—
It was really just amazing the way life kept grinding forward, demanding things of him. He had to get up and go to work and earn a living and cook dinner and be a parent, all on days when he didn’t know if he could manage to brush his teeth. And he had to take Matthew to Origami—some special meeting where Matthew’s club was joining forces with another origami club. (Graham had gathered that there was bad blood between the two clubs—some sort of turf war over who could and who could not shop at a certain paper-supply store in the West Village—but evidently they had all moved past it.)
“Do you think it’s safe just to drop him off?” he asked Audra in the kitchen as he shrugged into his coat. “What if these other men are child predators?”
“Oh, I’m sure they’re not child predators,” Audra said, in her maddeningly calm way. She was paging through an Italian cookbook.
“Why wouldn’t they be?” Graham asked. (Sometimes, they did accidentally drift into conversation.)
“Well, because think how much trouble it would be for a child predator to learn to fold that Tadashi Mori Dragon—”
“Leviathan,” Matthew corrected from the hallway.
“Leviathan,” Audra said. Then she lowered her voice. “Why does he always listen when we don’t want him to and never when we do? Anyway, the Leviathan has about five hundred folds and they can all do it by memory and I don’t think a child predator would go to so much trouble. I think he’d just go out and buy an Xbox. Besides, Clayton will be there to look after him and bring Matthew home.”
Clayton! If there was someone of more questionable emotional maturity and moral fortitude, Graham couldn’t think who it was.
But Matthew called from the door, “We’re going to be late if we don’t go now,” so Graham left and he and Matthew took a cab down to the diner.
The other Origami Club members were already there—plus a few men Graham didn’t recognize, who must have been from the other club—clustered around a table.
“Hello, everyone,” Graham said.
They’d saved a chair for Matthew, who slid into it, already unzipping his backpack.
“You’re five minutes late,” one of the other members said—a large man wearing a camouflage jacket. Graham hadn’t seen this particular man before. He looked like he ought to be sitting in a duck blind somewhere.
“Well, traffic,” Graham said, shrugging.
“You should allow for traffic,” said the duck-blind man. (Graham had noticed that OCD was somewhat widespread in the origami crowd.) “Anyway, now that Matthew’s finally here, we can start. First we need to make fifty triangular units each.”
All the salt-and-pepper heads and Matthew’s brown-haired one bent over their stacks of origami paper.
“Um, goodbye,” Graham said, feeling like an idiot. He always expected to feel suave and sophisticated in front of the Origami Club and yet he never did. “You’re bringing him home, right, Clayton?”
Clayton looked up and gave an impatient nod and then looked down again.
Graham took another cab back home, thinking that before, he would have looked forward to a Sunday alone with Audra. Even if they were both working on separate projects, he would have enjoyed her presence in the apartment, would have looked forward to meeting her in the kitchen, would have persuaded her to come out with him somewhere. But now he didn’t want to go home and see her. He wouldn’t have gone home at all except that he couldn’t think of anywhere he did want to go.
Julio was on duty when he got back to the apartment building, nearly unrecognizable in his uniform. “Hi, Mr. Cavanaugh,” he said.
“Hey, Julio,” he said. “Should I count on you for dinner tonight?”
“Absolutely,” Julio answered. “I finish at seven.”
One of the other tenants, a man about Graham’s age, was reading the newspaper in the lobby and he peered at Graham over the top of it. He probably thought Julio was Graham’s rent boy. Well, let him think that. Graham was too dispirited to care.
He took the elevator up and opened the door to the apartment.
Audra’s voice reached him. Not the careful, solicitous voice she used with him now, but her normal voice, warm and full of laughter. “Tell me about it,” she said. Then there was a pause. “Well, I don’t know.”
She was on the phone. Graham paused. He left the door open behind him, and hoped no one would take the elevator up to this floor and cause the bell to ring. He stood and listened.
“Yes, me too,” Audra said. Pause. “I know, but what can we do?” Pause. “I hate it, too.” Pause. “I know.”
Graham tried very hard not to fill in the pauses. But then what was he standing here listening for, if not to do that?
And then Audra said, “What am I supposed to do with a hundred Ethiopian cookies when there’s no Ethiopia Room, though? I didn’t even know they had cookies in Ethiopia. I thought there was a perpetual famine there.”
Graham sighed and let the door bang shut. He felt a sudden longing, sharp enough to cause his chest to tighten. He wanted his life back.
—
They sat in the living room, making a cozy family picture: Graham in the armchair with a newspaper, Audra curled on the couch with a magazine, Matthew next her, Julio on the floor, tapping out texts on his phone.
“Can we all watch a movie together?” Matthew asked.
“Only if I pick the movie,” Audra said.
Matthew frowned. “What’s up with that shit?”
There was a pause, long enough for several blinks, and then Graham said to Julio, “If we get called in for some sort of school conference about this, you have to go,” and Audra laughed.
Graham had noticed that it was easier for him and Audra now to communicate by bouncing conversation off Julio. He wondered if they would become like Graham’s mother, who projected her feelings onto her elderly spaniel and said things like, “Bilbo doesn’t like it when people forget to hang up their coats.” Maybe Graham would say to Audra, Julio doesn’t know if he’ll ever feel the same about you.
“What’s up with that shit,” Audra said to Matthew, “is that after Spy Kids 4, I absolutely cannot watch another bad children’s movie. I feel like I was never the same afterward, like some vital part of my brain was destroyed.”
Ironic that she would say that when it was Graham who knew all about vital parts of yourself being destroyed—Graham who knew all about never being the same afterward. He couldn’t stop thinking about ironies, and before, and after.
“So what will we watch?” Matthew asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Audra said. “Something scary and inappropriate, probably. Maybe a disaster movie.”
“Will you watch with us?” Matthew said to Graham.
“Of course.”
“And Julio?”
“If he wants to.”