Monogamy

by Sue Miller

  She had to wait two days, drugged nearly the whole time and with her arm in a sling, for the swelling to go down, for the orthopedic surgeon to fit her into his schedule. She watched television hour after hour, repeatedly nodding off and then waking to check the time, to see if she could take another oxycodone yet. On the third day, she came in for the surgery that would pin the pieces of her arm together.

  In the car on the way home, she said to Frieda, “I forgot he was dead. Graham.”

  Frieda looked quickly over at her. “What do you mean?”

  “I had some confusion, I guess. There are initials—P, O . . . postoperative . . . something or other.” This is what the doctor had told her when he finally came by. It happened “not infrequently,” he said, to the elderly after anesthesia—this confusion. He had warned her that she might have other episodes of it for a month or two, but said that it was a good sign that she’d recovered so quickly from this one, and that it was so minimal.

  “Oh, yes,” Frieda said now. She frowned and shook her head. “I don’t remember the name either. It sounds like PTSD or something, but that’s not it. Anyway, the doctor did tell me about it.” She looked at Annie quickly. “You’re not supposed to worry.”

  “I know,” Annie said. After a moment had passed, she said, “I thought he was the one who would be coming to take me home—Graham—and I was so glad.”

  “Well, of course you were.” Frieda reached over and touched Annie’s arm.

  After a minute, Annie said, “No. It was different from that. It was . . . more important than that.”

  She didn’t know how to explain it to Frieda. Her gladness. It wasn’t just that Graham was alive again. It was that she was too. I loved him again, she wanted to say. I remembered that I loved him.

  Frieda stayed and had dinner with Annie. She’d brought over a soup she’d made, split pea with ham and dill in it, and she’d bought a loaf of dark rye bread at Formaggio to go with it.

  While they ate, they talked about Annie’s fall, about other family accidents. Lucas falling off a climbing structure in second grade and breaking his arm. Graham breaking his ankle trying to slide into third base at a bookstore game on the Common.

  This was on account of Graham too, Annie felt—this ordinary, easy exchange with Frieda. The way he’d come back to her had made this possible.

  Frieda had never broken anything. “Except, I suppose, my heart a few times.”

  “Oh well,” Annie said. “We’ve all done that.”

  Frieda seemed to be waiting for her to go on, to discuss her broken heart.

  Instead Annie talked about the night of her accident, the reading by Lucas’s writer, Ian. Her quick drink with him afterward. She didn’t mention his mistake, or her sense of shock, of humiliation. Or the relief, afterward, of escaping him. She told Frieda that she’d bought his book, but dropped it when she fell, something she hadn’t realized until later. “So it’s lying out there in the snow somewhere, I suppose.”

  “Oh, I can easily get you another,” Frieda said.

  She looked at Frieda, generous Frieda, her old friend. Her hair was even messier than usual, from the winter hat she’d been wearing. When they were leaving the recovery area, the nurse had said to them, “Are you guys sisters?” They must have looked puzzled, because she said, “Just, you know, you’ve got the same name.” They looked at each other then, the tall Mrs. McFarlane, the short one, and they both laughed.

  “No,” Frieda had said. “No, but we might as well be.”

  Now Annie said to Frieda, “That’s okay. I’ve got plenty to read.”

  Annie woke in the night. She’d been dreaming of Graham—so he’d come back to her in this way too.

  She got up. Sam followed her into the bathroom, where he sat by the door watching her while she took some ibuprofen under the too-bright light, while she used the toilet. When she came out into the dark hall and turned toward her room again, he ran ahead of her and sprang onto the bed. She could hear his tail thumping slowly on the quilt as he waited for her.

  She slid under the covers, easing him over with her body. He stood up, and then, as soon as she was still, he lay down again and settled himself against the rise of her hips under the covers. Slowly she felt his warmth radiate through the quilt. She reached over with her left hand and stroked him for a moment, feeling the way his body lifted slightly, the way it tensed in pleasure under her touch.

  She was wide awake. She was trying to resurrect her dream, and couldn’t. She just knew that Graham had been there, his enveloping, reassuring presence—and the same sense of joy she’d felt earlier in the day came to her again, a kind of peace descending on her. It was as though some part of her that had been missing had been returned.

  She remembered so many things, things it seemed she’d forgotten. Things she must have willed herself to forget in her anger at him. The first time they’d made love—that wonderfully easy, slippery night when she’d walked him home from the bookstore. That he’d half carried, half danced her into his bedroom, his hand moving up under her skirt, his fingers finding her already, sliding into her already. That he’d gotten up hours later at a pause in things to go to the bathroom, and that on his return, he’d danced naked in the half-light of the room, his penis flopping as he leapt, his big body turning this way and that, as if he were offering it to her in this preposterous way. She remembered that she’d been embarrassed on his behalf at first, but then, slowly, amused, delighted. Later she’d thought that he was perhaps getting out ahead of the possibility of her finding him ridiculous by being ridiculous.

