Monogamy

by Sue Miller

  Years ago her parents had painted the room a pale ochre that had faded over time. Sarah couldn’t think of the word that would give a sense of its color now, a color she had thought of in her childhood as rich and elegant. Now it was worn, a brownish white. The floors were scuffed, she noted, and stained here and there. Annie’s photographs hung everywhere, or were propped on the shelves in front of the books, including many shots she’d taken of Graham and Sarah and Lucas, of various friends, many of groups of people at parties. There were paintings on the walls and shelves too, most of them by artist friends of her parents.

  It was shabby, you could see that clearly now in the daylight—transformed from the loveliness Annie had created last night with the flowers, the softer lighting, the candles everywhere. Sarah hadn’t known that, growing up—that the house was shabby. She hadn’t noticed how different it was from the grand houses around it. Small, square, the one big room downstairs, four small ones up—it had felt capacious to her. It had felt perfect.

  But once a friend from college had stopped as she came into the big room and said, “Wow! This is so . . . funky. Or bohemian. Or something. So . . . sixties. There’s just so much stuff.” Sarah had seen it clearly then, that it wasn’t beautiful, as she had thought it was. But maybe that was after things in the neighborhood began to get elegant—the houses that had been divided into apartments reclaimed as single-family homes, shutters hung, clapboards repaired and painted in rich colors, gardens established. Maybe it was then that she began to see that her house didn’t belong on their grand street, among the big Victorian houses with their wide porches, their cupolas.

  Would Annie stay on here? she wondered. Could she even afford to?

  It occurred to her that she had no idea of her mother’s finances. She couldn’t earn much of anything from her work—maybe, actually, not even enough to pay for the studio, maybe not enough for the developing—which, since her mother had moved to the large color prints, was almost prohibitively expensive, she knew.

  Did they even own the house? She knew they’d gotten a second mortgage to pay for her college, but she had no idea how much of that they might still owe. Or even whether the first mortgage had been paid off. She hadn’t asked her mother any of this, hadn’t thought about it until just now.

  She couldn’t imagine Annie anywhere else, she realized. Even as she also realized that this feeling had to do not so much with her mother as with herself. Really, what she couldn’t imagine was not having this home. Of course this home to come back to, yes. But also, she understood, to be gone from. The place she could call up from far away in her own life when she thought of home—this room, and everything in it.

  She got up and went back to the kitchen. The breakfast things and their later coffee cups were still in the sink. She cleaned it all up—loading the dishwasher, wiping the counters and the end of the long table where she and Annie had been sitting. When she was done, she went into the living room again. She moved around, looking more closely at everything there, touching things. She stood in front of one of the framed photographs of her father. He was looking at the camera—at her mother—with a gentle smile, his eyes announcing all that he felt for her. There was a smaller picture of herself that she’d always liked—she was in the sandbox that had predated the brick terrace in the backyard, dirty, wearing just shorts, a clear stripe through the dirt on her belly where she’d drooled on herself, waving a plastic shovel at her mother. Or at the camera, anyway.

  Before she left the room, she stood for a moment, turning in a slow circle. Then she went quickly over to the low shelf. She reached down and slid about a quarter of the tiny, beautiful shells off it and into her hand. She put them in her jeans pocket. Then she went to the kitchen area again and up the back stairs, up to her parents’ bedroom.

  She stood for a moment in the doorway, surveying everything. She crossed the room and sat in the big chair at the foot of the bed, her father’s chair. Part of her had been glad when Annie left, she felt it now. Yes, glad to have the house to herself. Glad to move around in it, to remember her father here, without her mother’s sorrowing presence.

  She smiled. Glad to have a chance to take something that connected to him without having to ask her mother’s permission, without even having to let her know she’d done it. A secret.

  She put her feet up on the bed as her father used to do in the mornings when she was a little girl. On the weekends especially, Sarah had sometimes joined her parents in here, climbing into bed with her mother or sitting on her father’s lap while the two grown-ups went on talking and drinking their coffee.

  Through the open window now she heard the rain intensify, she smelled the dampness of earth. She remembered the sense she often had when she came into this room—the sense that her parents had been telling secrets to each other, that there was something between them, maybe everything, that she didn’t know about. Her strategy for making room for herself between them then had been to throw herself at one or the other, to be wild, noisy. Her father always responded, tossing her around, roughhousing, making her shriek with joy.

  Her mother was not as much fun—on those mornings when Sarah started being too rowdy, she simply withdrew. She’d get up out of the bed, tying her kimono tighter around her, and head for the bathroom. Which ended everything.

  How obvious it was to her later, thinking back on it—embarrassingly obvious—that often enough it must have been sex that she’d interrupted.

  She had a memory now of waking in the night in her own room. She must have been seven, maybe eight. She’d heard something, a cry. A moan. She had lain there, listening intently for a long, silent interval that frightened her.

  But then her parents’ voices began, that familiar rhythmic flow between them. His deep rumble, whispering. Her mother’s higher, gentler voice answering him—rising, falling. They laughed softly. Sometimes her mother’s voice was so low she couldn’t really hear it. But she could still somehow feel it, the special way of talking she saved only for him.

