Читать книгу Standard Deviation: ‘The best feel-good novel around’ Daily Mail - Katherine Heiny, Katherine Heiny - Страница 8

“You won’t believe what happened!” Graham’s secretary said.

Her name was Olivia and she had long dark hair with heavy bangs. She always looked out from under the bangs like an excited cat peering from under a chair when you’re about to throw a ball of yarn. She was twenty-three, freshly emerged from college, although Graham sometimes thought she could be freshly emerged from the womb, given how naïve she was. Graham had had to show her how to read her bank statement! He had had to explain the difference between local and state taxes, and that food could still go bad in a refrigerator, and even daylight saving time. How could you not know about daylight saving time and live on your own? What were her parents thinking? But for all that, she was a pretty good secretary—an extremely fast typist and she never ran out of cheerful, friendly energy. (Graham’s previous secretary had been a woman in her fifties who sighed heavily, like a dog or a teenager, whenever he asked her to do anything.)

“What?” he asked now.

“I’ve locked myself out of my apartment!” Olivia said. “Just as the door clicked shut behind me this morning, I thought, Wait!—wait! And sure enough, I’d left the keys sitting on the kitchen counter.”

Graham recognized that feeling. “Call your roommate,” he said. He knew Olivia had a roommate. It was the only reason he could, in good conscience, stand to let her go home at night.

“She’s in Kentucky visiting her parents,” Olivia said.

“What about your neighbors?”

“What about them?”

“Do any of them have a key?”

She looked puzzled. “Why would I give a key to my neighbors?”

“In case you lock yourself out.”

“Oh! I see what you mean. But keys are expensive to make—like twenty-five dollars just for the one for the dead bolt.”

This was another thing about Olivia—how she and her roommate seemed to live on no money at all. Although she brought a giant Starbucks Frappuccino to work every single day, so Graham suspected it was not lack of funds but how those funds were spent.

“What about the super of your building?”

“Luis, you mean?”

“If that’s your super’s name, then yes.”

“But I don’t have his phone number,” Olivia said, “and he hardly ever answers when we knock on the door.”

“Well, then I guess you’re going to have to call a locksmith,” Graham said gently.

Olivia’s eyes got very wide, and she nodded gravely.

She went back to her desk and Graham could hear her pressing buttons on her phone and an instant later she said, “You won’t believe this! I locked myself out of my apartment!” and then she had basically the same conversation she’d just had with Graham. “No … She’s in Kentucky!? … No … No …”

She hung up and dialed another number. “You won’t believe this! I locked myself out of my apartment!”

Graham sighed and got up to close the door to his office. He supposed that when Olivia had called all her friends, she would get around to calling a locksmith. He could still hear the beginning of every call, even through the door, with Olivia squawking the word believe like a pterodactyl.

Almost as soon as he returned to his desk, Olivia buzzed him on the intercom. “Phone call for you on line one,” she said. “Esp—Els—Elsp—”

“Elspeth?” Graham said. “Elspeth Osbourne?” (Like he knew more than one.)

“Yes,” Olivia said. “Can I put her through?”

“Go ahead,” Graham said.

Elspeth had never called him at work before. Well, not in ten years, at least. Imagine: it had been over a decade since he had spoken by phone to a woman he had once married. People were not meant to live like this, he sometimes thought. It was too confusing. He lifted the receiver and punched the button.

“Graham Cavanaugh,” he said, figuring that it was best to start out formally.

“Hello, Graham,” Elspeth said crisply, causing Graham to have an unexpectedly vivid image of her. Audra and every other woman he knew tilted their heads slightly when they answered the phone, so they could slide their handsets under their hair. But Elspeth always wore her hair pulled back in a French twist. She answered the phone without any nonsense. He could visualize the rest of her, too: her perfect posture, the silk blouses she favored, the narrowness of her shoulders, the way she always sat with her feet tucked slightly under her chair because she believed that crossing one’s legs caused varicose veins. (“It does?” Audra had said in a horrified voice when Graham had told her this years ago. She’d lost nearly a whole night of sleep worrying about it before deciding it was an old wives’ tale, like that thing about leaning on your elbows making them ugly.)

“Hello, Elspeth.”

They sounded like characters from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Graham thought. Won’t you be my neighbor? Won’t you please?

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Elspeth said, “but—”

“It’s no bother,” Graham said, interrupting without meaning to.

