The problem with so much makeup sex, Graham thought, was that sometimes it led to a makeup baby. At least that’s what Audra said. She said she was almost certain. She said she’d walked past a hot dog vendor and the smell made her want to throw up and that meant definitely. But then again she said maybe not, because the other two times she’d been pregnant, she’d had a sexy dream about Anthony Hopkins very early on and she hadn’t had the dream yet. (Graham trusted this person to manage birth control; sometimes he shocked even himself.)
He was standing at the kitchen counter, pouring himself a glass of wine and struggling to comprehend what she’d said—trying to gather up her sentences like someone trying to gather up the loops of a garden hose—when she called out, “Matthew! Be sure to pack long underwear!”
How could she think of something as mundane as long underwear when they may actually be expecting another child? Was her mind that compartmentalized? What about the compartment that monitored the birth control? Perhaps she had been thinking about long underwear or frozen burritos when she should have been concentrating on putting her diaphragm in correctly.
It was the last day before spring break and Matthew was leaving for sleepaway camp—a unique sleepaway camp where all the kids had special needs, all the kids were like Matthew. And apparently, at this camp, Matthew would learn to love hiking and swimming and canoeing (which were all things he did not care for), and learn not to mind mosquitoes and wasps and mud between his toes and freezing cold water and being away from his family (which were all things he minded a lot). This was what everyone said. Other kids from Matthew’s school were going, and Matthew had wanted to go, too. So why was Graham so scared, so certain that Matthew would be the camp’s first failure?
And then the phone rang and it was Mr. Sears, the principal of Matthew’s school. Mr. Sears was calling, he said, to tell them that Matthew and another boy had used a school computer to access porn.
The evening was off to a very poor start, in Graham’s opinion.
“The other boy almost certainly was Derek Rottweiler,” Audra said.
It almost certainly was. Matthew’s new best friend was a sly, feral child named Derek Rothmuller but whom everyone, including Matthew, called Derek Rottweiler. He was a sweet-looking child with a heart-shaped face and curly black hair, but his eyes were like lasers, constantly scanning for trouble. He was the worst-behaved student in the school, a constant discipline problem, and his own parents had advised Audra to put her purse in a dresser drawer when Derek came over. And yet, Graham and Audra welcomed him into their home and tried to feel fond of him. Maybe other parents had the luxury of turning away their children’s friends, of telling their children to look for more suitable peers, but Graham and Audra did not. They took what they could get.
“What did Mr. Sears say, exactly?” Audra asked.
“Just that Matthew and another boy had used the computer in the school computer lab and later the computer-science teacher checked the history and found they’d been looking at porn.”
“Matthew, though?” Audra said. “Our Matthew?”
It was easy to believe that Derek Rottweiler would look at porn on a school computer, or on any computer at all. But not Matthew, their good boy, their sweet handsome well-behaved son. Why, last year, when the teacher had implemented a system where each day every student was assigned a color based on behavior—green, blue, yellow, orange, or red (just like the original Homeland Security System)—Matthew had never moved off green, not one single time. (Derek Rottweiler, it almost went without saying, shot straight to red on the first day of school and stayed there, the sixth-grade discipline equivalent of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.) Matthew was the opposite of disruptive. Matthew had beautiful manners and the gentlest nature—everyone said so.
But when they called Matthew out to the living room for a family meeting, he looked alarmed (which was normal—he hated change of any kind and always feared that family meetings were called to announce a move or a new school), but he also looked guilty.
“What is this meeting about?” he asked.
“Well,” Graham said, and then found he didn’t know quite how to continue. “It’s about watching porn.”
“What’s porn?” Matthew asked. For a moment Graham thought Matthew was being sarcastic, but he should have known better. Matthew was never sarcastic. He actually didn’t know.
“Pictures or movies of people having sex,” Audra said.
And then it was clear that Matthew did know; he just hadn’t known the term. Remorse and shame swamped his small face.
“I don’t do that,” he said. “And I especially didn’t do it today in my room between four-thirty and five.”
Graham felt his heart twist. Matthew was so guileless, so defenseless against the world.
“Well,” he said slowly, “be that as it may, Mr. Sears called and said that you and another boy had been using the school computer to look at porn, which is against the rules.”
“There’s nothing wrong with porn,” Audra said. (Immediately Graham imagined Matthew repeating that to the school guidance counselor.) “It can actually be very, sort of, nice, and enjoyable sometimes. Relaxing, even. It’s just that we want you to wait until you’re a little older.”
“How much older?” Matthew asked.
“Twenty,” Audra said. “No—thirty.”
Graham had the feeling this conversation was so far off track that they couldn’t see the rails anymore. “At any rate,” he said deliberately, “the point is that you and Derek broke a school rule and there will undoubtedly be consequences. Mr. Sears is trying to decide now what your punishment will be.”
Graham wondered why Mr. Sears hadn’t just told them what the punishment would be. Didn’t the school have a policy in effect? Were they supposed to stress about that all through spring break? What if Matthew got expelled?
Matthew went back to his room and Audra slid down on the couch until her head was resting against the back of it. “I feel like this is some sort of cosmic payback,” she said. “Just last week, Derek Rottweiler was over for a playdate and they were in Matthew’s room and I sat in the kitchen and felt all superior. I thought they were watching Robert Lang’s TED Talk on origami! I sat there and thought, Well, other mothers may have to worry about sex and drugs and alcohol, but not me. My son is in there improving his mind. I actually thought that, Graham! Those very words!”
“Well,” Graham said, “he has watched that TED Talk—”
“I haven’t felt so—so ridiculous since that time I worked the PTA bake sale with Penny Fitzgerald and I said, ‘Uh-oh, some creepy man with an awful mustache is watching us from that car over there,’ and she said, ‘That’s my husband.’ ”
Audra slid even lower on the couch. Soon she’d be sitting on the floor. “And now after all this I can’t even have a beer because it might be bad for the baby,” she said.
Baby! Twenty minutes ago she had said she wasn’t even sure she was pregnant and now it was a baby! Did she not understand what that word did to Graham—how it wrenched him?
Matthew left for camp the next morning. He stood in the hallway by the door with Graham’s huge old backpack on his shoulders. Was there any sight more heartbreaking than a small boy with a big backpack? Well, yes, of course, there was. Think of the photos of victims of the Nepal earthquake, of the starving children in South Sudan. But those weren’t the same. Those photos made you sad for a little while, but they didn’t make you want to run out on the balcony and drop to your knees, promising God anything if only He will protect your child from bullying and motion sickness.
Audra was standing next to Matthew, wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, jingling her car keys and sipping her coffee, just like this was a normal morning. Graham hugged Matthew goodbye, and then Audra and Matthew were both out the door, gone from his protection, out in the big bad world. Graham could not shake the feeling that the next time he saw Matthew, Matthew would be in tears.
Depressed, Graham got a cup of coffee for himself and went into his study to work. An hour later, Audra leaned around the doorjamb. “Matthew went off on the bus so happily!” she said. “He was sitting by Derek Rottweiler. Now I’m going to call Dr. Medowski and see if I can have a pregnancy test this early.”
She liked to do that—announce she was going to do something, then do it, then come back and tell him about it. It was as though their lives were being televised, with a lot of buildup and recap, like the Academy Awards or election results.
“Okay,” Graham said.
He heard her walking around the living room and the small beeps as she dialed her phone. “Oh, hello,” he heard her say. “This is Audra Daltry. Can I speak to Dr. Medowski?”
