by Sue Miller
From outside, they heard a dog somewhere nearby barking loudly. Someone yelled, “Shut up, Bertie!” and the dog barked again.
“That worked well,” Edith said.
Annie smiled at her. After a moment, she said, “Mostly they were just passing notions, though.”
“What were?”
“His opinings. His opinions. Half the time he’d change his mind the next day. He’d take the opposing view.” She tried to make her voice deep, Graham-like. “‘You know what? I’ve rethought.’”
Edith smiled. “Yes. A hard man to pin down.”
“A fancy dancer,” Annie said. She had a sudden memory of him, dancing. Fancy indeed, and so incongruously light on his feet. They had sometimes danced together, just the two of them, in the evenings. Occasionally Annie stood on those graceful feet so he could move her around as though she were a child, he the grown-up.
“I remember when he was on about the Iraq War,” Edith said. “Well”—she made a face, she rolled her eyes—“one of the many times he was on about that. But the idea was, ‘Why did we have to kill a hundred thousand Iraqis just to get Saddam Hussein out of there. Whatever happened to the wet job?’ Remember?”
“Oh yes,” Annie said, and laughed.
“‘Ah, the good old wet job,’” Edith intoned, wanting to keep her friend happy a few moments longer. She’d succeeded, Edith—she’d made Annie laugh. Her mobile face showed her pleasure in that.
“Yeah,” Annie said, “but then he couldn’t stand the drone program.”
“Too dry maybe,” Edith said. “Not quite wet enough.”
After a minute, Annie said, “As much as anything, I think he just liked saying it—‘the wet job.’”
Edith smiled. “It does roll nicely off the tongue.”
The room was dusky by now. Outside, the backyard was deep in shadow, but the sky above the neighbors’ houses was a clear deep blue, and the higher leaves of the trees seemed to shimmer in the last of the sunlight’s lingering touch on them.
“Do you remember his argument about fiction?” Annie asked. “About narrative? Another big theory.”
“I don’t. Probably I wasn’t at that party.”
“Just, that we read fiction because it suggests that life has a shape, and we feel . . . consoled, I think he said, by that notion. Consoled to think that life isn’t just one damned thing after another. That it has sequence and consequence.” She smiled at Edith. “I think it was more or less the idea that fictional narrative made life seem to matter, that it pushed away the meaninglessness of death.”
Death. She’d said the word, and Edith’s face was suddenly serious. After a long silence, she said gently, “And otherwise it doesn’t matter? Life doesn’t matter?”
Annie was stopped by the question for a few seconds. Then she said, “Well, look at his life. It was. And it was, and it was. And now”—she shrugged—“it isn’t. Pfft. There’s nothing left.” Annie was startled by how angry she sounded. She tried to lighten her tone. “Some narrative,” she said. After a moment or two, she got up and fetched some matches. She lit the candles on the table.
Edith was quiet, watching her. Then she said, “That’s not true, Annie.”
“What?” Annie sat down again.
“That there’s nothing. Nothing left. There’s lots left.” She sounded almost fierce.
“Like what?”
“Well, all our memories of him.”
Annie didn’t want to fight with Edith, who was only being Edith, her good friend. “Okay,” she said. Her voice sounded tired.
“That’s not enough?” Edith asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What about Sarah, then? What about Lucas? What about the bookstore?”
Annie started to cry.
“Oh, Annie,” Edith said. “Annie.” She leaned forward in her chair and reached her hand across the table toward Annie.
“He’s just so fucking gone.”
“I know,” Edith said. “I know.”
Annie got up to get a tissue from the box on the counter and blew her nose, wiped her eyes. When she was sitting again, she said, “I’m sorry. This is really all about me. It’s not about Graham. Or it’s only partly about Graham.” She blew her nose again. “Mostly it’s about how empty and small my life feels now.” They were quiet for a moment. Annie said, “I’m so angry at him, in a way, that he had so much energy. That he took up all that psychic space. That he took me up.”
“Well, he did. That’s who he was. That’s why we loved him.”
