Monogamy Read online

  “But see, the thing is, I’m leaving with the one what brought me.” Though she was feeling some regret about that.

  They looked at each other. It struck Annie that they were commiserating. Graham was nodding, over and over, as if taking in terrible news. “Well, I like to hear that,” he said at last. “It speaks well of you, I suppose. But also . . .”—he made a rueful face—“also I don’t like to hear it.”

  When she left a while later, with Jeff, Annie turned at the door to look for Graham. She found him—he was so tall, so prepossessing, that he was easy to spot. She waved, and he seemed to take a step in her direction, but then someone in the group standing with him must have said something to him, and he turned back, away from her.

  She lay awake that night. She kept thinking about Graham—his apparent joyfulness, his ease, the feeling of his rumbling voice in her ear. Even his size. How tall was he? she wondered. Six-three? Six-four? More than a foot taller than she was, certainly. Ridiculous, really.

  And he was so big. She’d never been attracted to a fat man before.

  But no, she thought. He wasn’t really fat. He was barrel-chested, large, yes. But somehow the way he carried himself—and of course, also his quick appreciation of her—had canceled out that notion for her. She remembered mostly wanting to touch him, wanting him to touch her. She’d been aware again, in the moments they stood so close to each other, of the wetness between her legs.

  Alone in her bed under the skylight, Annie felt it all merge, the by now free-floating sexual alertness that had lingered from her afternoon with Jeff, and her happy encounter with Graham. She might have felt bad about using the sensations she’d had with Jeff to feed her response to another man, but she didn’t. It didn’t seem complicated at all to her—just the necessary way she’d stumbled onto Graham.

  He interested her, she thought.

  And then: C’mon, how could you even begin to know that? You exchanged about two words.

  But he had seemed so open, so without caution or defenses. So sweet, really. So eager—for her, certainly, but also somehow for life, she would have said. In the dark, thinking of him, she was smiling.

  The next evening she stopped in at the bookstore. It was miraculously clean. The shelves that had been pushed against the walls the night before were back in place, filling the room. There were comfortable chairs set here and there, floor lamps next to them. Graham was busy behind the long checkout counter in front of the plate-glass window, talking, answering questions, manning the cash register. Annie chose a book almost at random from the fiction section—something by John Gardner—and got in line.

  When it was her turn, he looked up and his face changed. “Ah, it’s Annie!” he said, grinning. Then a moment of doubt. He looked worried, suddenly. “Isn’t that it? Annie?” he asked. She nodded, and he smiled again, more slowly. “What are you doing here?”

  “This.” She held her book up, and he took it. While he was ringing her up, Annie said, “Also I thought maybe I could walk you home.”

  His hands stopped. He looked at her. His face lifted in a way she would become familiar with, a way that meant he was purely happy, a way that would come to mean that she was happy too.

  “Well, you’d have to wait,” he said. “I don’t get off till ten.”

  “I can wait,” she said.

  “Music to my ears,” he said.

  And so it began, with Graham.

  Annie misunderstood it at first, probably partly because the sex worked so well between them from the start. Happy sex. Seemingly uncomplicated. As soon as they began to sleep together, her worries about it vanished. In bed he moved above her, below her, inside her, as if in an element made for him. Swimming in sex—easily, slowly. More of the same in Annie’s life, but better.

  For a while it didn’t occur to her that it would ever be anything more than this. In her dizziness about how well things were going, she didn’t notice the changes in him. In herself. She thought of herself as still sliding through the world in the same way—loose, free, wild. Why not?

  It was true that she felt overwhelmed sometimes—by Graham’s size, by his energy, his appetite for people, for music, for food. By his appetite for her. It made her uncomfortable, occasionally. She actually slept with Jeff once again after she’d started with Graham. And with one other man, someone friends introduced her to, a bass player, who made her laugh in bed by remembering for her an early Chekhov story about a double bass and a naked woman. She thought of these adventures, she even explained them to Graham, as the result of a generalized excitement created by her affair with him. It was only looking back on them later that she understood she’d also been using them, using them as a way to resist Graham.

