Everywhere Graham turned, relationships were crumbling, hearts were shattering, romances were dying—the fragile golden fabric of their lives was being ripped apart by giant, uncaring hands. (Audra said that last part.)
But it was sort of true.
First of all, Lorelei and her husband were moving to Boston.
Audra couldn’t get over it. “But we only bought this apartment because Lorelei lived here,” she said.
This was, amazingly, true. They had moved out of the apartment Graham had originally shared with Elspeth and had actually bought a piece of Manhattan real estate and undertaken all the responsibilities that went with it—maintenance fees and school districts and property taxes—because Lorelei lived on the third floor and Audra had wanted to live in the same building. It was like being married to someone in junior high.
“I can’t believe she’s going to move because of her husband’s stupid job,” Audra kept saying. (Graham felt that it was likely that if he were transferred to Boston, or anywhere else, Audra would stay in New York to be near Lorelei—it was extremely likely.)
Second, Matthew wanted to quit Origami Club. He had told Graham and Audra he didn’t want to go to the meetings anymore, he didn’t want to get the newsletter, he wasn’t even sure he wanted to do origami at all anymore. Graham’s first thought was entirely selfish: No more Origami Club! No more conventions! No more origami people!
But Audra had looked dismayed. “Who’s going to tell Clayton?” she’d whispered.
Oh. That was a good question. Clayton and the other members of the Origami Club would be so disappointed. They would have to be let down easily, with many flattering and completely untrue excuses. (Dealing with the Origami Club was also a lot like being in junior high, come to think of it.)
Third—and by far the worst—Derek Rottweiler appeared to have broken up with Matthew. No argument, no insult, no explanation—just all of a sudden Derek wouldn’t sit with Matthew at lunch or talk to him on FaceTime or accept his invitations to sleep over. Matthew said Derek’s best friend now was some kid named Mick Blackburn, who was the meanest, worst-behaved kid at school.
“It scares me to think that there is a child meaner and more badly behaved than Derek Rottweiler,” Audra said.
Matthew came straight home from school now and went to his room. He said he didn’t want to go to that school anymore. He said he didn’t want to have other friends over. He said he missed Julio, who had moved back to his own apartment. He didn’t want to go to the movies, or watch TV, or go buy candy at the store. He didn’t want anything but to be Derek Rottweiler’s best friend again. This was also a lot like junior high, but since Matthew was actually in junior high, that was probably to be expected. Still, Graham doubted if Matthew realized life would always be this way, pretty much.
Audra told Graham that she thought she could heal the rift between Matthew and Derek Rottweiler by calling Brenda Rottweiler and persuading her to speak to Derek about it privately. And so with a kind of serpentine wiliness, Audra called Brenda under the guise of asking her about the School Fundraising Plant Sale. Graham was sitting on the sofa next to Audra, reading the newspaper. Matthew was still at school.
Brenda answered in her usual shy, scared voice—perhaps she feared every call would be the school telling her that Derek had scalped someone. “Hello?”
“Brenda, hello!” Audra said.
She set the phone on the coffee table and put Brenda on speakerphone, which was something she’d taken to doing lately. (Graham found it about as appealing as listening to your neighbors have loud sex, only less so.) Graham had to hear the whole thing—did Brenda think it was fair to let the parent volunteers have first crack at the plants? Well, the perennials and the annuals, sure, but remember last year when Mrs. Sandberg up and bought all the bonsai trees before the sale even opened? What did people think when they came to the plant sale and there was a big sign saying BONSAI TREES and then no bonsai trees? It made them look downright amateur, was Audra’s opinion. Maybe they should put a limit on what the parent volunteers should buy. Or maybe just a limit on what Mrs. Sandberg could buy. Or maybe let all the other parent volunteers buy as much as they liked, but ban Mrs. Sandberg altogether—
After about fifteen minutes of wearing Brenda down, Audra must have judged her sufficiently vulnerable, because she said, “You know, Brenda, there’s one other thing I’d like to talk to you about. It seems that Derek and Matthew have had a falling-out.”
“Oh?” said Brenda. If she was trying to sound innocent, she failed miserably. Audra gave Graham a slit-eyed look.
“Yes, well, they have,” Audra said, “and it’s really upsetting Matthew because he likes Derek so much.”
She paused, clearly hoping that Brenda would say that Derek liked Matthew a lot, too, but all Brenda said was “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“So I was wondering if maybe you could have a little word with Derek and ask him to perhaps sit with Matthew at lunch—”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Brenda said tentatively.
“Or perhaps you could encourage Derek to come over here,” Audra said. “I know Matthew would love that.”
“Derek’s grounded for taking all the bolts out of his bunk bed,” Brenda said. “It collapsed and his five-year-old cousin got a concussion.”
“Well, then, maybe Matthew could come over to your place,” Audra said. Push, push, push.
“I’m sorry,” Brenda said softly. “But we don’t believe in interfering with Derek’s social life.”
“What?” said Audra. She swung her feet to the floor.
“I said, we don’t believe in interfering—”
“I heard you,” Audra said, standing now. She was barefoot, in jeans and a gray sweatshirt. She looked very strong to Graham. “But what does that mean, exactly? That you don’t interfere in his social life?”
Brenda sounded confused herself. “Just—just that we tend to let him choose his own friends,” she said. “And when there’s a disagreement, we try to stay out of it.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” Audra said. “Isn’t that basically what parents do? Interfere in their kids’ social lives and teach them about the value of friendship and the meaning of loyalty and stuff?”
“Well—” Brenda began.
“I mean, children need help making choices!” Audra said. Graham had never heard her talk this way. She must have read some parenting book. “They need to be taught compassion and empathy! They need to learn acceptance and respect!” Audra paused and then said in her regular voice, “Honestly, Brenda, being a good mother is not just about making peanut butter sandwiches.”
“Derek can’t have sandwiches anymore,” Brenda says. “The doctor has put him on a gluten-free diet.”
This happened much more frequently than you might think: Audra said something crazy and the other person responded with something even crazier. It made Graham doubt the sanity of almost everyone.
“So what are you saying?” Audra said. “That Derek could—could go off and become friends with Robert Mugabe and you wouldn’t interfere unless pasta and cookies were involved?”
“Robert Mugabe?” Brenda sounded confused. “What grade is he in?”
“Never mind about that,” Audra said, leading Graham to believe that she didn’t know precisely who Robert Mugabe was, either. “The point is that Derek needs to make better choices.”
“We believe in letting Derek learn from his own mistakes,” Brenda said, a statement so flawed—if you knew Derek Rottweiler even slightly—that apparently Audra didn’t know where to start.
The conversation didn’t end then, so much as dribble off, like when you knock over a soda can you thought was empty but it spills sticky droplets all over your newspaper. Brenda thanked Audra for calling and Audra said she had a good recipe for gluten-free cake and Brenda said she would see Audra at the plant sale and Audra asked what shift was she working, and on like that.
Then Audra hung up and said to Graham, “She is the most amazingly misguided woman!”
But the really amazing thing about this phone call, to Graham, was that apparently Audra believed there were two kinds of breakups: the kind that’s obvious and inevitable and permanent, and then some other kind that’s more like a clerical error. The second kind of breakup is reversible. It’s like when you get home from the supermarket and realize you left a gallon of milk at the checkout lane instead of putting it in the cart, and so you go back to the store and show the receipt to the manager and he looks at you kindly and says, “Why, certainly, take another gallon from the shelf.” In other words, you haven’t really been dumped because it’s just a matter of going back and presenting a little paperwork and having the person who dumped you quickly and sincerely realize their mistake. Actually, all people believe there are two kinds of breakups—the kind that happens to other people, and the kind that happens to them. But in reality there’s just the one.
Olivia wanted to do role play with him. Not the sexual, exciting kind of role play where Olivia played a nurse and Graham played a patient, but a vaguely insulting one where Olivia played herself and Graham played her father.
