Monogamy

by Sue Miller

  “You can’t sleep?” he asked, his voice nearly a whisper in order not to wake Claire. Her room, the butler’s pantry between the kitchen and the dining room in some earlier era—a room that had been Lucas’s study until a few weeks before—was open to the dining room, and Frieda could see the little girl in her miniature crib, a tiny rounded shape in her yellow sleeper.

  “Well, I will, I’m sure,” she said. “How about you? Do you plan on sleeping tonight?”

  “I just want to get through a few more chapters. If I can. If you hear my head hit the table, you’ll know I didn’t make it.”

  Frieda was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Well, that’s sort of what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  Lucas looked puzzled. “What?”

  Frieda looked at her hands folded on the table in front of her. She had been intensely aware of them this last week, the raised, lilac-colored veins, the spotted papery skin stretched over them, the lines circling each knobbed joint—they had seemed so crone-like as she moved them over the baby, whose skin was so perfect, so unmarked.

  “There’s so much you have to do. It seems like too much. I just wondered if perhaps I shouldn’t . . . stay on for a bit longer. To help.”

  Something changed in Lucas’s face. Then changed back—she could watch him recover from his first response, which, she had seen, was dismay. Or worse.

  His hands moved to the closer stack of paper, as if it offered a kind of support. “Ah,” he said. “Well, you know, you’ve been helpful beyond words, Mom, but honestly, I think we’re looking forward to figuring out how to manage on our own.” He nodded several times.

  When she didn’t answer right away, he said, “This part of it, God, I mean, we’re so grateful to you.” He’d regained his composure, his smooth, fast voice. “You taught us, really, how to do it. Taught me, mostly. You’ve showed me how to do it. How to be of use to Jeanne, which I’m not sure I would have been, otherwise. But I honestly . . . really, I think I will be—we will be—if not fine, exactly”—he grinned, the charming smile that he’d inherited from Graham, the smile that looked so different, so much more rakish on him—“at least okay.”

  In the train on the way home, Frieda found a seat by the window on the right-hand side of the car. While they were still in the city, while the window was still showing the city’s rump side to the train as it sped by, Frieda read, looking out only intermittently. But when they began to pass the small towns in Connecticut that opened out to the ocean, she closed the book on her lap. She watched the water, the beautiful swaying grass. She was aware that she had had exactly this consolation in mind when she chose her seat, and she was grateful now that she could feel it working.

  This was how you did it, she thought. How you managed in life. And she had, hadn’t she? Right now, the conscious noticing of the sun over the beautiful sweeps of pale-gold spartina, over the dark sea, the faraway boats. These last days, holding the baby, singing to her. At home, the careful preparation of the meal for one. The ritual glass of wine. The slow making of music from the patterns of notes on the lined page.

  All in the service of some sense of . . . what? Purpose, she supposed. Order.

  Or loveliness. A sense of loveliness that made everything possible.

  Why shouldn’t you have to work to hold on to it?

  26

  In the days after Claire’s birth, Lucas had been afraid that he would never be able to love her. Some of it was simply physical—he couldn’t help it, he found her unappealing. She had dark, oily-looking hair that stuck to her head in thinning clots. She herself was thin, and her legs bent in curves that made them resemble an old cowpoke’s. The un-Gerber baby. Her flesh was red and blotchy and angry-looking; her hands with their tiny, sharp nails seemed large for her size. Her size: six pounds two ounces. They’d roasted chickens larger than that, he’d joked to Jeanne.

  “Not funny,” she said coolly, announcing her distance from him, her loyalty to Claire.

  He understood it, of course he understood it. He wished he could feel it too, the unswerving interest she had in the baby, the love that he couldn’t understand the source of.

  He didn’t get it, that was the problem. Claire was unseeing, unresponsive except to her own internal signals, all of which were invisible to him. “She’s just shitting,” Jeanne would say when he wondered why she was crying. Or not really crying, but making her dry squawk. “See? She’s turning red, a little bit.”

  But she was always red, as far as he could tell.

