Monogamy

by Sue Miller

  They would lie still in the dark. Later he sometimes turned to her, occasionally bringing her back from the beginnings of sleep, his mouth on her, his fingers sliding in and out of her, her sensations confused sometimes—what was tongue? what lips or fingers? which, moving where? She would teeter for long moments on the edge of coming, the feeling would ebb and then return, and then finally it would begin, a more dizzying, slower version of it than she was used to, the dark and silence around her so complete as to make the experience nearly disembodied, while also being almost purely of the body—like a nearly solitary dream of wordless sex they were also somehow sharing. When it ended she felt shaken, sometimes near tears.

  They both slept deeply here, and woke with the faint silvery light of first morning, its touch bringing her back to the room, the animal shapes of the clothes on the hooks, the light reflecting on the old mirror like a window where there wasn’t one.

  Annie stayed for five days. She drank coffee in the morning for energy—three, sometimes four cups. More than once, if she stood up too fast, her heart pounded and she felt lightheaded.

  The first afternoon she called everyone who might be worried about her—Natalie and Edith, Frieda and Sarah and Lucas—to tell them where she was.

  She tried to order her time. She read in the books that were on the shelves in the living room. The “shelves”: just horizontal boards between the exposed studs. They were in the same plane as the studs too, and therefore not really deep enough to hold some of the resting books. Sometimes when Graham walked around too heavily, one or two of the larger volumes would fall out. Volunteers, he called them, and always laid them out to read next, following some obscure rule of his own.

  She read Auden. A translation of Catullus that Graham had been reading—funny and, to Annie, surprisingly, amusingly, dirty. She’d taken Latin in high school and read Catullus then. An expurgated Catullus, she saw now. She read Simic. She read Szymborska, hard and yet somehow comforting about aging and death.

  She lay down a lot—it became an activity, a way to pass the time. She lay down on the couch, reading. She lay down on the bed and, while the sky changed out the windows, was overcome by memories. She lay down on the dock and listened to the ever-changing motion of the water. She fell asleep once on the dock, no sunblock on at all, and woke with a painful sunburn, the first one she’d had in decades. (A week or so later, back in her real life, it had turned into a tan. “It’s good you went away,” Frieda said when she saw Annie. “You look great. You look rested.” Annie didn’t disabuse her, didn’t speak of her long sleepless nights, or nights when she did sleep but had dreams so urgent that she woke already tired.)

  She ate only what was for sale at the farm stand in this early season, and scrambled or fried eggs and toast—it seemed like too much work to cook meat or fish, even to make a salad. At night she listened to the radio and drank wine. Half a bottle made it possible to sleep, though she woke then, at two or three, and lay awake, listening to the occasional night sounds. She’d fall back asleep after a while and dream vividly, then wake again with the room full of light, often the nearly iridescent pearly light of sun through the thick white fog that hung heavily on the lake.

  She made herself take a daily walk. Once she walked partway around the lake on the path in the woods. Through the treillage of the trees she had glimpses of the expensive summer homes, some of them silent, apparently not yet opened. But at others, she could hear the shrieks of children playing. The next day, toward the end of the afternoon, it was adult voices that floated over to her from an elegant old house, the clink of ice in glasses, the laughter of the cocktail hour. It was hard to come back to the cottage after that, hard to feel her solitude.

  On the fourth day she was there, she made a reluctant trip to the little town store—she needed toothpaste and she wanted a newspaper. She thought she might also get some tuna fish and mayonnaise, just to vary her menu.

  John Lawrence was there at the back of the store in what she and Graham had spoken of as his “uniform”—jeans and a plaid shirt. She saw that he was lifting boxes from a shopping cart, putting them on the shelves. He called out a greeting. Then, when Annie began to set her things on the counter, he came to the front of the store to ring her up.

  “Annie,” he said in greeting, nodding once on the word. He stepped behind the counter and began to slide the groceries past himself on its worn wooden surface with his right hand, while his left hand danced on the register, putting numbers in. “I was sorry to hear about Graham,” he said. “He was a fine man.”

