by Sue Miller
Frieda set the tray down. “She didn’t, I don’t think.”
Frieda poured out Lucas’s cup and then her own. They watched her.
“Why don’t you think so?”
“I think she would have told me. We’ve been friends for a long time.”
She went over to the chair she usually sat in, next to the purely ornamental wooden mantel, the fireplace closed in with plaster at some point in its past. She set her teacup down on top of a stack of books on the little table there.
“And she would tell you a thing like this?” Jeanne had taken her shoes off. She’d stretched out, and her feet, in their black stockings, rested in Lucas’s lap.
“She has told me lots of things a lot like this. None of them involving her sleeping with someone else.”
“Ah!” Jeanne said.
“Told ya,” Lucas said to her.
After a moment, Jeanne said, “Still, she seemed interested.”
“Well, yes. Even I could see that,” Lucas said.
“Well, maybe interested. But maybe just surprised,” Frieda said.
As if Frieda had said nothing, Jeanne said to Lucas, “Perhaps you should somehow let him know about her. He is divorced, isn’t he?”
“Oh, is he?” Frieda asked.
“Yeah, for the third time, actually,” Lucas said, looking over at her. “A bit of a rake, I think.”
Frieda smiled. “‘And a rambling boy,’” she said.
“What do you mean?” Jeanne asked, frowning.
“Oh, that’s just a song. An old folk song. I think Joan Baez sang it.”
“Oh, of course, I’ve heard of her,” Jeanne said. Then, to Lucas, “But she is too much alone, don’t you think? Annie? Do you think she would be ready to . . . I don’t know. Date someone?”
“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “But I’m not eager to be the one setting up anything like that.”
“Yes, that would be . . . uncomfortable,” Frieda said.
“Yucky, I would say.” Lucas. This time Frieda laughed—the word that had entered the whole family’s vocabulary now that Claire was talking.
They moved on to other things. A job Jeanne thought she might get, the first one she’d tried for since Claire was born, a bit part in a television soap opera. “I’m wicked in this role—evil, evil, evil. And the proof of this is that I speak with a French accent. It wasn’t supposed to be that way—I was supposed to be American, and I read for the part with an American accent—but when I spoke in my normal way, with my own accent, they were wild with excitement. Much better, to have the bad person be from France.”
“Well, of course,” Lucas said.
Then he talked, about the possibility of a change in his own life. He told Frieda that he didn’t see how they could manage in New York on his salary with all that would be coming at them—Claire and school and within a year or two, surely a new, larger apartment. He said that he was thinking of becoming a literary agent, that he’d spoken to one of the agents he admired, who’d encouraged him.
Frieda listened and commented. Yes, how funny about the soaper part! Yes, yes, she understood the financial strain of life in New York.
But while she was talking, making herself so agreeable, she thought about those subjects, and then all the other subjects everyone had raised at dinner, all the things that everyone had talked about these last few days, and the way they never centered on her.
She would have liked to talk, of course. About her life. About how torn she was at the thought of retiring. How would she spend the days? When would she see the colleagues who had become friends, most of whom lived in the little towns west of Boston, closer to the school? And then, should she sell the apartment, maybe move to someplace cheaper? Arlington? Somerville?
Sitting in the dark in her bedroom after they’d all said good night, waiting for Jeanne and Lucas to be finished in the bathroom, she thought of what they’d just been talking about—Annie, their concern for her. Of course it was because Annie was newly alone, Frieda knew that. But still . . .
She thought of that, she thought of all the other subjects everyone had talked about these last few days, and the way they never focused on her.
She had felt a kind of invisibility today, that was it. First at the party, and now here at home with Jeanne and Lucas. She thought about how differently the day would have gone if Graham had been here.
She missed him. She missed his cry of pleasure when he saw her. “Ah, Frieda! The first Mrs. McFarlane,” he’d say when she arrived at a holiday dinner. And then, holding her hands, smiling at her, “How did I ever let you go?”
And she would answer, “You had no say in the matter,” and he would throw his head back and laugh.
She thought again of the way he’d kept her in his life. The questions he always had for her. About her father, who’d lived well into his nineties. About her piano lessons. About the books she was reading, about her teaching. About what she’d heard from Lucas.
He knew her as no one else did, she thought. She had relied on that. On him.
Too much, too much, she saw now. She’d gone on loving him for too long. He had been too important for her—she hadn’t tried, really, to have another life, focused somewhere else.
Now she was remembering something he’d said at a party one night—she couldn’t recall where, or how long ago. He was talking to someone—Aaron Lambert, she thought it was—about how impossible it would be for him ever to move away from Cambridge. He’d listed his reasons. The store, she remembered. “I hope I’ll be standing at the register, book in hand, and just keel over one day.” The house, which he loved and would never leave voluntarily. He’d mentioned a few other things. Then, “My two children, of course.” Followed quickly by, “My two wives.”
Everyone had burst into laughter. Annie and Frieda had laughed too. At the way he’d exposed himself, she supposed.