  But Graham was persistent, a joyous lover, an enthusiast, and finally Annie gave over to him. How could she not? She’d been waylaid, really—by happiness, by his love for her, and then, more slowly, hers for him. By the end of the fifth month she’d known him, she’d moved into his place on Ware Street, a quick walk for him to the bookstore, for her a short drive to her studio in Somerville.

  What she told people at first was that she’d moved because her very informal lease was coming up for renewal and the couple who owned the house that contained her attic apartment were going to raise her rent. But she knew, even before she and Graham spoke openly about it with each other, that a life together had begun. Within the year—actually on the anniversary of the store’s opening (“The two happiest days of my life,” he always said)—they were married.

  Annie was happy too. But occasionally through their years together, and in spite of everything that was pleasurable and loving between them, she would feel it again, the sense of his having overtaken her somehow, overwhelmed her.

  2

  Here’s Graham, awake even earlier than usual this morning, sitting alone in the kitchen in the clean, grayish predawn light. He’s wearing an old cotton bathrobe, faded blue—a nothing color in this light. It’s frayed at the collar and cuffs. Under it, a T-shirt. His bare feet, crossed at the ankle under the table, are unusually slender and high-arched for someone so big. His hands, too, holding his mug, are shapely, the fingers long and tapered, reminders of his life as a thinner young man. Normally his expression is alert, ready to be amused at whatever might happen next. Now, in repose, he looks tired. The air is full of the smell of coffee.

  He’s at the expansive table where everyone sits during the dinner parties he and Annie like to throw. Facing him on the other side of the table is a row of tall windows that open out over the backyard, still in shadow at this hour—the leaves of the lilac bushes that line one side of the patio are an almost blackish green.

  The newspaper, most likely containing the report of what the newly anointed Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has said or done the day before, is laid out in front of him, but he’s not reading it as he usually does. Instead, he’s remembering his first wife, Frieda. Remembering the day she left him: the chilly morning, homely Frieda in her old tweed coat, trying to hold back her tears as she carried Lucas out to the car. Just thinking of it makes him almost physically uncomfortable, even after all these years. He takes an audible, openmouthed breath and shifts his weight in the chair.

  Their apartment then, his and Frieda’s, was on the second floor of a sagging frame house on Windsor Street in Cambridge. He was standing on the brick sidewalk in front of it with nothing to do at this point but watch her, having already hauled down the last of the things she had wanted to take—a carton of her books, a carton of toys for Lucas. The trunk of the car, an old blue Ford Fiesta pocked with rust, was held almost shut with the bungee cords he had stretched over the many other boxes and suitcases she was taking. As she bent to settle Lucas into the back seat, Graham could see the tears glistening on her cheeks.

  “Mumma’s owie?” he heard the little boy ask. His small, pretty face, looking up at her, was frightened.

  “A tiny one,” Frieda said, trying to smile. “Just tin
y.” She pushed at her cheeks with her palms. “I’ll be okay in . . . three minutes.”

  She’d turned then, and come to stand in front of Graham. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her eyes behind her glasses were swollen, the wet lashes spiked darkly together.

  “No,” he answered.

  No, because it was he who had wrecked things. No. Because it was he who was sorry.

  Sorry in every sense of the word, he thinks now, in his comfortable kitchen. A sorry bastard. My fault.

  Mea culpa.

  An open marriage. They’d agreed on it at first. It had been that era—the world was shifting and changing rapidly around them, and Graham had stepped forward into this altered universe eagerly, along with what seemed like half of Cambridge, compelled by all the things it seemed to promise—among them a different meaning for marriage, for sex.

  The problem was that Graham had been happy in this new world, and Frieda hadn’t. She tried, she dutifully had a few lovers in the first year or so. But then she got pregnant with Lucas and realized that she’d never really wanted any of it.

