Monogamy Read online

  She looked over at Karen. “I love that dress you’re wearing,” she began.

  6

  At five thirty Graham takes over the second register, next to Bill. There’s a steady flow of customers. Never a line, he never has to call for backup, but he has barely a moment to stop and think. And then it slows, and there are once again browsers moving slowly around the store or sitting in the chairs, reading. This is the time of day when he and Bill usually lean back against the top of the low wooden bookshelves that run under the windows behind the counter, lean back and talk to each other between customers.

  Today that’s not going to happen, though, because Graham realizes he’s made a decision while he was so busy. Maybe it has to do with what he remembered John saying about him all those years ago, that he asked too much of people, that he needed forbearance. Maybe it has to do with Annie this morning, Annie in the sunlight, lifting her hands to him and saying “My sweet husband.” Or John—John at lunch, saying about Rosemary, “Be mean to her, a bit. That’s what you have to do.”

  So the next time he and Bill are standing idle next to each other, Graham asks him if he thinks he can manage alone until Sasha arrives—the part-timer who comes late and helps with the closing up.

  “No problem,” Bill says.

  Graham fetches his suit jacket from the office. He locks that door behind him and says his good-night to Bill.

  Outside the sun is lowering in the sky. In its syrupy yellow light, Graham walks fast. He turns right on Ash Street and walks up to Garden, then past the old brick hotel, past the intersection by the music school where you always have to wait for the walk signal. When he gets to Shepard, he turns right. He passes what used to be the Radcliffe Quad when he was young. Left on Avon, right on Martin, and there, almost at the corner of Gray and Martin, is the big house Rosemary lives in, a house she’s going to have to put on the market, she’s told Graham.

  He’s startled by her appearance as she opens the door. As she clearly is by his. Her mouth opens and her hand rises to her hair, which usually falls in long, carefully curled-under sweeps around her face. Now it’s pulled tight and held in some kind of clip at the back of her head. Her face is scrubbed clean of makeup, pale and washed-out in a way he finds prettier, actually, than her usual careful presentation. This is not a presentation at all, and he’s somehow touched by it. By her.

  “I didn’t expect you,” she says, stepping back into the hallway, holding the door open for him.

  “I know. Am I intruding?” He smiles at her. “Or really, I guess, may I intrude?” He bows slightly, a joke.

  “Well, of course, now that you’re here. I just wish . . .” And her hands rise again, a vague gesture. “I just got out of the shower.” She shuts the door and they stand awkwardly in the wide hallway for a silent moment. Then she gestures behind her at the stairs, which rise up to a landing with a multipaned window. “Shall we?” she asks, smiling.

  “Let’s just sit for a while,” he says, taking a few steps toward the open archway to the living room.

  “Oh!” She hesitates. “Okay,” she says, and follows him into the room.

  He sits down on one of the two small matching couches facing each other on either side of the fireplace. The word comes: settees, they are. She remains standing, though she moves to the fireplace and rests her elbow on the wooden mantel above it. She’s in khaki pants, and her feet are bare. Her toenails are painted a rich emerald green, another surprise for him the first time they made love.

  He looks around. It’s an old-fashioned room. Formal furniture, worn oriental carpets on the floor. Bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. He’s been in this room only once, the first time he came over, but he didn’t really take it in then. They’d had a drink, sitting on one of the couches together, but once they began touching each other, kissing, she suggested they go upstairs. After that, they went directly up to her bedroom each time he arrived, up to the king-size bed she’d shared until recently with her husband.

  “You’re making me a little nervous,” she says now. Her smile looks forced. Anxious.

  He feels suddenly overwhelmed by pity for her. He should have warned her, he should have let her fix herself up. His mother used to call it “war paint” when she got ready to go out. Lipstick, rouge—nothing as complicated as Rosemary’s stylized eye makeup, or the skin makeup, whatever it was, that let her look unblemished. Today she’s pale and freckled, and her eyes are unshadowed. They look exposed, smaller.

