We’re Here

It was the night before the origami convention. Graham’s wife, Audra, said that they could still change their minds and get their deposit back. He was pretty sure they couldn’t get their deposit back, but he knew if he pointed that out, she would say she didn’t care. She said whether they went all depended on how much they loved their son.

“That’s easy, then,” Graham said. “Because we love Matthew more than anything in the world.” They were in the kitchen, speaking softly so Matthew wouldn’t hear.

“Exactly!” Audra said. “And I still don’t know if I can bear to go to a whole weekend of origami lectures in Connecticut.”

It was kind of startling, Graham thought, how true that was.

“Well,” he said slowly, “there are two of us, so one of us can go to the classes with Matthew and the other one can relax. We’ll take turns. Maybe it won’t be so bad.”

“There’s a dinner dance,” Audra said, in the tone of voice someone might use to say a dog had mange.

“Dear God,” Graham said.

“I know!” she said. “I think maybe it’s some sort of divine punishment for how superior I felt last summer when the Bergmans had to take their little girls to that American Girl Doll museum in Chicago.”

“The Bergmans survived,” Graham said. “And so will we.”

“I guess,” Audra said gloomily. “Maybe we’ll meet Matthew’s future wife there. Some nice Japanese girl who likes origami and who doesn’t mind that Matthew is quiet and wears sweat pants all the time and has an extensive Pokémon collection.”

It was awful to hear Matthew summed up that way, and yet Graham knew exactly what she meant.

An hour later, Graham found the phone number.

He was in his study, feeling unsettled. They hardly ever went away for just one night. They went to their beach house for a month during the summer and then a week skiing in March and usually took a week at Christmas to see Audra’s family. Graham hated coming home from the Christmas trip, hated how unlived-in the apartment felt, hated the stale smell, the air pockets in the pipes making the faucets spit, the lack of food in the refrigerator, the sense that night was coming on and he didn’t have enough provisions, hated how chilly it was until the furnace woke up and drove the cold air out again.

He realized he was out of stamps and went out to ask Audra if she had any.

Audra and Matthew were in Matthew’s room and she was saying, “Now, I’m going to put out everything you need to take on your bed, but I’m expecting you to pack it all in your suitcase,” and Graham experienced the wave of weariness he sometimes felt when he considered all the steps it would take to make Matthew— any child, but especially Matthew—a functioning adult.

Audra’s handbag was on the hall table and Graham opened it and took out her wallet. He knew she sometimes kept an extra stamp or two behind her driver’s license, where they wouldn’t be lost amid the shuffle of bills and receipts and business cards in the main part of her wallet. But Graham didn’t find any stamps. Just a small scrap of yellow paper with the name Jasper written on it and a phone number.

Graham looked at it for a long moment. The handwriting wasn’t Audra’s.

Audra knew hundreds of people. She had her six best friends, and then her other friends and her mom friends (as she called them) and her work friends and her professional contacts and her army of acquaintances and the man at the bodega and the girl at the library and the woman who ran the bake sale and the boy who found Audra’s sweater at the library once and ended up coming to Thanksgiving dinner. (Graham could never quite figure that out.) She knew all those people and probably all of their phone numbers, too, and maybe even one or two of them were named Jasper, but Graham didn’t think this particular Jasper fell into any of those categories. Otherwise his phone number would be in Audra’s phone or her Rolodex and not folded up and hidden here.

He heard Audra’s footsteps and knew she was about to enter the hallway where he stood, but he made no move to put the paper back. Oh, he was not the secretive one here. Let her see him with that yellow scrap of paper, let her say, Oh, Jasper? He’s a commercial artist I work with over on Broadway and I have his number tucked in there because—

But Audra crossed the hall from Matthew’s room to their bedroom without noticing him.

Graham slipped the yellow piece of paper into his pocket and returned Audra’s wallet to her handbag. He went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of wine. He looked out the window for a long moment. Then he started chopping onions to make chili for dinner.

He didn’t feel any need to reach into his pocket and make sure the number was still there. He could feel it, bright, like an ember, or a luminescent watch face, or an isotope of radium that would glow for hundreds of years.

They were up early the next morning. Matthew didn’t have to be called to the table for once—he showed up before breakfast was even ready, dressed and chattering about the origami classes he wanted to take. As she put Matthew’s plate of pancakes in front of him, Audra said, “I can’t help but feel that across town, Clayton’s wife is doing exactly what I’m doing: making breakfast and listening to an excited male talk about outside reverse folds.”

