Monogamy

by Sue Miller

  When she hung up the phone, Frieda stood for perhaps a minute, sightless, deaf. Then she crossed the room and sank onto the piano bench, her back to the keys, to the possibility of music, to the possibility of anything further. After a moment she opened her mouth to shout, to scream, but nothing at all came out.

  11

  Frieda tried to call Lucas at his office a little after eleven, but he was in a meeting at the time with the editor in chief and the publisher, trying to persuade them to raise the amount he could offer for a first novel he was bidding on competitively. When the meeting was over, when he stopped in his office, he saw the note from his assistant on his desk: “Your mother called; wants you to call her back.” But he was worried about being late for lunch with Ian Pedersen, one of his newest authors. New to him, but probably in terms of age, oldest. Seventy at the least, Lucas thought. He was in town and probably needed some encouragement. He’d been divorced recently, for the third time, and it had “knocked him for a loop,” he’d told Lucas on the phone. He’d be longer than he’d thought getting this novel in.

  In his hurry not to be late for Ian, Lucas left the office without calling Frieda.

  He wasn’t late, though Ian, who was always early, was there ahead of him, sitting in a booth facing the door, his glass of wine already half gone.

  He was late getting back from that lunch, and late, therefore, getting to the meeting about next year’s spring list. He wasn’t able to call Frieda back until after three. He didn’t worry about this, although it was a bit unusual for Frieda to call him at work. But she had, a few times. Once when she sprained her ankle, once when she was upset because someone had broken into the Whittier Street apartment in her absence and, among some other junk, stolen an old guitar of his, one he didn’t even remember owning.

  “Oh, thank God it’s you!” she said. “Oh, God, Lucas.”

  He was suddenly alert. An accident, he thought. Cancer. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Graham,” she said. “He had a heart attack.”

  “And?” he asked, already irritated, irritated at the way she dramatized things, withheld the important information, buried the lead. “How is he?”

  “He died!” she said, sounding surprised herself at this news.

  Lucas was standing, looking out the window at the deep valley below him that was Broadway. He could hear the honking as it floated up to him. He had a momentary sense of absence from his own body, as if he were suspended in the air above what he was looking at. Later he couldn’t remember what questions he asked or how his mother had answered them. Somehow he learned that his father had died in the night, that Annie had called his mother to tell her the news this morning, that Frieda didn’t know whether there was a service planned or if so, when. He was aware of thinking, as he listened to her, as he slowly came back to the present, that this was very much a secondhand version.

  He asked about Annie, how she was doing, and his mother said, “Badly, I imagine. But it’s hard to tell.”

  Then—too late, too late—he thought to ask her how she was doing.

  “Oh, I’m a complete mess,” she said, her voice suddenly wobbly.

  “Would you like me to come? Now, I mean?”

  “Wouldn’t that be difficult? To get away?”

  “I could come for a day or two, certainly. Part of the weekend, anyway.”

  “And what about Jeanne?”

  What about Jeanne? His wife, an actress, French. Mostly, at this point in her career, doing voiceover work and commercials. She had a cordial but not close relationship with Frieda, whose emotional valence was incomprehensible to her. And though he had made the case for his mother to Jeanne many times—talked about the hard things she’d been through—Lucas was comforted, too, by Jeanne’s retroactive defending of him, of the childhood he’d had, living with Frieda, yearning for Graham.

  “Jeanne wouldn’t be able to come. It’d just be me.”

  “Well, I know Annie would be pleased if you came.”

  “We’re not talking about Annie, Mom. We’re talking about you.”

  She was silent a moment. Then she said, “Well then, I’d like it very much.”

  “Good. I’ll take an early train in the morning. Be there well before noon, I would think.”

  After he’d hung up, he stood for a long time at the window in his office. In his mind he saw his father, that big, happy man, as he had looked when Lucas turned up at the bookstore after school on the days his father had him.