Elspeth paused for a moment. She didn’t like to be interrupted. “I’m calling because my great-aunt Mary died—”

“I remember Aunt Mary,” Graham said, interrupting again. He seemed to have forgotten how to talk to Elspeth. “I’m so sorry.”

“Yes, well, this is slightly awkward,” Elspeth said, “but Aunt Mary left us a joint bequest. She hadn’t updated her will. She had quite advanced dementia for many years.”

The implication was clear: only someone with advanced dementia would leave anything to Graham, after what he’d done to Elspeth. But Graham decided to ignore that.

“I see,” he said.

“So,” Elspeth said. “I was wondering if you might be able to meet me at the estate lawyer’s office so we can both sign for the bequest.”

“Certainly,” Graham said. “When?”

“How about tomorrow?”

She gave him the address and he wrote it down and they agreed on three o’clock and it was just like a normal phone call really. Almost.

Elspeth was waiting in the lobby of the estate lawyer’s building when Graham arrived. Her ash-blond hair was pulled back neatly, and she wore a tightly belted pale pink trench coat over a matching pink turtleneck and white wool pants. She was still Elspeth, still absolutely immaculate.

“Hello, Graham,” she said. “I’m sorry to put you to so much trouble.”

“It’s no problem.”

They took the elevator up to the lawyer’s office and signed together for the bequest, which turned out to be a small marble statue of a cat. Graham recognized it instantly—it had arched its marble back on a shelf directly over Aunt Mary’s head at the dining table during a dozen Sunday lunches.

“Oh, right, that cat,” Elspeth said flatly.

The lawyer explained that they could have the statue evaluated and then one of them could buy the other one’s half, or they could sell the statue and split the proceeds.

“I know,” Elspeth said. “I’m an attorney.”

The lawyer’s secretary boxed up the marble cat, and Graham and Elspeth took it with them, along with a sheaf of papers for each of them, the top one of which had a photograph of the statue paper-clipped to it.

“You can have the cat,” Graham said as soon as they were on the street. “I only came because the lawyer needed my signature.”

“I don’t want it,” Elspeth said. “I think we should sell it.”

“Okay,” Graham said. “But you sell it and keep the money.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t feel right about that,” Elspeth said, and Graham knew enough to realize that it wasn’t that she felt she owed him anything, it was that her lawyer’s mind had leapt ahead to the potential problems that might arise from such a casual arrangement.

They went into Starbucks to talk about it, and finally agreed that Elspeth would take the statue to Sotheby’s to have it valued and put up for auction.

“I feel like we’re on Antiques Roadshow,” Graham said.

“I can’t stand that program,” Elspeth said. “It’s so depressing how they always choose people whose whole quality of life hangs in the balance of the value of some knickknack.”

They had finished their coffee and began moving toward the door.

“I guess you should know,” Elspeth said, pulling the belt on her coat tight. “I’m living with someone.”

Actually, there was no reason he should know that. He and Elspeth had no children. In lots of really important ways, it was like they’d never been married at all.

“That’s great,” he said. “Who is it?”

“Oh, you don’t know him,” Elspeth said. “His name is Bentrup Foster.”

What is the very best thing about him? Audra would have asked. Where did you meet him? What did you think when you first saw him? Is he the type of person who thinks a bowl of cereal counts as dinner? How many times does he hit the snooze button in the morning? Would he ever do a shot of tequila to get drunk quicker? Does he watch game shows? Does he give good back rubs?

But Graham did not want to start channeling his second wife in the presence of his first wife, so he only said, “What does he do?”

“He works in the shoe department at Barneys,” Elspeth said.

“I’m glad for you,” Graham said. “That you have someone.”

“Yes.” Elspeth looked thoughtful. “With is better than without.”

He wondered if she would ever—ever—say anything that didn’t make him feel automatically guilty. He doubted it.

When Graham got back to their apartment that night, Audra was helping Matthew with his homework at the dining room table.

“What the heck is bus station division?” she asked Matthew, wrinkling her forehead as she read the worksheet. “Can we Google it?”

“Hi, Daddy,” Matthew said.

“Oh, hey,” Audra said. “How was it? What did Aunt Mary leave you?”

Graham dropped the sheaf of papers on the table, and Audra glanced at the photograph of the statue. “A marble kitty cat,” she said, clearly not impressed. (Honestly, Graham was starting to feel offended on the cat’s behalf.) “Did you see Elspeth?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Who’s Elspeth?” Matthew asked.