She must have been pacing because her voice grew fainter and then indecipherable as she moved away from him and then louder as she moved back and crossed the doorway of his study again.
“I know I should have gotten up and taken out my diaphragm and used more contraceptive gel,” she was saying. “But Graham was so eager, and I didn’t want to break the mood. Also, I sort of thought, my eggs are so old and his sperm is probably pretty slow by now—it just seemed so unlikely!”
Graham’s face was suddenly scorching, as though he had thrust his head through the trapdoor of a smokehouse. He could not have been more embarrassed if he’d appeared naked in front of the Origami Club.
Relax, he told himself. Audra was speaking to her gynecologist. It was probably nothing the man hadn’t heard before.
“So I knew at the moment that it was fairly unwise,” Audra said. “But I thought everything would probably be just fine.”
That was pretty much her theory of life, Graham thought—this belief that everything would be just fine. He wondered how often that actually turned out to be true for her. He would guess at most—at most—half the time.
Audra paced out of his hearing again, and he tried perfunctorily to compose an email. But he was listening for her footsteps, and sure enough, she came back along the hall and into his study.
“You won’t believe this,” she said, collapsing into a leather armchair, “but they’re out of the office! Until Thursday! Because of Easter! I wanted to say, ‘You think people don’t have pregnancy scares on major holidays? You think you can just close up shop and leave all your patients sweating and anxious?’ ”
Graham frowned. “So you didn’t speak to Dr. Medowski?”
“No, I just told you,” she said impatiently. “The office was closed.”
“So who were you talking to?”
“Some woman at the answering service,” Audra said.
The answering service! Graham’s face felt hot again.
“She said Dr. Medowski is playing golf in Florida, which I can’t help feeling is sort of frivolous, but I guess he couldn’t know I was suddenly going to need him,” Audra said, and she sighed.
Graham studied her. If she really was pregnant, it agreed with her. She looked pretty—pink-cheeked and bright-eyed, her wavy auburn hair like a hint of autumn color. He remembered suddenly how she’d looked in the months after Matthew was born. Her face had been thin, with too-prominent cheekbones, and her hair had grown dry and brittle, as though motherhood were draining her of all vitality.
“Lorelei says that the doctor would probably tell me to wait anyway,” Audra said.
“Lorelei knows, too?” Graham asked.
“Yes, I stopped by her apartment on my way back from taking Matthew to the bus,” Audra said. “We talked about how terrible it is that you spend so much of your life hoping you’re not pregnant. Like this time in college when Lorelei had a one-night stand with the guy who lived in the apartment below us. He was handsome but he had this very distinct unibrow. Lorelei and I used to call him Bert because of that. So, anyway, after the one-night stand, Lorelei said she had these very vivid dreams about being in a delivery room and the doctor holding up a baby with Bert brows. And even after she knew she wasn’t pregnant, she would have, not nightmares, I guess—more like bad daydreams—where she took little Bert home to her family and they were all like ‘But his eyebrows! Where did they come from?’ ”
Graham closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the chair. He thought that, really, Journey was right: it just goes on and on and on and on.
Graham had been developing a theory lately that the parents of kids with Asperger’s also had Asperger’s, only less pronounced. A milder Asperger’s. The seeds of Asperger’s. And he’d certainly met enough parents of special-needs kids to know.
Of all the dozens of special-needs kids’ parents he knew, one parent of every couple always seemed a bit odd, a bit eccentric, a bit Aspergery. One parent would be unable to pick up on social signals—say, for instance, not understanding that Graham’s putting on his pajamas and brushing his teeth was a signal the evening was drawing to a close and they should go home. The father of a friend of Matthew’s named Lucas used to actually follow Graham and Audra out to their car and keep talking while they drove away. Graham had always been worried about running over the man’s foot. Another man had seemed unable to process that he and Graham drove the same make and model of car but that Graham’s was a different color. “It’s not blue?” the man had said more than once. “I want it to be blue, like mine.”
One woman, the mother of a small boy named Jack, used to respond to anything other than a direct question by saying, “Well, that’s news to me.” You could say “I’m going to pick up Matthew at six” or “Jack ate some cupcakes”—it didn’t matter. She would say, “Well, that’s news to me.” The first time she did it, Graham thought maybe Jack wasn’t supposed to eat cupcakes, or maybe Jack didn’t like cupcakes as a rule, but it quickly became clear that this was her all-purpose response to any remark. Graham wondered why she’d settled on that particular statement, because it didn’t seem like it would apply to all that many situations. Perhaps it had started as some sort of sports-related thing with her husband: “The Giants are on tonight.” “Well, that’s news to me.” “The Mets won!” “Well, that’s news to me.”
And food! Dear God. Graham had never met such finicky adults. The kids, sure, he expected that—nothing spicy or exotic or oddly textured went over well with children. But the parents were just as bad, and full of exacting standards—steak was supposed to be medium-rare, pasta was supposed to be spaghetti, chicken was supposed to be white meat, ice cream was supposed to be vanilla. “Soup is supposed to be hot,” one man had said accusingly when Graham served gazpacho. (That was back in the early days, before he truly appreciated the magnitude of the problem—back when he still experimented and hoped for the best.)
One woman had said, “This salad has so many vegetables!” in a soft, startled voice, and Graham had thought at the time that she meant it had too many greens and not enough delicious, high-calorie things like bacon and candied walnuts. But looking back on it now, he thought it was more likely she meant it had too many ingredients. She probably wanted just two: iceberg lettuce and beefsteak tomatoes.
They didn’t like too many ingredients, these parents of Matthew’s friends, or even too many dishes to choose from. And often, he’d noticed, they ate their meals in a certain order—all the meat, then all the starch, then all the vegetables. Every single one of them left the vegetables for last, like overgrown children. They didn’t like the different foods to mingle on their plates, and they didn’t seem to like meat to be carved at the table, or sauce, or gravy, and there was a near-universal distrust of salad dressing.
Once they had the parents of Matthew’s friend Carolyn over and Carolyn’s mother had come up to Graham in the kitchen afterward as he was stacking plates in the sink and thanked him for making lasagna. “It was such a treat!” she’d said in a low voice. “Colin doesn’t like me to make anything but meat and potatoes.”
Graham was startled. “What, all the time? No exceptions?”
“Not really,” she said. “I mean, on Fridays we have hamburgers and French fries, but the other nights, it has to be meat and potatoes.”
How did she manage that? Were there six different combinations of meat and potatoes? He began thinking aloud. “Steak and baked potatoes, pork chops and mashed potatoes…”
The woman beamed. “Exactly! And one night I make ham with potatoes au gratin.”
“Pot roast,” Graham said thoughtfully.
“With roasted potatoes,” she finished helpfully.
“Does he eat chicken?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” she said. “Roast chicken.” She put enough emphasis on the word roast to make Graham sure that it was roast chicken only, nothing fried or breaded or sautéed. “With hash browns.”
“And what about the seventh night?” Graham asked.
“Cottage pie.”
Well, wasn’t she the sneaky one with that cottage pie! He hadn’t thought of that.
“And that’s it?” he said. “No pasta or rice or pizza?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “Colin is very old-fashioned.”
Old-fashioned? Unacceptably rigid was more like it, Graham thought. Difficult. Impossible. Life without pasta or pizza? Who could live like that? Had she known it when she married him? Were there compensations? (He could hear Colin and Audra talking in the dining room and Colin was saying something about how the law of unintended consequences was affecting gas prices, so if there were compensations, they weren’t readily apparent.)
