Monogamy

by Sue Miller

  “Oh! I’m supposed to ring now.” Even as she smiled back at him—his eyes so like Graham’s, disappearing with his smile—Annie thought, Yes, yes, you should: the sense of the house being taken over, of her being somehow no longer in charge of anything.

  Then no, remembering how it had been, how delighted she’d been when, at age ten or eleven, Lucas began to come over by himself. Not ringing. Just walking in. “Is Daddy here?”

  No, she was grateful to both of them, she thought, as they sat together in the living room.

  After a while Sarah suggested they take a walk, partly just to get out of the house while the rain held off, and partly to escape the intermittent arrival of people stopping by with food. Annie loaned her a raincoat, just in case, and put on her own almost waterproof jacket, and they went down the driveway and got into Frieda’s car—Lucas had driven over in it. Lucas and Sarah sat in front, Annie in back. She noted that the two of them were almost the same height. There was something pleasurable in seeing this—Graham’s genes, in Sarah’s case triumphing over her own.

  They drove to Fresh Pond, parked, and started on the path that ran around the water, three abreast on its wide asphalt, alert for possible dog shit underfoot or the panting footfall of joggers approaching from behind. Even though it was a Saturday, it wasn’t crowded—the rain had kept people away. The water in the reservoir moved, gray and sullen, on the other side of the chain-link fence. Ahead of them, the dark woods seemed unwelcoming.

  Sarah said, “Lucas and I were talking, Mom.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We wondered if we shouldn’t have a service of some kind.”

  We, Annie thought. Not you. Not are you going to.

  But it wasn’t that, she didn’t think, that made her say, “I don’t know. Graham might have been appalled.” Her no was ready, for reasons she wasn’t sure of.

  “Oh, I’m not talking about a religious service,” Lucas said.

  Sarah said, “Yes, we didn’t mean a service, a religious service, so much as a gathering of some sort. At the store, maybe?”

  “Can’t it wait?” Annie asked.

  “You’re not ready,” Lucas said.

  Annie forced a laugh, but she could hear that it wasn’t convincing. “I’ll say. I don’t think I’ll ever be ready.”

  Sarah said, “But a lot of people will want to . . . I don’t know. Remember him. Ceremonially, I guess you’d say.”

  “Well, that’s just it.”

  “Too many people.” She was asking Annie, her eyes full of concern.

  “Yes. Too many people with a claim on him. Too many people for me to deal with right now.”

  “On your left!” someone called from behind them, and Annie turned just as Sarah caught her hand and pulled her to the side of the path. A whole team of adolescent boys, all wearing identical navy-blue shorts and gray T-shirts, pounded by, large and muscular and overwhelming as a group, a couple of them actually talking through their gasps for air.

  Once they were past, Annie and Lucas and Sarah started walking again, Sarah still holding Annie’s hand. After a moment she said to her mother, “Your brother asked about it. And so did Daddy’s, actually.”

  Annie could feel it—it had been decided. She knew that. Lucas and Sarah had decided it. They were taking charge of it. Of her. In the name of helping. Of being kind.

  She had the sense of things shifting around her. It would be different now, without Graham. She and he together had made an impregnable fortress. They decided what happened next in their own lives. His death would be the end of that. They would speak to her differently now. They would speak to her the way she’d spoken to Karen. More kindly perhaps, but that way. Taking charge.

  She remembered her grandmother suddenly, alternately furious and resigned when her children put her into a “continuing care facility.” In her tiny room, too full of every possession she cherished—the spoon set from Grandma Ida, the tea service from Auntie—she had smiled bitterly at Annie and said, “Just wait. It will come to you too.”

  “Actually,” Annie said quietly now, “he didn’t want a service, but he said we could have a party if I wanted to. If I had the energy.” Annie had read this earlier—yesterday—when she’d found Graham’s living will, just before she called the hospital. Maybe a party, he’d written, if she was up to it. And then he’d written, “But absolutely nothing more!”