  How had he gotten there? He supposed early on someone had picked him up at school and dropped him off. Someone—Annie?

  Not likely Frieda. She was teaching by then, out in the suburbs.

  But what he remembered best was later, when he was allowed to walk down to the store by himself after school, a walk that seemed endless, and bitterly cold in winter. But he had loved it: the sight of the old yellow overhead lights in the store, entering its warmth, everyone greeting him. His father coming out from the office or behind the counter, calling his name. “Lucas! Here he is, at last. My arctic explorer. My brave young man.” Swooping him up, asking him questions, making jokes. Later, he’d settle Lucas in one of the big chairs with a book, or his homework, and every time he passed, he’d set his hand on Lucas’s head.

  How could he be gone? He was at the center of everyone’s life. Frieda’s, Sarah’s, Annie’s.

  Then he was trying to imagine it, the way Frieda had said it happened: Annie, waking up, finding Graham lifeless in the bed next to her. He couldn’t. He couldn’t get beyond that point, that image.

  Someone knocked on the doorframe. His assistant, Caroline. She was tall, blond, soft-spoken. She wore her hair in long braids that she pinned up in a bun at the back of her head, like some Scandinavian princess. She had printed out the manuscripts that two of his authors had emailed in—manuscripts he supposed now he’d be taking with him to Boston on the train.

  He told her about his father.

  Why? She hadn’t even known he had a living father. But sympathy leapt to her face, transformed it. Tears stood in her eyes.

  She put her hand on his arm. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  And how odd that now, with this simple gesture, he was so stricken with his sense of loss that he had to turn away from her. “Thank you,” he said, in an unsteady voice. When she left, he closed the door and sat down at his desk.

  He was thinking about this on the subway ride home, standing close to the door, hemmed in, gripping the overhead rail and not seeing anything, anyone, around him. Why did Caroline’s sympathetic but essentially rote response reach him, when the news from his mother hadn’t?

  Because his mother had her own sorrow, he supposed, and needed him. That was the impediment, wasn’t it, to feeling his own grief? He had a quick flash of the resentment he’d felt for his mother as a teenager, a young man.

  Frieda was good, she was honorable. She’d sacrificed so much for him. Even the job she’d taken, teaching history at the Canfield School, was work she did for him, so that he could attend high school there tuition-free when the time came, since none of the parental figures in his life had, as his father put it, two dimes to rub together.

  He’d minded it, he’d minded it all. Minded being alone with her as a child, exiled from Graham, minded the sense that she needed him, minded driving out to the high school with her, minded her cheerful greeting when they ran into each other on the campus there. Minded the guilt he felt about resenting all this.

  But here it was: there was a sadness at his mother’s core that he had felt the wish to lift as a child, the impossible wish to lift. And because he could never achieve that, what he wanted as he grew older was to be free of it. To separate himself from it, and therefore from her. He’d tried boarding one year at Canfield, and he’d spent much of his adolescence hanging around at Annie and Graham’s house.

  He remembered abruptly a winter afternoon, sitting at the table in the big room talking to Annie, trying to ex
plain his feelings about Frieda to her. Snow was falling steadily outside, thick, heavy flakes. The bare branches of the lilac bushes in the backyard were outlined in white. He was saying that he wished that Graham had never left his mother. “I mean, not that I don’t like you as a stepmother, but it’s like she’s never going to get over it.” He’d gone on for a while, listing his complaints, slowly becoming aware of Annie’s silence, of the sense that she was just waiting, waiting for him to stop so she could talk.

  So he stopped; and Annie told him that it was more complicated than that. That he should try to understand, now that he was a little older, how complicated it was. That it was Frieda who had left Graham, not the other way around. That Graham had been unfaithful to Frieda. Did he understand what that meant?

  Yeah, he had said irritably. Of course.

  She went on, explaining the way the world was then, the great experiment of the 1960s that Frieda had turned against, that had made her feel she needed to end her marriage to Lucas’s father.

