An hour later, Graham found the phone number.
He was in his study, feeling unsettled. They hardly ever went away for just one night. They went to Long Island for a month during the summer and usually took a week at Christmas to go somewhere warm and tropical—although not too warm or too tropical given how scared Matthew was of bugs. Graham hated coming home from the Christmas trip, hated how unlived-in the apartment felt, hated the stale smell, the air pockets in the pipes making the faucets spit, the lack of food in the refrigerator, the sense that night was coming on and he didn’t have enough provisions, hated how chilly it was until the furnace woke up and drove the cold air out again.
He realized he was out of stamps and went to ask Audra if she had any.
Audra and Matthew were in Matthew’s room and she was saying, “Now, I’m going to put out everything you need to take on your bed, but I’m expecting you to pack it all in your suitcase,” and Graham experienced the wave of weariness he sometimes felt when he considered all the steps it would take to make Matthew—any child, but especially Matthew—a functioning adult.
Audra’s handbag was on the hall table and Graham opened it and took out her wallet. He knew she sometimes kept an extra stamp or two behind her driver’s license, where they wouldn’t be lost amid the shuffle of bills and receipts and business cards in the main part of her wallet. But Graham didn’t find any stamps. Just a small scrap of yellow paper with the name Jasper written on it and a phone number.
Graham looked at it for a long moment. The handwriting wasn’t Audra’s.
Audra knew hundreds of people. She had Lorelei and then her other friends and her mom-friends (as she called them) and her work-friends and her professional contacts and her army of acquaintances and the man at the bodega and the girl at the library and the woman who ran the bake sale and the college student who found Audra’s sweater at the library once and ended up coming to Thanksgiving dinner. (Graham could never quite figure out how that happened.) She knew all those people and probably all of their phone numbers, too, and maybe even one or two of them were named Jasper, but Graham didn’t think this particular Jasper fell into any of those categories. Otherwise his phone number would be in Audra’s phone or her Rolodex and not folded up and hidden here.
He heard Audra’s footsteps and knew she was about to enter the hallway where he stood, but he made no move to put the paper back. Oh, he was not the secretive one here. Let her see him with that yellow scrap of paper, let her say, Oh, Jasper? He’s a commercial artist I work with over on Broadway and I have his number tucked in there because—
But Audra crossed the hall from Matthew’s room to their bedroom without noticing him.
Graham slipped the yellow piece of paper into his pocket and returned Audra’s wallet to her handbag. He went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of wine. He looked out the window for a long moment. Then he started chopping onions to make chili for dinner.
He felt no need to reach into his pocket and make sure the number was still there. He could sense it there, bright, like an ember, or a luminescent watch face, or an isotope of radium that would glow for hundreds of years.
—
They were up early the next morning. Matthew didn’t have to be called to the table for once—he showed up before breakfast was even ready, dressed and chattering about the origami classes he wanted to take. As she put Matthew’s plate of pancakes in front of him, Audra said, “I can’t help but feel that across town, Clayton’s wife is doing exactly what I’m doing: making breakfast and listening to an excited male talk about outside reverse folds.”
They had agreed to give Clayton a ride to the convention, and when they drove up to his apartment building, Clayton did indeed seem excited; he was waiting outside with his backpack already on. That and the fact that Clayton’s wife was with him made him seem very juvenile to Graham, as though they were picking up a contemporary of Matthew’s rather than a grown man.
Clayton and his wife resembled each other: tall, lean, white-haired, bespectacled. The only real difference seemed to be that Clayton wore an outfit so mundane it defied description and his wife wore a cherry-red warm-up suit and matching red earrings made of extremely small paper airplanes.
“Hello, Pearl!” Audra said as they got out of the car, and Graham was grateful because he couldn’t have remembered Clayton’s wife’s name if he’d been left in a prison cell for five years with nothing else to do.
“Hello, Audra,” Pearl said cheerfully. “Hi, Graham, and hi, Matthew!” She had to lean down to say the last through the car window because Matthew hadn’t gotten out.
“Let’s get going, shall we?” Clayton said.
“Goodbye, dear,” Pearl said.
Clayton was already getting in the backseat with Matthew. “Bye!” he called.
Audra and Graham said their farewells, too, and Pearl smiled and waved. She turned to walk back into the apartment building, off to enjoy a presumably origami-free weekend. Graham felt a pang of envy so sharp it was like being snapped with a rubber band.
The feeling that Clayton was ten instead of in his fifties persisted. He took forever to buckle his seat belt, and he adjusted his air-conditioning vent far more than could have actually been necessary. He opened and shut the cup holder quite a few times, and probably would have rolled the windows up and down, too, except that Graham had locked them as soon as he’d noticed Clayton’s preoccupation with the cup holder.
Audra must have felt it, too, because after a few minutes, she said, “Clayton, can I ask you to not bang the armrest like that?” exactly the way she would have said it to Matthew.
Clayton stopped his fidgeting but still didn’t sit back in his seat. “This is my favorite weekend of the whole year,” he said—which was so depressing that Graham thought he might involuntarily plunge the car into the East River.
As Graham wove through the Lower Manhattan traffic, Clayton and Matthew talked about origami—about double rabbit ears, crimps, double sinks, closed sinks, and their shared disdain for people who could not fold a bird base from memory. (Graham gathered this last was necessary to qualify for the more advanced classes.) Then they moved on to discussing Star Wars, which Matthew loved, and apparently Clayton also loved, although he pretended to be interested in it only in an academic, linguistic sort of way, talking about whether Old Galactic Standard was based on a mix of Durese and Bothese, or whether it was influenced by Dromnyr, which they speak on Vulta.
Audra said something, but Graham was so busy wondering how he and Audra could have been such idiots as to leave their beloved child in the care of someone so clearly insane that he didn’t hear what it was.
“What?” he asked.