Monogamy

by Sue Miller

  “Okay. I take you at your word,” John says. “So. What was the draw?”

  Graham explains the history of the thing, how he’d more or less backed into it. John’s face has shifted, become faintly amused, but he’s listening.

  “I went a couple of times more,” Graham says. “It was kind of like drinking too much. I’d tell myself I really should stop, and then I’d tell myself, well, just this once more and then I will.”

  “The sex was great.” This is a question.

  “Sure.” Then, because this seems tepid, “Yes. It was good.” His tone is dismissive, but he’s thinking of the shock of Rosemary’s soft, lush flesh, so different from Annie’s. The amazement of entering her. The unqualified, undrugged hard-on he had that first time.

  “And you don’t need to tell me, because I know, I know it was because it was new, it was different. And then”—he will think later in the day with chagrin of saying this—“amongst other things, she had shaved her pussy. Or, I suppose, waxed it.”

  Why is he telling John this? Why isn’t he telling him also how it reminded him instantly of Sarah as a little girl, the deep, naked cleft? How alarmed he was at first? How he wasn’t sure, for a moment, that he would be able to go on?

  “Ah.” John nods his head knowingly.

  Graham sits back. He’s surprised at John’s response. “Well, what’s that about?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I guess it’s . . . Well, I have been led to believe that it’s the norm now.”

  “It is.”

  “But why? When did this happen?”

  “While you and I were sound asleep, my friend,” John says, and a smile changes his worried-looking face. He adds, “It’s from porn.”

  “Yeah?”

  John makes a small noise, a kind of uncomfortable laugh. Then he sets his fork down and says, “The thing is, in most porn now, women are bare. I mean, no pubic hair at all. It’s, you know, it’s useful, in porn. It’s so everyone can see everything. And I guess that’s more or less where kids—men in particular—learn about sex now. From porn. So that’s their expectation, they’re accustomed to it. That’s what they want. At home too, as it were. It’s sexier to them.” He shrugs, making a face. “So slowly it becomes the norm. It probably ends up feeling sexier to the women, too.”

  “But this is a woman who’s my age. Maybe five years younger.”

  “What can I tell you? Maybe she celebrated getting divorced by getting a wax job.”

  The waiter appears at the table to ask them if everything’s all right. Yes, they say. Yes. They smile. Delicious. He nods, approvingly, and leaves.

  After a long moment, Graham laughs. He leans forward and says, “How do you know all this crap?”

  “Three boys, my friend. I know so much more than I ever wanted to about how sex works today.”

  Graham laughs again. John smiles ruefully across at him. “It seems to me it’s a little . . . sad, in some ways.”

  “It is, I think.”

  They both pick up their forks and knives and return to the food.

  Graham says, “I can’t believe we’re talking about this. Over lunch.”

  “I know. I know. We should be more high-minded.”

  “It’s me,” Graham says, feeling it: John is high-minded. “My bad. My fault.”

  “If it’s any comfort, I think of you as fairly high-minded. It’s just this thing, this thing you have with women.”

  “C’mon, John, I don’t have a thing. It’s been a long time anyway. And then this . . . mess.” They are quiet for a few moments, eating.

  “Have you ever cheated?” Graham says. “On Betsy?”

  John shakes his head. “I haven’t.” He shrugs. “I just feel so . . . bound to her. It’s unthinkable, really.” He smiles. “On the other hand, I have thought about it every now and then. Maybe more than that.” He grins at Graham. “So, actually I guess it is. Thinkable.”

  Graham returns the smile. He has finished eating. He sits back, watching his friend.

  John says, “If I didn’t feel I’d be doing it to her, in some sense—Bets, I mean—maybe then I could. But that’s what it would feel like.” He frowns. “Maybe this is part of my response to the missing-father thing. Just, I always have to be there.” His face changes. He grins. “Uxorious. Remember you called me that once?”

  Graham shakes his head. “I don’t.”

