Noah’s grandfather was not what they were expecting. Graham had pictured a genteel, urbane older gentleman with a pointy white beard who would make witty conversation about his travels and possibly have a passion for the early works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton. But in reality Noah’s grandfather was a balding red-faced man who swayed alarmingly even when using a cane. He wheezed badly just from taking the elevator, and his first words to them were “These long flights are murder on my kidneys.”
Even more startling than this was that Noah’s grandfather was accompanied by a barrel-chested chocolate Labrador named Brodie, who lumbered past Graham and Audra as they stood at the door. Graham could hear Brodie’s claws scrambling madly for purchase on the hardwood floors.
At least Noah was the same as they remembered—pallid and thin, with no-color hair and pale eyelashes, and a gap-toothed smile. It was true: you really cannot help who you fall in love with. He smiled waifishly and Matthew beamed at him and then they disappeared into Matthew’s room.
Meanwhile Brodie pushed through the swinging door to the kitchen, letting out a little yelp as the door closed on his tail.
Graham pointed at the kitchen. “Did you know about this?” he said to Audra. Noah’s grandfather was in the bathroom.
“What—Brodie?” Audra said, as though Graham could possibly be referring to something else. “No. No. Well. No. Anyway, Graham, forget about the dog! What about him? He’s so old! What if he falls over and breaks his hip and we have to take care of him for three months? What if he wakes up tomorrow and can’t move the left side of his body? What if he has to be in rehab for months!”
“That’s not going to happen,” Graham said.
“But how do you know?”
“Because I won’t let it. Because if he falls and breaks his hip or has any other health problem, I will pay for him to be medevaced back to California.”
“Really?” Audra said. Her eyes were shining and she was gazing up at him as though he knew all the world’s secrets.
This was an actual conversation. Graham meant every word.
Graham and Audra had never had a dog; they were not dog people. And Graham thought that probably even dog people weren’t Brodie people. Graham could not get used to the way Brodie’s nails scraped constantly on the floors, or the strings of drool that hung from the corners of Brodie’s mouth, or Brodie’s sudden fits of scratching, which seemed to go on endlessly, his tags jingling noisily. Brodie panted constantly, even though it was February, and he barked almost as much as he panted. He barked when the elevator dinged, or the phone rang, or when they opened and shut the cabinet doors (or when their neighbors opened and shut their cabinet doors). He barked for almost half an hour at an African mask in the den until Audra pulled it off the wall and put it in a closet. Brodie carried their shoes around and chewed the laces out of the eyelets. He also got into the coat closet and chewed the pockets out of all their coats (there must have been crumbs in them), which they only discovered when their keys kept falling on the floor. He jumped up on everyone who came into the apartment, and he tipped over the wastebaskets and spread garbage on the floor, and he stole a whole loaf of bread off the kitchen counter.
“Brodie, sweetie,” Papa Stan said. “You have to behave! Remember your manners! These nice people are our hosts. This is their home. Now show them what a good boy you can be. Please? Can you do that? Brodie? Brodie! I asked you a question.”
That’s the way Papa Stan spoke to Brodie: long complicated sentences that didn’t contain one single command. Clearly, this was what happened when you were a lonely old man and a dog was your only companion. It was only too easy to imagine them watching the nightly news, Papa Stan trying to elicit Brodie’s opinion on same-sex-marriage appeals.
When Papa Stan spoke to Brodie like that, Graham’s throat tightened and he had to turn away. Sometimes other people’s pain is more than you can take. You have to seal yourself off.
—
Elspeth’s apartment was as simple and stylish as a showplace. Part of it, Graham supposed, was that she was one person living in a two-bedroom apartment, but he didn’t like to think about that. And anyway, he knew that the main part of it was just Elspeth. She liked to keep things extremely neat. That had driven him fairly crazy when they were married. She could not relax—she was always moistening her finger to pick crumbs off the table or stretching to pluck fluff off the carpet—and she’d had a way of watching him, too, as though silently daring him to spill his drink or crumble a cracker. And—this was the worst—often when Graham himself neatened up, when he pushed in the dining room chairs, or centered a candlestick on a table, Elspeth would come along right behind him and readjust the chair or candlestick by an inch. It was as though she didn’t want objects in the apartment to get the wrong idea and start thinking Graham was the boss.
But the apartment seemed overly tidy, even for Elspeth. Graham found it depressing. It was like when you were young and single and cleaned your apartment and then realized you still didn’t have a date—you were just a person with a clean apartment who didn’t have a date.
Even her handbag on the hall table looked staged, like something out of a magazine, perhaps because otherwise the tabletop was bare, with no jumble of keys or scattering of mail. In the kitchen, the counters were free of crumbs, the appliances shining; there was no dish drainer because Elspeth dried dishes and put them away as soon as she washed them (and if you think that’s relaxing, think again). The carpet was far cleaner than a twice-a-week cleaning service could account for, and the furniture was dustless but without the smell of Pledge—Graham seemed to recall that Elspeth polished it with lemon oil. The dining room table gleamed so deeply it was reflective, and Elspeth always had a different centerpiece—a candle floating in a crystal dish, or a square tray filled with blue stones, or a bowl of perfect green apples. Real apples, too. But what did she do when they started to ripen? One person couldn’t eat a dozen apples in a day or two. Perhaps she got all economical and whizzed them up into applesauce. But how often does a single person eat a dish of applesauce? Oh, everywhere Graham turned, he stumbled into the fact of Elspeth’s aloneness.
Still, it was a nice apartment—no getting around that.