Monogamy

by Sue Miller

  Sitting here at his desk, he suddenly remembers that in the midst of all that, when he was most besotted, she told him that she’d slept again with an old lover—Jeff, it was. Jeff, the guy who’d brought her to the bookstore party. Jeff, and then, unbelievably, another guy too, someone she’d been fixed up with by friends, friends who didn’t yet know about Graham’s presence in her life. How astonished he’d been that she wasn’t, like him, feeling the overwhelming sense of a beginning—a beginning that would have made even the idea of sex with someone else impossible.

  He remembers now that she said the impulse was born, in fact, exactly from being with him—the sense she had because of that of being wildly fuckable. Of wanting everything. “Really, almost everyone,” she said. She laughed then, before she saw his face.

  He’s stopped by this memory.

  And then he understands what he’s up to. Oh, blameless, blameless Graham—because she did it too. That’s what this is, he thinks.

  But she did it before we were a couple.

  For a while, this checks him. He types in the changes he’s made to the introduction to Jamie, and reads it through, speaking it aloud once more. He looks over the monthly figures from the store.

  Then it begins to nag at him again: isn’t it possible, might she not have amused herself with someone else, maybe even after they were a couple? After they were married?

  Amused herself, he thinks. A little amuse-bouche. He thinks of going down on her, his own amuse-bouche. How he loves it. A time back then when he felt he wanted to enter her, swim into her, headfirst, mouthfirst.

  These images, these thoughts, arrive and disappear as he finishes at the desk. He gets up finally and goes into the bathroom, into the lingering scent of her shampoo, of her soap—but something else too, something elemental to her.

  The sun from the skylight above the shower warms him even before he turns the water on, and he stands gratefully under it and the spray. When he’s finished and steps out, the air is cool on his wet body. He dries off, inspecting himself as he works the towel—the diminishing number of white hairs at the top of his chest, the sling of his belly, the fattish penis below it, his burden, apparently. He sighs and goes to the bedroom to get dressed.

  Standing in front of the closet, he slides the hangers along. The light brown linen suit, he thinks. An off-white shirt. The soft leather shoes just a shade darker than the suit.

  All this—these expensive clothes and his love for them—was a later element in his transformation. It happened at about the time he bought the bookstore, just before he met Annie. He had wanted to mark the end of his catch-as-catch-can life—the blue jeans, the secondhand tweed jackets, the thick Frye boots. He wanted, he supposed, to look more like a man of substance. A burgher. The spring the bookstore opened, he’d bought two suits, one seersucker, one a pale gray linen. Then, in the fall, two more suits, light wool ones.

  He’d actually talked to his shrink about these choices, these decisions.

  The shrink was part of his old life. An éminence grise, Graham was given to understand later, who didn’t seem to feel the need to play by what Graham had always understood to be the rules for shrinks. He talked freely about himself to Graham, he shared anecdotes from his own life. He did have a couch in his office, but he and Graham sat opposite each other at a wide desk—like colleagues, Graham thought, working on some shared project. Sometimes his flatulent old dog scratched at the door, and Dr. Fielding got up and let him in. Their conversations on those days were punctuated by Boogan’s occasional prolonged farts.

  He had started seeing Dr. Fielding after he and Frieda split up. First about his guilt over that—over Frieda and Lucas—and later about everything else: his family background, his sexual life, the store and how it was changing everything for him. And then, after she’d entered his world, Annie.

  But from the beginning they had also talked every now and then about clothing, talked about it as an expression of Graham’s wish to be changed, somehow. To be a better person. Or at least a different person.

  He’d stopped seeing the shrink by the time his interest intensified, by the time he began to really know about the quality of the clothes, to care about it—the fabric, the leather, the cut, the stitching. By the time he became, as Annie calls him occasionally, “something of a fop.”

  Those early clothes are all gone now. Even the clothes he’s putting on today are old enough to be a bit worn, but he finds them the more beautiful because of this.

  He looks at himself in the full-length mirror before he leaves for lunch. He’s thinking of how much it would amuse his friend John if he were here, watching Graham costume himself.

  Rather like Karen, he thinks.

  Only different.

  He laughs, quickly. “Enough,” he says aloud, and heads down the narrow, tilting staircase and out the door into the perfect early-summer day—the sky the blue of a child’s bright crayon. The humid air a kiss.

  3

  As she stepped out of the house, her hair still damp from her shower, Annie paused to look over at Karen’s yard, thinking that she would speak to the old woman if she was still outside, that she’d comment somehow on the possibility—yea, the desirability—of getting dressed before going out to meet the world. But Karen was back in her house, apparently. Sam, her fat orange cat, sat alone and imperturbable at the opened gate between her yard and theirs, looking back at Annie in his bored, slightly contemptuous way. She gave him the finger and continued down the driveway past the Caldwells’ dark dining room windows and to the curb, where her car sat waiting.

  Her car. Annie loved this car. It was an old green Citroën van that she’d kept alive at great expense. She could have bought several newer cars for the money she’d spent over the years getting it ready to pass inspection—always a dicey call. She even loved the guys who’d repaired it for her over and over, who groaned dramatically whenever she called to make an appointment. At one point they’d had to replace its entire underside—it was so laced with rust that when you drove through a puddle, water splashed up under your feet.

