Of course, Graham realized that it must work the other way around and that Lorelei must know everything about him, too, but he had always sort of enjoyed that. How many people could have such intimate knowledge of another person and yet never really say anything beyond The salmon here really is excellent? It sometimes stirred in Graham a profound affection for Lorelei.
And yet, even Lorelei, who was a client service director with a big social advertising agency, was here, humbly seeking knowledge from Audra, a part-time graphic designer!
It was not the graphic designer bit that made it odd to Graham that someone would want Audra’s advice because he actually thought Audra was very talented. And it wasn’t the part-time thing, either, because that was sort of necessary at least until Matthew went to high school (or possibly until Matthew got married, at age forty-five). It was more just Audra, who had recently wondered aloud to Graham where the fuse box was (they’d lived in their apartment for ten years) and had often said she considered herself privileged to live in the age of the hair towel.
But there was no doubt that Audra knew people, and she knew things about people, and often she knew things about people who knew other people who knew people who had brothers who worked in the State Department and it was very helpful when your passport got stolen.
Lorelei went into the living room to talk to Audra, and Graham went into the kitchen to make tea for all of them. He knew just how Lorelei took hers—a single Ceylon tea bag, steeped for four minutes, with one sugar and a dash of lemon. He even knew which mug she preferred—an old-fashioned turquoise one with white enamel lining—and that she liked gingersnaps with her tea, although they didn’t have any gingersnaps right now.
Graham liked making tea. He liked cooking, he liked baking, he liked food, he liked kitchens. In another life, he would have made an excellent owner of a safe house in the Underground Railroad. He would have always been happy to get up in the middle of the night and poke up the fire, listen to the fugitives’ tales while he fried ham steaks and made hot biscuits. And although Graham had been a teenager in the seventies and never attended a consciousness-raising group, the idea had always deeply appealed to him. Political activism while you stirred the spaghetti sauce? What could be better?
He had started out as a medical researcher—Graham liked routine and order—and now he was in charge of medical ventures for a venture capitalist firm. There was just no market for underground safe houses anymore.
“So this very junior person in our office,” Lorelei was saying to Audra, “basically the girl who makes the coffee, tweeted something without approval—”
“What did she tweet?” Audra asked.
“Oh, just something about how the clients’ shoes are guaranteed not to give you blisters,” Lorelei said. “She didn’t realize the word guarantee was legally binding language and now the clients are furious, and I have to meet with them tomorrow.”
“Who are the clients?” Audra asked.
“Superguardian Footwear,” Lorelei said.
“Just a sec, let me look them up,” Audra said, and there was the muted clatter of her laptop keyboard.
Graham tried to remember how conversations like this went in the pre-Google world and found he couldn’t, although the pre-Google world was only what, ten or twelve years ago? (Some people, like his mother, still lived there.) Before Google, it seemed to Graham, there was probably a great deal more topic changing. Or maybe conversations were just shorter. Maybe you said, Have you ever heard of a company called Superguardian Footwear? and the other person said, No, and you said, Oh. Well, anyway, I’ll see you tomorrow.
“All right,” Audra said in that half-present, half-absent sort of voice people use when they’re looking at a computer screen and talking at the same time. “Let’s see. Here’s their website—wow, I really do not like that color blue.”
“Go to their company page,” Lorelei said. “Maybe you know the vice president or someone.” She sighed. “I wish you could go to this meeting for me, the way you broke up with Jeff Mayberry for me in college.”
Audra sounded puzzled. “I broke up with Jeff Mayberry for you?”
“Oh my God, yes, don’t you remember?”
“No, not at all.”
“I wanted to break up with him,” Lorelei said, “but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. So you and I were doing a lot of role play and pretend phone calls, with you being me and me being Jeff, but whenever he called, I couldn’t quite do it, and finally you got impatient, and the next time he called, you pretended to be me and said, ‘Listen, Jeff, I’m just in kind of a crazy situation and I can’t see you anymore.’”
“Did it work?” Audra sounded amused.
“Yes!” Lorelei said. “That’s the most amazing thing about it.”
“Jeff couldn’t have been that attached if he didn’t even recognize your voice—”
“I can’t believe this,” Lorelei interrupted. “I have, for years—literally, for decades—been going around telling people I couldn’t do things because I’m in kind of a crazy situation. It’s been my all-purpose answer to almost every awkward question and now I find out you don’t even remember saying it.”
“Who all have you said it to?” Audra asked.
“Everyone!” Lorelei said. “I’m sure I’ve said it to people who were collecting money for UNICEF, and my mother-in-law when she asks why I haven’t had children.”
This was the pleasure of twenty-year-old friendships, Graham thought. Tracing a memory back to its source. Like following a stream through the woods and up a mountain until you find the spring trickling from a rock and you clear away the dead brown leaves of the intervening years and the water flows as sweetly as ever.
Audra’s voice came clearly from the living room. “Really, the only connection I have at Superguardian—and it’s not much help—is that their chief operations officer is a man named Columbus Knox and I believe I gave a man by that name a blow job once outside the Raccoon Lodge in, like, 1990.”
“What?” Graham said, startled.
“It was a long time ago,” Audra called soothingly. “And I didn’t know him terribly well.”
You know, actually, it was nothing like being married to Warren Buffett at all.
Click here to buy Standard Deviation…
About the Author
Katherine Heiny is the author of Standard Deviation, a novel, and Single, Carefree Mellow, a collection of short stories. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, Narrative, Glimmer Train, and many other publications. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and children.
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