This was another thing about Cub Scouts: you started out using all these scouting terms ironically—Akela, Webelo, woggle, camporee, Okpik—and you ended up using them sincerely. Before you knew it, these words had crept into your vernacular and you said them to prospective clients or sex partners.
So they went to “network,” leaving Matthew with Bitsy, and walking over to the Akela’s very nice eight-room apartment on 108th Street. (The Akela was married to an investment banker.)
The Akela herself answered the door. She was a tall, large-boned woman with sharp blue eyes and blunt-cut blond hair. Graham was used to seeing her in the ill-fitting and unbecoming khaki Scout uniform, but the long red velvet dress she wore now was no more flattering. And what’s more, she had the slightly sweaty, shaky look of someone hosting a party. Graham’s heart went out to her at once.
“Graham! Audra! Welcome!” she cried, and Graham realized he had no clue what the Akela’s name actually was.
“Maxine,” Audra said. “Thank you for having us.”
The Akela was carrying a wineglass—the sight of it lifted Graham’s spirits like a scrap of paper tied to a weather balloon; alcohol wasn’t banned at this party!—which she used to gesture vaguely down the hall. “Just help yourselves to a drink…we have, you know, whatever…and I’ll introduce you…” She trailed off as the buzzer sounded again and took a big swallow from her glass before she answered.
Graham and Audra walked into the living room in search of drinks. Indeed, alcohol was in abundance; in fact, there wasn’t even food. The long white-clothed table in the living room held a huge punch bowl of ruby-red rum punch swimming with raspberries, a tray of frosted tumblers filled with mojitos as cool and green as a shady lawn, another tray of sugar-rimmed cocktail glasses of margaritas garnished with mint, a dozen pineapples cut in half and filled with creamy pi?a coladas, three fruit-clogged pitchers of sangria, long lines of bubbling champagne glasses, and a towering pyramid of small plastic cups of red Jell-O with a small sign that read Vodka Shots! in a cheerful handwriting propped in front.
Audra helped herself to a margarita and squeezed Graham’s arm. “Network,” she whispered, and slipped away into the crowd.
Graham took a glass of champagne and backed up until he was standing against the sideboard. A large man with wide flat hips was standing there, too, talking to another man about how his GPS was getting frustrated with him.
“So it’ll say, ‘When possible, make a legal U-turn,’?” the man said. “And if, for some reason, I don’t make a U-turn, it says it again, but with, you know, this little pause, like, ‘I said, when possible, make a legal U-turn.’ It sighs at me.”
The man stepped forward to get another champagne glass and Graham gasped, because the man’s midsection had completely hidden another bar set up behind him, which featured the largest bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label whisky Graham had ever seen in a private residence.
Graham set his untouched champagne aside with a brief apology to the poor starving children in China (or whoever suffered when you wasted alcohol) and filled a cut-glass tumbler with ice. It took both hands to lift the Johnnie Walker bottle, but Graham held it steady as he poured the whisky into the glass. It glowed a soft amber, as fine and warm as your best childhood memory. His respect and admiration for the Akela was growing by leaps and bounds.
Graham took his whisky glass and began to circulate. He approached people standing alone or in groups, introducing himself, asking about the names and ages of their children, comparing teachers and classroom experiences. He talked to fathers about tuition costs and to mothers about cafeteria food. He talked about math homework and reading logs. It was intensive labor, similar to panning for gold—patiently sifting through sediment and muck while your back ached and cold river water numbed your ankles. The whisky helped, but only so much. Graham didn’t find a gold nugget, but much patient conversation shifting revealed a tiny gold flake: one woman told him that if Matthew wanted to play an instrument in the band, he should choose the trumpet or the French horn because the music teacher sprayed saliva when he talked and it was hard on the woodwinds up there in the front rows.
Graham poured himself another whisky, thinking briefly of the fairy tale where the man’s servant drinks an entire lake, and went in search of Audra. He found her sitting at the kitchen table drinking with the assistant cubmaster, a short burly man with thick gray hair. Graham circled close enough to hear their conversation, and found that she wasn’t networking at all. They weren’t even talking about children or scouting!
“Now, the man who owns the liquor store on Ninety-seventh Street is very kind,” Audra was saying earnestly. “Very caring, very friendly. He always waves at me when I walk by, although once he waved at me when I happened to be walking past with my neighbor Mrs. Gorsky and Mrs. Gorsky said, ‘I don’t think it reflects well on the building’s reputation for you to be so chummy with the liquor store owner,’ and I said, ‘If you’re so worried about appearances, maybe you shouldn’t put a million empties out every Tuesday.’?”
A bell clanged suddenly in Graham’s head. He hadn’t known this conversation had taken place, but he discovered he was able to pinpoint exactly when it must have occurred: last September, when Mrs. Gorsky had suddenly turned silent and squinty-eyed when he met her at the elevator bank.
“Mrs. Gorsky sounds extremely unpleasant,” the assistant cubmaster said, stretching his arm across the table to add more Don Julio to Audra’s margarita, which was now so strong it was nearly transparent.
“The liquor store on Seventy-fourth is owned by a Serbian couple,” Audra continued. “They aren’t quite as compassionate but they often have better prices.”
The crowd shifted, pushing Graham back out of the kitchen. He talked to someone about furnace maintenance and blocked air vents. He had another whisky and talked to someone about traffic and how at first audiobooks seem like the solution to your commuting nightmare but they’re actually not. He talked to someone else about the Whole Foods and the difficulty of finding kosher M&M’s.
Then he had a long boring (that is to say, even more boring than the previous conversations) discussion about diabetes research with a woman who had what Matthew would call “angry eyebrows,” and at the end, when he said innocently, “Now, whose mother are you?” she got even angrier-looking and said, “You don’t have to be anyone’s wife or mother to have an identity,” and it turned out she was single and from out of town.
He decided it was time to go and went to find Audra, who was still sitting at the kitchen table.
“Wait, wait,” she was saying to the assistant cubmaster. She had a little froth of margarita foam on her upper lip. “Exactly what is the difference between Tinder and Grindr?”
Graham sighed. “I think we should be going,” he said loudly.