  As she got in and started the engine, she was swept anew by her sense of deep friendship for it—a pleasure in its smells, in its improvised elements: the radio that turned on and off via a doorbell installed on the dashboard, the seat covers she’d made out of a bright-orange-and-pink-striped Sunbrella fabric when the old plastic covers had cracked and worn through.

  It had served them so well through the years, in so many ways. She had a sheet of plywood and a mattress she could install in it, and in their impoverished early life together, she and Graham had driven up and down the East Coast several times, sleeping at state parks and the occasional rest stop, pulling the curtains across the windows when they wanted to have sex. When the children were young, in the days before mandatory car seats and seat belts, Lucas or Sarah and sometimes a friend or two had sat in folding chairs in the open back space, chairs that occasionally slid sideways, to their delight, if she or Graham took too sharp a turn.

  And if she took the seats out of the back entirely, the space was more than ample to transport her equipment when she traveled to take pictures. Or to haul framed work here or there, which would be her task today.

  It couldn’t last much longer, the van, but she didn’t want to imagine living with another car, a newer one, this one spoke so eloquently to her of the past, of her happiness then, of her hopes for herself. Of her youth.

  In her youth—relative youth: her mid- to late thirties—Annie had seemed on the path to a notable career. She’d had a New York gallery then, and the two solo shows they mounted early on in her professional life were both well received, which had perhaps misled her about how the rest of that life was going to go.

  The first show, called Emergency, consisted of shots she’d taken over about a year and a half in the ER at Boston City Hospital. Closeups of the hands of doctors as they worked, shots of their faces in concentration, alone with whatever they were doing. Shots of
nurses, one standing exhausted at the station between patients, clutching some kind of stained linens, her eyes half shut, another mysteriously running down a long, empty hallway. A picture of a cluster of doctors and nurses working over a patient with an open, bleeding abdominal wound, their bodies forming a kind of human triangle around him, the apex an IV bag held aloft by a nurse kneeling on the bed. A doctor in the hallway, laughing with someone, his scrubs sprinkled lightly with blood. These photographs had resulted in her only book, beautifully produced by a small press in Boston.

  The second New York show was a series of photographs Annie had taken of her mother over several years, beginning even before the first show was up, photographs that recorded the shifts in her face and carriage as she descended into Alzheimer’s disease: the slow withdrawal of alertness, the visible draining of physical energy, the seeping away from her eyes of some sense of vitality and focus, so that in the last few pictures her body seemed stilled, her face devoid of personality or intelligence—a mask. For one of the last shots Annie had set her own infant daughter, Sarah, across her mother’s lap. She lay there, unsupported, frowning in what looked like surprise as she stared up at the old woman, whose hands were set uselessly at her sides, whose eyes showed no sign that she even registered the baby’s presence.

  There were fine reviews of this show, though several, while praising the pictures themselves, were disapproving of the enterprise—“voyeuristic,” one critic called it. The Museum of Fine Arts had purchased one of the photographs for its permanent collection, and it was this material that won Annie grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

  But her oldest sister got wind of it at some point, and there was a stink in the family, a taking of sides that ended in what seemed a permanent estrangement for Annie from everyone but the younger of her two brothers. It wasn’t a great loss for her—she hadn’t been close to any of them, even in childhood—but she did feel some of the shame her sister called down on her. In the last painful telephone call they had, she had said Annie was “cold.” It was as though no time at all had passed since their adolescence together, Audrey’s voice was so full of assured and easy contempt. “You always thought you were so much better than anyone else,” she said. “But you’re not. What you are is cold. You’re a cold little bitch.”

  Annie was proud afterward to have managed some of that coldness in her response: “It’s so good to have your diagnosis, Audrey.”

  But in fact it had been hard to hear Audrey’s judgment, partly because it was so close to what she often thought about herself—the coldness part, anyway. Not, she thought, the bitch part—whatever that really meant. The coldness, though, that cut deeper. But it was something she’d learned over the years to make excuses about to herself. She’d connected it to her being a photographer, to the distance required to do that work, to the need to develop a certain way of looking at people for what could be used, what would be good in a picture, even if it was rooted in a moment of pain, or in what should have been a private joy.

  Her sister’s comment made her begin to wonder: maybe instead of her work fostering in her a certain tendency toward remoteness—or even creating that sense of remoteness—maybe she’d been remote from the start. Maybe she’d become a photographer to find a way of living with that. She recalled that at various times in her life she’d felt she married Graham because he was warm, because her life with him made her more generous than she actually was, connected her to people in a way that would have been impossible if she’d still been on her own.

  All of this pushed at her, and it slowly brought her to what she understood afterward was a kind of failure of nerve. Sarah was a toddler by then, and Annie took that as reason enough to slow down for six or seven years, grateful for the permission that being a mother seemed to give her.

  “But this is just the moment when you don’t slow down,” Frieda had counseled earnestly—Frieda, Graham’s first wife.