“You’re about his age,” Olivia said. “Well, maybe he’s, like, ten years younger than you, but whatever. So, okay, I’m going to be me and you be my dad. All right, now, here, I’m starting.” She paused and cleared her throat a little. “Dad, I’m moving in with Brian.”
“Who’s Brian?” Graham asked.
“My boyfriend!” Olivia said impatiently. “But my dad would know that. You have to stay in character. Okay, let’s start again— Dad, I’m moving in with Brian.”
“Fine.”
Olivia frowned. “Do you mean, ‘Fine, we can start the role play now,’ or are you being my dad saying ‘Fine’?”
“I’m being your dad.”
Olivia turned her palms up in frustration. “My dad would never say that! That’s the point!”
“Well, what would your dad say?”
“He’d say something like this,” Olivia said. She sat up straighter and drew her eyebrows together. When she spoke, her voice was deep and incredulous. “ ‘Moving in? I’m not paying a thousand dollars a month for you to cohabitate with Brian! This could affect your credit score! Your joint assets will have no protection! What are Brian’s long-term financial goals?’ ” She paused and nodded. “Like that. He’s like you—talks about money and finance all the time. Throw in some percentages, too.”
Graham decided to ignore the unflattering portrait of himself that was emerging: old and boring. Instead he said, “Your father pays your rent?”
“Yes.”
“Even though you work full-time?”
“Yes. He pays my sister’s rent, too,” Olivia said. “Now, can we get back to this?”
“I think maybe you should be your dad,” Graham said. “And I’ll be you.”
“Okay!” Olivia said happily. “Ready, set, go.”
Graham made his voice higher than usual. “Dad, I know this is a big step but Brian and I have decided to move in together strictly for financial reasons. Brian’s rent is nineteen percent more than what I’m currently paying, but we’ll be splitting the cost evenly, resulting in a nearly a forty percent overall savings for you.”
“Oh my God,” Olivia moaned. “This is fantastic. Keep going.”
Graham wondered if she said the same thing to Brian during sex. “Furthermore, as two single wage earners, we will remain in the twenty-eight percent tax bracket, whereas if we got married, our combined net income would put us in the thirty-one percent bracket—”
“Wait!” Olivia cried. “I have to write this down!”
She dashed out of his office to her desk.
Graham followed her, pulling on his suit jacket. “Later,” he said. “Right now I’m going out for a walk.”
He did this every afternoon to clear his head. It drove him insane to sit at his desk all day.
“Okay,” Olivia said agreeably, scribbling on her steno pad. “All that tax stuff you were saying—is that true?”
“Yes,” Graham said. “I can explain it to you when I get back.”
Olivia looked overwhelmed by that prospect. “Maybe you should just call my dad directly,” she said uncertainly.
Graham left her still making notes and took the elevator down and walked through the lobby out into the sunshine. Yes, the outside world still existed. The sky was blue and an early-summer sun was shining, making the city seem filthy and stinking, but somehow even more alive.
He was on Fifty-third Street when a woman in a pale blue shirtdress with white cuffs came out of the Hilton Hotel. Graham watched her appreciatively from behind. Her hair was pulled up in a ladylike little knot and her dress reminded him of an old girlfriend of his who used to wear one of Graham’s shirts around the apartment with only bikini underpants on beneath it.
Men, he realized, only like clothing that reminds them of other, sexier clothing, and they only like the other, sexier clothing because they hope the woman wearing it will soon stop wearing it and get into bed with them. Graham believed this was the reason men were so hopeless at fashion, unless they were for whatever reason not hoping some woman would soon be taking off her clothes—i.e., they were very old, very young, gay, or women themselves.
He was just taking his interest in the shirtdress woman as a sign that he wasn’t all that old yet when the woman stepped to the street and hailed a cab. She looked uptown, her arm already held up and her face a delicate oval.
It was Audra.
Graham caught Audra’s attention just as a taxi pulled over to pick her up. She waved it on with one hand and came hurrying to greet him.
“Hey!” she said. “Fancy meeting you here.” She sounded genuinely happy to see him.
“What are you doing in midtown?” Graham asked her.
“I was having coffee with the Akela,” Audra said easily. “But now I can have coffee with you, too. Do you have time?”
Coffee with the Akela didn’t really explain why she was coming out of a hotel.
“Well, sure,” Graham said, and they went into an Italian restaurant that had the depressing air of having been some other kind of restaurant very recently: red and gold wallpaper, ornate carpeting, tasseled light fixtures.
“Two, please, just for coffee,” Audra told the hostess. The hostess led them to a booth in the corner, and took their orders.
Audra pushed a stray lock of hair off her face and smiled at him happily.
Genuinely. Easily. Happily. Graham was only inserting these adjectives. He had no idea whether he was interpreting Audra correctly. Right at this moment, she seemed as opaque to him as obsidian.
“So, listen to this,” Audra said, leaning back against the banquette. Her face was lightly sheened with perspiration. “The Akela wants me to go to some training weekend with her so we can become certified BALOOs. And I’m, like, ‘Baloo? From The Jungle Book?’ and I swear for a second I thought she was talking about the two of us trying out for a musical! But, no, she says, ‘It stands for Basic Adult Leader Outdoor Orientation,’ like I should know that. And then she’s all ‘Now, I think we should go the second weekend in July,’ and I was like,‘Maxine! That’s just crazy talk!’ ”
What was crazy here was that Graham could have sworn that Audra had met with the Akela last week and told him this exact story. But it was hard to remember. Sometimes he thought Cub Scouts had given him low-level brain damage.
The waitress set their drinks down. Audra’s cappuccino cup looked large enough to be a small punch bowl. She picked it up with both hands and took a sip, still talking. “So then she’s going on about how there has to be at least one BALOO-certified person on every camping trip, and I’m like ‘As far as I’m concerned, that’s a good reason to not get certified, ever.’ You would not believe how pro-BALOO she was.”
Well, actually, Graham would believe that. Graham would believe just about anything. Audra should know.
Normally, Audra drove Matthew to school, and Graham took the subway to work. But today Audra had a meeting with a client near Matthew’s school, and Graham had to take the car in for an emissions inspection, so they all drove together.
This meant that Graham exchanged the normal thirty minutes in which he peacefully commuted to work—the time in which his thoughts untangled from the messy knot of home life and smoothed into the sharp clean lines necessary for the office—for a raucous, disorganized departure with his family. Matthew had to go back up to the apartment once for his lunch box and Audra had to go back up for her keys, all while Graham sat double-parked with his blood pressure skyrocketing. And then Graham realized that he’d forgotten the emissions inspection notice and he had to go back up, too. (Once Audra had told him, “Nobody but nobody gets out the door smoothly. At least not people with children.” It helped to remember this.)
Now they were finally driving toward Matthew’s school—Graham at the wheel and Matthew in the passenger seat and Audra in the back, where she was shuffling papers and rummaging in her bag. She reminded Graham of a hen trying to settle, all that ruffling of feathers and shifting around.
“Don’t ask me why I agreed to work with this man—” she began.
“Why did you agree to work with this man?” Graham asked. It was an old joke, and a favorite of Matthew’s, but Graham noticed Matthew didn’t smile.
“So this man asks me to design a brochure for his landscaping business and he wants me to draw a monkey, you know, on every page, sort of swinging around on vines, and stuff,” Audra said. “So I do that and show him the mock-up and the man says, ‘The monkey doesn’t look like Curious George,’ and I say, ‘Curious George is a trademarked illustration,’ and the man says, ‘I thought he was a monkey,’ and round and round we go, with me doing more and more mock-ups and every single time, the man says, ‘Make him more look like Curious George,’ so finally I say, ‘Why don’t I just make him look exactly like Curious George, and then you and I can go to prison for copyright infringement,’ and the man says, ‘How soon can you do that?’ ”
Graham pulled the car up in front of the school. Some kids were milling around in front, and one of those kids was Derek Rottweiler, his arm hooked around a pole, spinning lazily. It was horrible to look at him—this small dark-haired boy in a faded T-shirt—and realize that he held the key to your happiness in his grubby little hands.