“Daddy’s first wife,” Audra said.

“I didn’t know you had another wife,” Matthew said. He looked at Audra. “Did you have other husbands?”

“Only other people’s,” she said cheerfully. (She claimed she couldn’t censor herself around Matthew or she’d go crazy.) “Now finish up your homework. It’s only seven problems. Just do them the regular way, I guess.”

She followed Graham into the kitchen. “How was it, seeing her?”

“It was okay, actually.”

“Did you have the sense she wanted to murder you?” She said this in a normal sort of voice; they might have been discussing whether they had any lemons.

“No, of course not,” Graham said.

“You used to say that,” Audra said. “You used to hang up the phone with her sometimes and say that you could tell she was hoping you’d drop dead.”

Had he said that? It was hard to remember. “Well, that’s different from wanting to murder me,” Graham said. “She was actually perfectly friendly. She’s living with someone.”

“Perfect!” Audra exclaimed. “We can go on a double date!”

“I don’t know about that,” Graham said. “That might be pushing it.”

“Oh, please,” Audra said. “It would be the most natural thing in the world.”

Well. Graham was not so sure it would be, not sure at all. “You seem to be forgetting,” he said, “that you were the cause of my divorce in the first place.”

“Oh, but that’s ancient history,” Audra said. “That was all twenty years ago.”

“Thirteen,” he corrected. She had a tendency to round up. It was almost a way of life.

“Well, whatever,” she said. “Surely she’s over it by now. She’s living with this other man. Aren’t you the least bit curious to meet him?”

“No,” Graham said, knowing full well that she would find this attitude incomprehensible.

Audra sighed loudly. “But I’m dying to meet her. Just think, you were married to her for a decade”—it had been eight years—“and she and I have never even laid eyes on each other!”

That was only half-true. Elspeth had seen Audra once but Audra didn’t know that. He and Audra had been on their way to Macy’s to register for wedding gifts and they’d come up out of the subway on Thirty-fourth Street, and dashed across Seventh Avenue into the store, and in those brief moments, Elspeth had seen them. Graham knew because she told him the next day on the phone. (This was when they were first separated and still talked bitterly on the phone every few days.) “I saw you and your girlfriend going into Macy’s yesterday,” she’d said. Graham still remembered what Audra had been wearing that day: jeans and a silk blouse and a little rabbit-fur vest she’d bought in a secondhand store. She had looked unbearably pretty and young, so young. He’d seen her through Elspeth’s eyes and felt guilty all over again.

“Maybe that’s for the best,” he said now.

“Why?” Audra said. “Are you ashamed of me? Ashamed of her?”

“No, neither,” he said, realizing as he said it that it was true.

“Then, please, just ask her,” Audra said. “The next time you speak to her, just mention the idea and see what she says.”

“Okay,” Graham said. Sometimes it was easier just to give in.

So when Elspeth called to tell him that the marble kitty cat had been valued at four thousand dollars, he said, “I’ve been thinking we should all have dinner together.”

“Dinner?” Elspeth repeated. She sounded startled.

“Yes,” Graham said. “The four of us. You, me, Audra, and Bentrup. Like a double date.”

“A double date?”

(This was a problem when you lived with people who had strong personalities; you started to sound like them.)

“That’s only an expression,” he said hastily. “I just thought, you know, the four of us could have dinner. But we don’t have to if you think it’s too, ah, unconventional.” He’d been about to say kooky when he realized that was an Audra word, too.

“Of course it’s unconventional,” Elspeth said. “We’re divorced.”

“There are a million ways to be divorced,” Graham answered. Which was another thing Audra said: There are a million ways to be married, there are a million ways to raise a child, there are a million ways to run a household. It so happened he agreed with her.

“I guess,” Elspeth said slowly, like someone struggling to comprehend a difficult concept.

“It doesn’t have to be a big deal,” Graham said. “We could—” He was about to say go out somewhere casual, when he remembered that Elspeth didn’t like to go to restaurants. “You could just come over for dinner,” he finished.

She was quiet for so long that he finally said, “Elspeth?”

“I’m thinking,” she said.

Graham remained silent, and after a moment, Elspeth said, “Okay. Let’s do it.”

“Good,” Graham said. This had to be the most lukewarm meeting arrangement ever made.