  “Everybody loves a fat penis,” he had said after he’d taken a deep theatrical bow and come back to bed. “Why not love the fat man who carries it around?”

  Why not?

  She had loved his fat penis, the way it filled her, how much she could feel it inside her. And she had loved him, the fat man—she had come to love even that about him—his bulk, his flesh. The touch of his beard, of his mouth on her body everywhere. How the talking in the dark—it didn’t matter what about, just the passing of the words, the ideas, the jokes, back and forth—was part of all of it. She remembered his voice, whispering so as not to wake Sarah, but still somehow deep, rumbling. She remembered his laughing so hard once that he had to get out of bed and pace around the room to try to catch his breath.

  All this, all this returned to her. Because of her fall. Because she’d gone to hear Ian read. Because of the chairs, the missing chairs that had made her think of Graham, made her remember that night with him.

  Why had she gone to hear Ian, really?

  Because of Graham. Because she’d still been angry at him—angry at him on account of Rosemary. Because, as she’d come to see, Ian—wanting the disturbance of Ian—had been, now just as much as when she was at MacDowell, a way of making up for something that had gone wrong between her and Graham.

  She remembered again what she’d written to Gertie about Ian—so proudly. That nothing had happened. That he didn’t matter, that it didn’t matter.

  But of course the truth was that she had wanted something to happen with him at MacDowell. She had wanted him. But not enough, apparently.

  Had she been frightened? Was that it? Or was it just Graham, finally? Her sureness that in the end he was what she wanted.

  Some of both, perhaps. In any case, she hadn’t let it happen. They’d done that ridiculous thing instead. At the thought of it, she stirred uncomfortably and the cat once more had to readjust himself.

  It seemed to her, lying there, that some of what she’d felt for Graham after the discovery of Rosemary was envy. Maybe partly because he had done it—fucked someone else—and she hadn’t. But more, she thought, for his honest embrace of pleasure. Pleasure was who Graham was. It was his gift. It was the reason he’d said yes. As he almost always did.

  “And me?” she thought, whispering it to herself. I said no, of course. But I didn’t say no because of who I was, because I was the moral being that Grah
am wasn’t. The reason I didn’t do it was because I was scared, because Ian had scared me.

  Not the person Ian was, no. She hadn’t even known that person. She had understood that at the reading, she realized. She remembered now listening to him talk, hearing in what he said his bitterness—so separate from what was fine in the story he’d written.

  No, Ian had scared her all those years ago because she was angry at Graham when she entered that dreamy time with him. Because her alienation from Graham had created the possibility of someone like Ian. And she had known somehow that sleeping with Ian would confirm that alienation, that distance from Graham, and she didn’t want to do that. Because she loved him. She loved Graham.

  She thought then of the uncomfortable sense of distance from Graham in the weeks just before he died. She had missed him in those weeks, she had wanted him back. She had been so happy when he’d suddenly seemed himself again, as she’d thought of it. When he toasted her beauty and Karen’s, when he brought her flowers.

  She had imagined that they would make love that night, that last night together, he had been so at ease through dinner, through the evening. When they left the rinsed dishes in the sink instead of cleaning up, she had been certain of it, even though she hadn’t seen Graham taking his pill.

  They’d gone upstairs. They undressed, they drifted separately back and forth to the bathroom to brush their teeth, to use the toilet. She had been aroused by his familiar nakedness, their nakedness together. He had touched her arm as they passed in the hallway once, and she had to catch her breath.

  Finally they lay down together, and Graham turned off the light. She reached over to him, started to move her hand over his furred chest and then down.

  But he stopped her hand, he held it. “I’m so tired,” he had said, and she could hear it, the exhaustion in his voice. “I just can’t tonight. Can you forgive me?”

  “I’ll try,” she said. She lay back down next to him. “Big effort, though.”

  They were quiet for a moment. He said, “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” she said into the dark.

  “No,” he said. “I love you. I always love you.”

  “Well, good. I know that.”

  “I want you to know that.”

  The window was open, and they heard one of the kids at the Caldwells’ house calling out, asking if someone had locked the front door. They lay still for a while. Then Graham whispered, “God, I’m such a fat, sad, needy man. I need so much . . . stuff. From life.”

  After a moment, she said, “I thought you were a fat, happy man.”

  That’s what she’d said. She’d made a joke of it, when he was trying to say something important to her.

  Something about himself. Maybe even something about Rosemary. Yes, maybe he was beginning to try to explain Rosemary to her.

  After a moment when neither of them said anything, when he was perhaps in some way hurt that she hadn’t been able to hear him, to listen, he had rescued them. He said, “Fat? You think I’m fat?” And they laughed together.

