by Sue Miller
Left over were the shots she had taken of the barns, the collapsed sheds, the houses, outside and in, everything worn and tired looking, slightly begrimed in some cases. Occasionally a figure was almost visible, usually just at the edge of the frame—someone glimpsed passing by an open doorway, someone turned to do something at a stove, someone leaving a room, having completed a chore—the back of a pants leg, the sole of a shoe, a hand, a blur. But just as often, there was no sign of anyone.
Annie found she liked them, these odd pictures. More than liked them. Even in the completely unpeopled shots, she felt the sense of a presence in the absence, the sense of someone having just departed.
And taking them had been a relief, she realized. The relief of not thinking about herself at all while she shot them. Of not thinking about how the people she was looking at would also be looking at her. Of not thinking about how she would need to explain herself to them. About what it was she wanted from them.
It made her remember the pictures she had taken of her mother. The use she’d made of her. The power she’d had over her. The power you always had, you always exerted, when you photographed someone. Even if they had consented to it.
The innocence of consent! she thought. And the way it was so often wrong to ask it, in one way or another.
At a party at their house, she had taken a picture of a friend of hers, Edith Hodges, standing with her husband Mike—Mike, the publisher who had done her first book and Graham’s memoir; Mike, who had moved only months before out of the large house on Avon Hill he’d shared with Edith and their four children to live with the man he’d fallen in love with.
She’d invited both of them, Mike and Edith, to a party she and Graham were throwing, after checking with each of them ahead of time to be sure this would be all right.
She had spent a part of that evening moving around, taking pictures, as she often did at these gatherings. She’d spotted the two of them standing together in the wide opening between the living room and the kitchen area, so concentrated on each other, so yearning toward each other, that they canceled out everything around them. Edith’s eyes were glittery with unspilled tears. Her hand was on Mike’s sleeve, gripping it so tightly that the fabric was pulled into a kind of knot under her fingers; and he was leaning slightly toward her, as if to shelter her from view.
As she was developing it, Annie could see the power of what she’d captured: the anguished impossibility of their deeply felt bond made visible.
“Of course, if you think it belongs,” Edith had said when Annie showed it to her and asked if she could include it in the Couples show.
Then, because she suddenly understood how wrong she was to have asked this, Annie said, “You don’t have to.”
Edith had tilted her head and smiled tolerantly at Annie, as if to say, Once you’ve asked, of course I have to.
In that moment, Annie had known that she wouldn’t—that she couldn’t—use it. Not without regret, of course.
What she wanted now, she realized, was to give up on people. Or more accurately, to see them differently, to imagine them differently through their absence. To make images that said something about the people who weren’t there. She thought of some of the paintings of Vuillard, or Bonnard—the figures half seen, the rooms themselves often more the subject than the people in them. But rooms suffused with the feeling of a liminal presence. Or with the feeling of an absence—but an absence full of implication, of mystery.
Images that worked like memory, she thought. The way memory is triggered by objects. The way objects, spaces, the arrangements of things, can call up those who aren’t there, can give life to them again. Of course, not the literal life that direct images give, but the sense of the living presence. She thought of the Danish painter Hammershoi—she’d seen several of his paintings in a museum show in New York. She’d liked best the ones that had no people at all in them, gray and clean and infinitely suggestive.
So she started up once more, started up with the feeling she had thought she might have lost forever. The feeling that she knew what she was looking for, what she wanted to make.
And these were the photographs she’d be packing up today, the selection from the hundreds she’d taken. The selection that would be made public, as of Sunday.
Driving through the crowded, sun-dazed streets of triple-deckers to her studio, she was thinking now of Sunday: of the party at the gallery, the wine, the friends and possible collectors she would move around among, make nice with. The exciting pleasure of being at the center of attention in the crowd. The pleasant nervousness as people bent to look closely at what she’d seen, at what she’d made of what she’d seen. The wait after that for sales, for reviews. And then, if the show was a success, maybe the other kind of pleasure, the deeper, rarer kind.
Between now and then, though, she had a few hurdles to leap. Self-constructed hurdles, she reminded herself, but still, hurdles. Hurdles that she’d chosen to distract herself from all her fears around the show.
First, of course, she had to schlep the chosen photographs over to the gallery. And then on Friday—tomorrow!—there was the dinner at the house after Jamie’s reading, the dinner for eleven. Twelve if John Norris could come.
When she’d woken this morning to the light in the bedroom, it had seemed, momentarily, like too much.
“But you’re used to that,” she told herself, speaking aloud now in the car.
And of course she was. Over the years, Graham had come to rely on her to provide for the many gatherings he liked to have in connection with events at the bookstore. The gatherings that she liked to have too. She enjoyed it, almost all of it. The preparation, the cooking itself, the old friends who sat around the big kitchen table in the candlelight, the long, meandering conversations, the comfort, the pleasure of it all.
And always, Graham would stand up at some point in the meal and offer a toast to her. Always he—and sometimes friends who’d stayed on late—helped with the cleanup. And often in the old days—less now—if they hadn’t drunk too much, if she wasn’t too exhausted, she and Graham made love after everyone had gone home.