“But I was just . . . I didn’t ask anything of myself. I just went along.” Yes, Annie felt, this was it. She should have been more separate, more independent. Then she wouldn’t feel so hollowed-out now.
“But who wouldn’t, Annie? It was a great ride. We all went along.”
“But now that it’s over . . .”
“You don’t think you were part of it? Part of what made it all work? The ride? The ride was your life together.” Her voice was almost angry. “He didn’t do it alone. He couldn’t have done it without you.”
Annie looked at Edith. She didn’t know if what Edith had said was true or not—really, she was so lost that there was a sense in which she wasn’t sure exactly even what Edith meant—but she was grateful. She knew that. She felt it. “Thank you,” she said. ‘Thank you for saying that.”
“I mean it. Everyone knows it.”
It was a few days after Edith came over for dinner that Annie walked past the bookstore for the first time since Graham’s death, heading for a routine dentist appointment. She’d thought of canceling it, but she knew there would be a long wait to get another. Also, it seemed to her a small step back into normal life. She was feeling almost childishly proud of herself—Going to the Dentist—as she left the house and started down the long driveway.
She was deliberately walking on the other side of Mount Auburn Street from where the store sat, but even from there, it caught her eye, hanging in the plate-glass window—a huge image of Graham, the blowup of a photograph she recognized as one she’d taken, years earlier. She knew instantly what it was—the poster about the memorial gathering.
She crossed the street then, jaywalked, and stood in front of it, taking it in. It was, in a way, an odd photo for someone to have chosen to announce a party—an uncharacteristically contemplative moment for Graham. But it was arresting, and at this size, compelling. It was a shot of him in the store at night, taken from almost exactly where she was standing now, on the sidewalk. He hadn’t seen her through the darkness, the rain, as he stood staring out through the streaked glass, his reading glasses swung up on his head, his arms crossed and resting on the shelf of his belly.
Above this image the poster said simply, graham. Below it, in smaller print: “Come and Remember Him.” Below that, “September 8, 5:00 p.m.” The date she and Sarah and Lucas had finally agreed on because it was after Labor Day—everyone would be back from their summer vacations.
Suddenly Annie was aware of a movement inside the store, behind the image. It was Bill, working at the register, his back to her. And then she saw that there was a man beyond him, deeper inside the store, standing fixed in an aisle, reading a book he’d taken off the shelf. And several other customers, too, moving around.
She fled.
Or that’s what she felt she was doing. In any case, she walked away as quickly as she could, with the hope that no one had seen her, no one would come outside to call after her, to try to talk to her.
The image, the image she’d made, had startled her and then moved her, coming across it so unexpectedly, coming across Graham as he so rarely looked in life—stilled, thoughtful, unguessable. It stayed with her through the appointment at the dentist’s office, the long, strange-but-familiar hour of weird compliance, of accommodating the tools, the fingers, the antiseptic flavors in her uncomfortably open mouth, the sense of drowning in her own saliva. “It’s like being waterboarded,” she said to the technician, who didn
’t respond. Was that politically incorrect? she wondered.
It struck her as surreal, this juxtaposition—even in some sense comedic. She wished she could talk to Graham about it, laugh with him, when she got home.
Instead, as soon as she got back, she went to find it, the book in which the photograph of Graham appeared. Graham’s book, Memoir with Bookshop. It was with the other outsize books—art books, books of travel photographs—on the lowest shelf of the bookcase behind the couch.
Annie sat on the couch and flipped through it slowly. The text accompanying each picture consisted of Graham’s comments on what the occasion was, sometimes on who attended, sometimes on odd or amusing things that had happened. Sometimes he just used quotes from the aftermath—the more telling thank-you notes, a couple of written apologies for some outrageous behavior.
Here was that event at the store with Cameron Marx, his third book of poetry, the one that got nominated for something—the National Book Critics Circle Award? The National Book Award? The photo was taken from behind Cameron as he read in his wildly incantatory style, and the upturned faces watching him were rapt, shocked. Graham was in the front row, as usual, and there were tears in his eyes.