  There was so much stuff he needed, she thought now. She remembered his asking her to come and work in the bookstore once. It was during one of the periods in her life when she was lost, professionally. Lost and depressed. When she was renting herself out until something else came to her.

  They were sitting in bed. Graham had been reading, and she had been pretending to read, but now her book was resting, opened, across her outstretched legs. She wasn’t aware that he had stopped reading too, that he was watching her, until he began to speak, to make his suggestion, and she turned to look at him.

  What had he said? Have you ever thought of coming to work in the bookstore with me? Something like that.

  She hadn’t been able to tell if he meant it. He was serious, but he might just have wanted to comfort her in some way.

  She said no. She said it immediately, without even thinking about it. She said she knew he would devour her completely if she was his employee as well as his wife. Wasn’t it enough that he had his cake? Why did he need to eat it too?

  He had rescued them both then, too. “My cake! my cake!” he had cried, sliding over to embrace her, gobbling at her neck, her throat, opening her shirt to mouth her breasts.

  What an impossible match they were! She could never have surrendered enough of herself to make it perfect for him. She sees that. And perhaps in some way that was part of what happened. That he needed too much, too much stuff, because of who he was. And that she couldn’t give him enough, because of who she was.

  He had understood that, it seems to her, and she hadn’t.

  And yet how open he was! How he kept coming at her with his love, with himself.

  Her hand rests on the old cat, so warm, so alive.

  She remembers what Sarah had said about her once long ago—that she was unreadable. But Graham had tried, always, to read her, to understand her. To keep her laughing, to keep her talking. The night he died, when they were talking in the shadowy kitchen, he had called her an open book. A book, open to him. She remembers that now too.

  She whispers, “Reader, I married you.”

  Much later in the night, she senses the muffling of the house as the snow begins to fall, heavy and steady. She wakes once to the distant sound of the plow singing down Prentiss Street, and then goes back to sleep again.

  In the early morning, in the strange gray half-light of the ongoing storm, she wakes again and gets up. The skylight in the bathroom is blank with snow and her face looks young in the gentle dusk the mirror offers. She goes downstairs. She feeds the cat. She makes her own coffee and sits at the big oval table drinking it, imagining Graham in this very spot, morning after morning, alone, as she slept on upstairs.

  She remembers sitting here at the table the night John came over with his flowers, and her sudden conviction then, hearing his steps on the porch, that he was Graham, come back to her. She remembers too that after John left her alone that night, she had imagined how, in just that same way, she might wake up one day having dreamt Graham alive, and have to face her loss again. That this might happen over and over.

  She watches the heavy flakes fall. They’ve bent the branches of the lilacs nearly to the ground, they’ve weighted the viburnum that Sarah and Lucas planted in memory of their father, they’ve covered the box shrubs that Karen disliked so much, they’ve made a circle of mysterious mounds out of the old chairs on the patio.

  Looking out into this world, shrouded in the warm gray tones of an old photograph, full of the mystery of everything that’s there but has been made invisible, she wants to record it, to make it last. She thinks for a moment of going upstairs to get her camera.

  And then it comes to her, really for the first time since her fall, that she won’t be able to take pictures, at least for a while.

  That she will have to record all of this, remember it, on her own.

  She feels it coming then, and she welcomes its return—the grief that seizes her.

  About the Author

  Sue Miller is recognized internationally for her elegant and sharply realistic accounts of the contemporary family. Her books have been widely translated and published in twenty-two countries around the world. The Good Mother (1986), the first of her eleven novels, was an immediate bestseller (more than six months at the top of the New York Times charts). Subsequent novels include three Book-of-the-Month main selections: Family Pictures (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), While I Was Gone (an Oprah’s Book Club selection), and The Senator’s Wife. Her nonfiction book The Story of My Father was heralded by BookPage as a “beautiful, spare memoir about her relationship with her father during his illness and death from Alzheimer’s disease.” Her numerous honors include a Guggenheim and a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship. She is a committed advocate for the writer’s engagement with society at large, having held a position on the board of PEN America. For four years she was chair of PEN New England, an active branch that worked with wr
iting programs in local high schools and ran classes in prisons. She has taught fiction at, among others, Amherst, Tufts, Boston University, Smith, and MIT.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Sue Miller

  The Good Mother

  Inventing the Abbotts

  Family Pictures

  For Love

  The Distinguished Guest

  While I Was Gone

  The World Below

  The Story of My Father

  Lost in the Forest

  The Senator’s Wife

  The Lakeshore Limited

  The Arsonist

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  monogamy. Copyright © 2020 by Sue Miller. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  first edition

  Cover design by Joanne O’Neill

  Cover images © AzFree/iStock/Getty Images

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-296967-5