Clayton was Matthew’s origami teacher, and they had agreed to give him a ride to the convention. He did indeed seem excited; he was waiting outside his apartment building with his backpack already on when they drove up. That and the fact that Clayton’s wife was with him made him seem very juvenile to Graham, as though they were picking up a friend of Matthew’s rather than a grown man.

Clayton and his wife resembled each other: tall, lean, gray-haired, bespectacled. The only real difference seemed to be that Clayton wore an outfit so mundane it defied description and his wife wore a cherry-red warm-up suit and matching red earrings made of extremely small paper airplanes.

“Hello, Pearl,” Audra said as they got out of the car, and Graham was grateful because he couldn’t have remembered Clayton’s wife’s name if he’d been left in a prison cell for five years with nothing else to do.

“Hello, Audra,” Pearl said cheerfully. “Hi Graham, and hi Matthew!” She had to lean down to say the last through the car window because Matthew hadn’t gotten out.

“Let’s get going, shall we?” Clayton said.

“Good-bye, dear,” Pearl said.

Clayton was already getting in the backseat with Matthew. “Bye!” he called.

Audra and Graham said their farewells, too, and Pearl smiled and waved. She turned to walk back into the apartment building, off to enjoy a presumably origami- free weekend. Graham felt a pang of envy so sharp it was like a physical blow.

The feeling that Clayton was ten instead of in his fifties remained. He took forever to buckle his seat belt, and he adjusted his air-conditioning vent far more than could have actually been necessary. He opened and shut the cup holder quite a few times, and probably would have put the windows up and down, too, except that Graham had locked them as soon as he’d noticed Clayton’s preoccupation with the cup holder.

Audra must have felt it, too, because after a few minutes, she said, “Clayton, can I ask you not to bang the armrest up and down?” exactly the way she would have said it to Matthew.

Clayton stopped his fidgeting but still didn’t sit back in his seat. “This is my favorite weekend of the whole year,” he said—which was so depressing that Graham thought he might involuntarily plunge the car into the East River.

As Graham wove through the lower Manhattan traffic, Clayton and Matthew talked about origami, about double rabbit ears, crimps, double sinks, closed sinks, and their shared disdain for people who could not fold a bird base from memory. (Graham gathered this last was necessary to qualify for the more advanced classes.) Then they moved on to discussing Star Wars, which Matthew loved, and apparently Clayton also loved, although he pretended to be interested in it only in an academic, linguistic sort of way, talking about whether Old Galactic Standard was based on a mix of Durese and Bothese, or whether it was influenced by Dromnyr, which they speak on Vulta.

Audra said something but Graham was so busy wondering how he and Audra could have been such idiots as to leave their beloved child in the care of someone so clearly insane that he didn’t hear what it was.

“What?” he asked.

“I said that it made me feel old, the way they’re talking about Anakin Skywalker, and I can only remember Luke Skywalker,” Audra said.

“Oh, well, now, Anakin—” Clayton began from the back.

“It’s OK,” Audra said hastily. “I don’t need to know.”

The traffic and the conversation were making Graham’s head ache, but then suddenly they were out of the city and on I-95 and the day was beautiful and the leaves around them were almost gaudy with fall color, the red ones as bright as candy apples. The hum of tires on the highway seemed to make both Matthew and Clayton sleepy and their conversation dwindled to sporadic half sentences like, “But if Cloud City is on Bespin . . .”

Audra put in a Leo Kottke CD, nice and soft and gentle. If it weren’t for the piece of paper with the phone number on it in his pocket, Graham would have been almost happy.

As soon as they got to the hotel, Matthew and Clayton went off to look at the model menus set up in the conference rooms, and Graham and Audra waited in line in the lobby to check in. Audra was carrying her overnight bag with both hands and leaned back slightly to balance the weight, bouncing it against her knees.

“What I don’t understand about origami,” she said to Graham in her normal speaking voice, “is why can’t anyone like it a little bit? Why aren’t there nice, well-rounded people who enjoy a bit of origami, the way there are nice, well-rounded people who enjoy a bit of bondage?”

