by Sue Miller
“I don’t see it that way,” she said.
Suddenly he felt a little short of breath. “Oh,” he said. Her face after sex was pinkish—almost chapped-looking. They were still in bed, in her grand bedroom. Even up here there was an expensive-looking kilim on the floor.
“I don’t see it as an accident at all,” she said.
“You don’t.”
“No, I think it was inevitable.”
He didn’t know what to say to this, or even how to take it; but slowly, over the next few times they were together, he began to understand her, to see that she was, if anything, absurdly romantic. Certainly not jaded, or even sophisticated. She was lonely. In need. This made him feel sorry for her, but it also frightened him.
Ah!—his attention is drawn now by the appearance on her back porch of his elderly neighbor, Karen. She pauses there for a moment, her head tilted back, maybe to smell the morning air. Then she laboriously descends the stairs and begins to survey her garden. She’s dressed in one of what Graham thinks of as her “outfits”—in this case a wide-brimmed straw hat, a knee-length white nightgown, and tube socks. She has bright blue sneakers on her feet. There’s something jagged-looking and silvery on these sneakers—maybe lightning bolts? They glint every now and then as she moves around.
He watches her stand for a few moments in front of various plants, her hands on her hips, as though she were chastising them. Occasionally she bends over to painfully, slowly, pull a weed. Her old cat trails her. Sam, orange with white patches. He twines around her legs when she stands still, his tail lightly whipping her mottled shins.
Graham and Annie are worried about Karen. What were once charming eccentricities have ripened, he would say, into more troubling behavior. She seems addled sometimes. Only a few days earlier he found her in the house when he came home from work, standing irresolutely, frowning, in the middle of his living room.
“What are you doing here?” she’d said sharply to him.
“I might ask you the same question,” he said. “But I won’t.” She laughed then—gaily, it seemed to him—and headed toward the back door.
He thinks now of how strange it is that she should be so much in their lives. More than their own parents ever were—certainly more than his, anyway. And this purely the result of the accident of buying the house next door to hers all those years ago.
Standing at the window, he remembers walking with Annie behind the real estate agent through the dim rooms of the house. Annie, small and slender ahead of him, her dark hair still long then, a thick ribbon down her back, her carriage elegant. The graceful accommodating dancer’s turn to whatever the agent was pointing out.
They’d been house-hunting for a while, feeling more and more discouraged as they slowly discovered how limited their choices were going to be. This, the house they were looking at—the house they ended up buying—was a converted coach house. You walked up a long driveway at the side of the much larger, real house, as he thought of it, to get there.
It had been divided then into what were essentially dark cells, tiny rooms that had depressed him on that walk-through. But what Annie said afterward as they talked about it was that those walls would be as easy to take down as they’d been to put up. That when the towering old pine that leaned over the roof was removed, the light would pour in. That the house was essentially surrounded by open land—all those other people’s backyards. In that era before gardening was chic, most of these yards were overgrown with thick, tall grasses gone to seed—a kind of prairie encircling the house. A prairie, except for Karen’s yard, shockingly lush with the perennials, the roses, the shrubs, that the others would slowly acquire as gentrification took hold.
On the day they moved in, Karen, then middle-aged, a handsome, tall, prematurely white-haired woman with a Brahmin accent, had welcomed them with a jug of the cheap wine they all drank at that time—Almaden or Mateus, something like that—and a strange-tasting pasta casserole she said she’d made herself. When Graham returned the empty dish to her, he asked her what it was, exactly. She told him she’d invented the recipe. “I think what really makes it work, though,” she said in her toney voice, “are the canned plums I always add to it.”
Annie sometimes used this line when she was complimented on a meal. Thinking of this, of her excellent imitation of Karen’s voice and patrician accent, he smiles.
As if on cue, above him, footfalls, and then, a minute later, the rush of water through the pipes: she’s awake. He goes to the coffee machine and with the push of a few buttons, the turn of a valve, makes a cappuccino for her and a second cup for himself.
All this is part of their routine. He gets up first, usually around five. He goes downstairs, he makes his coffee and sits alone with it while he reads the paper—the headlines and maybe an article or two. In the summer, he can watch the sun rising slowly over the houses that back up to his and Annie’s, rising until the tops of the trees in his neighbors’ yards look as if they’ve burst into flame. Usually he enjoys every ritualized part of all this.
Not today.
He brings both cups of coffee up the steep back stairs to their bedroom. When he leans against the bedroom door, it swings open to the dazzling morning light up here. In this light, propped against the pillows on their bed, Annie, in her blue-green kimono.
Maybe because of the light, maybe because of his guilt, maybe because he’s been thinking of Frieda—Frieda, homely and in pain—he sees Annie afresh. Annie, this graceful, delicate woman he’s married to, her wide mouth moving now with pleasure into the smile that transforms her, that thrills him now as much as when he first saw her, thirty years before, at the opening party for the bookstore he still owns.
“My sweet husband,” she says, reaching up with both hands to take the cup he holds out to her.
