“Well, what would your dad say?”
“He’d say something like this,” Olivia said. She sat up straighter and drew her eyebrows together. When she spoke, her voice was deep and incredulous. “?‘Moving in? I’m not paying a thousand dollars a month for you to cohabitate with Brian! This could affect your credit score! Your joint assets will have no protection! What are Brian’s long-term financial goals?’?” She paused and nodded. “Like that. He’s like you—talks about money and finance all the time. Throw in some percentages, too.”
Graham decided to ignore the unflattering portrait of himself that was emerging: old and boring. Instead he said, “Your father pays your rent?”
“Yes.”
“Even though you work full-time?”
“Yes. He pays my sister’s rent, too,” Olivia said. “Now, can we get back to this?”
“I think maybe you should be your dad,” Graham said. “And I’ll be you.”
“Okay!” Olivia said happily. “Ready, set, go.”
Graham made his voice higher than usual. “Dad, I know this is a big step but Brian and I have decided to move in together strictly for financial reasons. Brian’s rent is nineteen percent more than what I’m currently paying, but we’ll be splitting the cost evenly, resulting in a nearly a forty percent overall savings for you.”
“Oh my God,” Olivia moaned. “This is fantastic. Keep going.”
Graham wondered if she said the same thing to Brian during sex. “Furthermore, as two single wage earners, we will remain in the twenty-eight percent tax bracket, whereas if we got married, our combined net income would put us in the thirty-one percent bracket—”
“Wait!” Olivia cried. “I have to write this down!”
She dashed out of his office to her desk.
Graham followed her, pulling on his suit jacket. “Later,” he said. “Right now I’m going out for a walk.”
He did this every afternoon to clear his head. It drove him insane to sit at his desk all day.
“Okay,” Olivia said agreeably, scribbling on her steno pad. “All that tax stuff you were saying—is that true?”
“Yes,” Graham said. “I can explain it to you when I get back.”
Olivia looked overwhelmed by that prospect. “Maybe you should just call my dad directly,” she said uncertainly.
Graham left her still making notes and took the elevator down and walked through the lobby out into the sunshine. Yes, the outside world still existed. The sky was blue and an early-summer sun was shining, making the city seem filthy and stinking, but somehow even more alive.
He was on Fifty-third Street when a woman in a pale blue shirtdress with white cuffs came out of the Hilton Hotel. Graham watched her appreciatively from behind. Her hair was pulled up in a ladylike little knot and her dress reminded him of an old girlfriend of his who used to wear one of Graham’s shirts around the apartment with only bikini underpants on beneath it.
Men, he realized, only like clothing that reminds them of other, sexier clothing, and they only like the other, sexier clothing because they hope the woman wearing it will soon stop wearing it and get into bed with them. Graham believed this was the reason men were so hopeless at fashion, unless they were for whatever reason not hoping some woman would soon be taking off her clothes—i.e., they were very old, very young, gay, or women themselves.
He was just taking his interest in the shirtdress woman as a sign that he wasn’t all that old yet when the woman stepped to the street and hailed a cab. She looked uptown, her arm already held up and her face a delicate oval.
It was Audra.
—
Graham caught Audra’s attention just as a taxi pulled over to pick her up. She waved it on with one hand and came hurrying to greet him.
“Hey!” she said. “Fancy meeting you here.” She sounded genuinely happy to see him.
“What are you doing in midtown?” Graham asked her.
“I was having coffee with the Akela,” Audra said easily. “But now I can have coffee with you, too. Do you have time?”
Coffee with the Akela didn’t really explain why she was coming out of a hotel.
“Well, sure,” Graham said, and they went into an Italian restaurant that had the depressing air of having been some other kind of restaurant very recently: red and gold wallpaper, ornate carpeting, tasseled light fixtures.
“Two, please, just for coffee,” Audra told the hostess. The hostess led them to a booth in the corner, and took their orders.
Audra pushed a stray lock of hair off her face and smiled at him happily.
Genuinely. Easily. Happily. Graham was only inserting these adjectives. He had no idea whether he was interpreting Audra correctly. Right at this moment, she seemed as opaque to him as obsidian.
“So, listen to this,” Audra said, leaning back against the banquette. Her face was lightly sheened with perspiration. “The Akela wants me to go to some training weekend with her so we can become certified BALOOs. And I’m, like, ‘Baloo? From The Jungle Book?’ and I swear for a second I thought she was talking about the two of us trying out for a musical! But, no, she says, ‘It stands for Basic Adult Leader Outdoor Orientation,’ like I should know that. And then she’s all ‘Now, I think we should go the second weekend in July,’ and I was like,‘Maxine! That’s just crazy talk!’?”
What was crazy here was that Graham could have sworn that Audra had met with the Akela last week and told him this exact story. But it was hard to remember. Sometimes he thought Cub Scouts had given him low-level brain damage.
The waitress set their drinks down. Audra’s cappuccino cup looked large enough to be a small punch bowl. She picked it up with both hands and took a sip, still talking. “So then she’s going on about how there has to be at least one BALOO-certified person on every camping trip, and I’m like ‘As far as I’m concerned, that’s a good reason to not get certified, ever.’ You would not believe how pro-BALOO she was.”
Well, actually, Graham would believe that. Graham would believe just about anything. Audra should know.
—
Normally, Audra drove Matthew to school, and Graham took the subway to work. But today Audra had a meeting with a client near Matthew’s school, and Graham had to take the car in for an emissions inspection, so they all drove together.