  There was a silence. Annie could feel a shift in the air among them. They’d won. After a long moment, Lucas said, “We could do it later. When you’ll have more energy. The party. Sarah and I would do all the work.”

  “Yes,” Sarah said. “We could ask Erica”—the events person at the store—“to put up a poster now, or in the next couple of days, for a, you know, a celebration of his life. Say, a couple of weeks from now.”

  Annie groaned.

  “Okay, a month, then,” Lucas said. “A month and a half.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Whenever you want, Mom,” Sarah said. “It’s just I think people are going to start asking you about it all the time, a service, and this would be a simple, quick answer.”

  Annie didn’t say anything.

  “Mother?”

  “All right,” Annie said. “Let’s look at the calendar.”

  A little after nine on Monday, the day Sarah was to go back to the West Coast, Annie answered the door and the nice young man from the funeral home was standing there, blurry through the old screen with its rusted mesh. Behind him, the sunshine through the leaves of the linden tree in the Caldwells’ side yard made a greenish light. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” he said.

  For a moment Annie couldn’t imagine why he had come, but then she saw the wooden box, the one she’d chosen for no good reason to hold Graham’s ashes. Or really, she thought now, she’d chosen it because it had felt wrong to her at the time to ask them to put the ashes into a cardboard box, which seemed to be the only alternative. It was ridiculous—Annie knew she’d be scattering the ashes, not keeping them. But the thing was, she didn’t want to seem cheap—that was it, wasn’t it?—so she’d succumbed to it, this large, overweening box.

  “No,” she said now. “There’s nothing to interrupt.” She thought that sounded self-pitying, so she opened the screen door. “I see you’ve brought me Graham’s ashes.”

  “Yes.” He held out the wooden box. “Again, our condolences.”

  “Yes. Thank you.” Annie reached out to take the box. She was surprised at how heavy it was.

  “We were glad to help.”

  Now he held up also a cloth satchel, the kind the bookstore would sell you to tote your books home in. This one had no logo.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “His clothing,” he said. “What he was wearing.”

  She remembered it instantly, the old T-shirt. She remembered, too, lifting the sheet to see Graham’s nakedness below it, her moment of looking at him, his big body, his penis, his long thighs—eons ago, it seemed. Three days. No, four now.

  He reached into the bag and lifted a small white box from within it to show her. “And his ring. His wedding ring, I imagine.” He dropped it back into the bag.

  Annie had thought of none of this, that these things would be coming back to her. It made her feel negligent. She’d let Graham go off to be declared dead, to be burned up, wearing nothing but an old T-shirt, his wedding ring still on his finger. Who would do such a thing?

  “Thank you. Thank you for everything,” she said, taking the bag from him, holding it and the big wooden box awkwardly as she stepped back. The screen door shut between them, a gentle smack.

  “We were honored we could help,” he said again, already turning away.

  Annie watched him go down the walk. He was dressed as if perhaps he was going to play golf in a little while, green slacks and those brown-and-white shoes—she couldn’t think of the name for them at the moment

  She could hear Sarah back in the kitchen. She was putting so
mething together for breakfast.

  For a moment she stood in the hall, unsure of what to do next, where to put the bag and this absurd wooden box. It seemed to her that there must be some appropriate place for it that she was just not capable of thinking of at that moment.

  In the kitchen, Sarah turned the blender on.

  Annie didn’t want to discuss any of this with her. Certainly not the ashes —it was too soon!—but also not her stupidity in capitulating to this ridiculous, outsize wooden object.

  She moved to the narrow stairs and started up. She would put the box in the bedroom. If Sarah asked about the ashes, she’d make something up about when they were supposed to arrive, or when she was going to pick them up. They’d agreed, anyhow, she and Lucas and Sarah, to scatter them together up at the cottage before the memorial party, which they’d finally decided to have in the fall, when people would be back from their vacations, their summer homes.