Now—especially now, when Audra might be pregnant—Graham began to wonder with more and more frequency where he and Audra fit on this sliding scale of parental Asperger’s. He didn’t have a problem with food, and Audra would eat anything—literally anything, it seemed. Twinkies, Spam, pork rolls, beef jerky, Lucky Charms, Hot Pockets, tapioca. He wondered sometimes if her genes had been spliced with a goat’s. And as far as he could tell, they had good social skills. Why, Audra was the most social person he had ever known.
But still. But still. There were other family members’ genes to consider. Graham’s uncle, for instance, who was so scandalized by the price of food that his wife used to stop by the side of the road on her way home from the supermarket and scrape the price tags off all the groceries to prevent him from going berserk. That same uncle had very rigorous criteria when it came to how the carpet should be vacuumed. “In an expanding wave pattern!” he used to say. “Like a seashell! Is that too much to ask?” (Well, yes, it is.) And Audra had a cousin who could not understand or recognize even the most common idioms. You could say, “It’s raining cats and dogs,” and he’d look out the window with a slightly fearful expression. And Graham’s own cousin with the miniature-train collection that no one else was allowed to touch. And Audra’s uncle with the fear of acorns. The great-grandmother with the alphabetized linen closet. The aunt—
It really did not bear thinking about, all the strange relatives, all those peculiar genes floating around in their gene pool. But Graham could not seem to stop.
“I feel so bad for the baby,” Audra said to Graham. “It’s going to have such old parents.”
“Bad for the baby?” Graham said. “What about me? I’ll be seventy-five by the time the baby graduates high school.”
Another baby? Impossible. Really impossible.
“If I am pregnant,” Audra continued, “the first thing we’re going to do is invest in a Bugaboo stroller. Remember that awful stroller we had when Matthew was a baby? The one that was, like, two inches too wide to fit through any doorway? And I would have to lift him out and hold him and then try to get the stroller to snap shut with one hand? Because it was supposed to just collapse if you pressed this one button, but I could never do it. I tell you, that is my worst memory of Matthew’s babyhood, standing there in doorways, shaking this stupid stroller while people tried to get past me.”
That was her worst memory of Matthew’s babyhood? What about the sleep deprivation? Graham could remember realizing that if they had ten minutes, he and Audra ate something; if they had twenty minutes, they slept. He remembered seeing Audra walk down the hall toward the baby’s room in the very early morning, trailing her hand along the wall. At first he thought it was to help her find her way in the dark—then he realized that it was already light. She was touching the wall to help her stay upright.
From his earliest days, Matthew awoke with the birds. Or the neighbors. Or the traffic. Or the whine of the elevator. Nothing, it seemed, could induce him to sleep beyond 5:00 a.m. Not blackout curtains, not a white-noise machine, not even the special sound-absorbing cork they used to line the walls of his nursery. The early rising lasted through infancy, through babyhood, through the toddler years. Graham would look at the clock every morning as soon as he heard Matthew’s cries and do a sort of internal calibration—4:45 or later meant a good day, a survivable one. By the time Matthew was three years old, Graham and Audra were so desperate for sleep that they would bring Matthew into their bed and try to snuggle him down between them, to lull him with their body heat and slow breathing. Occasionally this would work and Matthew would drift back to sleep and then inevitably assume the dreaded starfish position in the middle of the bed, a little hand flung into each of their faces, a little foot poking into each of their hips.
But more often Matthew was just awake for the day and would squirm and wiggle and toss around until Graham felt like he was trying to sleep next to a bag of something that clattered, like a bag of aluminum cans. On those days, Graham would force himself out of bed and entice Matthew to the kitchen for breakfast while he drank coffee with an extra shot of espresso in it. And then they would leave the apartment together in the early morning and Graham would push Matthew in the stroller to the playground on Ninety-sixth Street, usually stopping at Starbucks for another coffee. (The thought of Matthew’s babyhood made Graham’s mouth feel sour with the heavy saliva left over from so much coffee drinking, made his head feel light with remembered caffeine.) Sometimes they skipped the playground and pushed on to the pond by the boathouse, where they could rest and have animal crackers or Cheerios or vanilla wafers—that was another thing about Matthew’s early childhood: crumbs everywhere, always, as inescapable as sand in the desert—before Graham would begin the long walk home. They had the park to themselves at that time in the morning—almost too much to themselves; Graham worried about muggers sometimes—but one day as they sat by the pond, another father came along. He was older than Graham and his son was older, too, a boy in his mid-twenties with Down syndrome. They sat on a bench near Graham and Matthew, and Graham felt moved by a spirit of shared suffering to offer small talk.
“Nothing like an early morning, is there?” he said to the man.
The man grunted. “We’re here a lot,” he said. He looked at his watch. “Come on, Timmy.”
Graham was startled. It has been his experience that adults on outings with children liked conversation with other adults—loved it, craved it, would rustle up a conversation based on the most artificial and flimsy connection. Where’d you get that T-shirt? You don’t have a Band-Aid in your bag, do you? Do you have four quarters for a dollar?
The man and Timmy moved off, having stayed only a moment. Graham realized that Timmy was even older than he’d first assumed, maybe in his thirties. How many years, how many decades, had Timmy’s father been bringing him here, on made-up outings, in the early morning? No wonder he was cranky and antisocial. He must be exhausted. And for him, there was no end in sight. At least for Graham, the end was in sight. Matthew would mature, perhaps more slowly than other children, and certainly more slowly than he and Audra might desire, but he’d get there. He would not always awaken before first light, and even if he did, he would eventually be able to make his own breakfast and get dressed and entertain himself. In fact, at age eleven, Matthew could already do those things. (Pretty much. If he didn’t touch the stove.)
It would be unbelievably—cruelly—frustrating to start all over again. It would be like finding your own footprints while lost in the jungle and realizing you had been walking in circles.
Julio came over for dinner the next night, and while Graham was pouring him a beer, Audra came rustling out of the bedroom and said, “Julio! How are you? Did Graham tell you I might be pregnant?”
One of the very best things about Julio was that he was nearly impossible to embarrass. Graham supposed that came from being a doorman.
“Well, now, no, he didn’t,” Julio said, leaning forward to accept Audra’s hug. “Congratulations!”
“It’s not for certain,” Audra said. “Especially since I haven’t had my Anthony Hopkins dream, but—” She paused suddenly. “Where is Sarita? Why didn’t you bring her?”
Julio sighed. “We broke up.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that,” Audra said, putting a hand on Julio’s arm. “Was it because she refused to go to your sister’s wedding?”
“What?” Julio looked very startled. “My sister’s wedding? No.”
“Then why did you break up?” Audra asked.
“She said we wanted different things and that she—” Julio stopped. “Can we just go back to what you said before? About my sister’s wedding? Because Sarita said she had conjunctivitis that weekend. She said her eyes were redder than stop signs! And now you’re saying she just plain didn’t want to go?”
“Well, she mentioned some detail about your mother not liking that Sarita took such long baths,” Audra said. “And Sarita said she didn’t like people standing outside the bathroom door and saying in loud voices, ‘I sure hope Julio makes a good salary to pay the hot water bill. Must be nice to lie in the tub while other folks set the table and chop the vegetables!’ Sarita said baths are her way of relaxing and she didn’t deserve to be criticized. Sarita said not every woman relaxes by drinking an entire pitcher of sangria at four o’clock in the afternoon the way your mother does.”
Julio was looking positively alarmed.