Graham turned to say goodbye to Matthew, and caught Matthew looking at Derek, too. In that instant, Matthew’s face was as starkly revealed as a Mount Rushmore sculpture. Matthew’s eyes were wet and his jaws were clenched, his mouth a straight line. Graham reached out to touch his shoulder, but Matthew shoved the car door open and stood on the sidewalk for the briefest of moments, pulling his backpack on.
“Goodbye, Matthew!” Audra said from the backseat, but Matthew shut the car door without speaking.
Derek Rottweiler stopped spinning around the pole and his face lit up—lifting Graham’s heart with it for the tiniest of seconds—and then he ran to the other side of the school yard, where a heavyset man in yellow work boots and army pants had just arrived. No, not a man, Graham saw—a big heavy kid, with a moon face and a diamond-shaped body. This must be Mick Blackburn, the new object of Derek’s affection. Derek had dropped his backpack to the ground and was rooting through it excitedly, looking up at Mick. Matthew stood on the school steps, looking very hard at nothing.
Graham put the car in gear and drove away. Audra now moved from the backseat to the front seat—legs first, back arching, struggling and kicking. It was like a giraffe was being born next to him.
“Don’t knock the steering wheel,” Graham said.
Audra plopped into the passenger seat and buckled her seat belt.
“Was he crying?” she whispered, although they were at least half a mile from the school now.
“A little bit, yes,” Graham said.
“And did you see Derek Rottweiler run up to that other kid?” Audra said. “Like he couldn’t wait to see him?”
Graham sighed. “Yes.”
“That’s it,” Audra said. “We’re converting to Hinduism.”
“Hinduism?”
“Don’t Hindus have arranged marriages? Or tell me some other religion that does arranged marriages and we’ll convert to that. What about the Amish?”
“I think Hindus do have arranged marriages, yes,” Graham said. “But why do we need that?”
“So we can pick some nice pretty girl for Matthew to marry and set it all up when he’s fifteen,” Audra said. “Because I absolutely cannot go through this again. What’s it going to be like when some girl dumps him? And the girl after that? And the girl after that?”
She was right. Life was just a long stretch of people breaking up with you, really. Of course, it wasn’t all people breaking up with you. There were good things, too—ruby-red sunsets and afternoon naps and onion rings and whatnot. But when you looked back, you really only remembered the breakups, and it seemed unfair to have to live through all those breakups and then have to relive it—a hundred times more painfully—through your child.
Of course, life is unfair. People say that all the time, but they’re usually talking about some sort of capital-gains tax, or the fact that every once in a while Christmas falls on a Sunday, which is a day you’d have off anyway. They weren’t talking about the really awful, searing, painful kind of unfair. Most people didn’t know a thing about it.
The week before Lorelei and Doug were set to move, Graham and Audra took them out to dinner. They met up in the lobby and Audra said, “Greek or French?”
She sounded like a prostitute frisking with a john, but when Doug said “Greek,” they all knew without discussing it that he meant the Greek place two blocks down and one block over, because that was the Greek restaurant they all liked, and that unspoken agreement was one of the extreme pleasures of the friendship. It’s actually one of the extreme pleasures of any friendship. Don’t kid yourself—emotional attachment and common hobbies are great, but not having to defend your choice of restaurant is hard to beat.
At dinner, they ordered a bottle of red wine and discussed, as they always did, current events. They started on a very micro level: their apartments. Obviously Doug and Lorelei had a lot going on since they were packing to move.
“I have two questions,” Doug said. “Where did all this stuff come from and why do we keep it?”
Audra and Lorelei pondered whether it was better to pack your lingerie and nightgowns yourself, or let the movers do it and live the rest of your life knowing that some coarse man had handled your underwear. (They decided it depended on how stressed you were feeling on the actual day.)
From there, they adjusted their conversational focus outward slightly and discussed current events in the building. Julio had told Audra that the building was currently debating whether to replace some of the storage units with a fitness center.
“Fitness center,” Graham and Lorelei said at the same instant. They were like that sometimes.
“Storage,” Doug said. “We have to have somewhere to keep all this stuff we never use.”
The waiter brought their entrées and another bottle of wine. Then they moved the conversation up a level, and discussed current events in the neighborhood. What did Doug and Lorelei think of the bakery that had opened up across from Nam’s Bakery and seemed determined to run Nam’s out of business?
“What do you suppose the profit margin on cheesecake is, anyway?” Doug said.
(Friendship doesn’t get any sweeter than this.)
The price of baked goods led them straight to national current events, i.e., the stock market, which was Graham’s favorite part of the conversation. He and Doug discussed the Beige Book and the FOMC and Chipotle stock performance until Audra began making impatient sounds through her nose.
And then, as always, just as they finished the meal, they talked about world current events. Conversationally, it was just like the zoom-out feature on Google Maps and no less satisfying. The waiter brought the check (none of them liked to stay for coffee; it was one of their compatibilities), and afterward they walked back home and said goodbye in the lobby.
“I might not see you again before you leave,” Graham said. “So let me say goodbye now.”
He shook hands with Doug, and then he turned to hug Lorelei.
Lorelei had intensely green eyes, and Audra had a raincoat of exactly the same shade of green, and sometimes when Audra wore that coat and stood next to Lorelei, Graham felt a strange sense of doubling, as though Lorelei were wearing the wrong coat or Audra had the wrong eyes.
And now, as Lorelei hugged him, he felt the same sort of doubling—it seemed he was hugging Audra goodbye. He held Lorelei against him briefly, inhaling the scent of the patchouli oil she wore in place of perfume, and feeling the soft roughness of her hair against his chin. His thoughts were jumbled and he could only think, You and I share the heart of my one true love.
But maybe that was just the wine, because by morning, Graham felt like himself again.
This was Graham’s favorite slice of the day: that hour when Matthew had done his homework, and dinner was cooking, and the dishwasher was chugging, and the sunbeams came through the kitchen window like dusty gold searchlights. If you made a pie chart of the day, Graham would color this wedge that same shade of gold.
He didn’t always get to enjoy this hour. Sometimes Matthew got frustrated with his homework, and there were tears, or Graham and Audra had to attend some awful school function. Or he was late, or Audra was. It was all so precarious! But tonight it had worked. Matthew had done his homework relatively cheerfully and with minimal assistance from Audra. (Elsewhere in the world, parents said, Hey you, go do your homework, and the kid said, Yeah, okay, and went and did it in his room. Graham hoped to reach this stage by the time Matthew was maybe thirty.) Beef Stroganoff was simmering on the stove, Audra was working on her laptop at the kitchen table, and Graham was drinking a glass of merlot as soft and red as a rose petal. Why, then, did he feel so sad?
“I’m beginning to believe,” he said to Audra. “That there is just too much love loose in the world. Too much love with nowhere to go.”
“Oh, sweetie,” Audra said, looking at him over the lid of her laptop. “Is it because of that man in the Japanese restaurant?”
“What man in the Japanese restaurant?” Graham asked.
(And no—it was because their son was brokenhearted, because their friends were moving, because his mother was alone in her old age, because the world was falling apart. Man in a restaurant?)
“You remember,” Audra said. “We were having sushi last week and this old man at the table next to us tried to tell the waitress about how he visited Tokyo once and she was like ‘I don’t have time to listen to this!’ ” She frowned. “Was I with you or was I with Lorelei?”
“It wasn’t me,” Graham said.
“No, I think it was you,” Audra said, nodding slowly to herself. “In fact, I’m sure of it, because I wanted to invite the old man to sit with us and tell us about his trip to Tokyo, and you wouldn’t let me. You said you didn’t want to hear about it any more than the waitress did, and at least she was getting a tip. And I said, ‘It’s not about us wanting to hear, it’s about him wanting to tell,’ and you said that was exactly your point.”
