Monogamy Read online

  Dedication

  For Doug,

  mainstay

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  About the Author

  Also by Sue Miller

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Acknowledgments

  This book was, to my regret, a drawn-out project—it took six years to write. There were people who helped me through those years in one way or another, and I want to say thanks:

  to Ben and Zoe Miller, for lifting my spirits without even knowing they were doing it,

  to Shellburne Thurber, photographer extraordinaire, for telling me everything I needed to know—and about a twentieth of what she knows—about her art,

  to Jill Kneerim and Maxine Groffsky, who had to tell me—and did it gently and generously—that I’d made a long false start to this material,

  to my Walker Street friends—Laura Zigman, who knows a lot about How Things Work and was happy to share that,

  and Joan Wickersham, for our talks over many afternoons made warm by the fire and her rare company,

  to the Walshies, my second family,

  to Michelle Huneven and Michele Souda and Lynne O’Hara, dear friends,

  to Doug, who read it again and again as it grew and changed, without complaining,

  to Graham and Annie, who kept me interested for all those years,

  to Suzanne Gluck, who took me on and changed everything,

  and to HarperCollins and Terry Karten, my warm and judicious editor, who have welcomed me home.

  Thank you all, for everything.

  1

  Annie had been single for seven years when she met Graham. Whenever she thought about her first marriage, even long after it had ended, her primary emotion was a kind of shame. Shame that she could have been attracted to someone she felt so little for in the end. That she could have lived with him for so long.

  She had excuses, if she’d wished to use them. Alan had been remarkably handsome in a preppy kind of way—tall, with a thatch of blond hair that flopped elegantly across his forehead. And she’d been young, so young and ignorant that she’d regarded him at first as a superior sort of person—he knew where he was going, he knew what he wanted. Annie was shakier on those issues. She had just graduated from college with not much sense of what came next.

  Then there was the fact that he felt he was a superior person too. He had an easy contempt for the people around him—even for their friends. For a while, Annie had enjoyed sharing that careless contempt, unsure of herself socially as she was. How much fun! to come home from a party and sit around bad-mouthing all the people who’d been there. How sophisticated, how competent, it had made her feel. How adult—she was twenty-three.

  Soon enough, though, as she might have foreseen, Alan’s disdain turned to her. To her life, to her useless preoccupations—she was taking course after course in photography at the Museum School then. To her pitiful income (she did portraits of dogs for their owners, she photographed family reunions and graduations and birthday parties). To her self-delusions (she kept sending off photographs of local events to The Phoenix, to The Boston Globe, in hopes that she could get work as a stringer). It seemed to her a failure of character that she hadn’t known this would be coming, that she should have imagined she’d be exempt from his general critique of the world.

  It was when she was driving home with him from a party, a party he was speaking of in that familiar, slightly irritated tone, that it occurred to her that she simply didn’t like him. Over the next few days she came, almost literally, to see him differently. Everything that had seemed admirable about him seemed just the opposite now. Small. Defensive. How could she ever have thought she loved him?

  She didn’t love him. She felt she never had.

  Had she? Had she ever loved anyone? She felt herself to be without love—it seemed a kind of incapacity, a hollowness within her. This was the first time she had this thought so clearly, and also the first time she connected it—slowly, over some months of self-examination—to her photography. In her work, she felt, she was like him, like Alan. Cold, removed. Was it possible that this was why she’d chosen it?

  In any case, she withdrew from Alan. He noticed this, finally. He wanted to talk about it, but she felt she had nothing she could say to him. How could you say, “I don’t like you anymore”? “I don’t think I ever loved you”?

  She suggested they separate. He was surprised by this, which surprised her. She had assumed, as critical of her as he was, that he must have wanted out too. They had some weeks, then, of anguished back-and-forth. He pleaded. Annie felt awful. But even in the midst of his pleading, he couldn’t resist offering more of his general critique of her, and that made it easier for her, the ending.

  She left. She took none of the things that they’d accumulated together—the expensive wedding gifts from his kind, moneyed parents and their moneyed friends. The silver vegetable servers with covers, the napkin rings, the fish knives, the linen tablecloth and napkins—she left all of it behind, thinking of it as the price she was paying for her freedom. At the time, she thought there ought to be a price, she felt so guilty, so ashamed of this failure.

  But she kept the camera his parents had given her when she’d begun to be interested in photography, an expensive Rolleiflex that she’d only slowly learned how to use. That, and her books, many of them purchased for courses in college, filled with markings and notes she’d taken in a neat, careful handwriting she could barely recognize as her own.

  So she was free, at twenty-nine. Which should have made her feel liberated, expansive. And she did, in some ways. Except that for a long while after the divorce, she was uncomfortable around men. For at least a year, maybe longer, she read almost every gesture, every remark, as controlling, as dangerous for her.

