In the cab on the way home, Audra ate a handful of Oreos and got crumbs all over the taxi’s upholstery. “I was hoping Bentrup would be there,” she said thoughtfully.
“Bentrup?” Graham said. “Why would he be there? They broke up on such bad terms.”
“Well, maybe not Bentrup but someone,” Audra said. “Some nice older man who was Elspeth’s lover.”
Now, it wasn’t an affair if you didn’t go through with it, right? If you never so much as kissed the person in question? Then why was Graham’s mouth so dry suddenly that his tongue felt small and shriveled?
“I don’t believe she had anyone,” he said at last. “Not for a while.”
Audra pried open an Oreo and licked the filling off. “But there must have been someone,” she said. “Even if it was just sex and not a serious relationship. But everyone at the funeral just up and disappeared right away! I kept thinking some man would come up and say, you know, ‘Elspeth and I were very close,’ or ‘Elspeth meant the world to me,’ or some other thing that would be code for them having slept together. The only person who even spoke to us was that Mr. Perkins, and I couldn’t picture him and Elspeth having sex, though I tried to picture it, a little, while he was talking about codicils and stuff.”
“As far as I know, there hasn’t been anyone since Bentrup,” Graham said carefully. “I think she was going through a dry spell.”
Audra looked at him in astonishment. “What? No sex at all?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Not even a one-night stand with a drunk migrant worker she picked up in a bar or something?”
Graham couldn’t imagine anyone less likely to do that than Elspeth. He shook his head. “I don’t think anyone, ah, touched her,” he said.
“Well, I had dry spells when I was single, too,” Audra said. “But those were times when I didn’t have a steady boyfriend. I mean, there were still men who touched me. And then some.”
Mercifully, the taxi pulled up to their building. Graham paid the driver and Audra hopped out to hug Julio, who was on duty, and then there was the mail to collect, and homework to supervise, and dinner, and dishes, and all that stuff you do every day that sometimes seems pleasurable and sometimes seems pointless but never seems to end.
Later that night, in bed, when they’d turned off the lights and the darkness of their bedroom was as soft and deep as mink fur, Audra sighed.
“I hope Elspeth was at least fingered by a drunk migrant worker,” she said.
Graham pretended he was already asleep.
—
The worst thing, the most unjust thing, about Elspeth dying—well, okay, obviously, the worst, most unjust thing about Elspeth dying was that she died at age fifty-four and didn’t get to lead a long and happy life, and nobody seemed to even miss her all that much. But the second worst thing, the second most unjust thing, was that Graham never got to tell her he was sorry they argued about the All-Clad frying pan.
He could remember—vividly—splitting up their belongings on the day when Elspeth had moved out of their apartment all those years ago. It was a Thursday, he recalled, because Mrs. Batista, their cleaning lady, was there. He and Elspeth had moved from room to room with Elspeth pointing out which possessions she wanted and Graham obediently marking them for the movers. So great was his guilt over their separation that he had disputed no request, had relinquished every article she asked for, but every item he agreed to give up just seemed to make Elspeth angrier. By the time they got to the kitchen, her face was so flushed that her blond eyebrows stood out like white lines. Her skin was sweaty, and strands of her hair kept escaping her ponytail and sticking to her cheeks. She pointed angrily to the KitchenAid mixer, the Sabatier knives, the Le Creuset casserole dish, the copper-bottomed pots, the baking tins, and the antique cobalt glassware. Graham agreed to all of it.
Then she snapped, “And don’t for one minute think I’m leaving you the All-Clad frying pan!” and she took the pan out of the cupboard and banged it on the counter so hard it startled Mrs. Batista (who was trapped in the far end of the narrow kitchen, discreetly polishing the stove top).
And Graham had hesitated. It was true that the frying pan had been his originally. He had brought it in to the marriage and he had expected to take it out of the marriage, too. It was true that the frying pan felt as good and right in his hand as a baseball bat does when you’re on your way to the park on a sunny summer morning. He could have just said, “Fine.” Instead he’d said, “If you must.” He wanted to make Elspeth feel guilty about it. He wanted her to feel ever so slightly bad when she used the frying pan. Despite Audra, despite Marla, despite all the other Marlas, Graham had wanted to diminish Elspeth’s pleasure in a frying pan. He wanted to taint her association with it, to make her feel a little bit dishonest. God, he was a small, small person. He knew that.
The movers had come the next day and taken all Elspeth’s belongings, and even though he still had plenty of furniture and dishes and lamps and candlesticks, the apartment had the sad, deserted look of a dorm room on the last day of the year, when all that’s left on the wall are four tacks and the corner of a poster.
The next Thursday, Mrs. Batista had left him a note: I miss some of the things around here. It was difficult to tell whether this was a note of condemnation (“All your pretty things are gone, serves you right”) or commiseration (“I can’t believe she walked off with that Waterford pitcher!”). Graham guessed the latter, though, since Mrs. Batista had continued working for him, not Elspeth. In fact, Mrs. Batista still worked for him, only now she was older and brought her daughter along to do the vacuuming.