  After that, his father had spoken about it with him too—because of course Annie had talked to him about her conversation with Lucas. What he said to his son was that Frieda was “blameless.”

  Lucas never forgot the word. Blameless.

  It only made things worse for him, to be told that he had no right to his anger at his mother—which was how he heard all this. It wasn’t until he went away to college—went away legitimately, as he thought of it—that he had the sense of shedding it all, Frieda’s sadness and his responding anger at her.

  But today, he realized, he was feeling it again. He saw that somehow his father’s death would have to be, for him, first about his mother. That her sorrow would have precedence over his, would once again get in the way of what he wanted to feel, cleanly, selfishly: grief. Grief for the father he had loved so unequivocally, the one he held, always, blameless.

  12

  Annie wasn’t sure how the afternoon passed. Mostly, she stayed in the house. At one point, for no particular reason, she went outside and weeded in the backyard, but then didn’t have the energy or willpower to pick up the little heaps of wilting green she’d left everywhere on the bricks.

  The funeral home called and asked her to come in and fill out some forms, so she drove over and signed her name several times. The young man in the office there offered her an array of containers for Graham’s ashes, and, confused—who cared, really?—she chose one.

  Her friend Edith came over late in the afternoon with takeout food from Formaggio and a bottle of wine. “In case you feel like eating,” she said. “Or maybe just drinking.”

  Annie was glad to see her, glad to be held, to have to talk; but also glad when she left, relieved to let herself sag back down into silence, into the nothingness she felt, which she knew was just the holding off of a grief that promised to be, as it threatened every now and then, overwhelming.

  Around seven, she was still sitting at the table with a glass of Edith’s wine. She had set out the cartons of food and eaten a few bites of each one. Without bothering to put the food away, she had poured herself a second glass and had sat down again to drink it slowly.

  Shadows had started to gather in the backyard when she heard the footsteps on the front porch.

  Graham! Her breath seemed to stop.

  For the three or four seconds that followed, she understood that everything that had happened wasn’t real, that it had been a dream, a dream she’d had of his death. And now—of course!—he was coming home to her in life, just as he always did. Her breath seemed to stop.

  But then the doorbell rang.

  She thought of not answering, of just sitting there in the empty room, her heart still pounding, waiting for the footsteps to retreat.

  But some sense of duty or obligation moved in her, and after those few seconds more, she got up and went to the front of the house.

  When she opened the door, John Norris stood on the other side of the screen, beaming at her. He raised his arms and waggled the flowers he had in one hand and the bottle of wine in the other.

  She was confused for a moment, and then remembered: of course, he’d been invited to dinner—yesterday, when Graham was alive—and because she’d forgotten that this morning, he hadn’t ever been uninvited.

  By the time she reached out to push open the screen door, his smile had dropped. He clearly knew, by how she looked and was dressed, by the deep silence in the house, that something was very wrong.

  “Come in, John,” she said.

  “Did I get the day wrong?” he asked. “What is it?” He came into the hall. “What’s happening?”

  “Graham died, John. He had a heart attack.”

  “Christ! Annie!” He looked stupid, Annie thought. Almost funny, standing there with his mouth open, his hands, still full of his useless gifts, dropped down by his sides.

  “Here,” she said, wanting to help him, reaching for the flowers, the wine. He mistook her meaning, he stepped forward and embraced her. She felt the wine bottle cold on her back. After a moment, she stepped away, out of his arms, and he stepped back too.

  This time when Annie reached for his gifts, he ceded them to her, his face blank. Then he lifted his empty hands. “But when did this happen? I just saw him.” He looks like a confused little boy, she thought.

  “I know,” she said. “Come on. Come on back and sit with me.” She started back toward the kitchen, and he followed her.

  “I was having wine,” she said. “Would you like some?”

  “Sure.” He sat down at the big table. “Sure. That’s fine.”