  She thought of “the cottage”: the little summer house she and Graham had bought as a gift to each other the year after Sarah graduated from college. She pictured it, the world that she and Graham had made there. The world away from the world. She’d like to be there now. Away. She would go, she decided. Soon. She would go alone.

  In the bedroom, she slid the wooden box to the back of her side of the closet, amid the jumble of her own shoes. Graham’s side was nearly empty—one of the chores Sarah had undertaken yesterday was clearing out his clothing. Annie had been surprised, actually, when she found Sarah laying those things out on the bed, bagging them. Then, after she’d helped Sarah set them out on the front porch for a pickup on Monday, suddenly grief-stricken. She wanted them back, the things he’d worn. The night after he’d died, after she’d gone to bed and woken from a light sleep, she’d gotten up and gone to stand in the dark closet among them, the beautiful linen and wool jackets, the slacks, the soft, worn shirts.

  Now she took the ring and the T-shirt out of the bag and started to put them in the top drawer in Graham’s side of the dresser. But then she stopped and lifted the shirt to her face, inhaled the scent of Graham it still carried, even as she was aware of this as cliché too, of how often she’d read it, seen it. But how impossible it was not to do these things! These things that so many others had done before you. These were the things you wanted to do.

  She went to the bathroom to be sure she looked all right—whatever that meant; normal, she supposed—before going back downstairs to sit with Sarah, to eat whatever she’d prepared or assembled out of the many gifts of food that friends had brought over.

  Annie had checked herself over and over in one mirror or another in these last few days, so keenly did she feel that she must have been transformed. That her emptiness, her shock, must be visible somehow, must have stamped her. And always, always when she looked, here she was, the unchanged face, the graying dark hair framing it, the wide-spaced, slightly startled-looking dark eyes, the thinning lips with the little net of creases above and below. Normal.

  She had been pretty when she was younger, pretty in what might have been called a gamine way. Perhaps “elfin,” if you were being less kind. She had actually dressed as an elf once, for a costume party early on in her marriage with Graham. He was Santa Claus that night, there was that radical a difference in size between them.

  Her old friend from photography school, Natalie Schumer, had said to Annie once that of course they all speculated on the sex between Graham and her, on how it could possibly work, mechanically. And though Annie had been startled by the idea of this being discussed openly among her friends, she’d tried to keep her face pleasantly expressionless as she said, “Oh! Very well, thanks.”

  After a second, Natalie had grinned and said, “You’re not going to give me anything?”

  She smiled now at the memory, at the thought of Natalie, big and solid and almost manly, even in her tentlike dress—“Our own Gertrude Stein,” Graham had called her—and watched her face in the mirror grow younger by ten years. Five, anyway.

  She tried it again downstairs, smiling at Sarah as she came into the kitchen, and was touched to see relief and pleasure lift her daughter’s face.

  “Sit,” Sarah said, smiling back. “I’ve made us a lovely brunch out of this and that.” And Annie thought again of how changed she was. Of how the Sarah who’d arrived back home this time was not the Sarah she’d expected.

  14

  Annie had been relieved when Sarah arrived, but she was relieved too when she left. She was glad not to have to talk. Not to have to do much of anything. There was a sudden sense of freedom in the empty house. She had food, she had wine—mostly Graham’s cheap stuff in the pantry, but still, wine, and more than enough.

  For a few days, then, she stayed by herself. She didn’t cry, in part because she felt that if she started, she might never stop. Later she was unable to account for the time to herself, other than that she supposed that what she mostly did was sit. Either Edith or Frieda called every day—perhaps they’d discussed it, she thought, and were taking turns. She talked to Sarah twice. The landline rang, but she didn’t answer it, didn’t even check the messages. They would call the office, she thought, and hear from someone else that Graham had died.

  She did sit at Graham’s desk to sort through the papers on it. She made a pile of things she thought ought to go to the bookstore, but then left them lying there. Danielle called several times on her cell, to tell her that six of the photographs had sold, but Annie didn’t return the calls. The condolence cards, identifiable mostly by their size—smaller than a letter—piled up in the front hall.