  But Graham did want it, he still wanted all of it, it was part of his excited sense of everything that was newly possible for him. And because Frieda didn’t ask him to stop—wouldn’t have been able then to ask him to stop—he went on doing it, obliviously, happily.

  Frieda, private uncomplaining Frieda, kept her suffering about this to herself until she was too angry, too wounded, to continue. It was over, she told him. It hurt, it hurt all the time.

  Afterward he sometimes thought that, as much as anything, she was angry at his physical transformation. When he looks at photos of himself from college or from the early days of their marriage, he barely recognizes the tall, gawky boy captured in them. In one image he remembers with pain, he had on a shirt that could have passed for a pajama top, it was so shapeless, so hopeless, so plaid. And always those thick, dark-framed glasses. The idea that they’re now chic, that beautiful women willingly wear them, this amazes him.

  The beard had been the first change. And when he grew his curly hair longer, as men were doing then, he looked like another person entirely. People responded to him differently, women especially. And in an answering response partly to that, and partly, he supposes, to all the other changes that were opening out to him in those heady days, he slowly more or less became another person—buoyant, outgoing, confident.

  Frieda doesn’t look like another person, even now. She’s still the suitable mate for that old version of Graham—a tall, big-boned woman with a wide plain face and her own pair of thick, perpetually smudged glasses. He can’t see her without the tug of all those old feelings—guilt, sorrow, love.

  They’re friends now, he and Frieda. They’ve had to be, for Lucas, but they both would have tried anyway, because in some sense they still love each other. Though part of what they’re loving is the sweet, serious people that they once were. That Frieda still is.

  Not him. Not sweet. Certainly not serious. A joke, really.

  He sips his coffee. Even this coffee makes him remorseful, this amazing cappuccino with its thick, creamy foam. He made it on the expensive espresso machine that Annie gave him last year for Christmas. Her generosity, along with the machine’s sleek perfection sitting over there on the counter—these both seem a chastisement to Graham.

  He’s been much more careful in his marriage to Annie. More careful and more faithful.

  Yet not entirely faithful.

  Which is partly what’s making him remember the end with Frieda. Because he’s done it again.

  A light thing, that’s what he’d thought at first. A fling. He’d had one other short affair much earlier on in his marriage to Annie, in a period when things were suddenly difficult between them, for reasons he didn’t feel he really understood. The earlier affair was with a woman he’d known for a while, a married woman, Linda Parkman. A friend, in their large circle of friends. He hadn’t seen it as any kind of threat to his marriage, and neither had Linda. It was a tonic, actually—and it had turned him eagerly back to Annie when it was finished. She had asked him once about his suddenly increased ardor, and he’d made some kind of joke about it.

  He remembers now coming into a party in someone else’s house at around that time, looking across the room and seeing her, seeing Linda. By then, things were easily over between them. Well, relatively easily—just a mild bump or two. And she had ended it, for which Graham was grateful—it was the kind of thing it would have been difficult for him to do.

  Whose party? Whose house? That was lost to history. There was always a party then, and the houses, the apartments, with their worn sofas, their secondhand chairs and lamps, their straw rugs, were pretty much all the same anyway.

  So he saw her on somebody’s couch in somebody’s living room. Her face is what he recalls clearly, frowning in concentration as she listened to the woman who was speaking to the little group settled near her. Her chin was resting on her hand, one finger set sideways across her upper lip. When she looked up and saw Graham, her eyes rounded, her lips pursed, and the finger straightened out, rose vertically across her lips to touch the tip of her nose: Shhhhh.

  He had felt a quick pulse of relief, of pleasure. He’d smiled at her then, and turned away.

  He hadn’t gotten off scot-free, though. He’d made the mistake of talking to Frieda about it. He’d let himself think it wouldn’t matter to her, that they’d moved so far away from the grief of pulling apart that he could treat her like a confidante, a friend.

