Monogamy

by Sue Miller

  Sarah made a noise, a raspberry. “Come on, Mother,” she said.

  “Well, you know what I mean.” Annie looked over at the cat. She shook her head. “No, your father’s death was completely different. It was way too soon. It was untimely.” She turned back to Sarah. “There were things . . . some things I would have liked to talk to him about, I suppose.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Oh. Just. Married things. How we would . . . have gone on being married, I suppose.”

  “What do you mean?” Sarah’s voice was alarmed.

  Annie heard it. “This is . . . kind of personal, isn’t it?” She laughed. “Very personal. Why don’t we talk about the cat?”

  “But you brought it up, Mom.”

  “Not really. It came up, I would say. And then you asked.”

  Sarah stood and began to pick up the glasses, the delicate little glasses that had held the sauterne. “Well. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be . . . personal. Or I did, actually. But . . .”

  “Oh, hon,” Annie said, “I’m the one who should be sorry. And I am. I’m sorry.”

  “But . . . what do you mean?” Sarah had set the glasses in the sink, and now she turned to face her mother.

  Annie inhaled sharply, and then let her breath go. After a moment she said, “Just, there were things I would have liked the time to talk to your father about.”

  “But you talked all the time,” Sarah said, remembering their voices in the night. The laughter, the music downstairs after they’d put her to bed. The way he turned to her, expectant, smiling, when she spoke.

  “Yes. Of course, we did. But some things . . . There were things, things we didn’t have time to talk about.”

  “How could you not have time? You had years.”

  “Well, I suppose you put things off, don’t you? The hard things.”

  Sarah was about to ask, “What hard things?,” but she didn’t. Later she thought that she must have been afraid. That she didn’t want to know, whatever it was. Whatever they were. She turned back to the sink and began to wash the little glasses by hand.

  After a long moment, she said, “How well did you know Lucas’s writer? The guy you met at the artists’ colony.”

  “Ian?”

  “Yeah, Ian. What was his last name?”

  “Pedersen.”

  “Right. He was a friend?”

  “Well, it was kind of a strange setting.” Annie had poured herself another tiny glass of the sauterne. She was twirling it slowly by its stem. “You got . . . very intimate, very fast, in a kind of unreal way. So yes, I knew him well, in exactly that way. That odd way.” She laughed, quickly. “He was a friend. I suppose I had a little crush on him or something like that.”

  “When? This was before you met Daddy.”

  “No, it was after. After we were married, actually. But it was one of those . . . just lovely, fizzy things. Nothing happened.”

  This phrase struck Sarah, all the parts of it. First, of course, fizzy. A fizzy thing. Something she’d never had, as far as she knew. Certainly not with Thomas, things had gotten so serious so fast. Because of her father’s death, she supposed.

  Or maybe because she wasn’t fizzy. Maybe because she just wasn’t a fizzy kind of person.

  Then, “one of those.” One of those lovely fizzy things. Implying—did it not?—that there were other lovely fizzy things her mother had lived through. Implying another life for her. A life beyond the whole, complete, private world she’d created with Graham. The world Sarah had grown up sensing all around her. The world that she’d felt shut out of.

  “I’m going to head up, I think,” Annie said. She tilted her head back to drain her glass, and then brought it over to the sink. She crossed to the door to the back stairs.

  “Okay. I’ll follow in a bit.” Sarah said. “I’m still sort of on West Coast time.”

  Annie stood at the door for a moment, looking back pensively at Sarah. Then she said, “You shouldn’t hold your father too dear, sweetie.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just . . . oh, I don’t know. He was . . . human, after all. And maybe it keeps you from looking around. At, other men, I suppose.”

  Sarah waited a moment before she said, “Now who’s being too personal?”

  Annie bowed her head, as if conceding the point.

  Sarah felt her anger fully seize her. “And I’m allowed to, anyway. Children are allowed to hold their parents too dear. As dear as they want to.”

