With four of them folding, conversation was somewhat stilted, although conversation was never that stilted with Audra around. Soon she had them telling her about last year’s convention and how someone named Joe got locked in the men’s room and missed all of lunch and part of the advanced snowflake workshop.
Graham reached for the bottle of red wine nearest him and found that Audra’s hand was already on it. They traded looks. Let’s get drunk, his look said. How else can we get through this? hers answered. Audra took her hand from the bottle and held out her glass, and he recognized a tiny flourish in the gesture, a sign of Audra making the decision to let herself go. He knew her most minute movements, her most subtle turn of mind. There was no way she kept a secret—a meaningful secret—from him.
—
Graham went to the men’s room between the first and second courses and took a circuitous route back to the table, hoping it would take a long time and spare him having to make conversation with Clayton and Trina and Li. And so it was that he was walking aimlessly past a set of French doors leading to a balcony on the other side of the hotel and he looked out and saw Audra.
She was talking on her cellphone and pacing back and forth in the cool October evening, her long velvet dress whirling prettily around her ankles every time she turned. The balcony was in darkness, except for the squares of light that fell from the windows of the hotel along one side, and it was through these patches of brightness that Audra moved. Her auburn hair appeared much darker and her skin much paler than usual, and her butterscotch-colored gown was a hundred shades of gold where the folds of it caught the light.
Oh, Audra was wrong when she complained that Graham was not a visual person, that he had no memory for specific hues, that he could not recognize the simplest pigments, that he grew impatient when she got out her color boards. (Actually, she was right about the color boards.) For here was Graham, drinking in the very sight of her, and wishing he were a painter or photographer so he could capture the way she looked forever. Here he was thinking that her eyes were like pools of still water when she looked up at him and that the lock of wavy hair the wind blew across her face was like a dark tendril of ivy on a marble statue.
She saw him and gave a slight wave. Then she said something into the phone, and took it from her ear, turned it off, and slid it into her handbag.
Graham opened the French doors and she came inside, along with a gust of cold air.
“I was talking to Lorelei,” she said, slipping her arm through his. “I wanted to tell her about my new handbag.”
It didn’t strike Graham as at all unusual or unbelievable that Audra would call Lorelei to talk about her new handbag (Audra had called Lorelei from their honeymoon to describe a coconut-curry sauce), but suddenly he wondered if it was unusual for Audra to tell him who she had been talking to. Did she normally do that? Or was she trying to prevent him from asking, from wondering? Graham tried to remember, and since Audra talked on the phone constantly, he should have had millions of incidents to compare with this one, millions of incidents to use to calibrate her behavior. And yet he couldn’t remember a single time.
He put his hand over hers on his arm. Her fingers were cold and he wondered suddenly how long she’d been out there.
He could be certain of one thing only: he couldn’t go on like this.
—
The wine was working. Dinner no longer seemed to Graham like an extended running track with a long series of conversational hurdles he had to force himself over. In fact, he didn’t have to talk at all. Matthew was quiet beside him, happy with the endless French fries and milk shakes that the waiters brought, and his stack of origami paper.
Clayton and Trina were deep in discussion about something—Graham couldn’t hear what, exactly. But Clayton was even more hyper and worked up than usual, and Trina nodded when he spoke in a manner that reminded Graham of the way North Korean delegates nodded when the Dear Leader gave political speeches. Occasionally she put her hand on Clayton’s arm and leaned closer.
On his other side, Li was teaching Audra how to fold a square of paper into sixty-fourths. Graham felt impatient despite the wine. Audra didn’t care about how to fold a paper into sixty-fourths any more than he did. Why couldn’t she talk to him, when he was sitting right here?
Audra was saying whenever she tried this with Matthew, she ended up with a rectangle, not a square, and Li said that could happen with machine-made paper if you weren’t careful, and Audra said why is that, and Li said it was because in machine-made papers, the fibers are aligned, and Audra said that is so interesting, and Li said modestly that he didn’t see any problem with having slightly off-square paper for tessellations, and Audra said he must be the most amazing teacher, and Li said, “I am so fucking turned on, you wouldn’t believe it.”
(Actually, Li didn’t say that last part, but Graham was pretty sure it was true. Who wouldn’t be turned on having Audra hang on your every word while you talked about your favorite subject and got to look down the front of the velvet dress, which was very low cut?)
Finally the others left to go to the dessert buffet and Audra moved her chair so she was nestled up to Graham. “What do you think of Trina?” she asked in a low voice.
“I think she’d be pretty if she were a little…softer,” Graham said.
“Oh, I didn’t mean her looks,” Audra said, “because, please, those shoulder pads! Is there a Van Halen concert I didn’t know about?”
She said things like that occasionally, which Graham found absolutely inscrutable. She might as well have been speaking whatever they speak on Vulta.
“What I meant,” Audra continued, “is, do you think she’s flirting with Clayton?”
Graham looked over at Trina and Clayton, who were going through the dessert line together. Trina kept picking desserts up with the serving tongs and inspecting them, and then putting them back. Clayton appeared to be making helpful suggestions.
“That did occur to me, yes,” he said finally.
“Look, I know he’s making an origami candy cane out of fifty triangular units,” Audra said. “And that must be very exciting to her. But honestly, can’t she see that he’s just a superskinny guy in weird jeans?”
There was no one in all the world he’d rather sit next to.
—
Audra was so sleepy and tipsy from all the wine that she wanted to go straight to bed after dinner. Graham had a far greater tolerance for alcohol. The wine had only relaxed him. So he sent her on ahead to the room and he took Matthew to the All Night Folding Room, which was set up in one of the conference rooms.