If she had to pick a central element to their marriage, it might be this. More than their general compatibility, more than their child or their shared sense of humor—this. This nexus, this web: the parties, the bookstore, the food, the friends. Occasionally still, the sex. As she pulled into her parking space in the lot behind the studio building, she was thinking of all this, hoping that tomorrow it would work its usual magic—that Graham would come back to her from wherever it was he’d been.
4
Graham and John Norris met each other in their freshman year of college at the University of Massachusetts, after a drunken party. They had stayed on together in the trashed common room after all the others left. Almost all: one guy remained, snoring steadily on a couch as John and Graham earnestly offered their stories to each other. And discovered that they shared a history: both of their fathers had abandoned them when they were young. Vanished, gone, with no forwarding address and no way to trace them.
John’s father at least had a reason. He’d embezzled some money from the office he worked in. He needed to disappear. He’d left a note for John’s mother, a note “which she didn’t care to share with us,” John said, bitterness in his voice. And it seemed that from time to time in John’s growing up, his father must have sent some money to her, because the family lived in relative comfort, and when he and his sister started college, both of them inexplicably had enough dough for tuition.
Graham’s story was shabbier, but he offered it up. His father hadn’t come home one night for dinner. Graham had three younger brothers, and they were all clamoring for food, so the meal was served without him. In the chaos of eating and cleaning up and doing homework and watching television, no one, not even Graham’s mother, really worried about his father’s absence. He’d often stayed out drinking with friends after work—he was a roofer—not coming home until all of them were
in bed, asleep. One of Graham’s clearest childhood memories was of waking to the sound of his father stumbling up the stairs in the dark, talking loudly, angrily, to himself. This was where Graham first learned all the swear words that became so unremarkable to hear later, in the 1960s and ’70s—fuck, shit, asshole, cunt, prick—but which shocked him then because of the suggestion of violence in his father’s voice, of the darkness and fearfulness of sex.
But this time his father wasn’t there in the morning when they got up either.
Graham’s mother called the Springfield police. Apparently they weren’t concerned. His mother slammed the phone down after the call and turned to her sons, who were waiting for whatever the news would be. “‘Probably off on a toot,’ they said.” She snorted. “Assholes.”
A few days later, after the police finally did a cursory investigation of the disappearance, that’s what they concluded. A toot.
It turned out to be a long toot. A toot that never ended. A toot that left Graham’s mother in a state of free-floating rage, which she directed mostly at her children.
And it stayed directed at them for as long as Graham was living at home. As he put it that first night to John, it was as if he and his brothers were the ones to blame, as if they were the ones who’d left—which was very convenient for her, Graham noted, because as a matter of fact, they were still right there and available to take the brunt of her anger.
“She hit you?” John asked, incredulous. Graham had laughed at his surprise. She had, of course she had, but mostly in a way that made Graham feel sorry for her—quick slaps at one or another of their faces, a wild swing at the back of someone’s head or his butt as he walked past. Laughable, really. And ineffectual. So sometimes he was able to tell himself it wasn’t really so bad.
But then he’d remember some incident. Once, his mother sitting on one of his younger brothers in the front hallway, screaming, lifting his shoulders up repeatedly so that his head banged the floor over and over.
Graham had been watching afternoon television in the living room. The laugh track rose loudly enough over his mother’s voice to allow him to pretend to ignore her. He remembered that he’d actually tried to justify her rage to himself, thinking that after all, his brother had stolen money from her purse—what did he expect? And maybe his brother was thinking that too, because he wasn’t resisting their mother, though he was of an age and a size that if he’d wanted to, he could have.
Once, drunk, she’d really come at Graham, but he was able to pin her arms down against her sides. Trapped in this odd embrace, she had leaned her head against his chest. She started to cry, as though he really was holding her, as though he were comforting her.
This had repulsed him. He’d let go of her and turned quickly to leave, to flee. At the door he’d looked back. She was standing there, wailing, as helpless as a child, and all he could feel in that moment was a perverse joy. He was glad she’d hit him, glad she seemed to dislike him so. It meant he didn’t have to feel sorry for her. He could leave without guilt now, and when the time came to really leave, to leave forever, he would be able to escape without guilt too.
He did escape, as soon as he finished high school. He saw her twice again in his life. Once when one of his brothers got out of prison, a seven-year sentence for trafficking heroin. There was a party for him, and he wanted Graham to be there. And when his next oldest brother died of cancer at thirty-two, Graham went to his funeral. He was married to Frieda by then, and Lucas was a baby, so he brought them along, a kind of shield.
He’s late for his lunch with John—he can see him as he enters the dining room at Harvest, a small man, bald, bent over the table reading something in the light that’s falling in from the patio. It’s crowded and noisy out there under the spreading tree, where everyone wants to sit in this weather. The rumble of conversation and the clinking of implements drift in through the opened doors. It’s quieter here, inside. Dimmer. More elegant. Just a sprinkling of people, couples mostly.