  Sarah had started crying in her bed then, at first just for herself, a nameless, private grief that at that age she didn’t ask herself to understand. But then more loudly, wanting someone to come to her. After a minute or two, her mother did, sitting on the edge of the bed. Pushing Sarah’s hair gently off her face, she asked whether Sarah had had a bad dream.

  Sarah remembered willfully intensifying her sorrow then, moving into a kind of hysteria that became real as she enacted it.

  Finally her mother left and her father came in, the one she had wanted all along, apparently. He sat with her, stroking her hair as her mother had, whispering to her in a kind of song, “Hey, little girl, hey, little girl.” When he lay down next to her, she began slowly to calm herself, until finally she fell asleep.

  She had talked about this with Lucas once much later, her wish, her “classic wish,” as she described it to him, to interpose herself between Graham and Annie. To triumph over her mother. So embarrassingly oedipal.

  Or Elektral, he said.

  “Whatever,” she said. She’d asked him if he’d ever felt anything like that.

  “Toward Graham?” he’d asked.

  “I suppose.”

  “Well, as you know, Annie was not my mother, so everything was different for me, I think.”

  “I guess so. Yeah.”

  “I liked her being with Graham. I liked Graham’s being with her. I wanted her for my mother. I wanted him for my father.” He grinned at her, his famous Lucas wolf-grin.

  “But he is your father.”

  Lucas had looked at her and nodded, the smile still on his face. “I wanted both of them,” he said. “For me, I wanted them together. Don’t you get it? What they had together. I wanted this very house to be mine.” He looked around, as if newly taking it in. They were sitting at the kitchen table, where everyone sat when they talked. He laughed then and said, “I wanted exactly what you had, sister Sarah.” He made his hand like a gun, pointing his finger at her
. “I wanted your life.”

  “And I wanted yours,” she almost said. But of course, that wasn’t true. Because though she would have had Frieda then—so steady, so safe, so much the same, always—she wouldn’t have had Graham. And that was at the heart of what she and Lucas had been talking about, really, she thought now. They both wanted the same thing. And for different reasons, neither of them could have exactly what they wanted.

  She could feel the tears rising to her eyes, the cottoning in her throat. She got up from the oversize worn chair and went into Graham’s office. She lay down on the daybed there and looked up and around at everything there—the books crowded onto the shelves, in places two deep. The books stacked on the floor, on his desk, on the table. The papers with his backward-sloped handwriting on them. The photographs—of Annie, of Lucas, of her. The room actually held his scent somehow, though you could as easily have said that Graham had held the room’s scent—the scent, that is to say, of books, of paper. Everything, down to the fraying cushion on the daybed where he lay to read. Where she lay now, beginning to cry.

  Throughout the summer, Sarah had been intermittently overwhelmed by her grief for her father—always taken by surprise, in ways that felt like a siege sometimes.

  Not right away, no. When Annie called to tell her he had died in the night, in his sleep, she hadn’t seen her father for six months, not since Christmas. His death had hardly seemed real, it had happened so far away from where she was then, in distance, in time. Not seeing him was the norm in her life, and in some ways it was hard for her to believe he was any more gone now than he was from her every day. She wept a little, even then feeling constrained by Thomas’s presence. But also because there was just so much to do. Getting the ticket right away, arranging for her absence from work, packing.

  And then, when she was in Cambridge for those few days, there was her mother, so lost in sorrow that Sarah felt obliged to be strong. It didn’t seem that this was the time for her own grief.

  Once she was back in San Francisco, though—oddly, once again so far away from her father, from the place where he’d been so alive—it came to her unpredictably and illogically at odd moments. She was making a solitary dinner for herself one night in the middle of the summer, and the thought occurred to her, as though she hadn’t really taken it in before, that she’d never see him again, never hear his voice, that joyful, deep voice.

  She carefully turned the burners off, taking an absurd kind of pride in how responsible she was being, and sank to her knees on the floor, rocking herself back and forth as she wept.

  And one afternoon at work as she walked past the staff room, she first heard, and then saw, that there were three people in there, three people cracking up over something, laughing uproariously, one of them bent over and pounding on the table, so carried away was he in the hysterical hilarity of whatever the joke was. She had felt such a wave of rage at them—for laughing, for not knowing—that she had to go directly to her office and shut the door to calm herself, to wait for her hands to stop shaking.

  And the first time she and Thomas made love after she was back from the June trip home, he was treating her so tenderly that she couldn’t stand it. She wanted to disappear in sex, to be no one, to be just her sensations. She pulled him down next to her, turning under him, directing him with her body, her hands, to enter her this way, that way, pushing her body hard against him over and over until they were both slick with sweat, until she’d exhausted herself.

  Afterward Thomas had held her and stroked her damp hair back off her face. Had whispered, “What are we doing here, Sarah? Why are we doing this now?” and she had burst into tears and cried out, “Because we’re alive!”

  What did she mean? Thomas didn’t ask her to explain again, he just held her. But later she had asked herself, what was she doing? Was she mourning her father in this crazy way?

