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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      Audra and the assistant cubmaster gave him twin looks of annoyance, but he stood firm. Audra shrugged slightly, and the assistant cubmaster pushed back his chair reluctantly.

      “It has been my sincere pleasure talking to you,” he said to Audra, clasping one of her hands in both of his.

      “Mine—too,” she said warmly, with just a little bit too much space between the words. “A sincere—pleasure.”

      It took the combined efforts of Graham and the assistant cubmaster to haul Audra to her feet, and then Graham led her out of the kitchen. He propped her against a bookshelf the way you’d lean a broom against a wall while he checked his pockets to make sure he had his wallet and phone. He waved a hasty goodbye to the Akela across the room and propelled Audra out the door.

      In the elevator, Audra pressed the button for the lobby with great concentration.

      Graham regarded her silently for a moment. “Did you talk to anyone besides the assistant cubmaster?”

      “Hmmm?” Audra peered at him, her eyes beady with tequila.

      “I said, did you talk to anyone? Did you network?”

      She looked thoughtful. “Well, yes, there was a woman at the beginning of the party. I can’t recall her name, but she had wild frizzy black hair. Did you talk to someone like that?”

      Graham shook his head.

      “I must say, I found her quite—intrusive,” said Audra, who had once interrupted a complete stranger on a crosstown bus to say that the symptoms she was describing sounded like bacterial vaginitis. “She kept asking what Matthew’s issues were, what medications he takes.”

      When the elevator came to a stop, Audra swayed in an alarmingly loose-jointed way, like one of those spring-loaded string animals that collapse when you push the button in the base. Graham took her arm and led her into the street.

      He had planned to take a taxi home, but it was no fun having a driver holler at you because your drunken spouse had vomited in the back of his cab. (Graham knew this from experience as bitter as raw aspirin.) They would have to walk. But the weather was fine, and the whisky had stoked a red-hot sort of pleasure-furnace deep within him. Now that he was out of the party, Graham felt like he could walk for miles. He linked his arm through Audra’s.

      All hail the Akela, he thought.

      The next morning, Bitsy took Matthew to an origami demonstration at a mall in Garden City and Graham and Audra got to sleep in, which was good, considering Audra’s hangover. Graham got up eventually and walked down to the corner and bought some brioche and two coffees and a hair magazine for Audra.

      Audra was pleased by the hair magazine, which she took to be a sign of his love and affection for her, although actually Graham had bought it for the amusement of watching her devour it. She was like a stock analyst studying the big board. He thought Audra had great hair already.

      “Any developments with Bitsy and her husband?” he asked. He had to ask once more before she heard him and then she still didn’t take her eyes off the magazine.

      “Oh, no, same old, same old,” she said, folding over the corner of a page.

      Graham had been wondering lately if it was a good idea to let Bitsy have so much access to Matthew. What if she found out about her husband’s relationship with the miniskirt girl? For all he and Audra knew, Bitsy could decide to run down her husband with their SUV while Matthew serenely folded an F-16 in the backseat. But before he could say anything, the phone rang.

      “Oh, hi, Maxine!” said Audra.

      So Graham read the newspaper while Audra had a fifteen-minute postmortem of last night’s party. Clearly there were a few blanks in Audra’s memory—“I’m so sorry I didn’t get a chance to meet your husband … Oh … Did he happen to mention what we talked about?”—but, in general, Audra was very supportive and told the Akela that it was a fabulous party; and no, the Jell-O shots were retro, not vulgar; and Audra was pretty sure СКАЧАТЬ