Monogamy

by Sue Miller

  Her no to these invitations had been automatic, but now, with Lucas’s quasi-invitation, she began to consider it. And in the end, she decided she would go. Go, to see how Ian had weathered the years—she recognized her curiosity about that. Go, to see how she might respond to whatever the new version of Ian would be, without the complication of being married to Graham. It had been long enough, after all. It would have been long enough even without Graham’s affair with Rosemary, but perhaps that gave her a more powerful permission.

  Why not? she thought.

  Why not?

  And maybe he’d have no memory of her. Fine. She was curious, anyway—or at least interested—to hear him read what Lucas had admired so, to buy the book.

  And if he did remember her, if he was interested in her, they might have a brief conversation. That was probably the most likely outcome. A brief conversation.

  But even that she looked forward to, she realized. An evening out, a conversation with a probably perfectly safe man. Any other possibilities seemed unlikely, and she tried not to let herself entertain them.

  Annie was sure she’d be late. Just as she was leaving the house, she remembered that the cat was outside. She went onto the back stoop and called and called, her breath pluming thick and white in the light over the back door, but Sam didn’t turn up.

  She didn’t really worry about his wandering. He had disappeared occasionally before, but he never went far from the yard—he hadn’t in Karen’s day either. Still, it would be a long time for him to be out on a cold night. She felt bad about leaving.

  And then she felt anxious because she was going to be late, which made her realize how much she’d been looking forward to this evening, to seeing Ian again. She hadn’t fully acknowledged that to herself, she understood now, walking too fast to the bookstore over the icy sidewalks. She was breathless and frazzled by the time she arrived—a bit early, after all. She bought the book, she went to the open area for readings at the back of the store to find a seat.

  There was a decent audience, Graham would have said.

  Disappointing, Lucas would have said.

  But the new owners (she’d met them, Sid and Olympia, a youngish couple) were as smart as Graham had always been about the number of chairs set up—never as many as you suspected you might need, in case it turned out you didn’t need them and the place wound up feeling disappointingly underpopulated.

  In this case they’d set up about ten rather narrow rows, rows that were already about two-thirds full when she arrived. She waved to a couple of people she thought of as “Graham’s writers,” and sat near the middle, in a row with two or three empty seats.

  Something about the store felt different to her. She had the sense that things had been rearranged somehow since she’d last been here. She looked around, but she couldn’t quite figure it out—what the difference was. It was a bit disorienting, so she stopped trying. She took off her coat. She opened the book to the back flap to look at the author photograph.

  She wouldn’t have recognized him. His hair was white and cut close to his head, which made him look quite other. Tougher, she thought. None of that androgyny stuff anymore. She read the short bio, then the acknowledgments, then the dedication. There was nothing that signified wife to her, or even lover.

  She felt self-conscious, suddenly. Foolish. She shut the book.

  The rows had almost filled, and now a couple of store workers were setting up more chairs, the metal clanging and clattering. She watched the people arrive, and she waited.

  At about five past the hour, Sid, the new owner, moved up to the podium, trailed by a tall, lanky man—the new, white-haired version of Ian. Sid welcomed people and read through the announcements of upcoming events. He had none of the palpable energy and enthusiasm Graham had brought to this task—the asides, the jokes. She thought of the way he used to worry before each of these evenings. Then his happy, busy hosting of things once they got started.

  Sid introduced Ian. She’d been watching him the whole time. He looked the same in some ways—in many ways. His face was lined, she could see that even from where she was sitting, but it was lined kindly, gently, as if a faint netting had been set evenly over his features. He was dressed a bit like a cowboy (jeans, boots) but then wearing what looked almost like a woman’s shirt—white, slightly belled, no collar—and over that, a brown tweed jacket so old it was almost shapeless. He’d grown a mustache, which enhanced the cowboy look. (She remembered then how contemptuous Graham had been of mustaches when they came into vogue in the 1980s. He thought they signaled an absurd kind of vanity. Well, what about the mustache and beard upon his own face? she’d asked him. Completely different, he said. This was the way facial hair was meant to grow. A mustache by itself—he’d shaken his head pityingly—was an artifice.)