That did sound like something he would say. Graham had no memory of this, but he was secretly proud of himself for not having let the old man sit with them.
Audra continued, “And I felt so bad for the rest of lunch that I couldn’t even look at him! I made you change places with me, remember? And you were all like ‘No problem! I can look at him without feeling a morsel of pity!’ And now you tell me that he’s up and changed your whole view of the world!”
“Well,” Graham said. “I don’t know—”
“And it’s really not all that helpful a worldview,” Audra said. “It’s like suddenly telling me, I don’t know what. That you think there’s too much boiled wool in the world. What can we do about it? I mean, I could throw away all my vintage peacoats and a couple of sweaters, and as a family, we could stop wearing boiled wool, but that wouldn’t have much effect. And it’s the same with this unrequited love business. We could start having weekly dinners where we invite the most unloved people we know, like Manny and, well, there’s this very nice woman at the deli—”
“I don’t want to have weekly dinners with unloved people,” Graham said firmly.
“What about a happy hour?” Audra asked. “Maybe not weekly, but monthly—”
“No.”
“Well, okay, but even if we did do something for the unloved people we know,” Audra said, “it wouldn’t solve the problem. Love would still be out there, roaming all over the place.”
“Yes,” Graham said. “That’s my point.”
“But I don’t think it’s much of a point,” Audra said. “It’s like when Matthew found out that the actors who played C-3PO and R2-D2 in Star Wars can’t stand each other in real life. It’s just sort of extraneous upsetting information.”
She gave him a dark look and went back to her laptop.
The Origami Club wanted to come over and talk about what went wrong. It looked like it was going to be one of those bad, complicated breakups.
But was there any such thing as a good breakup? Graham wondered. A good, uncomplicated, friendly breakup? Had there ever been a time in the history of relationships where a couple sat down to eat breakfast and one of them said, You know, I think we should split up, and the other person said, I agree! It’s like you read my mind! and the first person said, What about our season theater tickets, though? And the second person said, I’ll go and take your mother with me—I’ve always been so fond of her, and the first person said, I’m hoping your mother will give me her watermelon pickle recipe.
I’m sure she’d be delighted. What worries me is our trip to France.
Oh, that’s no problem. I bought trip insurance.
I think one of us should keep the apartment since we just had those expensive curtains made for the den.
Well, you stay and I’ll find my own place.
Really? Then, I insist on paying you three percent above fair market value for your half—
“Graham!” Audra said. “Stop daydreaming! They’ll be here any minute.”
He sighed. He doubted Audra knew what fair market value meant, anyway.
Just then the buzzer sounded and Graham went to answer. Clayton and Manny stood there, with a third man, who was presumably Alan.
Graham had met Alan before, but he remembered a large, soft man with freckles. This man, though, was a lot bigger—a lot. Graham could not even begin to estimate how much weight Alan had gained, but he seemed to fill the hallway. Manny and Clayton looked like twin Pinocchios next to him. Alan’s face was now too wide for his features—his eyes and mouth and nose seemed all clustered together in the middle—and his shoulders had taken on a sloped, shambling look.
“Come on in,” Graham said.
Audra was just coming out of the kitchen, and when she saw Alan, she gave a startled squeak.
Then she said, “Hello, everyone!” in a hearty voice. “Just go on in the living room! We’ll be there in a sec.”
As soon as they went by, she grabbed Graham’s arm. “What happened to Alan?”
“He gained some weight, I guess,” Graham said.
“Some!” Audra whispered. “He looks like a—a bear. He’s crossed species!”
Graham went into the living room. Clayton and Manny and Alan were all sitting on the sofa expectantly. Graham walked over to the corner of the living room where they kept the liquor and began taking drink orders. He suspected that this would be an alcohol-required sort of meeting.
Of course, nothing was ever uncomplicated with the Origami Club—Alan wanted light beer, which they didn’t have, and Manny wanted to know what was in a Rob Roy, and Clayton had to do some sort of calculation on his iPhone because he was counting carbohydrates.
In the middle of this, Audra came out of the kitchen with a little silver serving bowl filled with Canada mints—those thick pink candies that taste like Pepto-Bismol. Those mints had been in their kitchen cupboard for months, if not years. It was possible the mints had been in the apartment when they first moved in. So right away Graham knew that she considered this a B-list sort of get-together.
This is one of life’s secrets: the status of the guest is directly proportional to the freshness of the snack food offered by the host. This secret had been revealed to Graham only after he had wandered the earth and sought enlightenment for nearly sixty years. (Others of life’s secrets are: baby carrots are in fact just regular carrots cut into smaller pieces, and there is no scientific or medical reason you need to wait an hour after eating before you go swimming. About everything else, Graham was still pretty much in the dark.)
“So,” Clayton said, after deciding he couldn’t have any alcohol and asking for seltzer. “What’s this nonsense about Matthew wanting to quit Origami Club?”
Graham didn’t feel that this indicated much open-mindedness on Clayton’s part, but he started in dutifully anyway. “Matthew’s getting a little older now, and he’s finding it hard to prioritize things.”
“What things?” Manny asked.
Audra spoke up. “Well, you know, he has so many interests now that it’s hard to find time for everything.”
Clayton looked suspicious. “What sort of interests?”
“Ohhhhh,” Audra said, and Graham could tell by her drawling tone and the way she tipped her head back slightly that she had been caught unprepared. So had he. They really should have thought this out more. Audra began speaking very slowly. “Minecraft, of course, and he wants to take banjo lessons, and he’s tremendously interested in astronomy, and he’s learning to speak Spanish.”
What fascinating information! Matthew did love to play Minecraft—that was true. And once when Matthew was, oh, maybe six years old, Graham had taken him to hear an entertainer named Mr. Knick Knack, who played the banjo, and Matthew had liked that quite a bit. And sometimes on a rainy Sunday afternoon, if there was absolutely no other movie playing nearby that they wanted to see, they took Matthew to the Hayden Planetarium. And Julio had taught Matthew how to say El burro sabe más que tú—“The donkey knows more than you”—in Spanish. But basically, everything Audra said seemed to be pure fabrication. It was like leaning over someone’s shoulder while they falsified their résumé or wrote their Christmas letter.
Audra was picking up speed. “He’s also developed an interest in photography and botany. And of course, he spends lots of time with his friends.”
“But we’re his friends,” Manny said, and Graham had to close his eyes for a second. (There was too much love loose in the world—way too much.)
“Well, of course you are,” Audra said. “And you and he will still see lots of each other. After school, and weekends, and holidays.” She paused, but evidently she couldn’t think of any other times they might see Matthew. “It’s just he prefers not to go to the club on Sundays anymore.”
“But origami will teach him many skills that are valuable in later life,” Alan said.
Was that true? Graham wondered. Certainly you could live a full, rich life without ever having folded an origami T. rex. Oh, he supposed origami taught you something about patience and attention to detail, but did that really prepare you for life? Graham was of the opinion that nothing prepared you for life, unless maybe you were forced to run an Indian gauntlet as a toddler.
“That’s right,” Manny said. “You shouldn’t let him quit. I quit piano lessons in the third grade, and my mother let me even though the teacher said I had great promise and could become a professional musician.”
“Oh, I think all piano teachers say that to anyone who wants to quit,” Audra said. “It’s a way of keeping up business.”
Manny frowned. “Are you saying I wasn’t talented?”
“Sort of, I guess.” Audra looked thoughtful instead of contrite. “I mean, did the teacher ever say that you were very talented before you wanted to quit?”
“Well, no,” Manny admitted. “Up till that point, she mostly just said that my shoes scuffed up her hardwood floors too much.”
“She sounds like a dreadful person,” Audra said sympathetically.
“She was,” Manny said, in the tone of someone just realizing they’ve been scammed. “She also said that the Beatles were overrated and she wouldn’t let me learn any of their music.”