  “Thank you,” Annie said.

  How gracious, she was thinking. That was the way to do it. Simple. Plainspoken. It seemed to her at that moment, remembering the complexity of the sympathy of some of her Cambridge friends, remembering what had felt like the insufficiently grateful or articulate responses she had tried to speak or to write back to them, that there was something vainglorious about their articulate commiseration. Don’t tell me what Shakespeare said about death, or Auden, or Tillich, or Annie Lamott, she thought now—she’d had all of these offered to her. Don’t make me have to find a way to rise to any of that. Just say what John said, let me just say thank you, and then move on.

  She remembered Felicity Rogers’s question to Sarah: “Don’t you think it’s better that he died before your mother?”

  And Peter Aiello standing in the front hall later that day, holding her hands between his. “It’s like a huge tree has fallen, a tree that was shading us all, and now we’re just all blinking away in the sunlight,” he had said.

  Annie was struck dumb, this was so elaborately unlike what she felt.

  “Don’t you think?” he’d persisted. What had she answered? She couldn’t remember.

  Now, coming out into the sunlight with her bag of groceries on her hip—yes, she thought, blinking in the sunlight, but here, now, only because of the contrast with the dimness of the country store—she stopped for a moment to look at the bulletin board.

  Unedited for at least several weeks, she noted. Obsolete events: a multifamily yard sale that had happened on May 31. A dinner for seniors in the town hall a week before. But new things too: there was an open meeting of the town selectmen coming up on July 1, a meeting to downgrade the classification of some of the town roads to “unmaintained”—nothing near her, she noted. There was a reading in the middle of August at the town library, a reading by a writer whose work Annie knew and liked. Maybe she’d go, if she were up here.

  Would she be up here? She didn’t know. She had a sense abruptly of how open, how shapeless, her life was. How empty and without rules. She felt, for a moment, the physical sensation of loss, a wave of it. After a few seconds she shifted the grocery bag to her other hip and made herself focus on the bulletin board again, made herself try to concentrate on the words in the notices.

  A lost dog. No date. Somebody with old windows you could take away for free. She remembered then that at some point Graham had spoken of exactly that—acquiring old windows—the idea being that he would build a cold frame off the side of the cottage when he got enough of them, something Annie had been sure would never happen. Graham was full of such projects, begun and then abandoned. The vegetable garden. The studio he was going to make for Annie in the shed. More bookshelves for their bedroom. The bookstore was the only context in which he always finished what he’d started.

  There was the announcement of a music program at Lake Scarborough, a program that offered master classes with the members of the quartet in residence. Which quartet would also perform at a public concert—Schumann, Beethoven.

  She might go, Annie thought. She would need to start doing things at some point. Learning to do things, alone. She looked more closely for the date and saw that it had already passed. Ah. She’d missed it. She looked at the announcement again. The Wadsworth quartet, they were called. The cellist for this quartet, she saw now, was named Sofie Kahn.

  She stepped closer to the bulletin board to look at th
e photo. It was hard to tell, but it looked like the Sofie Kahn she remembered. And how many professional cellists with that name could there be, after all? She felt oddly breathless. She turned away to go to her car. Where she sat for some minutes before she started the engine, trying to order the chaos of her thoughts.

  The last time Annie had seen Sofie Kahn’s name was perhaps thirty-five years earlier in a New York Times review, an almost entirely positive review of Sofie’s debut performance at Carnegie Hall. Annie had been young and ambitious for herself at that time, and she had felt a pinch of envy reading the piece: Sofie had made it then, into the world of public achievement, in a way that Annie wasn’t sure was ever going to happen for her. But she’d been pleased for her old friend too, pleased that the hard work of music, begun so early in her life, had brought its reward.

  Sofie Kahn. She hadn’t thought of her in all these years. Their childhood, their girlhood, together.

