“He’s subletting from a college student.”
Audra made interested eyes over a mouthful of spaghetti. “A female college student?”
Bitsy nodded. “Yes, her name is Jasmine.”
“Jasmine what?”
“I don’t know,” Bitsy said, cutting her spaghetti. (You sort of knew ahead of time that she was a pasta cutter the way you knew Audra was a pasta twirler.)
Audra looked disappointed. Graham was sure she’d hoped to do some pleasurable Jasmine cyberstalking. He cleared his throat to indicate a change of topic, but Audra was not so easily diverted.
“You should go visit Ted,” she said to Bitsy.
“Oh, no,” Bitsy said. “I don’t want to intrude on his creative process.”
“A surprise visit!” Audra said. “Think how romantic—”
“More garlic bread, Bitsy?” Graham asked. “More wine? More water? More butter? No? Matthew, what about you? Well, I know you don’t drink wine—that goes without saying—but water? And tell us about school! What happened today?”
And on and on, until his voice rasped.
Later that night in the bathroom, he said to Audra, “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”
“Do what?” she asked, clipping her hair back.
“Have those conversations with Bitsy.” Graham began brushing his teeth and then stopped. “What if she actually agreed to go to Ithaca and surprise Ted? Think of the mess you’d make.”
“I can’t help it,” Audra said. “She’s so delusional!”
“You know that business about leading a horse to water,” Graham said, rinsing his toothbrush. “You just can’t make it drink.”
“But you can pop an ice cube into the horse’s mouth!” Audra protested. “You can moisten the horse’s lips with a wet washcloth! That’s all I’m trying to do here—just prepare Bitsy ever so slightly for the inevitable.”
She turned on the taps in her sink and began soaping her face.
There were other questions about Bitsy, lots of them. Was she really so blind when it came to Ted? Would it, in fact, be better for her to know the truth? What if she didn’t want to know the truth? What if they told her and by some miracle, Ted actually was on a sabbatical? How long was Bitsy going to live in their den? Why was Bitsy here if Audra didn’t even like her? Why did someone from Brooklyn belong to a Manhattan book club? Was it true that she could run an eight-minute mile?
Don’t ask Graham about any of it. He didn’t have a fucking clue.
—
To be totally honest, Audra wasn’t the only one who enjoyed a good cyberstalking session. Right now, right this second, Graham was the one settling down at the dining room table with his laptop and that first magical whisky of the evening, preparing to devote half an hour—thirty minutes of his life that he could never ever reclaim!—to cyberstalking his ex-wife. And yes, he was looking forward to it.
Again, he wondered, what exactly did people do before the internet? Oh, all sorts of studies existed about how people used to read more books or watch more TV or make more telephone calls or snowshoe or keep bees or make marmalade, but Graham was not sure he believed those studies. It seemed to him that people still read a lot of books and watched a lot of TV and talked on their cellphones all the damn time, especially in restaurants when you were trying to read the newspaper.
Maybe, before the internet, people just lazed around pointlessly more, or threw tennis balls at the wall to hear the pleasant thwock! thwock! sound, or wondered idly what kind of mileage their friends’ cars got. It didn’t seem to Graham any sort of great loss. Not when he could sit here and snoop on his former spouse without even leaving his own living room, and no awkward questions about what you were doing watching the neighbors with binoculars, either (which was what they did instead of searching the internet when Graham was a teenager, now that he thought about it).
Graham took his first sip of whisky and typed Elspeth’s name into the search engine.
“What are you doing?” asked Audra. She was sitting on the couch with her own drink beside her, sewing a badge onto Matthew’s Cub Scout uniform.
“Just looking something up,” Graham said absently.
Elspeth didn’t have a Facebook page, but that wasn’t really surprising. If someone asked her if she was on Facebook, she would probably say, “Why do I need to be on Facebook?” (She had always been a conversation-stopper kind of person.)
She wasn’t on Twitter or Instagram, either. Graham had to content himself with going to Stover, Sheppard’s website. There she was: Elspeth Osbourne, partner, mergers and acquisitions. Elspeth’s photograph had been Photoshopped so aggressively that it didn’t even look like her. Maybe it wasn’t her, Graham thought suddenly. Maybe it was just a stock photo of a blond lawyer. He read the little blurb beside her picture: Ms. Osbourne practices in the Mergers and Acquisitions Group. She advises U.S. and international corporate and private equity clients on a full range of transactions…
This was so boring that Graham was beginning to wish he’d spent the last ten minutes throwing a tennis ball at the wall. He took another, bigger drink of whisky and tried to remember the apartment building Elspeth had said she wanted to move into. The Roseland? No, that was a ballroom. The Rosemund, that was it.
And here it was, the Rosemund website, at his fingertips. Graham clicked on some floor plans and photos—chrome, glass, marble, stainless steel. Everything as bright and hard and shiny as the sidewalk after an ice storm. No wonder Elspeth wanted to live there. She had an intense dislike of carpeting—or anything soft, really. Graham clicked on the “Amenities” page. Billiards Room, Concierge, Fitness Center, Heated Outdoor Pool, Parking Garage, Starbucks. Did that mean there was an actual Starbucks in the lobby? Audra would never leave the building if they lived there. He clicked on the somewhat ominously titled “Our Application Process” page and scanned the building’s board of directors.
Then he glanced over at Audra, still sewing in a little pool of lamplight, the auburn in her hair glinting like tinsel.
If you were married to Marie Curie, you might ask her what the atomic weight of lithium was from time to time. Not to keep her on her toes, but just because you could. And now, in that same sort of spirit, Graham said to Audra, “Do you know any of these people?” and he read her the list of board members:
Francis Ray
Gordon Richards
John Palmer
Marco Luxe
Connie Sharp
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Audra said. “Marco Luxe is the doctor who delivered Matthew.”