Monogamy Page 31

She hadn’t arranged anything about opening the cottage either, so the grass would be unmown, the screens would still be in the shed, the bed would be unmade, the house would be dusty and spiderwebbed and dotted here and there with mouse droppings.

Yet she felt a sense of deep relief to be leaving, to be escaping the neighbors who came to check on her, to offer help, to drop off food. To escape even her friends, with their concern, which she had no adequate response to. She’d felt, over and over, the strain of trying to rise to some kind of sociability. She felt watched. She wanted an uninterruptable solitude, and the cottage, she thought, would offer this.

The sense of relief—release, really—grew as she passed the highway markers and familiar milestones, a release that turned into an odd kind of elation. It made her blood pound audibly in her ears, this crazy freedom, but it also made her feel more keenly her grief. She was giddy with both—with the glad escape from anyone’s expectations of her, with a joy in being safely alone, but with an awareness the more intense because of that of the long aloneness to come.

She heard herself suddenly, a kind of rhythmic keening she was doing. There were no tears. It wasn’t that—crying. It was a kind of protest, something that felt more primal than tears. She gave herself over to it. By the time she was crossing the border into New Hampshire, she was wailing her sorrow. Wave after wave of lamentation, until, finally, she’d worn herself out and she had to stop. Her throat was dry and a little sore. She felt there was nothing left inside her.

As she drew nearer to the border with Vermont, it occurred to her that she would need to stop in Hanover for groceries. She couldn’t think what she wanted. She hadn’t really cooked since Graham died. What would you make if Graham weren’t going to sit down with you and cry out over the food?

Of course he had loved it best when there was company and she made fancy dishes—cassoulet or stuffed bass or Moroccan lamb. But even when there were just the two of them, even if there was just roast chicken or some kind of pasta, he would open a bottle of wine, she would light the candles, and at the first bite he would signal his joy—a hand to his heart, or just her name aloud. Annie remembered his rising once from his end of the table and coming over to her, bending to kiss the top of her head. “You make me so goddamned happy, Annie,” he said.

“Ah, it’s food that makes you happy, Graham,” she had answered.

“You are food,” he said.

In the end she bought just wine and fruit and breakfast things—eggs, bacon, bread and butter, coffee beans and milk.

Though the sun was warm on her head and shoulders as she moved across the overgrown yard to bring the groceries and her bags inside, the cottage itself was chilly and smelled of old ashes and damp—the odor of sorrow itself, it seemed to Annie. She plugged in the refrigerator and turned it on, put the perishables inside it, and then went around the three small rooms, opening windows. As she slid one of them stiffly up at the front of the house, she stopped to watch the light move on the lake, spangling it. She could hear a motorboat somewhere, and distant voices, pitched to carry over the engine noise. She could hear the breeze hissing lightly in the pines. The house itself was silent but for the low, steady mumble of the refrigerator.

She called Dan Curtis about the mowing, and he said he could get to it within a few days. She decided to do the cleaning herself—she didn’t want anyone in the house with her. She fixed herself some scrambled eggs and toast and coffee, and when she was finished eating, she started in, dusting everything, sweeping down cobwebs from the corners of the ceiling, vacuuming. In the bedroom she opened the storage crate for the bedding, a wooden box lined with wire screening to keep the mice out. She took out the quilt, the sheets and pillows, and made the bed.

When she was done with everything, she went outside and down to the lake. She walked to the end of the dock. She took off her shoes and sat, hugging her knees.

The lake had a pleasant, slightly algal smell. Wavelets lapped lightly at the posts under the dock, a gentle slurping sound. The wood was warm on the soles of her feet.

Graham had loved it here, though he worried at the notion of being a person with two houses. “I’ve become a fucking grandee!” he said once. They were sitting on the dock with gin and tonics late in the afternoon. Out in the middle of the lake, a water-skier had moved slowly past, behind a white boat.

“To be a fucking grandee, you need something a little more grand than a five-hundred-square-foot cottage,” Annie had said. “Unwinterized, yet.”

Now she dropped her feet into the water. As cold as ever. Only toward the very end of the summer could you jump in without gasping, without worrying about the shock to your heart. She pulled her feet back up, reached down to warm them with her hands, thinking of Graham’s hands, warming her.

He had been different up here, as Annie knew she was too. Quieter. The great sociability that marked him in the city eased.

Eased. That was an odd word to think of—as though the sociability were a kind of affliction or burden for him.

Which sometimes it seemed it might be, it occurred to her now. As when his face sagged in exhaustion at the end of an evening with others. As when, occasionally, instead of welcoming an invitation (Good God, are you kidding?! Of course we have to be there), he would ask her to get them out of something. “I just can’t,” he’d say, and it would seem to her he was speaking of a nearly physical impossibility.

Because the cottage was so small that they really couldn’t have guests, they just assumed their solitude here. Alone together, they quietened. Whole days passed when they barely spoke to each other. But where Annie had imagined Graham chafing at this, he seemed instead to welcome it. Over time, she thought, to need it.

Their lovemaking had seemed different up here too, not to be generated by conversation or wordplay, as it so often was at home, but by something more visceral—more, again, like need. In the dark silence of the tiny bedroom he’d reach for Annie, move over her, rise up on his knees and enter her, all quickly, quickly. And usually quickly too, he’d come—arched away from her, crying out.

They would lie still in the dark. Later he sometimes turned to her, occasionally bringing her back from the beginnings of sleep, his mouth on her, his fingers sliding in and out of her, her sensations confused sometimes—what was tongue? what lips or fingers? which, moving where? She would teeter for long moments on the edge of coming, the feeling would ebb and then return, and then finally it would begin, a more dizzying, slower version of it than she was used to, the dark and silence around her so complete as to make the experience nearly disembodied, while also being almost purely of the body—like a nearly solitary dream of wordless sex they were also somehow sharing. When it ended she felt shaken, sometimes near tears.

They both slept deeply here, and woke with the faint silvery light of first morning, its touch bringing her back to the room, the animal shapes of the clothes on the hooks, the light reflecting on the old mirror like a window where there wasn’t one.

Annie stayed for five days. She drank coffee in the morning for energy—three, sometimes four cups. More than once, if she stood up too fast, her heart pounded and she felt lightheaded.

The first afternoon she called everyone who might be worried about her—Natalie and Edith, Frieda and Sarah and Lucas—to tell them where she was.

She tried to order her time. She read in the books that were on the shelves in the living room. The “shelves”: just horizontal boards between the exposed studs. They were in the same plane as the studs too, and therefore not really deep enough to hold some of the resting books. Sometimes when Graham walked around too heavily, one or two of the larger volumes would fall out. Volunteers, he called them, and always laid them out to read next, following some obscure rule of his own.

She read Auden. A translation of Catullus that Graham had been reading—funny and, to Annie, surprisingly, amusingly, dirty. She’d taken Latin in high school and read Catullus then. An expurgated Catullus, she saw now. She read Simic. She read Szymborska, hard and yet somehow comforting about aging and death.

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