It seemed to Graham that a silence spread out from them, like ripples from a pebble thrown into a pond. But with this crowd, it was hard to imagine whether they were more offended by her first sentence or her second.

Audra continued, oblivious. “I mean, it’s like miniature trains or dog shows. It takes over people’s lives and they end up going to conventions. It’s not like, you know, gardening or sailing or something you just have as a hobby.”

Like bondage, Graham was sure the rest of the lobby mentally added.

A portly Asian man in line in front of them turned around. “I take it you don’t fold,” he said stiffly to Audra.

She gave him her friendliest smile. “No, I don’t.”

“Then why are you here?” he asked.

“We’re here because we love our son,” Audra said in a bold, sincere, preachy tone Graham had never heard her use before. Then she looked thoughtful and added in her usual voice, “Plus, we didn’t want to be outdone by the Bergmans.”

“And your son,” the Asian man continued, “—is he passionate about origami?”

“It’s pretty much a way of life for him,” Audra said. “But we’re hoping he’ll outgrow it.” She stuck out her hand. “I’m Audra Daltry.”

The man shook her hand. “I am Li.”

“The Amazing Li!” Audra exclaimed. “You teach the class where they fold the praying mantis! Matthew can’t wait.”

It was amazing, Graham thought, that even origami geeks were susceptible to pretty women flattering them. It was kind of comforting, actually. It gave him hope for Matthew.

There were only five people in line ahead of the Amazing Li but by the time Li reached the front desk, Audra had found out that he had once broken both wrists in a tree-climbing accident and thought he’d go crazy not doing origami for six weeks, and that he was having trouble finding a girl his parents would approve of because they were so old-fashioned and, well, Chinese, and that he really disliked the taste of canned soups, chicken noodle in particular.

Graham had often wondered how Audra got people to tell her everything about themselves so quickly. Once he had asked her and she’d said vaguely, “Oh, I don’t know, I guess I think life is too short for all that crap about ‘Where are you from?’ and ‘Do you play the zither?’”

The zither! On what planet was “Do you play the zither?” considered normal small talk? But no matter. What mattered was who Jasper was, or how Audra had met him, and all the things she no doubt knew about him.

Graham took Matthew to his first class: The F-16 Fighting Falcon. The man teaching the class called himself Captain Jim, and he fit the part: tall, imposing, silver crew cut, solid jaw, commanding voice. But Graham wondered whether he was actually a retired Air Force captain who had figured out how to fold an incredibly complicated design, or a crazy origami person who figured out the design and then adopted the military persona. Graham sighed. There were so many crazy people in origami.

Matthew had only been allowed to attend the more advanced classes if accompanied by an adult, but Graham knew that Matthew wouldn’t need any help. They sat at a table together and Graham read the Wall Street Journal and drank a cup of coffee and wondered what Audra was doing—had she noticed Jasper’s number was missing from her wallet? Even if she had never called him, did she sometimes take that scrap of paper out and smooth it against the leg of her jeans? And then Captain Jim was standing at their table and admiring Matthew’s work.

“Well, look at this,” Captain Jim said in his authoritative voice, startling Graham. He picked up Matthew’s partially folded airplane and flexed it slightly, checking the folds. Then he looked sharply at Matthew. “How old are you?”

“Ten,” Matthew said. “Can I have my paper back?”

Captain Jim gave it to him. “It’s interesting,” he said. “You are two folds ahead of my instructions. How did you know what I was going to say?”

“I just knew,” Matthew said.

Captain Jim nodded. He didn’t seem to find Matthew’s answer odd, or care that Matthew didn’t want to discuss it. He looked at Graham and said, “He has very unusual ability.”

Graham smiled but said nothing. He thought, as he sometimes did, that Matthew’s origami ability was like a rampart they’d erected to shield them from the rest of the world, and Graham and Audra crouched behind it. People looked and saw only the handsome little boy with the unusual talent. They did not know of the struggles to teach Matthew to tie his shoes, or ride a bike, or try new foods, or wear clothes with scratchy tags, or have his toenails clipped, or understand sarcasm. They did not know that sometimes Graham would be willing to exchange all that origami talent for just a little sarcasm.

After class, they met Audra in the hotel coffee shop for lunch. Matthew was so dazed and dreamy that Graham had to keep reminding him to take bites. He practically had to remind him to chew and swallow.