  But all of that was behind her by the time she met Graham. By then she had shed that sense of danger, she could enjoy men again. And some of that enjoyment was the pleasure of casual sex, something that wouldn’t have been possible for her when she emerged from college, when she married at twenty-three. But postdivorce, in a world that had itself changed, Annie learned to sleep around. Happily. Enthusiastically. Fairly indiscriminately too, so that later she couldn’t call up the names of some of the men she’d had sex with.

  Sometimes, though, at the end of one of these casual relationships, she experienced a kind of melancholy that lingered for days or longer, a sense that, free as she felt she was, pleasurable as she felt that freedom to be, there was part of her that might be hoping for something else. Some deeper connection.

  Even, perhaps, monogamy again.

  She met Graham at a party he was throwing, a party to celebrate the opening of his bookstore.

  He had been lucky in the weather the night of this party. After several rainy, gray weeks that had darkened the brick sidewalks of Cambridge and depressed everyone, the sky had brightened through the day, and at five o’clock it was a lovely late-spring evening. People were suddenly out everywhere on the streets, walking, enjoying the benign touch of the air, air that still
carried the scent of the various trees budding and blooming and dropping their pale confetti all over town—hawthorns, crabapples, lilacs.

  Annie had ambled slowly over from her attic apartment on Raymond Street with Jeff, someone she slept with from time to time. They’d spent several naked, sweaty hours before this in her bed.

  The bookstore party had been an afterthought. He’d been invited—did she feel like going?

  Why not? she said.

  Why not was the way she had come to navigate the world then. The way she’d come to understand it in the years since the end of her marriage. There was always the next thing, the next possibility. The man, yes. Sex, yes. But also perhaps just something interesting. Something to look at. Something to do.

  They’d showered together, she and Jeff, before they started their stroll down to the bookstore. Annie’s long, dark hair was still damp when they left her apartment, though it had dried by the time they arrived.

  She stepped inside ahead of Jeff, stepped into the store’s heat and hubbub, into the heady odor of women’s perfume and cigarette smoke and here and there the whiff of pot. There must have been sixty or seventy people already there, milling around, talking loudly to be heard over some barely audible music playing in the background. The crowd was mostly her age—thirties, forties.

  From the moment she entered the room, Annie was excited. She felt sexed, maybe a bit predatory, intensely aware of her body in all its parts, of her thighs moving against each other, slick and slippery in spite of the shower.

  When Jeff brought her over to Graham to introduce her, Annie recognized him. She’d seen him often around the square, sitting with an espresso at one of the little tables at Pamplona, or ducking into a bookstore, or drinking at Casablanca or The Blue Parrot or Cronin’s—a large man, bearded, visibly energetic, even from a distance, with a mop of curly hair. He was almost always with other people—talking, laughing, gesturing expansively. One of those habitués, then, of whom there were perhaps three or four familiar to her. She had felt envious sometimes when she saw him—envious of his liveliness, of what looked like his easy sociability, of the active pleasure he seemed to take in the people around him.

  He took her hand in both of his as she reached out to shake. “What is it?” he asked, leaning down to hear her over the noise.

  “Annie,” she shouted, looking up into his light eyes.

  “Ah, Annie,” he said. He smiled, and the eyes almost disappeared. “I’m glad you came.” After perhaps a few seconds too long, he let go of her and turned a little so he could gesture at a long table set in the middle of the room, a table covered with wine bottles, with three or four towers of clear plastic cups, with multiple ashtrays, some half full, with baskets of bread and two huge wheels of Brie, one of them already ravaged. He said something—she thought maybe, “Have at it”—before he turned to greet someone else and she and Jeff moved away, obediently, to get some wine.

  After the first few conversations they tried to have as a couple—leaning forward, shouting at people one or the other of them barely knew—they drifted apart. Annie looked at the spines of the books on the shelves, at the people standing in groups near her. She found herself talking briefly to someone she’d known years before in a photography class, but even as they were speaking, she could watch his eyes moving around the crowd, trying to spot someone perhaps more promising. She talked to several people she didn’t know—quick, shouted exchanges. How do you know Graham? Yes, what a perfect night for a party. Did we really need another bookstore in Harvard Square? Thank God the rain stopped, I thought I’d go mad.

  She went back over to the big table a few times to get more wine, one time lingering to eavesdrop on a long conversation between a man and a woman who clearly didn’t know each other very well. She was asking him many, many questions about a trip he’d taken recently, and listening with what seemed like great interest to his account of how strange the people were, “sort of innocently open,” he said. Annie was trying to figure out what country he was talking about, and then she realized it was not a country at all—it was Chicago, the city she’d grown up in. She laughed out loud, and a man standing near her stared at her for a moment. She looked back at him and smiled before she turned away.