“Now, Matthew’s piano teacher, Mr. Vargas, would never say that,” Audra said. “He is the nicest, most patient man, and he lets Matthew learn whatever songs he wants. Plus, he told me about this great Cuban diner in the Village where they make the best fried plantains.”
“What’s the difference between a plantain and a banana?” Manny asked. “Because I’ve never known.”
“I don’t think there is a difference,” Audra said. “It’s like turtle and tortoise.”
Alan had been struggling valiantly for the past five minutes to separate a single mint from the others in the dish—they had apparently adhered together at some point (possibly during the heat wave of 1977)—but now he looked up and said sharply, “There most definitely is a difference between turtles and tortoises. Turtles live primarily in water, and tortoises live primarily on land.”
“I’m not sure that counts as a difference if no one knows it,” Audra said.
“I knew it,” Alan said. “Most people know it.”
“Well, then, perhaps you know the difference between plantains and bananas,” Manny said challengingly. “Or don’t they have shows about that on Animal Planet?”
“I didn’t learn the difference between turtles and tortoises on TV,” Alan said. “I learned it in school.”
“What grade?”
“Fourth, I believe.”
“Well, I guess Audra here and I both happened to be sick on the selfsame day of our respective fourth grades,” Manny said. “Because neither of us knew that.”
“I guess so,” Alan said, missing the sarcasm completely. “It was in the Life Science unit. And to answer your earlier question, there’s a difference between plantains and bananas.”
The conversation seemed completely out of control, topic-wise, but suddenly Clayton said, “Now, look here. Has Matthew joined some other club?”
Ah, so this was the crux of it, as with any breakup. They thought Matthew was seeing someone else. It actually surprised Graham that it had taken them this long to ask. Wasn’t that pretty much the first thing anyone wondered in a breakup? And wasn’t it usually true? And what was worse, finding out that the person you loved was seeing someone else—possibly meeting someone else in midtown hotels—or finding out that they’d just sort of outgrown you?
“No, no,” he said. “It’s really a matter of more demanding schoolwork.”
After that, there didn’t seem to be much point in further discussion, so they finished their drinks and Alan managed to separate another mint from the pack. Then they all made their way down the hall to the door, with the usual rumble of disjointed conversation—Clayton saying, “Tell Matthew he’s welcome on a drop-in basis,” and Alan saying, “I suppose you think a cold spell and a cold snap are the same thing, too,” to Audra.
Graham found himself suddenly reluctant to close the door behind them while they waited for the elevator. They looked like such a ragtag, dispirited group. He had to remind himself that they always looked that way. And yet, he felt infinitely, unbearably lucky as he stood there with his arm around Audra.
Manny looked at Graham and shrugged. “One door closes and another opens,” he said.
Graham didn’t think that was really the right metaphor for this situation. It was more like an emotional food chain: Derek Rottweiler had broken up with Matthew, and Matthew had broken up with the Origami Club, and now the Origami Club would—would—would tell some new club member his creases weren’t sharp enough and force him to leave. And meanwhile, that awful kid, Mick Whatsit, reigned triumphant as the apex predator (Graham was certain this term was applicable in a thousand ways). But sooner or later someone would break up with Mick, too.
The thought made Graham so happy he gave Audra a little squeeze.
Audra had come up with a new idea to win Derek Rottweiler back.
“He loves to go fishing,” she said. “So we’ll invite him to spend a day fishing with us—I already researched it and there are lots of places on City Island where they do these all-day fishing trips—and he won’t refuse because he likes fishing so much. Matthew told me that. And then Derek will spend all these happy hours with Matthew and remember how much he likes him and all the good times they’ve had together and they’ll be friends again.”
Was it just Graham or did that sound a lot like the sort of bad idea you had sometimes where you called your former girlfriend up and asked if you could stop by because you were pretty sure you’d left your green T-shirt at her apartment but really you just wanted her to fall back in love with you, and when you got there, your former girlfriend (a) had forgotten you were coming, (b) was there with her new boyfriend, or (c) both.
He must have looked skeptical because Audra sighed softly and said, “Well, at the very least, maybe Derek will be nicer to Matthew, hoping we’ll invite him again.”
Graham did have doubts, of course, but he was as eager as Audra was to reinstate the Matthew-Derek merger, so he agreed. And then Audra gave him this big rap about how fishing was a manly activity and so Graham, being the man, should be the one to call Jerry Rottweiler, another man, and invite Derek, a very small man, to go fishing with him and Matthew. Graham suspected that Audra just didn’t want to talk to Brenda Rottweiler after the last phone call, but he agreed anyway and called.
Brenda answered in her scared-rabbit voice. “Hello?”
Graham decided not to bother asking for Jerry and instead just said that this weekend they were going on a family fishing trip—“Striped bass fishing trip!” Audra whispered urgently—and they thought perhaps Derek would like to join them.
“Just a minute,” Brenda said, “I’ll see if he’s available,” as though Derek Rottweiler were the prime minister and Brenda his humble secretary.
She was gone somewhat longer than it would have taken for her to say Do you want to go fishing with Matthew? and Derek Rottweiler to say I’d love to, but she eventually did come back and said, “Derek would like that very much.” (Thank God.)
She and Graham worked out the logistics, and as soon as they hung up, Audra went online and booked them tickets on a fishing boat called the Sapphire for Saturday morning. The tickets cost one hundred dollars each, which seemed like kind of a lot of money for a trip that three of them didn’t really want to go on, but Graham didn’t hesitate.
Though it did occur to him: were they not, in effect, bribing Derek Rottweiler? Were they not attempting to buy his friendship? Were they not offering payment for something that ought to be freely and naturally given, something that was in fact priceless? Yes, indeed. Just show me where to sign.
They picked Derek Rottweiler up at five-thirty in the morning on Saturday. The things we do for love! (Walking in the rain and the snow? The person who wrote that song knew nothing about love. And clearly did not have children.)
Derek and Brenda Rottweiler were waiting in front of their building. Brenda was dressed in a blue sweat suit but her face was still sleep-creased and her hair was unbrushed. Derek was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and his hair was a curly mass of black ringlets. He clambered into the car and then they all waved to Brenda and pulled away from the curb.
“Hi, Derek!” Matthew said in a soft excited voice.
Derek stared out his window. “Hey,” he said tonelessly.
Graham’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel. Children were monsters. He didn’t like a single one of them.
“How’s school going, Derek?” Audra asked.
“Okay.”
“And your parents?”
“Okay, I guess.”
A small gap opened up in the conversation then and seemed to spread. It got larger and larger and Graham thought someone might actually fall into it, but then Audra suggested brightly that they play Twenty Questions. “Now, Derek, you’re the guest, so you go first. Do you know how to play?”
“Yeah,” Derek said, and his voice sounded agreeable. “Okay, I’m ready.”
Graham felt his hands loosen slightly on the wheel.
“Now you can ask the first question, Matthew,” Audra said.
They all took turns guessing but nobody got it and after the twentieth question, Derek revealed that he was Ivan the Terrible. (It wasn’t like he chose Hitler or Jeffrey Dahmer, but that was really the nicest thing you could possibly say about his choice.) Fortunately, the game lasted until they got to the marina.
The blue-trimmed Sapphire was moored at the dock and looked promising, with an enclosed cabin and the upper deck shielded by a bright blue canopy. In an ideal world—the one Graham pictured—the captain of the Sapphire would be a young, handsome guy, perhaps resembling the Brawny Paper Towel Man, who was kind and enthusiastic and good with children. Instead they walked down the dock to find an old man with whisky blooms on his face and a harsh expression standing next to the boat with a clipboard. He wore stained shorts and a faded T-shirt and uneven grizzled whiskers.
“Hello,” Audra said cheerfully. “Are you the captain?”
“Uh-huh,” said the man, his breath damp with the smell of Budweiser. (It was just past six-thirty in the morning.)
“It’s so nice to meet you!” Audra said. “I’m Audra, and this is my husband, Graham, and our son, Matthew, and his friend, Derek.”
Graham and the boys looked at the captain expectantly, but he just grunted.