  Which girlhood Annie was calling up in the car all the way back to the cottage, and later, while she unpacked the groceries, and still later than that, while she made her supper in the shadowed kitchen, while she ate it alone on the front porch.

  When she lay down to sleep in the cottage that night, it occurred to Annie that this long afternoon of calling up her youth with Sofie Kahn was the first time since Graham had died that she’d managed to sustain thinking about anyone or anything else for longer than a few minutes. After a moment’s almost childish sense of accomplishment, she felt a sudden sweep of grief so strong that she began panting and had to sit up in the dark room to catch her breath.

  16

  In the late 1940s and ’50s, Annie and Sofie Kahn had been in the same grammar-school class in a public school in Hyde Park, on the south side of Chicago. Sofie was small, like Annie—the other girls and most of the boys in their class towered over both of them—and maybe as much as anything else, this was what drew them together. But they also both had fathers who worked at the University of Chicago, another bond that made them different from many of the other kids.

  They lived in different areas of Hyde Park though, neighborhoods separated by the tracks the Illinois Central Electric trains ran on. In order to see each other after school, one or the other of them had what seemed at the time a long walk. But in that other world, where children at nine or ten or eleven could move around unaccompanied, this wasn’t a difficulty.

  By Sofie’s preference, as Annie remembered it, they went to her apartment more often than to Annie’s house. That was fine with Annie. She liked the sense of peace at the Kahns’. It felt welcoming to her.

  Annie had four siblings, all of whom, unlike her, often had several friends at a time over after school, so that the house was usually full of kids and their activities: records playing, the bigger boys bounding recklessly and thunderously up or down the stairs, Annie’s sisters and their friends in one or the other of their rooms, dressing up or trying different hairstyles suggested by Seventeen; or gathered in the front hall, using the telephone to pass along school gossip. It must be that, she had thought, that put Sofie off—the noise, the looseness. A looseness that for Annie and her siblings was just part of the sense among them that they were on their own. That their mother had better things to do than fuss with them.

  Or other things, anyway. In the daytime, what seemed like her endless chores. Ironing in the kitchen, her cigarette set in an ashtray on the counter nearby, a ritualized pause after each section of a girl’s dress or a boy’s shirt to drag on the cigarette some predetermined number of times. Typing up a report by Annie’s father at the dining room table, or a long letter of her own to her mother, with many carbon copies to go to her sisters.

  Sometimes she was literally absent, particularly late in the afternoon, when she went down the street to the Petersons’ house, or the Millers’ or the Levis’ or the Nakagawas’ to have cocktails with the other wives—and then the husbands too, as they drifted home from the campus or emerged from their studies at the far reaches of the houses.

  Without her, the noise level in the house rose even higher. The records were turned up, the older kids danced with their friends in the living room or tried their mother’s cigarettes in the backyard—she smoked Pall Malls, which she drew out of an oval red tin, a hundred to the can. It was easy to pilfer a few without their absence being noticed.

  All of this couldn’t have been more different from the atmosphere at Sofie’s house. Most importantly, Sofie’s mother was always present—present in every sense, engaged with her two daughters and whatever friends they brought home. Milk and cookies were served when you arrived. The napkins were cloth, ironed, folded elegantly on one side of the plate. The plate was beautiful, more beautiful than Annie’s mother’s best china, which had an ivy pattern trailing around the edge and was used only at Sunday dinner and on holidays. The glass that held the milk was thick and cut with patterned shapes. Mrs. Kahn sat with Sofie and Annie and Vera, Sofie’s little sister, and asked about their day at school in her faint accent, unidentifiable to Annie at the time.

  She seemed genuinely interested in Annie too. Oh, Annie liked painting? Why? What about it? Had she ever seen Cézanne’s still lifes? Oh, she must, she must. She went off to find a book to show Annie images of these paintings. “Of course, this one is in the Art Institute,” she said, pointing.

  Oh, yes, Annie said, as though she’d known that, as though she went to the Art Institute regularly—which she knew Sofie and Mrs. Kahn and Vera did.