The bookstore. It had been another part of Graham’s transformation. For years after he quit graduate school—all but dissertation on a doctoral degree in English literature—he taught as an adjunct here and there in the Boston area, finally mostly adult education classes, all the while trying to write his novel. He was slow to give that up, but at some point he saw that he wasn’t going to be able to write a book he’d want to read, or, more important, that he’d want anyone else to read. It had felt liberating to acknowledge this to himself and others, to shed his painful sense of the obligation to be somehow remarkable; but it left him with the unanswered question of what to do with his life, and simultaneously the realization that working on the novel endlessly had been a way to avoid facing that question.
As he took stock of himself, he remembered the time when he had worked a part-time job for a year or so in a small bookstore in Harvard Square—gone now—and it seemed to him that he was most happy then, living among books, talking about books. He began to nurture the notion of a bookstore of his own.
So when an uncle of his—the lone success in his mother’s family—died and left him what he described to friends as “a little chunk of change,” he and an older friend, Peter Aiello, who always seemed to have many of those chunks more or less just lying around, bought a storefront on Mount Auburn Street, the plan being that Graham would run the store, with Peter as a silent partner.
On the opening night—of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world—Annie walked in with a guy, a guy he’d sent an invitation to for reasons he couldn’t later recall. And in spite of everything that seemed ladylike and elegant about her—her slender dancer’s body, her grave, sober face—she also carried a kind of charge that he felt instantly. He understood it as sexual, yes, and it turned out that was apt—she told him later that she’d been fucking Jeff all that afternoon. But in the moment he imagined it as directed at him, connected to all the changes he’d made and wanted to make in his life, to who he wanted to be; and his impulse was to try to be sure she didn’t somehow slip away.
Now Graham sits down in his chair by the bedroom window and lifts his feet, sets them on the end of the bed.
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sp; “What news?” she asks, after she’s had a sip or two of her coffee.
“I don’t know.” He lifts his empty hand. “I didn’t read the paper.”
“What?” Her eyebrows rise in theatrical surprise. “You’re supposed to be my conduit to the wider world.”
“I know, I know. Falling down on the job. But . . .” He shrugs. The sun is warm on his feet. Only now does he realize how cold they were downstairs.
They are quiet awhile. He’s aware again of the racket of the birds. They both drink their coffee. He has a mug with his store’s name on it. Annie has a wide white bowl that was an enormous cup before the handle broke off. She has to raise it to her lips with both hands now.
She lowers it to the worn quilt that covers her lap and looks at him, frowning. She says, “Are you worried about something?”
“No, everything’s fine in my little world.”
“Hmm,” she says, looking steadily at him. “Because you seem a bit . . . preoccupied.”
He can hardly stand it, this solicitude toward him, a solicitude that only compounds his guilt. She knows something is bothering him, which makes him ever more evasive. Which worries her the more.
Don’t, he wants to say. Don’t be concerned. Don’t care about me.
“Just, store stuff,” he says. “Nothing important.”
“Well, what? What store stuff? If I can help . . .”
“No. No, everything’s fine.”
She makes a face—eyebrows lifted skeptically, mouth drawn down. “I guess I have to believe you,” she says. “Thousands wouldn’t.”
He smiles at her. Then, to change the subject, he says, “Karen’s out and about.”
“Is she. Gardening?”
“So to speak. In not exactly gardening togs.”
“Oh dear.”
He nods, first up and down, then—what to do?—side to side. “All that’s missing, really, is the boa.”
She laughs quickly and says, “Shit. Well, I’ll talk to her on my way out, for all the good it’ll do.”
They sit in what he hopes is a comfortable silence. In the early days of their marriage, Graham sometimes climbed back into bed with her after they’d drunk their coffee and they made love, but they’ve mostly given that up in recent years. And on those rare occasions when they start in, as often as not, absent the magic blue pill, Graham winds up “underperforming,” as he calls it. Still, it brings them close again each time, the warm touching, flesh on flesh.
He’s thinking of this when she says, “What are you up to today?”
He smiles at her. “More of same, of course. Ever more of same. But I think I’ll stay home this morning. Work at my desk here.” Then he remembers. “Oh, and I’m having lunch with John.” His oldest friend, from college.
“John Norris?” Her voice has a surprised pleasure in it, her smile changes her sober face.
“Yeah. Didn’t I mention it?” She shakes her head. “He’s in town for some conference, I think at MIT, so he’s making time for me today.”
“But how nice. Maybe he can cheer you up.” He doesn’t answer her. After a moment, she says, “How long will he be around?”
“I’m not sure. He might have told me, but I don’t remember.”
“Why don’t you ask him for dinner tomorrow, then? If he can. One extra person would be nice. Balance out the boy-girl thing. And I’d love to see him.”
This is the dinner party they’re having the next night—Friday—to celebrate Jamie Slattery’s reading at the bookstore from her new book, an apocalyptic novel set in a fictional New Orleans after a flood more devastating than Katrina.