“But I could be wrong,” Audra added hastily. “Maybe I’m thinking of someone else.”
Hear those hoofbeats? Graham thought. Those are the horses running away after you forgot to lock the barn door.
Graham was making dinner: pork tenderloin with herbed wild rice. No need to cater to the crazy whims of picky eaters tonight. Julio was a pleasure to cook for. He not only ate whatever you put in front of him but said it was the most delicious meal he’d had in a long time. This might even be true, because the doormen in their building seemed to eat take-out Chinese food all the time. If he’d lived in pioneer times, Graham sometimes thought, Julio would be the bachelor homesteader who came over for dinner in exchange for helping with the spring lambs.
Since there were no lambs needing to be born, Julio repaid them with gossip about the people in the building. Mrs. Mullen in 10E had her brother-in-law visiting and she wanted Julio to find out how long the brother-in-law was staying. “She told me, ‘Just ask him all natural-like. You know, inquire as to how long we’ll have the pleasure of his company, and then tell me what he says.’ ” Mr. Coltrane in 3D had sublet his apartment (something strictly prohibited by the building) and the subletter had left the windows open during a rainstorm and now there were mushrooms growing in the carpeting. Mrs. Begay in 9C had received a package labeled “Live Reptile.” Mrs. Salerno in 4A had gone on a monthlong bird-watching trip to the Pacific Northwest and her husband was having his girlfriend visit every night, telling the doormen it was his assistant bringing him important papers from the office.
“How do you know it’s even his girlfriend?” Audra asked. “Maybe it’s a hooker.”
“Oh, no—they’ve been going out for a while now,” Julio said. “Mr. Salerno also forgot a lot of important papers at work last fall while his wife was off looking at warblers in New Brunswick.”
After dinner, Audra said the baby was making her sleepy and if they didn’t mind, she would just go to bed.
Graham and Julio went up to the roof terrace with a bottle of port—it was warm for April. They pulled two chairs together, and Julio lit a cigarette while Graham poured the port into tumblers from the kitchen.
“How do you feel about the baby?” Julio asked once they were settled.
Exhausted, Graham could have said. Disheartened. Nearly hopeless at times.
“Nervous,” he said. “But it’s not for sure.”
“Kids are nice,” Julio said. He might have been talking about place mats, or tomatoes, or those sprinkles you put on ice cream.
Children were many things—heartbreaking and wonderful and worrisome—but Graham had never thought they were nice, exactly.
“Yes,” he said. “They are.”
He wished suddenly that he had more vices. Perhaps he should begin gambling or start abusing drugs. Even smoking, like Julio. Right now, Graham wanted desperately to be someone like Julio, who smoked cigarettes in the dark, the tips of them red as lipstick, hot as tears.
It was odd, how empty the apartment seemed without Matthew. And even odder that they had only the roughest idea of where he was (camp) and what he was doing (camp things).
Years and years before Apple had launched the iCloud—perhaps before they’d even thought of it—Graham had suspected that Audra had some version of it in her head. You could ask her any question about anyone’s schedule and her eyes would unfocus for a second (while she accessed the Audra-cloud) and then she would say, “Well, Carrie can’t pick Matthew up then because her boys have soccer on the North Meadow and it takes her over forty-five minutes to get home in rush hour,” or “Matthew has Science from 9:10 to 9:55 on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, but on Wednesday he has Computer Art, and on Fridays, they have assembly,” or “The dentist is open on alternate Saturdays but closed on Wednesday afternoons and the orthodontist is open on Wednesdays and also stays late on Thursdays.” She just knew it! And she could access it! Sometimes Graham felt selfish, being married to Audra. She was like a national resource, or a piece of farm machinery too valuable to be owned by just one family. At the very least, she should be co-oped.
But even Audra didn’t know Matthew’s schedule at camp, and neither of them knew how he was doing. Campers were not allowed to call home. The camp website said, rather euphemistically, that they found calling home “reduced morale.” Was Matthew homesick? Was he scared? Was he being bullied? Did he like the food? Could he sleep at night? Had he suffered from bug bites or poison ivy, had he burned his fingers roasting marshmallows? If so, had he cried in front of all the other kids? Could he keep up on the hikes? Did they go on hikes? Was he wearing a life jacket when they went canoeing? So many things could go wrong. It wrung Graham’s heart just to think about.
“No news is good news,” Audra insisted, and Graham supposed she was right. No school or camp ever called to tell you that your child was having a marvelous time and fitting in beautifully with his peers. No, Graham thought (not without a trace of bitterness), they only called with bad news. They only called to tell you that your child had cried in science lab when it was time to dissect worms, or that your child fell on the playground and screamed at the sight of his own blood, or that your child wasn’t making any friends. Then they couldn’t wait to get ahold of you.
But now Matthew might as well be on another planet. The only news they’d had came from Brenda Rottweiler. The camp had called her yesterday to say that Derek had flushed sweet potatoes down the staff toilets so that now the staff had to use the same smelly outhouses as the campers.
Graham and Audra had debated this news intensely, like Kremlinologists studying the parade lineup in Red Square. Evidently Matthew wasn’t involved because they hadn’t gotten a call. Did that mean Derek Rottweiler had abandoned Matthew, or did it mean only that Derek had acted alone? Did this mean the camp was so lacking in fun that the campers had to play pranks to amuse themselves? Was the camp so absent of discipline that the children were running wild like a pack of hyenas? So primitive in its amenities that the campers were striking back at the staff, in the manner of serfs raiding the castle?
Graham and Audra talked about it for nearly an hour, nearly a whole bag of peanut M&M’s (Audra said it might be a pregnancy craving), and in the end, they had nothing, except that Audra said she thought she might be in love with Derek Rottweiler.
Graham went to a diner near his office for a quick, solitary lunch, and there—right in front of him!—were Clayton and Manny, sitting in a booth together. When they saw Graham, they looked at each other with unmistakably guilty expressions. What were they guilty of? Dear God—were they lovers? Graham’s mind stepped around that thought the same way his body stepped around a puddle of vomit on the sidewalk.
They were both sitting on the same side of the booth nearest to the door.
“Hello,” Graham said.
“Hello,” they said nearly in chorus. Again, they exchanged that look. They were definitely hiding something.
“Would you like to join us?” Manny said, seeming to indicate that he was several rungs higher on the evolutionary ladder than Graham had suspected.
So Graham sat down across from them and struggled to think of something innocuous to say. “What are you guys up to?” he said, and then immediately regretted it.
Manny shot Clayton a long look and then Clayton blew out a breath and said, “We shouldn’t be meeting like this, but we’re discussing a new club member.”
“It’s supposed to be a club decision,” Manny added.
“We’re supposed to vote,” Clayton said.
“Those are the rules,” Manny said.
They were both looking at Graham challengingly, so he said gently, “But…?”
“But we’re very unsure about this new guy,” Clayton said. “So unsure about him that we decided to meet outside the club and discuss him.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Graham asked. “Does he belong to a gym or something?”
Clayton and Manny both burst into laughter.
“Good one,” said Manny, shaking his head slightly.
It occurred to Graham that this was the first time he had ever made either of them laugh, and he had no idea what he’d said that was funny.
“The main thing wrong with him,” Clayton said, apparently having decided to toss caution, or at least discretion, to the wind, “is that he speed-folds.”
“That makes sense,” Graham said, although it actually made no sense. Speed-folding? What was that?