How easily he cried! As easily as he laughed. As he kissed.
And yes, sprinkled among the other photographs, perhaps on every sixth or seventh page, was an image of him kissing someone. A few that Natalie had taken of him kissing Annie—once his head bent down to let his lips touch her arm as she leaned over the long table, holding out a platter of something or other. Here kissing Edith, kissing Erica. Also kissing men. Kissing Bill, who’d worked at the store from the earliest days. Kissing Cameron, and Peter. At least as many hugging people, people he swamped and surrounded.
Looking through it, Annie felt pulled back from her sense of smallness, of emptiness. Because as much as the photographs were a history of the bookstore and the parties, they were a history of their marriage. All of it, from the very start. For here was Graham in shirtsleeves at the opening party for the store, wearing the red wine stain down his front, her calling card. And here she was, sitting next to him in the front row at John Arnold’s reading, their bodies touching.
What she felt keenly as she turned the pages was how much they had made it together, this world that she and Natalie had recorded—just as Edith had said the other night. And Graham had written a version of that same thing over and over in his comments on the photos. On a photo of him talking animatedly to someone whose back was to the camera, Sarah sound asleep on his shoulder: “At least two of us up well past our bedtime. Annie, the third member of our merry crew, danced until almost dawn.”
On a photo of Annie, standing in the bright light of the kitchen, glasses and plates everywhere, Graham behind her wearing his favorite apron, loading the dishwasher. “Cleaning up together when all the fun is over. After this picture was taken, Natalie put the camera down and she and Don stayed on, helping us until everything was done. Then we all had a nightcap and bet on the Nobel Prize in literature, due to be announced soon. Annie, a little less tipsy than everyone else, called it: Nadine Gordimer. I owed her $150. Or so she told me the next day, and I was in no condition to disagree.”
When she had turned the last page and shut the book, Annie sat motionless for a long moment. Then she got up and moved to what was almost the center of the open space she and Graham had made of the first floor those years ago. She turned slowly, surveying the room—the living area, the big table, the kitchen that extended into the space under the back stairs. Unpeopled, it seemed bigger than in the world of the photographs. Bigger, and emptier. How could she ever find a way of filling it without Graham?
Come back, she thought. Or maybe she said it aloud.
15
Almost from the moment she got onto the highway, headed north toward the cottage in Vermont, Annie was thinking of the things she hadn’t done when she left the Cambridge house. No windows were locked, as far as she knew. Probably some had been left open. She hadn’t changed the telephone message to say she was gone or where she’d be. She’d left purely on impulse, shoving a few clothes into an overnight bag, grabbing some toiletries from the bathroom.
She hadn’t arranged anything about opening the cottage either, so the grass would be unmown, the screens would still be in the shed, the bed would be unmade, the house would be dusty and spiderwebbed and dotted here and there with mouse droppings.
Yet she felt a sense of deep relief to be leaving, to be escaping the neighbors who came to check on her, to offer help, to drop off food. To escape even her friends, with their concern, which she had no adequate response to. She’d felt, over and over, the strain of trying to rise to some kind of sociability. She felt watched. She wanted an uninterruptable solitude, and the cottage, she thought, would offer this.
The sense of relief—release, really—grew as she passed the highway markers and familiar milestones, a release that turned into an odd kind of elation. It made her blood pound audibly in her ears, this crazy freedom, but it also made her feel more keenly her grief. She was giddy with both—with the glad escape from anyone’s expectations of her, with a joy in being safely alone, but with an awareness the more intense because of that of the long aloneness to come.
She heard herself suddenly, a kind of rhythmic keening she was doing. There were no tears. It wasn’t that—crying. It was a kind of protest, something that felt more primal than tears. She gave herself over to it. By the time she was crossing the border into New Hampshire, she was wailing her sorrow. Wave after wave of lamentation, until, finally, she’d worn herself out and she had to stop. Her throat was dry and a little sore. She felt there was nothing left inside her.
