When Graham got home from work about a week after the discovery, Audra was talking to Lorelei outside the building. She and Lorelei did this constantly—bumped into each other and said they wished they had time to talk but they didn’t, and then stood around talking for an extremely long time anyway. Graham guessed they’d been standing there for at least forty-five minutes.
“It’s like I’ve turned,” Audra was saying. “Like I’ve become someone else. This perfectly nice lady called me and offered to work on the Food Committee between two and four, and I said I was really hoping for people to work all day, and she said she could only do that one shift, and I was like, ‘United Nations is a big day and I need a big commitment.’ And then I stopped and thought, Did I just say that? What’s happened to me? I think when United Nations Day is finally over, I’m going to need deprogramming.”
Normally Graham would have stopped and joined the conversation, or at least said hello. But suddenly he realized that Lorelei must know all about Jasper—that surely Audra had shared it with her on a minute-by-minute basis as it happened, for there was nothing that Audra didn’t share with Lorelei immediately.
And so instead of stopping to talk to them, he continued on into the building, feeling that losing Lorelei on top of Audra was entirely too much for him to bear.
—
“I have been in United Nations Day meetings all afternoon,” Audra said the next evening, banging into the apartment and slamming her purse down on the table where Graham and Julio were sitting, drinking beer. Julio had just gotten off duty and was still wearing the red-and-gold pants of his doorman uniform with a plain green T-shirt.
“It was excruciating,” Audra said, going into the kitchen to get her own beer. “As head of the Food Committee, I had to stand up and give a progress report and afterward everyone said, ‘Things used to run so smoothly when Mrs. Adams was in charge of the Food Committee,’ and ‘Mrs. Adams had such a serene, efficient manner,’ and then they’d look at me sideways.”
“What’s up with that shit?” Julio asked. “Where’s this Mrs. Adams now?”
“She moved to Ohio,” Audra said. “Which is apparently my fault. People kept saying, ‘It was such a shame she had to move.’ Honestly, it was even worse than the time Grandpa Sandoval French-kissed me under the cuckoo clock.”
Julio looked extremely startled by this piece of information but Graham wasn’t. Audra had five events that differed in degrees of awfulness and she was always using them as reference points, as though she were plotting all the events of her life on some chart. One: the time when her grandfather French-kissed her one sunny afternoon when she unsuspectingly wandered into her grandparents’ kitchen looking for a Fresca. Two: the time when her car ran out of gas in the driveway of some man she was having an affair with while his wife was at work. (Graham didn’t imagine this was one of the man’s particular favorite memories either.) Three: the spectacular case of food poisoning which had put her off Taco Bell forever. Four (sometimes this moved up to number three temporarily, displacing Taco Bell): the time when she gave a man she was dating a blow job and immediately afterward, he said, “Well, I don’t know if I would call you my girlfriend.” Five: the Cub Scout camping trip when Matthew was six and they woke up with two inches of rain in the tent.
She didn’t include even worse events, like the day they got Matthew’s Asperger’s diagnosis, or her miscarriage the year before Matthew was born, or when her college roommate took an overdose of sleeping pills, though Graham supposed maybe she kept a more private roster of them.
“Your grandfather French-kissed you?” Julio asked.
“Yes,” Audra said. “He had Alzheimer’s, although we didn’t know it then. I think maybe he thought I was my grandmother and it was 1930.”
“How old were you?” Julio asked.
“Nineteen.”
“That’s terrible,” he said. “I don’t know how you’re, like, still a functioning member of society.”
Graham said nothing, though he wanted to. He wanted to tell Julio that you could go through much worse than that and still function. You could learn things about your wife and marriage that you never suspected and still function. You could go around completely shredded inside and no one could even tell.
—
It turned out that Julio had a girlfriend. He brought her over one night to introduce her to them. At least Graham thought it was just to introduce her, but maybe the girlfriend was going to move in with them, too. Lately the mesh of his brain had widened—too much information slipped through.
Julio and his girlfriend arrived at dinnertime, when Graham was in the kitchen, braising peppers and onions.
“Mr. Cavanaugh, this is my girlfriend, Sarita,” he said. “Sarita, this is Mr. Cavanaugh.” (He called Audra by her first name, but not Graham.)
Sarita was a slender black-haired girl in her early twenties, with enormous brown eyes fringed by thick dark lashes and full red lips that even Graham could tell were free of lipstick. She looked extremely nervous, and Graham wondered if her promotion to Julio’s girlfriend was something that had happened very recently.
Audra came down the hall from Matthew’s room to greet Julio, and when she saw Sarita, her face became carefully neutral and her eyes took Sarita in from head to toe with a long look and a slow single blink, like a lizard’s. Graham knew she was assessing Sarita’s outfit—jeans and a tight-fitting pink satin cowboy type of shirt with pearly snap-buttons—and comparing it to her own. He waited to see whether she would decide that Sarita’s outfit was sexier.
She must have, because in the next instant, she gave both Sarita and Julio her most dazzling smile and said, “It’s such a pleasure to meet you, Sarita! Give me a kiss, Julio!”
Graham marveled for the hundredth time that out of all the women he knew, Audra alone seemed to understand that the prettiest woman in any room would always be the one with the most confident smile.
For a second there, he almost admired her.
—
Audra asked Graham and Julio to collect food for United Nations Day from the people who had it frozen and ready a week in advance. She said people needed motivation to plan ahead because everyone is basically so lazy.
“Our car’s in the shop, remember?” Graham said happily. (Sometimes the gods smile on you for no reason at all.)
“Oh, honestly,” Audra said, as though this were a piffling detail.
She was standing in front of Graham and Julio, who were unfortunately both sitting on the love seat in the living room. The love seat was very deep with a short back, and anyone seated on it tended to look recumbent and idle.
“I’ve already told everyone to expect you tonight,” Audra said in a wheedling tone.
“I could probably find us a car,” Julio said to Graham. Julio looked guilty. (He didn’t know that Graham never needed to feel guilty again where Audra was concerned.)