When Audra asked Matthew how class was, he said, “Great!” and his face glowed with happiness but he didn’t elaborate. Audra glanced at Graham, looking amused, but she didn’t press. They knew how to handle Matthew by now, and when he was this overwhelmed by something, even overwhelmed in a good way, they let him be.

Instead Audra told Graham that while he’d been in class (she made it sound like he was the one who wanted to go), she had unpacked their suitcases, removed the macadamia nuts from the minibar so Matthew wouldn’t eat them, called down to the front desk for extra conditioner, explored the fitness room, done some yoga, and bought a knockoff of a Chloé handbag in the parking lot from a Hispanic man named Sugar.

She had the handbag with her, in an ordinary plastic grocery bag, and she took it out and showed it to Graham. It was a deep mahogany color, with about a hundred zippered compartments, and looked large enough to hold a poodle comfortably.

“How much did you pay for that?” he asked.

She beamed. “Fifty dollars!”

“That’s amazing,” he said. “I think you’ve done really well.”

He didn’t actually think that. He actually thought there was a limit on how many handbags any one person needed and that limit was probably one. But Graham thought that the secret to understanding women (if in fact there was a secret and they could be understood at all) was to admire their purchases. Approve of the stuff they brought home after shopping and they thought you were wonderful.

Audra looked at him happily and put the handbag on the table and began showing him all the little compartments and telling him what she planned to keep in each one.

“Now Sugar told me that the lining is actually the same as the lining in a real Chloé bag,” she said. “Apparently the factories in China always make extra and sell it and the companies know but they just consider it part of the cost of doing business. So the only real difference is the quality of leather, and—”

There was more like this, but Graham didn’t listen to it, although he kept an attentive look on his face. Audra hated it when he did this, but he still couldn’t stop himself. She didn’t understand that it wasn’t that he wanted her to be quiet; it was that he didn’t want to be held accountable for paying attention. He liked the sound of her voice, which was warm and bubbly, and it flowed over Graham, as cozy as bathwater, as comforting as tea.

The name Jasper and the fact that the number was written on a fragment of legal-pad paper made Graham picture a lawyer, someone older and respectable and dependable. Someone like Graham himself. And wouldn’t that make sense? Didn’t most criminals get caught because they made the same mistakes over and over, because they couldn’t break familiar patterns?

So when Audra took Matthew to his afternoon class and Graham went into the bathroom and changed the settings on his cell phone to disable his caller ID and dialed the number written below Jasper’s name, he was expecting a mellow, confident voice to answer. Instead it went straight to voice mail and a man said, “Hey, this is Jasper. Leave a message.”

There was a hurried quality to the voice that Graham associated with young people: breathless, staccato, busy.

He rapidly abandoned the mental image of the older man with the short white hair and the blue eyes and the long, interesting face (who, Graham realized suddenly, was the lawyer who’d drawn up his will) and replaced it with the image of a tall, thin young man with unruly dark hair and horn-rimmed glasses. Then he realized he was thinking of a children’s folk singer he’d taken Matthew to see last month. Apparently he was so lacking in imagination that he couldn’t visualize someone he’d never met.

Hey, this is Jasper. Leave a message. Hardly words to haunt you.

He knew he should throw the piece of paper with the phone number away, or better yet, flush it down the toilet. Graham had a poor memory for phone numbers and he wouldn’t be able to recall this one (even this one) a week from now. That would be the sensible thing to do. Get rid of the number, clear it from his phone, forget about it, let Audra think it had fallen out of her wallet.

But instead Graham put the number back in his pocket and splashed cold water on his face, already thinking about when he might call again, and what he might say. Criminals were not the only people who made the same mistakes over and over again.

Graham put on a suit for dinner and then sat on one of the beds in the hotel room and waited for Audra to get ready. They were late but he didn’t try to rush her. By now he was used to being late wherever they went. She was wearing a butter-scotch-colored velvet dress, with a tight bodice and long skirt. She had owned it for many years—in fact, it had been her backup choice for a wedding dress. But she’d stuck with her first choice and married Graham wearing jeans and an ivory blouse of shattered silk. Graham could still remember the feel of that blouse, its silky-rough texture against his fingers when he put his hand on the small of Audra’s back.

He watched Audra as she pinned her hair up. It always surprised him that a woman whose hair was not even long enough to touch her shoulders could have so many hairstyles. She clipped on dangly earrings and then turned to face him.

