This meant that Graham exchanged the normal thirty minutes in which he peacefully commuted to work—the time in which his thoughts untangled from the messy knot of home life and smoothed into the sharp clean lines necessary for the office—for a raucous, disorganized departure with his family. Matthew had to go back up to the apartment once for his lunch box and Audra had to go back up for her keys, all while Graham sat double-parked with his blood pressure skyrocketing. And then Graham realized that he’d forgotten the emissions inspection notice and he had to go back up, too. (Once Audra had told him, “Nobody but nobody gets out the door smoothly. At least not people with children.” It helped to remember this.)
Now they were finally driving toward Matthew’s school—Graham at the wheel and Matthew in the passenger seat and Audra in the back, where she was shuffling papers and rummaging in her bag. She reminded Graham of a hen trying to settle, all that ruffling of feathers and shifting around.
“Don’t ask me why I agreed to work with this man—” she began.
“Why did you agree to work with this man?” Graham asked. It was an old joke, and a favorite of Matthew’s, but Graham noticed Matthew didn’t smile.
“So this man asks me to design a brochure for his landscaping business and he wants me to draw a monkey, you know, on every page, sort of swinging around on vines, and stuff,” Audra said. “So I do that and show him the mock-up and the man says, ‘The monkey doesn’t look like Curious George,’ and I say, ‘Curious George is a trademarked illustration,’ and the man says, ‘I thought he was a monkey,’ and round and round we go, with me doing more and more mock-ups and every single time, the man says, ‘Make him more look like Curious George,’ so finally I say, ‘Why don’t I just make him look exactly like Curious George, and then you and I can go to prison for copyright infringement,’ and the man says, ‘How soon can you do that?’?”
Graham pulled the car up in front of the school. Some kids were milling around in front, and one of those kids was Derek Rottweiler, his arm hooked around a pole, spinning lazily. It was horrible to look at him—this small dark-haired boy in a faded T-shirt—and realize that he held the key to your happiness in his grubby little hands.
Graham turned to say goodbye to Matthew, and caught Matthew looking at Derek, too. In that instant, Matthew’s face was as starkly revealed as a Mount Rushmore sculpture. Matthew’s eyes were wet and his jaws were clenched, his mouth a straight line. Graham reached out to touch his shoulder, but Matthew shoved the car door open and stood on the sidewalk for the briefest of moments, pulling his backpack on.
“Goodbye, Matthew!” Audra said from the backseat, but Matthew shut the car door without speaking.
Derek Rottweiler stopped spinning around the pole and his face lit up—lifting Graham’s heart with it for the tiniest of seconds—and then he ran to the other side of the school yard, where a heavyset man in yellow work boots and army pants had just arrived. No, not a man, Graham saw—a big heavy kid, with a moon face and a diamond-shaped body. This must be Mick Blackburn, the new object of Derek’s affection. Derek had dropped his backpack to the ground and was rooting through it excitedly, looking up at Mick. Matthew stood on the school steps, looking very hard at nothing.
Graham put the car in gear and drove away. Audra now moved from the backseat to the front seat—legs first, back arching, struggling and kicking. It was like a giraffe was being born next to him.
“Don’t knock the steering wheel,” Graham said.
Audra plopped into the passenger seat and buckled her seat belt.
“Was he crying?” she whispered, although they were at least half a mile from the school now.
“A little bit, yes,” Graham said.
“And did you see Derek Rottweiler run up to that other kid?” Audra said. “Like he couldn’t wait to see him?”
Graham sighed. “Yes.”
“That’s it,” Audra said. “We’re converting to Hinduism.”
“Hinduism?”
“Don’t Hindus have arranged marriages? Or tell me some other religion that does arranged marriages and we’ll convert to that. What about the Amish?”
“I think Hindus do have arranged marriages, yes,” Graham said. “But why do we need that?”
“So we can pick some nice pretty girl for Matthew to marry and set it all up when he’s fifteen,” Audra said. “Because I absolutely cannot go through this again. What’s it going to be like when some girl dumps him? And the girl after that? And the girl after that?”
She was right. Life was just a long stretch of people breaking up with you, really. Of course, it wasn’t all people breaking up with you. There were good things, too—ruby-red sunsets and afternoon naps and onion rings and whatnot. But when you looked back, you really only remembered the breakups, and it seemed unfair to have to live through all those breakups and then have to relive it—a hundred times more painfully—through your child.
Of course, life is unfair. People say that all the time, but they’re usually talking about some sort of capital-gains tax, or the fact that every once in a while Christmas falls on a Sunday, which is a day you’d have off anyway. They weren’t talking about the really awful, searing, painful kind of unfair. Most people didn’t know a thing about it.
—
The week before Lorelei and Doug were set to move, Graham and Audra took them out to dinner. They met up in the lobby and Audra said, “Greek or French?”
She sounded like a prostitute frisking with a john, but when Doug said “Greek,” they all knew without discussing it that he meant the Greek place two blocks down and one block over, because that was the Greek restaurant they all liked, and that unspoken agreement was one of the extreme pleasures of the friendship. It’s actually one of the extreme pleasures of any friendship. Don’t kid yourself—emotional attachment and common hobbies are great, but not having to defend your choice of restaurant is hard to beat.
At dinner, they ordered a bottle of red wine and discussed, as they always did, current events. They started on a very micro level: their apartments. Obviously Doug and Lorelei had a lot going on since they were packing to move.
“I have two questions,” Doug said. “Where did all this stuff come from and why do we keep it?”
Audra and Lorelei pondered whether it was better to pack your lingerie and nightgowns yourself, or let the movers do it and live the rest of your life knowing that some coarse man had handled your underwear. (They decided it depended on how stressed you were feeling on the actual day.)
From there, they adjusted their conversational focus outward slightly and discussed current events in the building. Julio had told Audra that the building was currently debating whether to replace some of the storage units with a fitness center.
“Fitness center,” Graham and Lorelei said at the same instant. They were like that sometimes.
“Storage,” Doug said. “We have to have somewhere to keep all this stuff we never use.”
The waiter brought their entrées and another bottle of wine. Then they moved the conversation up a level, and discussed current events in the neighborhood. What did Doug and Lorelei think of the bakery that had opened up across from Nam’s Bakery and seemed determined to run Nam’s out of business?
“What do you suppose the profit margin on cheesecake is, anyway?” Doug said.