  She didn’t know, and it shook her—her inability to understand herself in that moment, and the way she’d let Thomas see that intimate confusion.

  She’d stopped crying now. She sat up on the daybed. She’d been wrong—she didn’t want to stay here alone. She got up, turned on Graham’s computer, and began to look for flights later in the day for San Francisco.

  When she got home, a little before eleven, she dropped her bag in the hall just inside the door. She went down the long hallway to the bathroom to wash her face, to brush her teeth. In the bedroom, in the dark, she took off her shirt and dropped it on the floor. She undid her jeans and lowered them quickly. The tiny pale shells she’d stolen from home fell out of her pocket and scattered themselves with a gentle, scuttling, animal sound over the floor, under her bed.

  24

  As Annie turned off the engine, slowly looking around her at the overgrown field the cottage sat in, she felt it deeply: it was a mistake to have come up here. It wasn’t going to help this time—being alone.

  But she couldn’t have stayed with Sarah a minute longer, she felt. She couldn’t go on pretending her fury at Graham didn’t exist.

  She opened the door and crossed the yard from the car. Under the gray sky everything looked unwelcoming. The cottage itself needed paint. The stepping-stones laid by Graham the first summer they owned the house were almost hidden in the wet grass. The leggy plants where they’d scattered his ashes were losing their petals, turning to dry stalks.

  When she stepped inside, the house was chilled and musty. The very opposite of a refuge. She set her purse, her overnight bag, her keys, on the table and then stood there in the main room, overcome by a nearly bodily sense of irresolution. Because there was nowhere else to go—that was it. No place to escape herself, to escape her brain, which kept going over and over the thing she didn’t want to remember—Rosemary, lifting her face from Graham’s desk, offering her grief to Annie. And the other visions, the imagined ones she couldn’t stop from pressing in. Graham moving over Rosemary, Graham pushing her legs apart, Graham laughing with her, Graham sitting across a table from her, talking.

  When she’d come up here those few weeks after he’d died, she hadn’t been able to stop calling him up either, all her memories of him. Her face twisted into a bitter smile at the thought, at how much she’d wanted to remember him then. She’d wanted to remember everything so she could feel him with her and be comforted by that. She’d sought those memories, they were the balm she needed. And of course they were exactly also the wounds she needed balm for. She’d thought again and again during those days of everything—of the darkness when they’d made love here, of the daily quiet and ease between them. His warming her lake-cold feet with his hands. His hand on his heart, thanking her for dinner. Even the old dishes she ate out of by herself seemed dear to her, seemed to bring him close. Imagine it, she thought now—my fear of losing all that, of forgetting him.

  Now what she wanted was to forget him, was for her brain to stop its circuit of all these images.

  There’s nothing there to comfort me, she thought.

  “Everything I remember is . . .” She shook her head fiercely, “Shit.”

  Shit, because each of those memories came trailing pure bitterness. Trailing too its own corrective—the imagining of the other person he might have been thinking about when they did this, or this. How he had done these very things with someone else. Again and again the thought of Rosemary, turning her face to the light falling in from the hall.

  Suddenly, quickly, she crossed the living room to the line of books sitting on the horizontal boards in the wall. With one long swoop, she knocked all of the books between two of the studs to the floor, welcoming the loud thudding. She was panting. She spun around and walked over to the kitchen. She made herself stand still there, facing out the window over the old kitchen sink, gripping the edge of the counter, looking at the glitter of the lake and not seeing it. Not seeing the trees on the opposite shore, not seeing the touch of yellow and cerise on their leaves.

  Who is this version of me? she thought. So jealous. So full of rage.
>
  She was lost. She’d lost herself. When? It had happened, what she’d been so afraid of when he was wooing her. She’d given over to him, to being married to him. She was like Frieda now—the jealous wife.

  She remembered Frieda, what Frieda had said about Graham’s infidelities—that they weren’t important to him, that Annie should understand that, that she had understood it too late for herself. But Frieda had had the great privilege of agreeing to it at the time, even if she’d come to regret that later. She had agency, of some sort. At any rate, he’d told her what he was doing. She had known. She didn’t need to find out after the fact. She didn’t need to be shocked by it. Damaged by it.

  “And what if he’d asked me?” she said aloud. What if he’d said to her, “Annie, I want to do this. Do you?” Or just, “I want to do this.”

  But he hadn’t, she thought. He hadn’t asked. He’d kept it from her. A secret.

  And told Frieda all about it. Frieda. Her friend. She made a funny noise, a moan.

  She opened the door to the screened porch and went outside.

  The air felt cool, almost cold. What time was it? Midafternoon, anyway. The sun had come out from behind the clouds for a moment, and there were deep shadows in the woods around the house. The air stirred, and she heard raindrops falling from the trees onto the bed of dry leaves below them.

  She had to leave. She had to get the fuck out of here. She felt it as a physical necessity. Her breath was coming short, her hands shaking. She went back inside the cottage, shutting the porch door behind her, locking it. She picked up the things she’d set down on the kitchen table and crossed the room to the front door. She went back out into the cool, wet air and locked that door behind her too. Something felt final about this.