  Annie must have heard the anger in Sarah’s voice. She said, “They are. They are allowed, of course. I’m sorry.” She came across to Sarah and hugged her. Sarah barely responded, holding her mother loosely for just a few seconds. Then Annie turned and went up the back stairs, Sam trailing behind. Sarah heard the door to her bedroom close.

  Sarah was still thinking of this, and of the evening generally, as she finished clearing up. As she loaded the dishwasher and set it going, as she covered the leftover cake and chocolate mousse and put them in the refrigerator. As she wiped down the table and the counters.

  She turned off the kitchen lights and went into the living room. She sat down.

  Claire’s wooden spoon was on the floor in front of her, and she bent over and picked it up. She stretched out on the couch, the spoon in her hand, tapping it on the top of the couch back. Tump, tump, tump, tump, tump.

  A strange night, all right. Her mother and Lucas’s writer. The way her face had changed across the table when Lucas said the man’s name. His fizzy writer’s name. What would the right words be? That it . . . what? Became guarded, maybe.

  She thought of Claire then—of her sweet unguarded face, of the game she’d thought of, born of what must have been her idea that the adults had made a circle so they could jump. She had been looking at Lucas when Claire yelled, and saw his face change in pleasure, watching his daughter.

  Abruptly she thought of his embarrassment after he’d said she’d better get her own small person. As though he was pointing to something that was clearly an impossibility for her.

  And what was her mother talking about at the end there? As though Sarah would be, maybe had been, damaged by loving Graham too much. As though it had unsuited her for someone else. For love.

  Always, always, that fucking implication—that her life was empty, that she had no one. It made her angry at her mother whenever she caught this glimpse of how Annie saw her. Tonight, angry at Lucas too. It had been clear to Sarah that he felt he’d pointed out what he must have seen as a problem of hers. Her unpartnered life.

  She remembered Thomas’s body suddenly, his turning her over as they made love, pulling her hips up to him, coming into her from behind.

  Her hand had loosened on the spoon, and it clunked to the floor behind the couch. “Shit,” she said. She rose on her knees and looked down. There it was. She tried to reach it, to retrieve it. Too far.

  But her glance had fallen on a book, the book her father had written—or the book her mother had taken the pictures for. The memoir. It was lying on top of a bunch of other coffee-table-size books on the lowest shelf behind the couch. She could easily reach it, and she did, pulling it up, already anticipating these old familiar pictures—like a history of her life here, in this house, the way it had been. Her father and mother, their friends—all the writers, the artists, the photographers, the parties she’d fallen asleep listening to. She hadn’t looked at it in years.

  The book felt odd, thickened and misshapen. Had it gotten wet, somehow? She opened it, and took an audible breath. Page after page, perhaps a third of them, had been ripped out. Some fell on her lap.

  It took her a moment to get over her shock. Then, slowly, she began to look at it, at the damage.

  There were many pages—from about halfway through the book on to the end—that were intact, so it wasn’t as though someone were removing the images systematically to do something with them. Anyhow, the rips were uneven, incomplete, chaotic. Sometimes a page was gone c
ompletely. Sometimes four or five pages had been ripped at once. Some were ripped only halfway through.

  How could this have happened? Could Claire somehow have gotten hold of the book and started tearing it apart?

  But Claire couldn’t have managed this. She didn’t have the strength for any of it. She would never have been able even to hold the book, let alone tear a page out, or tear multiple pages at the same time.

  Her mother, then.

  Yes, her mother, the only possibility.

  It must have been after her father died, Sarah thought. The despair, and clearly some kind of rage—at what?

  Her abandonment?

  Or maybe some of those hard things she never got to talk about with Graham. Things hard enough, difficult enough, unresolved enough, to make her tear at this record of her life with him? To make her try to ruin it?

  She couldn’t imagine this. She didn’t want to imagine it. She wanted the old version, the old, familiar sorrow. Not this new story. This new sorrow.

  She lifted her hands to her face and made a noise at the thought of it.