  “Why don’t you sit down too?” he says. He pats the settee next to him.

  She does, she comes over and sits down, but at the opposite end of the settee. She swings her legs up, tucks her feet under her buttocks.

  “Tell me why you’ve come, when you said earlier that you wouldn’t.” Her voice is flat, without the teasing, seductive tone she usually uses with him.

  He’s conscious of trying to make his own voice gentle. “I’ve come to say I can’t come anymore.”

  He watches as her face changes, several times. At first, briefly, it’s as if he’d struck her. She sits up taller. Then she almost smiles. Somehow, within a few seconds, she’s achieved a kind of pained dignity. “Why not?” she asks. Her voice is polite enough, but still expressionless.

  “It’s too dangerous. For my marriage.”

  She looks levelly at him. Then she smiles in an unfriendly way and says in mock surprise, “Oh, you’re married!”

  He waits a moment before he answers her. “As it turns out, I am. Or really, as it turns out, I always was.” He takes a deep breath. “I always felt . . . bad, about this. About us. Even when I felt most good.”

  She is silent. Then she says, “When was that?” her voice empty again.

  “When I felt most good?”

  “Yes.”

  “When we made love, of course. When all of that fell away for a few moments.”

  He’s become aware of her hands in motion on her lap, her fingers scratching at her thumbs. “And then it came back?” she says. “All of that?”

  “Yes.”

  After a moment, she speaks again. Her voice is almost hoarse. “And what, exactly, was all of that?”

  He takes a deep breath. “It was Annie. The way I feel about Annie. The way I always feel about Annie.”

  “Except for those few moments when that fell away.”

  “Yes.”

  Her hands still. “Well, you must have wanted it to fall away.”

  “I suppose I must have in some way, or I wouldn’t have come. But that’s not what I’m aware of feeling.”

  There have been pauses between everything they’ve been saying to each other. Now, after another pause—as though it’s taking her a long time to form the correct question—she says, “What are you aware of feeling?”

  He can’t tell if she’s mocking him, but he doesn’t want to think about that now. “Mostly that I love Annie. That I want to guard my love for her.”

  A bitter little smile reshapes her lips.

  “That I want to protect her. That I don’t want to hurt her.”

  “How nice that must be for her. To be protected.”

  Now it’s his turn to pause. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I can’t protect you, Rosemary. That you’re, more or less, out here on your own. I’m sorry.”

  Her face goes rubbery, unpretty. Tears rise in her eyes. He can hear her breathing slowly, trying to stay in control of herself.

  “It’s no consolation, I know,” he says. Yet he wants to console her. He wants to protect her too. “I know a little, I think, of how it feels to be newly alone. To want someone. Anyone, really. To be . . . unready to see how unlikely it is for some particular person to work out.”

  “A person such as you.” An accusation, as she says it.

  “Such as me.” He bows his head slightly: okay.

  Her breathing slows, her face sags. It seems she won’t cry, after all.

  “I’d be a bad bet even if there was no Annie, Rosemary. I wou
ld have been. I’m just not good at saying no. I want—I always want to say yes. And I want to want to say yes. To everything. I’m a greedy person. More or less bottomlessly hungry.” He thinks of babies again. “What I’ve tried to be, with Annie, is less hungry. In general, less hungry. More hungry just for her.”

  “No luck there, it would seem.”

  “Well. You interrupted a long string of luck.”

  She looks away, out the big curved window in the bay behind the couch. The settee. “Just my luck, I guess.”

  He reaches out. He puts his hand on her knee, the part of her closest to him. “It is your luck. Your luck that I’m getting out of your life. As a lover.”

  She looks back at him, sharply. “Oh, you’ll be my friend,” she says, with heavy sarcasm.

  “I am your friend. I wasn’t your friend when we started this. But I am. I am being your friend now.”

