When they got up to the cash register, Audra said, “Good morning, Jordan!” so suddenly that Jordan fumbled the can of peas he was holding and had to lean down behind the counter to pick it up off the floor.
He looked at Audra cautiously. “Good morning.” He began scanning items.
“How are you, Jordan?”
Jordan paused, a bottle of ketchup in his hand. “Pretty good.” He scanned the ketchup and reached for a box of cereal.
“I was hoping you’d be working today,” Audra said. “You always do such a good job.”
Jordan stopped again. It was clear he couldn’t work the register and talk at the same time. Graham estimated that they had at least fifty items in their cart. So if each conversational exchange took thirty seconds—
“Thanks,” Jordan said finally.
He scanned a carton of orange juice and a box of pasta—Graham’s hopes rose microscopically—before Audra said, “You’re so efficient!”
Jordan stopped. Graham sighed. The man in line behind Graham sighed, too.
Jordan swallowed nervously. His neck poked out of the too-large collar of his tan uniform, narrow and vulnerable. “Thank you, ma’am,” he whispered.
“Audra,” Graham said quickly.
“Hmmm?”
“We forgot to get Parmesan cheese.”
She frowned slightly. “Did we? You want to run back and get some?”
That was the last thing Graham wanted to do, but at least Jordan had managed to scan another three items while Audra was distracted.
“I think we also forgot toothpaste,” he began again, but she had already turned back to Jordan.
“Excellent, Jordan!” Audra told him. “Look at you go!”
(Try to imagine having sex with someone so universally encouraging. It was, like almost everything about Audra, both good and bad.)
Graham sighed again and rested his elbows on the handle of the cart.
They had left Matthew, their ten-year-old son, at home with Bitsy, and when they got back from the supermarket, they found that Bitsy and Matthew had built a domino line through every room in the apartment, including the bathrooms.
Bitsy had been living in their den for about three weeks. It wasn’t accurate to say a friend of theirs named Bitsy or even Audra’s friend Bitsy because Graham had never seen Bitsy before she moved in and Audra had only met her a handful of times at book club. Graham had thought the only people named Bitsy were bubbly teenagers, but this Bitsy was in her early fifties—with a long, narrow face and close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, and the sinewy body of a devoted runner. She looked more like a greyhound than like someone named Bitsy.
The reason (if you could call it that) Bitsy was living in their den was because about six months ago, Audra, who was a freelance graphic designer, went to deliver a mock-up of a menu to a restaurant client in midtown and when she came out of the restaurant’s office, she happened to see Bitsy’s husband—she recognized him from the time Bitsy hosted book club—having lunch with a twenty-something girl in a miniskirt. (Audra had described the girl to Graham at length and was apparently upset because the girl was wearing a pair of knee-high Frye leather boots that Audra had tried on once and had been unable to get zipped over her calves.) Graham had told her that there might be an innocent reason for Bitsy’s husband to be having lunch with a girl in a miniskirt, but Audra’d just given him a withering look, and then about a month ago, Bitsy’s husband had moved to Ithaca on a creative sabbatical. (“Creative sabbatical?” Audra’d said to Graham. “He’s a bank manager! I never heard of anything so suspicious in my whole entire life.”) Audra had felt so bad—so responsible in some weird way, she said—that she’d offered to let Bitsy move in even though Bitsy and her husband owned a nice brownstone in Brooklyn. Bitsy didn’t like to live alone.
“Hey, honey,” Audra said to Matthew now, carefully stepping over the line, “some kids are playing in the lobby. Why don’t you join them?”
She said this type of thing at least once a day, apparently not having realized in ten years that Matthew was not a social person, that he would never go and join some kids who were already playing. He probably wouldn’t go even if the kids came to the door and asked for him. He was like Graham, not like Audra, and Graham thought that sometimes they both frustrated her endlessly.
“I don’t want to,” Matthew said. “Me and Bitsy are going out to buy batteries for her camera and then she’s going to film it when I knock over the domino line.”
“Okay,” Audra said, and sighed.
“Thanks, Bitsy,” Graham said.
She smiled at him. “No problem.”
Bitsy and Matthew left. Graham followed Audra into the kitchen and began unpacking the groceries. “How’s it going with Bitsy and her husband these days?” he asked.
“Oh, he’s still feeding her all this nonsense about the creative sabbatical,” Audra said. “And she believes it! I honestly don’t think she understands that she and Ted are acting out this sort of cliché. I don’t think she knows that men have been making fools of themselves chasing around after girls in miniskirts for hundreds of years.”
“You seem to be forgetting that you were a miniskirt girl yourself,” Graham said. “My miniskirt girl, in fact.”
“Oh, I never forget that,” Audra said. “That’s how I understand about these things, insider knowledge.”
It was true that Audra had a lot of insider knowledge. And it seemed like everyone wanted to trade on it. Sometimes Graham felt like he was married to Warren Buffett. Well, a female Warren Buffett who knew about everything except finance. (Maybe Audra and Warren Buffett should be married to each other and have every possible base covered. They would be the most sought-after couple in the world.)
People came to Audra for advice—well, no, not advice, that was the wrong word. They came to her for secrets, for gossip, for connections—for intel, that was the term—about everything. Friends sought her expertise on their job interviews, on their children’s chances of getting into private schools, on marriage counselors, on hairdressers, on au pairs, on restaurants, on shops, on neighborhood watches, on gyms, on doctors, on internet providers. People asked her about local politics and she didn’t even know who the mayor of New York City was! (Well, she probably did know who the mayor was, but it wasn’t a certainty by any means.)
Right now, Audra’s friend Lorelei had called and said she was on her way up to ask Audra’s advice about a client meeting.
Lorelei was Audra’s best friend, had been her best friend since they were both twenty. She lived on the third floor of their building and Graham sometimes saw her in the lobby and about once a month Lorelei and her husband and Audra and Graham had dinner together, and they often spent Thanksgiving together, so Graham saw Lorelei fairly often, but it felt like he was married to her because for fourteen years now, Audra had been giving him Lorelei’s opinion on everything along with her own. “Lorelei thinks you’re too old for me, but I don’t,” she’d said when he first met her. Or “Lorelei and I both think you shouldn’t have given in to your first wife about those maintenance fees.”
Audra did this constantly, and not just to Graham. She even did it to people in shops and restaurants, saying, “Lorelei would never pay so much for a jacket, but I love it,” or “Lorelei and I both like scallops so I’ll try the special.” (Did people think she was schizophrenic and referring to some person only she could see? Graham wondered suddenly. Or did they think she had multiple personalities and Audra was the dominant self who spoke for both?)
The