Graham had blushed, she remembered that now. In embarrassment? In shame? But then he had laughed too, at himself.
Thinking of this, she was uncomfortable, she shifted on the bed.
It came to her then, almost as a shock: he had relied on her for too long, too. Her life at the margins of his marriage to Annie had been something that he wanted, that he had made happen.
He had held her too tight, he had kept her from other possibilities. The first Mrs. McFarlane.
Suddenly she was thinking of Annie’s misplaced anger at her for what she understood as Frieda’s having kept Graham’s secret about Rosemary.
But that wasn’t the problem, she thought. The problem wasn’t that she’d kept Graham’s secret. It was that she had been told Graham’s secret.
She shouldn’t have been told. He shouldn’t have told her things he didn’t tell Annie. She shouldn’t have been his confidante, his second wife. It wasn’t fair to Annie.
It wasn’t fair to her.
Her throat tightened.
30
He’d looked nothing like a writer, Annie had thought when she met him. Ian.
She’d spent the afternoon, her first at the colony, out at her studio, unpacking her stuff. It was getting dark when she walked slowly back up the road that led to the main building where they would all gather to have dinner—and where, on the second floor, she had a tiny, monastic bedroom. She stopped several times in the dimming gray light to listen to the rustling noises in the woods on either side of the dirt track, spotting only a chipmunk once, and then, as she rounded a curve in the road, a group of wild turkeys, frightening in their size, in their primitive ugliness. They didn’t even bother to hurry away from her, just moved off at the same glacial pace toward the woods, lifting each leg with what seemed like dramatic deliberation, slow-motion monsters.
As she came up the porch stairs, she heard the hubbub of many voices. Earlier in the day, when she’d come to the main building to announce her arrival, there had been one person in the large living room there, reading. He had looked up briefly to answer her question about where the
office was.
Now the room was crowded, the noise of the voices almost overwhelming as she opened the door. She hung her coat up and started to try to mix with the others.
There were too many people there for Annie to remember names, but after they were called into the dining room, Ian sat at her table and introduced himself again. He was slender, clean-shaven, pale, with disorderly brown hair. His voice was soft—faintly southern, she thought. (This was wrong, it turned out.) He was handsome in an almost androgynous way. A writer, he said. Fiction.
She said she was a photographer, and he asked about that, about how she would characterize her photographs, about what she planned to work on while she was here.
He spent some time then talking to the woman on his right, Amelie, also a writer. She was beautiful, Annie thought, in a wiry, tense way, her skin tanned a dry, nutmeg brown. She’d “broken the back” of a chapter in her book that day, she said, and for a moment Annie didn’t understand what she could possibly mean. But Ian apparently did, and he spoke with enthusiasm about it to her.
Were they a couple? she wondered. It seemed possible. There might be something sparky going on there.
She watched them for a moment, and then turned to talk to the young woman next to her on the other side. Melinda. A painter. She was flippant about her work, nearly every sentence punctuated by a breathless short laugh, a dismissal of whatever it was she’d just said. She was into glazes, she told Annie. She did a lot of still lifes, then glazed them over and over. “Which will get me nowhere, of course.” The laugh. “I mean, who even does glazes anymore? Me. Little me. The only one.”
But Annie was intrigued. It seemed to her it might be a bit like developing a photograph, the slow changing of the tone and sense of depth that a glaze would create. “I’d love to see them,” she said. She and Melinda arranged a time the next afternoon when she could stop by.
She had scattered conversations with others at the table. There was the composer, elderly, originally from Poland. He had an accent so thick that it was hard for Annie to understand most of what he said, but she smiled and tried to respond when it seemed he’d asked her a question. There was a printmaker from San Francisco, and an African guy doing a book on the damaging side effects of international humanitarianism.
After dinner, nearly everyone went back into the big living room, which was divided into two areas. In one, a large fireplace with a big couch and chairs arranged around it. In the other, beyond the couch, a pool table took up most of the space. Melinda was over there, beginning to teach the game to Samuel, the African guy. A group of about six people was milling around, gathering their coats. They were going to a movie in a nearby town, clearly something planned ahead of time. There was another cluster of people settling in around the fireplace, but Annie would have had to ask someone to move over to make room for herself, and she felt a sudden, nearly adolescent sense of social incapacity. She’d go back out to the studio, she thought. Finish organizing things there.
She got her coat and waved goodbye to the room—jauntily, she hoped. When Josh, the printmaker, noticed her, he waved back. Then, just as Annie turned to go, several of the others looked up and called goodbye or waved too. “See you, Annie,” Melinda called from the other side of the room. “See you tomorrow.”
She was on the dirt road, flashlight in hand, watching the circle of white light dance ahead of her. She was scaring herself a little—the city girl, imagining bears, imagining a vaguer, more ominous animal life—when she heard footsteps behind her. Running. She turned. A man.
“Hey,” the figure said. She flicked her light up, to his face, and he lifted his arm to shield his eyes. It was Ian.
