She gestured at him impatiently. “I can’t believe that in this entire time you’ve unwrapped three caramels. It goes much faster if you use your fingers. The way you sit there with your bifocals and a penknife!”
“What’s wrong with a penknife?” Graham asked. “And why shouldn’t I wear my bifocals? Otherwise, I’ll cut my hand and bleed all over the caramels and you wouldn’t like that, either.”
Audra moved the double boiler off the burner and came over to help. “It’s more the picture you create,” she said. Her fingers were monkey-quick on the caramels, unwrapping three more in the time it took her to say that. Her voice was amused. “It’s like, I don’t know, you’re a patient in an old folks’ home and this is some project I’ve given you and you don’t know how to do it.” She laughed. She had a habit of laughing at her own jokes.
Graham laughed, too. He was glad, suddenly, that she was teasing him about seeming old, because, he realized, when she stopped teasing him about it, it would be because he really was.
—
They met Elspeth and Bentrup for dinner in a small French restaurant on the Upper East Side that Audra knew.
“Is this okay?” Audra said to Elspeth while they were waiting to be seated. “It’s not freaking you out?”
“No,” Elspeth said. “I don’t have a phobia about restaurants. I just don’t particularly like them.”
Audra looked intrigued. “Is it because you’re paying someone? For something you could do in your own home?”
“Yes, sort of.”
“I’ll bet you don’t like getting massages, either,” Audra said.
“Correct,” Elspeth said.
“I love massages,” Audra said. “I don’t mind that I’m paying someone to touch me. That doesn’t extend to hookers, though.” She glanced at Bentrup with an apologetic expression, as though to imply that everyone present knew Bentrup had a heavy prostitute habit but that they all liked him anyway.
Bentrup smiled reassuringly. “I don’t go to hookers, either,” he said.
“I think being a hooker would be the worst job in the world,” Audra said, and her voice took on a slight relish. “Well, except maybe cat food salesperson. But honestly, imagine all the unattractive men you’d have to have sex with if you were a hooker. Just think about it.”
“I am, I am,” Bentrup said. He seemed to have gotten the knack of conversing with Audra, the knack being that you had to pretend you were talking to someone in the time before society had formed and social boundaries had been invented.
“If you were to go to a hooker, though,” Audra said to Bentrup in a slow, considering voice, “what-all would you ask for?”
Bentrup looked alarmed and another man waiting to be seated looked delighted, but fortunately the hostess came to lead them to their table just then. Audra went first, followed by Bentrup, but Elspeth lingered for a moment to give Graham a hard look. Her eyes reminded him of a certain kind of gravel, the type that bit your feet when you walked on it barefoot. She probably thought this was the kind of conversation he and Audra had at home all the time. (It sort of was.)
The hostess seated them at a table. They ordered wine and listened to the specials and then they were left to study the menus.
“What are you having?” Audra asked Bentrup.
“Well, now,” he said, rolling the words around in his mouth like a merlot. “I believe I’ll have the baked clams and the pork tenderloin.”
“I know without even asking that Graham will have the duck,” Audra said.
“Oh, do you still like duck so much?” Elspeth said to him. “It always bothered you that I never cooked it.”
It seemed to Graham that a crevasse had opened suddenly, that he was perilously close to falling in. “I do still like duck,” he said carefully. “I cook it myself.”
“What are you having?” Audra said to Elspeth.
“The trout with raspberry vinegar,” Elspeth said. Graham could have predicted that, too.
“I’m sorry to interrogate you,” Audra said, “but my grandfather always wanted everyone at the table to order the same thing, and it sort of affected me.”
This confirmed something that up to now Graham had only suspected: that Elspeth’s refusal to be charmed by Audra’s eccentricity made Audra act even more eccentric in front of her. The grandfather story was true, he happened to know, but she generally only told it when she wanted attention of some sort.
“Why on earth would he want that?” Elspeth asked.
“He thought it would be easier on the waiter,” Audra said. “He thought if we didn’t all order the same thing, the waiter would have some sort of breakdown.”
Elspeth looked a little astonished. “Did you all do it?”
But it was as though having finally gotten Elspeth’s attention, Audra had lost interest. “Oh, sometimes,” she said, studying her own menu. “More often, we just changed our orders when he was in the bathroom or something.”
It made her sound callous, suddenly, and selfish and insensitive and unkind, and all the things she wasn’t.
—
Then one night they went over to Elspeth and Bentrup’s for dinner, and Elspeth answered the door. She had a glass of red wine in her hand and looked exceptionally pale. It took Graham a minute to realize she wasn’t wearing any makeup.
“Oh,” Elspeth said when she saw them. “I meant to call you and cancel but I forgot.”
“What’s wrong?” Audra asked. “What can we do?”
Elspeth studied them for a moment. “Come on in,” she said finally.
She didn’t hold the door for them but walked ahead into the apartment, calling over her shoulder, “Get some glasses from the kitchen, Graham. You know where they are.”
He did know exactly where they were. Elspeth never changed anything in the kitchen. He went into the kitchen and pulled two more glasses out of the cupboard.
Audra called, “I think you should bring another bottle of wine, too.” She said it exactly the way she told him to bring Tylenol and the thermometer when Matthew had a fever, so Graham picked up another bottle from the counter and hurried into the dining room.
The table was not set, the only things on it were a mostly empty wine bottle and Elspeth’s glass. She sat at the head of the table with Audra on her left. Graham sat across from Audra.
“Where’s Bentrup?” he asked.
This question seemed to make Elspeth take a very long drink of wine. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “He left. I told him to leave.”
“Oh, Elspeth,” Audra breathed. “How terrible. What happened?” She motioned impatiently for Graham to open the wine. He obeyed.
“Well,” Elspeth said. “Last night he said—”
“Wait, wait,” Audra interrupted. “Where were you? What were you doing, exactly?” Audra liked her stories to have context.
“Oh-kay,” Elspeth said slowly, in a we’ll-do-it-your-way-if-we-must voice. “Last night we went to a farewell dinner for this man who works in my department. Yes, Audra, it was at a restaurant.” She took another enormous swallow of wine. Graham wondered if she would be able to finish her story at this rate. “And the people at our table were discussing movies and Bentrup said that he saw Accidental Love last week, at a matinee.”
Audra moaned.