  And through all of this, she kept seeing Graham as he moved around the room, as he embraced people, men as well as women, as he threw his head back to laugh. His shirt was visibly damp with sweat by now, his skin slightly pinked from the heat. Or perhaps, she thought, just from excitement. When passersby stopped to look in the open doorway, trying to figure out what was happening in here, he would call out “Come in! come in!” He seemed so ingenuously happy and enthusiastic that she couldn’t help smiling as she watched him. At one point he caught her glance and looked steadily, quizzically, at her for a moment before smiling back. As if he were really registering her, Annie thought. Maybe he’d noticed her too, here and there in the square, though that seemed unlikely, she was so much less noticeable a person—a personage—than he was, in his size, his ebullience.

  Several times she spotted Jeff somewhere in the room too, once leaned over a woman, listening attentively. She recognized this posture. He’d assumed it with her too when he was picking her up at the party where they’d met. She watched him now for a few moments. It seemed to be working in this instance too—the woman gazed up at him, apparently dazzled. He was good at it.

  At some point she went outside to cool off, standing among a small group of people gathered there. She fell into a conversation with a tall, middle-aged man who vaguely resembled Al Pacino. She couldn’t place his accent. New York? He was a friend of Graham’s, he said. His partner, in fact.

  “Partner?” she asked. Was he gay then, Graham? She felt a quick jolt of disappointment.

  “Yeah, you know, the guy who owns the bookstore with him.”

  “Oh!” she said.

  Peter, he said his name was. Peter Aiello. They talked for a while, easily, a bit flirtatiously, and then he saw someone inside the store he needed to speak with and moved away.

  Annie stayed outside, by herself. The air was fresh and cool, the first stars visible in the deepening blue of the sky. She found herself wishing she could just leave—leave, and walk home alone. It wouldn’t bother Jeff for more than a few seconds at the most.

  Or maybe it would.

  This was the trouble with these ruleless relationships, she thought. You couldn’t really know anything for certain about what the other person might be feeling. Might be entitled to feel.

  She went back in and made her way slowly through the press of people to the table, to get herself another glass of wine. Just as she turned to face the room again, wine in hand, she bumped into someone. It was Graham. He was holding a glass of wine too. White wine, she was happy to note, as she felt it slosh abundantly across the front of her shirt, cool and shocking.

  “Oh, shit!” he cried. He grabbed napkins from the table and began dabbing at her awkwardly, mostly at her bosom, such as it was, which was where the wine had landed. “Oh, I’m so fucking sorry.”

  “It’s all right, really,” Annie said. She was as much embarrassed by his response as by having caused him to spill the wine.

  “It isn’t,” he said. “How could it be? Look at you!” He dabbed away, talking all the while, lost in apology. “What a klutz I am! I’m just so sorry!”

  “Really, it was my fault,” Annie kept saying, trying to stop him, trying to slow the hand that wielded the napkins.

  “No, no. How could it be? It was me. Oh, God, I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Please.” But now he was insisting on his idiocy, saying what a clod he was, an asshole. Until, just to make him shut up, Annie raised her glass—red wine, unfortunately—and tossed it at him, at his shirt. A blue shirt, as it happened, a beautiful soft shirt, now with a dark stain blooming on its front.

  His hands froze, he paused for a visible intake of breath, and then he burst into laughter. A guffaw, Annie thought.
Of course Graham would guffaw.

  “Off the hook!” he cried. “Thank God!” He started to use the dampened napkins now to wipe at himself. “Free at last!” He looked at her. “Thank you. Thank you so much!”

  He was grinning at Annie now, and she was smiling at him. They were standing close, people pressing in at their backs.

  After a moment that began to seem too long, he said, “Here, we both need more wine, don’t we?”

  “Well, I don’t need it, but sure.”

  He reached over to the table, now a mess of empty and half-empty bottles, crumbs, plates daubed with partially eaten food, here and there cigarettes stubbed out on them. He turned back to Annie with two opened bottles—red, white, one in each hand. He poured, first for her, then for himself. When he’d set the bottles back down, they raised their glasses vaguely toward each other and each had a sip.

  Graham was looming above Annie—though what she felt was that he loomed around her, that she had somehow entered a space he owned. Heat radiated from him.

  His face had become serious as he bent to her. He said, “What are you doing with Jeff?” His voice, she noted, was deep, resonant.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know. It seems an odd pairing, somehow.” He was speaking very near Annie’s ear, and she could feel his winey breath warm on her cheek, the rumble of his voice in her spine.

  She pulled her head back to see him. “We’re hardly paired,” she said, looking into his eyes.

  His face changed. “Ah! Good news.” He smiled down at her, and they relaxed into the noise. Annie wanted him to touch her, she realized. She was waiting for it, her body was waiting.

  Then, leaning forward again, he asked, “May I walk you home?”

  “Now?” Annie pulled back again, laughing. She raised an open hand to indicate the people pressed in against them. The party was at full tilt, louder, bigger, more lubricated than it had been all evening.

  He looked around, as if only now taking in all the people. “Oh!” he said. “Yeah. Later, I suppose, would be better.”