What she remembered their talking about that night—he’d invited her to his studio, where he had a bottle of wine and some glasses—was mostly work. Though he also offered her information on some of the other residents. “Campers,” he called them. He’d been there for almost a month, and he knew everyone pretty well. He had another month to go.
“Two months!” she said. “I’m only here for three weeks myself. Any longer, and my husband would shoot me.” (Why had she been so quick to bring it up, the fact that she was married?)
Ian was squatting by the fireplace now, trying to start a fire—balling up newspaper, jamming more in under the kindling each time the paper fire dwindled. Annie watched him for a minute. She felt conspicuously useless. She began to move around the room, looking at everything. There was an old wooden desk in front of the windows, a typewriter on it. Next to it were several stacks of paper, covered with print that had been scribbled over in ink here and there. The room had unfinished wood walls, walls that were studded with Post-its, a line or two on each in the same nearly indecipherable longhand. “Isaac needs to be more comfortable with himself.” “Changes in the scene with Ruby—she’s the angry one.”
“There we go,” Ian said, and she turned. The fire had caught. He gestured for her to take the armchair set by the fireplace, and he pulled his desk chair over on the other side of the hearth. They sat in silence for a moment, a moment that stretched out too long. Annie was aware of the noises of the fire. They both started to speak at once, they both said, “You . . . ,” and then both stopped.
He smiled and said, “Okay. Really: you.”
She made comments then, as she thought of it later. How little stuff he required for his work—gesturing at the desk. How it was just a matter of him and the paper and the typewriter. “That must be so lovely,” she said.
“Yes. Lovely,” he said, exaggerating the word. “I don’t usually think of it that way, but there it is.”
She began dramatically listing everything she’d brought with her, all the equipment.
He seemed to be amused, sitting, listening.
The fire popped, noisily, and little embers jumped onto the outer hearth.
Why was she going on and on? Annie thought. It occurred to her that she didn’t know how to be alone with a man anymore.
Or maybe not exactly that. She was fine with male friends, with the writers and photographers she knew. With other women’s husbands. She was thinking she’d be fine, she’d be comfortable with Ian, if they were both single, if sex were going to be a possibility. There was just something anomalous about this situation in her life—not knowing what the possibilities here were. Or weren’t.
Were there possibilities?
In the next silence she said, “Why did you ask me here?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Oh! Well, I guess I supposed you might like some company on your first night.” He smiled. A slight smile, though. “You don’t have to stay, you know. I like sitting by the fire perfectly well on my own.”
“No, I do like the company.”
“Well, I’m glad then. Glad I asked.” He was still holding the poker he’d used earlier to push the paper under the kindling. Now he leaned forward and nudged one of the logs back with it. “You seemed . . . lonely. You seemed new, in any case. I suppose I feel like the old hand.”
“A welcoming committee of one,” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
A silence accrued again. She was more comfortable in it. Still, she was the one who broke it. “What are you writing about?” she asked.
“Oh, it’s not interesting to describe it.”
“I’m interested, though.”
He waited a moment, and then he said, “A marriage.”
“That could be anything. It could be . . . Henry James. It could be Updike.”
So he explained it to her. An older man. A younger woman—a divorcée, with a little boy. He knows almost right away that the marriage is a mistake for him, but he has come to love the boy, so he does nothing about it. The woman understands this finally, and is wildly angry. “She starts to lead her life more and more away from him, away from the child. And finally she leaves, but she leaves the child with him.”
Annie was thinking of Lucas, the little boy she loved. The boy who already had a mother.
“Is it a happy ending, then?”
“I suppose you could call it that, if you felt it was.”
“But do you?”
He shrugged.
“Ah, you’re impossible.” She laughed.
“Well, you asked what it was about, and I told you. I told you, basically, the plot. But I don’t want to tell you what I think it’s most deeply about, or what you’re supposed to think about what it’s about. That’s something I can’t control anyway.”
She said, “It’s about Isaac and Ruby.”
“That’s it. The boy and the girl. Same old, same old.” They were quiet for a moment, and then he said, “Now you have to tell me what your work is about.”
“Ah! It’s even harder for a photographer, saying what it’s about. What you see is what you get.”
“And what would I see?”
Annie had just started to work from the negatives of the images she’d taken of her mother then, most of them of her face. She was, as she put it now to Ian, going to fool around with what she wanted from these shots. “Then I’ll know what they’re about.”
Annie had been angry with Graham when she left for MacDowell. It was at a time in her life when she wanted to move to New York. What she said to Graham was that she thought it would help her professionally, she thought it would be a more sympathetic place for a person like her. And she was tired, she said, of Cambridge.
This was before they bought the house, before she had Sarah. And it was after her first show did so well, when she had thought that this meant that all the shows would do well—all the future shows—and that her life would change as a result, she would belong in New York. She said this to Graham. “I think New York would be a much better place for me. For my work.”
But her tone when she spoke was deliberately careless—so careless that Graham must have thought it was just a kind of daydream she was talking about, a sort of joke.
“Yes, isn’t it pretty to think so?” he said. Then he laughed.