“Don’t you sometimes just know things?” she asked Frieda.

“I suppose,” Frieda said, after a few seconds had passed. Then, after a longer silence, she said, “But . . . this is the party last night you’re talking about?”

Annie stared at her for a moment. “Yeah?” she said. What was Frieda’s point?

“Oh,” Frieda said. “I guess . . . uh. I guess I was just confused.”

“Huh!” Annie said. They sat there, not looking at each other.

(Lucas and Jeanne had still been there, at Frieda’s, when Annie arrived, though they said they were just leaving, that they needed to get back. “I don’t mean to drive you away,” Annie had said.

“You’re not,” Jeanne said.

“Are you sure?”

“No, no, no, no,” Jeanne said. “Not at all. We really do need to get back. We’re supposed to turn the car in this afternoon.”

Lucas said, “And you and Frieda need some time together, I’m sure. No, it’s fine.”

So there’d been the politeness there too. Annie was sick of it. Sick of making nice.)

Frieda said, “If I can just say . . .”

“Say away. It won’t make any difference to me.”

Frieda took a deep breath. “It’s just, I don’t think it mattered much to him, in some way.”

Annie snorted.

“No,” Frieda said. “No, what I mean is that I wish I had understood that when . . . even when he and I were together. Because it was true then too, I think. That it didn’t really matter.”

“Then why do it?” Annie said furiously. “Why take the risk of . . . doing such damage. To you? To me? Of getting caught?”

Frieda was silent for a long time. “I don’t know. Of course I don’t know. But the way I saw it . . . I’ve come to see it, I guess, as part of his . . . Grahamness. Just his appetite, for everything.”

“So you forgive him. How generous.”

“Annie,” she said reproachfully. Her plain face was anguished.

(When she heard Rosemary starting to come out of the bathroom, her instinct was to hide. Almost frantically, she opened the door to the study and went in, closing it quietly, quickly behind her. She heard Rosemary go downstairs, and her body relaxed. She stood there for maybe a minute, her thoughts racing. Then, almost breathless, she stepped across the room and sat in Graham’s chair. Her legs were trembling.

It was dark in there with the door closed, but the window was open and she could hear music drifting up from below, music she’d chosen for the party—jazz, one of Graham’s favorites: Cootie Williams, his horn rising clearly every now and then. She could hear voices outside now, too.

Sarah, it was. Sarah on the porch saying good night to someone, her voice audible, deep and clear. The other voice was just a low murmuring in response.

Sarah. She could ask her to handle the rest of the party. Sarah could explain her absence: poor Annie, poor grief-stricken Annie.

She went to the window, slid the screen up, and leaned out. “Sarah,” she called, and after a moment Sarah appeared in the walk, looking around. Annie called again, and Sarah looked up.

“I need you up here,” she said.)

“I hate him,” she said now to Frieda.

“That’s not true. That’s the problem. The problem is you don’t hate him. You don’t.” Frieda’s voice was gentle, as though Annie were a child she were comforting.

“No, you’re right. I don’t. I just want him back.”

“Of course that’s it.”

“Then I could hate him. I could hit him, anyway.”

They were both silent for a long moment. Frieda looked exhausted. “For what it’s worth,” she said quietly, “he loved you. He loved you very much. You do know that, don’t you?” Annie thought suddenly of John, of what he had said to her the night after Graham died. Wasn’t it exactly this? That she should remember that Graham had loved her? No matter what else happened? Or maybe, no matter what she heard?

Had he been referring to this, to Rosemary?

Did he know too?

“Did everyone know?” she asked Frieda.

“I . . . I don’t think so.” Frieda shook her head. “No, no, they didn’t.”

She leaned forward now and opened her hands out toward Annie, the gesture a bit like the one Annie had made to her in thanks for her toast at Graham’s party. “His marriage to you meant everything to him.”

Annie laughed again, a sad little noise. “Well, maybe not quite everything,” she said.