He wondered what factors she had been weighing during her silence. He was, he realized suddenly, very happy not to know.

How do I look?” Audra asked, as she and Graham stood in the front hall, waiting for the babysitter. It had somehow worked out that they were going over to Elspeth’s new apartment for dinner, something to do with Bentrup’s work schedule.

“You look great,” he said, and she did. She wore black jeans and a thin fuzzy white angora boatneck sweater. The wide neckline showed her collarbones. Graham did not have the heart to tell her that she couldn’t win tonight—if she looked pretty, it would be assumed he was with her for her looks; if she didn’t, it would seem like she had let herself go.

“Now, remember,” he said. “Don’t say anything about helping her get the apartment. In fact, don’t even mention the apartment.”

“How can I not mention it if we’re standing inside it?” Audra said. “Won’t that seem sort of ungracious? What if, after we leave, Elspeth turns to Bentrup and says, ‘That woman was so odd! She didn’t say one word about our home.’”

That seemed to Graham to be possibly the best thing Elspeth might say about them after they left.

Audra had arranged for their downstairs neighbors’ daughter Melissa to babysit Matthew while they were at Elspeth’s. “It’s strange that Melissa’s always available,” Graham said. “It must say something about her social life.”

“Or else her boyfriend’s some married guy she can only see at, like, lunchtime,” Audra said, knotting a scarf around her neck.

It surprised Graham, still, how quickly Audra could access the seamy side of life.

There was a soft knock at the door and it was Melissa. Graham studied her while she slipped off her shoes, but he couldn’t picture her with a married lover, or any lover, in fact. To him, she just seemed like a cheerful, freckled teenager, almost without a gender. He could barely imagine having a conversation with her, let alone an affair.

(Audra had about two hundred stories of all the lecherous fathers of children she’d babysat in high school, including one father she’d actually had an affair with, a man named Edward. Edward used to pretend to walk his dog in the evenings but he would actually sneak over to Audra’s house on nights her parents weren’t there, and one night Edward’s wife drove by and saw their dog tied up in front of Audra’s house, looking cold and forlorn. So the next night, Edward’s wife called Audra up and said, “Just tell me the truth, has Edward ever—ever touched you?” and Edward picked up the basement extension and whispered, “Say no, Audra!” which was just about the stupidest thing anyone could’ve possibly done, in Audra’s opinion, and it blew up into a big scandal and she was blacklisted as a babysitter by the whole entire neighborhood and— You know, actually, maybe it wasn’t so surprising that Audra’s mind always leapt to some sort of sordid answer so quickly after all.)

“Hey, Melissa, how are you?” Audra said. “I love those boots. Are they new? Are they Uggs? I’ve never seen that color before. Matthew’s in his room, he wants to show you something on Google Earth. He wants a peanut butter sandwich for dinner—you know how he likes that, right? And he can have chocolate milk with dinner, and he can watch half an hour of TV, and read a little before bed but lights out by nine, and keep going back in to check, because otherwise, he’ll turn the light on again.”

Melissa said nothing, just nodded gently. Graham had noticed that shy people loved Audra because she talked so much, and she frequently did both parts of the conversation.

“Okay, great,” Audra said now, though Melissa had not actually said a word. “I guess we’re off.”

Melissa smiled. “I know the drill by now.”

“Well, good,” Audra said. “Because I feel like I was machine-gunning you with information there.”

Melissa laughed. They said good night, and as they walked out, Graham thought that if he had made a joke like that to Melissa, it would have been awkward, not funny. It was as though Melissa could not see or hear him. That was the real reason he couldn’t imagine having an affair with her. He was dead to her, but Audra, at barely forty—Audra was still young enough to move in the real world.

Bentrup answered the door of Elspeth’s apartment, and Audra said, “Goodness!” in a startled voice. (It was even ruder than it sounds, if that’s possible.)

But Graham knew what she meant because he was shocked by Bentrup’s appearance, too. It wasn’t so much that Bentrup was in his early sixties, or that his hair was bright silver, or that it was slicked back from his forehead in a pompadour, or that he had a deep artificial-looking tan the color of toast, or that his eyes were caught in nets of wrinkles, like a reptile’s, or that he was wearing a green velvet smoking jacket and an ascot—it was all of these things. All those details added up to make him someone entirely other than Graham had expected.

“It’s so nice to meet you,” Audra said.

So that, technically, she’d said Goodness, it’s so nice to meet you, except with a long pause in the middle and the intonation all wrong.