Audra was undeterred. “And what is your name?”
“Captain.”
“But Captain what? What’s your first name?”
The man had a cough drop in his mouth and he caught it between his teeth for a moment. “Some people call me Salty.”
Audra smiled encouragingly. “Like Salty Dog, the drink?”
For the first time, the captain looked even mildly interested. “What’s in that?”
“Oh, let me think,” Audra sounded thoughtful. “Vodka and grapefruit juice, and maybe gin, too.”
“How much vodka?”
“I guess half vodka, half grapefruit juice.”
“Then where’s the gin come into it?”
“I’m not sure,” Audra said. “But any bartender should know how to make them.”
A few other people came up behind them then, so Captain or Salty (or whatever the hell the man’s name was) checked them off on his clipboard and they went aboard the boat. Audra carried a cooler, and her sneakers squeaked on the deck’s varnished boards. Two crew members—Graham noted with satisfaction that they were younger and friendlier than Salty—took the boys over to a rack in the center of the boat where the fishing rods were stored.
Both Derek and Matthew seemed excited, and the water was as blue as a marching-band uniform. Even the ropes tethering the Sapphire to the dock seemed to creak with anticipation. Salty rang a bell and the boat pulled out of the marina.
It seemed that in the excitement—excitement? that was the wrong word—in the distraction of arranging this trip to woo Derek Rottweiler, Graham had forgotten how prone to seasickness he was. Within twenty minutes of the Sapphire leaving the harbor, he felt dizzy and nauseated and sweaty. Saliva was thick in his mouth, like a raw oyster, like a blood clot.
He glanced down and saw that Matthew looked as bad as he felt.
“Hey,” he said. “You okay, buddy?”
Matthew shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He was standing near the railing next to Derek, but now he slid down until he was sitting on the deck.
Graham and Audra crouched beside him.
“What’s up, sweetie?” Audra asked, rumpling Matthew’s hair.
Matthew’s eyes were huge. “I want to lie down,” he whispered. Graham could barely hear him over the sound of the boat’s engine.
He helped Matthew to his feet. They left Audra with Derek, and Graham led Matthew toward the cabin. “It’ll be better when we’re at sea,” he said, having no idea if this was true. The deck seemed to sway beneath their feet until Graham felt like they were trying to walk across a floor made of cargo netting.
The cabin, which had looked so inviting when the boat was docked, smelled like fish and oil and vomit—the olfactory history of a thousand fishing trips, a thousand miserable souls. Matthew groaned and slumped down on one of the hardwood benches.
A lady about Graham’s age was sitting on one of the other benches, knitting, and she looked up and smiled at them. “Oh, is your little boy seasick? That’s a shame.”
Even to Graham’s inexperienced eye, something was wrong with the way this woman was dressed. She wore a high-necked flowered blouse with a ribbon around the collar, a vest that seemed to be made of a furniture doily, and a patchwork skirt. Her clothing wasn’t just unseasonal and inappropriate for a fishing trip—there was some other thing wrong with it, too. It took a Graham a moment to figure it out: her outfit was homemade. Way too many patterns and frills and embellishments. He seemed to remember from high school that girls dressed that way for a while when they first mastered the sewing machine.
Graham sat on the end of the bench where Matthew lay. Matthew had closed his eyes, but his face was pale and slick with sweat. Graham squeezed Matthew’s ankle.
“Seasickness can be just terrible,” the lady said. Click went her knitting needles. “Luckily, I have never suffered from it. Otherwise I couldn’t accompany my husband on all his fishing trips.”
“Is your husband the Captain?” Graham asked politely.
“Oh, no,” the lady said. “I’m Mrs. Wilcox. My husband is one of the men fishing. I’m just with him for company.”
“I see.”
Matthew’s breathing had already deepened. His skin had a pinched, lavender look, and his eyebrows were drawn together. Graham had never seen someone look so pale and wretched in his sleep. The rocking of the boat made Graham feel like a bubble of air was blocking his throat.
Click, click, pause. Mrs. Wilcox picked a small pink square off her knitting needles and showed it to Graham. “I’m making an afghan for my niece’s baby. Pink and blue squares because she doesn’t know if it’s a boy or a girl. Don’t you think that’ll be pretty?”
“Oh, yes,” Graham managed to say.
Mrs. Wilcox’s fingers began working her knitting needles again. “I don’t believe married couples should spend too much time apart,” she said. “When Gordon tells me he’s going fishing, I’m right there with a packed lunch and my embroidery bag.”
Graham leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. Almost immediately it seemed to him that his mother spoke from directly behind him. Graham’s mother said, “Oh, sweetheart, I wouldn’t have had that happen for a million dollars,” and Graham looked down at his forearm and saw the deep gash he’d gotten climbing over Mr. Danbury’s picket fence. He clamped his left hand over the cut and watched the blood well up between his fingers, just like rainwater rising through the gravel in the sidewalk. And then he was sitting on the long bench seat in his mother’s Buick Century and they were driving to the hospital and his mother was saying, “Keep the towel on it! Hold on!” The Buick took the corners in long swooping turns, swaying like a ship, making Graham’s head rock on his shoulders and his elbow slam against the car door…
He woke up with a start.
Mrs. Wilcox was still talking. “I made Gordon the nicest fishing vest, and I embroidered it with every kind of fish I could think of and—can you imagine!—he won’t wear it. Says it’s too tight in the armpits and runs around wearing his smelly old canvas one.”
Graham didn’t know whether he’d been asleep for hours or minutes or seconds. He had a feeling it didn’t matter—Mrs. Wilcox would still be talking no matter what.
Matthew looked a little better. At least he was no longer frowning in his sleep.
“I did most of that embroidery using fishbone stitches, too!” Mrs. Wilcox said indignantly. “And that’s a very difficult stitch—you might say it’s only for people who are very advanced. I thought it would be a cute sort of pun, fishbone stiches on the fishing vest, but—”
“Excuse me,” Graham said. “I’m going to go up to the deck for a minute. If my son wakes up, will you tell him I’ll be right back?”
“Why, certainly,” Mrs. Wilcox said, and as a sort of punctuation, her knitting needles spat forth another soft pink square.
Graham went up to the deck and stretched. He got out his phone and saw that he had slept for almost ninety minutes. The boat had stopped moving, and all along the rails, he could see people with fishing rods. He went in search of Audra and found her on the top deck, talking to Captain Salty. Evidently she’d broken through his taciturn nature and they were discussing how Salty’s wife was mad at him for staying out all night.
“Now my suggestion,” Audra was saying, “would be to buy your wife a very nice classic leather handbag.”
“I think that might make her more suspicious,” Salty said.
“But that would be overridden by her love of the handbag,” Audra said. “If it’s the right handbag.”
Salty scratched his chin. “Sounds mighty expensive. Flowers’d be cheaper.”
“Yes,” Audra said. “But a handbag would last for years! For a lifetime, even. And every time she’d look at it, she’d think, What a thoughtful, loving gift! Salty is such a romantic, devoted husband! I love him so!”
“That’s not really the way she talks,” Salty said.
“But inside, she’d be feeling that way,” Audra insisted. “In her heart, she’d be thinking, I don’t care if he did stay out all night—I don’t want to be married to anyone else.” She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “I tell you what—you come into the city sometime, and I’ll take you shopping for the handbag. My last name is Daltry, remember? We live on West Eighty-fourth Street. I can put my number right into your cellphone if you like.”
It was fairly remarkable that they had all not been murdered in their beds, the way Audra handed out their names and address. (Once she’d told a man in line at the hardware store that he should come right over and she’d give him some old drawer pulls they had and the man had said, politely, that he couldn’t come over because he was on work release from a correctional facility and had to be back by four o’clock. Graham had feared for a while that they would have to move.)
Salty’s eyes were flickering over Audra, whose hair had gone curly in the sea spray. Her lips were prettily chapped. She gazed up at him trustfully.