  Or she was hungry, and Jeanne would open her blouse and fetch out a newly enormous, leaky breast, which tiny, ugly Claire would attach herself to, making slurpy, grunting animal sounds, amazingly loud for someone her size. And then almost immediately fall asleep, flopping back, her mouth open, whitish inside with the thin milk.

  She was cold. Or she was wet. Jeanne seemed to understand all these things. His mother had too, when she arrived to help out, which was a kind of news to him: his mother, so at ease with Claire, so gentle. He was in the kitchen making coffee one morning when he heard her talking to Claire, just describing what she was doing (“We’re going to get this wet nightie off you, yes, we are”), but in a voice so suffused with love that it startled him.

  He was, he supposed, disappointed in the experience of fatherhood. Mostly in himself as a father. Why did he feel nothing? Or not quite nothing—a kind of revulsion, really. Was he as cold as he seemed to himself to be? Was he as jealous as he knew himself to be when Jeanne turned all her attention to Claire, when she was forbidden to have sex yet, when she didn’t seem to be interested in any intermediate activities? Or in him, as far as he could tell.

  He stayed later at the office. He found people to have a drink with after work. He was aware that he was waiting for the middle of April, when Jeanne was taking the baby to France for a month to introduce her to her family. When, as he felt it, he would reclaim himself, his life. Or at least shed the daily guilt he felt for being so uninterested, really, in his own daughter.

  On the way home from seeing Jeanne and Claire off at the airport, he stopped at the bistro on the corner of their quiet street. He felt young, unencumbered. He didn’t even have his briefcase with him—he’d come home early from work and left it at the apartment when he went with them to the airport.

  He sat outside by himself at one of the three metal tables on the sidewalk. The new, small leaves of the trees that bent over the street were the tenderest of greens. It was a mild evening, and the big folding windows of the restaurant were pushed back, releasing the noise from inside. This lifted his spirits. When the waitress came out to take his order, he asked for a dirty martini and oysters, a half dozen.

  While he ate and drank, he watched the couples inside. Slowly his sense of exile from the world evaporated. The waitress came out to ask him if he needed anything else, and he ordered an expensive glass of white wine and another half-dozen oysters.

  The sky was lavender above him. Yellow lights were coming on in the apartments in the houses across the street. The rooms they revealed seemed full of promise and mystery. Had there been, ever, such a beautiful evening? Everything felt strange and new to him.

  The color in the sky deepened, and he asked for his check. When he looked in his wallet for his credit cards, he felt a little shock at seeing the American bills there—it seemed to him that he should be carrying some other currency, he was at such a distance from what he felt was his life.

  He walked slowly the half block home. As he entered the dark apartment, he thought of Jeanne. He remembered how she had looked, standing in the line to go through security—Claire just a bulge in the baby carrier on her front, her purse on one shoulder, the big overnight bag, full mostly of Claire’s necessities, slung from her other shoulder. She had turned to look for him to wave goodbye, her eyes searching the crowded space, and in that moment she had looked so alone, so burdened, that he was sorry he wasn’t going with her. He raised his hand and waved it wildly over his
head until she spotted him, feeling a desperate wish to make up for how separated from her he’d been. Her face softened, opened. Awkwardly, she shifted the overnight bag so that she could blow him a kiss.

  He thought of that moment often during the weeks she was away, weeks when he swung from the kind of easy pleasure of that first night alone (he ate out almost every night, he drank much more than he usually did) to his dread when he thought of his sense of distance from Claire. His repulsion, really.

  He made promises to himself. He would help Jeanne more. He would act as though he loved Claire, in the hope that it would open a way for him to feel that love. He thought of his mother, not his mother with Claire, but what he remembered from his own childhood—her inexpressiveness, what seemed her lack of feeling. He didn’t want to repeat that. He could not allow it, allow himself to feel so cut off from his daughter. He would be like his father, like Graham, joyous and loving.

  Did you get to choose? It seemed to Lucas this must be possible, that this must be some of the point of living in a family. You could look at different ways of being in the world, you could exercise some will.