  “Well, you did. I had to look it up. And I suppose I am.”

  After a moment, Graham says, “I feel that bond to Annie, too. That need to be there. I do.”

  John frowns. “So why this other person? Why isn’t it enough, with Annie?”

  That isn’t the point, Graham thinks. It isn’t the point. “It is enough, with Annie,” he says. “It was something else I wanted with Rosemary.”

  “What?” John’s hands open on the table.

  Graham shrugs. “Excitement, I suppose.” Maybe even this very anguish, he thinks. “And it could be that if she’d been more interesting at that level, I’d actually want more now, instead of just wanting out.” He is trying not to think about that, wanting more. He is, after all, right to want out. Right for all the reasons he didn’t let himself think of when he wanted in.

  Or didn’t want in so much as allow himself to respond to her. He suddenly sees this clearly. It startles him. God. So even in this, he hasn’t been an adventurer, a seeker, so much as a schlump. No, a schlemiel. He slowly shakes his head. He made nothing happen.

  It happened to him. Because he let it.

  John’s face has sobered. He says, gently, “So, you plan to end it.”

  “Well, I’ve tried.” He clears his throat. “I have. But it seems apparent to me that she . . . she would prefer not to.”

  “Ah,” John says.

  “It’s because of the divorce, I know it. Her divorce, which is less than a year old. And I understand it. I understand it. I did it too after the divorce from Frieda. That’s just what divorced people do, at first. I wanted to be with someone, and for a while I grabbed at whoever happened along. I honestly thought I loved them all. Seriatim, of course. I would have sworn I did. And I think that’s what Rosemary—her name is Rosemary—I think that’s what she’s feeling. It doesn’t have much to do with me, I don’t think. I was just the one who happened to be there.”

  “But also the one who went along with it.”

  “Yes,” Graham says. “As is my wont, as you so kindly point out.”

  They sit in silence for a few minutes, looking out to the patio, which has slowly emptied out, only two couples left.

  “I’m sorry,” John says. “I just . . .”

  Graham sighs. “Okay. I mean, you’re right. I did go along with it. I did. But we were coming from different . . . well, with different expectations, I guess.”

  “Okay.” John leans forward, his face earnest again. “So let her know that. That she misunderstood you. That you misunderstood her.”

  “I’ve tried. I’ve tried to be honest.”

  John smiles.

  “I know. I know.” Graham does know. He’s not honest. He wants too much for everyone to like him to be honest.

  Annie is honest. She tells the truth. She’s told him, honestly, about things she’s done that she regrets. People she’s hurt. About how she struggles with her feelings of reserve. Of “chilliness,” she’s called it more than once. And she told him, after all, about the lovers she had after they met. Even about someone later in their marriage that she never slept with, but was attracted to.

  But Graham is trying, anyway, to be honest now with John. Trying not to excuse himself.

  The waiter comes over and clears their plates away. He asks if they need anything else. Coffee, John says, and Graham asks for some too.

  “You have to talk to her,” John says, when the waiter has left.

  “But I have.”

  “More. You have to be mean.” He shakes his fist and then smiles again at Graham. “A litt
le tiny bit mean. I know that’s hard for you, but you’re going to have to. Tell her Annie is your first love and your last love, and that’s not going to change.”

  “She is. She is. Well, not the first, of course. But yes, the last. She’s . . . I love her. I love her still. I’m not interested in a life with anyone else. At this point I’m not even interested in sex with anyone else. I just feel . . .”

  John waits for a moment, and then he says gently, “That’s it, then. That’s all you have to say.”

  “Yeah.” They sit in a silence that feels warm and enveloping to Graham. On the walk back to the bookstore, he will think of the word eased. He’s feeling it now, that ease, and it makes him understand how anxious he’s been for these weeks.

  “So what’s the conference?” he asks.