“And you, too, my dear,” Bentrup said, taking one of her hands in both of his. His voice was another surprise: British and fulsome and taking too long to get to the ends of words.

Then he shook hands with Graham and took the bottle of wine they’d brought and there was a little flurry of conversation (Bentrup asking how their trip over was and Audra saying, “Well, you won’t believe this but the cabdriver told me how to program our TV remote”) and then they followed Bentrup down the hall.

The Rosemund was just as Graham thought it would be—glossy and hard-edged, with so many chrome and stainless steel fixtures that it seemed as though the apartment were wearing braces. It was the kind of place that had to be kept aggressively clean, otherwise all those reflective surfaces would double any messes you left behind.

Elspeth was in the kitchen. “Graham, hello,” she said, and kissed his cheek. He wasn’t expecting that. “And you must be Audra,” she said. Was he imagining it or was there just the slightest bit of mockery in her tone? Like You must be Audra, unless Graham’s moved on to someone else by now.

“Hello,” Audra said, and her voice was warm and pleased. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

“Likewise,” Elspeth said, and turned to stir something on the stove.

This was something he’d forgotten about Elspeth, how she tended to be very minimal in conversation sometimes, and a certain kind of person found that minimalism uncomfortable and rushed in to fill the void with revealing chatter.

“You know, I think I was in this building years and years ago for an alcoholic intervention,” Audra said. “I was working as this woman’s personal assistant and she asked me to participate. She was arranging the intervention for her husband, and I think she wanted to up the numbers. I was afraid she might fire me if I said no, so I went and then we all had to get up and talk about how the husband’s drinking was impacting our lives and I didn’t know what to say. I mean, I wanted to say, ‘Well, it’s impacting my life because I have to be here on a Friday night when I could be out drinking with my friends,’ but I didn’t feel that would be overly helpful.”

Bentrup was twisting a corkscrew into a wine bottle. “Did it work?” he asked.

“Hmmm?” Audra said absently, as though she had already moved on to thinking about something else. “Oh, no. It turned out that the husband was in an alcoholic blackout that night and didn’t even remember there’d been an intervention.” She turned toward Elspeth. “So if you don’t mind my asking, why don’t you like restaurants?”

Elspeth pursed her lips slightly. “Why don’t you like Chinese food?”

“I do like Chinese food,” Audra said.

“Well, name something you don’t like,” Elspeth said.

“People’s breath after they’ve eaten Doritos,” Audra answered so promptly that Elspeth blinked.

“Okay,” she said, still stirring the pan on the stove. “Why don’t you like people’s breath after they’ve eaten Doritos? It’s the same sort of question.”

“Not really,” Audra said. “Because, I mean, have you ever smelled someone’s breath after they’ve eaten Doritos? It’s really unpleasant, but restaurants are, on the whole, pleasant experiences.”

“Unless the waiters have been eating Doritos,” Bentrup said, and Audra laughed.

“Now I have to ask you something,” she said to him.

“Certainly,” he said.

“If you work in the shoe department, why are you wearing slippers?”

Bentrup was indeed wearing slippers—or maybe they were moccasins. They looked new and stiff, nothing like the ones Graham wore at home, which bulged out at the sides like a hamster’s cheeks. Bentrup smiled. “I don’t like to be too predictable.”

During all of this, Graham was very distracted by the blouse Elspeth was wearing. It was black silk and had a picture of a white bow on it, but not an actual bow. Graham liked analogies and he couldn’t help thinking that there was some way in which the blouse suited Elspeth perfectly. It was not that she was a two-dimensional person, he knew her far too well to ever think that. It was more the self-contained, insoluble, impenetrable nature of it.

Bentrup raised his wineglass. “To your very good health,” he said.

“Cheers,” Audra said, clinking her glass with his.

Graham and Elspeth raised their glasses. Graham glanced at Elspeth and saw that he could read her expression as easily as he read a clock face: she was amused at her own expense. Who would have ever thought I’d be socializing with these two particular people? She was thinking that, or something close to it, he could tell.

It was amazing, really, that after so many years apart, he and Elspeth still spoke in marital code.

He called the day after dinner to thank her and she said, “It was a pleasure. Audra is certainly vivacious.” But what she meant was She talks too much, however do you stand it?

“I enjoy that about her,” he said. “Bentrup is extremely dapper.”

