But through all this, even after the bond between Annie and Frieda was a settled, predictable part of their lives, what Frieda couldn’t help feeling was that Annie didn’t know—couldn’t know—the real Graham. And that she, Frieda, did. That she understood him in ways Annie would never be able to. After all, she had met him, fallen in love with him when he was homely, unbearded. She was a geeky girl, he a geeky boy, when they first went out together, when they married.

They were suited to each other. She did love him, and he loved her too, but she also felt he was as good as she would have. They were in the same league, was what she thought. What Annie didn’t know—couldn’t have known—what Frieda did know, was how the 1960s, the ’70s, had made Graham who he was now. Had made him sexy.

Oh, he’d always been passionate—about life, women, food, books, music, booze. But when he was homely, people didn’t find that as charming as they did later. Later, when all the changes in the rules came around. And for Graham, the beard, the full head of hair, the contact lenses, the sudden interest in elegant clothes. And the way all of those choices seemed to color everything he did or said. Seemed to change its meaning. Seemed to make him attractive.

Did make him attractive, Frieda understood that. Made him magnetic, even.

Which must have been what made Annie think that she and Graham were in the same league, that he deserved her. Only Frieda—Frieda and maybe some of his old friends—knew that if the beard came off, if the slight overbite were revealed, if you put him in his old clothes, then everything he did, everything he said, would be tonally altered.

No, without the transformation—what Frieda sometimes thought of as Graham’s disguise—Annie wouldn’t have been interested, Frieda was sure of it.

She thought that Graham understood this at some level too. That his worship of Annie was born of this, his sense of his extraordinary good fortune. His undeserved good luck.

And when, early on in his marriage to Annie, he confessed to Frieda that he’d been unfaithful to her with Linda Parkman, Frieda felt confirmed in this. She had a quick frisson of vengeful pleasure she could barely acknowledge to herself. Of course, for the infidelity itself; but then more deeply, more clearly, for the fact that he hadn’t told Annie about it.

And the reason he hadn’t told her? He couldn’t risk telling her. What Frieda knew was that there was this difference for him between her and Annie—that he’d always been honest with her, with Frieda, more deeply so than he could afford to be with Annie.

But she was Annie’s friend too. She was also angry with him on Annie’s behalf for that early infidelity; and maybe even more deeply angry with him on her own behalf once again for everything she’d lost all those years earlier. Sitting opposite him in her kitchen, full of the pain she thought she’d relinquished long ago, she wept. He’d reached his hand out to her then, but she turned away from his touch. He’d sat there uselessly for a few minutes, watching her slowly pull herself together.

After she’d stopped crying, he asked her if she thought he should tell Annie.

“No!” she had said, too loudly. “You’d relieve yourself at the price of her suffering. Why should she suffer? You suffer for a change.”

But oddly, or maybe not so oddly, the news of this—his infidelity with Linda Parkman—increased her pleasure in her friendship with Annie. She knew the shift had to do with her vague sense of having won something—what, she couldn’t have said. But whatever it was, it somehow evened the balance between her and Annie, it made everything easier.

Sometimes Frieda wondered how it would all play out over time, this complicated web of love and something else among the three of them—the five of them, if you counted Lucas and Sarah. She occasionally indulged the fantasy that Graham and Annie would take her in in her old age. Or perhaps, she thought, if Graham died first, she and Annie would live together, two old ladies, caring for each other. She could imagine this, the dinners together in the evenings, the visits from the children, the grandchildren.

And then there was the thought she rarely allowed herself, the one that came by itself, unbidden, from time to time, the one she pushed away as quickly as she could: What if Annie died first, and Frieda and Graham were the ones left behind? Would they come to live together again? Surely by then he would be changed. Surely by then—maybe even by now—it would be safe, he would be less libidinous. Maybe the passing of time had made a monogamous man of Graham.

When she hung up the phone, Frieda stood for perhaps a minute, sightless, deaf. Then she crossed the room and sank onto the piano bench, her back to the keys, to the possibility of music, to the possibility of anything further. After a moment she opened her mouth to shout, to scream, but nothing at all came out.

11

Frieda tried to call Lucas at his office a little after eleven, but he was in a meeting at the time with the editor in chief and the publisher, trying to persuade them to raise the amount he could offer for a first novel he was bidding on competitively. When the meeting was over, when he stopped in his office, he saw the note from his assistant on his desk: “Your mother called; wants you to call her back.” But he was worried about being late for lunch with Ian Pedersen, one of his newest authors. New to him, but probably in terms of age, oldest. Seventy at the least, Lucas thought. He was in town and probably needed some encouragement. He’d been divorced recently, for the third time, and it had “knocked him for a loop,” he’d told Lucas on the phone. He’d be longer than he’d thought getting this novel in.

In his hurry not to be late for Ian, Lucas left the office without calling Frieda.

He wasn’t late, though Ian, who was always early, was there ahead of him, sitting in a booth facing the door, his glass of wine already half gone.

He was late getting back from that lunch, and late, therefore, getting to the meeting about next year’s spring list. He wasn’t able to call Frieda back until after three. He didn’t worry about this, although it was a bit unusual for Frieda to call him at work. But she had, a few times. Once when she sprained her ankle, once when she was upset because someone had broken into the Whittier Street apartment in her absence and, among some other junk, stolen an old guitar of his, one he didn’t even remember owning.

“Oh, thank God it’s you!” she said. “Oh, God, Lucas.”

He was suddenly alert. An accident, he thought. Cancer. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“It’s Graham,” she said. “He had a heart attack.”

“And?” he asked, already irritated, irritated at the way she dramatized things, withheld the important information, buried the lead. “How is he?”

“He died!” she said, sounding surprised herself at this news.

Lucas was standing, looking out the window at the deep valley below him that was Broadway. He could hear the honking as it floated up to him. He had a momentary sense of absence from his own body, as if he were suspended in the air above what he was looking at. Later he couldn’t remember what questions he asked or how his mother had answered them. Somehow he learned that his father had died in the night, that Annie had called his mother to tell her the news this morning, that Frieda didn’t know whether there was a service planned or if so, when. He was aware of thinking, as he listened to her, as he slowly came back to the present, that this was very much a secondhand version.

He asked about Annie, how she was doing, and his mother said, “Badly, I imagine. But it’s hard to tell.”

Then—too late, too late—he thought to ask her how she was doing.

“Oh, I’m a complete mess,” she said, her voice suddenly wobbly.

“Would you like me to come? Now, I mean?”

“Wouldn’t that be difficult? To get away?”

“I could come for a day or two, certainly. Part of the weekend, anyway.”

“And what about Jeanne?”

What about Jeanne? His wife, an actress, French. Mostly, at this point in her career, doing voiceover work and commercials. She had a cordial but not close relationship with Frieda, whose emotional valence was incomprehensible to her. And though he had made the case for his mother to Jeanne many times—talked about the hard things she’d been through—Lucas was comforted, too, by Jeanne’s retroactive defending of him, of the childhood he’d had, living with Frieda, yearning for Graham.

“Jeanne wouldn’t be able to come. It’d just be me.”

“Well, I know Annie would be pleased if you came.”

“We’re not talking about Annie, Mom. We’re talking about you.”

She was silent a moment. Then she said, “Well then, I’d like it very much.”