Audra and the assistant cubmaster gave him twin looks of annoyance, but he stood firm. Audra shrugged slightly, and the assistant cubmaster pushed back his chair reluctantly.
“It has been my sincere pleasure talking to you,” he said to Audra, clasping one of her hands in both of his.
“Mine—too,” she said warmly, with just a little bit too much space between the words. “A sincere—pleasure.”
It took the combined efforts of Graham and the assistant cubmaster to haul Audra to her feet, and then Graham led her out of the kitchen. He propped her against a bookshelf the way you’d lean a broom against a wall while he checked his pockets to make sure he had his wallet and phone. He waved a hasty goodbye to the Akela across the room and propelled Audra out the door.
In the elevator, Audra pressed the button for the lobby with great concentration.
Graham regarded her silently for a moment. “Did you talk to anyone besides the assistant cubmaster?”
“Hmmm?” Audra peered at him, her eyes beady with tequila.
“I said, did you talk to anyone? Did you network?”
She looked thoughtful. “Well, yes, there was a woman at the beginning of the party. I can’t recall her name, but she had wild frizzy black hair. Did you talk to someone like that?”
Graham shook his head.
“I must say, I found her quite—intrusive,” said Audra, who had once interrupted a complete stranger on a crosstown bus to say that the symptoms she was describing sounded like bacterial vaginitis. “She kept asking what Matthew’s issues were, what medications he takes.”
When the elevator came to a stop, Audra swayed in an alarmingly loose-jointed way, like one of those spring-loaded string animals that collapse when you push the button in the base. Graham took her arm and led her into the street.
He had planned to take a taxi home, but it was no fun having a driver holler at you because your drunken spouse had vomited in the back of his cab. (Graham knew this from experience as bitter as raw aspirin.) They would have to walk. But the weather was fine, and the whisky had stoked a red-hot sort of pleasure-furnace deep within him. Now that he was out of the party, Graham felt like he could walk for miles. He linked his arm through Audra’s.
All hail the Akela, he thought.
—
The next morning, Bitsy took Matthew to an origami demonstration at a mall in Garden City and Graham and Audra got to sleep in, which was good, considering Audra’s hangover. Graham got up eventually and walked down to the corner and bought some brioche and two coffees and a hair magazine for Audra.
Audra was pleased by the hair magazine, which she took to be a sign of his love and affection for her, although actually Graham had bought it for the amusement of watching her devour it. She was like a stock analyst studying the big board. He thought Audra had great hair already.
“Any developments with Bitsy and her husband?” he asked. He had to ask once more before she heard him and then she still didn’t take her eyes off the magazine.
“Oh, no, same old, same old,” she said, folding over the corner of a page.
Graham had been wondering lately if it was a good idea to let Bitsy have so much access to Matthew. What if she found out about her husband’s relationship with the miniskirt girl? For all he and Audra knew, Bitsy could decide to run down her husband with their SUV while Matthew serenely folded an F-16 in the backseat. But before he could say anything, the phone rang.
“Oh, hi, Maxine!” said Audra.
So Graham read the newspaper while Audra had a fifteen-minute postmortem of last night’s party. Clearly there were a few blanks in Audra’s memory—“I’m so sorry I didn’t get a chance to meet your husband…Oh…Did he happen to mention what we talked about?”—but, in general, Audra was very supportive and told the Akela that it was a fabulous party; and no, the Jell-O shots were retro, not vulgar; and Audra was pretty sure everyone there was too old to be posting drunk selfies on social media this morning, so don’t worry about your judgmental colleagues. Then she said, “Tuesday would be super!”
When she hung up, she poked Graham and said, “That was Maxine, wanting to know if Matthew could come over for a playdate with Joey this week. I told you it would pay to network.”
Graham did not know what to say. He wanted to tell her that eventually Matthew was going to have to do this on his own, that she could not get him through life on the force of her own personality. But she was too happy. And she wouldn’t have believed him anyway.
—
Sadly, Graham was not home when Audra called Dr. Luxe, and so he had to imagine how the conversation went. All Audra told him was that Dr. Luxe was “delighted” to hear from her, that he remembered her “vividly,” that they had a “marvelous” time catching up, and that Dr. Luxe was “tickled pink” to be able to do them the small favor of recommending Elspeth to the Rosemund board. Graham didn’t believe that anyone under the age of seventy—and possibly no male of any age—used the phrase tickled pink, but he supposed that was about the gist of it.
In fact, Audra and Dr. Luxe were now such good friends that Dr. Luxe had invited Audra (and Graham and Matthew, even) to his son’s wedding the next weekend to bulk out the number of guests—something to do with a lot of guests canceling at the last minute.
“I don’t want to go to a wedding where I don’t know the people getting married,” Graham said. “I don’t even want to go to weddings where I do know them.”
It seemed to Graham that one of the benefits of getting older was that your friends stopped getting married and having expensive boring weddings that wrecked your budget and ruined your weekend. (There aren’t a lot of benefits of getting older, but that was one of them. Also: you don’t have to pick up cans and bottles for beer money; and if you stay out late, you don’t have to sneak back into your house through the basement window to avoid waking your parents. That’s pretty much it.)
“You’re the one who wants a favor from him,” Audra said mildly. “Besides, we can give them those horse-head bookends that my cousin Susie gave us as a wedding present.”
“We still have those?”
“Oh, yes,” Audra said. “Somewhere. I didn’t feel right giving them to the thrift store, but I didn’t want to give them to someone we actually liked, so they’ve been hanging around forever.”