—
Graham had to spend the first half hour of his workday— just think, thirty minutes during which no medical research was accomplished, no capital raised, no venture undertaken—examining a tiny little raised freckle on Olivia’s hand and reassuring her that it wasn’t skin cancer.
“But what is it?” Olivia said worriedly. “It was never there before.”
She rested the hand with the new freckle in the bright circle of light cast by the gooseneck lamp on Graham’s desk. Her hand was like an actress’s hand in a commercial for paper towels, slim and white and red-nailed.
“It’s a skin tag,” Graham said.
“Skin tag!” Olivia looked like she would be happier to hear it was cancer.
He turned the light off now, the afterimage blooming behind his eyelids like a bruise. Olivia pulled her hand away. “It’s a harmless lesion—”
“Our dog has skin tags!” Olivia nearly wailed. “And she’s like a million years old in dog years!”
“If it really bothers you,” Graham said, “you can have a dermatologist remove it.”
“Our dog has them all over her body,” Olivia continued. “Is that going to happen to me? Is this thing”—she gestured at one hand with the other—“going to get brothers and sisters?”
“I don’t think it will repopulate the area, no,” Graham said drily.
Olivia examined her hand suspiciously. No doubt about it: there were too many women in his life.
—
Graham called Audra to tell her he wouldn’t be home for dinner and caught her just as she was going out the door.
“What?” she said. “Well, okay. Right now I have to take Papa Stan to a playdate and Brodie to the tutor and Noah to get his shots. Matthew’s staying with Julio.”
“Wait,” Graham said. “You mean you’re taking Noah to a playdate and Brodie to get his shots and Matthew to the tutor?”
“No, I meant exactly what I said.” Audra sounded harassed, but she never hurried a conversation. “Papa Stan met an old man in the park and the man’s daughter called me and we set up a time for them to get together for a couple of hours. They want to watch some History Channel special about Vikings. Isn’t that a playdate? I don’t know what else to call it.”
“Well, I guess—” Graham started.
“And it turns out Noah is allergic to Brodie and has to have these superstrength allergy shots every week while he’s here,” Audra said, “and I found this dog trainer for Brodie who specializes in difficult cases so today I’m taking him over for his assessment.”
“Assessment?” Graham asked.
“The trainer calls herself the Alpha Dog,” Audra continued as though he hadn’t spoken, “and everyone else has to call her that, too. Can you imagine how I felt calling up and asking for her? This woman answered and I said, ‘Could I speak to the Alpha Dog, please?’ and I thought the woman would say something like ‘You lousy kids and your prank calls!’ but she just said, ‘Speaking.’ So we had this normal conversation about setting up the assessment, but the whole time I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was talking to a standard poodle. But apparently she’s excellent. Mrs. Swanson recommended her after Brodie bit her hand in the elevator.”
“Brodie bit someone?” Graham asked. It seemed to him that biting was the one piece of bad behavior Brodie didn’t indulge in.
“Papa Stan said it wasn’t biting,” Audra said. “He said it was mouthing, which is apparently some instinctual way that dogs communicate with each other, only Brodie does it to people, too. He did it to Mrs. Swanson in the elevator and Mrs. Swanson felt that what Brodie was trying to communicate was that he wanted to bite her hand off. But she said the Alpha Dog would fix him right up and it seemed like the least I could do was agree to take him.”
Graham wondered if the Alpha Dog would agree to work with Papa Stan, too. Perhaps they could book a double appointment.
“So Matthew’s going to stay with Julio because I didn’t know what else to do with him,” Audra finished. “Why were you calling?”
“Just to tell you I’d be out for dinner,” Graham said.
Surely it was possible to love your family from a distance. People must do it all the time.
—
It seemed that now that they knew the worst about each other, Graham and Elspeth could relax for the first time in twenty-three years. Sometimes silence rolled out between them like a cottony soft cloud Graham could float on. And when they did talk, not every subject had to be pursued until Graham nearly collapsed under the strain of it. (Conversations with Audra often felt to Graham like asymptote curves on a graph, where the distance between the curve and the line approaches zero but never actually gets there; that’s how endless they were.) But Graham and Elspeth were just two people making a delicious meal that no one complained about. Heaven.
Sometimes Elspeth would reach around him in the kitchen and her blouse would whisper sweetly against the silk of her camisole, and it would seem to Graham that he had retained the muscle memory in his fingertips of all those wonderful, maddening layers that Elspeth wore—blouse, skirt, slip, camisole, bra, stockings. It was like unwrapping an Eskimo who wore only silk. And underneath all those cool slippery layers, the warmth of her skin. He remembered, too, that Elspeth’s breath had always tasted sweet and faintly spicy, like cinnamon or cardamom. The first time Graham had ever had a chai latte in Starbucks, he’d had a flashback to kissing Elspeth that was so powerful he’d nearly dropped the cup. And still they never touched.
And then after dinner, there would be the long pleasantly drunk hours on the couch, talking or not talking, no forced chatter, no hearing about people he had no interest in, no breathless revelation about how the cashier at the supermarket had broken her eyetooth on a stale bagel. Instead they discussed their days and current events and sometimes Graham told Elspeth stories about Papa Stan and Brodie that made them seem—just for a moment, in the subdued, tasteful light of her apartment—amusing. And Elspeth smiled but she didn’t laugh until she spit wine everywhere. It was all wildly civilized.
All this and afterward Elspeth did the dishes! Now you’re talking, as Audra would say.
—
The garlic from their meal had given Elspeth’s face a pink, girlish glow. Graham had forgotten that, how garlic made very fair women flush like they’d just had the best sex of their lives. (If you only ever got that look from a woman after shrimp aioli, you were doing something wrong, was Graham’s view.)
But maybe it was more than just the garlic because Elspeth took a long sip from her wineglass and then said, “There’s an ABA Leadership Conference on Thursday and I get a room at the conference center even though I live here. I thought I would stay there—you know I like hotel rooms.”