  “I’m sorry I don’t have dinner for you. Are you hungry?” She set John’s bouquet and the bottle of wine down on the counter. She pulled her already opened bottle from the refrigerator. “I have some takeout stuff,” she said, gesturing at the open white cartons. “A friend brought them by.”

  No, no, he wasn’t hungry, John was saying. “But what happened? When did he die?”

  She put a glass down in front of him, and as she poured wine into it, she said, “Last night. Last night, in his sleep.” She noted with a kind of distant curiosity that her hand was shaking, her breath was still coming unevenly. She set the bottle down and sat kitty-corner from John, who was at the head of the table, in Graham’s chair. His face was still a mixture of perplexity and shock.

  She told him a few of the details, aware of a sense of practice in this—she was getting numb to these words, these words that had been so unbearable to speak the first few times.

  “It’s just unbelievable,” he said. He still hadn’t touched his glass.

  Annie leaned forward and gently pushed it toward him. “I’m sorry I didn’t remember to let you know when I canceled the rest of them.”

  “What?” He leaned forward, squinting at her.

  “When I canceled the dinner party. I forgot you were coming. That Graham had asked you.”

  He sat back and nodded. After a long moment, he said, “God, we just had lunch.”

  “I know,” Annie said. After a few seconds, she thought to say, “I’m really glad you saw him.”

  “Yeah.” His voice was still full of a kind of puzzlement. Then he looked sharply at her, as if really seeing her for the first time. “Did he tell you about it?”

  “He did. Not much. He’s always just so happy to see you. He’s always so . . . buoyant afterward.” She shook her head. “Listen to me, talking about him in the present tense.”

  “Well. Of course. It’s just impossible to think of him gone.”

  She smiled at John. “As if he were more or less too alive to die.”

  “I suppose,” John said.

  “If only it were so,” she said. And then, because she didn’t want to weep in front of John, she said, “No. It’s just not . . . believable, is it?” They sat quietly for a moment. “I almost thought you were him. When I heard you.”

  John frowned, confused.

  “Just now, coming onto the front porch,” she clarified.<
br />
  “Oh!” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, no. I don’t mean . . . It’s just that I keep expecting him, I suppose.”

  John nodded slowly. “To walk in,” he said.

  “To walk in and start talking.” She laughed, awkwardly.

  “Yes,” he said. He sipped the wine. They sat, not saying anything for a long moment. John looked over at her. “He was happy, you said.”

  “He was. He really was.”

  “Hmm.” He swallowed again.

  “And you know,” Annie said, “he’d been a little . . . distracted, I guess you’d say, recently. So I was pleased that he seemed . . . back to normal. We had a lovely dinner. For which I have you to thank, I suspect. Whatever it was you talked about, it did the proverbial trick.”

  “Oh, it was nothing much. You know.”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “That feeling of important things being said, and then you can’t really remember any of it. Just that it felt that way. Important, I mean.”

  “Yes, kind of like that.” Then, after a long moment, “He hadn’t been . . . sick or anything. No warning.”

  “No. I mean, he was overweight, of course. He was on statins, so . . .” She lifted her shoulders. “But nothing that would make you think . . .”

  “Yeah.” They sat in silence. John seemed to be watching his own hand turn his wineglass slowly.

  Because she didn’t know what else to do, to say, she asked about his family then, how they were, and heard the same report—with fewer details—that Graham had heard at lunch and passed on to her. He said Graham had told him about her show, and he wished her well with it. He was sorry, he said, that he wouldn’t have time to get over there. The silence fell again, a silence that felt awkward to Annie, but she didn’t have the energy to break it.

  After a moment, John asked about a service—he said he’d like to come if there was one, and she said she didn’t know yet, it was one of the things she needed to talk about with Sarah and Lucas. “They’re coming, tomorrow.” (Frieda had called just before Edith came over, called to say Lucas would be up from New York. And Sarah had called a bit after that to tell Annie that she couldn’t get on a plane until late in the evening, that she wouldn’t get there until morning.)