  It’s on artificial intelligence, and John talks about it for a while—it seems, to Graham, with the same eager tone he was using himself when he was telling John about Rosemary earlier. But this is just so much better than his own tired tale. He feels an increasing sense of shame as John goes on. He thinks again of the cheesiness of telling him about Rosemary’s bare pussy.

  The coffee comes, and then after that, the check. Graham picks it up quickly. They argue for a moment, but Graham succeeds in holding on to it and setting down his credit card. While they wait for its return, they talk in a more desultory way about the health of friends, illnesses. People they both know who’ve died. How impossible it is to believe in, death. That it’s striking so close.

  John describes a funeral he thought was “wonderful.” His word. He’d like something like that when he dies, he says.

  Graham looks at his friend, so boyish, so . . . unmarked, he thinks. “You’re crazy even to be thinking about it,” he says.

  As they are standing on the street saying goodbye, Graham remembers to ask John about the dinner party the next night, whether he can come.

  He’d love to, John says. He might be a little late—there’s a cocktail hour after the lectures are over, and he feels obliged to make an appearance—but he’d love to. They embrace, and turn away from each other.

  Graham walks slowly through the gentle air down Mount Auburn Street, aware of a sense of relief. (It’s now that the word eased comes to him.) It doesn’t matter, it never does, exactly what he and John say to each other, it doesn’t matter what advice John gives him—in this case it is, after all, the same advice he’s been giving himself for weeks now. What matters is their history together, the way they understand each other. John can say anything to him, really, and Graham will hear in it the affection, the loyalty, that comes along with the words.

  But there was that one time, he remembers now, when this wasn’t so. How much it wounded him! A dinner years earlier, a dinner with John at his and Annie’s house. They’d had champagne to celebrate their being together, they toasted one another, they talked about their lives, their work.

  Eventually, as usual, he and John came back to the central topic between them: their lost fathers, and how it affected them to be abandoned, how it stayed with them. About the various ways they acted out as young men. Annie was mostly quiet at this point, listening, watching them. As the evening passed, the wax from the candles had made odd shapes on the table, and she was idly picking at some of these shapes.

  They talked about their relationships to their mothers. Graham’s, of course, was by now a nonrelationship. John’s was one of resentment. He’d always felt that his mother might have known where his father was, at least some of the time. But she’d died, and if she did know, that information had died with her.

  After a long, silent moment, John had said, “It’s so odd, isn’t it, that with these useless jerks for fathers, it’s our mothers we’re so pissed off at.”

  Graham offered his theory: the problem was that they both felt their mothers should have been better at being women. At being wives. “They should have held on to our fathers for us,” he said. “It was all their fault.”

  They were quiet for a moment. Then Graham said, “Lost boys, lost boys.” He smiled. “It excuses everything we’ve ever done wrong, of course. We wuz done to first.”

  “Oh, everyone was done to,” John had said.

  “I suppose,” Graham said. “You know the Larkin poem. ‘They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad.’”

  “God, that’s in a poem?” John said.

  Graham stood up, his chair sliding back making a harsh sound on the floor, and recited it from memory.

  “The English scholar, strutting his stuff,” John said.

  “But it’s the only stuff I have,” Graham said. “And there are so few opportunities in life to strut it.”

  He sat back down. They were all silent a moment. Graham could see that Annie was stifling a yawn. Her neck corded, her eyes silvered with tears.

  John said, “It doesn’t save you from being an asshole, though—having been fucked up.”

  “You talkin’ to me?” Graham said in what he thought of as a tough-guy voice.

  “I’m talking to—or maybe I’m talking about—all of us. Just, it’s an old tired story, that’s all, the damaged person who can’t be held responsible for the damage he causes.”

  Graham felt shamed. He felt John had misunderstood him. “You know I wasn’t serious, right?”

  “I don’t know,” John said. “You ask too much of other people, I think sometimes.”

  “Like what?”

  John had paused then. It was as though he knew he was about to hurt Graham. He looked at him across the table in the flickering light, and then he shrugged. “Forbearance, I guess. If not forgiveness.”