  She’d forgotten Ian’s voice, how soft it was, how gentle. “Can you hear me?” he asked, and almost everyone more than three rows back called out “No!” in a ragged chorus.

  He adjusted the mike so it was closer to his mouth. “Better?” he asked.

  A more organized chorus this time. “Yes!”

  He began. No introduction, no explanation of inspiration, of process, as it was called in this universe. He read for about twenty-five minutes. As Lucas had promised, the story was a boy’s, told in a voice that combined the boy’s and the grown man’s perspectives, moving easily between the two.

  In the section Ian was reading from—the very beginning of the book—the boy explained his father, a patient, disciplined man, the editor of the only newspaper in a town of about five thousand people in Arizona. A man who would listen to you, question you patiently, even when you’d done something foolish or just plain wrong. Who’d want to hear your explanation for your behavior. Who always assumed you would have one. “Nothing made me angrier at him than that quality of my father’s,” Ian read. “His unforgivable readiness to understand me, to see me as a rational human being.”

  This first chapter set up the tension and foreshadowed the way the conflict between the two, father and son, would play out. The boy, driven to wilder and wilder misdeeds; the kind, slightly abstracted father willing to find a reason to forgive the son every time; the mental instability of the mother obviously the battlefield on which the conflict would play out. It was quiet, a bit slow, and entirely compelling to Annie.

  There was generous applause after Ian closed the book. He took off his glasses and lifted his face to the audience. She remembered again the way it had looked the afternoon they lay down together.

  “I’ll take questions,” he said.

  There was the usual awkward pause before they began, but finally someone about three rows back raised her hand: How much of what he had read was autobiographical?

  “Pure invention, all of it!” he said, smiling. Cue the laughs.

  The smile made him more recognizable, the pursing of the lips first, their slight twist sideways. He was an old pro, she thought. And clearly enjoying himself.

  Why the silence of so many years?

  “You’d have to ask that question of any number of unreasonably picky publishers.”

  It was hard for Annie to figure out what to make of this. Some people laughed, but she thought there might be a bitter quality to Ian’s voice.

  What were his writing habits? someone else asked, perhaps intending to change the subject.

  “Diurnal,” he said, and turned to point to another raised hand.

  There was a series of familiar questions then, ones Annie had heard many times at other readings she’d come to—they didn’t seem to change much over the years. How did you get started? When did you know you were a writer? How much does place figure in your work? What kind of research do you do for each novel? Ian’s responses were more interesting than the questions, but they also seemed familiar.

  Someone asked once more about his long silence. He paused for a moment, as if making a decision about how to respond. Then he began again, differently this time. While
he was speaking, the humor fell away, and she heard clearly the anger he’d masked with his first, joking response—which had been the one he was used to offering, she supposed.

  He spoke of his years “out in the cold,” as he put it, starting with his third novel. There’d been a crappy review in the Sunday Times of this book, “possibly my strongest novel to date at that point,” he said. Then they piled on, the reviewers. Some of the later reviews actually echoed the language of the first one. He paused and smiled, a mocking smile. “Apparently a case of monkey see, monkey do,” he said.

  He went on. His publishers backed away from him—they dropped him, dropped the book. No ads, no pushing it. Several radio interviews that would have made a big difference were canceled. “Let’s just call it a clusterfuck, pardon my language.” But as a result of all this “bad faith,” he said, the book didn’t sell. “And that follows you around,” he said. “It makes everything harder.

  “Plus, it didn’t help to be a white man either at that particular point in time. I actually had someone say to me that if my fourth book—my very unpublished fourth book—had been written by a woman, almost any house would have taken it.”

  There was an uncomfortably long wait, and then another hand went up. What effect did all this have on his writing?