After a moment she blurted, “I just don’t know what to do with all these feelings.” She raised her hands helplessly. “I should be able to just grieve, shouldn’t I? I should be able to have that.” This is what she had felt last night, sitting up late in Graham’s study after everyone had gone home, after she’d heard Sarah go to bed. That this shouldn’t be happening now. Not yet. Not yet.

Not yet, because in those long days and weeks after his death, she had been feeling her grief as her deepest connection to Graham. While she mourned him, while she felt as fragile as she did, he was still with her, in some sense. His death had seemed to her even to draw them closer—maybe because she was so frightened of life without him, maybe because she barely wanted to go on. In any case, she had felt completely engaged with him. He was never not in her thoughts, it seemed.

Now this insult—she supposed that’s what she felt at some basic, shabby level: insulted—this insult separated her from Graham more than his death had. Rage instead of sorrow. Rage, and then jealousy.

What stage of grief would this be, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross? The wish to kill, to punish, the already dead person?

In the dark of Graham’s room, in the silence of the house after everyone had left the party, she had remembered a moment at the other party, the party at the bookstore where they’d met all those years ago. The moment when he leaned over her, and she felt taken in.

Now she understood that differently, that verb, that preposition. She felt taken in differently.

She felt robbed, cheated.

“You might be just as confused if he were still alive,” Frieda said.

Her voice sounded almost tearful to Annie. But she wasn’t interested in Frieda’s sorrow now. “At least I could hit him really hard then,” she said.

“Well, that,” Frieda said. She looked almost tearful too, and suddenly smaller to Annie. Weak.

“But maybe he would have helped you with your anger,” Frieda said. “Your sorrow.” Her open face, even plainer now in her anguish, was pleading. “Maybe you would even have had angry sex as a way of getting back together. Or maybe you would have cried together.”

Annie had a sudden vision then of Frieda and Graham crying together at the end of their marriage. Hadn’t Frieda told her once that they did? That they held each other and wept?

She could imagine too his crying with her, she could imagine crying with him—for who he was, for what he’d done. Their holding each other in terrible consolation for both their losses.

It’s what she wanted, suddenly—him, holding her, him with her—and it made her weep.

Frieda crossed the room and knelt in front of her, her arms reaching up, encircling Annie’s waist. Annie let her. She let her, but some unyielding part of her felt separated from Frieda, angry and unconsoled.

22

Jeanne said, “What could they be talking about, do you think, your two mothers?”

They were on the Mass Pike going west, home to New York. Lucas looked over at her. She had tilted the seat of the rental car partway back, and was turned slightly to him, resting almost on her side. Her hands lay still on her belly, which was beginning to show a little, though over the last few days no one except Sarah had seemed to notice, preoccupied as they all were. He loved her hands, which were long and smooth and elegant, the nails unpolished but beautifully shaped. He loved her pregnant belly, the way it pulled her abdomen lower, the way it had already loosened and softened her body. He reached over to set his hand, too, on the slight curve.

“My father, would be my guess,” he said.

“Yes?” Her eyebrows arched higher. “They would talk about him together, you think?”

Lucas shrugged and put his hand back on the steering wheel. “They’re friends,” he said.

“Even so,” Jeanne said. She had always thought it was strange, Frieda and Annie’s relationship. Not so much that Annie was kind to Frieda—that, she understood. Annie could afford such generosity. But for big, homely Frieda to be kind to Annie, her pretty successor—that, she’d told Lucas, she didn’t comprehend.

“They both loved him,” he said now. “They’re both grieving. Who better to talk to?”

“I should think it would make it harder. It means they are both thinking of the same things. The things he did with both of them.” She stretched, and was quiet for a minute or two. “I wouldn’t care to share my memories of you with someone who had the same memories.”

“No one does.”

“No one wishes to share?”

“No, no one has the same memories of me that you have.”

She smiled. Then she pulled her chin in and pursed her mouth, a disbelieving face. She said, “So, you have never made love to anyone else.”