Graham remembers abruptly the funkier way the restaurant had looked years earlier, with the big central bar taking up about half of this room. One night, in that version of things, he’d seen Marianne Faithfull, middle-aged then, sitting unnoticed and alone at a small table, drinking, smoking. This is one of the things Graham loves about having lived in the same place for so long—the layers of time you’re always moving through.
John’s concentration is so intense that he doesn’t notice Graham until he is standing next to John’s table. A technical article of some kind, Graham can see by the charts and footnotes, even as John feels his presence and looks up. He rises, smiling broadly. He hugs Graham, arms reaching up to pat him on the back.
“Apologies,” Graham says as they both sit down.
John is still smiling. He has a boy’s unlined, open face, though it always looks slightly worried in repose. “It was ever thus,” he says.
This isn’t quite true, Graham thinks. Not the ever part anyway. Occasionally thus would be more accurate. But John’s words were spoken in a tone of wry affection, and it was the affection that Graham heard most clearly. “I know, I know,” he says.
They compliment each other on the health of their appearances. As they’re looking over the menu, talking about what to order, John asks about the bookstore and Graham talks about how much better they’re doing, about the possible resurgence of the independent. John mentions Annie, and Graham tells him about her show, for a moment feeling the pang again of his forgetting it. “It’s being mounted as we speak. How long are you staying? Maybe you can get to the opening. Sunday afternoon.”
John shakes his head. “That won’t work. I have stuff right through the afternoon, and then as soon as I’m done, I have to leave. I have permission to attend this conference on the condition that I get my ass back up to Maine the second it’s over.”
“What a taskmaster.”
They are talking about Betsy, whom John married as soon as he graduated from college—at about the same time Graham married Frieda. The difference being that John and Betsy are still married and have three children.
The waiter comes, and they order their food—fish for John, a salad for Graham. They talk about their kids—John’s three are all in math or tech stuff, are all doing well. He speaks with pride about each of them.
It’s a blur for Graham. He doesn’t understand their work any more than he understands John’s, and he’s distracted anyway. He’d like to talk to John about the situation he’s in with Rosemary. He wants help. He wants advice. Or perhaps not advice. Perhaps just sympathy.
“And Sarah?” John says now. “Lucas?”
So Graham takes his turn with this instead—his kids, two of them, one from his marriage with Frieda, one with Annie. Lucas, doing well in publishing in New York, Sarah working for an NPR talk show in California. “I’m not sure exactly what it is she does. Kind of research, I guess. She’s happy though. I think. Maybe a bit afloat.”
He doesn’t speak of his ongoing sadness for her—he isn’t sure he has a right to it. She is happy, he thinks, but she seems to him to live mostly for her work and for the long hikes she takes in the Sierras each summer with a group of people she knows from college.
“Yeah,” John says. “Probably not much of a career path there.”
Graham smiles. “She’d be so full of contempt if she heard you say that. ‘How fucking bourgeois can you be?’”
“Yeah, well, watch me,” John says.
They grin at each other. After a moment, Graham says, frowning, “It’s just I don’t think she has a dating life at all.”
“Maybe she’s gay,” John offers cheerfully.
“She could still have a dating life.”
“Yes. Of course.” John waves his hand, as if dismissing his own stupidity. “Of course she could.” After a moment, his face thoughtful, he says, “But it might be a reason she wouldn’t talk to you about it.”
They speculate about this—if Sarah were gay, would she
feel comfortable telling Annie and Graham? Would one of John’s boys, telling him and Betsy such a thing? They assess their readiness for this, their openness to it. They agree Graham would be easier about it. They wonder about it: Is this because Graham is more relaxed about his kids than John is about his? Because Graham is more relaxed, period? Or is it because Sarah is a girl, and somehow, because they’re both straight men, lesbianism would be easier for either of them to accept than homosexuality?
They think so, they think that’s right. “You just can’t escape it, can you?” John says. “Straightness.”
“Maleness,” Graham says, feeling his sense of shame descending again. Or maybe, he thinks, just self-pity.
The food comes and they start to eat, reporting to each other on how things taste. Graham is a foodie, mostly because Annie is a good cook. He always finds the food here only adequate, though also seemingly ambitious to be better than that. Today, as usual, he’s slightly disappointed, and John makes fun of him for his impossible standards. “It’s a salad, Graham. Cut it some slack.”
After a few moments Graham sets his fork down and says, “I’m in a bit of trouble, my old friend.”
“Uh-oh.” John’s gaze up at him is quick. “The usual?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, women.”
“That’s not usual.”
“No? Wasn’t that what ended things with Frieda?”
“That was decades ago, John. A different world. Different times.”
“Okay, but wasn’t there something earlier with Annie too?”
“God, one thing.”
“Okay,” John says. He has another bite of fish. He looks at Graham again. He’s frowning, serious—his almost smooth face that of a troubled child. “Still, I remember it.”
Graham is silent for a long moment. Finally he says, “This is different. This is the first time in a long, long time.”