“You look beautiful,” he said sincerely. “I’m sure you’ll be the most beautiful woman there tonight.”

She laughed. “I’m not sure that’s all that much of a compliment, given this group,” she said. “But thank you.”

They retrieved Matthew from the lobby, where he was examining a display of origami animals, and went into dinner and found the table with their name cards. Graham was sitting between Audra and Matthew and next to Matthew was Clayton, and next to Audra was Li. (“Li!” Audra exclaimed, the way someone might cry “Grandma!” at Thanksgiving.) On Clayton’s other side was a girl of about thirty, who Graham thought would be really pretty if she weren’t so full of hard edges. Her flat blond hair hung past her shoulders and was cut straight across with what appeared to be razor precision. She had a nice but very square jaw, and her eyebrows were straight lines without a hint of arch. She wore wire-rimmed glasses and the lenses were perfect rectangles. Her dress was stiff and white, with a row of gold buttons marching down the front.

Her name was just as hard-edged. “Trina,” she said when Graham introduced himself and Matthew. “And you must be the Matthew everyone’s talking about.”

Matthew looked puzzled. “Why is everyone talking about me?”

“Because you’re so good at origami,” Trina said.

“But everyone here is good at origami,” Matthew said. “Well, except one lady who couldn’t collapse multiple creases.”

Graham expected the service to be awful, but to his surprise the waitstaff were efficient and he was pleased that instead of taking individual drink orders, they put entire bottles of wine on the tables. As Graham filled up his glass and Audra’s, Li and Trina and Clayton pulled stacks of origami paper from their bags (Clayton had his backpack and Li had a man purse of some sort) and began folding. Audra laughed and reached into her own handbag and produced a stack for Matthew. “I don’t leave home without it.”

With four of them folding, conversation was somewhat stilted, although conversation was never that stilted with Audra around. Soon she had them telling her about last year’s convention and how someone named Joe got locked in the men’s room and missed all of lunch and part of the advanced snowflake workshop.

Graham reached for the bottle of red wine nearest him and found that Audra’s hand was already on it. They traded looks. Let’s get drunk, his look said. How else can we get through this? hers said. Audra took her hand from the bottle and held out her glass, and he recognized a tiny flourish in the gesture, a sign of Audra making the decision to let herself go. He knew her most minute gesture, her most subtle turn of mind. There was no way she kept a secret—a meaningful secret— from him.

Graham went to the bathroom between the first and second course and took a circuitous route back to the table, hoping it would take a long time and spare him having to make conversation with Clayton and Trina and Li. And so it was that he was walking aimlessly past a set of French doors leading to a balcony on the other side of the hotel and he looked out and saw Audra.

She was talking on her cell phone and pacing back and forth in the cold October air, her long velvet dress whirling prettily around her ankles every time she turned. The balcony was in darkness, except for the squares of light that fell from the windows of the hotel along one side, and it was through these patches of brightness that Audra moved. Her auburn hair appeared much darker and her skin much paler than usual, and her butterscotch-colored gown was a hundred shades of gold where the folds of it caught the light. Oh, Audra was wrong when she complained that Graham was not a visual person, that he had no memory for specific hues, that he could not recognize the simplest pigments, that he grew impatient when she got out her color boards. (Actually, she was right about the color boards.) For here was Graham, drinking in the very sight of her, and wishing he were a painter or photographer so he could capture the way she looked forever. Here he was thinking that her eyes were like pools of still water when she looked up at him and that the lock of wavy hair the wind blew across her face was like a dark tendril of ivy on a marble statue.

She saw him and gave a slight wave. Then she said something into the phone and took it from her ear, turned it off, and slid it into her handbag.

Graham opened the French doors and she came inside, along with a gust of cold air.

“I was talking to Lorelei,” she said, slipping her arm through his. “I wanted to tell her about my new handbag.”

It didn’t strike Graham as at all unusual or unbelievable that Audra would call her friend Lorelei to talk about her new handbag (Audra had called Lorelei from their honeymoon to describe a coconut-curry sauce), but suddenly he wondered if it was unusual for Audra to tell him who she had been talking to. Did she normally do that? Or was she trying to prevent him from asking, from wondering? Graham tried to remember, and since Audra talked on the phone constantly, he should have millions of incidents to compare with this one, millions of incidents to use to calibrate her behavior. And yet he couldn’t remember a single time.