  Graham had felt Annie’s eyes on him. He looked at her. She was watching. They were all solemn for a moment.

  Then John had changed the subject, and they were on to something else—the kids, or politics, or the Red Sox—and Annie got up to make some coffee, which it turned out no one wanted. Graham opened another bottle of wine, and Annie excused herself, went up to bed.

  They sat for a long time after that, he and John, talking. They talked while they did the dishes too, their voices pitched loud over the clatter of it—talking, laughing together.

  A while after Graham had come to bed, Annie spoke to him, almost a whisper in the dark. “What did John mean, do you think, when he said you ask so much of everyone? Their forbearance.”

  Graham was startled. He’d assumed she was asleep when he lay down next to her. He had been on his side, curved toward her, but now he flopped onto his back and looked at the ceiling, at the faint light from Karen’s back porch slanting across it. He was glad Annie couldn’t see his face. Finally he said, “Just, I think, that I’m a loud fat man who spends more of his time away from home, glad-handing everyone I see, than I should. I drink too much. I have to have everyone’s love. So, yes, forbearance is called for. Maybe forgiveness too.”

  That’s it, isn’t it? he thinks now, walking along Mount Auburn Street. A greedy, fat, entitled baby. Everything born of some unsatisfied need on his part.

  He thinks of the forgivable entitlement of babies, of their great need. He remembers the perfect faces of his own children in infancy, their fragile heads moving with a desperate snuffling motion as they sought the breast. Little animals. He thinks of Frieda with Lucas, Annie with Sarah, both of them seemingly so lost when the children were little. “I don’t even have a mind anymore,” Annie said once, picking up Sarah to nurse her.

  Annie, with fat full breasts! He had been so surprised by that, the newness of it. Remembering this, his joy in it, he feels again the downward pull of the task awaiting him—the job of making it right again.

  He passes the glass front of the store and turns into its doorway.

  The bookstore. He loves it. He loves walking through the door. He loves the tables where the fiction and nonfiction books that the staff like best are set out. He loves the deep, comfortable chairs scattered around, and the pleasure of seeing people in them, reading under the floor lamps. He lo
ves the low-ceilinged room upstairs where the art books, the books on photography and travel, are kept. He loves the wooden counter running in front of the big plate-glass windows that look out on Mount Auburn Street, he loves the office in the back with its long single desk where they all sit in a row, facing their computers. He loves the kinds of conversations they have—about writers, about wonderful passages that must be read aloud, about fictional characters. Conversations often broken off midstream by something someone has to do, but always, he feels, important. He loves unboxing the books, pulling them out, looking at the typeface, the cover, the author photo, the acknowledgments.

  He waves at Bill behind the counter, then goes to the office to tell Georgie and Emily and Erica he’s here. Georgie passes him a message slip. “A woman,” she says. “She didn’t give her name. She said you’d know.” He pockets it without looking at it. He talks to Emily about the numbers to order from Knopf, he talks to Erica about arrangements for Jamie’s reading.

  He goes out to the floor to make himself useful by calling the people whose special orders have come in. In between a couple of these calls, he takes out the message slip Georgie gave him and reads it. “It’s Thursday,” it says, in Georgie’s neat handwriting. She’s put quotes around the words, and there are three question marks on the line where the caller’s name should go.

  He makes his next call to Rosemary. When she answers, he says, “I’m not going to make it today.”

  “Oh,” she says. “I’ll miss you.”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Is it hard to talk right now?”

  “It’s always hard at the store.” Though at the moment, everyone out here is busy. He could say whatever he wanted and no one would hear. “But we do need to talk.”

  “Good,” she says. “When?”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  “When?” she says.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow. There’s a lot to discuss.”

  She’s quiet for a long moment. Then she says, “That sounds ominous.”

  He doesn’t know what to say. Finally he offers, “Well, maybe it is. A little.”