Standard Deviation: ‘The best feel-good novel around’ Daily Mail. Katherine Heiny
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was in abundance; in fact, there wasn’t even food. The long white-clothed table in the living room held a huge punch bowl of ruby-red rum punch swimming with raspberries, a tray of frosted tumblers filled with mojitos as cool and green as a shady lawn, another tray of sugar-rimmed cocktail glasses of margaritas garnished with mint, a dozen pineapples cut in half and filled with creamy piña coladas, three fruit-clogged pitchers of sangria, long lines of bubbling champagne glasses, and a towering pyramid of small plastic cups of red Jell-O with a small sign that read Vodka Shots! in a cheerful handwriting propped in front.
Audra helped herself to a margarita and squeezed Graham’s arm. “Network,” she whispered, and slipped away into the crowd.
Graham took a glass of champagne and backed up until he was standing against the sideboard. A large man with wide flat hips was standing there, too, talking to another man about how his GPS was getting frustrated with him.
“So it’ll say, ‘When possible, make a legal U-turn,’” the man said. “And if, for some reason, I don’t make a U-turn, it says it again, but with, you know, this little pause, like, ‘I said, when possible, make a legal U-turn.’ It sighs at me.”
The man stepped forward to get another champagne glass and Graham gasped, because the man’s midsection had completely hidden another bar set up behind him, which featured the largest bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label whisky Graham had ever seen in a private residence.
Graham set his untouched champagne aside with a brief apology to the poor starving children in China (or whoever suffered when you wasted alcohol) and filled a cut-glass tumbler with ice. It took both hands to lift the Johnnie Walker bottle, but Graham held it steady as he poured the whisky into the glass. It glowed a soft amber, as fine and warm as your best childhood memory. His respect and admiration for the Akela was growing by leaps and bounds.
Graham took his whisky glass and began to circulate. He approached people standing alone or in groups, introducing himself, asking about 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.