“I like the way he looks,” she said spikily, having understood him correctly to mean He looks like a dandy. (Actually, Audra had said on the way home that Bentrup reminded her of a sexy snake-oil salesman, but Graham wasn’t going to go there.)

“I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet Matthew,” Elspeth said, which didn’t make much sense because Matthew hadn’t been invited.

“Well, it was a school night,” Graham said.

“Audra told me he goes to the Laurence School,” Elspeth said. “I didn’t realize he was autistic.” I guess everything didn’t turn out so hunky-dory for you and Audra after all.

“He’s not autistic,” Graham said, his voice rapping out more sharply than he’d intended. “He might not even have Asperger’s. No one knows. But he’s a visual learner and he does well at Laurence. Lots of kids there have exceptional IQs.” And, as anyone with a special-needs child could tell you, that sort of defensive speech is code for Watch it.

“Yes, of course,” Elspeth said. “And Audra showed me a picture. He looks like her, very handsome.” I can give compliments, even about your second wife. I am not a small, vindictive person.

So Graham said, “Matthew reminds me of your father, actually.”

“My father?”

“Yes,” Graham said. “Very bright and mathematical but not terribly good at picking up on social signals.” Take that. Actually, it sort of described Elspeth, too.

“My father did not have Asperger’s,” Elspeth said, emphasizing every other word slightly. You never liked him.

“Not diagnosed, no,” Graham said. “But remember the first time you took me skiing with your family and he asked me to calculate what temperature water boils at at ten thousand feet? That was his idea of small talk.” I know how strange your family is, don’t forget.

“And you did it,” Elspeth said. Who are you to accuse my father of having Asperger’s?

“Yes,” Graham admitted reluctantly. And even more reluctantly, but also involuntarily, he supplied the answer again. “One hundred and ninety-four degrees Fahrenheit. For each thousand feet above sea level, the boiling point of water drops two degrees.”

“And I married you,” Elspeth said. “So there you go.”

This last part was a little cryptic, even for code. Did she mean, I married you and look how horribly it turned out, or I married you because you reminded me of my father, so it serves me right, or even something more general, like For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost?

Graham didn’t know how to respond, so he said, “Thanks again for last night. The red snapper was delicious.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I took an Asian cooking class last year.”

There was a moment of silence when they both seemed to realize that they had actually meant what they were saying. They weren’t speaking in code anymore. Graham felt a needle of fear: God only knew what she might say now.

So he said he had a meeting and that they should all have dinner again soon and he would be in touch, and she said the same sorts of things back, and—safely cloaked in code again—they hung up.

Can I just ask,” Audra said that night. “Is Elspeth in or is she out?”

They were sitting on the sofa after dinner and she was drawing dolphins freehand for a brochure she was designing for a scuba diving school. Dolphins in left profile, dolphins in right profile, dolphins looking straight ahead, smiling, staring, laughing. She tore each sketch out of the book after she drew it and threw it on the floor. It was how she got inspired.

“What are you talking about?” Graham asked.

“It’s just something I’ve noticed about you as you get older,” she said, sketching. “People are either in or out with you. Either you accept them as a friend and someone you’re interested in, or you want no interaction with them.”

“You couldn’t be more wrong,” Graham told her. “It’s not something that’s happened since I’ve gotten older. I’ve always been that way. I don’t need to be friends with the doormen and the man at the bodega and the dentist.”

“I’m not friends with the dentist,” Audra said. (They had their own marital code.)

“You had lunch with him.”

“Never!” She looked scandalized. “I think you mean Dr. Medowski.” She’d had lunch with her gynecologist? This seemed even worse on a number of levels, but before he could say anything, she continued, “And you should be friends with the doormen, Graham. They’ll do anything for me—call me a cab in the worst weather or carry the teeniest package.”

“I can call my own cabs,” he said. “And carry my own packages, too.”

“You miss out on a lot, though,” Audra said, tearing another sketch out of her book. A drawing of a dolphin talking on the phone floated to the floor. “They know so much gossip about everyone in the building. You know that couple on Two with the little redheaded boy who keeps pulling leaves off the plants in the lobby? Well, they hired a nanny last week and she quit after half an hour. Half an hour. Can you imagine? Anyway, you never answered—is Elspeth in or is she out?”