  “On the writing itself, I don’t know.” Then he shrugged, and his face changed. The charming half smile returned. “But who knows? It might have been useful to me personally, in the end.”

  How, useful?

  “Well, it brought me to my knees. And that is always useful, for a person like me.”

  “What kind of person is that?” someone in back called out.

  The audience laughed, a bit uneasily. Was this too intimate a question?

  “An arrogant son of a bitch.” He offered the smile again. “Or so I’ve been told.”

  There were a few more questions, and then a silence. No hand went up to break it. Stepping back, he nodded his head several times. “Okay,” he said. “I’m here to sign.” As the applause rang around the room, he opened a questioning hand out toward Sid, who had been standing behind him while he read, leaning against a bookcase.

  Sid directed him to the table off to the side of the space the podium was set in. Ian sat down, and people began to rise from their seats and move slowly toward the ends of their rows. A line started to form in the aisle, a line that shuffled and shambled and then pulled itself into a kind of disorderly order, winding around the side of the rows of chairs and beginning to move very slowly forward, toward where Ian was seated now.

  Annie was standing with the others in her row, waiting to move toward the aisle. She was watching Ian, who was looking out over the room as the line formed, perhaps counting the house. For a moment, their eyes met.

  He recognized her. Or at any rate he was trying to place her—she could see that: the frown, the mouth that opened, just slightly. But then he turned away to look at the first person standing by the table, holding out her book to him.

  Annie inched forward toward the aisle end of her row, looking over several more times at Ian. He was mostly engaged in conversation or looking down to inscribe a book, but their eyes met again once and he smiled his ironic smile and nodded several times, as if to say yes, he recognized her. Yes, he was waiting for her. She was aware of standing up straighter, of a kind of pleasant breathlessness.

  As she reached the aisle and turned toward the table where Ian waited, she saw that Olympia, Sid’s freckled, redheaded wife, was standing at that side of the room, asking for the correct spelling of people’s names and writing this down on Post-its that she handed to them to affix to the front of their books, a time-saving courtesy to the author that Graham had always insisted on too. Olympia looked up and smiled as Annie reached her. “You don’t need to tell me your name,” she said to Annie, and wrote it down. As Olympia handed over the slip of paper, Annie felt someone grip her arm. She turned. It was Bill, skinny, gray-haired, ever the same. He leaned forward and hugged her quickly, shyly. “It’s so good to see you here,” he said. “You should come more often.”

  “I know. And maybe I will once the weather makes it a bit easier.”

  “Yeah, this is always a tough month,” he said. They talked for a few minutes more, Bill moving forward along with her, and then he said he had to get back to the front desk. Annie reached up to hug him, to kiss his cheek before she stepped away.

  She finally reached the table and stood waiting while the couple in front of her finished talking with Ian. As they moved on, Ian looked up and saw Annie. He stood quickly, reaching his hands across the table to take both of hers. Awkwardly, she set the book down to let this happen.

  “God, it’s so good—it’s just amazing!—to see you again,” he said. He leaned toward her to touch his cheek momentarily to hers on one side and then the other.

  “It is,” she was saying. “It’s wonderful to see you, too.”

  He kept standing for a moment, looking at her, grinning. “I recognized you right away,” he said. His mouth twisted slightly. “‘Across a crowded room.’”

  He sat down, sliding her book toward him while he looked up at her. “You live near here?”

  Yes, she said. A couple of blocks.

  He smiled at her for a moment, nodding his head slowly. He said, “It was Yaddo, wasn’t it?”

  “Almost Yaddo,” she said, smiling back. “MacDowell.”

  “Right. Right. Right.” He nodded several times again. “But I mean, Christ! How many years ago was it?”

  “Maybe thirty?” she said. “Shockingly enough. Since we’re both so young.”

  He laughed. He shook his head then and said, “It’s just so fucking good to see you, Annie.”