“Maybe you and me could have a drink after we go shopping,” he said. “Maybe one of them Salty Dogs you were talking about.”
“I don’t drink those anymore,” Audra said. “Not since that time I told you about earlier, when I woke up in Astoria not knowing where my purse was. But a glass of wine, sure—”
“Hey,” Graham interrupted. “Matthew still feels pretty sick. Where’s Derek?”
Audra looked around her in a startled fashion. Goodness, where was that child they were looking after? Dearie me, did he fall overboard back a ways? Graham sighed.
Eventually, they found Derek on the other side of the boat, wearing a filthy yellow slicker that one of the crew must have lent him. A bucket next to him contained two fish, swirling around like three a.m. thoughts.
Audra handed Derek a ham sandwich from the cooler she’d been dragging around and offered one to Graham. He shook his head and reached for the thermos of coffee.
And so the morning passed—as slowly as the morning passes when you’re waiting for a baby to nap so you yourself can sleep. Graham stayed with Derek, leaning against the side of the cabin and drinking coffee. The wind off the sea made conversation impossible—just the way Graham liked it. Audra went down to check on Matthew and presumably got sucked into the Mrs. Wilcox conversation vortex, because Graham didn’t see her or Matthew again until the bell rang. The crew announced they were returning to dock and made everyone reel in their lines.
Audra showed up then, Matthew stumbling after her, both of them blinking in the daylight. Graham put an arm around Matthew’s neck and kissed the top of his head, but Matthew was looking at Derek’s bucket of fish.
“How many did you catch, Derek?”
Derek shrugged, his eyes on his fishing rod. “Six or seven.”
“That’s fantastic!” Matthew’s eyes shone with admiration. He wasn’t even jealous.
“Whatever,” Derek said.
“No, seriously,” Matthew said. “It’s great.”
“I know,” Derek snapped impatiently, and went back to reeling in his fishing line.
Matthew shrank back as though bitten, and Graham looked at Audra. Her eyes were dark with pain, bleak-looking. She leaned forward to stroke Matthew’s hair.
Eventually, they got back to shore and into the car. They drove home in a silence that not even Audra broke, except once to ask Graham, “Have you ever heard of fishbone embroidery?”
Graham drove straight to Derek Rottweiler’s building without even stopping at McDonald’s because he felt that he could not physically endure being in the car with that ghastly, heartless child one minute more than absolutely necessary. And then they drove to their own building, where Matthew had some delayed seasick reaction and threw up in the hall outside their apartment door, and Audra discovered she’d left her phone charger aboard the Sapphire.
It was not the least fun Graham had ever had for four hundred dollars—that honor was reserved for a mule ride up a mountain trail in Puerto Vallarta, where Graham’s mule had died and Graham had had to hike back down with the sobbing guide—but, oh man, it was pretty close.
Graham expected Audra to be weepy on the day that Lorelei moved, but when he got home after work, she and Matthew were both pink-cheeked with pleasure.
“Lorelei gave me her Coke machine!” Audra said excitedly. “The movers couldn’t promise not to break it so she had them move it down here.”
“Come look, Dad!” Matthew said.
Graham set down his briefcase and followed them down the hall. Lorelei’s vintage Coke machine stood proudly in their living room, as immovable as a tree whose roots have cracked and lifted the sidewalk.
Audra showed him how to use it, as though he’d never seen a vending machine before, let alone this exact vending machine, which had stood in Lorelei’s den for years. Audra had always been enamored of it.
“Now you just put a dime here in the coin slot,” Audra said. “And then you press the button and your drink comes out! It can hold up to nine different flavors or whatever—including beer bottles!—so Matthew and I stocked it from the fridge and Matthew had his very first Coke!”
Perhaps caffeine was responsible for the bright-eyed looks on both of them? For a second, Graham had thought Audra was going to say that Matthew had had his first beer, so he was actually relieved that it was just a Coke. Although up until now they had refrained from giving Matthew caffeine, fearing that it would be as disastrous as introducing television to a primitive culture. Oh, well, who cared? It had to happen sooner or later.
Then suddenly Graham was reminded of the time when Matthew was four and they had made him give up his pacifier. (Yes, at age four, he still used a pacifier; they were tired of hearing about it.) They had promised Matthew that once he’d gone without a pacifier for ten days, they would take him to Chuck E. Cheese’s. Matthew had been surprisingly—joyously to Graham—cooperative, letting Audra collect all the pacifiers from around the apartment (she threw them away the next day while he was at preschool) and watching Graham carefully each night as he wrote a big black X on the calendar. The ten days went by like syrup sliding down a stack of pancakes, and they went to Chuck E. Cheese’s, and in the car on the way home, Matthew said, “That was great. And now I get my pacifier back!” He had not understood the deal at all, and when they explained to him that the pacifiers were gone for good, his wail of outrage had made Graham’s eardrums pulse. Graham suspected that they might be in for something similar now—the novelty of the vending machine would wear off and Audra would want her friend back.
“Press the button, Matthew!” Audra said now, inserting a dime into the coin slot.
Matthew pressed and the machine rumbled and clunked but no beverage dropped into the little glass-fronted dispenser.
“Huh,” Audra said, fumbling for her phone. “Lorelei said this might happen. Let me just call her—”
“Mom, you said we could go out and get more drinks,” Matthew said. “Special, interesting ones.”
“We will, sweetie,” Audra said, pressing buttons on her phone. “Just let me ask Lorelei about this.” She put the phone to her ear. “Oh, hey, it’s me! Are you guys at the airport yet? Remember that time you dropped me off at the airport and we were so busy talking that you dropped me at Arrivals instead of Departures and I had to—”
“Mom!” Matthew protested.
Audra pressed the phone against her chest. “I know, honey. Just give me two minutes.” She put the phone back to her ear.
Matthew looked at Graham. “Does she mean the long two minutes or the short two minutes?”
Graham sighed. “The long two minutes, I think. But I’ll take you.”
So Graham and Matthew went to the supermarket and bought ginger ale and root beer and cherry Coke and cream soda—all those strange drinks that you forget were once actually popular—and some cold beer in case Audra hadn’t been able to get the Coke machine working again. While they were shopping, they called the pizza place and ordered a large pizza with pepperoni and basil leaves.
They picked up the pizza on the way home. Audra was off the phone, amazingly, and the vending machine was working again. Matthew stacked the new drinks on the machine’s shelves while Audra updated them on Lorelei’s move, which was now less than three hours old—“So they leave for the airport, and Lorelei was all emotional, you know, watching the building get smaller and smaller in the window, and Doug starts talking to the cabdriver about mortgage refinancing and the Federal Reserve! She wanted to kill herself!”—and Graham set the table.
The Coke machine made sort of conversational noises, like an elderly relative—rumbling and shuddering and switching a fan on and off—but the drinks were ice-cold and Graham agreed that it was very satisfying to get them from your own personal vending machine. It was like being the proprietor of a general store, but without the pesky customers.
Say what you will about fat and sugar and salt and alcohol—it’s all true. But the meal really did—in a way, for a moment, under the circumstances—make them all a little bit happier, even Graham.
Graham and Audra were going out to dinner—just the two of them—while Matthew had a playdate with a new friend from school named Theo. Evidently Theo was going to be Matthew’s rebound relationship. Graham didn’t hold out much hope. Rebound relationships never worked. Not even when the rebound person was superior in every way to the previous person, not even when the rebound person owned a PlayStation 4.
They were all going to walk over to Theo’s apartment and then Graham and Audra would go on to the restaurant. Graham and Matthew waited for Audra by the door and at last she came clacking down the hall. She wore a rose-colored sheath dress and thin gold hoop earrings and a pair of platform cork sandals so high that it seemed as though she were standing on a stack of telephone books. Graham looked at the sandals doubtfully. “Are you sure you can walk to the restaurant and back in those?”
“Oh, yes,” Audra said. “They’re new.”