  “Sure. A friend I won’t see again. Or talk to alone again. Or touch again.”

  Without planning to, he lifts his hand from her knee.

  She looks down and laughs, a quick bitter noise. “Yes, indeed,” she says.

  After a moment he says, “Do you remember what I was saying to you when all this started? At dinner that night?”

  “No.”

  “I said how many people were going to be lined up to be your lover. How many men. And I meant that. It’s just that I shouldn’t have been the first in line. I should have been smart enough to treat it as a kind of joke when you suggested it—that I get in line. But it’s true. There will be others. Better others. In the sense that I’ve been a crappy other. Chock-full of my own torment and guilt. And useless to you.”

  She looks out the window again. It’s open a few inches. The air stirs outside, the leaves rustle. She looks back at him, her face unguarded. “But what if I love you?” she says softly.

  “You don’t.” He shakes his head. “You wouldn’t ask it that way if you did.”

  Her voice instantly hardens. “Oh, you know better. You know better than I do what I feel.”

  “And if I say yes, that I do?” They sit, each looking at the other, as quickly as that, enemies.

  She smiles. “Do you know what you sound like, Graham?”

  “No.”

  “You sound exactly like a parent, talking to an adolescent.”

  Suddenly he’s remembering talking to Sarah in her adolescence, telling her it would end—her loneliness, her pain. Her weight problem.

  How little he’s done for anyone he loves, really.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t mean to. It’s the last thing I mean to sound like. Or to be.”

  She’s looking down now. “I think you should go,” she says tonelessly.

  “Fair enough.” He stands.

  Rosemary doesn’t move. She’s still not looking at him.

  He waits for a moment. Should he touch her? Kiss her goodbye? He’d imagined something like that, he realizes. Yes. A fond goodbye. Forgiveness.

  Stupid, stupid.

  All he can see of her from this angle, standing above her—her face turned down—is the top of her head, the pinned-up damp hair drooping against the curve of her cheek.

  He crosses to the archway at the foyer and stops. “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “Sure,” she says, softly.

  Without looking back again, he goes to the door, opens it onto the evening air, and steps outside.

  For the first few blocks, he carries his remorse with him. And then it begins to lift—though there’s shame in that, isn’t there? In that lifting?

  Yes. And remorse, for that quick reversal.

  But he can also feel a kind of joy rising in him, a release. His pace over the bumpy bricks quickens. On the sidewalk outside the convenience store a few blocks from home, he sees a white plastic five-gallon bucket with a few only-slightly-tired bouquets left in it. Daisies and some other purplish flower. Annie, he thinks. An offering for Annie. He pulls a bunch out of the water, the stems dripping, and takes it inside to pay for it.

  Carrying his bouquet as he walks, he begins to feel somehow aimed at her. An arrow making its way directly to her. He actually tries running for a few steps, but that’s not going to work. He slows down, panting. Amused at himself, at his absurd idea of himself—the heavy bear, as arrow—he laughs out loud. He’ll make a silly story of this for Annie. Another offering. He takes his jacket off and slings it over his shoulder, dangling it from one finger.

  At home, Graham shuts the front door behind him and turns to the shadowed house to call Annie’s name. But he can tell, even before he does, that she isn’t home. That there is no one home. He was so ready to be received back into his own life that his disappointment feels like a kind of grief. He’s suddenly tired. He goes slowly through the living room to the big kitchen to find a vase for Annie’s flowers.

  But then he hears her, outside, her voice steady and gentle. The back door and the windows are open, and she’s sitting with Karen in the old chairs on the patio. Graham stops, motionless, the flowers in his hand. He stands within the kitchen’s shadows, looking out at her, feeling a wash of relief, feeling how close he has come today to the nothingness of a moment ago, when there was no one here to welcome him.

  Karen says something, her voice querulous, and Annie answers her.

