unzipping his backpack.
“You’re five minutes late,” one of the other members said—a large man wearing a camouflage jacket. Graham hadn’t seen this particular man before. He looked like he ought to be sitting in a duck blind somewhere.
“Well, traffic,” Graham said, shrugging.
“You should allow for traffic,” said the duck-blind man. (Graham had noticed that OCD was somewhat widespread in the origami crowd.) “Anyway, now that Matthew’s finally here, we can start. First we need to make fifty triangular units each.”
All the salt-and-pepper heads and Matthew’s brown-haired one bent over their stacks of origami paper.
“Um, goodbye,” Graham said, feeling like an idiot. He always expected to feel suave and sophisticated in front of the Origami Club and yet he never did. “You’re bringing him home, right, Clayton?”
Clayton looked up and gave an impatient nod and then looked down again.
Graham took another cab back home, thinking that before, he would have looked forward to a Sunday alone with Audra. Even if they were both working on separate projects, he would have enjoyed her presence in the apartment, would have looked forward to meeting her in the kitchen, would have persuaded her to come out with him somewhere. But now he didn’t want to go home and see her. He wouldn’t have gone home at all except that he couldn’t think of anywhere he did want to go.
Julio was on duty when he got back to the apartment building, nearly unrecognizable in his uniform. “Hi, Mr. Cavanaugh,” he said.
“Hey, Julio,” he said. “Should I count on you for dinner tonight?”
“Absolutely,” Julio answered. “I finish at seven.”
One of the other tenants, a man about Graham’s age, was reading the newspaper in the lobby and he peered at Graham over the top of it. He probably thought Julio was Graham’s rent boy. Well, let him think that. Graham was too dispirited to care.
He took the elevator up and opened the door to the apartment.
Audra’s voice reached him. Not the careful, solicitous voice she used with him now, but her normal voice, warm and full of laughter. “Tell me about it,” she said. Then there was a pause. “Well, I don’t know.”
She was on the phone. Graham paused. He left the door open behind him, and hoped no one would take the elevator up to this floor and cause the bell to ring. He stood and listened.
“Yes, me too,” Audra said. Pause. “I know, but what can we do?” Pause. “I hate it, too.” Pause. “I know.”
Graham tried very hard not to fill in the pauses. But then what was he standing here listening for, if not to do that?
And then Audra said, “What am I supposed to do with a hundred Ethiopian cookies when there’s no Ethiopia Room, though? I didn’t even know they had cookies in Ethiopia. I thought there was a perpetual famine there.”
Graham sighed and let the door bang shut. He felt a sudden longing, sharp enough to cause his chest to tighten. He wanted his life back.
They sat in the living room, making a cozy family picture: Graham in the armchair with a newspaper, Audra curled on the couch with a magazine, Matthew next her, Julio on the floor, tapping out texts on his phone.
“Can we all watch a movie together?” Matthew asked.
“Only if I pick the movie,” Audra said.
Matthew frowned. “What’s up with that shit?”
There was a pause, long enough for several blinks, and then Graham said to Julio, “If we get called in for some sort of school conference about this, you have to go,” and Audra laughed.
Graham had noticed that it was easier for him and Audra now to communicate by bouncing conversation off Julio. He wondered if they would become like Graham’s mother, who projected her feelings onto her elderly spaniel and said things like, “Bilbo doesn’t like it when people forget to hang up their coats.” Maybe Graham would say to Audra, Julio doesn’t know if he’ll ever feel the same about you.
“What’s up with that shit,” Audra said to Matthew, “is that after Spy Kids 4, I absolutely cannot watch another bad children’s movie. I feel like I was never the same afterward, like some vital part of my brain was destroyed.”
Ironic that she would say that when it was Graham who knew all about vital parts of yourself being destroyed—Graham who knew all about never being the same afterward. He couldn’t stop thinking about ironies, and before, and after.
“So what will we watch?” Matthew asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Audra said. “Something scary and inappropriate, probably. Maybe a disaster movie.”
“Will you watch with us?” Matthew said to Graham.
“Of course.”