He put his hand over hers on his arm. Her fingers were cold and he wondered suddenly how long she’d been out there.

He could only be certain of one thing. He couldn’t go on like this.

The wine was working. Dinner no longer seemed to Graham like an extended running track with a long series of conversational hurdles he had to force himself over. In fact, he didn’t have to talk at all. Matthew was quiet beside him, happy with the endless French fries and milk shakes that the waiters brought, and his stack of origami paper.

Clayton and Trina were deep in discussion about something, Graham couldn’t hear what, exactly. But Clayton was even more hyper and worked up than usual and Trina nodded when he spoke in a manner that reminded Graham of the way North Korean delegates nodded when the Dear Leader gave political speeches. Occasionally she put her hand on Clayton’s arm and leaned closer.

On his other side, Li was teaching Audra how to fold a square of paper into sixty-fourths. Graham felt impatient despite the wine. Audra didn’t care about how to fold a paper into sixty-fourths any more than he did. Why couldn’t she talk to him, when he was sitting right here?

Audra was saying whenever she tried this with Matthew, she ended up with a rectangle, not a square, and Li said that could happen with machine-made paper if you weren’t careful, and Audra said why was that, and Li said it was because in machine-made papers, the fibers are aligned, and Audra said that was so interesting, and Li said modestly that he didn’t see any problem with having slightly off-square paper for tessellations, and Audra said he must be the most amazing teacher, and Li said, “I am so fucking turned on, you wouldn’t believe it.”

(Actually, Li didn’t say that last part, but Graham was pretty sure it was true. Who wouldn’t be turned on having Audra hang on your every word while you talked about your favorite subject and got to look down the front of the velvet dress, which was very low-cut?)

Finally the others left to go to the dessert buffet and Audra moved her chair so she was nestled up to Graham. “What do you think of Trina?” she asked in a low voice.

“I think she’d be pretty if she were a little . . . softer,” Graham said.

“Oh, I didn’t mean her looks,” Audra said, “because, please, those shoulder pads! Is there a Van Halen concert I didn’t know about?”

She said things like that occasionally, which Graham found absolutely inscrutable. She might as well have been speaking whatever they speak on Vulta.

“What I meant,” Audra continued, “is, do you think she’s flirting with Clayton?”

Graham looked over at Trina and Clayton, who were going through the dessert line together. Trina kept picking up desserts with the serving tongs and inspecting them, and then putting them back. Clayton appeared to be making helpful suggestions.

“That did occur to me, yes,” he said finally.

“Look, I know he’s making an origami candy cane out of fifty triangular units,” Audra said. “And that must be very exciting to her. But honestly, can’t she see that he’s just a super-skinny guy in weird jeans?”

There was no one in all the world he’d rather sit next to.

Audra was so sleepy and tipsy from all the wine that she wanted to go straight to bed after dinner. Graham had a far greater tolerance for alcohol. The wine had only relaxed him. So he sent her on ahead to the room and he took Matthew up to the All-Night Folding Room, which was set up in one of the conference rooms.

Graham thought that the main problem with the All-Night Folding Room was that there was no one around to make fun of the All-Night Folding Room with. Everyone there seemed to take it very seriously. They were gathered in small clusters around different models, folding intently. A few instructors wandered from group to group, but there was little conversation and no background music, just the rustle and snap of many papers being folded.

Matthew left Graham’s side and went to one of the tables, and the people there greeted him and quickly made space for him. Their manner was so much more welcoming and accepting than the kids’ on the playground at Matthew’s school that Graham’s heart squeezed briefly with pain.

He waited until Matthew was settled and then he stepped out of the ballroom and found a quiet corner. He took out his cell phone and Jasper’s number and dialed.

A girl answered, saying, “Jasper’s phone.”

Graham swallowed. “Could I speak to Jasper, please?”

“Sure,” the girl said. “Hang on.”

So there was a girl in Jasper’s life and he let her answer his phone. Both of those were good signs.

“Hello?” It was Jasper now, the same voice as on the message.

“Hello,” Graham said. “You don’t know me but my name is Peter and I’m a friend of Audra’s and she has a message for you.”

“Friend of whose?” Jasper asked. Graham could detect no hesitation. He sounded open and friendly, honestly confused.

