You Think It, I'll Say It(8)

They would never acknowledge it.

She would say something the next time she saw him.

After three A.M., Julie fell asleep, and she woke before five, resolute. The next time she saw Graham, she’d say nothing out of the ordinary and simply use the opportunity to acquire data.

At no point had she previously considered cheating on Keith; indeed, she’d felt slightly terrified by the divorces of other couples, as if they were a communicable disease. But apparently life contained surprises. Second acts! She was forty-four.



* * *



—

Oddly, Julie couldn’t remember whether she and Graham were in the habit of embracing when they greeted each other. Usually not, she concluded, or maybe not during the day but sometimes at adult events, at night, when alcohol was or would be involved.

Gayle came without him to a black-tie fundraiser for cancer research, after Julie had taken particular care with her appearance in anticipation of seeing him there. (Uncomfortably, Julie actually liked Gayle. She was pretty and kind, a petite woman with a brunette bob, and she’d always struck Julie, though maybe this was erroneous, as someone who found being a mother and a volunteer gratifying and sufficient.)

Julie finally saw Graham at a high school girls’ basketball game on a Saturday afternoon; Julie’s oldest and Graham’s middle child were a year apart but on the same team. Julie climbed up the bleachers and sat with him, her heart hammering. He was alone, and she’d come with Lucas, who was scampering around the basketball court’s periphery. Julie frowned and said, “I’m sorry about you and Gayle,” and then she had difficulty listening to him because she was thinking about what she’d say next, what it might reveal about her, and whether he’d find it funny. Also, when was the part when they’d have sex?

He raised his eyebrows in a rueful way and said, “Divorce is the worst, Julie. The very, very worst. But Gayle’s and mine has been a long time coming.”

“Everything is so complicated, isn’t it?” Julie said.

Graham turned his head, and his expression was odd—it was both mournful and a little arch. He said, “Thank you for existing with me in this cosmos.”

It was early November, and she decided to maintain the status quo until January because she didn’t want to actively be cheating on Keith for what was probably the last Christmas that their youngest child would believe in Santa; she wanted to enjoy the holidays with a heart that was, if not uncorrupted, then only passively corrupt. She’d move forward with Graham in the new year.



* * *



—

For the lunch where Julie was planning to confess her love, her criteria for the restaurant had been a place where (1) it wouldn’t be weird to order a glass of wine and (2) they were unlikely to run into people they knew. She decided on the restaurant inside the Four Seasons, which soon seemed humiliating—of course she’d considered the convenience of adjourning to a room, though she was planning on Graham being the one to suggest the adjournment. She’d contacted Graham by email, the first email she’d ever sent him, and she’d guessed correctly at his work email address based on Keith’s. I wonder if you’re free to have lunch next week, she’d written, and he’d written back, Hi Julie! I can’t do next week, but I can do Tues or Fri of the week after.

Graham arrived ten minutes late, seeming preoccupied in exactly the way Keith was when his attention got pulled from office matters during the day; if anything, Graham seemed less chipper than Keith would under such circumstances. Later she guessed that Graham had imagined she was about to ask him to, say, join the host committee for the annual gala of the homeless shelter on whose board Julie served. Or possibly he’d thought she was hoping to fix him up with a single woman she knew; no doubt this had begun happening, which was part of why Julie couldn’t delay. At the time, though, Julie had thought that Graham knew, more or less, why she’d invited him to lunch, and even afterward she wasn’t convinced she’d been wrong.

By the time he sat, she’d already consumed most of her glass of white wine. They discussed Graham’s older son’s college applications (his first choice was Duke, though Graham considered this unrealistic). After they’d placed their orders with the waiter, Graham leaned in and said, “What’s up?”

He was wearing a gray suit, a light blue shirt, and a dark blue tie with red stripes, and he was painfully attractive to her. He had hazel eyes with crow’s-feet around them, a strong jaw, and completely gray hair, though he was only a year older than Julie.

She said, “This is hard to say—” and paused and looked at him, and there was nothing encouraging in his expression. If anything, a kind of cloudiness had overtaken his face. So should she have stopped? Or was some ritual degradation necessary, and if she hadn’t gone through with it in the moment, she’d just have had to enact it in the future? She said, “Lately, I’ve been having trouble sleeping. Ever since I heard that you and Gayle had separated—I keep picturing you and me—”

Six months after Lucas was born, Julie had been shopping alone at a boutique, examining a tunic on a hanger, when a fellow shopper, a chic woman about thirty years her senior, had said, “That looks comfy!” The woman had lightly patted her own midsection and added with a smile, “Not much longer for you, I’m guessing?” That the woman assumed she was pregnant wasn’t as horrifying to Julie as the prospect of what they’d both do when Julie had to reveal she wasn’t. She was flustered enough that it didn’t occur to her that she could simply pretend the woman was correct, and her focus was on preventing the woman from explicitly articulating her assumption. Julie extended one arm, palm out, as if to physically stop the next words. She said, overly warmly and loudly, “They sell so much great stuff here, don’t they?” Then she hastily rehung the tunic and bolted from the store.