“And Julio?”
“If he wants to.”
“I’d love to,” Julio said, not looking up from his phone.
Graham envied him suddenly. Julio could drift in and out, partaking of family life, and yet leading his own romantic life (he was frequently out all night). Julio could stay on the surface, where everything was fine, where the happy family watched movies and ate dinner and sat around in cozy clusters. Julio never had to look deeper and examine the foundation. That was Graham’s job.
Graham was standing at the kitchen counter, trimming the fat off the pork chops for dinner, when Audra appeared in the doorway. She was wearing jeans and a bright red flannel shirt that he’d always liked.
“You’re going to think I’m a horrible person,” she said.
No, he wouldn’t think that. Or maybe he thought that already.
“But someone just called to say she was bringing two hundred pork sausages for the England Room, but the England Room already has tons of food. Do you think anyone will notice if I put the sausages in the German Room and call them wurst? Because the German Room hardly has any food at all.”
Graham decided to cut up the pineapple. It was nice and noisy and required lots of attention. “No, I’m sure no one would notice,” he said.
“Graham—” Audra began, and then stopped.
He kept cutting the skin off the sides of the pineapple, concentrating on making the knife follow the curve. He could tell she was still standing in the doorway.
But when he finished with the pineapple and looked up at her, she had already turned to go, her shirt leaving an afterimage of red that hurt his eyes.
Graham and Julio were assembling an IKEA bookcase for Matthew’s room.
“Shit,” said Julio. “I think it’d be easier to build one, from scratch, with no instructions, than to follow these.”
They both squinted at the instructions spread out on the floor between them, along with the little plastic bags of screws and bolts, and those maddening Allen wrenches.
Graham had grown very fond of Julio, although he knew better than to get too attached to houseguests, which he and Audra seemed to have perpetually. Julio was moving back to his apartment next week.
“Well,” Graham said, “we could just wait until Audra and Matthew get back and then have Matthew put it together. He’ll take one look at the instructions and just know.”
“Yeah, I remember he fixed Mrs. Allman’s dryer down on Four,” Julio said.
“Before we had Matthew to do this,” Graham said, “I used to tell Audra that I would divorce her if she brought home another piece of flat-pack furniture.”
And then he wished he hadn’t said that because it made him think of the time when marital troubles were something they laughed at, nothing to do with them.
He realized Julio was watching him closely. “But you don’t want to do that—divorce her,” he said. “You and Audra, you’re good together.”
“You don’t understand,” Graham said flatly.
“Oh, I understand enough,” Julio said. “I know that when you two sit on the couch, you leave enough space for, like, an invisible person to sit between you. I know that when we watch some shit on TV and one of the characters is having an affair, you grab hold of the arms of the chair like you’re an astronaut in liftoff. I see Audra walking around looking like a dog just before someone shouts at it. I know what’s going on.”
“Well, then,” Graham said, annoyed, “you know how I feel.” But Julio didn’t know how he felt. Julio couldn’t imagine the effort it took just to carry on this conversation.
“But that shit doesn’t mean anything,” Julio said. He saw the startled look Graham gave him and went on. “I mean, I know it means everything but it doesn’t really mean anything.”
It was yet another irony, Graham thought, that something so inarticulate should make so much sense, and that it should turn out that Julio would be the one to understand exactly how he felt.
The phone rang at six in the morning on United Nations Day, with the news that some woman had burned ninety Swedish meatballs and didn’t know what to do.
“That’s easy,” Audra said. “Just buy frozen meatballs from the supermarket and we’ll stick toothpicks with little Swedish flags in them and no one will ever know any different.”
She hung up and said to Graham, “Honestly, do you think people bother Ban Ki-moon with nonsense like that?” And she flounced off to take a shower.
A little while later she came into the kitchen, where Graham and Julio were sitting at the counter, drinking coffee. She was wearing jeans and a purple silk shirt and long dangly earrings. Her clothes were casual and yet she looked vaguely corporate. Graham supposed that was just her determined expression.
“Have you made Matthew’s lunch?” she asked abruptly. “Have you made sure he’s awake and started his breakfast?”