“Audra’s,” Graham said.

“Who’s that?

“Audra Daltry? Graphic designer?”

“I’m a photographer,” Jasper said. Again, Graham heard that breathless, energetic sound in his voice, as though he were hopping on one foot or putting on his shoes while he talked. “I know dozens of graphic designers.”

“Who is it?” the girl asked in the background.

“Someone calling about a designer,” Jasper said.

“We have to go,” the girl said. Graham wondered where they were going at 10:30 pm. But that was young people for you.

“I know,” Jasper said. “You go on out. I’ll be there in a sec. Wait, take my blue— no, right, that one, thanks.”

Graham smiled slightly at their shorthand. Every couple had that. “I’m sorry,” he said, feeling foolish. “I must have the wrong number.”

“No problem,” Jasper said.

“Sorry to have bothered you,” Graham said. “Good-bye.” He could feel his whole body relaxing, relief flowing from the hand that held the phone all the way through him.

“Wait,” Jasper said. “What was the message?”

Graham gripped the phone harder. “What?”

“You said she had a message for me,” Jasper said. “What was it?”

Graham was silent. Most people are uncomfortable with silence and will eventually say something to fill it. He waited to hear what Jasper would say. “Was it—”

But suddenly Graham couldn’t bear to hear any more. “It doesn’t matter,” he said quickly. “Good-bye.” He ended the call.

His heart was thudding and he could barely swallow. It had been a mistake to call. The worst decision possible. If there was anything to know, he didn’t want to know it. He couldn’t bear to know it. His heart would burst under the weight of it. He realized that now.

In the morning, Audra was so hung over that Graham sent Matthew down to Clayton’s room to tell him that they would leave an hour later than they’d planned. Audra stayed in bed with the pillow pulled over her head, and Graham sat in a chair and leaned his head carefully against the back of it, taking small sips from a glass of water. He was a little hung over, too.

Matthew was back five minutes later. “Clayton was in the shower but the girl said she’d tell him.”

“What girl?” Graham asked. “Are you sure you went to the right room?”

Audra sat up on one elbow.

“Yes, I went to the right room,” Matthew said. “Room 471.” Matthew never made mistakes when it came to numbers. “And I did like you said, I knocked and the girl answered and I said that Mommy had had too much wine and needed more time.”

“I didn’t mean for you to say that part—” Graham began and then gave up. He also hadn’t specified not to say that, and Matthew was so literal.

“What girl, Matthew?” Audra asked. “What did she look like?”

“The girl who sat at our table last night,” Matthew said. “With the blond hair and the glasses. Can I go downstairs and look at the models since I’m ready?”

“Sure,” Graham said absently. “Just don’t leave the hotel.”

Matthew left, banging the door behind him, and Graham and Audra stared at each other. Audra was sitting all the way up now and the strap of her pale yellow nightgown slid down one arm. She always wore pale nightgowns, she said, because men liked it when they could see her nipples through the fabric. (She had told him this on their first date, cheerfully, while she ate a cheeseburger.) Graham could see her nipples now, and he liked it. But the thought of Jasper seeing them and liking them made Graham feel as though an unseen person had suddenly laid a cold hand on his chest, directly over his heart.

“I think it is just unforgiveable of Clayton to do that to Pearl,” Audra said. “Especially considering how she wears those itty-bitty paper-airplane earrings all the time.”

“You think wearing paper-airplane earrings is the worst part of being married to Clayton?” Graham asked.

“Sure,” Audra said. “What do you think the worst part is?”

“Well, having to talk to him or have dinner with him or go to bed with him. Just Clayton himself, I guess,” Graham said. “The earrings might be the best part of being married to him.”

“I just hate him now, though,” Audra said. “I can never forgive him for this.”

And Graham thought that someone else might take Audra’s anger at Clayton as proof that she would never have an affair herself, but he knew differently. He knew that adultery was just like any other vice, pride or gluttony or overspending or vanity. It was easy to condemn other people for it, but then you went right out and did it yourself. It was all different when it was you.

As they got in the car, Graham thought that he and Matthew and Clayton looked like three of the seven ages of man. Matthew the healthy little boy and he and Clayton the stooped gray men at the end. He would even put Clayton as the final man, though Graham was probably older by a few years. Clayton’s hangover appeared extreme; he looked dull and shrunken, with none of his usual hyper energy.