  She had gone once in fact—perhaps twice? she couldn’t remember—with her father. Her gentle father, the one in Annie’s family who, like Mrs. Kahn, seemed to care about the worlds his children were interested in, though he didn’t have the time Mrs. Kahn had to open the doors to these worlds for them. In any case, at that period of clearly defined divisions of labor between men and women, this would have been Annie’s mother’s role, if she’d cared to play it. Which she didn’t care to do. Or perhaps was too busy to do.

  When Annie and Sofie went into Sofie’s room to loll on either end of her bed and talk or to listen to the radio, Mrs. Kahn would go to the living room and play the piano. Annie could hear the rich, rolling music intermittently under their own noise.

  She used to be a pianist, Sofie said when Annie asked about it.

  “But she’s not anymore?” Annie asked.

  “Yah, the war,” Sofie said, in a way that seemed so much to assume Annie’s understanding that she felt precluded from asking anything more. “The war” was a point of reference in Sofie’s house in a way it wasn’t at Annie’s, in a way that gave it a mysterious power for Annie.

  Those afternoons always ended the same way. At a certain point, Mrs. Kahn would knock on Sofie’s door, and when Sofie opened it to her, she would turn to Annie and say, apologetically, that she hated to interrupt, but it was time for Sofie to practice.

  When the outer door to Sofie’s apartment building closed behind Annie and she started the walk home down Hyde Park Boulevard and then across Fifty-Sixth Street to Stony Island Avenue and under the IC tracks, she was aware of the complex and conflicting feelings that flooded her, every time. A real pleasure in moving away from the quiet of Sofie’s life toward the freedom of the ruleless, noisy house she inhabited with her siblings; but also a keen jealousy of the rituals, the sense of beauty, she was leaving behind at Sofie’s house, a growing consciousness of the high expectations that were clearly set for Sofie and her sister, and of the sense she always had at the Kahns’—the sense that she too might be a serious person, to be taken seriously.

  Later Annie came to see that of course money was part of it—the difference between the homes. That her own father, who ran the university’s admissions office, was undoubtedly paid far less than Mr. Kahn, who was a physicist. But she thought that the mothers had something to do with it too. The problem being, as she saw it even then, with her own mother, who seemed to have no interests beyond her personal experiences, her own history.

  She c
ould remember rushing upstairs to tell her mother of her own rapture with The Messiah after she’d gone to hear it in Rockefeller Chapel one year with her father and her oldest sister. Oh, of course, her mother said, dismissal in her voice. She knew it perfectly well. She’d sung it in Chorus in her senior year of high school in Belmont, and Bob Samuelson, who had the tenor solos, had been madly in love with her then and couldn’t keep his eyes off her. She remembered what she’d worn for their performances—it was the first time her mother had allowed her to wear black: how sexy she’d looked! She recalled—for herself primarily, Annie sensed even then—the party they’d had after the last performance. Bob had drunk too much from a flask he’d brought with him, and in the car on the way home, he’d tried to kiss her.

  She was stretched out on the daybed in Annie’s father’s study while she was telling Annie this, a paperback mystery in her hand, her cigarette waiting in the ashtray next to the bed, its smoke coiling slowly upward.

  But what about the music? Annie wanted to ask.

  What about Handel? What about beauty? What about Cézanne?

  What about Bach? Whose perfect music Annie had heard Sofie play one Sunday afternoon when the Kahns had a concert for friends in the living room of their apartment. Through the row of windows to the east, you could see the lake—immense, churning, a white-capped greenish gray below the leaden sky on this cold late-fall day. The audience sat in rows of folding chairs the Kahns must have kept just for these occasions. There were perhaps twenty people there. Annie was one of three non-adults present, the other two being Sofie and Vera. She felt both proud of that and terrified of the conversations with the adults that would resume once the performance was over. You are a friend of Sofie’s? How nice. A musician too? Oh. Well, so few people had Sofie’s gifts. Or her mother’s, for that matter.