  Annie hadn’t paid attention to that. What did Frieda know about Annie’s world? She was, after all, a schoolteacher, a safe job if ever there was one.

  She should have listened. By the time she started to try to come back, things seemed to have changed in the world of photography, and her work wasn’t as hot, as transgressive, as the work getting noticed then, the work of newer artists—Goldin, Mapplethorpe, Mann. The New York gallery that had done her first shows wasn’t interested in what she offered them now, a series of shots of friends—artists, writers, photographers—in their work spaces. This made her doubt herself in a way she hadn’t earlier. When she looked at these photographs after they’d been turned down, they seemed to her banal, they had no reason to exist. Why had she even taken them?

  It made her feel, as she said to Graham one night after dinner, “Just done. Done in. Done for. Done over. Fucked.” She made her voice tough, she didn’t cry, and he poured her another glass of wine in commiseration.

  In response to all this, she had turned to a different kind of project, an easy book Graham suggested to her. A book that would make use of images she and a photographer friend, Natalie Schumer, had taken over the years of parties at the house and events at the bookstore. They supplemented these with new pictures, mostly by Annie. Graham did the text around the images. He’d called it Memoir with Bookshop.

  Mike Hodges, who’d published Annie’s Emergency book, published this one too—mostly, Annie thought, out of friendship. It sold some copies at the store, but never took off beyond that. But she got a local solo show out of some of the pictures at a small museum in Framingham, a show called Friends—and many of them were included in group shows here and there.

  It went like this for a decade or so. Annie kept at it—that was the way she felt about her work during this period. She had about a show a year, most of them group exhibitions in small, mostly local venues—she had stopped even trying the New York galleries.

  But she had tried again with a show she called Couples—shots of odd pairings that intrigued her. One of two old ladies—sisters, Annie guessed, though not twins: one was taller and larger than the other. But they looked very like, and they were wearing matching shapeless old-fashioned raincoats and wide-brimmed rain hats tied neatly under their chins. She caught them on a stormy day just as they stepped, arm in arm, off a curb on Linnaean Street into the rain-slicked street, each looking for traffic in the opposite direction from the other, as synchronous as dancers—as Rockettes! Annie had thought, loving the sense of incongruity.

  Another, of Natalie Schumer’s parents playing cards—something they did every evening, Natalie had told her—had turned out to be one of Annie’s favorites: Natalie’s parents, dressed as if going out somewhere, he in a brown tweed suit, she in a sweater set and pearls, her hair a rigid halo around her head. Both wore puffy slippers on their feet, which Annie was sorry not to have been able to get into the picture.

  In the photo Annie finally chose, Natalie’s mother—Hannah was her name—was just looking up from her cards. They partially blocked her face, but you could see her eyes, the steady murderous gaze at her husband over her hand. He was oblivious, fussily rearranging his own cards. It had made Annie think of a snake one of her brothers had for a while as a pet. He would drop a mouse into its cage every few weeks or so, a mouse that would obliviously putter, putter, putter around for days while the snake slept, occasionally eyeing it, waiting for the hungry moment to strike.

  Again the New York galleries weren’t interested. So Annie made the rounds of several Boston galleries, and the Hughes Gallery, owned by Danielle Obermann, took her on. The show did fairly well, Danielle was pleased with the result, and from that point on, Annie was able to count on Danielle for a show of her own every three or four years, in addition to the odd group show.

  In between these shows, just to make money, she sometimes “rented herself out,” as she thought of it—something she’d done in the early days of her work life too. Weddings, family portraits, graduations
, bar mitzvahs, some of which, of course, yielded images she could use—that she did use—at smaller shows. This time she found she welcomed it. The simplicity. The freedom from any kind of expectation. She found herself thinking maybe she should just settle for this—wasn’t it enough?

  But then a commission had dropped into her lap—a commission from a New England magazine to shoot a series of family farms in Maine, in New Hampshire and Vermont.

  She took it because she was desperate to work, because she needed the money, but it turned out that she loved it, driving around back roads by herself, stopping at farm stands, at old houses that overlooked apple orchards or grazing cows. Knocking on doors, talking to people and then shooting their lives. She’d begun to use color some time before this, and she loved working with it in this project, playing digitally with tones and light in the shots of people in their worn clothes standing in front of the deep red barns, or in the lush early green of hayfields.

  And for her own composing pleasure, she shot a series of photographs with no one in them—empty fields edged by the outlines of trees, the light falling across them in different ways over the course of several days. She shot the sagging outbuildings, the worn wooden fences, the tumbled stone fences running through the woods that had grown up around them. She took some pictures of the interior spaces she’d looked at too. She found herself focusing a lot of attention on these images, on the hard-used homes, the old-fashioned kitchens, the tired furniture.

  Of course, she sent only the peopled shots to the magazine. They paid her the modest fee, and the article came out some months later, a kind of Norman Rockwell presentation of the sturdy folk who still lived off the land in rural New England. It seemed entirely trite to Annie, though she had liked the people in the photos, and the photos themselves, she knew, were fine for their purpose.