Manny leaned forward. “And at the first meeting, Clayton here happened to mention an eight-petal flower fold and the guy’s look was totally blank! No idea! You can bet he’s never made anything other than a five-petal.”
“I see,” Graham said.
“Now, we don’t mind taking on someone with limited experience,” Clayton said. “Not if he’s serious-minded. Not if he wants to improve. But this guy. I get the feeling he’s—he’s—”
“Dabbling,” Manny finished.
“Exactly.” Clayton nodded. “Especially after what he said about origami sheep for Chinese New Year.”
“Well, of course,” Graham said.
He was beginning to have more sympathy for the woman who said Well, that’s news to me all the time. He was beginning to understand how that could happen. He wished Audra was here. Audra could converse with a statue. (In fact, once in the ER she had had a long talk with a man who turned out to have had a stroke and could only communicate by blinking.)
They struggled along for a while, with Manny and Clayton talking about origami and Graham saying “I understand” or “That sounds wise” or “Of course” whenever a response seemed called for. There was a brief bit of something you might call an actual conversation, if your standards were very low, when Clayton asked why Matthew wasn’t at the club meeting on Sunday.
“He’s at camp,” Graham said.
“Origami camp?” Manny asked, looking hopeful.
“No,” Graham said. “Just camp.” He wasn’t about to say special-needs camp. Not in front of these two. Not in front of anyone.
“What do they do at this camp?” Clayton asked suspiciously.
“Well, you know,” Graham said. “Hiking and campfires and stuff.”
“Oh, outdoor camp,” Clayton said.
“Yes, exactly.”
“I never cared for that myself,” Clayton said.
“Me, either,” Graham said, realizing it was true. Why had he sent his child off to do something he himself would have hated? (He kept forgetting that Matthew had wanted to go.)
They made it through lunch, just barely. Graham had the fish and chips, Clayton had a grilled cheese sandwich, and Manny had mashed potatoes with a side of cauliflower and a vanilla milk shake. Graham had forgotten that Manny only ate white foods off white plates. It seemed impossible to forget such a thing, but he had.
“We come here because they don’t insist on garnish,” Manny said. “It can ruin a whole meal for me if someone puts a little colored doodad on my plate.”
Afterward, Graham went back out on the street, feeling sad because he had liked the diner very much and now he knew he would never go there again, for fear of running into Manny and Clayton. This seemed to him sometimes to be the essence of aging: that the places and people you loved were ruined for you, or you ruined them for yourself, or they stopped serving the complimentary breadbasket, and before you knew it, you were left with nothing but memories.
But he wouldn’t go back and risk putting himself through another lunch where he felt like such an outsider. And then Graham felt even sadder than before, because he wondered suddenly if this was what life was like for Matthew all the time. Guessing at people’s meanings and relying on stock phrases to get you through? Knowing that you weren’t connecting but not knowing why, or how to fix it? He had read somewhere that people with Asperger’s had to work very hard to exist in this world, the normal social world, with all its complicated nuances. They preferred their own worlds, but Graham wanted Matthew to live in this world, with him.
“I’m finding the no-alcohol thing really hard,” Audra said that night. “And it’s only been three days.”
Graham admired her for avoiding alcohol before they even knew for certain that she was pregnant, but he couldn’t help noticing that even without alcohol, she got a little loopier around seven o’clock every evening. Perhaps she didn’t need alcohol anymore. Maybe she was so conditioned from years of happy hours that her brain was now spontaneously releasing some organic form of a cocktail at the same time every day.
Right now, for instance, she was sitting on the living room couch with him—her bare toes gripping the edge of the glass coffee table—and eating a bag of Cheetos while he drank a Scotch. She said the baby loved Cheetos. Apparently the baby had likes and dislikes now, perhaps even an opinion on Hillary Clinton.
Audra tossed her nearly empty Cheetos bag on the coffee table. “Cheetos are just delicious while you’re eating them,” she said. “But then you feel yucky afterward. Sort of like porn.” She frowned. “I feel like porn is becoming the underlying theme of our lives.”
Graham ignored that. “Do you ever worry,” he said slowly, “that another child would be like Matthew?”
Audra was licking orange dust off her fingers, but they weren’t getting any less orange. “Like Matthew in what way?”
Well, that was a good question. Because Matthew had a million sterling qualities—sweet, affectionate, brown-haired, dimpled, good at math, kind to animals, smelled faintly like maple syrup even though he sometimes went days without a bath. So why when Graham said “like Matthew,” had he only meant “with Asperger’s”?
“Well,” Graham said. “With the same learning differences and challenges.” Now it seemed he was speaking some sort of school missionese.
“Oh, I see what you mean,” Audra said. “No, I guess I don’t worry about that, because Matthew has always seemed to me like a little bit of an outlier. Like, if we had one hundred children, would Matthew represent the minority or the majority? I mean, if we had one hundred children, maybe sixty or seventy would be just like him in all sorts of ways. But I always thought Matthew would be Matthew, unique, and the other ninety-nine would be, I don’t know, sort of standard children. Like child actors from central casting. Not so special. I always feel like Matthew is the child we were meant to have. If anything, I worry that another baby won’t be enough like Matthew.”
They were so different, and Audra didn’t even know it. She didn’t know how often Graham had wished for a more standard son. She didn’t know that sometimes he thought a child actor from central casting would have suited him just fine.
It seemed that sleep deprivation was not the only thing Audra had forgotten. When she talked about the baby (that word again!), she only said things like, “I definitely wouldn’t get a bottle sanitizer this time,” or “Remember baby food? Remember that sort of liquefied ham?”
Liquefied ham! No, Graham didn’t remember that. He remembered Matthew as an easy but peculiar baby, slow to walk and even slower to talk, but smiley and sweet, obsessed even at an early age with the stroller’s wheels and lift-out puzzles and lining toy cars up in precise rows. But at about eighteen months the constant toddler meltdowns started—over nothing, very close to literally nothing. Taking a different route home or drying Matthew off with the wrong bath towel or missing the first thirty seconds of The Wiggles would cause Matthew to scream and kick and turn nearly geranium-colored with rage. Constant battles over getting him dressed. For one solid year Matthew had refused to wear anything other than a flimsy Spider-Man costume. Audra had even bought a second one, but Matthew could be satisfied only with the original, which grew thinner and limper and more faded as the months and months and months passed. Audra quickly washed it and dried it every night while Graham spun out bath time as long as possible. Surely Audra couldn’t have forgotten that! They had a photo album to prove it, an entire one in which Matthew wore nothing else. My son, Spidey.
The tantrums didn’t go away. The terrible twos seemed to have a magical stretching ability when it came to Matthew. They went on for years. Eruptions over milk served in anything other than the Buzz Lightyear sippy cup, over music that was too “tinkly,” over carpet that was too scratchy, over people who stood too close, over the smell of sunblock, the prospect of butter on biscuits, the sight of cheetahs in an animal documentary. The littlest thing could set Matthew off, and there seemed to be no way of calling him back from the land of the tantrum—in an instant, he would be flat on the floor, back arched, legs rigid, mouth a wide-open circle of angry scream. They would do anything to prevent it. Graham could remember once frantically Scotch-taping the last banana in the fruit bowl back into a banana peel so Matthew could eat it monkey-style. Graham’s hands had been shaking with desperation.
