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

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СКАЧАТЬ more books or watch more TV or make more telephone calls or snowshoe or keep bees or make marmalade, but Graham was not sure he believed those studies. It seemed to him that people still read a lot of books and watched a lot of TV and talked on their cellphones all the damn time, especially in restaurants when you were trying to read the newspaper.

      Maybe, before the internet, people just lazed around pointlessly more, or threw tennis balls at the wall to hear the pleasant thwock! thwock! sound, or wondered idly what kind of mileage their friends’ cars got. It didn’t seem to Graham any sort of great loss. Not when he could sit here and snoop on his former spouse without even leaving his own living room, and no awkward questions about what you were doing watching the neighbors with binoculars, either (which was what they did instead of searching the internet when Graham was a teenager, now that he thought about it).

      Graham took his first sip of whisky and typed Elspeth’s name into the search engine.

      “What are you doing?” asked Audra. She was sitting on the couch with her own drink beside her, sewing a badge onto Matthew’s Cub Scout uniform.

      “Just looking something up,” Graham said absently.

      Elspeth didn’t have a Facebook page, but that wasn’t really surprising. If someone asked her if she was on Facebook, she would probably say, “Why do I need to be on Facebook?” (She had always been a conversation-stopper kind of person.)

      She wasn’t on Twitter or Instagram, either. Graham had to content himself with going to Stover, Sheppard’s website. There she was: Elspeth Osbourne, partner, mergers and acquisitions. Elspeth’s photograph had been Photoshopped so aggressively that it didn’t even look like her. Maybe it wasn’t her, Graham thought suddenly. Maybe it was just a stock photo of a blond lawyer. He read the little blurb beside her picture: Ms. Osbourne practices in the Mergers and Acquisitions Group. She advises U.S. and international corporate and private equity clients on a full range of transactions …

      This was so boring that Graham was beginning to wish he’d spent the last ten minutes throwing a tennis ball at the wall. He took another, bigger drink of whisky and tried to remember the apartment building Elspeth had said she wanted to move into. The Roseland? No, that was a ballroom. The Rosemund, that was it.

      And here it was, the Rosemund website, at his fingertips. Graham clicked on some floor plans and photos—chrome, glass, marble, stainless steel. Everything as bright and hard and shiny as the sidewalk after an ice storm. No wonder Elspeth wanted to live there. She had an intense dislike of carpeting—or anything soft, really. Graham clicked on the “Amenities” page. Billiards Room, Concierge, Fitness Center, Heated Outdoor Pool, Parking Garage, Starbucks. Did that mean there was an actual Starbucks in the lobby? Audra would never leave the building if they lived there. He clicked on the somewhat ominously titled “Our Application Process” page and scanned the building’s board of directors.

      Then he glanced over at Audra, still sewing in a little pool of lamplight, the auburn in her hair glinting like tinsel.

      If you were married to Marie Curie, you might ask her what the atomic weight of lithium was from time to time. Not to keep her on her toes, but just because you could. And now, in that same sort of spirit, Graham said to Audra, “Do you know any of these people?” and he read her the list of board members:

      Francis Ray

      Gordon Richards

      John Palmer

      Marco Luxe

      Connie Sharp

      “Oh, for God’s sake,” Audra said. “Marco Luxe is the doctor who delivered Matthew.”

      Graham frowned. “I thought that was Dr. Medowski.”

      “It was supposed to be Dr. Medowski,” Audra said, holding the shirt closer to the light and then putting it back in her lap, “but he was grouse hunting! Don’t you remember? I called his office to say that my contractions had started and to ask him to meet us at the hospital and his receptionist said, ‘Oh, Dr. Medowski isn’t here, he’s grouse hunting in the Adirondacks,’ and I said, ‘Why on earth does he want a house in the Adirondacks?’ and she said, ‘No, grouse hunting,’ and started telling me about grouse or partridges or what have you, and I’m like, ‘Fine, whatever, but I’m having a baby here and I need Dr. Medowski,’ and she says, ‘Well, you can have Dr. Luxe,’ and I said, ‘I don’t want Dr. Luxe, I want Dr. Medowski,’ and she says, ‘It is the first day of grouse season, you know,’ in this very blaming sort of voice, like I should have planned better—”

      “Do you think Dr. Luxe would remember you?” Graham asked.

      “Oh, I’m sure he would,” Audra said serenely.

      Actually, Graham was sure he would, too. Audra had talked nonstop during labor and even through the delivery. He remembered the doctor (apparently it was Dr. Luxe) saying to the nurse, “The epidural has really thrown her for a loop,” and the nurse saying, “No, that’s just her personality.”

      “Do you think you could call him?” Graham asked. “And ask him a favor?”

      “What sort of favor?”

      “For Elspeth.”

      “I don’t see why not,” Audra said. She sighed suddenly. “I think I’ve sewn this shirt to my jeans. God, I hate Cub Scouts. Get me another drink, will you?”

      Matthew wanted to join an origami club that met on Sundays at nine in the morning on the Lower East Side that Bitsy had helped him find on the internet. Was it fair to blame Bitsy for this? Would it be fair to ask Bitsy to take Matthew to the club meeting every Sunday for the duration of her stay in their apartment, and possibly years beyond that? No, probably not. Graham sighed and called the number on the website.

      Later Graham would tell himself that he knew just from the way Clayton answered the phone that there was something not really—not exactly—not quite—normal about him. But the truth was that he wasn’t really paying that much attention and he didn’t pick up on anything until they were at least four or five exchanges into the conversation.

      “Hello,” Graham said. “Can I speak to Clayton Pierce, please?”

      “This is Clayton speaking.”

      “Well,” Graham said. “I’m calling about the Origami Club—”

      “All right, all right, just hold up a second here,” Clayton said. “First, how old are you?”

      “I’m calling for my son,” Graham said. “He’s the one who wants to join.”

      “And you?” Clayton said. “Do you fold?”

      “No,” Graham said, and there was a small frosty silence on the line, the same kind of silence that might follow someone at a swingers’ party asking if you swing.

      “I see,” Clayton said. “How old is your son?”

      “He’s ten.”

      “Mmmm-hmmm,” Clayton said, obviously writing something down. “And his name?”

      “Matthew Cavanaugh.”

      “Is СКАЧАТЬ