  He watched children when he was outside, and he was outside often—the weather held steady in its beauty from that first night on.

  Four days before Jeanne and Claire were to return, Lucas left work late and was walking home from the subway in the pale twilight. There was a woman walking slowly toward him on West Tenth Street, pushing a stroller. Even from a distance, he could hear a kind of mindless chanting arising from within it, and when he got closer, he saw the child making the noise. It seemed to be a little boy, though Lucas couldn’t be certain of that—his hair was longish and curly. He might have been somewhere a bit over two. He was singing—mnh, mnh, mnh, mnh—moving up and down again and again through just a few notes. He was holding a badminton racket across his lap, and he was playing it, his left hand holding the handle, his right hand strumming wildly across the stringing of the racket’s head.

  He looked directly at Lucas without self-consciousness, without even seeing him, really, so lost was he in the music he imagined he was making.

  As they were about to pass each other, Lucas’s eyes swung up to meet the mother’s. She met his gaze and lifted her shoulders, making a quick sly face, a face that indicated both a relinquishment of any responsibility for the little boy’s behavior and an amused pleasure in his game.

  It was a vision for Lucas, a vision of the fact of the inner life, even in someone so young. A vision of the way Claire too might come to have a self, independent of him or Jeanne.

  That night he dreamed of Graham. He was dancing in the living room of the Cambridge house with each of them in turn, but each of them as a child. He bent tenderly first over Sarah, Sarah at the same age as the boy in the carriage—her hair still shortish around her head, her sturdy legs stomping on the old wooden floor of the big room. Then Sarah slowly turned into Annie, a small, dark child; but he knew it was Annie because there was something mysterious, something sexual, that was part of her dance with Graham. Nothing explicit—Lucas felt, rather than saw, the strong erotic element working between them.

  Then Lucas, although perhaps because he couldn’t actually get into this dream, since he was seeing it from outside, Graham was dancing with a creature, an animal of some kind—feral, it seemed in the dream. But he knew this creature to be himself.

  And last, Frieda, whom he treated more tenderly than anyone else. They waltzed, prettily, gracefully, his father leading Frieda gently. His kindness, so entirely in character, was unbearable to Lucas. It made him uncomfortable, ashamed; and it was then that he woke up.

  The aftermath of the dream, though, was relief, a sense Lucas had that Graham had come in his dream to help him, to show him the way, so that he would know how to do it too, to love easily, generously, those who were close to him. To dance with Claire, with whoever she was. Perhaps also the sense that she would simply be who she would be, as each of the dancers with his father in the dream was. As the child in the carriage had been. That he didn’t need to worry about that. It would be all right.

  He hoped it would be all right.

  Jeanne’s plane got in at one, but she had insisted he not take the time off from work to meet them. She said she could manage it all—the baby, the luggage, the cab. She would call their neighbor David when they got close, and he could come down and help her bring things up.

  So Lucas arrived home from work at the time he usually did. He was just putting his key into the lock when he heard the latch click free from within. The door swung open, and there was Jeanne.

  She stepped forward, into his arms, and it was as though the tension of the months after Claire’s birth had never been. He felt the full length of her strong body pressed against him. He felt rescued. After a moment, he held her head in his hands and tilted his own head back to see her face. She seemed to be laughing, and then he saw that she was also crying. He kissed her eyelids—the salty taste—and then her mouth, open and warm. “You’re here,” he said.

  “You’re here,” she answered.

  They rocked together side to side, a little like the dance Graham had done with Annie in Lucas’s dream.

  “Is Claire napping?” he asked after a moment.

  She stepped back, wiping at her eyes with the heels of her hands. She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Go and see.” She smiled. “She’s in the living room.”

  Lucas made his way down the hallway toward the light that was the living room. And here she was, lying on her back on the floor in a yellow shirt and diapers, looking up intently at a kind of mobile that arched over her, its legs on the floor around her. Her hands, fisted, worked in the air above her, as if she thought she could reach the suspended cloth animals if she tried hard enough. Her bare feet worked too, dancing and kicking, and she made gentle noises of effort.