Matthew had woken from all naps in the foulest mood imaginable, yelling with outrage—over what? Graham always wondered. Being pulled back into the waking realm that seemed to so aggravate him? The only solution was to rush into the nursery at the first hint of Matthew beginning to stir and hand him a grape Popsicle. Grape was the only flavor he would eat—they threw away dozens, probably hundreds, of orange and yellow ones. They needed the freezer space for the purple ones. Once Matthew had a Popsicle, he would consent to be wrapped in a blanket and sit in Graham’s or Audra’s lap and be rocked and soothed, gently coaxed into the world again. It was an arduous process. Graham could remember being on vacation once with Matthew sleeping on the hotel room bed, he and Audra out on the balcony, shivering and drinking wine from paper cups because they dreaded the prospect of waking him. Surely, Graham had thought, not all parents lived like this.
Public places were the worst. Once Matthew had screamed so loudly and forcefully during a haircut that they’d been blacklisted from the salon—and it was a place that specialized in children’s haircuts! And at a supermarket one time Matthew had taken a big bite out of a doughnut with jam in the middle and you would have thought he had bitten into a caterpillar from the way he carried on. Other shoppers rushed over to help, but there was nothing to do except scoop Matthew up and carry him out to the car while he wailed like a siren. Oh, how they tried to tell themselves this was normal.
Preschool to Matthew had been like a blowtorch held to a bare foot. He had screamed all the way there, every day, and continued to scream while Graham gently pried Matthew’s fingers from the car seat and the doorframe and carried him into the school, where he handed him over to the sweet, saintlike teacher who ran the place. (It was months before Graham actually heard the woman’s voice—all he saw were her lips moving.) Matthew screamed in the teacher’s arms while Graham left, and the sound of his cries followed Graham out the door and back to the car and all the way to his office, it seemed.
Sometimes Matthew screamed all morning at preschool, although sometimes he calmed down for a while, until something else set him off—a glass breaking, another child using his pair of scissors, a smoke alarm beeping. When that happened, the teacher or one of the assistants would come out and wait to speak to Audra at pickup time—the other children waited inside and were released one at a time when their parents arrived. Audra had told Graham that once she had driven up and seen the teacher standing outside with Matthew and had wanted to keep going. “I thought, Has she seen me? If she hasn’t seen me, I could quick turn around and she’d never know. I could go to Starbucks and have a coffee and wait until I felt stronger.” Could Audra have forgotten that?
And then finally, when Matthew was four, they had taken him to an educational psychologist, someone who had told them gently but firmly that Matthew’s behavior was very similar to that of children with Asperger’s, and had outlined the ways in which Matthew’s symptoms fit the criteria for diagnosis. The doctor had talked about the psychological assessment, and the communications assessment, the long questionnaires filled out by Matthew’s teachers, and by Audra and Graham, too. Hundreds of questions on those behavior forms were boiled down to a few numbers, expressing Matthew’s profile in terms of what is typical for a four-year-old.
The doctor’s voice was soft and soothing and a little bit singsong. “As you can see,” he said, “Matthew’s score on the questionnaires for oversensitivity to stimulation ranked more than a full standard deviation above the average for children his age.” He pointed to the peak on the graph of Matthew’s scores. “His score for social development problems is also elevated, again by more than a standard deviation.”
Standard deviation! Graham was appalled. Was that what they were discussing here—statistics? And who’s to say that there isn’t a standard deviation from the standard deviation? Who was this doctor to say that because of standard deviation, Matthew stood firmly on the stark cracked-earth desert of Asperger’s, that he would never feel the long cool green shade of normal?
Graham had wanted to argue with the doctor. He had wanted to say, Go back and spend a little more time with him! I don’t think you know him well enough to be saying these things.
They had left the doctor’s office and Graham could still remember another couple sitting in the waiting room. He had looked at them, wondered if they were about to receive a similar diagnosis, if this was what the doctor did all day—broke devastating news to parents in his Mary-had-a-little-lamb voice?
In the elevator, Graham had put his arms around Audra and she had pressed her face against his chest and slipped her hands into his coat pockets. It had been years since she’d done that. “How are you feeling?” he’d asked softly.
She’d sighed and leaned against him. “Blacker than midnight,” she’d said.
Had Audra forgotten that day, too? Was that even possible?
They were going to have dinner with the Rottweilers. Audra had arranged it.
“This way if we end up in some sort of school conference, they’ll side with us,” Audra said. She had the shrewd, hard instincts of a good hunter.
And so on an evening when Graham could have been sitting in the comfort of his own house, drinking whisky and watching the news, he and Audra went to an Italian restaurant in midtown and met the Rottweilers.
Brenda Rottweiler was a petite woman with the same bright brown eyes as her son, and a halo of curly hair that looked like someone had drawn swirls with a brown crayon. She had a small, soft-looking mouth and an anxious expression. Jerry Rottweiler was a bearded man with very round rimless glasses. He looked something like a furry owl.
After they were seated and had ordered wine—“Just mineral water for me,” Audra said—Brenda leaned toward them and said, “Thank you so much for suggesting we get together. This has been the worst experience.”
“I know,” Audra said, giving Brenda her warmest smile.
“We checked Derek’s computer as soon as he left for camp,” Jerry said.
Audra sighed. “We did, too. We found a lot of porn sites.”
“I don’t even like to think about it.” Brenda lowered her voice. “It was so upsetting! They were looking at the most terrible, graphic things! Threesomes and bondage and double entry.”
Audra looked at her thoughtfully. “I think it’s called double penetration.”
The waiter was just approaching their table with a wine bottle, and he paused uncertainly.
“You’re quite right,” Jerry Rottweiler said. “Double entry is an accounting term.”
Graham sighed and waved the waiter forward with the wine. Apparently they were going to need it.
But actually it was okay. It turned out that Jerry was a civil-litigation lawyer, and, surprisingly, Brenda was a real-estate agent. (Surprising because Graham thought she must be a substitute teacher or perhaps someone who worked in customer service, but evidently her scared, beaten-down expression came from being mother to Derek.) They weren’t without quirks. Brenda spoke to Jerry as though he were a child—“Napkin on lap,” she said firmly, just before the appetizer arrived. And Jerry tended to say unremarkable things as though they were scandalous announcements: “Brenda likes dry white wine.” “I started at the firm almost ten years ago.” “You say Matthew is eleven now?” Almost everything he said had an unspoken Can you believe it? attached to the end.
But on the whole, they were well traveled and well-read and they had a seemingly endless supply of parenting horror stories about Derek Rottweiler, including (but in no way limited to) the fact that the only person who would agree to babysit Derek was a parole officer who lived in Queens.
“That wasn’t so bad,” Graham said to Audra in the cab on the way home. “I kind of liked them.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “All those I’ve-been-to-France stories get so old.”
“They lived in Marrakesh for three years,” Graham protested.
“I guess,” Audra said glumly, looking out the cab’s window. The streetlights threw fleeting lines of shadow across her face, like prison bars. “It’s just that there’s only so much mineral water you can drink.”
Graham and Audra were in the kitchen, putting away groceries.
Audra had been playing tennis with the Akela (who apparently had a killer backhand), and she still wore her tennis dress, with a baggy sweater over it, and white shoes and socks with those hilarious little pom-poms at the back. It never failed to amaze Graham that Audra played tennis. First of all, how did she make it through a game without talking? Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she frequently called the Akela to the net and said, “Oh, now, before I forget, did I tell you about this book my book club is reading?” Second, he had always admired women in tennis skirts—the smooth tanned legs, the springy steps—and here he was married to one. Life was strange.
“Do you ever think,” he said now, “that you and I might have Asperger’s of some sort?”
“Oh, no,” Audra said immediately. “Not at all.”