  Not about this, he couldn’t. She wept. She called him a fool. She said he might as well attach reins to his penis and gallop around after it. She asked what the point of all her pain back then was, if he was still at it in his marriage to Annie. Was it all a perfect waste?

  There was something about Frieda that had always made him feel protective, even though he’d been so bad at protecting her. Her awkwardness. Her earnestness.

  No, he’d said to her then. No, of course not.

  “What did you learn, then?” she asked shrilly. “What is it that you learned from all my suffering?”

  They were sitting across from each other at the kitchen table in her shotgun apartment on Whittier Street. He’d just returned Lucas after a weekend. He reached out to touch her hand across the scarred tabletop, but she pulled it back and turned sharply away, to the side. He could watch her mouth pulling into a bitter shape as she tried to keep herself from crying.

  “I did, Frieda,” he said. “I learned.”

  “Not enough,” she said. And for weeks, she wouldn’t talk to him.

  Now he sees that she was right. This time it isn’t working the way it did before, and he feels he may have put things with Annie at risk, something he never intended.

  Things with Annie: your marriage, you asshole!

  The problem is that Rosemary—Rosemary Gregory, the woman he’s slept with maybe four, maybe five times—has started to behave as if there’s some kind of commitment between them, as though she has a claim on him. Twice she’s called him at work at the bookstore in the morning, a time when he’s almost always sitting in the office, surrounded by other people. Her tone in these calls is too intimate, and this scares him. He needs to end it, but that’s something he’s never been good at—at disappointing people. At being, as he sees it, unkind.

  Rosemary is sort of an old friend too—more a friend of friends, actually. But he and Annie have liked her well enough—her and Charlie, her husband. In fact, they’ve probably liked Charlie better. He’s smart, affable, well-read. He designs interactive museum exhibits.

  But they’re divorced now, Charlie and Rosemary. Newly divorced. Graham should have remembered the rule: you don’t fool around with the newly divorced.

  They were seated next to each other at a large dinner party. He was flirting with her. Graham likes to flirt with women. He likes being courtly, flattering people, making people feel good; but especially making women feel good. Everyone knows this about him. Rose
mary should have known it too. People, including Annie, make fun of him for this behavior.

  He can’t even remember what he was saying, but he was, as usual, joking around. The merry grass widow. How men were going to be lined up to receive her favors.

  She had looked levelly at him. She was gorgeous, he’d always thought so, but in a dramatic, almost stylized way that didn’t much interest him. Careful makeup, careful hair, lots of expensive-looking ethnic jewelry. “Well, why don’t you just jump in at the head of that line?” she said.

  Thinking she was simply being flirty too, he said, “Damn straight. I’ll just push all those other guys aside.”

  “Thursdays are usually best for me,” she said. “Late afternoon. I’ll expect you.”

  She would?

  Or was it an answering joke on her part?

  He had no idea, he realized. And she turned away just after she’d said it, turned to talk to the man on her right, so he didn’t have the chance to make it part of his game, to let her know he wasn’t taking it seriously.

  He let one Thursday pass, but then he thought that perhaps it might be awkward socially to see her again if she hadn’t intended it as a joke, if she’d actually been inviting him. Maybe he should go, then. Go, and explain himself. Explain that he’d just been horsing around. Not that he wouldn’t love to, et cetera, et cetera. He didn’t let himself think until later that to ponder going there at all was further horsing around on his part, horsing around with the itch of what had begun to feel like a real possibility. And by then it was too late.

  Outside, the shadows have lifted and the birds are launched into the frenzied call-and-response that starts their day. He gets up and comes around the table to the windows. Someone—Annie—has left a sweater on one of the old chairs that sit on the mossy brick patio. Its white is startling against the other, muted tones.

  He had misunderstood Rosemary, he knows that now. With the quick turn she’d made on his playful tone, she had seemed to him worldly-wise, sexually sophisticated. After the first time they had sex, he tried to make a light remark about this, about how they had stumbled into bed with each other by accident, each of them joking, neither of them getting the other’s joke.