  After three days of this, she called Edith and asked her to dinner the next night, warning her that she would take no responsibility for the meal—she planned just to heat up one of the casseroles still stacked one on top of the other in the refrigerator, and they could nibble on the cookies or brownies or muffins sitting in tins on the counters, most handed to Sarah at the front door or left anonymously on the table on the porch in those first days.

  Fine, Edith said. She’d be happy just to see Annie.

  Annie had met Edith after her husband, Mike Hodges, had published Annie’s photo book Emergency, and certainly Annie had liked Edith well enough then, Mike’s nice wife; but when he moved out to live with the man he’d fallen in love with, her real friendship with Edith began.

  One of the things they talked about was Mike, of course, about the complicating reality that Edith was still in love with him, and he, in another way, with her. He came to celebrate all the holidays with her and the children; they spoke to each other almost daily on the telephone.

  Annie had at first been so angry on Edith’s behalf that she couldn’t understand this. “After all,” she said to her new friend, “he was unfaithful to you. Many, many times, in fact, he was unfaithful to you.”

  “Annie, he was gay. He was struggling with that.”

  “Why should that excuse it? Who cares if it was a man? He was fucking another person—he was wooing another person—and he was your husband.”

  “But think how hard he must have been trying—working really—all those years, to be married to me.” Edith’s face was anguished with the thought of it. “The wrong person entirely,” she said. “The wrong gender, even. It breaks my heart.”

  Annie had persisted for a while, even as she understood how judgmental, how small, she sounded. (“So Protestant!” Edith said to her once, and laughed.) But over the weeks and months, she came to accept Edith’s position, and finally, to admire her for it, for her generosity. As they began to know each other well in the aftermath of Edith’s marriage, Annie slowly understood that this generosity, this kindness, was part of what drew her to the other woman.

  That, and her physical loveliness—she was at the time possibly the most beautiful person Annie had ever met. She was tall and slender. Her hair then was an unusual bronze color, and she wore it pinned up in a ballerina’s bun. Her face had exactly that kind of beauty—a classic, sculpted ballerina�
��s beauty, remote and lovely until she smiled, a smile that even in her sorrow conveyed a kind of pleasure in life.

  It seemed she was conscious of this, of her beauty. She always dressed elegantly, if simply—tailored slacks on her long, long legs. Silk shirts. Bright lipstick. But she said all that was to please her patients—she was a pediatrician. It mattered to children, she’d said, how you looked. “Remember how much you loved pretty ladies when you were a child?” she asked Annie. “‘Pitty ladies,’” she said in a little-girl voice, and then laughed. “It’s only when you grow up that you learn you can love what’s ugly, too.”

  Annie had been unable not to smile—this, from a woman whose husband had been as gorgeous as she was, so that when they came into a crowded room together in the old days, there was an almost collective intake of breath, a kind of group sigh.

  Edith called out as she opened the front door, and Annie came around from the kitchen and walked into her embrace. After a long moment, Edith stepped back, holding Annie’s shoulders, looking hard at her. “Have you slept at all?” she asked.

  “Naps, mostly,” Annie said.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “I know you are. That’s why I wanted you here.”

  They opened the wine that Edith had brought, they talked as Annie heated up the meal, a kind of curried lamb stew. They talked about Sarah and Lucas. About what Annie had been doing. “Almost nothing,” she said, and Edith said, “That sounds about right.”

  While they ate, they critiqued the stew unkindly—Edith was a good cook too. Even so, they consumed a good deal of it, and opened a second bottle of wine when they’d finished the first. As Annie poured a glass for her, Edith said, “I feel he should be here, you know, pronouncing on something or other.” She had said something like this several times during the meal.

  “I do too,” Annie said.

  “Opining, I guess you’d say,” Edith said.

  “He did love to opine,” Annie said. They sat quietly for a few moments.