Graham considered for a moment before he answered. He and Elspeth had not made a very successful married couple, but maybe they could be successful friends. Didn’t they have all the ingredients for that: a shared history and common interests and similar intellectual outlooks? Certainly if Audra could be friends with the checkout girl at the health-food store, he could be friends with Elspeth.

“In,” he said finally. “She’s in.”

And so they began, cautiously, occasionally, to do the things that couples do.

Graham and Audra had Elspeth and Bentrup over for brunch and introduced them to Matthew.

“Do you know who Satoshi Kamiya is?” Matthew asked them.

“The head of Toyota?” Bentrup guessed.

“No,” Matthew said. “He’s the best origami guy in the world.” He turned to Elspeth. “Did you know who he is?”

“No,” she said. “Do you know who Alexander Fleming is?”

Matthew shook his head. “Does he do origami?”

“No,” Elspeth said, never one to volunteer information.

“Do you do origami?”

“No.”

“Who is Alexander Fleming?” Audra asked.

“He discovered penicillin,” Elspeth said.

Audra frowned slightly. “I thought that was Jonas Salk.”

(The rest of brunch went a lot better.)

But mainly they walked. They walked through Central Park and had hot dogs; they walked through Little Italy for the cannoli; they walked across the Brooklyn Bridge.

Since four people can’t easily walk together, they tended to divide into pairs, and the formation of these pairings and subsequent conversations were fascinating to Graham.

Sometimes he walked with Elspeth and they updated each other on mutual friends’ lives. (He and Elspeth never spoke directly of their marriage, only of the times before and after. Graham imagined it would be this way if you had a relative who went to prison.) Some of their friends had done so little in thirteen years that it was boring to hear the updates—“He still works in finance, his mother lives with them now”—but others were intriguing: Elspeth’s cousin had left his wife for the teenage pool boy; one of their former neighbors had started a healing ministry after his eczema mysteriously improved; another friend had invented a self-propelled vacuum and was now a multimillionaire. It amazed Graham that he had forgotten some of these people completely, and yet they were still around, still in touch with Elspeth. He in turn told her about his mother and her sciatica; about some people he worked with whom she’d always been fond of; about a friend from high school who still called drunk at three a.m. sometimes. Every time they exchanged information about someone who had chosen sides in that long-ago split, Graham felt a little less responsible, a little like he’d repaired some tiny bit of damage.

He wondered sometimes why Elspeth agreed to these outings, and even suggested them. Surely she didn’t feel guilty about their divorce. He thought maybe it was because she was, and always had been, a difficult person socially. He didn’t mind her quirks, and neither did Audra, but how many other friends did Elspeth have? Not many, was Graham’s guess.

Graham and Elspeth talked about the marble kitty cat sometimes, too, and speculated on its fate. Three months had gone by and Sotheby’s had yet to sell it.

“I feel bad for it,” Graham said.

“And for Aunt Mary, too,” Elspeth said. “She thought it was this treasure and no one wants it.”

“She should have had it buried with her,” Graham said, and wondered suddenly if he’d gone too far and offended Elspeth, but she only laughed.

While he talked to Elspeth, Audra and Bentrup strolled ahead, deep in conversation. Graham thought privately that Bentrup was in awe of Audra—her flirtatiousness, her prettiness, her forceful personality. But Elspeth never seemed the slightest bit jealous, even though Audra always tucked her hand into Bentrup’s arm as they walked, so maybe Graham was wrong about that. Later Audra would tell him that Bentrup was sixty-two, and that he grew up in Portsmouth, England, and that he used to go to tanning booths but didn’t anymore, his skin just sort of stayed that color. Also, he’d been married twice, the first time to a woman named Tillie, who had an unshakable belief that dishcloths should be folded a certain way to avoid bad luck, and the second time to a woman named Margaret, who disliked it when Bentrup spat in the rhododendrons.

Sometimes Graham and Bentrup walked together, but they never spoke of anything personal. In fact, Graham found Bentrup almost maddeningly impersonal, like some tour guide they’d hired and now regretted bringing along. He said things like, “Chinatown is the largest Chinese community outside Asia,” and “While much of the foliage in Central Park appears natural, it is in fact almost entirely landscaped.” Even worse, it took him easily—easily—five minutes to get to the end of any sentence with the way he drawled in his British accent. Was this the kind of conversation he had with Elspeth at home? Was this what she liked? But Graham never paid much attention to Bentrup because he was too busy trying to eavesdrop on Elspeth and Audra.