  He watches her face, the play of amusement and concern as Karen talks now at some length about something. Her eyebrows register her response. Graham loves her eyebrows, her dark eyebrows, and the way they give her away, even when her face is most still.

  He notices then that there’s another—a much better—bouquet set on the kitchen table in the old white pitcher. It’s enormous and droopy and lush, giving off an intense lilac odor.

  Ah! These are the flowers that he should have bought for Annie, the ones he would have bought if he could, the ones that would have spoken to her of everything—his sorrow about himself. His love for her.

  He steps forward and bends over them to breathe in the rich, erotic perfume. Something funny happens for a moment in his chest, and then it seems to him that the world shifts and is full of an almost painful joy. Just as he lifts his head to look at Annie again, she looks up too, she sees him there in the dark, and her face opens to him in a kind of answer.

  7

  Annie and Karen had been talking for a while when she looked up at a motion she’d caught in the kitchen and saw Graham there. He was in shadow, but she could see his face—he was looking back at her—and, as happened every now and then between them, she felt such a welling of love for him that her body seemed to soften, somehow. She turned back to Karen in a state of intense awareness, awareness of waiting for him, of feeling everything attendant on this moment.

  He came outside a few minutes later, carrying a glass of wine, wearing one of his beautiful old shirts, his amazing shoes. “My two favorite women,” he said.

  He stepped toward Karen. Annie was watching the old woman as he bent over her. Her toes, with their thickened, untrimmed nails, actually turned up in pleasure when he kissed her on the top of her head.

  He came over to Annie then and lightly touched his lips to hers, his soft beard brushing her chin, her cheek.

  Stepping back, raising his glass, he said, “Here’s to beauty. By which I mean both of you.” He drank in a dramatic gesture, swinging his arm wide before bringing the glass to his mouth.

  “And you,” Karen said, raising her glass too, and then drinking. Her lips made a light smacking noise. She lowered her glass and said, “You arrived in the nick of time—I’ve just gotten back from my trip.”

  “What trip?” Annie asked.

  She frowned at Annie, annoyed. “Paris!” she said. Her voice was impatient. “Paris, of course.”

  Graham and Annie looked at each other. She raised her eyebrows for him. After a few seconds, Graham turned to Karen and said, “Someplace I’ve always wanted to go.”

  “Well, you should!” Karen said. “It’s lovely. Fully as
elegant as they say it is.”

  He laughed.

  After a moment, Annie said, “Karen and I have been having a drink in our unimaginative backyard.”

  “What a thing to say!” Karen cried.

  “Well,” Annie answered, “that’s what you said about it.”

  “I never did,” Karen said.

  “You hinted at it, I think. A bit broadly, I would say.”

  “Well, I didn’t mean it then. Don’t be so quick to take offense.”

  “I don’t think I am,” Annie said.

  “How did your packing up go?” Graham asked Annie. He had sat down by now too, and had watched their exchange, amusement lighting his face.

  Annie looked over at him. He seemed relaxed in himself, in a way he hadn’t in a while. A couple of weeks, maybe. “The point there is that it’s done.”

  “You’re not moving!” Karen said, her face alert now, full of concern.

  “No, no, no,” Annie said.

  As Graham started to explain things to Karen—the photographs, the show—Annie stood and went up the stairs into the shadowy kitchen to get the lamb into its marinade and pull together a quick, simple dinner for Graham and herself. When she set her glass down on the table, she saw that next to her dramatic spring bouquet was a cluster of bedraggled off-season flowers, stuck in the small earthenware pitcher. Graham. It made her laugh, but then she took the big bouquet and set it on the kitchen island. She moved Graham’s bouquet to the corner of the table where they always sat to eat.

  When he came inside, she was just assembling the salad—a Niçoise, using the cherry tomatoes she’d bought earlier. She thanked him for the flowers.

  “Just a token, I’m afraid,” he said.

  He set the table while she made a dressing and then poured them each another glass of wine.