  The book slid off her lap to the floor, the loose pages scattering. She sat up and looked down at the mess.

  Then she got up. She went to the stairs and up to the bedroom that used to be hers, the one that had become her mother’s office after Sarah moved to the West Coast. Though the bed was still there, and the bureau, and the desk—covered now with Annie’s papers.

  It was completely dark outside the windows. Sarah turned on the bureau light and fished her phone out of her purse.

  Thomas’s voice warmed when he heard hers, and Sarah felt some of the anger and confusion leave her. They compared their holidays—he had spent his with his parents, at their retirement community in Seattle. They’d eaten in the common dining room, he said, among the other residents and all their visiting children and grandchildren. “The point there being,” he said, “to make me feel guilty for shirking my job—for me to see what the others had that my poor parents didn’t.”

  “And did it work?” she asked.

  “Oh, it always works,” he said dismissively. “And then I get pissed about that, because it has worked, and it’s made me feel guilty when I don’t want to. And then they get sad. Or my mother gets sad, sad that I’m pissed. And then my father gets pissed that I’ve made my mother sad. And then we all have another cup of coffee and say goodbye.”

  “No fun,” Sarah said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t as bad as all that. It’s almost like a predictable routine we go through at this point. We all know how to play our parts.” They were silent for a moment. Sarah thought she could hear him breathing.

  He said, “Yours does sound like fun, though.”

  “It had its complications too.”

  “What kind?”

  “Well, every kind, I guess. But I’ll list them for you when I get home tomorrow.” For now she just wanted this ease, this comfort—his voice. His breath.

  “But it was also fun. Yes?”

  “Parts of it, yes, I have to confess.” She was thinking of the big table, the familiar faces around it. Of Claire. She said, “But of course we did have the grandchild, so that wasn’t an issue.”

  “Touché.”

  “I’m only teasing.”

  “I know.”

  When he spoke again, his voice had changed. It was quieter. More intimate. “May I tell you this? It’s your voice. Just hearing you say hello. It thrills me.”

  She laughed.

  “I mean it.”

  “Well, we could always keep the light off when we’re together, and you could just listen to my thrilling voice in the dark.”

  “Oh, Sarah.” He sounded tired suddenly, and she felt it then, what she’d done. Again. Again she’d made a joke out of a gift he was offering her, a compliment.

  She thought of the way he looked—his watchful dark eyes under the smooth flat flesh of his eyelids, the lines of age just beginning at the outer corners. The thick black hair, going slightly gray at the temples. The squarish chin, the strong, graceful body, the lovely light-brown skin. The surprise of his smile, his ready laughter.

  Why couldn’t she just let it happen to her, let him say it, let herself feel it—what he meant?

  After a moment, she said, “But then, of course, I couldn’t see you. And that’s what I love.”

  “Do you?”

  “I do,” she said. She laughed, lightly, and said it again. I do.

  In the mirror over the bureau, she watched her own face, the way it had softened, become, it seemed to her, almost pretty.

  After she’d said good night to Thomas, she stood there, looking at herself. She had thought, when she came east, that she’d finally tell her mother about Thomas—or maybe she’d tell all of them.

  What would she have said? That she was involved with someone?

  No.

  That she loved someone, she loved Thomas. That he loved her.

  She’d had an image of announcing something like that at the table at Thanksgiving, she realized. She’d actually spent some time imagining the various responses.

  But she hadn’t done it, and now, standing at the bureau, thinking about the evening that had just passed, she thought she understood why not. Because her mother—and Lucas too, she thought—had revealed to her their unchanging, unchanged version of her and her life. Her announcement of her happiness would have seemed to them defensive, something she was offering as a kind of pathetic corrective to their understanding of her. It wouldn’t have the meaning for them that she’d wanted for it. The cleanness, the pure joy.

  And it would have become theirs, she thought. They would see her happiness as a kind of capitulation to their expectations, their way of living. They would see it as the beginning of a life like theirs. Married, like all of them—her mother, Frieda, Jeanne, Edith, with all the sad stories they had to tell about that.