“No talking,” Audra said to Matthew as they drove out of the parking lot. “Everyone has a headache.”

“I don’t have a headache,” Matthew said.

“Well, the grown-ups do,” Audra said. “You just sit quietly and think interesting thoughts. You too, Clayton,” she added quickly, leading Graham to believe Clayton must have opened his mouth in protest.

In less than fifteen minutes, Matthew and Clayton were asleep. Graham saw them in the rearview mirror and turned to smile at Audra but she was asleep, too, curled sideways in her seat with her feet tucked under her and her face resting against the upholstery. Her eyelashes were dark crescents on her cheeks.

What was the message?

Graham pushed the thought away.

Audra woke up an hour later and stretched. “Can we stop at an Arby’s?”

“Sure.” Graham knew she believed Arby’s to be the perfect hangover cure.

They saw a sign a few exits later and Graham pulled into the parking lot. Audra said she had to go into the bathroom so she would go inside and get their food.

Graham stayed in the car. He looked back at Clayton and Matthew, who were still asleep, and saw that Matthew had moved so his head rested against Clayton’s shoulder. Looking at him sleeping there so trustingly filled Graham with a love so strong he had to blink back tears. He had been wrong earlier when he thought he would change any part of Matthew, that he would trade any of Matthew’s sweet guilelessness for some sarcastic little kid. Matthew was beautiful, perfect, just as he was. Graham loved Matthew, he loved Audra, at that moment he almost loved Clayton. There, in the Arby’s parking lot, he felt almost overwhelmed by love for his family, and a certainty of his course of action. He would forget all about Jasper and who he might be to Audra. He would stop observing her, stop monitoring her, stop snooping and hoping to find proof of anything. He would love her and trust her—he did love and trust her!—and his love would bind them together, like the atoms in hydrogen, the compass needle and the North Pole, like the rings around Saturn—

“You will not believe this, but they were out of Horsey Sauce,” Audra said, getting in and slamming her door shut. She had a way of bringing him back down to earth.

Graham unlocked the door to the apartment and held it open. Audra walked in, saying, “Home again, home again,” and Matthew said, “Jiggety-jig.” It was their routine since Matthew’s babyhood, and made Graham think instantly of strollers and sippy cups and Cheerios everywhere.

Matthew ran off to his room to do origami, and Audra went to their room to unpack. She always unpacked right away. Graham took the mail and went into his study and sat at his desk.

He went through the mail, checked his e-mail and the stock market. He could hear Audra moving around in the bedroom and kitchen. She seemed restless, opening and shutting the refrigerator, pulling out a chair (he heard the scrape of it on the floor) and then pushing it back in.

She appeared in the doorway wearing an oversized sweater of dark-green yarn. Her face was pale and her hair was pulled back messily, but her smile was as warm and sweet as always. He had married her for that smile. “I’m going down to see Lorelei for a while,” she said. Lorelei lived on the third floor of the building and was the reason Audra had wanted to live here. It was sort of like being married to someone in junior high.

“OK,” he said.

“Are you alright?” she asked.

“Sure, just tired.”

“It makes me so sad that the best thing I can say about this weekend is that it’s over,” Audra said. She kissed the top of his head. “See you later.”

After she left, Graham went into the kitchen and made himself a cup of tea. He felt the same restlessness he’d sensed in Audra. It was that unpleasant feeling of returning to an empty apartment in the late afternoon at a time of year when night came early. It seemed like there should be more to do—groceries to buy, laundry to start, bills to pay, lists to make. But there wasn’t.

Graham left his tea sitting on the kitchen counter and walked down the hall to the front door. Audra’s handbag rested on a small table there.

He took the piece of paper with Jasper’s number from his pocket and put it carefully back in her wallet, exactly as he found it. He vowed that he would never look to see if it was there, not ever again. Eventually, he would forget about it, he would go back to being the person he was before.

He walked back down the hall, stopping to check the thermostat because the apartment felt cold. But it was set at seventy-two the way it always was, and they hadn’t turned the heat down when they left anyway. It was only the fact that they’d been away that made him imagine this coolness in his chest, this feeling that he ought to rub his hands together and start the blood flowing. That was ridiculous. It had only been a little more than twenty-four hours, not nearly long enough for a chill to set in.