Standard Deviation: ‘The best feel-good novel around’ Daily Mail. Katherine Heiny

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СКАЧАТЬ imagine having an affair with her. He was dead to her, but Audra, at barely forty—Audra was still young enough to move in the real world.

      Bentrup answered the door of Elspeth’s apartment, and Audra said, “Goodness!” in a startled voice. (It was even ruder than it sounds, if that’s possible.)

      But Graham knew what she meant because he was shocked by Bentrup’s appearance, too. It wasn’t so much that Bentrup was in his early sixties, or that his hair was bright silver, or that it was slicked back from his forehead in a pompadour, or that he had a deep artificial-looking tan the color of toast, or that his eyes were caught in nets of wrinkles, like a reptile’s, or that he was wearing a green velvet smoking jacket and an ascot—it was all of these things. All those details added up to make him someone entirely other than Graham had expected.

      “It’s so nice to meet you,” Audra said.

      So that, technically, she’d said Goodness, it’s so nice to meet you, except with a long pause in the middle and the intonation all wrong.

      “And you, too, my dear,” Bentrup said, taking one of her hands in both of his. His voice was another surprise: British and fulsome and taking too long to get to the ends of words.

      Then he shook hands with Graham and took the bottle of wine they’d brought and there was a little flurry of conversation (Bentrup asking how their trip over was and Audra saying, “Well, you won’t believe this but the cabdriver told me how to program our TV remote”) and then they followed Bentrup down the hall.

      The Rosemund was just as Graham thought it would be—glossy and hard-edged, with so many chrome and stainless steel fixtures that it seemed as though the apartment were wearing braces. It was the kind of place that had to be kept aggressively clean, otherwise all those reflective surfaces would double any messes you left behind.

      Elspeth was in the kitchen. “Graham, hello,” she said, and kissed his cheek. He wasn’t expecting that. “And you must be Audra,” she said. Was he imagining it or was there just the slightest bit of mockery in her tone? Like You must be Audra, unless Graham’s moved on to someone else by now.

      “Hello,” Audra said, and her voice was warm and pleased. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

      “Likewise,” Elspeth said, and turned to stir something on the stove.

      This was something he’d forgotten about Elspeth, how she tended to be very minimal in conversation sometimes, and a certain kind of person found that minimalism uncomfortable and rushed in to fill the void with revealing chatter.

      “You know, I think I was in this building years and years ago for an alcoholic intervention,” Audra said. “I was working as this woman’s personal assistant and she asked me to participate. She was arranging the intervention for her husband, and I think she wanted to up the numbers. I was afraid she might fire me if I said no, so I went and then we all had to get up and talk about how the husband’s drinking was impacting our lives and I didn’t know what to say. I mean, I wanted to say, ‘Well, it’s impacting my life because I have to be here on a Friday night when I could be out drinking with my friends,’ but I didn’t feel that would be overly helpful.”

      Bentrup was twisting a corkscrew into a wine bottle. “Did it work?” he asked.

      “Hmmm?” Audra said absently, as though she had already moved on to thinking about something else. “Oh, no. It turned out that the husband was in an alcoholic blackout that night and didn’t even remember there’d been an intervention.” She turned toward Elspeth. “So if you don’t mind my asking, why don’t you like restaurants?”

      Elspeth pursed her lips slightly. “Why don’t you like Chinese food?”

      “I do like Chinese food,” Audra said.

      “Well, name something you don’t like,” Elspeth said.

      “People’s breath after they’ve eaten Doritos,” Audra answered so promptly that Elspeth blinked.

      “Okay,” she said, still stirring the pan on the stove. “Why don’t you like people’s breath after they’ve eaten Doritos? It’s the same sort of question.”

      “Not really,” Audra said. “Because, I mean, have you ever smelled someone’s breath after they’ve eaten Doritos? It’s really unpleasant, but restaurants are, on the whole, pleasant experiences.”

      “Unless the waiters have been eating Doritos,” Bentrup said, and Audra laughed.

      “Now I have to ask you something,” she said to him.

      “Certainly,” he said.

      “If you work in the shoe department, why are you wearing slippers?”

      Bentrup was indeed wearing slippers—or maybe they were moccasins. They looked new and stiff, nothing like the ones Graham wore at home, which bulged out at the sides like a hamster’s cheeks. Bentrup smiled. “I don’t like to be too predictable.”

      During all of this, Graham was very distracted by the blouse Elspeth was wearing. It was black silk and had a picture of a white bow on it, but not an actual bow. Graham liked analogies and he couldn’t help thinking that there was some way in which the blouse suited Elspeth perfectly. It was not that she was a two-dimensional person, he knew her far too well to ever think that. It was more the self-contained, insoluble, impenetrable nature of it.

      Bentrup raised his wineglass. “To your very good health,” he said.

      “Cheers,” Audra said, clinking her glass with his.

      Graham and Elspeth raised their glasses. Graham glanced at Elspeth and saw that he could read her expression as easily as he read a clock face: she was amused at her own expense. Who would have ever thought I’d be socializing with these two particular people? She was thinking that, or something close to it, he could tell.

      It was amazing, really, that after so many years apart, he and Elspeth still spoke in marital code.

      He called the day after dinner to thank her and she said, “It was a pleasure. Audra is certainly vivacious.” But what she meant was She talks too much, however do you stand it?

      “I enjoy that about her,” he said. “Bentrup is extremely dapper.”

      “I like the way he looks,” she said spikily, having understood him correctly to mean He looks like a dandy. (Actually, Audra had said on the way home that Bentrup reminded her of a sexy snake-oil salesman, but Graham wasn’t going to go there.)

      “I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet Matthew,” Elspeth said, which didn’t make much sense because Matthew hadn’t been invited.

      “Well, it was a school night,” Graham said.

      “Audra told me he goes to the Laurence School,” Elspeth said. “I didn’t realize he was autistic.” I guess everything didn’t turn out so hunky-dory for you and Audra after all.

      “He’s not autistic,” Graham said, his voice rapping out more sharply than he’d intended. “He might not even have Asperger’s. No one knows. But he’s a visual learner and he does well at Laurence. Lots of kids there have exceptional IQs.” And, as anyone with СКАЧАТЬ