  Well, maybe not Jeanne. But even her mother, it turned out. The hard things, the doubt about whether she and Graham could have gone on being married. The surprise of it!

  She didn’t want to think about it. She didn’t want to change her version of things. Their voices in the night. Their safe, private world.

  She thought of her childhood, and Lucas’s, each of them yearning for what they thought the other had. She thought of the sense of isolation she had as a kid, the isolation she had so deliberately and slowly fought her way out of. She thought of Thomas, the miracle of having him in her life, the reward, she couldn’t help feeling sometimes, for her long struggle.

  And perhaps they would end up married, she and Thomas. Maybe they’d even have a child. But for now, what they had—the deep connection between them—that was exactly what she wanted, was all she’d ever wanted, she felt. That solace. That safety.

  Not marriage—not all the other promises to be made, and then broken. Not the children, the difficult growing up. The wounds inflicted, back and forth, the inevitable disappointments, the unbridgeable distances.

  Not that.

  Not monogamy.

  She went back downstairs. She gathered the scattered, mutilated pages of Memoir with Bookshop and put them back into the book, closed the cover over everything. She put the book back in the pile of other outsize books behind the couch, on top of the one with photographs of the Galapagos.

  Then she lay down on the floor in front of the couch, and with the tips of her fingers, found Claire’s wooden spoon and drew it to herself.

  29

  Claire fell asleep in her car seat on the short trip home. Frieda, sitting next to her in the back seat, watched her fight against this, watched her repeatedly jerk her drooping head up, struggling to open her heavy eyelids over unseeing eyes . . . until finally she yielded and slumped forward, limp against the harness that held her in her chair. There was something so touching about this, about the little girl’s hopeless wish to stay awake, to stay a part of things, that Frieda felt flooded with tenderness toward her.
>
  Lucas and Jeanne were discussing it as Lucas parked the car—the problem Claire’s conking out presented. Should they wake her to change her, to put her sleeper on? Would she resist going to sleep again if they did?

  She might, they agreed. The plan then, decided upon as they climbed the stairs to Frieda’s apartment—Lucas carrying Claire—was to let her sleep, even though she’d probably be very wet in the morning.

  “Should I take the snowsuit off?” Lucas asked Jeanne.

  “No, just unzip it so she doesn’t get too hot.” As Lucas headed down the hall to the room that had been his as a child, she called, “But take her shoes off.”

  Jeanne and Frieda put their coats away and went to the living room to sit down. When Lucas came back, Frieda offered them a drink, or coffee. She had decaf, she said.

  “Oh, I couldn’t!” Jeanne said. “I am stuffed.” Adding perhaps two extra f’s to the word, Frieda thought.

  Lucas said he’d have tea, if Frieda had any, so she went into the kitchen to prepare a pot. As she was setting the kettle on the burner, she heard Jeanne say, “How astonishing it is, isn’t it? That Annie should have known your Mr. Pedersen.”

  “Mister Young and Easy, as Edith calls him.”

  Jeanne laughed, her full, throaty laugh. “Yes.”

  She sighed then, and Frieda could imagine her stretching. She was like an animal, it sometimes seemed to Frieda. A large cat. A tiger, even. She thought suddenly of their telephone conversation about Graham’s ashes, of Jeanne’s strength through that. A tiger indeed.

  Now she heard Jeanne say, “I wonder if he and Annie might have had a little . . . fling. Whatever.”

  “I doubt it,” Lucas said.

  “Why would you doubt it?”

  Frieda couldn’t hear his reply. The kettle was boiling. She rinsed out the teapot with hot water.

  When she came back in to the living room, carrying her tray, Jeanne looked up at her, her wide mouth open in an eager smile. “We would like you to vote, Frieda. Do you think it is possible that Annie had some kind of affair with Lucas’s writer, Mr. Pedersen?”