Monogamy

by Sue Miller

  Annie’s plan had been to ask him to consider her idea while she was away at MacDowell, and his response felt like being slapped—so that by the time he understood how serious she’d been, the damage was done. She had turned away from him, wounded and furious. When he offered his real objections, having to do with Lucas, with Frieda, having to do with the bookstore, having to do with the impossibility of starting up all over again in Manhattan, she was unable to summon any sympathy for his point of view. He seemed to her, suddenly, small-minded. Everything he did, his pleasure in everything he did, was offensive to her. Unbearable. Only later did it occur to her that her proposal to him, taken seriously, would have felt like a dismissal of his whole life and what he’d made of it.

  At the moment, though, she wasn’t capable of thinking about how she had sounded. She felt, listening to him, that she was hearing doors shutting, that she was understanding, for the first time, how confined his life was. Confined by the small size of his ambition, and by his actual enjoyment of all of his familiar, repetitive routines.

  And that meant that her life was confined too. The fears she’d overcome to be with him, the fears of being eaten by him, absorbed by him, by his appetites, seemed suddenly confirmed.

  “Annie,” he said, his voice serious now. “We settled on this, long ago.”

  “We settled for this,” she said.

  There was a moment of silence between them. They were looking at each other, hard.

  “You know there’s such a thing as money, right?” he said, finally. “There’s no way we could even begin to swing it.”

  They had a chilly month and a half, and then Annie went off alone to MacDowell.

  After that first glass of wine in his studio, Annie and Ian began to seek each other out. It started a few days later when Ian asked her at breakfast if he could hitch a ride with her to town, to Peterborough. He didn’t have a car here, and he needed a few groceries for his studio. To make it worth her while, he’d buy her coffee. Or a drink. Whatever she liked. So they went into town together and walked around, looking at shop windows, looking at houses and gardens, and then they sat and had coffee at a lunch place.

  Ian had a slow way of talking. He seemed to her at first quiet, almost inexpressive, accustomed as she was to Graham’s exuberant assertiveness.

  What was the affinity, then? There was one, and they both felt it, it seemed. After that first afternoon together, they often sat next to each other at dinner. They fell into the habit of walking back to their studios together after breakfast. Occasionally they met in the afternoons and walked around the grounds, or took long drives in Annie’s van, weaving through small towns in northern Massachusetts or western New Hampshire. Sometimes they listened to music together in the building called the library.

  They touched each other carefully, Annie’s hand on his arm, on his shoulder, calling attention to something she wanted him to see. His arm across her shoulder, guiding her across a street, or into a bar. It felt a bit like high school, she thought. But thrilling, in that same way.

  There were several parties while she was there, parties in other people’s studios. They danced together a few times at these parties, and she was intensely aware of his body, so slender and muscled against her, his hands on her back so strong, so in control of how they moved.

  She recognized that something was happening between them. That she wanted something to happen. And didn’t, too. But she allowed herself to have fantasies about it—about an escape from her life with Graham. About an affair. She told herself this was all right, because she wasn’t going to do anything about it. It was just a way of adjusting the balance between them, between her and Graham.

  Though she didn’t think of it then, she realized later that it was a kind of revenge she was exacting. A private revenge. One Graham didn’t need to know about.

  Late in the afternoon four or five days before she was to leave, she was startled by a knocking on her studio door. When she opened it, Ian was standing there in the cool, damp air under the little roof that protected the doorway. Behind him, droplets from the eaves fell, a kind of silvery scrim. All around was the rustle of light rain landing on the carpet of bright leaves that covered the ground everywhere.

  “Oh, no,” she said, already shaking her head. “No, no, no, no, no. You’re not here. You’re can’t be here.” This was the rule of the colony. No one arrived at anyone else’s workplace without a specific invitation.

  “On the other hand, I am here.”

  He waited for a moment, as if for her answer. When it didn’t come, he said, “I think you know why.”

  Annie looked away, as if she were ashamed. “I do,” she said. Then back at him. “But . . . I just can’t.” She shook her head. “This is not something I can do.”

  “Just let me in,” he said. “We can talk about it.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “We can talk about something else, then. Anything you like.”

  So she let him in. For a while, they did talk. He sat slouched in the only chair in the room, his long legs stretched out in front of him. She was propped up against the pillows on the daybed she’d napped on sometimes in the afternoons. Photos she’d developed of her mother’s face were everywhere on the walls, looking blankly down at them.

  She’d turned the lights off when he came in, in case someone should pass by on the dirt road, out for a walk in the rain. The day was dark anyway, and with the lights off, the big room was shadowed—though outside, the yellow leaves of the birch trees that surrounded the studio seemed nearly to glow against the deep green of the pines.

  Ian talked about himself. He hadn’t before, not really. What she’d learned about his life were just odd, unconnected facts she’d had trouble fitting together. Now he spoke of living in New England for a while as a young man, having come to college from Phoenix. “It might as well have been another country,” he said. He spoke slowly, as always. Sometimes there was a long pause between sentences, but Annie was used to this by now. She’d learned to wait for him.