She was so definite that Graham felt better.
“Although,” she continued, frowning. “You do have that habit of saying north and south instead of left and right.”
“That’s called ‘having a sense of direction,’ ” Graham said. He didn’t add that Audra seemed to have been born without one. Actually, it was even worse than just having no sense of direction—it was like some sort of direction deficit, something that steered her in the wrong direction. They could go to the restaurant across the street from the apartment building—literally across the street—and when they came out, Audra would turn and wander down the block. Graham had told her once that when she was lost, she should close her eyes and try to sense which direction felt like the correct one, and then go the opposite way. (She had reported back that this was extremely helpful.)
“And there’s also the way you behave in the elevator,” Audra said. “I mean, we get in there with anyone from the building, and you just stand there, stiff as a soldier! Ignoring people like we don’t all know each other, like we haven’t all lived in the building for years and years. Flipping through your mail like the other person is not dying for you to say, ‘Now, Mrs. Pomranky, I have been meaning to tell you how nice your hair looks,’ or ‘Mr. Fielder, please tell me all about how your daughter’s getting along in med school.’ ”
Were the other people dying for him to say those things? Graham wondered. He’d always assumed that everyone would rather ride in peace, desperate as they all were to get up to their apartments and have the first whisky of the evening, thereby restoring the will to live.
“And then when I ask one of the neighbors to water our plants or turn down our thermostat,” Audra said, “I have to work extrahard because you’ve been so antisocial. I have to say, ‘Now, we’re going to be away for the weekend and I’m wondering if you could take care of such-and-such, and by the way, I’m terribly sorry that my husband acts like you’re a spider plant.’ ”
Spider plant? What was she talking about?
“First of all, I would never say that I’ve been meaning to compliment someone’s hair,” Graham said. “What if she hadn’t had anything done to it in, like, years and years—”
“Also,” Audra interrupted, “you have this, I wouldn’t call it an obsession, but certainly a rigidity about reading the newspaper in the morning.”
“Hey,” Graham protested. “I’m sure ninety-nine percent of all men read the paper in the morning. Ninety-nine percent of all people, probably.”
Audra herself never read the paper, never even watched the news. North Korea could bomb the entire Eastern Seaboard and she wouldn’t know about it until someone mentioned it on Facebook.
“But do they read it every single day?” she asked. “Even on their wedding day? Even on the day their child is born? Even while their wife is in labor and needing to go to the hospital?”
“I was checking the stock market!” Graham said. “You said the contractions were still fifteen minutes apart.”
“Don’t get so defensive,” Audra said mildly. “I don’t think you have Asperger’s. I just think you have it more than me.”
And then she picked up the water bottles and went off to put them in the hall storage cupboard, the pom-poms on the backs of her socks bobbing up and down like twin sailboats on a choppy sea.
Graham didn’t admit this to anyone, even Audra, but part of him was secretly pleased that Matthew had been caught looking at porn on a school computer. Wasn’t that—wasn’t that something normal kids did?
Graham remembered how he felt the first day Matthew went to school without crying (which hadn’t happened until he reached the second grade), and the first time Matthew had made it through a movie without throwing a tantrum, and the first time he’d eaten a grilled cheese sandwich made with whole-wheat bread instead of white, and the first time he’d consented to go over to some other kid’s house. Graham had felt relief and happiness and pride, but most of all, acceptance. He’d finally been granted entry into the world that other parents lived in, the one where children behaved sort of like you had expected back when you were young and foolish and thought child-raising was effortless.
And wasn’t this porn thing another version of that? Another developmental milestone that Matthew had achieved? And getting around the school’s content controls—didn’t that show initiative? Problem solving? Maybe this whole episode was something to be proud of.
He felt that way right up until Mr. Sears called and said they had to come into school for the conference.
The first thing Graham thought at the conference was that Audra had been right to take the Rottweilers out to dinner. Jerry and Brenda were already in the little waiting room outside the school conference room when Graham and Audra got there, and Brenda jumped right up and linked her arm through Audra’s. So not only did they present a united front, but they handily outnumbered the two school officials with whom they were meeting.
Mr. Sears, the principal, and Mrs. Costello, the guidance counselor, were already seated at a long conference table. Graham did not care for the conference table. He wanted this meeting to take place in some nice cozy office with pictures and a rug—the kind of place where they only told you good news.
As always, when Graham met Mr. Sears, his mind flashed back to a long car journey during which he and Audra had played Kill, Shag, or Marry and she’d chosen to shag Mr. Sears. “I feel obligated because he’s helped Matthew so much,” she’d said. “Remember when Matthew first started school and was so afraid? Plus I’m so grateful to Mr. Sears for overturning the school cafeteria’s ban on caffeinated drinks. He’s very petite and gentle—I don’t think it would be such a bad experience. I think he’d just be kind of grateful.”
(Audra had chosen to marry the art teacher, Mr. Menendez, because she felt they could do some interesting art collaboration, some sort of stained-glass mosaic. She’d ended up killing Eugene, the school custodian, a very nice man who’d never done anything to anyone.)
Mr. Sears was petite and gentle—a little man with a soft white pointy beard and silver-rimmed spectacles. He looked like the elderly cobbler in “The Elves and the Shoemaker.” He smiled at them now from his place at the table.
Mrs. Costello was a slender woman in her fifties, with pronounced circles under her eyes, the skin there looking bruised and crepey. She always looked like that, Graham knew from previous meetings, which he thought wasn’t a great advertisement for the school: was being the counselor there so incredibly stressful? Today she was wearing a terry-cloth dress, which along with the circled eyes, made her look like someone who’d been dragged out of bed with a terrible hangover.
“Thank you so much for taking time to meet with us!” Audra said, as though she and Graham had requested this meeting instead of the other way around. She shook hands with both of them in an eager, confident way. She reminded Graham of a politician.
When she got to Mrs. Costello, she said, “Now, Lois, you won’t believe this but I think we have the same hairdresser!”
Mrs. Costello looked startled. “Who, Bruno?”
“Yes.” Audra nodded. “I’ve been getting my hair cut by him for years. I always get the last appointment of the day and then he and I have a glass of wine together first.” Suddenly, she looked thoughtful. “I mean, I assume he only does that before the last appointment, but maybe he does it before every appointment. Maybe he’s hammered every time he cuts my hair. When do you get your hair cut?”
“Oh, well, Saturday mornings, usually,” Mrs. Costello answered. She had the look of someone unsuccessfully searching for the off button.
“Of course, of course,” Audra said soothingly. “You’re so busy at school, it would have to be on the weekends. Does Bruno offer you a glass of wine ever?”
“No—” Mrs. Costello said.
“Although for a while Bruno was coming over to our place on Mondays,” Audra said in a reflective tone, “and I never saw him drink during the day. The reason he came to our apartment on Mondays was that his mother-in-law had begun spending that day at his house. Bruno said that when he and his wife got married, the wife said, ‘If you’re going to go out with your friends on Thursday nights, then my mother is going to come for dinner every Sunday.’ So Bruno said fine and they got married—this was all ten years ago, I gather—and then abruptly the mother-in-law began coming over on Mondays, too, which, you know, for a hairdresser is part of the weekend. So Bruno said to his wife, ‘I agreed to Sunday but I never agreed to Monday—you never so much as mentioned Monday,’ and his wife said, ‘What am I supposed to tell my mother? That she’s not welcome here?’ and Bruno said, ‘Tell her whatever you like. Tell her I’m taking a class in ombre processing on Staten Island!’ and his wife said, ‘What? For six months?’ and Bruno said…”
Yes, this was the woman who had told Graham he was the more Aspergery of the two of them.