As she drew nearer to the border with Vermont, it occurred to her that she would need to stop in Hanover for groceries. She couldn’t think what she wanted. She hadn’t really cooked since Graham died. What would you make if Graham weren’t going to sit down with you and cry out over the food?
Of course he had loved it best when there was company and she made fancy dishes—cassoulet or stuffed bass or Moroccan lamb. But even when there were just the two of them, even if there was just roast chicken or some kind of pasta, he would open a bottle of wine, she would light the candles, and at the first bite he would signal his joy—a hand to his heart, or just her name aloud. Annie remembered his rising once from his end of the table and coming over to her, bending to kiss the top of her head. “You make me so goddamned happy, Annie,” he said.
“Ah, it’s food that makes you happy, Graham,” she had answered.
“You are food,” he said.
In the end she bought just wine and fruit and breakfast things—eggs, bacon, bread and butter, coffee beans and milk.
Though the sun was warm on her head and shoulders as she moved across the overgrown yard to bring the groceries and her bags inside, the cottage itself was chilly and smelled of old ashes and damp—the odor of sorrow itself, it seemed to Annie. She plugged in the refrigerator and turned it on, put the perishables inside it, and then went around the three small rooms, opening windows. As she slid one of them stiffly up at the front of the house, she stopped to watch the light move on the lake, spangling it. She could hear a motorboat somewhere, and distant voices, pitched to carry over the engine noise. She could hear the breeze hissing lightly in the pines. The house itself was silent but for the low, steady mumble of the refrigerator.
She called Dan Curtis about the mowing, and he said he could get to it within a few days. She decided to do the cleaning herself—she didn’t want anyone in the house with her. She fixed herself some scrambled eggs and toast and coffee, and when she was finished eating, she started in, dusting everything, sweeping down cobwebs from the corners of the ceiling, vacuuming. In the bedroom she opened the storage crate for the bedding, a wooden box lined with wire screening to keep the mice out. She took out the quilt, the sheets and pillows, and made the bed.
When she was done with everything, she went outsid
e and down to the lake. She walked to the end of the dock. She took off her shoes and sat, hugging her knees.
The lake had a pleasant, slightly algal smell. Wavelets lapped lightly at the posts under the dock, a gentle slurping sound. The wood was warm on the soles of her feet.
Graham had loved it here, though he worried at the notion of being a person with two houses. “I’ve become a fucking grandee!” he said once. They were sitting on the dock with gin and tonics late in the afternoon. Out in the middle of the lake, a water-skier had moved slowly past, behind a white boat.
“To be a fucking grandee, you need something a little more grand than a five-hundred-square-foot cottage,” Annie had said. “Unwinterized, yet.”
Now she dropped her feet into the water. As cold as ever. Only toward the very end of the summer could you jump in without gasping, without worrying about the shock to your heart. She pulled her feet back up, reached down to warm them with her hands, thinking of Graham’s hands, warming her.
He had been different up here, as Annie knew she was too. Quieter. The great sociability that marked him in the city eased.
Eased. That was an odd word to think of—as though the sociability were a kind of affliction or burden for him.
Which sometimes it seemed it might be, it occurred to her now. As when his face sagged in exhaustion at the end of an evening with others. As when, occasionally, instead of welcoming an invitation (Good God, are you kidding?! Of course we have to be there), he would ask her to get them out of something. “I just can’t,” he’d say, and it would seem to her he was speaking of a nearly physical impossibility.
Because the cottage was so small that they really couldn’t have guests, they just assumed their solitude here. Alone together, they quietened. Whole days passed when they barely spoke to each other. But where Annie had imagined Graham chafing at this, he seemed instead to welcome it. Over time, she thought, to need it.
Their lovemaking had seemed different up here too, not to be generated by conversation or wordplay, as it so often was at home, but by something more visceral—more, again, like need. In the dark silence of the tiny bedroom he’d reach for Annie, move over her, rise up on his knees and enter her, all quickly, quickly. And usually quickly too, he’d come—arched away from her, crying out.