  He’d gone back to Arizona to try to make a life there when he was through with college. He’d lasted about five years, he said, the whole time missing the East. “Especially this time of year. The town greens, the leaves, the white houses.” He’d yearned for it, he said. Even for the women, who seemed to him as different here as everything else was.

  “So I came back. Tried the Vermont life, along with the other thousands. Everyone who wasn’t in . . . Copenhagen. Or Marrakech.” He seemed to be smiling. “San Francisco.” He nodded, several times. “I actually got married. Which turned out to be a great mistake. And when it all ended, I felt exiled. From Arizona. From New England. So I went where everybody goes to escape where they’re from.”

  “That being New York?”

  “Yes.”

  She could hardly see his face, the shadows in the studio had deepened so.

  “It’s just about killing me to be here again.” His voice hitched, and she realized that he was weeping.

  “Oh, Ian,” she said. “Why don’t you come over here?” She patted the bed.

  He came and lay down next to her, directing her with his hands to make room for him. Then to slide down and lie beside him.

  “You know I can’t do this,” she said again.

  He was turned to her. “We’re talking. I’m crying. You can do this.”

  They did talk some more. But then, of course, as she had known would happen, they began to touch each other. His hands slid along her back, and in response, she held him too. She was almost trembling, his bones under the flesh felt so different from Graham.

  Then he was moving over her, moving onto her. His hands started to slide under her sweater, and she stopped them. They moved to the waistband of her jeans, and she stopped them. But her body kept responding to him, rising up to him, moving in what felt to her like slow waves that didn’t seem stoppable. She became aware that he was moving too, slowly at first, and then m
ore definitively, moving toward a climax.

  Which happened, quietly, a final tightening of all his muscles as he pressed against her, several catches in his breathing, then a long exhalation, and the gradual easing of all the tension, his weight sinking fully onto her. They lay in each other’s arms, loosely. Then he slid off her. She turned toward him. In the dim light, she could see the tightening of his mouth, the slight twisting that meant he was smiling.

  After a few moments, he cleared his throat. He said, “This is not a grown-up thing to be doing.” She heard in his voice that he was still smiling.

  “Yet you did it,” she answered.

  “Oh, but you did it too,” he said. They were speaking softly, as if there were someone nearby who might hear them. After a minute, he said, “I feel like a teenager. And I don’t mean that in a good way.”

  She laughed, a quick, small sound.

  “Actually,” he said, “it was sort of fun. In its way.” After a moment, “Anyhow, it’s always nice, isn’t it?”

  “Always?” she whispered. “You do this a lot?”

  He laughed. “No, I don’t. I never do this.” He pulled his head back, to look at her. “Who would do this?” Then he relaxed again. He spoke close to her ear. “No, what I mean is just coming. Coming is nice. That release. And actually, there was a sweet quality to this particular one, I thought.” She couldn’t tell if he was serious. After a moment he said: “Sticky, though,” and she could hear that he wasn’t.

  “I suppose.” She turned onto her back. “Of course, I didn’t have that ‘sweet release.’” She emphasized the words, making fun of him.

  He reached for her. “I’d be only too happy to—”

  “No. No, really, I can’t.” And felt how odd it was to say that, how different from everything she’d understood as her own sexuality.

  After Ian left (“I suppose we should show up separately for dinner, yes?”) she lay on the bed for a while, watching the dark gather around her studio, thinking about what had just happened. And then about Graham, about the first time she’d had sex with him.

  There were only four days left in Annie’s stay after they lay down together. They talked as much during these days, sitting in a corner of the big main room, or having some wine in the library after someone’s reading, but they seemed to be trying not to be alone together. At least Annie felt it was mutual. They seemed, she thought, to be acting out a kind of sweet, stupid companionship, as though their attraction to each other had become a kind of joke they shared.

  It occurred to her only much later that he might have lost interest when it was clear that they weren’t going to fuck. That he was perhaps being only polite after that, while basically waiting for her to leave so he could try his luck with someone else. She’d heard about people like that at artists’ colonies. Serial romancers for whom the assembled writers and artists were just so many opportunities.

  In any case, it was easy enough not to be alone. There were always people around, and she had come to know some of them, to like some of them. Melinda, the painter, had left after Annie’s second week, but she’d grown close to a sociologist named Gertie Grant, who was writing a history of federal housing policy and its impact on the black community, “For a general audience,” she said. “And all that really means is that I’m hoping for some dough with this one.”

  Gertie walked into the main building one afternoon about an hour before dinner to find Annie and Ian sitting together in front of the fireplace. They’d been talking, but they stopped when she came into the room. She stood frowning at them both for a long moment. She said, “What is it with you guys?” Gertie was tall and of ambiguous sexuality, with a pug face, everything a little bit flattened-looking. Still, there was something appealing about her.

  “There is nothing with us,” Ian said. “We were happily alone here, until you arrived.”