Normally, Graham got very restless when Audra went off on a conversational tangent like this, but now he was grateful. Furthermore, he thought it might actually have a purpose. Perhaps Audra was hoping they would run out of time, or that if she went on for long enough, no one would remember what they were here to discuss.
“Anyway,” Audra was saying, “Bruno came over on Mondays for quite a while and he was very easy to have around. He did my hair on Monday mornings and I saw how people get used to that, you know, like movie stars. I read once that Princess Diana had her hair done professionally every day of her life. I guess that’s why it looked so good all the time. My hair didn’t look that good on Mondays, though better than the other six days, certainly. But then Bruno and his wife worked it out. I think that maybe now the mother-in-law still comes on Mondays but she babysits for them on Friday nights.”
She suddenly turned to include Mr. Sears in her smile. “Now, what can we do for you nice people?”
Mr. Sears had curled up a little smaller in his chair while Audra was talking and now he stroked his tiny beard and said, “I’m going to cut out leather for a pair of shoes and see if elves come in the night.”
(He didn’t really say that but Graham was so tense that he was sure for a moment that he would.)
What he did say was “Well, ah, thank you all for coming in. The school takes internet safety and propriety very seriously, and Derek and Matthew have violated our policy. I’m sure you remember that all students and parents have to sign an internet-usage agreement at the beginning of the year.”
They did? They had? It was hard for Graham to remember. They had signed so many forms.
“However,” Mr. Sears continued. “We, ah, have reached a decision about the internet incident and we feel that while this has been a serious matter and both boys have shown very poor judgment, we don’t think a suspension is called for.”
“Hurray!” Audra cheered in an excited whisper. Graham wished he had a sock he could stuff in her mouth.
“So what is the punishment, exactly?” Brenda Rottweiler asked timidly.
“We’d like the boys to write a letter of apology to the computer-science teacher,” Mrs. Costello said. “And to stay after school two days next week and clean the computer lab.”
“Clean the computer lab?” Jerry said in his can-you-believe-it? voice.
“Oh, it’s probably dirtier than you can imagine,” Audra said. “Once this salesman came to my office trying to sell this special little vacuum for cleaning keyboards and I said my keyboard was perfectly clean and he said, ‘Turn it over and shake it,’ and I did and all these cracker crumbs and a fair bit of lettuce fell out and the salesman said, ‘Well, see now! You could make a chef’s salad from what you got there.’ It was very disturbing.”
Nobody said anything for at least fifteen seconds. Graham was sure they were all afraid of inadvertently starting Audra up again. Finally, he said, “I think that’s very fair. We will see that the boys write the letter.”
“Oh, yes,” Brenda Rottweiler said. “Immediately.”
They all shook hands again, which was very awkward with everyone stretching across the conference table and supporting themselves with their free hands.
Graham waited for Audra to say something else, to talk about baby names or ask what everyone thought of the color chartreuse. But she only smiled and slipped her hand into the crook of Graham’s arm. Perhaps, for once, she was as eager for something to be over as he was.
When Graham opened the apartment door on Thursday evening, he heard the gasp and pop of a cork being eased out of the wine bottle. It was so perfectly timed that he wanted to close the door and reopen it to see if would happen again.
“Graham?” Audra called from the kitchen. “I have the best news! I went in to Dr. Medowski for a blood test and I’m not pregnant!”
Graham set down his coat and briefcase and walked down the hall to the kitchen doorway. Audra had poured two glasses of wine and she handed him one.
“I’m so happy and relieved,” she said, drinking deeply from her glass. “Oh, I have been without the gentle touch of alcohol for far too long. Anyway, cheers!”
Graham lifted his glass automatically to clink against hers, but he didn’t take a sip. He sat down slowly on the kitchen chair.
“I just got back about two minutes ago,” Audra said. Graham saw that she was more dressed up than usual in a suede skirt and silk blouse. “Dr. Medowski called me this morning and I went in this afternoon and the nurse drew some blood and while we were waiting for the lab, Dr. Medowski showed me about a million photos of his golfing vacation, and then they got the results back and I was so happy I could have hugged him.” She frowned slightly. “Well, I did hug him goodbye, I always do. But I could have hugged him there in the middle, too.”
Audra wasn’t pregnant. Now that Graham knew that, he could allow himself to feel longing for a baby—a regular old baby, nobody special, a baby who would reach all the developmental milestones right on time. Sorrow swept through him like cold water through a faucet. Why was he always conflicted? Always two steps behind Audra?
“Anyway,” Audra said, pacing rapidly around the kitchen, taking plates from cabinets and silverware from drawers. “The Rottweilers are picking Derek and Matthew up from the bus and they’re all coming here. I invited them for dinner, I hope that’s okay.” She took another drink of wine. “Although at this rate, I’ll be sloshed before they get here.”
She stepped past him and went into the dining room to set the table. “I asked Brenda if they had any food preferences and she said Jerry doesn’t eat fruit or vegetables,” she called. “And I said, ‘Well, what about onions?’ because I know you put them in almost everything and Brenda said, ‘Onions are okay if you grate them superfine so he can’t detect them,’ and I didn’t ask what happens if he can detect them. Like, does he just stop eating or does he have some sort of meltdown? And I wonder about his health, too. Does he have scurvy or rickets or whatever it is you get without vitamin C?”
Chicken and potatoes, Graham was thinking. No, chicken and rice, because Jerry Rottweiler might consider the potato a vegetable. Chicken and rice, then, with French bread and butter as a side dish. Gravy served in a separate bowl. Vanilla ice cream for dessert. A fattening and joyless meal, but undoubtedly it would do. Graham sighed. The innkeeper and his wife at the House of Picky Eaters.
Just then the door burst open and Matthew came running in, followed by all three of the Rottweilers. Graham caught a glimpse of Derek Rottweiler’s face and wished he’d thought to close the door to his study and put their new camera out of reach. But then Matthew was standing in front of Graham and he could think of nothing else.
Matthew was suntanned and grass-stained and mosquito-bitten. His lovely thick brown hair was matted and greasy, and a long red scratch traced along one cheekbone. A cluster of red dots that might well be poison ivy showed on his neck.
“Camp—was—fantastic!” Matthew said, and Graham gathered him close.
Camp was fantastic, which meant life was fantastic. Audra was fantastic. The Rottweilers were fantastic. Chicken and rice was fantastic. Who needed fruit and vegetables? Not Graham, not now.
Graham’s only regret was that he hadn’t known ahead of time that Matthew would love camp, that Matthew could go off in the world and sleep in strange places and have new experiences and love doing it, just like any other kid. If Graham had known that, he could have enjoyed this week, relished it, even. He could have lived life like other parents, the way he’d always wanted to.
Graham leaned down and pressed his cheek against the top of Matthew’s head. Matthew smelled like woodsmoke and pine needles and sweat, but Graham could still smell maple syrup. Camp had worked its miracle, but underneath Matthew was still Matthew.
And then Graham understood that it was almost too late. He had spent so much time wishing Matthew were different, wondering how to make Matthew different, when it was actually the process of living that did it. Life forced you to cope. Life wore down all your sharp corners with its tedious grinding on, the grinding that seemed to take forever but was actually as quick as a brushfire. What Graham had to do was to love Matthew right now, right this instant—heart, get busy—before Matthew grew up and turned into someone else.