Graham poured wine into the glass he was holding and handed it to her. She drank it in one long swallow and handed the glass back to him. He understood that she wasn’t giving him the glass because she was finished with it. He refilled it and gave it to her again, and then he sat on the bed to watch her.
“The Irish storyteller ate the cream tea that was on display in the England Room when no one was looking, and the England Room got all upset and demanded an apology. I’m sure if it had been anyone but someone from the Ireland Room, they wouldn’t have cared.”
Audra sipped her wine while she stood on one foot and then the other removing her boots. “Julio took Matthew out for pizza but I didn’t want to go. Pizza only reminded me of the Italy Room. I want to eat something tonight that has no cultural associations whatsoever.”
Was that possible? Graham felt a slight stirring of interest. Almost all food has cultural associations. What could they have? Not hamburgers or pasta or chili or quiche. Baked potatoes? Too Irish. Maybe scrambled eggs.
She came and sat by him on the bed.
“Still, it’s over,” she said, stretching her legs and wiggling her toes, “and I haven’t been so happy since, well, right about this time last year when United Nations Day was over.”
Last year! This time last year, he had been happy. This time last year, none of this had happened, he hadn’t even been suspicious, he had been living life just as he wanted to.
“Lorelei says she doesn’t want to hear about United Nations Day ever again,” Audra said. “She says no matter how long or short the rest of our friendship turns out to be, it’s off-limits, which I think is so unfair. It’s like when I told Matthew I didn’t want to hear any more about double rabbit-ear folds and now he looks so guilty when he brings it up, or when you—when you said you didn’t want to know any details. Everywhere conversations are being aborted.”
She sighed on the last word, making her sound like a pro-life person describing a very sad truth. And yet, he knew Audra did genuinely feel the loss of these conversations, of any conversation that she didn’t get to have. (She often claimed to regret not getting the phone number of a very nice woman she sat next to on a bus when Matthew was a newborn.)
“Do you really want to tell me the details?” Graham asked. He was not sure what he would do if she said yes.
“Oh, Graham,” Audra said suddenly, putting her hand on his arm. “I just want you to love me again.”
Well, love. Of course he loved her. He didn’t know if he could forgive her, or trust her, or go on living with her. But he still loved her. He couldn’t help it.
“I do,” Graham said. But it came out impatiently: I do, with so much emphasis on the second word that it sounded like it had two or three o’s. He swallowed and tried again. “I do.” That was better, but he said it again anyway. And again. Until he got it right.
Chapter Six
It was just like an affair, Graham thought, except without the sex or love or excitement or other good parts. There weren’t even the bad parts—shame or betrayal—because Audra knew and approved. Or at least she offered no objection and sometimes she even looked relieved. (She seemed overwhelmed lately.) No sex, no secrets, no guilt, no debauchery greater than gourmet potato chips.
So why then did Graham’s heart beat faster every time he climbed the steps to Elspeth’s building?
The reason Audra was so distracted was that she was getting the apartment ready for houseguests. She did all the usual things—set up a cot in Matthew’s room and put fresh sheets on the foldout bed in the den and stocked the bathroom with miniature toiletries and cleaned out space in the hall closet and made Graham wrestle the armchair out of the den and down to their storage space—this last part was reason enough never to have houseguests, Graham thought. But even for Audra, having these houseguests bordered on the extreme. Strangers. Two of them. For a month. (It seemed to Graham to get worse with every phrase.)
Over Christmas, Graham and Audra and Matthew had spent a week in a Miami resort and met another couple who were so unremarkable that if you got on an elevator with them, you not only wouldn’t remember them, you might not even notice they were there. They had an eleven-year-old son named Noah, and he, too, was completely unremarkable except for one quality—he and Matthew had become friends. The kind of friendship Graham had always hoped Matthew would have—easy and uncomplicated and heartfelt. Matthew and Noah explored the resort together and called each other on the hotel phones and went swimming and ordered milk shakes and stayed up late. Graham supposed they had fallen in love a little bit—the bright, sweet kind of love you feel when someone asks you to sit with them at lunch.
Naturally, Audra had spent hours talking to Noah’s parents and stayed in touch with them after they’d left. In some long complicated email thread (Graham imagined that printed out, it would stretch the length of a basketball court) Audra and Noah’s mother had worked out an arrangement where Noah would come and stay with them for the month of February, since he went to an international school with a long half-term break. And since Noah couldn’t travel by himself, he would bring his grandfather.
Oh, listen to Graham! Making it sound like this was all some crazy scheme of Audra’s. As if Graham hadn’t agreed to it, as if Graham hadn’t leapt at the chance, as if Graham didn’t want to live, however briefly, in that golden world where your child romped happily through the enchanted forest of friendship.
Graham knew that other people didn’t do this. Other people had children and those children had friends and they went over to the friends’ houses and watched TV and hung out and slept over and sometimes they drank the friends’ fathers’ whisky and then added water to fill up the bottle and kept doing that until the whisky was the color of dry sand. That was how it was supposed to work. That was how Graham remembered it working. But what happened when it didn’t work that way? What happened when your kid never seemed to make that kind of connection?
Before you had a special-needs child, you probably thought, Okay, special needs means a tutor, maybe a specialized school. You didn’t know then that having a child with special needs would seep into every part of your life, like rain through topsoil. Who would ever think you would be happy to host a strange boy and his grandfather for a month just so your kid could have a best friend? Your old self wouldn’t believe you would agree to such a thing. Your old self would stick his hands in his pockets and shake his head and give a little disbelieving whistle. But your old self knew nothing at all.
—