  She smiled back at him. “And you,” she said.

  He took the Post-it off the book and opened it to sign. “Just your name is fine,” she said, and he signed it quickly—illegibly, she noted. A big scribble. They talked for a minute or two more, Annie increasingly aware of all the people behind her. Remembering it later, she wasn’t even sure what they had said, but she was waiting through it anyway, waiting for him to say what he did then.

  “Look, Annie,” leaning toward her, lowering his voice. “Why don’t we get a drink somewhere when I’m done here?” He was holding the book out to her. “It’d be nice to take a break from the never-ending enforced politeness of the book tour. That’s hard to sustain for someone like me.” He grinned again. “Plus I’d love to catch up.”

  Annie looked over at the long line. “You won’t be done here for a while,” she said. “Maybe we could meet somewhere close by?”

  That sounded excellent, he said, and she suggested the bar in the restaurant of the Charles Hotel, a couple of blocks away. “It’s a nice bar. Quiet. Come up the staircase from the lobby. It’s easy to find.”

  Before she’d even turned to go, the man behind her was pushing his book across at Ian, asking if he could inscribe it to a friend.

  Outside, the bricks were wet and whited with the salty residue of the snow. The shoveled hillocks stood at the edge of the sidewalk, stained here and there with dog piss. Annie walked slowly, thinking about Ian, about how this might go. She was, she would have said to anyone who asked, excited. But also anxious. Maybe a bit scared.

  Well, she would see, she thought. And if things weren’t going well, if things were awkward or difficult somehow, she had an excuse ready—that she couldn’t stay too long, on account of the cat.

  But what if things were going well?

  She could offer him a drink at her house, of course. The cat could be useful in that case too—she needed to get home to let him in. It wouldn’t be hard to invite Ian to come with her.

  Inside the hotel, the ground-floor lobby was almost empty. She mounted the wide, carpeted stairs and went into the bar. She could hear the hubbub of conversation from around the corner, where the restaurant opened out. The bar was quieter—there were only two tables occupied out here, one by a c
ouple, the other by a solitary man. Japanese, she thought, in an expensive-looking suit, having his dinner. The wall of windows behind him looked out on the vast, empty courtyard, the only light out there the tiny white bulbs wrapped around the trees, leftover Christmas decorations.

  She ordered a whiskey, rocks on the side. When the drink came, she sat sipping it and looking out at the dark night, at the twinkly lights.

  Then Ian was there, at the top of the stairs, glancing quickly around to see which way to go. He saw her and grinned. Even as he threaded his way around the unoccupied tables, he was smiling at her.

  He leaned forward and touched her cheeks with his again before he sat down opposite her. He was glad she’d already ordered for herself, he said, and turned to signal the waiter. He asked for a beer.

  While they waited, they expressed amazement once more. He asked about the guy she’d been talking to in the line. Oh, an old, old friend of hers and her husband’s, she said. He worked in the store.

  Oh, yes. He remembered: she was married. And he smiled again, his minimal, sly smile.

  “I was,” she said. “I’m a widow now,” she said, surprising herself.

  Clearly surprising him too. His face changed. “Oh, I’m really sorry.”

  Had she wanted to do that? To startle him? To catch him off guard?

  Was she using Graham, Graham’s dying, for that?

  “Well, it’s been a while,” she said.

  “Still . . . ,” he said. He talked about his divorce then. “Not that it’s comparable in any way.” He’d gone into a funk, he said. “Technically, I suppose, a depression.” He’d stopped writing for a while. He described his slow recovery, the sense he had of returning to his work changed, strengthened in some way.

  His beer came, and he raised his glass. “To . . . reunions, let’s say.”

  She raised her glass too, and they clicked them together over the table.

  They talked about the reading then. She said how much she’d enjoyed it. He talked about the difficulty of choosing a passage to read, he described a couple of the possibilities he’d rejected, and explained why. She asked about the book tour—how long? Where? How was it going?