Standard Deviation: ‘The best feel-good novel around’ Daily Mail. Katherine Heiny
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very happy not to know.
How do I look?” Audra asked, as she and Graham stood in the front hall, waiting for the babysitter. It had somehow worked out that they were going over to Elspeth’s new apartment for dinner, something to do with Bentrup’s work schedule.
“You look great,” he said, and she did. She wore black jeans and a thin fuzzy white angora boatneck sweater. The wide neckline showed her collarbones. Graham did not have the heart to tell her that she couldn’t win tonight—if she looked pretty, it would be assumed he was with her for her looks; if she didn’t, it would seem like she had let herself go.
“Now, remember,” he said. “Don’t say anything about helping her get the apartment. In fact, don’t even mention the apartment.”
“How can I not mention it if we’re standing inside it?” Audra said. “Won’t that seem sort of ungracious? What if, after we leave, Elspeth turns to Bentrup and says, ‘That woman was so odd! She didn’t say one word about our home.’”
That seemed to Graham to be possibly the best thing Elspeth might say about them after they left.
Audra had arranged for their downstairs neighbors’ daughter Melissa to babysit Matthew while they were at Elspeth’s. “It’s strange that Melissa’s always available,” Graham said. “It must say something about her social life.”
“Or else her boyfriend’s some married guy she can only see at, like, lunchtime,” Audra said, knotting a scarf around her neck.
It surprised Graham, still, how quickly Audra could access the seamy side of life.
There was a soft knock at the door and it was Melissa. Graham studied her while she slipped off her shoes, but he couldn’t picture her with a married lover, or any lover, in fact. To him, she just seemed like a cheerful, freckled teenager, almost without a gender. He could barely imagine having a conversation with her, let alone an affair.
(Audra had about two hundred stories of all the lecherous fathers of children she’d babysat in high school, including one father she’d actually had an affair with, a man named Edward. Edward used to pretend to walk his dog in the evenings but he would actually sneak over to Audra’s house on nights her parents weren’t there, and one night Edward’s wife drove by and saw their dog tied up in front of Audra’s house, looking cold and forlorn. So the next night, Edward’s wife called Audra up and said, “Just tell me the truth, has Edward ever—ever touched you?” and Edward picked up the basement extension and whispered, “Say no, Audra!” which was just about the stupidest thing anyone could’ve possibly done, in Audra’s opinion, and it blew up into a big scandal and she was blacklisted as a babysitter by the whole entire neighborhood and— You know, actually, maybe it wasn’t so surprising that Audra’s mind always leapt to some sort of sordid answer so quickly after all.)
“Hey, Melissa, how are you?” Audra said. “I love those boots. Are they new? Are they Uggs? I’ve never seen that color before. Matthew’s in his room, he wants to show you something on Google Earth. He wants a peanut butter sandwich for dinner—you know how he likes that, right? And he can have chocolate milk with dinner, and he can watch half an hour of TV, and read a little before bed but lights out by nine, and keep going back in to check, because otherwise, he’ll turn the light on again.”
Melissa said nothing, just nodded gently. Graham had noticed that shy people loved Audra because she talked so much, and she frequently did both parts of the conversation.
“Okay, great,” Audra said now, though Melissa had not actually said a word. “I guess we’re off.”
Melissa smiled. “I know the drill by now.”
“Well, good,” Audra said. “Because I feel like I was machine-gunning you with information there.”
Melissa laughed. They said good night, and as they walked out, Graham thought that if he had made a joke like that to Melissa, it would have been awkward, not funny. It was as though Melissa could not see or hear him. That was the real reason he couldn’t 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,”