  As seemed to be the tradition, at least in the group at the colony while Annie was there, on her last night she had a party in her studio. She had resolved that she wouldn’t let Ian stay on with her afterward, but it seemed he must have resolved it too—he left with the last group to go, stopping to hold her face in his hands on the front stoop, to turn it and gently kiss each cheek.

  She was disappointed, in spite of her resolve. She was also a bit drunk. She sat down on the edge of her daybed and messily cried for a few minutes before she started to pick up the room.

  He wasn’t at breakfast the next day, but he’d left a note in her mailbox. Since she didn’t check the mailbox before she left, though, the note came forwarded to her at home after about ten days. She was back in the routines of her life by then, but not so much so that the thought of Ian had begun to seem as unlikely to her as it did later on.

  You almost broke my heart, Annie. And you could have, if you’d wanted to.

  I’ll hold all this time close to me.

  Ian

  One day, months later, when it felt safe to her, when the time with Ian had already begun to fade, she asked Graham if he’d ever read anything by Ian Pedersen.

  Oh yes, he said. He had. He’d read both of the novels, and he thought they were first-rate. Why did she ask?

  She was using a neutral, tempered voice, in spite of the perverse excitement she felt. She tried to make it no different from the voice in which she would have discussed any other writer. “Oh, he was at MacDowell when I was there, and I just wondered what you might think of him. Of his work, I mean. I thought I might try him.”

  Graham was looking at her, curiously, she thought. “Well, that’s what I think,” he said. “Of his work.”

  As he turned away, she had the sense that she’d betrayed him more with what she’d just done than with anything that had happened at MacDowell.

  31

  Since the day on Thanksgiving weekend when Lucas had first brought up Ian’s name, Annie had thought of him and of her time with him at MacDowell often. She mentioned him in an email to Gertie, the one friend from MacDowell she’d kept up with. Gertie lived in California, but whenever she was in New York, Annie tried to go down to see her.

  In her email, she told Gertie that Ian—“Remember Ian Pedersen?”—had another book coming out after all these years, and by an amazing coincidence, her stepson Lucas was his editor.

  Well, Gertie wrote. Here it is, your unencumbered chance to pick up where you left off.

  We were just friends. That’s where we left off.

  Har, har. So you say. So you said then. But none of us believed you.

  So I say now. And who’s this “us,” as in “none of us”?

  Did you not know you were the object—or is it the subject?—of gossip? We were all sure you were fucking.

  Well, we weren’t! she typed.

  But then, startled by her own quickness to respond, to respond so emphatically, she began to think about it, her afternoon with Ian, remembering it more and more clearly through that day, through the next few days. The visual images arrived first—the silver drops falling behind his dark shape on the porch. The golden light on the leaves of the birch trees. The deepening twilight inside the studio as they talked.

  And then the other details. (“Sticky,” he’d said.)

  It came to her that the difference between fucking and what they’d done was what Graham might have called “pretty technical.”

  How ridiculous, then, her prideful response to Gertie! In fact, the whole thing slowly began to seem laughable to her. And as her memory of the events sharpened, she recognized that over the years she’d created a particularly self-forgiving version of it for herself. That she’d been attracted to Ian, but had said no. It’s what she had confessed to Graham much later, her noble, noble confession. It’s what she had told Edith. And wasn’t it essentially what she’d said Thanksgiving weekend to Sarah, too? A sweet flirtation that hadn’t meant anything. Something like that.

  But now she was remembering more and more her own part in it. How exciting the slender, muscled quality of his bo
dy had felt to her when they danced, when they lay down together, the otherness of it. She remembered, with a sense of surprise, that she had argued with herself about whether or not to sleep with him over the days that preceded the rainy afternoon.

  She remembered the last night she saw him, wanting him to stay with her. Not wanting it. But really, wanting it. Crying when he left.

  She remembered too asking her question of Graham those months later—the question about Ian’s books, and the sense she had immediately afterward of having done something wrong to Graham.

  In late January, Lucas emailed Annie to say that Ian Pedersen was going to be reading at the bookstore. Just FYI, he wrote. No need for you to go. I didn’t mention anything about you to him. But just in case you want to see what “really old” looks like . . .

  Then the postscript: The book, by the way, is doing okay. Not quite as okay as we had hoped. But then that never happens.

  At first she didn’t plan on going. She had no wish to confront the version of herself that had been interested in Ian. Interested in Ian because she’d been furious at Graham. She had remembered that detail also—her anger.

  Which brought with it its own humiliation when she recalled the reasons for it: she’d been so sure that her life was moving in a different direction from Graham’s, that he was holding her back. (It was at this point that it occurred to her that she might have thought of Ian at the time as a handy instrument of revenge. Admittedly a strange, private revenge. One she wouldn’t reveal to Graham. But was that part of the affinity between them, then? The use she might make of Ian in her anger at Graham?)

  She suspected that Lucas was at least in part just trying to get her out of the house when he wrote to her about the reading. It seemed her friends took turns at this. But she reminded herself now that there had been also increasingly the sounding out of her possible readiness to meet someone. The odd tentative suggestion. Perhaps someone’s widowed brother? (This from Edith.) Or divorced friend? (Don.)