Graham wasn’t sure how the fact that they were new sandals made them any easier to walk in, but he supposed it was her decision. They left the apartment at five, which meant they would probably get to the restaurant at about five-thirty. Of course, five-thirty was earlier than Graham and Audra cared to eat, but it was like when Matthew was a baby and they watched TV with closed captions for an entire year because otherwise the sound woke him up: theirs was not a perfect world.
Out on the street, the new sandals forced Audra to walk as though her legs were short lengths of limp rope. She took Graham’s arm and they all walked very slowly.
“We’re going to be late,” Matthew said worriedly.
“Just fashionably late,” Audra said. “I tell you, these shoes looked so cute online! Who knew they’d be impossible to walk in?”
Graham and Matthew exchanged a look—the shared knowledge that it would be wiser not to answer that.
“Anyway,” Audra continued, “Matthew, would you like to invite Theo to go to the Natural History Museum with us tomorrow?”
“Derek Rottweiler can’t go to the Natural History Museum at all anymore,” Matthew said, “because he took a slingshot into the butterfly conservatory.” He spoke in the sorrowful voice of someone who has known great love and loss, and for whom there can be no one else.
“Well, all the more reason to invite Theo,” Audra said.
“Maybe,” Matthew said. “I don’t know.”
It took them fifteen minutes to walk the five blocks to Theo’s apartment building. The doorman called ahead, and when Graham pressed the buzzer on Theo’s apartment door, it was immediately opened by a smiling man with hair sticking up like bulrushes, and wide-open eyes. He looked like he’d just escaped from a psychiatric ward (a medium-security ward, where everyone was pretty high-functioning, but still).
“Hello!” Audra said. She put her hand on Matthew’s shoulder. “This is Matthew. Is Theo here?”
The man smiled even more broadly but said nothing. Graham wondered if perhaps he was a deaf-mute.
Fortunately, a plump woman with dark hair came bustling up from behind the man and said, “Hello, Audra! Hi, Matthew!”
“Hi, Marcia,” Audra said. “This is my husband, Graham.”
Graham shook hands with Marcia, who said, “And this is my husband, Steven.”
“Hello!” Steven said with eager happiness. (Apparently he wasn’t a deaf-mute.) He didn’t offer to shake hands.
“Theo’s in his room, Matthew,” Marcia said. “He’s building something with Legos. Do you like Legos? We didn’t know if you liked them. I told Theo you might want to play something else. I said, ‘We don’t know Matthew very well yet, maybe he wants to play a different game.’ Graham and Audra, do you want to come in for a drink? Or maybe you’re on your way out. I told Theo I didn’t know if Matthew’s parents would stay or not. I said, ‘Maybe they’re on their way someplace.’ ”
She was clearly one of those people who chased themselves through conversations—asking questions, answering them, explaining their reasoning—and never realized that their words were like a revolving door spinning faster and faster while the person they were talking to waited in vain for a chance to step in. Graham had met others like her; he knew the type. But Steven—beaming benevolently at them—seemed to be a whole new level of peculiarity.
Marcia finally paused for breath, and Audra quickly spoke up and gave Marcia a pre-playdate rap about Matthew: he had already eaten dinner at home, he really doesn’t like loud noises, and he could call them on his phone if he wanted to be picked up before seven. Marcia had a little Q and A with herself about children and cellphones—“Are you glad Matthew has an iPhone? Has he lost it? I’m afraid Theo would lose it. I told Theo, ‘I’m afraid you’ll lose it’ ”—while Steven fixed Graham with the most intense look of benign craziness imaginable, like a smiling Phil Spector.
A boy’s voice called, “Hey, Matthew, come here!” from inside the apartment, and Matthew squeezed between Marcia and Steven and ran down the hall. Graham and Audra said goodbye and left. They left. They left.
Just think about it: If Steven interviewed for a job at Graham’s office, Graham wouldn’t give it to him, even if it was a very menial job, because Steven was so odd-seeming. Graham would not lend Steven money, or trust Steven to house-sit his apartment, or valet-park his car. But leave their only child with him for two hours? Oh, well, sure, no problem! Here you go, his name is Matthew and we’re pretty attached to him, so try not to traumatize him, okay? This sort of trust is one of the great paradoxes of parenting, similar in importance to Galileo’s paradox of infinity, and no one tells you about it ahead of time. (No one tells you shit about parenting ahead of time, really. Well, they do but not anything useful.)
As they walked down the stairs in front of Theo’s building, Graham said to Audra, “Didn’t Theo’s father strike you as a little—off?”
“Hmmm?” Audra reached the bottom of the stairs and gave a slight lurch, like someone starting to hula-hoop, while she gained balance on her shoes. She slid her hand into the crook of Graham’s arm. “I think he was just shy.”
“People over forty can’t be shy,” Graham said.
“What are you talking about?” Audra asked. She looked at him, amazed, and a stray lock of hair blew across her face, as curly and delicate as a sweetpea tendril. “All sorts of people over the age of forty are shy! What about Mr. Calkins?”
“Who’s Mr. Calkins?”
“He lives in our building, on the second floor,” Audra said as they began walking. “And he’s too shy to answer the phone in case it’s a stranger. You have to call him and hang up and then call back, so he knows it’s you. Also, Julio told me Mr. Calkins doesn’t trust the postal service and won’t open any letters unless they’re addressed to him with his middle initial.”
“That’s what I mean,” Graham said. “I think at a certain point, it stops being shyness and becomes something else, some sort of actual disorder.”
Audra looked unconvinced. “Anyway,” she said. “We should probably have Theo’s parents over for dinner. You could make spaghetti marinara with garlic bread.”
There are not really words to describe how depressing Graham found this idea. Spaghetti marinara with garlic bread was his all-purpose crowd-pleasing picky-eater dinner. Spaghetti marinara was like taking a girl on a first date, actually: nothing fancy, no surprises, best foot forward. The second date would be like golden chicken with coconut rice—a little fancier, but if you encountered some pushback about the flavored rice, that would be a bad sign. The third date should be something like chile-blackened catfish fajitas—hot and spicy, definitely a flashier and more impressive effort. But be open-minded—check with the date first—because not everyone likes spicy food and, you know, you’re invested at this point, and are probably liking the sex. The fourth date is the true test of compatibility, and the future of the relationship hangs in the balance: moules farcies and vichyssoise. Can she eat cold soup? If not, you have to stop seeing her and pretend to be your twin brother when she calls.
Graham hadn’t especially wanted to date the Rottweilers; he really didn’t want to date the Theos. What it came down to was that he was too old for picking up girls in bars, too old to serve spaghetti marinara. He just didn’t have the energy.
Even more depressing than the idea of having Theo’s parents over for dinner was the knowledge that they would do so. Just as they would have the parents of the friend after Theo, and the friend after that, too. Then eventually, Matthew would have girlfriends and wives and in-laws and it would all involve a lot of spaghetti marinara, but Graham would do it. He would do it because that was what you did when you loved someone. You kept pushing until you broke on through to the other side, as Jim Morrison may have said. Only Morrison didn’t add that on the other side, you found another obstacle and had to keep pushing. Forever.
Graham was so busy thinking about this that he would have kept walking if Audra had not tugged his arm to stop him.
A workman outside a flower shop had dumped an enormous white pail of soapy water on the sidewalk and people on both sides of the stream had paused so as not to get their feet wet. Graham looked down at the rainbow pattern in the oily water—a dark sunburst edged with color, like a reverse paparazzi flash—and, just for a moment, it seemed to him to contain all the future joy and sorrow in the world, in equal amounts.
“My new shoes!” Audra said with a little moan, and then took his arm again. “Come on.”
They began walking again, slowly, clutching each other and concentrating on the ground in front of them. Graham took very short steps, and Audra tottered next to him, holding out her free hand, fingers splayed, for extra balance. He wondered what other people thought of them. He and Audra must look like the newest of lovers, or the frailest of seniors, or the drunkest of partygoers—or anything, really, other than the survivors they were.