(She kept saying God as if He were some friend of hers, the way another person might say Sheila.)
“Heavens,” Father Hicks said, looking a little startled.
“And furthermore, God wanted it done by his forty-sixth birthday!” Audra said. Then she touched Father Hicks’s arm. “I mean, Brice’s forty-sixth birthday, obviously. God is, like, seven hundred million years old.”
“Did Brice do it?” Lorelei asked.
“Oh, yes,” Audra said. “I don’t think Brice’s wife wanted to, but how can you argue with your husband and say you know more than God? Literally, more than God? So she went along with it and God made them have an estate sale to get rid of most of their earthly possessions and I bought their brand-new waffle iron for fifty cents, which is when Brice’s wife told me all this. And now they live in Queens with almost no stuff and I guess they go to some church out there. Although maybe they don’t really need to go to church at all, what with God talking to Brice directly.”
(Now Audra was saying God somewhat ironically, as though it had quotes around it, but the way someone might say Sheila if Sheila were a poodle, or perhaps a rosebush.)
“Can we just back up for a second?” Doug asked. His eyes were sharp with interest. “You say God was against adjustable rate mortgages but did He say anything about jumbo loans?”
“You’d have to ask Brice that,” Audra said primly.
“But why didn’t God tell Brice to buy Apple stock ten years ago?” Elspeth said suddenly. (Trust Elspeth to find the loophole even in divine intervention.) “Then Brice could have afforded any house he wanted.”
“I thought of that, too,” Lorelei said.
“Well, Apple or Microsoft,” Doug said to Elspeth somewhat critically. “Apple ten years ago or Microsoft twenty years ago.”
“Indeed,” Bentrup said. “It does seem there could have been some more forward thinking.”
“You know, maybe God wasn’t involved in people’s finances before now,” Audra said slowly. “He may only have started to think about finances extremely recently, since, in God’s lifetime, the stock market is a very new thing. Maybe He wasn’t sure it would last. Maybe God thought the stock market was like, I don’t know, break dancing or cocaine.”
Father Hicks’s eyes were huge. “I think that is absolutely profound,” he said.
He was gazing at Audra adoringly, and it seemed to Graham that he looked torn between wanting to convert her and wanting to pounce on her.
Finally, at ten-thirty, Doug and Lorelei made reluctant noises about going home, and Elspeth and Bentrup agreed. They all went to the front hall together. Elspeth had the deeply reflective air of someone who has just seen a particularly savage wildlife documentary, and Bentrup had taken on the seedy, shellacked look of a late-night convenience store shopper.
“Thank you for a delightful evening,” Father Hicks said, hugging Audra. His head fit under her chin and he seemed to rest his head on her breasts for a moment.
Lorelei hugged Audra, too, and Graham heard her whisper, “You are the most wonderful friend.”
Graham shook hands with everyone, and he and Audra watched them walk out into the hall toward the elevator, Father Hicks looking none too steady on his feet.
Audra shut the door and leaned against it. “Do you think we should give Matthew some sort of late baptism?” she asked.
“No,” Graham said. “I definitely do not.”
“Thank God,” Audra said. “Because I don’t think I have another such evening in me.”
And she went straight to bed without even clearing the table.
—
“You won’t believe who I ran into today,” Audra said one night a few days later.
“Who?” Graham asked.
“Bentrup!”
They were in the kitchen. Audra had promised to make something like two million cookies for the bake sale at Matthew’s school tomorrow, and she was melting chocolate in the double boiler while Graham unwrapped caramels.
“Where did you see Bentrup?” he asked.
“At Barneys.”
“Ah,” said Graham.
“I went there to buy some mascara,” Audra said, “and then I thought I would just mosey up to the shoe department and see if he was there and he was!” (Toward the end of the sentence, her voice had picked up speed, making it sound as though this were some amazing coincidence.)
“That makes sense, given that he works there,” Graham said. “Did he see you?”
“Oh, yes,” Audra said. “I went in and said hello and he was so nice. He took me through the whole store and introduced me to tons of people and let me use his employee discount to buy some scented candles and I told him he should buy one for Elspeth but he said she didn’t believe in them. How can you not believe in scented candles? They’re not like UFOs.”
Audra loved scented candles, which was something he’d always found slightly incongruous in her personality. “Why?” she’d asked once. “It’s not as though I like Yankee candles.” Graham had often tried to find the perfect comparison for the way she’d said that, something to do with champagne or caviar or maybe even real estate (“It’s not as though I live in Queens”), but he could never come up with anything that had exactly the right inflection. He had eventually concluded that it depended on some insider knowledge of scented candles he didn’t possess.
Audra was still talking. “And then we had coffee in the employee restaurant—did you know there’s a whole other café that the normal customers don’t even know about?—and then he had to go back to work.”
“What was more exciting, the employee discount or the employee restaurant?” Graham asked.
She did not even have to think about it. “The discount, of course. Though we had a very interesting conversation over coffee. He told me that when he and Elspeth go to dinners and stuff for her law firm, she wants him to tell people he’s retired, instead of saying he works at Barneys. Sadly, I was unable to find out what kind of sex they have.”
“What do you mean, what kind of sex?” he asked.
“Well, you know, how often and what position and does she make him wash his hands first and does he fetch her slippers in his teeth,” Audra said. “Really, I’m so interested, any little detail would have thrilled me. Aren’t you curious?”
“No,” Graham said. “I don’t like to think about it.” This was half truth and half lie because he honestly didn’t like to think about it, but he was very curious. To him, Elspeth and Bentrup seemed an entirely platonic couple, like Bert and Ernie. “And have you ever, ever made a man wash his hands first?”
Audra shook her head. “But she’s so fastidious and I’m so notoriously unfastidious.”
Notorious to whom? The general population or men she’d had sex with or what?
Audra stopped stirring and looked at him. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her skin was flushed from the heat of the double boiler. Graham would not have improved one single feature of her face.