Jamie is an old friend, but old friend or not, they often have parties for the writers who read at the store. He and Annie are known for these parties—for the meals Annie cooks, for the free-flowing wine, for the talk. In the old days, for the dancing too. It was only a few years ago that Graham finally threw out the stack of 45s he’d held on to for years, most of them so scratched or spilled on that they were unplayable anyway. He still misses them. At odd times he’ll think of one of them—Shirley and Lee doing “Let the Good Times Roll” or James Carr singing “Pouring Water on a Drowning Man”—and he’ll feel a pang of regret—yes, for the loss of the music, but more for those gone-by times. They mostly don’t dance anymore either.
He and Annie talk now about the various people who are coming tomorrow, they exchange what each knows about what’s been happening recently in one or the other of their friends’ lives, and for these moments, everything seems the same to Graham, he can almost forget his anxiety, his sense that he deserves to lose all of this.
Then she says, “You’re staying home more than usual these mornings.”
“Well, I can get more done here, really. And then I’ve been doing that late-afternoon, early-evening shift at the store.”
“I know,” she says. After a moment, “You like that better?”
“I do. I do in some ways. It’s a big rush right after everybody gets out of work, but then it quiets down and you can actually talk to people.” This is all true, but also there’s the problem of Rosemary calling him at the store in the morning.
“Ah, the house specialty,” Annie says. “Talk. And more talk.”
“I suppose,” he says.
“I miss you here when I get home, though. The house feels lonely.”
“Mmm.”
“You’re not avoiding me, are you?”
He reaches over to touch the tented shape of her feet under the quilt. “Hardly.” Though that may be part of it too, he supposes. He looks over at her. She’s lifted the cup to drink, and he can see only her dark brown eyes, steady on him above its rim.
“What are you up to?” he asks.
She groans and rests the cup again on her outstretched legs. “Packing up,” she says. “Getting ready to take the stuff over to Danielle’s. My bubble-wrap day.”
Annie is a photographer, and she has a show coming up at a gallery in the South End. It’s a big deal for her. She hasn’t had a solo show in almost five years.
And he forgot. Fucker that he is. He forgot all about it. He feels a sudden deeper remorse: he was so lost in his own shit that he forgot her life, going on around his. Her life, having to do with what she makes and then puts out into the world, with all that’s fraught about that for her—even more so now because of the long pause that’s preceded this show.
“Ah,” he says. “Well, if you need help, you know where I am.”
“Most of the time I do,” she says, and smiles.
He knows that she’s teasing, but it startles him anyway. He hopes that doesn’t show in his face.
He can hear Annie’s voice rising and falling softly while she’s taking her shower: she often talks to herself. As he passes the old bathroom door on the way to his office, she distinctly says, “Yikes!” and then something else he can’t hear.
It seems to him that these private conversations must be a bit like dreaming for her, but a kind of dreaming more closely based on the concerns of her daily life than would occur at night. Once he heard her say, “I should just shoot the guy,” and thought for a moment that she was talking about him, about something he’d done that had made her angry. But then it occurred to him that she was probably thinking about someone she wanted to take a picture of, and he laughed.
His office is at the front of the house. It’s a small room with a single window that looks out over the long driveway belonging to their neighbors in the real house—the driveway that is also essentially the walkway from the street to their own front door. He starts to neaten up his desk, which is, as always, heaped with books and papers and spreadsheets, printouts of reviews, schedules of upcoming readings at his store and others’. He has two of Jamie’s earlier books stacked next to his computer. He’s reread them quickly in preparation for writing her introduction—he always introduces the writers who come to the store, unless there’s a special reason for someone else to do it. Several drafts of that i
ntroduction are lying on top of everything else. When he’s made what seems to him like orderly piles of most of the stuff, he looks over the last version he’s done of the intro and starts to tinker with it—partly because it needs work, but partly also to look busy when Annie comes to say goodbye.
And here she is, standing in the doorway in jeans and sandals and a white linen shirt, her wet hair pinned up at the back of her head. “I’m off,” she says.
“You look ravishing.”
“Mmm. Thanks. Maybe you could ravish me sometime.” She comes into the room and bends over him, tugging lightly at his beard. His secret weapon, she calls it. She’s told him often how much she loves its soft touch on her thighs, her cunt.
He’s enveloped in her smell—soap, perfume, something clean and bleachy from her clothes. “I’ll ponder it,” he says.
“Ahh! Nothing like ponderous sex, is there?” she says, and laughs. She kisses him lightly and turns to leave the room. He hears her pause partway down the stairs. She calls back, “Late dinner tonight, then?”
“Yes,” he says.
The front door slams, and he’s alone again. He’s relieved to be alone, he realizes. Pathetic.
As he edits the introduction, he’s also intermittently thinking of Annie, of their earliest lovemaking. Of her body, of what they did with each other, of where they did it—her apartment, sunstruck and hot in the attic of a huge house on Avon Hill, the scudding clouds visible above her in the skylight as she rode him slowly. In his car at night in the dark parking lot behind some long-gone jazz club in Central Square, stopping, holding still when someone passed close by. Images like this have come to him often in the last few weeks, mostly, he thinks, as a way to make a distance between himself and Rosemary—reminding himself of those days when everything about Annie, too, was new, when everything they did with each other seemed a way they were claiming each other. For him, that he was owning this part of her, and this, and now this.
