Elspeth nodded.
Graham knew something had passed between them—that some essential piece of information had been exchanged—but he didn’t have a clue what it was. “I don’t get it,” he said.
Both women looked at him impatiently.
“No man would go see a romantic comedy by himself,” Audra explained. “Especially not in the afternoon. He obviously went with a woman.”
And then Elspeth said something else but Graham didn’t hear what it was because it was almost like he had physically left the room. It seemed as though he and Elspeth and Audra were all carts going along a track in a coal mine, and his cart had suddenly been shunted off on a separate track into a dark shaft while theirs continued ahead. Graham was so enveloped by emotion that he was utterly unaware of his surroundings, and the emotion was vindication. He was not the only person who couldn’t be faithful to Elspeth! Bentrup couldn’t do it either!
When Graham reentered the conversation, only a few seconds had passed and Elspeth was saying, “So this morning, I hid his iPhone and he looked and looked for it but finally he had to go to work without it and I took it into the office with me and hacked the pass code—”
“You hacked the pass code?” he asked, distracted despite himself. “How long did that take you?”
Elspeth waved her wineglass dismissively. “About five tries. It was his birth date but done the European way, with the day first.”
“Oh,” Graham said.
“Anyway,” Elspeth continued, “I entered the pass code and there were all these sexy text messages from some woman.”
Audra shook her head. “What a fucking idiot,” she said.
Graham and Elspeth both looked at her. Now, Graham thought, Audra would say Bentrup was an idiot to cheat on Elspeth, and he felt a momentary pride in Audra for knowing what to do. But what Audra actually said was “Everyone knows you get caught with text messages.”
Elspeth rolled her eyes. “I called him at work and we came home to discuss it and he admitted everything. It’s apparently some thirty-year-old woman and it’s been—”
“Thirty!” Audra exclaimed. “What sort of thirty-year-old?”
“Does it matter?” Elspeth asked, her voice cool.
“It would matter to me,” Audra said thoughtfully. “I mean, was it a thirty-year-old bombshell or some sort of chunky, messy girl who keeps pigeons?”
Elspeth stroked her chin with the side of her forefinger and looked at Audra for a long moment. Audra gazed back, unperturbed. It occurred to Graham that here, finally, was the similarity between the two women he’d chosen to marry: they were both totally unrufflable, one out of iciness, the other out of obliviousness.
“At any rate,” he interposed hastily. “You threw him out.”
Elspeth finished her wine. “Yup,” she said, and he knew she must be very drunk, because she always said yes, never even yeah.
“Have you had anything to eat?” he asked. “I could fix you a sandwich.”
He was a big believer in food as the answer to most of life’s questions.
She shook her head. “I think I’d like you to go, if you don’t mind.”
“Are you sure?” Audra said, as though there had been anything even slightly equivocal about Elspeth’s words or tone.
Elspeth nodded, and so Graham and Audra gathered up their coats, which hung over the backs of their chairs since Elspeth had never taken them.
“We can let ourselves out,” Graham said.
Elspeth smiled, a wry complicated smile. “I know.”
He regretted his words now. Wasn’t that a version of how their marriage had ended, Graham letting himself out?
And so they left. Graham made sure the door locked behind them in case Elspeth got too drunk to get up and check. He didn’t want to be held responsible for her being murdered in her bed, along with whatever else she held him responsible for.
They rode the elevator in silence, and as they walked through the lobby, Audra sighed deeply. “She hates us.”
“What?” Graham said, startled.
“She hates us now.”
Graham cleared his throat. “I think that might be—premature.”
“Didn’t you see the way she looked at us?” Audra asked. “We’re not her friends anymore, we’re one of them again: the cheaters, the trollops, the bastards.”
She sighed a second time, and Graham put his arm around her as they went out through the revolving doors and into the cool night air. Audra was not quite as oblivious as he thought.
—
Graham waited for Audra to say it and when, after five days, she didn’t, he couldn’t resist saying it himself: “I guess you can’t use that Barneys discount anymore.”
“I know!” Audra said. “I thought of that right away.”
They were in the kitchen, drinking wine on one side of the breakfast bar, while Matthew sat on the other, folding an origami creation called a Snake Dragon. Audra was folding origami, too, some part of the dragon’s tail. Just like the Old Masters had had apprentices who filled in the backgrounds of paintings, Matthew had Audra, who sometimes did the easier folds on very complicated projects.
“But we have to be loyal to Elspeth, even if she is ignoring us,” Audra said.
Graham had called Elspeth twice and left messages, asking if there was anything she needed, if there was anything at all that they could do. She hadn’t returned either call. Now both he and Audra glanced at the phone on the kitchen wall, even though they both had cellphones, and multiple email accounts, and Graham had a phone at his office. There were probably a dozen avenues Elspeth could use to ignore them.
“Why do we have to be loyal to Elspeth?” Graham asked.
“You’re doing that fold wrong,” Matthew said from across the counter.
“Sorry,” Audra said absently. To Graham she said, “Because Elspeth’s more, like, family or whatever. We have a connection to her. Besides, what are we going to do, have Bentrup and his new girlfriend over for dinner? That would be so—tangential.”
Graham could not help thinking that they’d certainly had more tangential social interactions. Last year the locksmith who came to fix the dead bolt ended up sleeping in the den for two nights because his wife had stopped speaking to him due to the fact that he insisted on cutting the dead skin off his feet with a very small pair of scissors instead of using a pumice stone. (“Have you ever heard of anything so ludicrous?” Audra asked. Yes, he had: letting the locksmith sleep over. Although the locksmith had repaired their toaster for free.)
“It’s supposed to be a valley fold,” Matthew said.
“Hey, I’m doing my best,” Audra answered. She took a new square of origami paper from the stack on the counter and started again. “You know,” she said, “I used to have this fantasy that Elspeth had a terminal illness and asked me to give you back for six months, and I did.”