“Am I supposed to take Matthew to school today?” Graham asked.
“For God’s sake,” Audra said irritably. “Yes. I have been telling you for weeks that I was going to leave before seven today. Do you just sit there and think about porn while I talk?”
Now, why was it exciting to hear a pretty woman say the word porn, no matter what the context? Graham glanced at Julio and saw that his eyes had unfocused slightly, too. Evidently it was a common phenomenon.
“Okay,” Graham said finally. “I’ll get Matthew going.”
Audra and Julio packed up and called questions to each other while Graham made Matthew’s lunch.
He went into Matthew’s bedroom to wake him. “Hey, buddy, time to get up,” he said, poking Matthew’s sleeping form. He opened the curtains to let some light into the room and saw Audra and Julio on the sidewalk below, setting out for United Nations Day. Audra was walking ahead, carrying a single tray of cookies, while Julio followed, loaded down with bags and boxes in a way that reminded Graham of a Sherpa guide.
He felt very sorry for Julio, who had taken a day off work to help Audra, and then he experienced a rush of relief that he was able to feel something—anything—for another person at all.
Graham was already home from his office, pouring himself a glass of wine, when Audra got back. He heard the door open, and Audra sigh and dump her bags on the floor with a muffled clatter. He didn’t call to her.
She walked past the kitchen into the bedroom. Graham followed, still holding the bottle of wine and the glass.
“How was it?” he asked.
“It was horrible,” she said. She looked tired. The purple silk shirt was rumpled and the auburn highlights in her hair seemed to draw all the color up and out of her face.
Graham poured wine into the glass he was holding and handed it to her. She drank it in one long swallow and handed the glass back to him. He understood that she wasn’t giving him the glass because she was finished with it. He refilled it and gave it to her again, and then he sat on the bed to watch her.
“The Irish storyteller ate the cream tea that was on display in the England Room when no one was looking, and the England Room got all upset and demanded an apology. I’m sure if it had been anyone but someone from the Ireland Room, they wouldn’t have cared.”
Audra sipped her wine while she stood on one foot and then the other removing her boots. “Julio took Matthew out for pizza but I didn’t want to go. Pizza only reminded me of the Italy Room. I want to eat something tonight that has no cultural associations whatsoever.”
Was that possible? Graham felt a slight stirring of interest. Almost all food has cultural associations. What could they have? Not hamburgers or pasta or chili or quiche. Baked potatoes? Too Irish. Maybe scrambled eggs.
She came and sat by him on the bed.
“Still, it’s over,” she said, stretching her legs and wiggling her toes, “and I haven’t been so happy since, well, right about this time last year when United Nations Day was over.”
Last year! This time last year, he had been happy. This time last year, none of this had happened, he hadn’t even been suspicious, he had been living life just as he wanted to.
“Lorelei says she doesn’t want to hear about United Nations Day ever again,” Audra said. “She says no matter how long or short the rest of our friendship turns out to be, it’s off-limits, which I think is so unfair. It’s like when I told Matthew I didn’t want to hear any more about double rabbit-ear folds and now he looks so guilty when he brings it up, or when you—when you said you didn’t want to know any details. Everywhere conversations are being aborted.”
She sighed on the last word, making her sound like a pro-life person describing a very sad truth. And yet, he knew Audra did genuinely feel the loss of these conversations, of any conversation that she didn’t get to have. (She often claimed to regret not getting the phone number of a very nice woman she sat next to on a bus when Matthew was a newborn.)
“Do you really want to tell me the details?” Graham asked. He was not sure what he would do if she said yes.
“Oh, Graham,” Audra said suddenly, putting her hand on his arm. “I just want you to love me again.”
Well, love. Of course he loved her. He didn’t know if he could forgive her, or trust her, or go on living with her. But he still loved her. He couldn’t help it.
“I do,” Graham said. But it came out impatiently: I do, with so much emphasis on the second word that it sounded like it had two or three o’s. He swallowed and tried again. “I do.” That was better, but he said it again anyway. And again. Until he got it right.