They had left the doctor’s office and Graham could still remember another couple sitting in the waiting room. He had looked at them, wondered if they were about to receive a similar diagnosis, if this was what the doctor did all day—broke devastating news to parents in his Mary-had-a-little-lamb voice?
In the elevator, Graham had put his arms around Audra and she had pressed her face against his chest and slipped her hands into his coat pockets. It had been years since she’d done that. “How are you feeling?” he’d asked softly.
She’d sighed and leaned against him. “Blacker than midnight,” she’d said.
Had Audra forgotten that day, too? Was that even possible?
—
They were going to have dinner with the Rottweilers. Audra had arranged it.
“This way if we end up in some sort of school conference, they’ll side with us,” Audra said. She had the shrewd, hard instincts of a good hunter.
And so on an evening when Graham could have been sitting in the comfort of his own house, drinking whisky and watching the news, he and Audra went to an Italian restaurant in midtown and met the Rottweilers.
Brenda Rottweiler was a petite woman with the same bright brown eyes as her son, and a halo of curly hair that looked like someone had drawn swirls with a brown crayon. She had a small, soft-looking mouth and an anxious expression. Jerry Rottweiler was a bearded man with very round rimless glasses. He looked something like a furry owl.
After they were seated and had ordered wine—“Just mineral water for me,” Audra said—Brenda leaned toward them and said, “Thank you so much for suggesting we get together. This has been the worst experience.”
“I know,” Audra said, giving Brenda her warmest smile.
“We checked Derek’s computer as soon as he left for camp,” Jerry said.
Audra sighed. “We did, too. We found a lot of porn sites.”
“I don’t even like to think about it.” Brenda lowered her voice. “It was so upsetting! They were looking at the most terrible, graphic things! Threesomes and bondage and double entry.”
Audra looked at her thoughtfully. “I think it’s called double penetration.”
The waiter was just approaching their table with a wine bottle, and he paused uncertainly.
“You’re quite right,” Jerry Rottweiler said. “Double entry is an accounting term.”
Graham sighed and waved the waiter forward with the wine. Apparently they were going to need it.
But actually it was okay. It turned out that Jerry was a civil-litigation lawyer, and, surprisingly, Brenda was a real-estate agent. (Surprising because Graham thought she must be a substitute teacher or perhaps someone who worked in customer service, but evidently her scared, beaten-down expression came from being mother to Derek.) They weren’t without quirks. Brenda spoke to Jerry as though he were a child—“Napkin on lap,” she said firmly, just before the appetizer arrived. And Jerry tended to say unremarkable things as though they were scandalous announcements: “Brenda likes dry white wine.” “I started at the firm almost ten years ago.” “You say Matthew is eleven now?” Almost everything he said had an unspoken Can you believe it? attached to the end.
But on the whole, they were well traveled and well-read and they had a seemingly endless supply of parenting horror stories about Derek Rottweiler, including (but in no way limited to) the fact that the only person who would agree to babysit Derek was a parole officer who lived in Queens.
“That wasn’t so bad,” Graham said to Audra in the cab on the way home. “I kind of liked them.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “All those I’ve-been-to-France stories get so old.”
“They lived in Marrakesh for three years,” Graham protested.
“I guess,” Audra said glumly, looking out the cab’s window. The streetlights threw fleeting lines of shadow across her face, like prison bars. “It’s just that there’s only so much mineral water you can drink.”
—
Graham and Audra were in the kitchen, putting away groceries.
Audra had been playing tennis with the Akela (who apparently had a killer backhand), and she still wore her tennis dress, with a baggy sweater over it, and white shoes and socks with those hilarious little pom-poms at the back. It never failed to amaze Graham that Audra played tennis. First of all, how did she make it through a game without talking? Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she frequently called the Akela to the net and said, “Oh, now, before I forget, did I tell you about this book my book club is reading?” Second, he had always admired women in tennis skirts—the smooth tanned legs, the springy steps—and here he was married to one. Life was strange.
“Do you ever think,” he said now, “that you and I might have Asperger’s of some sort?”
“Oh, no,” Audra said immediately. “Not at all.”
She was so definite that Graham felt better.
“Although,” she continued, frowning. “You do have that habit of saying north and south instead of left and right.”
“That’s called ‘having a sense of direction,’?” Graham said. He didn’t add that Audra seemed to have been born without one. Actually, it was even worse than just having no sense of direction—it was like some sort of direction deficit, something that steered her in the wrong direction. They could go to the restaurant across the street from the apartment building—literally across the street—and when they came out, Audra would turn and wander down the block. Graham had told her once that when she was lost, she should close her eyes and try to sense which direction felt like the correct one, and then go the opposite way. (She had reported back that this was extremely helpful.)
“And there’s also the way you behave in the elevator,” Audra said. “I mean, we get in there with anyone from the building, and you just stand there, stiff as a soldier! Ignoring people like we don’t all know each other, like we haven’t all lived in the building for years and years. Flipping through your mail like the other person is not dying for you to say, ‘Now, Mrs. Pomranky, I have been meaning to tell you how nice your hair looks,’ or ‘Mr. Fielder, please tell me all about how your daughter’s getting along in med school.’?”
Were the other people dying for him to say those things? Graham wondered. He’d always assumed that everyone would rather ride in peace, desperate as they all were to get up to their apartments and have the first whisky of the evening, thereby restoring the will to live.
“And then when I ask one of the neighbors to water our plants or turn down our thermostat,” Audra said, “I have to work extrahard because you’ve been so antisocial. I have to say, ‘Now, we’re going to be away for the weekend and I’m wondering if you could take care of such-and-such, and by the way, I’m terribly sorry that my husband acts like you’re a spider plant.’?”
Spider plant? What was she talking about?
“First of all, I would never say that I’ve been meaning to compliment someone’s hair,” Graham said. “What if she hadn’t had anything done to it in, like, years and years—”