  He saw instantly how changed she was. He knelt next to her. He could sense Jeanne behind him, watching them.

  He bent over her. “Hello baby,” he said. “Hello, Claire.” Her head wobbled a little from side to side, looking for him, and then her eyes found him.

  He said it again, smiling down at her. “Hello, Claire.”

  She looked up at him gravely, focusing hard on him—he thought for the first time that she could actually see him. And then her whole body answered him, her arms and legs doing their dance, for him this time. A wide, toothless grin transformed her face, and he felt something inside him lift, change, in response.

  Father, he thought.

  27

  It was Saturday, about 5:30, and Annie was making a warm frisée salad with new potatoes and bacon. Nothing heavy, she’d said to everyone. “We’ll all be in recovery from Thursday.” (Thursday, Thanksgiving, when she, Sarah, Lucas, Jeanne, and Claire had all spent the day at Frieda’s, the adults eating a meal of the traditional dishes Frieda liked to make—a huge turkey with stuffing, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, both apple and pumpkin pies.)

  Today Annie had set the table for nine adults, and asked Lucas to bring down the high chair that had been Sarah’s from the closet on the second floor. She had put candles in a row along the center of the table, the way she’d always done for the big dinners she and Graham had given. She felt light, actually cheerful, she realized.

  For the last two years, the holidays had been difficult for Annie; she was still so entwined with Graham’s death and then her anger at him for all that had happened afterward. The first year, Sarah had come home for both holidays. And last year, Annie and Frieda had gone together to New York on the train, just for Thanksgiving Day, and Lucas and Jeanne had hosted them. No turkey, Jeanne had insisted. (“Turkey is an American invention. Unknown elsewhere.”) They had small game birds instead, and the meal was spare and delicious, as if in defiance of the American notion of excess. Afterward they had sat in the living room with cognac and passed the baby around until it was time to go to the station. Annie had been grateful for this, for the way the baby
made it unnecessary to sustain a conversation. She felt—she had felt for months—that she had nothing of interest to say to anyone.

  In the taxi on the way back to Cambridge from the train station in Back Bay, she and Frieda had both fallen silent. Looking over at Frieda, Annie had seen stamped on her face the exhaustion that she felt herself. Here we are, she thought. Two old ladies. Stuck together.

  This year, having ceded the Thanksgiving meal to Frieda, she’d decided to have a small party two days later. At the moment, just the family had arrived. They were all waiting for the others—Natalie and Don, who’d been in New Jersey for Thanksgiving with their only child, an associate professor at Princeton. Edith, of course, after the huge Thanksgiving she’d been in charge of at her house for her children and grandchildren and Mike and his partner. And Peter, who had just returned to Boston from a long, wine-focused trip to California.

  Lucas had started to assemble various bottles on the kitchen island, and to open a few of the reds Annie had set out. Frieda and Sarah were in the living room with Claire. She was toddling across the room from one of them to another, playing a game she’d invented. She would hand a wooden spoon over to one of them, and it was Sarah or Frieda’s job to hold on to it and let the little girl tug at it for just long enough so that when it was released, it felt like a triumph to her. She would laugh, a hiccupping squeal of joy and triumph that sometimes convulsed her so thoroughly that she would sit down, hard, on the floor—which itself seemed funny to her, made her cry out again with a gurgling pleasure. Jeanne was there too, taking the opportunity of the other adults’ engagement with Claire to flip through the newspaper.

  Peter arrived, bundled up, his cheeks pinked by the chill, so that for a few moments he looked like someone else, not the dark, brooding version of himself he usually presented to the world. He’d brought a cake with him, from the new branch of the local bakery that was everyone’s current favorite. He handed the white box to Sarah so he could take off his coat. (“What a shame you wasted your time making that perfectly ordinary chocolate mousse,” Sarah said to Annie as she set the box on the counter back in the kitchen.)